Of course I want to have a fully charged battery in my laptop, that way, when they ask me to power it on and show the BIOS, I have plenty of room to put the explosive where the HD was, and need the power to fire the detonator.
Or they're just bad people who go into positions of power with no chance of being fired because they're bullies and jackasses.
When I go through the security screening, I often notice how they're members of the intellectual proletariat, obviously rising up in revolution against the bourgeois pigs who have their foot on their neck as they try to do their performance art about how hard it is being poor. Clearly they are from the non-nobility, who has codified peerage laws specifically naming them as next in line for the throne.P>
At least now it will be easier for the planes to be flown into buildings without the pilots knowledge and no terrorists needed, by projecting a false camera view.
MENSA is for people who are insecure and conceited about their intelligence. An analogy I always use is the Club of Certified Badasses. What kind of badass would want to join that?
I hear they're pretty big on scientific racism too...they can have fun with that without me.
Wth is scientific racism? Do they refuse to research black body energy or something?
So it's a group of insecure people who are conceited, and you spend some amount of your waking hours constructing analogies for them.
And FYI? Chuck Norris is a certified bad-ass. That's who.
I thought I was special until I realised there are 140 000 000 potential mensans on earth.
...and most of them are from China and India.
And the fact that I'm pretty good at guessing which dice should come after a serie of 4 other dice doesn't tell much about myself, and surely shouldn't be taken as a genius indicator.
You should use a Hidden Markov model. It'll free up your time.
They know how to control for controlling for economic and social factors? What?
You make sure the test is in both metric and imperial units, to make sure dark poor people will answer the questions since they deal with kilos and grams often because...um....never mind.
Before someone asks, yes, I am "Mensa material". I do IQ tests as a pastime. It's fun to watch shrinks stare in awe. So I could join them. As could, I'm certain, most people around here. Being in the 2% bracket isn't THAT difficult when you look at it. There are actually clubs out there with far tighter joining criteria. Also not really something I'd consider joining.
It isn't difficult to join. I mean, 50% of the population is below average intelligence and education. When you segment the rest up, you end up with a more focused test taker than the other handful of intelligent guys in the room. So unless you hang out regularly with the lower 50% in intelligence, you and most of your friends would probably be eligible.
I mean, let's be honest, why should I? Yes, it's fun to have a discussion with people who can think beyond next breakfast but it's no fun having them with people who consider themselves so "smart" and aloof to join a club that selects its members by intelligence. I mean, imagine you're good looking, would you want to join a club that only lets beautiful people join? Ponder what kind of self absorbed, shallow cunts such criteria attract. And then ponder whether you want to be part of that.
Mensa was started right after WW2, October 1, 1946. Television, cinema, media, culture was not like it is now. There were no cool internet billionaires. There were no movies showing how cool the nerds were if you just gave them a chance. You couldn't Facebook to find friends with your interests. Intelligence wasn't really part of the social fabric of the general population compared to today.
A high school might have a few HNICs (Head Nerds In Charge) who were beaten up, mocked, made fun of, and had their chess boards tipped over. Everyone else had probably been to war and/or in combat, and I'm going to assume most nerds didn't get that experience. They were isolated and alone. College wasn't like it is now when anyone can run up $100k in debt and join on ever lowering entrance requirements; not everyone could go into higher education in those days regardless of how smart they were. How were they going to hang out with people with their interests? Go to the bar with all the army guys talking about their experiences? Read comic books where pretty much the smart guys were all evil and beaten by the football-quarterback looking superhero? Go to a football game they might not have had an interest in?
People that tested in a particular bracket could join a group where there were other people like them. I don't think they were being snooty and laughing at everyone around them in the 1950s feeling superior. They weren't being shallow cunts who were the silicon valley hipsters of their day.
Mensa's constitution lists three purposes: "to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity; to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence; and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members".
Clearly a bunch of dicks.
And even more, ponder whether you want to spend at least part of your life with someone like that.
God forbid you want to spend time with someone you can talk to about things. This is why my primary measure of a partner is based on breast size and their understanding that a raised fist means to shut the hell up.
Either you'll have a completely broken person who snapped under the pressure of being the expected "pinnacle of intelligence", or you get the ultimate self-absorbed asshole, or a combination of both.
