I tried this in Galeon-0.12pre3 and the link loads fine. Maybe the problem you are experiencing has been fixed. I imagine 0.12 will be out fairly soon, since pre3 seems pretty solid.
Ironically, it looks like Galeon 0.12 was released the day before you posted that.
What are you talking about? Tit-for-tat wins prisoner's dilemma tournaments, not games in general. The name is even based on prisoner's dilemma, it doesn't make sense to call repeating your opponents's last move tit-for-tat in general.
Also, you could trivially beat it at rock-paper-scissors: just play rock, paper, scissors, rock, paper, scissors, and so on forever. You will win every round except maybe the first one. Finally, if you actually read the rules of this competition, you would find that there's no guarantee that there will always be one opponent move for every one of your moves, so you couldn't even implement tit-for-tat.
Re:What's the big deal with Pi?
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Well, I left out the little part about finding the text, that can be done later when quantum desktop computers are the norm.
But once found, the position can be described in some shorthand notation, and with the length, can be extracted at the target machine...
I guess I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to the difficulty of computing 2^300 digits of pi, I was referring to the likelihood that the position where the data exists is (a) smaller than the data itself or (b) highly compressible.
It's not that you'd be lucky to find 600kb of useful data early in pi, it's that you'd be lucky if the 600kb of data you want exists at all that early in pi. Further, it's unlikely that the position would be compressible at all, let alone 10000....0000001 in binary.
Re:What's the big deal with Pi?
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at position 2^300+1 the next 600,222 bytes are the Linux kernel compiled for Io Rover VII (or whatever)
What's uncompressed about that?
Of course, if you're lucky enough to find some huge useful piece of information not only around 10^600 times earlier than you'd expect by chance, but at a position that is itself highly compressible, maybe you should go spend your life saving on lottery tickets, and then bet all your winnings on a single roll of roulette.
Re:Random bits that are in Pi somewhere
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It is possible to have an infinite number that contians smaller sets of infinite numbers. Like the set of whole numbers of infinite. The set of even numbers is infinite. The size of the whole number set is larger than the set of even numbers. The even numbers could never hold the whole numbers, but the whole numbers do hold the even numbers.
This is just dead wrong. The set of even numbers and the set of whole numbers are the same size, because you can map then in a one to one correspondence.
I don't want to go off on a tangent about proofs... but I'm curious - what happens when a rule of mathematics is challenged? For example, some defenitions seem so arbitrary to me. 1 is not considered a prime number because it has only itself as a factor... I don't like that reason and I don't kow why. Years of work would be invalidated should such rules be thrown out, right?
Uh, changing a definition is hardly throwing out a rule. If you don't like one being prime, just take any mathematical work and replace every reference to 'primes' with 'primes other than one'. Whether you like how things are named has nothing whatsoever to do with validity. Definitions aren't really arbitrary, but they could be without messing anything up.
Re:Definition of frequency?
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I'm sure we're talking about the limit of the frequency in the first n digits of pi as n approaches infinity, or some similar definition. Frequency of course refers to the ratio of the number of ocurrences to the size of the string of digits.
You're right that we're likely to find a few interesting sequences earlier than we expect. However, this isn't one of them. Finding 88888888 (~8.9*10^7) at or before position 46663520 (~4.7*10^7) is clearly not unlikely. It should be around 37% probability.
Let's say you do make RAM out of this stuff. Now let's say your box hangs so badly you must power it off. Would you want it to return to the same state? What mechanism could be used to reset the RAM?
Current motherboard designs will work just fine. When you turn on or reset the motherboard, it resets the processor, so even if it and the RAM maintained state, the instruction pointer wouldn't be pointing at the same place, but rather at some location mapped to ROM, which would start the POST, etc. From that point, it clearly wouldn't matter, because your BIOS is going to be written such that it doesn't randomly execute unitialized memory.
If our own biological heart uses electricial energy to pump, why can't an artifical pump use that same signal?
