An average amateur player with a year or two of experience can beat any go AI.
The 15-12k rating of Many Faces and others is highly suspect. A few games against the machine and you can see how to beat it. Keep many open positions and don't pursue local conflicts. It is very easy to maintain sente against any of the programs. Against anyone with knowledge of the machines' style, it rates closer to 24-20 kyu.
Ya. I'm to the point I simply don't run IM, no matter how much they beg. There is no value in the chat interface. I'm in enough contact. Remember that no one's time is remotely as important as they would like you to believe it is.
That lumpy black thing on your desk is called a phone. Internal communications are free and internally routed. Cool.
I don't much care for Glazier either, for similar complaints. But DAdams is ripping a familiar form in English, the parody of poetic forms using neologisms, invented words.
Lewis Carroll:
Jabberwocky
' Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jub-jub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch.
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxsome foe he sought -
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy
Oh frabjous day! Calooh! Calley!
He chortled in his joy
' Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
The poster remarked the similarity of poetry to code, particularly that both are formalisms. New forms of poetry are akin to new languages, new works in old forms are like new ideas in familiar contexts.
The distinctions rely on differing relationships to syntactic rigor. What you unfortunately term *extensible* is really a matter of greater freedom: the only interpreter a poem will face is the reader; your code must pass muster with an interpreter whose concern for syntactic and structural detail is unsurpassed. For example, a modernist poet, Marianne Moore, I believe, has adopted a personal convention of declaring simile with the *::* syntax of PERL, long before the first bit was ever flipped. But this idiom does not have the same value, indeed, typically does not occur at all in the work of other poets. It is a personal signifier, rather than a syntactic contract.
It is possible to write a compiler or interpreter to handle any degree of syntactic or structural freedom, but its practical use would be nil. It might make an interesting art project, nevertheless, not unlike the free play of formal requirements Appolinaire exhibits in his picture/poems.
That said, the parallels are real and offer valuable insight, as Glazier's work has demonstrated for some years. But more interesting, perhaps than technical referentiality or verse rigidly structured like code, is the intersection of code and poetry in programs which are haiku generators and the like. In this case, the code embodies some of the requirements of the art form in unique ways. Features are highlighted and made manifest in code which are otherwise merely suggested in the collected body of work in that form.
I had intended merely a throw-away rant. I appreciate your detailed response and feel you deserve a more considered explanation of my views. That your reply has been moderated indicates someone besides us is enjoying this thread so I will take a moment to expand on my remarks and your rejoinder.
I should like to correct your prejudice as to my professional situation. I am a writer by training, a poet, and a film-maker by avocation. It is true that I am making my mortgage doing XML/XSLT plumbing with Java, but I have no formal training in computer science.
I should also point out that my rant overstated my position somewhat. I don't believe that GUIs should be outlawed. I contend that most GUIs are cluttered, mal-organized and require more training to use effectively than a comparable CLI tool would. I feel that the proper balance between graphical and textual tools in HCI has not yet been struck. I contend that the current Linux toolset is closer to a proper, natural balance of these assets in addressing general purpose computing than either Mac or MS at this time. I take the recent introduction of a CLI for Apple machines and the announced return of CLI tools for Windows to corroborate my view. Your mention of *text-based* GUI tools is quite apropos here. The expanding directory tree is one of the few really successful graphical representations we've managed.
I take a more nuanced view of the computer as a tool and its relationship to the user. Central to my thinking is an impression that the popularity of graphical interfaces is not a result of their intuitive ease, but consequent to a particular historical moment in the development of our relationship to the machine. Users did not charge from DOS to Windows. The market dramatically expanded at that moment as people who formerly resisted the notion that computers were useful to secretaries, truckers, actuaries and writers were suddenly convinced that computers might be not only useful, but something crucial and not to be missed. We have a generation now who have conformed their working styles to the demands the machines made of them at that moment and now do find them *intuitive*.