Or they're just some intelligent people who test well and get along fine with people and have learned how to handle social interactions?
Yeah really. Everyone I know at the groups is married or capable of going to an RG or SIG if they MUST pair up with an accredited Mensan. I'm not sure where match.com improves anything.
The irony of the whole thing is that it's a death spiral. By asking employees to do more with less and get less sleep, their health suffers which is a negative on the company in MANY ways. First, tired workers simply are less productive, period. It's very possible that the 10, 12 hour days they're putting in they're simply not going to be as productive than if you forced them to go home after 8 and let them have a good rest, ready to take on the challenge tomorrow.
This happens where I am all the time. It's always another case of "We'll need extended hours support tonight until 9pm because the developers just made a change to...." or some such nonsense. Pair that with complete lack of leadership. It used to be once or twice, now its pretty much 30% chance per day that someone will screw up, and instead of pushing it until the next day, it's us using what dregs of energy is left at the end of the day, from getting no sleep the night before.
My problem is I'm nocturnal, always have been. School was hard, work is hard, I just can't sleep until about 0400, then I have to coffee achieve the week until I can crash 15 hours on the weekend. Unfortunately I'm paid too much to go get some night job as a bartender where the hours would be acceptable
Second, there are health issues.First, weakened immune systems mean workers get sicker easier. And sick employees almost always come to work (a term we call "presenteeism", the opposite of absenteeism). Well, you have a sniffling, sneezing, coughing worker spreading their germs to everyone. What's THAT going to do for productivity?
I'm that guy. I come into the office no matter what trail of blood I'm leaving behind me. I simply can't blow the sick time, which is the only vacation you can get since vacations get cancelled because of deployment schedule changes. I actively spread contagion on management to punish them these days.
Of course, short term crunches do work. In the short term. Once they become chronic, well, the whole workplace suffers and you end up at some middling level of productivity caused by sick employees, tired less productive employees, and the lack of safety and quality in the final product.
What's interesting is that its now an indirect effect instead of a direct effect. Maybe it falls under the heading or "morale", but productivity suffers. But not because of lack of sleep directly. We're all tired and fed up, so we are actively sabotaging things. It's become more of a quiet revolution than just making coding errors, back check ins, inefficient coding, whatever. People intentionally lower their IQ. What I love about this job is that, to your average manager, they can't differentiate between Einstein, and someone ten times smarter than Einstein. Sure I could make an API call to do that, but why take 5 minutes when 5 days is a better option? Does fixing that bug take a day or a week? Maybe the lack of sleep just causes people to not care anymore and become dull, but it certainly has made a number of people I work with now actively become unproductive. On purpose. As punishment for piss poor management.
Ironically, either people will ignore you, or offer some stupid counterpoint about how you can't do that.
I got out of college (where I didn't have loans, but went part time with a night job fo many years) and quickly made an exciting job at a call center for $8 an hour.
I live(d) within my means, and after taking pay cuts even more to try and get ahead in a career. I had roomates, split rent, car pooled, etc. I had and have nothing but shit cars my life. I shop and Walmart and mostly Goodwill or army surplus stores for clothes.
I didn't get a mortgage for a home. I got two full time jobs, one W2 and one 1099, and balanced between them. Within two years I bought a small home for cash. I then bought another small home, because I could rent out the existing one, and I live cheap. Now I have a free home, and one providing rental income, so I'm profiting on it as an additional income stream.
Now work doesn't matter. It was a lot of stress having two jobs, and I had to kiss a lot of ass to balance it, but now I can live on one. I take extra jobs now and then (above my full time one) to gravy a bit more on my assets. I have few bills, so I'm maxing out my savings. Since the beginning I maxed anything I could save and lived on the smallest amount I could. i never went the management track so I wasn't locked into one company.
Now I have hundreds of thousands in the bank and tax free investments and I lost plenty in the real-estate bust before that. However I have no debt, I have assets. My held liabiilities (real estate) is offest by rental income.
I've helped some coworkers in the philosophy of getting out of debt, and now, like a crazy cult, we meet at lunch and they're excited about how soon they'll pay off a second mortgage, or a car, and things like that. They actually LIKE the idea of doing math and setting budgets, and seeing how a $20 here and there in expenses can cause large changes to their debt levels.