Our biological hearts do not use electrical energy to pump. They get energy by oxidizing glucose they get from the blood, the same way the rest of the body does (the blood also carries the oxygen). That's why you have to breath, to get oxygen. (Technically, cells can and do generate small amounts of energy without oxygen, but if your heart has to resort to that, you're pretty much dead.) The nerve signals are just that: signals. The amount of energy they carry is miniscule.
It shall be unlawful...and where the effect of such discrimination may be substantially to lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce, or to injure, destroy, or prevent competition with any person who either grants or knowingly receives the benefit of such discrimination, or with customers of either of them...And provided further, That nothing herein contained shall prevent persons engaged in selling goods, wares, or merchandise in commerce from selecting their own customers in bona fide transactions and not in restraint of trade
How the hell is charging their customers for speeding going to help Acme create a monopoly or prevent competition or act in restraint of trade? Talk about out of context.
I definitely agree that letting insurance companies offer a discount for drivers who put GPSs in their car would be good.
Actually, you're the one that seems confused.
Companies may not initiate criminal proceedings against someone, but that doesn't mean that committing illegal acts somehow voids other obligations you might have. If you go to a hotel and steal the TV, and you had signed a contract agreeing to pay for any damage to the room with your credit card, the hotel may simply bill you for it. They may do so even if no criminal prosecution occurs. Indeed, even if a criminal prosecution does occur and you are found innoncent, they have no obligation to pay you back. Even if you sued them, you could theoretically lose, since the standards of evidence are weaker in civil suits. You certainly could not expect to simply go to the hotel and say, "Hey, stealing a TV is a crime! You can't bill me for it unless I'm convicted in a court of law." That would be particularly bizarre since, by your reasoning, they could still bill you for spilling grape juice on the bed, since that's not a crime.
However, this doesn't mean that companies can take the law into their own hands and through you in jail for committing crimes. Companies cannot impose any criminal penalties whatsoever. This is the key distinction. Acme Rent-a-car can charge you $150 because you agreed to pay them that whenever you speed. This is completely different from a government speeding ticket, which can add points to your license, and can theoretically lead to your arrest if you don't pay. Acme can do neither of those things.
Granted, it would be more proper to call it a fee rather than a fine. Fees occur all the time. Banks charge fees for writing bad checks. They do so without dragging you before a jury of your peers and without following the criminal standards for due process.
WTF?? You're not just claiming that in theory everyone is provided with the necessities of life under communism, you're claiming that this was the case in the actual USSR? That seems outright delusional.
So just remember if you're sent to a labor camp, at least that you're not dying because you can't afford to live
And if you're shot in the head as a dissident, at least you're not dying because you can't afford to eat
And if you're starving in a famine in the Ukraine, at least you're not dying because...er...shit
GnuCash lets you create asset, liability, income, expense, and equity accounts, so you should easily be able to do accrual accounting if you set up a proper chart of accounts.
If you allow me to specify the machine model ahead of time, you'd lose. This was observed by Anonymous Coward in article 466.
As I understood the challenge, there was no requirement that the data I give you be random, though I might ordinarily give random data for such a challenge. If that was the machine model, however, I'd just give you a 0 followed by random data, and you would lose.
Yes, or simply require that the contestant submit a single program (with prescribed file name) which can regenerate original.dat and is shorter than
original.dat.
In that case, the outcome of the bet clearly depends on the machine model. If the machine model is "complete Debian Linux running on Pentium", I would
conjecture that the bet can't be won, but it is far from clear (obviously, a succinct powerful language is needed, maybe A+). On many machine models,
the bet can be trivially won.
No, the machine architecture doesn't matter. The bet can be won only if you are very astronomically lucky.
I'd gladly stake large amounts of money on this, though it would feel like I'm running a scam.
Nope, you don't have to record it, simply attach the part of the original file following the block of zeros to your decompressor program. The "compressed
file" is the part of the original file preceding the block of zeros. Your decompressor prints out the contents of the compressed file, then 1024 zeros, then it
reads from itself the remainder of the file and prints that out.
