Well it certainly looked like a reasonable well written article. But at the last page the writer suddenly goes into second gear or something. Calling the chess programms 'cheaters'. Sigh, you have this kind of thing all the time on usenet. Very sour losers those humans, thankfully computers do not whine.
-- Last page is below:
So, chess programs are based on a simple and rather slow algorithm. How do they manage to beat human grandmasters? What are the tricks of a chess cheater?
A chess cheat has an openings note in his left pocket with trap variants marked red.
Yeah, every chess program has a huge openings library to consult with, while a man has none. I might divide the human memory into internal and external. A paper sheet (a book) is a kind of CD, while human eyes are not far from CD-ROM heads. Thus, a man is not only deprived of some part of his memory, but of a specialized part. This is all right when humans compete with each other, but not fair when two kinds of intelligence are involved.
There is an endgames book in the other pocket of the chess cheater.
Having found no other way to make the program good at endgame, program developers started feeding them databases of common endgames. Without this, the program would be at a loss even in a simplest pawn endgame. That's the reason for chess programs being much larger today than before - they take whole CDs. It turns out man plays against his own knowledge base rather than against an AI. This is good for training young chess players, but we can't call it an achievement of AI.
Cheaters seldom work alone
The above-described matches were played between a man and a multi-processor machine. The processors were prompting to each other and exchanging ideas. This doesn't seem fair. You might go and load a huge chess program into all Internet-connected computers and make it play against a single human. Wouldn't that be right? A man must play against his own desktop PC.
Cheaters catch the opponents
Cheaters like to let their opponent win, grow heated and then beat him. Chess programs also may be tweaked during a match. The technicians change program settings and as a result create a completely different chess player. I wonder if they would be happy to suddenly get Kramnik as an opponent instead of Kasparov, with whom they were preparing to play.
The chess cheater has another chessboard under the table to check a few variants.
Chess programs have a lot of memory at hand. It's like they have a million of chessboards to make moves on. And the human has none. If I were Kasparov or Kramnik, I would come to the match against the computer with my own board and played all variants on it. The PC can't see, you know. Who said you can't touch the pieces when playing against the machine? There is no such rule.
It's like you play "blind" chess against a cheater. You are trying to figure it all out with closed eyes, while the cheater sees everything.
Cheaters win from blunders.
All the games the computer won in the above-described matches were won due to blunders of the human opponents. They blundered everything: a piece, a checkmate, a draw, an opening. The cheater can't win without that.
Yeah, but why did they add native-style widgets on winXP and OS X ? Didn't thay claim that using their own widget library was the reason that Mozilla was so portable. And in fact that writing this widget library had caused the (justified) delay?
I guess they are coming back from that viewpoint.
I use Mozilla every day, and it is very usable. There are still some very anoying bugs in it though. For example: It has a tendency to 'forget' load pictures. In fact sometimes half the page does't load. Freaky. At other times it really guessing where the focus went to this time.
All in all a good product thoough. It becomes time for that coveted 1.0 release.
Im running 2.4.0 since it was released. Not a lot seems to be different. But:
- For some reason my X-server dies with a segfault. I know this sounds like a hardware failure, but it surely doesn't happen in 2.2.17
- The latency seems to be worse. From time to time the kernel 'freezes' for about a second. I suppose this has to do with a not totaly matured Virtual Memory system.
All in all, im reverting back to the 2.2 series for the moment. I'll try again when 2.4.1 ships.
I can not really blame the Germans. If you havent got the source of a piece of software there is only one reason to believe that it it is not a security threat. That reason is the trust you have in the maker of the tool.
If you use windows, then you might reason like this: They write a lot of software, a lot of people use it, I guess there is not a NSA backdoor...
And that is a valid proposition, maybe M$ and CO$ are both evil. There is a marked difference there;-)
Of course, the true solutions to follow by any non-american goverment would be to insist on open-source software.
the DMCA!! Man, It seems that the DMCA is involved in half of the slashdot articles these days. And
it keeps getting better and better.
King, the attorny representing metallica claims, that:
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of
1998, requires that ISP's take reasonable steps to put an end to
copyright violations which they are made aware of by the copyright holder.
Imaging forcing an university to actively censor its incoming mail or incoming telephone calls, just in case there is copyrighted material there.
I dunno. Maybe this is a good thing. The more crap like this the DMCA can pull off, the more institution are going to stand up against it. On the downside, probably the main reason that they are against this, is that they are afraid that once they start blocking Napster, they might as well take on extra staff to block all the other web site which they will be asked to take down. Maybe this is a nice service that Mattel can start offering to ISP and Universities!
I use it almost every day. Unfortunatly not on Windows or Linux but under Solaris. I reported over 20 bugs to bugzilla and I used to be very enthousiastic about it. But recently I find meself using it less and less. Why?
It crashes every 5 webpages. But there is no talkback for Solaris. To report about a crash, I have to load the core into gdb. It takes me about half an hour do it all. The one crash I did report was marked 'Worksforme' Sigh.
It is slow. It is reeeaally slow. AND i have all debuggin of and all optimization on.
The building/compilation is crappy. Try to turn of mail of news.. doesn't work. And when you run it with a console you get JavaScirpt errors and Assertion errors ALL the time.
I could go on but the really sad thing is that each new version seems a litte bit more likely to crash while just a little bit slower. As I said, I find myself using Netscape more often.
But if U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan rules the way he appeared to be leaning in court, it's likely to create some ripples in the DVD industry. The computer code the judge may opt to protect would make it possible for anyone to copy DVDs.
And later in the same article
The judge must decide in the civil case whether eight major movie studios can stop Eric Corley from making software available online or posting links to it so that people can copy films that are in DVD format.