As a counter point, people used to tell me that I'm living life not to its potential, not having fun, I might die any moment, or I'll retire early and not be healthy enough. I am constantly abused by friends telling me to spend money (above the triple minimum wage I've set myself at) because I'm...what...not keeping up with the Jones' or something?
I remember being mocked, because in 2007 I was talking to my boss about buying a home and I was looking at some double wides on an acre, or a cheap 2/1 outside of town, and being told I was "stupid" because I should get a mortgage for as much house as I could max out on my credit. I guess I disappointed him.
that's interesting. I opened a new tab to read this forum, and in the background, the browser was making dozens of requests to various "ad" sites. I don't know if it was a poisoned existing ad on the page firing these background requests off, or if there is some sort of script injected or if this is what Dice does in the background for ad revenue. Using Ubuntu 13.10, Firefox 27.0.1. It did not occur on other forums.
It's not so much killer terminators in the classic sense.
A trifecta of air/sea/land operations is what's being done. Autonomous drones across the three game surfaces to eliminate the massive expense of physically present wetware, even remotely is the long term benefit. Being able to classify, analyze, and respond accordingly allows continuous intelligence and strike operations to be maintained 24/7 in any theater we need to be in.
You want to be able to move your troops in the area, send a signal to stop active guard while you traverse the area based on the pause code updated constantly by satellite so there's not more "thunder!" "Flash!" type of counter signing, you just want to click and go, and enable it again when you've cleared the area. You want to be able to throw a drone up in the air to target enemies when you're pinned down. You want a small sniper patrolling an area constantly while you're stuck in a forward area.
Classification of enemies isn't difficult, when you define it as anyone that should be there. It's the benefit of a mine field without the mines that blow up children 10 years later. Classification is much better when you are determining vehicles vs. people vs. children vs. animals, and is not that hard to do as it is already being done.
Can casualties occur? Civilian ones? Sure. The goal is to eliminate civilian casualties or infrastructure destruction is possible. That's not good war. Good war is eliminating he ability for the bad guys to make war against you. It's a lot easier to deny more and more territory from bad guys mixed with special forced who can move in and out of any territory without being ripper to shreds, while denying it to the bad guys.
Who wants to deal with all the political lash back of dead soldiers or civilians, when you can remotely guide assets for specific missions, and switch to autonomous target elimination or intelligence gathering or force protection on a whim?
A war with 5000 of our soldiers against an entire nation's army or insurgents in street to street fighting and winning because we had intelligent technology and having a dozen casualties is better for us and for them. It costs a lot less to tell the citizenry "don't be in this location" while it's cleared, as well as boxing a know civilian area to not be touched. It costs a lot less to granulate the destruction down to the actual baddies who are being tracked by constant intelligence streaming assets who work all day and night while spitting out a report in Alabama. Military engagements involving the first world are mostly politically won or lost, not militarily so. Eliminating soldier deaths and civilian deaths allows you more money and time and ability to politically win a conflict rather than spend those resources trying to handle lash back.
In an increasingly networked battlefield, these technological abilities are a godsend for keeping "good guys" alive and able to perform effectively. Having much more of an idea if an area is clear or you can sleep at night rather than burning out troops from psychological stressors is a nice thing.
Based on the demo, this appears to be a digital way to experience taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. Timelapse trails behind movement? Sharp sound focus? Are we creating an electronic ability to simulate pharmacological effects?
Thinking of branching out to simple arcade games, like Bubble Bubble or Pacman? I'd love to see a video of a computer mastering those...
Interesting you mention arcade games. As changes are made to the framework and some of the subsystems, we have a variety of benchmarks that are run that help evaluate breadth and depth of the learning process and quality of the strategies.
One of the benchmarks is a version of Asteroids. Depending on the strategy goals, it measures length of life without firing a shot (movement only while learning about spatial relationships of the asteroids), length of life based on cost of fuel (the ship is a floating platform for directing fire while using as little movement as possible), and stealth opposition, where its goal is to kill the enemy UFO while interacting with as few asteroids as possible, which is multi-objective, involving firing upon as few asteroids as possible and using spatial information to avoid asteroids until the UFO arrives, which involves it's own evolvable tactic for destroying it, while also must fit into it's overriding goal to not shoot asteroids and run into one.