The bet can be won; not in every instance of course, but in the long run.
That reflects a mistake on the part of Mike Goldman. If you want your decompressor and compressed file to be a total of length N, you can store log_2(N) bits of information in how you set the lengths of the two files. If you have more than two files, you can store even more information. Mike should have required that (number of bits in original data)+log_2(length of original data) > sum of number of bits in each compressed file and decompressor + log_2(product of lengths of each file and of decompressor), and he should have permitted himself to rename or change the file attributes of any file he wished in case information was being stored therein.
It's not so easy to generate a file to resist compression. If you had and used a method for determining whether a file could resist compression, then I could
compress your generated file simply by counting how many compression-resistant files preceded it in some sort order and writing that number as a binary
file. Decompression would proceed by counting that number of compression-resistant files in the same order and writing the file found at the count.
However, your decompression program would have to be smaller than M - log_2 (N) = log_2 (2^M/N) bits, where M is the number of bits in the compression-resistant file, and N is the number of compresion-resistant files preceding it in your sort order. So, the number of compression-resistant files would have to be small relative to the number of possible files if you want more than a bit to write your program. Since this is not the case, you would fail.
Yes, assuming appropriate restrictions against storing information in the compressed file's name or attributes, I'll give you N:1 odds that you cannot write the program G, where N is any positive number. X can also be any number.
Or, save yourself time, don't try to write the program at all, just send me money.
The bigger question isn't media, but sofware. I'm very confident we'll be able to get our files from ISO9660 discs, but I already have a bunch of WordStar and old MacWrite/MacPaint files I can't open and it's only been a decade. We'll be able to retrieve the raw data, but will be actually be able to interpret and make use of it?
Well, there are two issues here. One is keeping a readable copy of the software, the other is being able to run it. Since most software programs are used by large numbers of people, it seems likely that someone would have the foresight to keep a copy of the software to interpret the data along with the data itself. Running it also shouldn't really be a problem for future generations. Presumably, someone will have a copy of the specs for the architecture for which the software was written, and an emulator can be created. Of course, if the software's source is available, it would be even easier.
Also, reverse engineering a data format isn't that hard anyway. If you looked at the raw data of your MacWrite files, I'm sure you'd find your text in ASCII somewhere, possibly with embedded formatting information. Non-textual data is more difficult, but still possible, particular if you have some fragments of information about the data format to go on.
Vote Libertarian if it clearly is in a state Bush will win, otherwise vote Bush.
Huh? If you're a Libertarian in a state that Gore will win, why vote Bush? If you're in MA or CA, for example, Gore will just as surely win whether you vote for Bush or Browne. Hell, even in a so-called swing state, your one vote isn't going to make a difference. Vote Browne!
I find your comment "Most audiophiles are
full of shit" offensive--I know several audiophiles and none of them are full of shit. Some are musicians, some are electrical engineers. All of them have highly trained ears.
Can audiophiles make these distinctions in double-blind tests? I assume they can't, or people wouldn't be so condescending towards them all the time. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Explain to me how the richest company in the world could jump out of all their taxes, and not have the government up on their ear. This is the same government that shot the
company down for monoplistic practices. I'm not a big fan of US taxes, but I do know they nail the people with the most money first. If profit motive is key, MS's millions are far
more tempting than Joe Schmoe's couple hundred.
The government doesn't care because it didn't lose any tax revenue. What happened was the tax burden shifted from Microsoft to the employees exercising the options. These employees were probably in a higher tax bracket than the corporate tax rate anyway, so the government made more money. Hence, they don't care.
What bothers me is, if these companies paid no tax that should mean they effectively made no income last year. So what is keeping their value up? There has to be a missing
piece somewhere.
According to Dave Barry, internet investors have the brains of grapefruit. Perhaps that's the missing piece?
Slashdot Mirror
I tried this in Galeon-0.12pre3 and the link loads fine. Maybe the problem you are experiencing has been fixed. I imagine 0.12 will be out fairly soon, since pre3 seems pretty solid.
