[quote]This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world. Doomed to failure, but that won't stop the "visionaries." They should instead of focusing on having much better driving schools, much more stringent driving exams and recurring examinations. I find it ridiculous that having passed two laughable exams, I can now drive my car and ride my bike FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE (or at least for the next 50 years) without any retest.[/quote]
It doesn't matter if you take one driving test during your lifetime or a thousand, the Google robot driver will still be at least a hundred times safer than you.
Driving is a mundane task, one which requires constant attention, and thus by nature humans suck at it. Driving requires zero creativity and imagination, so human minds should really be put to better use elsewhere.
Yes, that is basically what happens. As soon as you start a call or when a call comes in, the data packets will not get through. And if your call lasts long enough eventually your connections will time out.
What a load of rubbish. How the hell did this get modded insightful?
Go only wins through brute force.
Go doesn't "win" anything. You play Go to win against someone else. In case you didn't know, Go is a game, with extremely simple rules, played between two players. As it happens, Go also pre-dates Chess by about 1000 years.
Sarcasm aside, to somehow suggest there is a "competition" between Go and Chess to the more "complex" is just absurd. I'm pretty sure our ancestors did not have this in mind when they invented Go and Chess.
go is 19x19
shogi is 9x9
chess is 8x8
Simply comparing board sizes between different games is pretty meaningless. The branching factor is governed as much by the board size as the actual rules of the game.
If a game like shogi or chess was extended to 19x19 it would be vastly harder for a computer.
And it would be vastly harder for the human as well. Assuming you could somehow meaningfully extend the complexed rules of Chess (as compared to rules of Go) to a 19x19 board, it could well be that the resulting mess would be so complex that no humans would be interested in playing. If it's not interesting to humans, than there's no point in writing computer programs to solve it.
Computers playing Go on 9x9 have beaten 9th dan.
In July of 2010, and the human isn't even near top 10 in the world. Also, 9x9 Go isn't Go, it's just that, 9x9 Go. These are two vastly different games. As an analogy, 9x9 Go is like fighting a single battle, where most of decisions are tactical. The normal Go is like fighting a war, with many battles going on at the same time. There are both strategical and tactical decisions to make.
And if it was 8x8 it would be even easier.
And if it was 7x7 Chess with no rooks Deep Blue would have crushed Kasparov.
What makes Go hard isn't anything particularly neat about the game.
What an arrogant statement coming from someone who apparently knows nothing about the game at all.
There has been considerably more research into Chess AI than Go AI, which may be one important contributing factor to the current relative weak status of Go AI. This may change in the coming years as more and more attention are being directed towards tackling Go. However, what we do know at this point is that writing competent AI for Go is very different from that of Chess, both in terms of the search strategy and the evaluation function, and very little of the advancements in Chess AI can be applied directly to Go. To me at least, the fact that Go is such a challenging game made out of such simple rules, is quite fascinating, and certainly qualifies as "neat".
The best a machine has done (I think) is winning against a 5th Dan.
... with a 7 stone handicap.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go#Recent_results) In chess terms, that's like winning an opponent who has no Knights.
"Claiming" something is meaningless and doesn't make it yours until all the countries in the world agree with you.
Well, apparently as this case shows it also means that there will be "strong reactions" from the Chinese government if you seize one of its citizen in the "claimed" territory, though I must say it's not even half as "strong" as what a great majority of Chinese people were calling for.
On the other hand, I don't think there really exists anything that "all the countries in the world" agree on...
GCJ is a portable, optimizing, ahead-of-time compiler for the Java Programming Language. It can compile Java source code to Java bytecode (class files) or directly to native machine code, and Java bytecode to native machine code.
And why do people get so emotional about programming languages?
A third option is for already democratic countries to reduce immigration restrictions, and have China's best and brightest vote with their feet.
Won't work. We Chinese are known to drop sleeper cell terrorist anchor babies all over the place. Eventually you will be forced to change your constitution.
Seriously though, you are much more likely to get our "corruptiest and greediest" rather than our best and brightest. It's well known fact that our corrupt officials move their dirty wealth overseas, and when they sense a change in the wind, they'll escape and go for "investment immigration". The USA and Canada are among their favourite destinations. I doubt these people will be a positive contribution to your society.
On the other hand, change in China is inevitable. It's not a question of "if" but a question of "when". The much more uncertain, and also more important question, though, is what will come after the dictator has fallen.