I'm not sure you misunderstood as much as my poor explanation. Although rules of many games specify what winning is, in some cases strategy solutions don't necessarily have a clear definition of winning. Sometimes winning isn't defined as well as treating it as an optimization problem. There are rules of the game, and goals of the game.
As a simple example, take tic-tac-toe. There are rules (you can only put your marker, a X or O in a blank space) which specify what you can do. There are goals that evaluate your play, such as you win with three in a row in various directions, a draw where no one has three in a row, and a loss if your opponent gets three in a row.
There is no other real knowledge of how to play. An expert player will never lose, they will either win or draw based on known strategies that are unbeatable. The basic rules don't define how to do that.
What the learning system does is create strategies. A basic strategy might be, randomly put your X or O in an empty square. You could occassionally win against novice opponents that way. But it would not be an optimal strategy and would regularly lose. Evolve that strategy a bit and you find the system putting its X or O in a proximity which increases its ability to put three in a row. Evolve it a bit more and it can recognize that its opponent is trying to put three in a row and will block it. Evolve it a bit more, and it will block its opponent putting three in a row at the same time putting that block in an advantageous placement to benefit itself to win.
Nothing in the rules specifies this, but is the result of experience or math or research or intuition. The rule is just "The placement rules say you can do 'this'. The measurement of winning is defined as 'that'." The system "learns" from it's mistakes and successes.
Optimization problems are a little different, certainly multiple objective problems. In a more complex "game", you might be trying to optimize solutions for (really we're just talking about a problem domain and a solution space) the stock market, military strategy, chess, TTT, whatever.
The rules of military strategy for an objective can be unique. The rules of the game may be, minimize civilian casualties, you can only use certain type of weapons systems based on political situations, total cost must be under such-and-such, distances must be capable of being reached by units involved, certain enemy units must be captured rather than killed, etc.
Nothing in that tells you HOW to win, it just says, "Here are the rules you must follow, find the best way to do so that comes with the best chance of winning, costs the least, limited friendly-fire situations, etc."
So I guess that's what I mean when I say we don't tell it how to win. We measure winning as what our definition is and how close the strategy solution came to that goal. If it was poker, we would say, "here's the rules of texas hold 'em". The only measurement of winning would be amout of money won. We wouldn't tell it what the hand values were, what were considered good hole cards, or anything else. It would evolve the concept of when to win, bet, bluff, fold, how much to bet at a time, recognizing if it was being bluffed, when do do so based on how many players are in the hand, even what the values of the hands are, etc. At the end a few hundred games, we'd tell it, "Hey you were the best poker playing strategy or you were the worst strategy". That's it. The system evolves 'good' play on its own.
That's what I mean by not telling it how to win. We tell it how it measured against other strategies. It doesn't know what's going on.
Portions of it were influenced on a couple of works done.
Chellapilla and Fogel's 2001 work on Anaconda which built a completely evolved checkers program, which did similar techniques at the broad level. The checkers playing strategies in their case were building neural networks which regulated play. Our similarities are in the way that the strategies evolved and that no game specific knowledge was needed, other than movement rules and an aggregation of strategy fitness across competition rather than individual competition values,
Other techniques are in Kewley and Embrechts 2002 work on military strategy which was interesting in that the evolved strategies were good military strategy (with emergent doctrinal tactics) which beat military experts strategies in a simulation, in additional to beating it's own strategy when military experts modified it. This also used evolutionary concepts to evolve its solutions.
Unfortunately I can't divulge our own specific information above and beyond what I've discussed, but we certainly have been influenced by previous work on the subject, and made a few new additions to it in our own work.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course I want to have a fully charged battery in my laptop, that way, when they ask me to power it on and show the BIOS, I have plenty of room to put the explosive where the HD was, and need the power to fire the detonator.
Or they're just bad people who go into positions of power with no chance of being fired because they're bullies and jackasses.
When I go through the security screening, I often notice how they're members of the intellectual proletariat, obviously rising up in revolution against the bourgeois pigs who have their foot on their neck as they try to do their performance art about how hard it is being poor. Clearly they are from the non-nobility, who has codified peerage laws specifically naming them as next in line for the throne.P>
At least now it will be easier for the planes to be flown into buildings without the pilots knowledge and no terrorists needed, by projecting a false camera view.