Ironically, it looks like Galeon 0.12 was
released the day before you posted that.
What are you talking about? Tit-for-tat wins prisoner's dilemma tournaments, not games in general. The name is even based on prisoner's dilemma, it doesn't make sense to call repeating your opponents's last move tit-for-tat in general.
Also, you could trivially beat it at rock-paper-scissors: just play rock, paper, scissors, rock, paper, scissors, and so on forever. You will win every round except maybe the first one. Finally, if you actually read the rules of this competition, you would find that there's no guarantee that there will always be one opponent move for every one of your moves, so you couldn't even implement tit-for-tat.
Well, I left out the little part about finding the text, that can be done later when quantum desktop computers are the norm.
But once found, the position can be described in some shorthand notation, and with the length, can be extracted at the target machine...
I guess I wasn't clear. I wasn't referring to the difficulty of computing 2^300 digits of pi, I was referring to the likelihood that the position where the data exists is (a) smaller than the data itself or (b) highly compressible.
It's not that you'd be lucky to find 600kb of useful data early in pi, it's that you'd be lucky if the 600kb of data you want exists at all that early in pi. Further, it's unlikely that the position would be compressible at all, let alone 10000....0000001 in binary.
What's uncompressed about that?
Of course, if you're lucky enough to find some huge useful piece of information not only around 10^600 times earlier than you'd expect by chance, but at a position that is itself highly compressible, maybe you should go spend your life saving on lottery tickets, and then bet all your winnings on a single roll of roulette.
It is possible to have an infinite number that contians smaller sets of infinite numbers. Like the set of whole numbers of infinite. The set of even numbers is infinite. The size of the whole number set is larger than the set of even numbers. The even numbers could never hold the whole numbers, but the whole numbers do hold the even numbers.
This is just dead wrong. The set of even numbers and the set of whole numbers are the same size, because you can map then in a one to one correspondence.
I don't want to go off on a tangent about proofs... but I'm curious - what happens when a rule of mathematics is challenged? For example, some defenitions seem so arbitrary to me. 1 is not considered a prime number because it has only itself as a factor... I don't like that reason and I don't kow why. Years of work would be invalidated should such rules be thrown out, right?
Uh, changing a definition is hardly throwing out a rule. If you don't like one being prime, just take any mathematical work and replace every reference to 'primes' with 'primes other than one'. Whether you like how things are named has nothing whatsoever to do with validity. Definitions aren't really arbitrary, but they could be without messing anything up.
I'm sure we're talking about the limit of the frequency in the first n digits of pi as n approaches infinity, or some similar definition. Frequency of course refers to the ratio of the number of ocurrences to the size of the string of digits.
You're right that we're likely to find a few interesting sequences earlier than we expect. However, this isn't one of them. Finding 88888888 (~8.9*10^7) at or before position 46663520 (~4.7*10^7) is clearly not unlikely. It should be around 37% probability.
Let's say you do make RAM out of this stuff. Now let's say your box hangs so badly you must power it off. Would you want it to return to the same state? What mechanism could be used to reset the RAM?
Current motherboard designs will work just fine. When you turn on or reset the motherboard, it resets the processor, so even if it and the RAM maintained state, the instruction pointer wouldn't be pointing at the same place, but rather at some location mapped to ROM, which would start the POST, etc. From that point, it clearly wouldn't matter, because your BIOS is going to be written such that it doesn't randomly execute unitialized memory.
If our own biological heart uses electricial energy to pump, why can't an artifical pump use that same signal?
Our biological hearts do not use electrical energy to pump. They get energy by oxidizing glucose they get from the blood, the same way the rest of the body does (the blood also carries the oxygen). That's why you have to breath, to get oxygen. (Technically, cells can and do generate small amounts of energy without oxygen, but if your heart has to resort to that, you're pretty much dead.) The nerve signals are just that: signals. The amount of energy they carry is miniscule.
