Maybe.
A decade or two ago, when the water utilities of England and Wales were sold to private companies, the legislation was written so that it was illegal to divert rainwater from [your land] into [your water system], and so avoid paying water fees to the companies.
This went to court. And the water companies almost won, until the trial judge started to lead the water company's barrister up the path of "it's your water as soon as it falls from the sky... therefore, if it floods someone's house, or leaks through their roof, it is YOUR property, and therefore YOUR fault.
The barrister dropped the case with between minutes and seconds to spare before the case was found in his client's favour, with the consequences.
This was in the late 1980s or so. The barrister has saved his employer's many billions of claims since.
Probably not, because it's less efficient than a standard lens.
FTFP (not the bullshit summary on Gizmodo):
far-field three-dimensional subwavelength focusing (Î^3/5) with an absolute focusing efficiency of >32% for a broad wavelength range from 400 to 1,500ânm.
That compares to the 1.22*Î/3.6um ~ Î/3 diameter of an Airy disc for this lens. But the diffraction pattern contains about 83% of the beam intensity in the central disc (the Airy disc proper) compared to 32% in the central spot for this system.
That energy will go somewhere. So you might get a sharper-focussed image from this, but you'll lose contrast.
To mis-quote the First and Second laws, you can't win and you can't even break even.
far-field three-dimensional subwavelength focusing (Î3/5) with an absolute focusing efficiency of >32% for a broad wavelength range from 400 to 1,500ânm.
That's a little under 1.5 octaves, whereas the human vision range is only about an octave (with some variation between individuals).
Johnson was somewhat predisposed to the Old French style anyway, which had little to do with how the common person spelled or thought.
At that time there was no such thing as "how the common person spelled" ; it probably wasn't until quite late in the 19th century that literacy rates even approached 50%, and as for "functional literacy" (the ability to actually read and comprehend newspaper articles and novels) it's a moot point if either side of the Atlantic has yet reached 75% functional literacy.
I was listening to a Dickens story on the radio earlier today (turgid, tedious shit, as expected ; I stopped 1/5 of the way through an tuned to something interesting instead) and I remember that he was still routinely using "shewed" well into the 1850s.
But for absolute certain, every person who suffers any degree of flooding damage within a thousand miles will be sueing your nuts off for actual, consequent and exemplary damages.
And the joke has only worked amongst people with no knowledge of Greek. No - not "Greek" in the sense of participating in anal sex (like "English" or "French"), but Greek in the sense of reading or writing at least some of the language.
Not necessarily. If the company declares bankruptcy, the employees become first in line for unpaid pay.
Again, not in the UK - and I would strongly suspect that it's not the case in the USA either. (NB : bankruptcy laws are different between the two countries!)
In a UK bankruptcy for a business, the first person in line for a pay-out from liquidating the assets of the company are the insolvency practitioners. Otherwise no one would be stupid enough to take the job on. Ten-foot barge pole ; not touching that. Game of tin soldiers. you'd get insolvency practitioners structuring themselves so that they could go bankrupt to avoid touching a poison pill of a corporate corpse.
The next people in line for a payout are the various tax authorities - HMRC and VAT-man being (I think) slightly higher on the pecking order than the NI man (whose slice is dependent on wages). Then it's the secured creditors, in approximate order, the pension fund, the payroll, and suppliers of physical goods. Then suppliers of non-physical goods. Then you're into the "no hope" brigade of unsecured creditors.
But - different countries, different details. Though I doubt the reasoning for paying the insolvency practitioners first would differ between the countries (unless the service is a government service in the US). And I don't see any government putting the interests of workers ahead of those of the government's revenue office.
Well, I've spent nearly 30 years on various mobile units in seas in various parts of the world, and still routinely see people being over-optimistic about the sea state they're going to get in a few hours. I don't know how "mill pond" the coasts of Florida and California are - but they're in the hurricane belt, aren't they? And the waves they stir up will travel outwards for days. Modelling and predicting sea state is a very fraught occupation.
(To be honest, when I see a "mill pond" sea, I wonder who is going to die today. When several friends and 165 others were burned on the Piper, it was just about the calmest sea I'd ever seen. Calm seas scare me.)