#911InsideJob #blessed #lolcats
Is that the only measure of success?
...and this is why the terrorists are winning. If you're in 'murica, get some Jesus. If you aren't, stop takin' meh jobs!
This saves us from the terrorists how?
This sounds like the beginning of evil technology so that I can't use my DVR to skip commercials.
MENSA is for people who are insecure and conceited about their intelligence. An analogy I always use is the Club of Certified Badasses. What kind of badass would want to join that?
I hear they're pretty big on scientific racism too...they can have fun with that without me.
Wth is scientific racism? Do they refuse to research black body energy or something?
So it's a group of insecure people who are conceited, and you spend some amount of your waking hours constructing analogies for them.
And FYI? Chuck Norris is a certified bad-ass. That's who.
I thought I was special until I realised there are 140 000 000 potential mensans on earth.
...and most of them are from China and India.
And the fact that I'm pretty good at guessing which dice should come after a serie of 4 other dice doesn't tell much about myself, and surely shouldn't be taken as a genius indicator.
You should use a Hidden Markov model. It'll free up your time.
They know how to control for controlling for economic and social factors? What?
You make sure the test is in both metric and imperial units, to make sure dark poor people will answer the questions since they deal with kilos and grams often because...um....never mind.
...sup.
People who boast about their I.Q. are losers. - Stephen Hawking
Said the man who is too stupid to operate a stairwell.
Mensies?
It's pronounced, "Menses". You've gone and made a bloody mess of it.
Before someone asks, yes, I am "Mensa material". I do IQ tests as a pastime. It's fun to watch shrinks stare in awe. So I could join them. As could, I'm certain, most people around here. Being in the 2% bracket isn't THAT difficult when you look at it. There are actually clubs out there with far tighter joining criteria. Also not really something I'd consider joining.
It isn't difficult to join. I mean, 50% of the population is below average intelligence and education. When you segment the rest up, you end up with a more focused test taker than the other handful of intelligent guys in the room. So unless you hang out regularly with the lower 50% in intelligence, you and most of your friends would probably be eligible.
I mean, let's be honest, why should I? Yes, it's fun to have a discussion with people who can think beyond next breakfast but it's no fun having them with people who consider themselves so "smart" and aloof to join a club that selects its members by intelligence. I mean, imagine you're good looking, would you want to join a club that only lets beautiful people join? Ponder what kind of self absorbed, shallow cunts such criteria attract. And then ponder whether you want to be part of that.
Mensa was started right after WW2, October 1, 1946. Television, cinema, media, culture was not like it is now. There were no cool internet billionaires. There were no movies showing how cool the nerds were if you just gave them a chance. You couldn't Facebook to find friends with your interests. Intelligence wasn't really part of the social fabric of the general population compared to today.
A high school might have a few HNICs (Head Nerds In Charge) who were beaten up, mocked, made fun of, and had their chess boards tipped over. Everyone else had probably been to war and/or in combat, and I'm going to assume most nerds didn't get that experience. They were isolated and alone. College wasn't like it is now when anyone can run up $100k in debt and join on ever lowering entrance requirements; not everyone could go into higher education in those days regardless of how smart they were. How were they going to hang out with people with their interests? Go to the bar with all the army guys talking about their experiences? Read comic books where pretty much the smart guys were all evil and beaten by the football-quarterback looking superhero? Go to a football game they might not have had an interest in?
People that tested in a particular bracket could join a group where there were other people like them. I don't think they were being snooty and laughing at everyone around them in the 1950s feeling superior. They weren't being shallow cunts who were the silicon valley hipsters of their day.
Mensa's constitution lists three purposes: "to identify and to foster human intelligence for the benefit of humanity; to encourage research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence; and to provide a stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members".
Clearly a bunch of dicks.
And even more, ponder whether you want to spend at least part of your life with someone like that.
God forbid you want to spend time with someone you can talk to about things. This is why my primary measure of a partner is based on breast size and their understanding that a raised fist means to shut the hell up.
Either you'll have a completely broken person who snapped under the pressure of being the expected "pinnacle of intelligence", or you get the ultimate self-absorbed asshole, or a combination of both.