It shall be unlawful...and where the effect of such discrimination may be substantially to lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly in any line of commerce, or to injure, destroy, or prevent competition with any person who either grants or knowingly receives the benefit of such discrimination, or with customers of either of them...And provided further, That nothing herein contained shall prevent persons engaged in selling goods, wares, or merchandise in commerce from selecting their own customers in bona fide transactions and not in restraint of trade
How the hell is charging their customers for speeding going to help Acme create a monopoly or prevent competition or act in restraint of trade? Talk about out of context.
I definitely agree that letting insurance companies offer a discount for drivers who put GPSs in their car would be good.
Actually, you're the one that seems confused. Companies may not initiate criminal proceedings against someone, but that doesn't mean that committing illegal acts somehow voids other obligations you might have. If you go to a hotel and steal the TV, and you had signed a contract agreeing to pay for any damage to the room with your credit card, the hotel may simply bill you for it. They may do so even if no criminal prosecution occurs. Indeed, even if a criminal prosecution does occur and you are found innoncent, they have no obligation to pay you back. Even if you sued them, you could theoretically lose, since the standards of evidence are weaker in civil suits. You certainly could not expect to simply go to the hotel and say, "Hey, stealing a TV is a crime! You can't bill me for it unless I'm convicted in a court of law." That would be particularly bizarre since, by your reasoning, they could still bill you for spilling grape juice on the bed, since that's not a crime.
However, this doesn't mean that companies can take the law into their own hands and through you in jail for committing crimes. Companies cannot impose any criminal penalties whatsoever. This is the key distinction. Acme Rent-a-car can charge you $150 because you agreed to pay them that whenever you speed. This is completely different from a government speeding ticket, which can add points to your license, and can theoretically lead to your arrest if you don't pay. Acme can do neither of those things.
Granted, it would be more proper to call it a fee rather than a fine. Fees occur all the time. Banks charge fees for writing bad checks. They do so without dragging you before a jury of your peers and without following the criminal standards for due process.
This song is basically what I think of Rand's "freedom".t fr.htm
http://www.dickalba.demon.co.uk/songs/texts/calli
WTF?? You're not just claiming that in theory everyone is provided with the necessities of life under communism, you're claiming that this was the case in the actual USSR? That seems outright delusional.
So just remember if you're sent to a labor camp, at least that you're not dying because you can't afford to live
And if you're shot in the head as a dissident, at least you're not dying because you can't afford to eat
And if you're starving in a famine in the Ukraine, at least you're not dying because...er...shit
GnuCash lets you create asset, liability, income, expense, and equity accounts, so you should easily be able to do accrual accounting if you set up a proper chart of accounts.
- "I'm not going to sit here and dissuade you from your views" - Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden
Here's a much more direct analogue:"Oh, Kent, I'd be lying if I said my men weren't committing crimes"- Homer J. Simpson
"Why do you have so many bowling balls?" - Marge Simpson
"I'm not going to lie to you. So long." - Homer J. Simpson (who then drives off)
If you allow me to specify the machine model ahead of time, you'd lose. This was observed by Anonymous Coward in article 466.
As I understood the challenge, there was no requirement that the data I give you be random, though I might ordinarily give random data for such a challenge. If that was the machine model, however, I'd just give you a 0 followed by random data, and you would lose.
Yes, or simply require that the contestant submit a single program (with prescribed file name) which can regenerate original.dat and is shorter than original.dat.
In that case, the outcome of the bet clearly depends on the machine model. If the machine model is "complete Debian Linux running on Pentium", I would conjecture that the bet can't be won, but it is far from clear (obviously, a succinct powerful language is needed, maybe A+). On many machine models, the bet can be trivially won.
No, the machine architecture doesn't matter. The bet can be won only if you are very astronomically lucky.
I'd gladly stake large amounts of money on this, though it would feel like I'm running a scam.