"Simply" tack welding cleats onto the deck and legs? Well that's going to provide a lot of restoring forces. Not.
That whole process is going to leave the landing weather and sea conditions as being a major constraint on operations.
OK - my experience is mostly North Atlantic, where a day of less than 2degrees roll and pitch is quite unusual, and normal operations can continue until about 6m of heave (plus up to 5degrees of pitch and roll) ; maybe they're going to run this system in better weather areas. But they're still going to have to watch their sea-state very carefully, before attempting a launch.
So after the stage lands on the barge safely, is there some method of securing the stage against high winds or waves?
Of course there will be.
Immediately?
That would require struts of pattern-welded Unobtanium and unicorn horn.
If you want to have realistic accelerations, you have to include the mass of the cranes implied, the forces they exert on their bases (which will torque the floating vessel... which you don't want). How fast and what degree of lock-down you are going to achieve requires decisions. If you can get people to go into a bomb shelter next to the landing deck, then with sliding lock-downs, you could probably get some tens of tonnes of lockdown forces in about 5 minutes. At the risk of putting a half-dozen people into a bomb shelter, then landing a bomb on top of them. If you want to design something like that, remember that you're going to have to attend the funerals and face the bereaved, or be counted as ball-less.
If your operating procedures allow you more time (e.g. the weather forecast for the landing pad becomes one of your go/ no-go criteria for launch. If the landing barge will be moving too much, then you don't launch. (Predicting how barges move in response to sea state is a fairly well established art - join me on an oil rig and you'll see why).
But it's an engineer-able problem. If you can give me 15 minutes to get first stabilisation, then a couple of hours to get the cranes into place to fully secure the rocket and hand over to the service crews... that's do-able.
any chance of getting a capture system on the barge to reduce complexity of the first stage?
Hmmm. There are a lot of difficulties about that. ("difficulties," not impossibilities).
You'll need the landing surface of your barge as unrestricted as possible. (I've mentioned previously on Slashdot the regulatory issues about sticking additional antennae onto oil rigs anywhere near the helideck ; these are real issues.) But the cranes needed for providing tie-down to secure the freshly landed craft would, of necessity, be pretty chunky cranes. So, moving them into position would itself introduce vibration to the system that would be counterproductive.
But it's an engineerable issue. I'm sure that Musk et al are on the question. I've managed to come up with one design worth investigation while writing this. Yes, I can envisage ways of achieving this once the rocket has landed. It looks as if they're dealing with that problem at the moment.
Damn, what's their website?... Ah, the obvious newegg.co.uk ; it redirects to their UK section, with several other parts of Europe, India, Singapore and Australasia. So I guess the other similar names will redirect appropriately.
Hmmm, beats my usual supplier by about 6% for a 4TB external hard drive. That is definitely worth remembering.
Newegg's Marketing Department may have reason to go around to the Legal Department for a mutual high-five. I'd literally NEVER have considered them before because previously I'd seen "Newegg" and read "foreign" with an undertone of "not considered."
I don't know Newegg from Adam (Savage? or just any Adam?) and I'm not sure if they ship to this side of the ocean. But I'm going to turn off ad-blocking and go to see what they do.
(Are they in America? I guess it's likely, because Texas is almost in America.)
Which in turn goes back to when you'd write on your slate at school with a scratch pencil, then "wipe the slate clean" (have you heard that one?)and start your next question/ problem/ subject.
And why did you get taught how to write on sheets of slate probably brought by the hundredweight form a building contractor? Because to buy paper and pencils, or even paper, pens and ink, was a continuing expenditure, while slates and slate pencils were a capital expenditure, but not a continuing cost.
OK. Sounds like son-of-deGroot. I always thought that his approach had some merit, even if he himself acted like... well, "not a nice person" is being very polite about it.
From the announcement's lack of associated bullshit, I take it that deGroot has been thoroughly walked past. Good. In the same way that he walked over other people's work after misappropriating it.