Or they're just some intelligent people who test well and get along fine with people and have learned how to handle social interactions?
Smartest guy I know wastes most of every day playing Xbox and smoking pot.
It's you isn't it. You're the pot smoker fragging me in CoD.
Your measure of intelligence is based on how many Doritos crumbs are scattered around?
Whenever someone tells me they are in Mensa, I usually think, what a fuck head.
The first sign of intelligence is making immediate conclusions based on no relevant observations.
Not only did you care enough to jump through the hoops to join, but you are arrogant enough to want everyone to know you're a member.
I just submitted my GRE. I think I had to use the post office at some point.
In my case, I stuck a "Federal Bikini Inspector" card on the back of my Mensa card. It's more amusing that way and decreases the punching.
Instead, show me your intellect with witty conversation, keen understanding, and curiosity, and you won't be such an ass.
Have you considered buying a television?
The really odd thing about this is I'm programming some hidden markov models right now.
Poorly.
You've never dated a stupid elitist have you.
Yeah really. Everyone I know at the groups is married or capable of going to an RG or SIG if they MUST pair up with an accredited Mensan. I'm not sure where match.com improves anything.
This happens where I am all the time. It's always another case of "We'll need extended hours support tonight until 9pm because the developers just made a change to...." or some such nonsense. Pair that with complete lack of leadership. It used to be once or twice, now its pretty much 30% chance per day that someone will screw up, and instead of pushing it until the next day, it's us using what dregs of energy is left at the end of the day, from getting no sleep the night before.
My problem is I'm nocturnal, always have been. School was hard, work is hard, I just can't sleep until about 0400, then I have to coffee achieve the week until I can crash 15 hours on the weekend. Unfortunately I'm paid too much to go get some night job as a bartender where the hours would be acceptable
Second, there are health issues.First, weakened immune systems mean workers get sicker easier. And sick employees almost always come to work (a term we call "presenteeism", the opposite of absenteeism). Well, you have a sniffling, sneezing, coughing worker spreading their germs to everyone. What's THAT going to do for productivity?
I'm that guy. I come into the office no matter what trail of blood I'm leaving behind me. I simply can't blow the sick time, which is the only vacation you can get since vacations get cancelled because of deployment schedule changes. I actively spread contagion on management to punish them these days.
Of course, short term crunches do work. In the short term. Once they become chronic, well, the whole workplace suffers and you end up at some middling level of productivity caused by sick employees, tired less productive employees, and the lack of safety and quality in the final product.
What's interesting is that its now an indirect effect instead of a direct effect. Maybe it falls under the heading or "morale", but productivity suffers. But not because of lack of sleep directly. We're all tired and fed up, so we are actively sabotaging things. It's become more of a quiet revolution than just making coding errors, back check ins, inefficient coding, whatever. People intentionally lower their IQ. What I love about this job is that, to your average manager, they can't differentiate between Einstein, and someone ten times smarter than Einstein. Sure I could make an API call to do that, but why take 5 minutes when 5 days is a better option? Does fixing that bug take a day or a week? Maybe the lack of sleep just causes people to not care anymore and become dull, but it certainly has made a number of people I work with now actively become unproductive. On purpose. As punishment for piss poor management.
No one will read this, but that's ok.
Ironically, either people will ignore you, or offer some stupid counterpoint about how you can't do that.
I got out of college (where I didn't have loans, but went part time with a night job fo many years) and quickly made an exciting job at a call center for $8 an hour.
I live(d) within my means, and after taking pay cuts even more to try and get ahead in a career. I had roomates, split rent, car pooled, etc. I had and have nothing but shit cars my life. I shop and Walmart and mostly Goodwill or army surplus stores for clothes.
I didn't get a mortgage for a home. I got two full time jobs, one W2 and one 1099, and balanced between them. Within two years I bought a small home for cash. I then bought another small home, because I could rent out the existing one, and I live cheap. Now I have a free home, and one providing rental income, so I'm profiting on it as an additional income stream.
Now work doesn't matter. It was a lot of stress having two jobs, and I had to kiss a lot of ass to balance it, but now I can live on one. I take extra jobs now and then (above my full time one) to gravy a bit more on my assets. I have few bills, so I'm maxing out my savings. Since the beginning I maxed anything I could save and lived on the smallest amount I could. i never went the management track so I wasn't locked into one company.