After this many years of trying, I've found that all publicly known methods of circumventing censorship do not last, no matter how promising the technique may seem at first. There are (were) online forums where people would share SOCKS and HTTP proxies they find or own, but nowadays these gets blocked faster than you can post it. The only reliable solution I've found is to buy your own commercial VPN service and keep it to yourself. I rent a VM host in California and run OpenVPN which I share with some of my friends. We get pretty decent connection speeds here in China, and it's actually pretty cheap even by us third-world standards, especially if you share the cost among a few people.
The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government, which is an endeavor that may take a few more decades. In the meantime, I suggest buying a VPN service as a temporary workaround.
I suppose all I have to offer is science fiction references since that's all that's being discussed here.
Not really.
It is of course pure fiction to imagine what a more advanced civilization would be like, since we've never been there, and any discussion in this direction is more or less pointless. However, we can make some reasonable predictions about the future based on what we do know. And what we do know is that, thoughout human history, any contact between a less advanced civilization and a more advanced one, has never ended well for the "backward" people. Based on this knowledge, and the fact that if we are to find any alien civilization at our current level of technological development, it's almost certain that the aliens will be far more advanced than us, thus any contact will not end well for us the "backward" race. That I think is the main point Hawking is trying to make. It's a rather simple line of reasoning, which I think is difficult to counter.
To take this argument one step further, the only places we should actively search for extraterrestrial life forms, are the places that we have the capability to actually go to, which means that we'll have a better chance of becoming the "Columbus" rather than the "natives". Sending out radio signals to invite aliens to us, according to Hawking, is a bad idea, and I tend to agree.
What are your afraid of if you're so sure Chinese made products are inferior to anything made everywhere else? Just let the free market sort it out. That is, after all, how capitalism works, is it not?
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Humans can drive.
...badly.
[quote]This push towards automating driving is yet another attempt to nerf the entire world. Doomed to failure, but that won't stop the "visionaries." They should instead of focusing on having much better driving schools, much more stringent driving exams and recurring examinations. I find it ridiculous that having passed two laughable exams, I can now drive my car and ride my bike FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE (or at least for the next 50 years) without any retest.[/quote]
It doesn't matter if you take one driving test during your lifetime or a thousand, the Google robot driver will still be at least a hundred times safer than you.
Driving is a mundane task, one which requires constant attention, and thus by nature humans suck at it. Driving requires zero creativity and imagination, so human minds should really be put to better use elsewhere.
Yes, that is basically what happens. As soon as you start a call or when a call comes in, the data packets will not get through. And if your call lasts long enough eventually your connections will time out.
Go only wins through brute force.
Go doesn't "win" anything. You play Go to win against someone else. In case you didn't know, Go is a game, with extremely simple rules, played between two players. As it happens, Go also pre-dates Chess by about 1000 years.
Sarcasm aside, to somehow suggest there is a "competition" between Go and Chess to the more "complex" is just absurd. I'm pretty sure our ancestors did not have this in mind when they invented Go and Chess.
go is 19x19 shogi is 9x9 chess is 8x8
Simply comparing board sizes between different games is pretty meaningless. The branching factor is governed as much by the board size as the actual rules of the game.
If a game like shogi or chess was extended to 19x19 it would be vastly harder for a computer.
And it would be vastly harder for the human as well. Assuming you could somehow meaningfully extend the complexed rules of Chess (as compared to rules of Go) to a 19x19 board, it could well be that the resulting mess would be so complex that no humans would be interested in playing. If it's not interesting to humans, than there's no point in writing computer programs to solve it.
Computers playing Go on 9x9 have beaten 9th dan.
In July of 2010, and the human isn't even near top 10 in the world. Also, 9x9 Go isn't Go, it's just that, 9x9 Go. These are two vastly different games. As an analogy, 9x9 Go is like fighting a single battle, where most of decisions are tactical. The normal Go is like fighting a war, with many battles going on at the same time. There are both strategical and tactical decisions to make.
And if it was 8x8 it would be even easier.
And if it was 7x7 Chess with no rooks Deep Blue would have crushed Kasparov.
What makes Go hard isn't anything particularly neat about the game.
What an arrogant statement coming from someone who apparently knows nothing about the game at all.