Whichever way it works, it's an improvement to previous programmes. Unfortunately it remains computer-Go, so I'm unlikely to ever sit down against it. I've tried various computer-Go and computer-mediated-Go options. I prefer the clock of shell on wood.
Given the connections between Holland and SA, I wouldn't be surprised that there are relatively large numbers of Go players in SA. "Relatively".
I'm surprised that you didn't meet any Go players in Japan. You may not have known that some people you knew were players, but that's a different point. When I had a weekend in Seoul, I was keeping my eyes open for the characters for a "go club", but I didn't find one. It's difficult to find things in a culture you don't know.
the advancement in chess was from position evaluation which is markedly easier than Go (because you can simulate chess to a deep enough level to see if a sacrifice of piece or position is worth it as long as you prune your tree even marginally intelligently)
Entirely accepted. This hasn't been a secret in Go-programming circles for years. Over a decade (I used to hang out in the appropriate USENET group).
For the audience... to a first approximation, each move in a tree of Chess positions (when you're looking forward, to evaluate a proposed move) has about 8 legal possibilities. So to look 10 moves ahead, brute-force evaluation requires around 8^10 branches to your tree - 1,073,741,824 a billion or so. Trim it a bit (say, to 7 legal moves per position) and you're only looking at 282,475,249 possibilities. Those ranges are broadly similar through the mid-game of chess.
Correspondingly for Go, if we go to mid-game (a corner play in each corner, plus 10 other mid-game moves ; symmetry has gone ; we're at move n=50), each move has around (361-n)*(361+(n+1))*(361+(n+2))*(361+(n+3))*(361+(n+4))*(361+(n+5))*(361+(n+6))*(361+(n+7))*(361+(n+8))*(361+(n+9)) moves. I make that 7,078,156,841,415,990,000,000,000 moves to evaluate for a 19x19 board (with no easy way apart from applying a "legality engine" to every move).
That's a fair difference in the brute force level needed.
A "legality engine" is non-trivial - unless you impose "superko" (thou shall never repeat a board position). Which is why "superko" is tremendously popular in theoretical evaluations.
FYI, if you move to 21x21, the corresponding number of moves for "mid-game" will be about 10 times higher. But the "mid-game" will be about a third longer, for a total of x30. (Tromp says about x25 for two stones ; seems reasonable, given that I haven't read his working on this).
it also seems true that chess was chosen because it was popular among those in computer sciences. Go may be played by more people, but those didn't hold doctorates on AI. [...]
You don't even need to proselytize for something already popular, right?
I never claimed that Go was popular in the west. Or even known. Unusually I had heard about it before I came to university - that was very unusual. But then I hit the proselytization trail for the next 3 years.
Significantly, I had to do far less explanation amongst the computer science students, because it was already quite well known as a really challenging case for information processing. For the corresponding case of chess, there were already commercial machines available that could take people up to something like a national-team grade player, and the topic was seen as dead from a theoretical point of view having moved to engineering. No wonderfully new insights seemed necessary to beat the rest of the world, just bigger, faster machines and/ or bigger faster ending databases.
So 30 years ago, there was a generation of CS students who were looking for AI challenges, and Go was on the radar. That it has stood as a challenge for 30 years after the fall of chess suggests that it is a genuinely harder problem.
There is also a point that John Tromp hinted at in his "we've counted L19" post of just a couple of days ago : 21x21 go has been an occasional pastime for regular players since... well at least 1965, since it was mentioned in a text book then. But I think that it has been experimented with back into the Middle Ages. (Sensei's Library has a discussion of 21x21, about how the balance of influence against territory may be different, and the corner-vs-centre balance is changed too, but few people have the experience to really say (a few thousand games played and recorded). But the same rules will work perfectly on a 21x21, making John's technique for analysing 19x19 applicable there, but it would just be a harder problem. So there is an open-ended range of exercising benchmark possibilities there.
Re:Don't fool yourself, poker will be solved easy
on
Computer Beats Go Champion
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Irrelevant.
Poker is a game of incomplete knowledge - you don't know what cards are in the other players hands.
Go is a game of complete knowledge. As is chess. And draughts.