Now I have hundreds of thousands in the bank and tax free investments and I lost plenty in the real-estate bust before that. However I have no debt, I have assets. My held liabiilities (real estate) is offest by rental income.
I've helped some coworkers in the philosophy of getting out of debt, and now, like a crazy cult, we meet at lunch and they're excited about how soon they'll pay off a second mortgage, or a car, and things like that. They actually LIKE the idea of doing math and setting budgets, and seeing how a $20 here and there in expenses can cause large changes to their debt levels.
As a counter point, people used to tell me that I'm living life not to its potential, not having fun, I might die any moment, or I'll retire early and not be healthy enough. I am constantly abused by friends telling me to spend money (above the triple minimum wage I've set myself at) because I'm...what...not keeping up with the Jones' or something?
I remember being mocked, because in 2007 I was talking to my boss about buying a home and I was looking at some double wides on an acre, or a cheap 2/1 outside of town, and being told I was "stupid" because I should get a mortgage for as much house as I could max out on my credit. I guess I disappointed him.
that's interesting. I opened a new tab to read this forum, and in the background, the browser was making dozens of requests to various "ad" sites. I don't know if it was a poisoned existing ad on the page firing these background requests off, or if there is some sort of script injected or if this is what Dice does in the background for ad revenue. Using Ubuntu 13.10, Firefox 27.0.1. It did not occur on other forums.
It's not so much killer terminators in the classic sense. A trifecta of air/sea/land operations is what's being done. Autonomous drones across the three game surfaces to eliminate the massive expense of physically present wetware, even remotely is the long term benefit. Being able to classify, analyze, and respond accordingly allows continuous intelligence and strike operations to be maintained 24/7 in any theater we need to be in. You want to be able to move your troops in the area, send a signal to stop active guard while you traverse the area based on the pause code updated constantly by satellite so there's not more "thunder!" "Flash!" type of counter signing, you just want to click and go, and enable it again when you've cleared the area. You want to be able to throw a drone up in the air to target enemies when you're pinned down. You want a small sniper patrolling an area constantly while you're stuck in a forward area. Classification of enemies isn't difficult, when you define it as anyone that should be there. It's the benefit of a mine field without the mines that blow up children 10 years later. Classification is much better when you are determining vehicles vs. people vs. children vs. animals, and is not that hard to do as it is already being done. Can casualties occur? Civilian ones? Sure. The goal is to eliminate civilian casualties or infrastructure destruction is possible. That's not good war. Good war is eliminating he ability for the bad guys to make war against you. It's a lot easier to deny more and more territory from bad guys mixed with special forced who can move in and out of any territory without being ripper to shreds, while denying it to the bad guys. Who wants to deal with all the political lash back of dead soldiers or civilians, when you can remotely guide assets for specific missions, and switch to autonomous target elimination or intelligence gathering or force protection on a whim? A war with 5000 of our soldiers against an entire nation's army or insurgents in street to street fighting and winning because we had intelligent technology and having a dozen casualties is better for us and for them. It costs a lot less to tell the citizenry "don't be in this location" while it's cleared, as well as boxing a know civilian area to not be touched. It costs a lot less to granulate the destruction down to the actual baddies who are being tracked by constant intelligence streaming assets who work all day and night while spitting out a report in Alabama. Military engagements involving the first world are mostly politically won or lost, not militarily so. Eliminating soldier deaths and civilian deaths allows you more money and time and ability to politically win a conflict rather than spend those resources trying to handle lash back. In an increasingly networked battlefield, these technological abilities are a godsend for keeping "good guys" alive and able to perform effectively. Having much more of an idea if an area is clear or you can sleep at night rather than burning out troops from psychological stressors is a nice thing.
I knew this was a mistake. Secure my ass. I'm going back to Windows.
Based on the demo, this appears to be a digital way to experience taking hallucinogenic mushrooms. Timelapse trails behind movement? Sharp sound focus? Are we creating an electronic ability to simulate pharmacological effects?
Thinking of branching out to simple arcade games, like Bubble Bubble or Pacman? I'd love to see a video of a computer mastering those...
Interesting you mention arcade games. As changes are made to the framework and some of the subsystems, we have a variety of benchmarks that are run that help evaluate breadth and depth of the learning process and quality of the strategies.