That is, to say that GUIs are good because they are popular is like saying Microsoft is good because its popular. You yourself call MS Office *crap*. In reality, either are popular because there is no practical alternative. And these two developments are closely related and a direct result of this flood of naieve users coincident with the release of Win95 and the development of the internet. The internal dialogue goes something like this: I don't know computers and don't want to know. I want something easy to use and I need to be able to open the Lotus and Word files people send me. Whether a mouse and graphical menus were, in point of fact, easy to use, did not enter into it. Users had no context within which to make an informed decision.
As to *most people* requiring a GUI to work with computers easily, I believe that remains an open question. I have myself overseen the transition of a 100 person compositing department from CLI tools to Quark at a halving of productivity. The rationale for this disastrous move was the *ease* of training new personnel. The ease of training existing personnel to the GUI interface was not considered. In fact they have been efficiently bringing more people on quickly, which is a good thing considering that the department nearly doubled in size without additional business to offset the expense. I left the company over the disaster.
You mention cameras and the example is fortuitous for several reasons. They clearly point the way forward for the penetration of computers in daily life. The embedded processor in your camera has, as its interface, the device itself. Its functions are so closely aligned to the use of the machine that traditional HCI concerns are moot. I think that this type of computing interface will be by far the most common going forward.
Y'know, it is starting to get on my nerves, this endless churning agon regarding graphical interfaces and Linux, or any other software for that matter. I, and frankly many others of my acquaintance, find a text interface both more functional and more intuitive than menus and buttons. C'mon, we've had a thousand years to get comfortable with text-based interfaces. A graph is a graph is a character, eh! I think with words by habit; I remember text and its meaning much more readily that the location of the farking widgit in the Husker Du of menus most GUI programs make available.
Here is my Dad when I introduced him to his new Ibook w/Aqua GUI: Do I click the word or the picture?
Here, developers, is a friggin clue: GUI's are no more fun to learn and use than they are to write!!! Unless I am doing something with a picture, pictures are not to the point. Somewhere in the mists of time, some arrogant HCI genius decided that unlike L33t programmers, normal Joe Sixpacks thought with pictures instead of words and its been downhill ever since. When is it ever easier to manually open and fiddle with more than two objects when a script can do it?!? When!?!
Has it not been amply demonstrated that the mouse is the most anti-ergonomical device in the modern office?!?
Bandwidth is an order of magnitude more limiting than tree parsing, egg. That and the facilities the tool vendors decorate their stuff with. Of course its not free, what is?
SQLXML and most other value-adds are bull. Your business objects should optimize the hell out of their DB access and return XML. XML is messaging and presentation tier glue. Read the book.
Yeah, but code *generation* with XML is the cat's pyjamas.
2) XSLT
You clearly haven't tried it, or did not use it as intended. Do you have any experience with other functional languages? I work almost exclusively with XSLT at the moment and wouldn't have it any other way.
3) SOAP
is butt-stupid, I admit. But hey, ninty-odd percent of the beef this topic has generated can be fixed with a glance at the book being reviewed.
Interestingly, XML was originally intended as a userland technology, bringing the strength of SGML to the web, fixing what was broken in HTML (the last great userland data format). The game has lost sight of the goal a bit, I think, which is the root of much of the kvetching this topic generates.
Frankly, ERH is a great writer and has good insights into the use and abuse of markup. This book is one of the things that was missing while the pro/anti-XML hype trains were picking up steam.
XPath is not inherently a pig. Many API's handle XPath with aplomb, usually building an alternative data structure behind the scenes for access. XSL usually wants the whole tree but many implementations optimize this out unless large structures are being reorganized.
Chess is simple calculation compared to the nuanced give and take of Go. There is only one move: place a stone on a point; there is no end to the possibilities.
I am a less than average Go player and I can easily beat the best available Go AI.
SCO knows they don't have a leg to stand on. They are plugging this in the court of public opinion. You've heard Darryl recently. He is going to be addressing somebody's conference about the *threat of Open Source Software*. They really do want to make this a fight about the whole notion of software libre.