I googled Fan Hui: one source says he's 8 dan amateur, another that he's 2 dan pro.
These two statements are not incompatible. 6 to 8 dan difference between amateurs and professionals sounds perfectly reasonable. They are on different scales.
If he's a top player in Europe, that mostly says that go isn't played at a very high level in Europe.
Yes. And tell us something we don't know?
Almost every high-grade European player has had to travel to the Orient to improve, because they simply cannot get the opposition to play against and learn from in Europe. Plus, they can make a living as professionals (tutors) in the Orient, and even a few - maybe a half-dozen - have competed as professional players.
We may be behind the Orient, but at least we're able to compete in the same league. We're in contact. Just.
Using well known and solid techniques along with vast computing power, Google has finally broken into the majors of Go. The next question is whether a home computer can run the neural network now that it's been trained;.. or do the CPU and RAM requirements still place this level of play into the corporate-only bracket.
The best computer Go programs of a decade ago were all requiring Beowulf clusters to run on. Every one of about 5 competing designs (with several implementations of each approach).
You might be able to run a programme from a 10 years ago Beowulf on a modern high-end machine. But you'd still be beaten by a 5-year ago Beowulf cluster, and completely fucked by the previous state of the art programmes. Which themselves are around 6 to 10 stones weaker than the system discussed here.
Slashdot Mirror
This went to court. And the water companies almost won, until the trial judge started to lead the water company's barrister up the path of "it's your water as soon as it falls from the sky ... therefore, if it floods someone's house, or leaks through their roof, it is YOUR property, and therefore YOUR fault.
The barrister dropped the case with between minutes and seconds to spare before the case was found in his client's favour, with the consequences.
This was in the late 1980s or so. The barrister has saved his employer's many billions of claims since.
There's a vitriolic fleshlight app?
FTFP (not the bullshit summary on Gizmodo):
That compares to the 1.22*Î/3.6um ~ Î/3 diameter of an Airy disc for this lens. But the diffraction pattern contains about 83% of the beam intensity in the central disc (the Airy disc proper) compared to 32% in the central spot for this system.
That energy will go somewhere. So you might get a sharper-focussed image from this, but you'll lose contrast.
To mis-quote the First and Second laws, you can't win and you can't even break even.
Trump will try to destroy the world.
FTFP(A) :
That's a little under 1.5 octaves, whereas the human vision range is only about an octave (with some variation between individuals).
What were the toilet-scrubbers doing handling a patient (as opposed to their faeces)?
At that time there was no such thing as "how the common person spelled" ; it probably wasn't until quite late in the 19th century that literacy rates even approached 50%, and as for "functional literacy" (the ability to actually read and comprehend newspaper articles and novels) it's a moot point if either side of the Atlantic has yet reached 75% functional literacy.
I was listening to a Dickens story on the radio earlier today (turgid, tedious shit, as expected ; I stopped 1/5 of the way through an tuned to something interesting instead) and I remember that he was still routinely using "shewed" well into the 1850s.
But for absolute certain, every person who suffers any degree of flooding damage within a thousand miles will be sueing your nuts off for actual, consequent and exemplary damages.
And the joke has only worked amongst people with no knowledge of Greek. No - not "Greek" in the sense of participating in anal sex (like "English" or "French"), but Greek in the sense of reading or writing at least some of the language.
Again, not in the UK - and I would strongly suspect that it's not the case in the USA either. (NB : bankruptcy laws are different between the two countries!)
In a UK bankruptcy for a business, the first person in line for a pay-out from liquidating the assets of the company are the insolvency practitioners. Otherwise no one would be stupid enough to take the job on. Ten-foot barge pole ; not touching that. Game of tin soldiers. you'd get insolvency practitioners structuring themselves so that they could go bankrupt to avoid touching a poison pill of a corporate corpse.
The next people in line for a payout are the various tax authorities - HMRC and VAT-man being (I think) slightly higher on the pecking order than the NI man (whose slice is dependent on wages). Then it's the secured creditors, in approximate order, the pension fund, the payroll, and suppliers of physical goods. Then suppliers of non-physical goods. Then you're into the "no hope" brigade of unsecured creditors.