One of the benchmarks is a version of Asteroids. Depending on the strategy goals, it measures length of life without firing a shot (movement only while learning about spatial relationships of the asteroids), length of life based on cost of fuel (the ship is a floating platform for directing fire while using as little movement as possible), and stealth opposition, where its goal is to kill the enemy UFO while interacting with as few asteroids as possible, which is multi-objective, involving firing upon as few asteroids as possible and using spatial information to avoid asteroids until the UFO arrives, which involves it's own evolvable tactic for destroying it, while also must fit into it's overriding goal to not shoot asteroids and run into one.
I'm not sure you misunderstood as much as my poor explanation. Although rules of many games specify what winning is, in some cases strategy solutions don't necessarily have a clear definition of winning. Sometimes winning isn't defined as well as treating it as an optimization problem. There are rules of the game, and goals of the game.
As a simple example, take tic-tac-toe. There are rules (you can only put your marker, a X or O in a blank space) which specify what you can do. There are goals that evaluate your play, such as you win with three in a row in various directions, a draw where no one has three in a row, and a loss if your opponent gets three in a row.
There is no other real knowledge of how to play. An expert player will never lose, they will either win or draw based on known strategies that are unbeatable. The basic rules don't define how to do that.
What the learning system does is create strategies. A basic strategy might be, randomly put your X or O in an empty square. You could occassionally win against novice opponents that way. But it would not be an optimal strategy and would regularly lose. Evolve that strategy a bit and you find the system putting its X or O in a proximity which increases its ability to put three in a row. Evolve it a bit more and it can recognize that its opponent is trying to put three in a row and will block it. Evolve it a bit more, and it will block its opponent putting three in a row at the same time putting that block in an advantageous placement to benefit itself to win.
Nothing in the rules specifies this, but is the result of experience or math or research or intuition. The rule is just "The placement rules say you can do 'this'. The measurement of winning is defined as 'that'." The system "learns" from it's mistakes and successes.
Optimization problems are a little different, certainly multiple objective problems. In a more complex "game", you might be trying to optimize solutions for (really we're just talking about a problem domain and a solution space) the stock market, military strategy, chess, TTT, whatever.
The rules of military strategy for an objective can be unique. The rules of the game may be, minimize civilian casualties, you can only use certain type of weapons systems based on political situations, total cost must be under such-and-such, distances must be capable of being reached by units involved, certain enemy units must be captured rather than killed, etc.
Nothing in that tells you HOW to win, it just says, "Here are the rules you must follow, find the best way to do so that comes with the best chance of winning, costs the least, limited friendly-fire situations, etc."
So I guess that's what I mean when I say we don't tell it how to win. We measure winning as what our definition is and how close the strategy solution came to that goal. If it was poker, we would say, "here's the rules of texas hold 'em". The only measurement of winning would be amout of money won. We wouldn't tell it what the hand values were, what were considered good hole cards, or anything else. It would evolve the concept of when to win, bet, bluff, fold, how much to bet at a time, recognizing if it was being bluffed, when do do so based on how many players are in the hand, even what the values of the hands are, etc. At the end a few hundred games, we'd tell it, "Hey you were the best poker playing strategy or you were the worst strategy". That's it. The system evolves 'good' play on its own.
That's what I mean by not telling it how to win. We tell it how it measured against other strategies. It doesn't know what's going on.
Portions of it were influenced on a couple of works done.
Chellapilla and Fogel's 2001 work on Anaconda which built a completely evolved checkers program, which did similar techniques at the broad level. The checkers playing strategies in their case were building neural networks which regulated play. Our similarities are in the way that the strategies evolved and that no game specific knowledge was needed, other than movement rules and an aggregation of strategy fitness across competition rather than individual competition values,
Other techniques are in Kewley and Embrechts 2002 work on military strategy which was interesting in that the evolved strategies were good military strategy (with emergent doctrinal tactics) which beat military experts strategies in a simulation, in additional to beating it's own strategy when military experts modified it. This also used evolutionary concepts to evolve its solutions.
Unfortunately I can't divulge our own specific information above and beyond what I've discussed, but we certainly have been influenced by previous work on the subject, and made a few new additions to it in our own work.