Their only prayer is that some reactionary hack on the way up the judiciary food-chain decides that OSS really is some pinko conspiracy to bankrupt vital American commercial interests. Meanwhile, sell! sell! sell!
They are all treated differently. Linus has trademarked the word *Linux*. The contributors to the GNU project and Linux kernel, including Mr. Torvalds, own the copyright to their particular contributions. Stallman created the GNU GPL and organized the FSF to protect this legal framework as the basis for free development. The FSF *is* in the business of enforcing the GPL, though historically this has involved exposing violations and pursuasion. They could enjoin SCO in the name of protecting their contributing copyright owners' IP.
FSF should be able to capitalize on this. Show me where to donate to a dedicated fund to get Moglen and company on their tails. This is beyond their other claims and concoctions. They are in direct violation of their license and must be enjoined.
If free software means anything, anymore, we have to go to court to enjoin this behavior. I'll pay, we all should be willing to pay to see this stopped.
They've gone beyond the simple, day-to-day corporate malfeasance and arrogance. A simple boycott of their crappy products doesn't help because their only clients are those already locked into their platform. FSF needs to open a website taking donations strictly for the fight they *must* pick with these bastards.
If software libre means anything, the FSF *must* file a suit. Show me where to contribute. Moglen, et. al. just got job security for the next four years.
is belied by the sorry condition of M and J's ships of state. If God were protecting one or the other it should have been evident by now. Unless. . . of course! THE UNITED STATES IS GOD!
Slashdot Mirror
An average amateur player with a year or two of experience can beat any go AI.
The 15-12k rating of Many Faces and others is highly suspect. A few games against the machine and you can see how to beat it. Keep many open positions and don't pursue local conflicts. It is very easy to maintain sente against any of the programs. Against anyone with knowledge of the machines' style, it rates closer to 24-20 kyu.
Ya. I'm to the point I simply don't run IM, no matter how much they beg. There is no value in the chat interface. I'm in enough contact. Remember that no one's time is remotely as important as they would like you to believe it is.
That lumpy black thing on your desk is called a phone. Internal communications are free and internally routed. Cool.
I don't much care for Glazier either, for similar complaints. But DAdams is ripping a familiar form in English, the parody of poetic forms using neologisms, invented words.
Lewis Carroll:
Jabberwocky
' Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jub-jub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch.
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxsome foe he sought -
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy
Oh frabjous day! Calooh! Calley!
He chortled in his joy
' Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
jdifool,
The poster remarked the similarity of poetry to code, particularly that both are formalisms. New forms of poetry are akin to new languages, new works in old forms are like new ideas in familiar contexts.
The distinctions rely on differing relationships to syntactic rigor. What you unfortunately term *extensible* is really a matter of greater freedom: the only interpreter a poem will face is the reader; your code must pass muster with an interpreter whose concern for syntactic and structural detail is unsurpassed. For example, a modernist poet, Marianne Moore, I believe, has adopted a personal convention of declaring simile with the *::* syntax of PERL, long before the first bit was ever flipped. But this idiom does not have the same value, indeed, typically does not occur at all in the work of other poets. It is a personal signifier, rather than a syntactic contract.
It is possible to write a compiler or interpreter to handle any degree of syntactic or structural freedom, but its practical use would be nil. It might make an interesting art project, nevertheless, not unlike the free play of formal requirements Appolinaire exhibits in his picture/poems.
That said, the parallels are real and offer valuable insight, as Glazier's work has demonstrated for some years. But more interesting, perhaps than technical referentiality or verse rigidly structured like code, is the intersection of code and poetry in programs which are haiku generators and the like. In this case, the code embodies some of the requirements of the art form in unique ways. Features are highlighted and made manifest in code which are otherwise merely suggested in the collected body of work in that form.