But - different countries, different details. Though I doubt the reasoning for paying the insolvency practitioners first would differ between the countries (unless the service is a government service in the US). And I don't see any government putting the interests of workers ahead of those of the government's revenue office.
(To be honest, when I see a "mill pond" sea, I wonder who is going to die today. When several friends and 165 others were burned on the Piper, it was just about the calmest sea I'd ever seen. Calm seas scare me.)
That whole process is going to leave the landing weather and sea conditions as being a major constraint on operations.
OK - my experience is mostly North Atlantic, where a day of less than 2degrees roll and pitch is quite unusual, and normal operations can continue until about 6m of heave (plus up to 5degrees of pitch and roll) ; maybe they're going to run this system in better weather areas. But they're still going to have to watch their sea-state very carefully, before attempting a launch.
I do hope that someone has legal challenges set up in both directions to just jam the electoral system to try to force reform.
Of course there will be.
That would require struts of pattern-welded Unobtanium and unicorn horn.
If you want to have realistic accelerations, you have to include the mass of the cranes implied, the forces they exert on their bases (which will torque the floating vessel ... which you don't want). How fast and what degree of lock-down you are going to achieve requires decisions. If you can get people to go into a bomb shelter next to the landing deck, then with sliding lock-downs, you could probably get some tens of tonnes of lockdown forces in about 5 minutes. At the risk of putting a half-dozen people into a bomb shelter, then landing a bomb on top of them. If you want to design something like that, remember that you're going to have to attend the funerals and face the bereaved, or be counted as ball-less.
If your operating procedures allow you more time (e.g. the weather forecast for the landing pad becomes one of your go/ no-go criteria for launch. If the landing barge will be moving too much, then you don't launch. (Predicting how barges move in response to sea state is a fairly well established art - join me on an oil rig and you'll see why).
But it's an engineer-able problem. If you can give me 15 minutes to get first stabilisation, then a couple of hours to get the cranes into place to fully secure the rocket and hand over to the service crews ... that's do-able.
Hmmm. There are a lot of difficulties about that. ("difficulties," not impossibilities).
You'll need the landing surface of your barge as unrestricted as possible. (I've mentioned previously on Slashdot the regulatory issues about sticking additional antennae onto oil rigs anywhere near the helideck ; these are real issues.) But the cranes needed for providing tie-down to secure the freshly landed craft would, of necessity, be pretty chunky cranes. So, moving them into position would itself introduce vibration to the system that would be counterproductive.
But it's an engineerable issue. I'm sure that Musk et al are on the question. I've managed to come up with one design worth investigation while writing this. Yes, I can envisage ways of achieving this once the rocket has landed. It looks as if they're dealing with that problem at the moment.
You'd include sea state and vessel heave state (not, obviously, the same thing) at the landing site as part of your "go for launch?" call out.
Is it obvious that sea state and heave state are not the same thing? It is to me, but I've worked at sea for decades, on both anchored and DP vessels.
Hmmm, beats my usual supplier by about 6% for a 4TB external hard drive. That is definitely worth remembering.
Newegg's Marketing Department may have reason to go around to the Legal Department for a mutual high-five. I'd literally NEVER have considered them before because previously I'd seen "Newegg" and read "foreign" with an undertone of "not considered."
(Are they in America? I guess it's likely, because Texas is almost in America.)
And why did you get taught how to write on sheets of slate probably brought by the hundredweight form a building contractor? Because to buy paper and pencils, or even paper, pens and ink, was a continuing expenditure, while slates and slate pencils were a capital expenditure, but not a continuing cost.
From the announcement's lack of associated bullshit, I take it that deGroot has been thoroughly walked past. Good. In the same way that he walked over other people's work after misappropriating it.
Whichever way it works, it's an improvement to previous programmes. Unfortunately it remains computer-Go, so I'm unlikely to ever sit down against it. I've tried various computer-Go and computer-mediated-Go options. I prefer the clock of shell on wood.