There has been considerably more research into Chess AI than Go AI, which may be one important contributing factor to the current relative weak status of Go AI. This may change in the coming years as more and more attention are being directed towards tackling Go. However, what we do know at this point is that writing competent AI for Go is very different from that of Chess, both in terms of the search strategy and the evaluation function, and very little of the advancements in Chess AI can be applied directly to Go. To me at least, the fact that Go is such a challenging game made out of such simple rules, is quite fascinating, and certainly qualifies as "neat".
The best a machine has done (I think) is winning against a 5th Dan.
... with a 7 stone handicap.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go#Recent_results) In chess terms, that's like winning an opponent who has no Knights.
"Claiming" something is meaningless and doesn't make it yours until all the countries in the world agree with you.
Well, apparently as this case shows it also means that there will be "strong reactions" from the Chinese government if you seize one of its citizen in the "claimed" territory, though I must say it's not even half as "strong" as what a great majority of Chinese people were calling for.
On the other hand, I don't think there really exists anything that "all the countries in the world" agree on...
GCJ is a portable, optimizing, ahead-of-time compiler for the Java Programming Language. It can compile Java source code to Java bytecode (class files) or directly to native machine code, and Java bytecode to native machine code.
And why do people get so emotional about programming languages?
Also the NAT haters main argument is that it doesn't preserve end to end reachability (which is not even true for N-to-N mappings)
OK, so it seems you agree (with the Founders of the Internet) that end-to-end is a good thing.
without NAT every PC in your local network may be identified individually, there are many cases where this may not be desirable.
.... and now you say it's a bad thing. So is it a good thing or a bad thing then?
without NAT everyone is gonna use a stateful firewall for ipv6, and guess what ... the effect on reachability is almost exactly the same.
Er, what??
A third option is for already democratic countries to reduce immigration restrictions, and have China's best and brightest vote with their feet.
Won't work. We Chinese are known to drop sleeper cell terrorist anchor babies all over the place. Eventually you will be forced to change your constitution.
Seriously though, you are much more likely to get our "corruptiest and greediest" rather than our best and brightest. It's well known fact that our corrupt officials move their dirty wealth overseas, and when they sense a change in the wind, they'll escape and go for "investment immigration". The USA and Canada are among their favourite destinations. I doubt these people will be a positive contribution to your society.
On the other hand, change in China is inevitable. It's not a question of "if" but a question of "when". The much more uncertain, and also more important question, though, is what will come after the dictator has fallen.
flickr is already blocked in China.
After this many years of trying, I've found that all publicly known methods of circumventing censorship do not last, no matter how promising the technique may seem at first. There are (were) online forums where people would share SOCKS and HTTP proxies they find or own, but nowadays these gets blocked faster than you can post it. The only reliable solution I've found is to buy your own commercial VPN service and keep it to yourself. I rent a VM host in California and run OpenVPN which I share with some of my friends. We get pretty decent connection speeds here in China, and it's actually pretty cheap even by us third-world standards, especially if you share the cost among a few people.
The only long term fix to this problem is, of course, to replace the communist (more like fascist nowadays) regime with a democratic government, which is an endeavor that may take a few more decades. In the meantime, I suggest buying a VPN service as a temporary workaround.
I suppose all I have to offer is science fiction references since that's all that's being discussed here.
Not really.
It is of course pure fiction to imagine what a more advanced civilization would be like, since we've never been there, and any discussion in this direction is more or less pointless. However, we can make some reasonable predictions about the future based on what we do know. And what we do know is that, thoughout human history, any contact between a less advanced civilization and a more advanced one, has never ended well for the "backward" people. Based on this knowledge, and the fact that if we are to find any alien civilization at our current level of technological development, it's almost certain that the aliens will be far more advanced than us, thus any contact will not end well for us the "backward" race. That I think is the main point Hawking is trying to make. It's a rather simple line of reasoning, which I think is difficult to counter.
To take this argument one step further, the only places we should actively search for extraterrestrial life forms, are the places that we have the capability to actually go to, which means that we'll have a better chance of becoming the "Columbus" rather than the "natives". Sending out radio signals to invite aliens to us, according to Hawking, is a bad idea, and I tend to agree.
What are your afraid of if you're so sure Chinese made products are inferior to anything made everywhere else? Just let the free market sort it out. That is, after all, how capitalism works, is it not?