My Dear Hermit,
I had intended merely a throw-away rant. I appreciate your detailed response and feel you deserve a more considered explanation of my views. That your reply has been moderated indicates someone besides us is enjoying this thread so I will take a moment to expand on my remarks and your rejoinder.
I should like to correct your prejudice as to my professional situation. I am a writer by training, a poet, and a film-maker by avocation. It is true that I am making my mortgage doing XML/XSLT plumbing with Java, but I have no formal training in computer science.
I should also point out that my rant overstated my position somewhat. I don't believe that GUIs should be outlawed. I contend that most GUIs are cluttered, mal-organized and require more training to use effectively than a comparable CLI tool would. I feel that the proper balance between graphical and textual tools in HCI has not yet been struck. I contend that the current Linux toolset is closer to a proper, natural balance of these assets in addressing general purpose computing than either Mac or MS at this time. I take the recent introduction of a CLI for Apple machines and the announced return of CLI tools for Windows to corroborate my view. Your mention of *text-based* GUI tools is quite apropos here. The expanding directory tree is one of the few really successful graphical representations we've managed.
I take a more nuanced view of the computer as a tool and its relationship to the user. Central to my thinking is an impression that the popularity of graphical interfaces is not a result of their intuitive ease, but consequent to a particular historical moment in the development of our relationship to the machine. Users did not charge from DOS to Windows. The market dramatically expanded at that moment as people who formerly resisted the notion that computers were useful to secretaries, truckers, actuaries and writers were suddenly convinced that computers might be not only useful, but something crucial and not to be missed. We have a generation now who have conformed their working styles to the demands the machines made of them at that moment and now do find them *intuitive*.
That is, to say that GUIs are good because they are popular is like saying Microsoft is good because its popular. You yourself call MS Office *crap*. In reality, either are popular because there is no practical alternative. And these two developments are closely related and a direct result of this flood of naieve users coincident with the release of Win95 and the development of the internet. The internal dialogue goes something like this: I don't know computers and don't want to know. I want something easy to use and I need to be able to open the Lotus and Word files people send me. Whether a mouse and graphical menus were, in point of fact, easy to use, did not enter into it. Users had no context within which to make an informed decision.
As to *most people* requiring a GUI to work with computers easily, I believe that remains an open question. I have myself overseen the transition of a 100 person compositing department from CLI tools to Quark at a halving of productivity. The rationale for this disastrous move was the *ease* of training new personnel. The ease of training existing personnel to the GUI interface was not considered. In fact they have been efficiently bringing more people on quickly, which is a good thing considering that the department nearly doubled in size without additional business to offset the expense. I left the company over the disaster.
You mention cameras and the example is fortuitous for several reasons. They clearly point the way forward for the penetration of computers in daily life. The embedded processor in your camera has, as its interface, the device itself. Its functions are so closely aligned to the use of the machine that traditional HCI concerns are moot. I think that this type of computing interface will be by far the most common going forward.
Y'know, it is starting to get on my nerves, this endless churning agon regarding graphical interfaces and Linux, or any other software for that matter. I, and frankly many others of my acquaintance, find a text interface both more functional and more intuitive than menus and buttons. C'mon, we've had a thousand years to get comfortable with text-based interfaces. A graph is a graph is a character, eh! I think with words by habit; I remember text and its meaning much more readily that the location of the farking widgit in the Husker Du of menus most GUI programs make available.
Here is my Dad when I introduced him to his new Ibook w/Aqua GUI: Do I click the word or the picture?
Here, developers, is a friggin clue: GUI's are no more fun to learn and use than they are to write!!! Unless I am doing something with a picture, pictures are not to the point. Somewhere in the mists of time, some arrogant HCI genius decided that unlike L33t programmers, normal Joe Sixpacks thought with pictures instead of words and its been downhill ever since. When is it ever easier to manually open and fiddle with more than two objects when a script can do it?!? When!?!
Has it not been amply demonstrated that the mouse is the most anti-ergonomical device in the modern office?!?
Ahrrrrrrrgh!
Thank you, and I apologize for the inconvenience.
