It's true that entertainment websites have stopped providing entertainment. Two largest video sharing websites, 6.cn and tudou.com, now only broadcast videos that are related to the earthquake, you can no longer view videos that are unrelated to the tragedy (could you imagine youtube only serves only one kind of videos but no others?). If you dare to try using the search box to look for other videos, you will either be brought back to the front page or to a page asking you to lend a helping hand, like donation.
Meanwhile, many portal sites have toned down the color of their layout to gray, very depressing indeed. Examples include baidu.com, www.sina.com.cn, the two video sharing websites mentioned above, g.cn (Google in China), www.tom.com. Many sections of the news portals have also been shut down and completely replaced with tragic news.
We should all mourn the death of the lives lost in the earthquake but the act of this information blockade is too much. The websites should be able to decide by themselves what to do instead of following a government order.
Interested readers are recommended to read Steven Minton's paper Solving large-scale constraint satisfaction and scheduling problems using a heuristic repair method and Minimizing conflicts: a heuristic repair method for constraint satisfaction and scheduling problems.
Constraint satisfaction is a framework to model many NP-hard scheduling and planning problems. A classic example is the n-queens problem and a famous benchmark problem is the radio link frequency assignment problem (RLFAP). I don't know if NASA's autonomous spacecraft planning algorithm is based on the constraint satisfaction model, but it's likely. (darn, I got a NOT FOUND error when trying to download the papers...)
Iterative repair is useful to get a new solution base on the previous one after there are changes in the environment. Since it won't solve the problem from scratch again so it can be very fast. But one of the big problems is convergence has not been proven yet, so it may be possible that the algorithm will try to find a solution forever but in vain (although very unlikely). There are ongoing research on explaining the behavior of iterative repair by mathmatical proofs, such as re-modeling it as a Lagragian multiplier method.
Although the definition of AI is controvesial as seen in the previous discussion, searching has long been regarded as the underlying technique for many AI algorithms. It can't learn, and it can't "think", but it can find a solution quick and looks like it can think, just like what a chess problem does.
I once accidentally typed rm -rf/home when I was extremely sleepy. Funny that I did notice that something was wrong and so I pressed ctrl-c immediately, I think it's about half a second after I issued the command. More than 1 GB data was gone! Dunno why but it just deleted all of my mp3s instead of my thesis's tex files =)
So beware, there's no undelete utilities last time I checked, though the authors would like to write one if you choose to pay them.
Exactly. Nearly all of my LaTeX questions are answered by searching Deja. Click Advance search, enter a few keywords, and put *.tex into the Group field, then I get the answers after a few seconds. Deja is the most useful if you know which newsgroups your questions are asked, which can raise the S/N ratio a lot.
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It's true that entertainment websites have stopped providing entertainment. Two largest video sharing websites, 6.cn and tudou.com, now only broadcast videos that are related to the earthquake, you can no longer view videos that are unrelated to the tragedy (could you imagine youtube only serves only one kind of videos but no others?). If you dare to try using the search box to look for other videos, you will either be brought back to the front page or to a page asking you to lend a helping hand, like donation.
Meanwhile, many portal sites have toned down the color of their layout to gray, very depressing indeed. Examples include baidu.com, www.sina.com.cn, the two video sharing websites mentioned above, g.cn (Google in China), www.tom.com. Many sections of the news portals have also been shut down and completely replaced with tragic news.
We should all mourn the death of the lives lost in the earthquake but the act of this information blockade is too much. The websites should be able to decide by themselves what to do instead of following a government order.
Constraint satisfaction is a framework to model many NP-hard scheduling and planning problems. A classic example is the n-queens problem and a famous benchmark problem is the radio link frequency assignment problem (RLFAP). I don't know if NASA's autonomous spacecraft planning algorithm is based on the constraint satisfaction model, but it's likely. (darn, I got a NOT FOUND error when trying to download the papers...)
Iterative repair is useful to get a new solution base on the previous one after there are changes in the environment. Since it won't solve the problem from scratch again so it can be very fast. But one of the big problems is convergence has not been proven yet, so it may be possible that the algorithm will try to find a solution forever but in vain (although very unlikely). There are ongoing research on explaining the behavior of iterative repair by mathmatical proofs, such as re-modeling it as a Lagragian multiplier method.
Although the definition of AI is controvesial as seen in the previous discussion, searching has long been regarded as the underlying technique for many AI algorithms. It can't learn, and it can't "think", but it can find a solution quick and looks like it can think, just like what a chess problem does.
So beware, there's no undelete utilities last time I checked, though the authors would like to write one if you choose to pay them.
Exactly. Nearly all of my LaTeX questions are answered by searching Deja. Click Advance search, enter a few keywords, and put *.tex into the Group field, then I get the answers after a few seconds. Deja is the most useful if you know which newsgroups your questions are asked, which can raise the S/N ratio a lot.
But they describe Linux as a freeware Unix-like OS!! Argh... I hope they really know what is free software.