Nope, you don't have to record it, simply attach the part of the original file following the block of zeros to your decompressor program. The "compressed file" is the part of the original file preceding the block of zeros. Your decompressor prints out the contents of the compressed file, then 1024 zeros, then it reads from itself the remainder of the file and prints that out. The bet can be won; not in every instance of course, but in the long run.
That reflects a mistake on the part of Mike Goldman. If you want your decompressor and compressed file to be a total of length N, you can store log_2(N) bits of information in how you set the lengths of the two files. If you have more than two files, you can store even more information. Mike should have required that (number of bits in original data)+log_2(length of original data) > sum of number of bits in each compressed file and decompressor + log_2(product of lengths of each file and of decompressor), and he should have permitted himself to rename or change the file attributes of any file he wished in case information was being stored therein.
It's not so easy to generate a file to resist compression. If you had and used a method for determining whether a file could resist compression, then I could compress your generated file simply by counting how many compression-resistant files preceded it in some sort order and writing that number as a binary file. Decompression would proceed by counting that number of compression-resistant files in the same order and writing the file found at the count.
However, your decompression program would have to be smaller than M - log_2 (N) = log_2 (2^M/N) bits, where M is the number of bits in the compression-resistant file, and N is the number of compresion-resistant files preceding it in your sort order. So, the number of compression-resistant files would have to be small relative to the number of possible files if you want more than a bit to write your program. Since this is not the case, you would fail.
Anyone willing to bet either way?
Yes, assuming appropriate restrictions against storing information in the compressed file's name or attributes, I'll give you N:1 odds that you cannot write the program G, where N is any positive number. X can also be any number.
Or, save yourself time, don't try to write the program at all, just send me money.
The bigger question isn't media, but sofware. I'm very confident we'll be able to get our files from ISO9660 discs, but I already have a bunch of WordStar and old MacWrite/MacPaint files I can't open and it's only been a decade. We'll be able to retrieve the raw data, but will be actually be able to interpret and make use of it?
Well, there are two issues here. One is keeping a readable copy of the software, the other is being able to run it. Since most software programs are used by large numbers of people, it seems likely that someone would have the foresight to keep a copy of the software to interpret the data along with the data itself. Running it also shouldn't really be a problem for future generations. Presumably, someone will have a copy of the specs for the architecture for which the software was written, and an emulator can be created. Of course, if the software's source is available, it would be even easier.
Also, reverse engineering a data format isn't that hard anyway. If you looked at the raw data of your MacWrite files, I'm sure you'd find your text in ASCII somewhere, possibly with embedded formatting information. Non-textual data is more difficult, but still possible, particular if you have some fragments of information about the data format to go on.
Vote Libertarian if it clearly is in a state Bush will win, otherwise vote Bush.
Huh? If you're a Libertarian in a state that Gore will win, why vote Bush? If you're in MA or CA, for example, Gore will just as surely win whether you vote for Bush or Browne. Hell, even in a so-called swing state, your one vote isn't going to make a difference. Vote Browne!
I find your comment "Most audiophiles are full of shit" offensive--I know several audiophiles and none of them are full of shit. Some are musicians, some are electrical engineers. All of them have highly trained ears.
Can audiophiles make these distinctions in double-blind tests? I assume they can't, or people wouldn't be so condescending towards them all the time. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Explain to me how the richest company in the world could jump out of all their taxes, and not have the government up on their ear. This is the same government that shot the company down for monoplistic practices. I'm not a big fan of US taxes, but I do know they nail the people with the most money first. If profit motive is key, MS's millions are far more tempting than Joe Schmoe's couple hundred.
The government doesn't care because it didn't lose any tax revenue. What happened was the tax burden shifted from Microsoft to the employees exercising the options. These employees were probably in a higher tax bracket than the corporate tax rate anyway, so the government made more money. Hence, they don't care.
What bothers me is, if these companies paid no tax that should mean they effectively made no income last year. So what is keeping their value up? There has to be a missing piece somewhere.
According to Dave Barry, internet investors have the brains of grapefruit. Perhaps that's the missing piece?