As a base-64 encoded binary object. Not everything belongs in brackets; I believe that's the point of the book.
Bandwidth is an order of magnitude more limiting than tree parsing, egg. That and the facilities the tool vendors decorate their stuff with. Of course its not free, what is?
SQLXML and most other value-adds are bull. Your business objects should optimize the hell out of their DB access and return XML. XML is messaging and presentation tier glue. Read the book.
1) Programming languages based on XML
Yeah, but code *generation* with XML is the cat's pyjamas.
2) XSLT
You clearly haven't tried it, or did not use it as intended. Do you have any experience with other functional languages? I work almost exclusively with XSLT at the moment and wouldn't have it any other way.
3) SOAP
is butt-stupid, I admit. But hey, ninty-odd percent of the beef this topic has generated can be fixed with a glance at the book being reviewed.
Interestingly, XML was originally intended as a userland technology, bringing the strength of SGML to the web, fixing what was broken in HTML (the last great userland data format). The game has lost sight of the goal a bit, I think, which is the root of much of the kvetching this topic generates.
Frankly, ERH is a great writer and has good insights into the use and abuse of markup. This book is one of the things that was missing while the pro/anti-XML hype trains were picking up steam.
XPath is not inherently a pig. Many API's handle XPath with aplomb, usually building an alternative data structure behind the scenes for access. XSL usually wants the whole tree but many implementations optimize this out unless large structures are being reorganized.
Use the context, Luke.
You either don't know Go or don't know AI. It is not a brute force problem and the difficulties in solving it are not a matter of popularity.
Start with this paper. Frankly, NLP is far ahead of GO AI.
That stuck in my craw too. I submit that beating up MS is just a happy side-effect for must of us.
Go. Wei-chi. Baduk.
Chess is simple calculation compared to the nuanced give and take of Go. There is only one move: place a stone on a point; there is no end to the possibilities.
I am a less than average Go player and I can easily beat the best available Go AI.
SCO knows they don't have a leg to stand on. They are plugging this in the court of public opinion. You've heard Darryl recently. He is going to be addressing somebody's conference about the *threat of Open Source Software*. They really do want to make this a fight about the whole notion of software libre.
Their only prayer is that some reactionary hack on the way up the judiciary food-chain decides that OSS really is some pinko conspiracy to bankrupt vital American commercial interests. Meanwhile, sell! sell! sell!
just builds this and that on top of LFS. Try this for starters.
As to a bootable cdrom how about this?
Google nazis? is that a sequitur?
They are all treated differently. Linus has trademarked the word *Linux*. The contributors to the GNU project and Linux kernel, including Mr. Torvalds, own the copyright to their particular contributions. Stallman created the GNU GPL and organized the FSF to protect this legal framework as the basis for free development. The FSF *is* in the business of enforcing the GPL, though historically this has involved exposing violations and pursuasion. They could enjoin SCO in the name of protecting their contributing copyright owners' IP.
FSF should be able to capitalize on this. Show me where to donate to a dedicated fund to get Moglen and company on their tails. This is beyond their other claims and concoctions. They are in direct violation of their license and must be enjoined.
If free software means anything, anymore, we have to go to court to enjoin this behavior. I'll pay, we all should be willing to pay to see this stopped.
They've gone beyond the simple, day-to-day corporate malfeasance and arrogance. A simple boycott of their crappy products doesn't help because their only clients are those already locked into their platform. FSF needs to open a website taking donations strictly for the fight they *must* pick with these bastards.
If software libre means anything, the FSF *must* file a suit. Show me where to contribute. Moglen, et. al. just got job security for the next four years.
next? And at a massive 7.5 X 7.5, a damn-sight cheaper, apparently.
Java, emacs and XML all suck.
in sales--better
Not one thin dime.
is belied by the sorry condition of M and J's ships of state. If God were protecting one or the other it should have been evident by now. Unless. . . of course! THE UNITED STATES IS GOD!