This is not about copying. This is not even about freedom of speech. It is about access control. About Fair Use. What a copyright holder can and cannot control. I think the judge gets though.
And where are those transcripts!! I need my daily doses of legalese;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well it certainly looked like a reasonable well
written article. But at the last page the writer
suddenly goes into second gear or something. Calling the chess programms 'cheaters'. Sigh, you
have this kind of thing all the time on usenet.
Very sour losers those humans, thankfully computers do not whine.
-- Last page is below:
So, chess programs are based on a simple and rather slow algorithm. How do they manage to beat human grandmasters? What are the tricks of a chess cheater?
A chess cheat has an openings note in his left pocket with trap variants marked red.
Yeah, every chess program has a huge openings library to consult with, while a man has none. I might divide the human memory into internal and external. A paper sheet (a book) is a kind of CD, while human eyes are not far from CD-ROM heads. Thus, a man is not only deprived of some part of his memory, but of a specialized part. This is all right when humans compete with each other, but not fair when two kinds of intelligence are involved.
There is an endgames book in the other pocket of the chess cheater.
Having found no other way to make the program good at endgame, program developers started feeding them databases of common endgames. Without this, the program would be at a loss even in a simplest pawn endgame. That's the reason for chess programs being much larger today than before - they take whole CDs. It turns out man plays against his own knowledge base rather than against an AI. This is good for training young chess players, but we can't call it an achievement of AI.
Cheaters seldom work alone
The above-described matches were played between a man and a multi-processor machine. The processors were prompting to each other and exchanging ideas. This doesn't seem fair. You might go and load a huge chess program into all Internet-connected computers and make it play against a single human. Wouldn't that be right? A man must play against his own desktop PC.
Cheaters catch the opponents
Cheaters like to let their opponent win, grow heated and then beat him. Chess programs also may be tweaked during a match. The technicians change program settings and as a result create a completely different chess player. I wonder if they would be happy to suddenly get Kramnik as an opponent instead of Kasparov, with whom they were preparing to play.
The chess cheater has another chessboard under the table to check a few variants.
Chess programs have a lot of memory at hand. It's like they have a million of chessboards to make moves on. And the human has none. If I were Kasparov or Kramnik, I would come to the match against the computer with my own board and played all variants on it. The PC can't see, you know. Who said you can't touch the pieces when playing against the machine? There is no such rule.
It's like you play "blind" chess against a cheater. You are trying to figure it all out with closed eyes, while the cheater sees everything.
Cheaters win from blunders.
All the games the computer won in the above-described matches were won due to blunders of the human opponents. They blundered everything: a piece, a checkmate, a draw, an opening. The cheater can't win without that.
> Elements to our attention.
O my god, they are going to be *so* slashdotted, they'll never now what hit them.
hehehe
Slashdot the very best thing next to the e-bomb
I guess they are coming back from that viewpoint.
I use Mozilla every day, and it is very usable. There are still some very anoying bugs in it though. For example: It has a tendency to 'forget' load pictures. In fact sometimes half the page does't load. Freaky. At other times it really guessing where the focus went to this time.
All in all a good product thoough. It becomes time for that coveted 1.0 release.
code snippets
(I C: www.geocities.com/connorbd/varaq/vcode.html+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:y1Zz_tiIDh
)
It doesn't make much sense to me, but neither does klingon, so I gues its ok.
I just finished reading the second and it is a thought provocing article.
This is the exact same story as last friday
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/27/133823 %200
I know Mrs Sullivan is the dean of Stanford Law School. No doubt she knows the law very well. But I think the first case was handled prety well.
So why the change of lawyers? Is this one cheaper or something?
- For some reason my X-server dies with a segfault. I know this sounds like a hardware failure, but it surely doesn't happen in 2.2.17
- The latency seems to be worse. From time to time the kernel 'freezes' for about a second. I suppose this has to do with a not totaly matured Virtual Memory system.
All in all, im reverting back to the 2.2 series for the moment. I'll try again when 2.4.1 ships.
Sander.
If you use windows, then you might reason like this: They write a lot of software, a lot of people use it, I guess there is not a NSA backdoor...
And that is a valid proposition, maybe M$ and CO$ are both evil. There is a marked difference there ;-)
Of course, the true solutions to follow by any non-american goverment would be to insist on open-source software.
Sander.
King, the attorny representing metallica claims, that:
Imaging forcing an university to actively censor its incoming mail or incoming telephone calls, just in case there is copyrighted material there.I dunno. Maybe this is a good thing. The more crap like this the DMCA can pull off, the more institution are going to stand up against it. On the downside, probably the main reason that they are against this, is that they are afraid that once they start blocking Napster, they might as well take on extra staff to block all the other web site which they will be asked to take down. Maybe this is a nice service that Mattel can start offering to ISP and Universities!
sander.
free-info/slashdot
lc2.law5.hotmail.com
were all served by Apache. I wonder what's wrong
This .sig is covered by the GPL
It crashes every 5 webpages. But there is no talkback for Solaris. To report about a crash, I have to load the core into gdb. It takes me about half an hour do it all. The one crash I did report was marked 'Worksforme' Sigh.
It is slow. It is reeeaally slow. AND i have all debuggin of and all optimization on.
The building/compilation is crappy. Try to turn of mail of news.. doesn't work. And when you run it with a console you get JavaScirpt errors and Assertion errors ALL the time.
I could go on but the really sad thing is that each new version seems a litte bit more likely to crash while just a little bit slower. As I said, I find myself using Netscape more often.
Maybe I have to wait for Explorer for Solaris ;-)
This .sig is covered by the GPL
And where are those transcripts!! I need my daily doses of legalese ;-)
Sander.
You can read chapter 6 of this book here: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mp3/chapter/ch06.ht ml