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Breakthrough In Automatic Handwritten Character Recognition Sans Deep Learning (technologyreview.com)
subh_arya writes: Researchers from NYU, UToronto and MIT have come up with a technique that captures human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts to recognize handwritten characters from World's Alphabet. Their computational model (abstract) represents concepts as simple programs that best explain observed examples under a Bayesian criterion. Unlike recent deep learning approaches that require thousands of examples to train an efficient model, their model can achieve human-level performance with only one example. Additionally, the authors present several "visual Turing tests" probing the model's creative generalization abilities, which in many cases are indistinguishable from human behavior.
This is much more important than Daesh/ISIS. If you think the US is threatened by these barbarians then they already achieved half their objective, getting into your head and under your skin. The other half of their objective is to get US troops involved into another mid-East quagmire.
I know I shouldn't respond to a troll, but you and congress-critters need to stop having wet dreams over a "draft". Modern warfare by the West is a professional occupation and requires much training. The unprofessional rabble that Iraq and Afghanistan's governments field show just how ineffective untrained meat-sacks are against religious zealots. Even Iranian backed Iraqi militias are pretty much cannon fodder with loud mouths. Ever watch the Kurds fight? They are just a bunch of guys with guns.
The U.S. cut through just about anything the Al Qaeda could field. Where it had problems was in attempting to solve the underlying issues that spawned the problems starting with Muslim 7th century wet dreams. One can see just how removed the current populace's idea of modern warfare is by listening to their mouthpieces in Congress. McCain (who ought to know better but stupidly doesn't) made some remark about how carpet bombing Germany finished off the Nazies. It didn't, Hitler was a more effective weapon against the Nazies by being a dolt. What carpet bombing did do was cause a massive human tragedy which put a big dent in the Marshall plan after the war. Cruz is another moron advocating this.
When asked if the U.S. would carpet bomb ISIS, Gen. Paul Selva (vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) in front of McCain said unequivocally, "The U.S. Military will never carpet bomb." He and the U.S. Military would be brought up on war crimes in EuroLand. But that isn't why he dismissed such a stupid move.
While we can be dismissive of that lot over there, public opinion matters, the general and the U.S. Military knows that the U.S. and the West is in an ideological war with Islam, to treat it as purely kinetic is just mindless. Europe, whatever their faults, did the Christian thing and accepted untold thousands of refugees from Syria but also Afghanistan, and N. Africa. They put the "Christians" in the U.S. to shame. Even Little Jerry Falwell at Liberty U. was counseling his students to arm themselves against the Muslims. I guess Jesus had a secret directive, "Turn the other cheek that I may get a better aim at your ass."
The general and the U.S. Military know damn well that the U.S. needs to work on the underlying problems that carpet bombing will not solve. It would only antagonize the pop., something Russia is conveniently forgetting, and not stopping Russia from doing this by giving Putin a swift kick in the nuts will cause spill over that the West will suffer from for years.