I'm surprised that you didn't meet any Go players in Japan. You may not have known that some people you knew were players, but that's a different point. When I had a weekend in Seoul, I was keeping my eyes open for the characters for a "go club", but I didn't find one. It's difficult to find things in a culture you don't know.
Entirely accepted. This hasn't been a secret in Go-programming circles for years. Over a decade (I used to hang out in the appropriate USENET group).
For the audience ... to a first approximation, each move in a tree of Chess positions (when you're looking forward, to evaluate a proposed move) has about 8 legal possibilities. So to look 10 moves ahead, brute-force evaluation requires around 8^10 branches to your tree - 1,073,741,824 a billion or so. Trim it a bit (say, to 7 legal moves per position) and you're only looking at 282,475,249 possibilities. Those ranges are broadly similar through the mid-game of chess.
Correspondingly for Go, if we go to mid-game (a corner play in each corner, plus 10 other mid-game moves ; symmetry has gone ; we're at move n=50), each move has around (361-n)*(361+(n+1))*(361+(n+2))*(361+(n+3))*(361+(n+4))*(361+(n+5))*(361+(n+6))*(361+(n+7))*(361+(n+8))*(361+(n+9)) moves. I make that 7,078,156,841,415,990,000,000,000 moves to evaluate for a 19x19 board (with no easy way apart from applying a "legality engine" to every move).
That's a fair difference in the brute force level needed.
A "legality engine" is non-trivial - unless you impose "superko" (thou shall never repeat a board position). Which is why "superko" is tremendously popular in theoretical evaluations.
FYI, if you move to 21x21, the corresponding number of moves for "mid-game" will be about 10 times higher. But the "mid-game" will be about a third longer, for a total of x30. (Tromp says about x25 for two stones ; seems reasonable, given that I haven't read his working on this).
I never claimed that Go was popular in the west. Or even known. Unusually I had heard about it before I came to university - that was very unusual. But then I hit the proselytization trail for the next 3 years.
Significantly, I had to do far less explanation amongst the computer science students, because it was already quite well known as a really challenging case for information processing. For the corresponding case of chess, there were already commercial machines available that could take people up to something like a national-team grade player, and the topic was seen as dead from a theoretical point of view having moved to engineering. No wonderfully new insights seemed necessary to beat the rest of the world, just bigger, faster machines and/ or bigger faster ending databases.
So 30 years ago, there was a generation of CS students who were looking for AI challenges, and Go was on the radar. That it has stood as a challenge for 30 years after the fall of chess suggests that it is a genuinely harder problem.
There is also a point that John Tromp hinted at in his "we've counted L19" post of just a couple of days ago : 21x21 go has been an occasional pastime for regular players since ... well at least 1965, since it was mentioned in a text book then. But I think that it has been experimented with back into the Middle Ages. (Sensei's Library has a discussion of 21x21, about how the balance of influence against territory may be different, and the corner-vs-centre balance is changed too, but few people have the experience to really say (a few thousand games played and recorded). But the same rules will work perfectly on a 21x21, making John's technique for analysing 19x19 applicable there, but it would just be a harder problem. So there is an open-ended range of exercising benchmark possibilities there.
Poker is a game of incomplete knowledge - you don't know what cards are in the other players hands.
Go is a game of complete knowledge. As is chess. And draughts.
The two classes are completely different.
These two statements are not incompatible. 6 to 8 dan difference between amateurs and professionals sounds perfectly reasonable. They are on different scales.
Yes. And tell us something we don't know?
Almost every high-grade European player has had to travel to the Orient to improve, because they simply cannot get the opposition to play against and learn from in Europe. Plus, they can make a living as professionals (tutors) in the Orient, and even a few - maybe a half-dozen - have competed as professional players.
We may be behind the Orient, but at least we're able to compete in the same league. We're in contact. Just.
The best computer Go programs of a decade ago were all requiring Beowulf clusters to run on. Every one of about 5 competing designs (with several implementations of each approach). You might be able to run a programme from a 10 years ago Beowulf on a modern high-end machine. But you'd still be beaten by a 5-year ago Beowulf cluster, and completely fucked by the previous state of the art programmes. Which themselves are around 6 to 10 stones weaker than the system discussed here.