Speaking as a Go player for over 30 years, while we had watched rapid advances over the last decade, leading to AI systems that could reliably make a 1-kyu or Shodan player work for their points, they were making progress at one or two points per year.
Last year's progress was more like 15 or 20 points. Which was a hell of a surprise. A hell of a surprise.
Cold fusion has never been less than the square root of minus one years away, forward, backwards or sideways.
Fusion, on the other hand, has been an established fact for around 13 billion years. That we don't know how to do it using less than around 10^30 kilogrammes of hydrogen is our technological problem, not an existential problem for fusion. Hail the excited state of carbon-12!
Go revise the "logistics" section of any of your large scale exploration expeditions of the 20th century. Going up the FuckingBig Face of FuckingBig Mountain, with cooking fuel, food and oxygen cylinders as your logistical necessities. Or crossing the FuckingBig White Plain of Antarctica, with fuel and food being the logistics constraints.
The logistic pyramid you describe is not simple. Many people have died as they have broken down. Just because it's not rocket science, doesn't mean that it's a piece of piss.
am I totally misunderstanding how quantum entanglement works
Probably. The return leg of an entangled system would be able to pass the data back at effectively infinite speed, one bit at a time. But each of those bits would have to be created at the source as an entangled pair, then one half of each entangled pair pair would have to be physically shipped from source to destination (at a speed capped by c, and probably a lot lower), before the bit is used. The bits cannot be re-used (measurement disentangles the pair). So your average communication speed is no better than c/2.
Faster than light anything is fiction at this time, and theory only has some very contentious holes by which it could become fact. For example, maintaining quantum entanglement between two particles for more than a few minutes is currently beyond our ken.
Could such a probe even transmit anything back to Earth?
Pretty hard to do on it's own. But since the proposal only requires the "launching lasers" to fire for a few months (until the probe is out in the Kuiper Belt)... would you really only launch one probe then dismantle the lot?
Of course you woudn't - you'd launch a whole series of probes. Some at (say) 2.01 c, 1.99 c, 1.98 c, 1.97 c,... (and not necessarily in that order) so that you havve multiple probes slowly separating in distance from Earth. The closer probes can then act as information relays for the more distant probes.
Perhaps you have to build your "launching lasers" on an asteroid - so at some times of the year it's line of fire would pass inconveniently close to the Sun (or Earth, or Jupiter... or Planet 9 (of Brown & Batygin 2016) for several months. So, you leave it un-used? Or you launch the first batch of probes towards Procyon?
Could such a probe collect interesting data in the first place?
Hmmm, New Horizons? I don't see this being a big problem. Communications back to base being a bigger problem. And there wouldn't be a single probe anyway.
Could it serve any purpose other than crashing into a planet with a potentially hostile civilization?
Very low probability. And also utterly irrelevant. Decades before the probe arrives in the target system, the "launching lasers" would have put a flickering brilliant light in the sky of the target. Further reading : first dozen or so chapters of "The Mote in God's Eye", 1991
by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, Publisher: Pocket Books (March 1, 1991) Language: English ISBN-10: 0671741926.
You don't do that. If you think it is important to send the genetics of humans to Alpha Centauri, then that's fine and good. Send the information. It's a small fraction of a gramme if you encode it as DNA molecules, probably less if you send it in some other encoding. You'll also need to send the information to build an incubation system, and to build the necessary infrastructure, but those are tasks that are under research already. Long before the "landing lasers" (opposite end of the "launching lasers" for Breakthrough Starshot) get ground-broken, you could have humans growing in artificial wombs over there.
Lather, rinse and repeat for the next star system out. A generation time of a century or two per colonisation is within the bounds of possibility. Each generation halves the probability of the human species dieing out. The odds of any human ever dieing in a different star system to the one in which they were born will remain small.
Star Trek it ain't, but it doesn't break the laws of physics.
I was thinking of the time to pass through the Goldilocks zone, where liquid surface water can exist.
"Goldilocks Zone"? Meh. We don't know for certain that it is possible to generate life in the sub-surface oceans of icy moons, but we do know that it is possible to combine chemical energy, liquid water and extended periods of time in such an environment. To discount such environments would be rash. It would make a mockery of any pretensions we have to being rational organisms.
At the costs of such an expedition, it would be ludicrous to not send something that can stay and report back to Earth. If that means more than doubling the mission length (to centuries, not multiple decades), then we should bite that bullet to get a first-version of a vonNeumann machine into another system. Once that has starting to build a space-bourn industry, then the human species is one large step closer to spreading through the rest of the universe. We may not be a wonderful species, but to the best of our knowledge, we're the only self-aware species in the universe. That's a big egg to have in one basket.
to get a useful probe to our nearest neighbouring star in a human lifetime.
Doing (whatever they're planning) within a human lifetime wasn't part of the design specification.
If you have a mentality that cannot conceive of starting a project that neither you nor any children you choose to have (and can afford to be-sprog) will live to see the end of, and that, then clearly you are a person who is severely lacking in ambition. People like you will never be the progenitors (genetically, or psychologically) of the first human-derivative to see the Milky Way from the outside.
a human expedition on an Orion drive-powered O'Neill cylinder generation ship; it'd be more inspiring.
It also happens to fall into the range of events that are (1) not impossible, and (2) broadly within the range of technologies which we have reasonable control over. It's doable.
But I don't think that you're the person to lead the project. With some effort, you might be worthy to clean up the dead coffee cups. When they're using paper, not ceramic.
The joke used to be that "you should act your age, not your shoe size". Of course, since we switched to using standard shoe sizes (typically numbers in the 30s or 40s) instead of our little country's parochial system (numbers around 10), that joke had to change. Now we use "act your IQ, not your shoe size.
This person is clearly doing both - IQ and shoe size in the same low numerical range.
I don't see arctic oil drill camps as being a large enough market to pay for the launch costs.
They've already got Iridium systems in place. Desktop systems for routine use, and a couple of hand-helds for emergency use - one in the drilling office, one in the life support office (sine life support is a critical operation in arctic work). The wife's worksite had a GLONASS system too - carried on orders from the Russian military.
Getting a two-way connection from a moving satellite is a nightmare.
It may be a nightmare, but it's a solved nightmare. The last time I was looking at ground stations for such systems at work (where you live on site for months, because it takes days to get to the site), you could get change out of $10000 for hardware costs, or change from $15000 if you wanted solidly-built equipment. It's not cheap, but it's not horrendous either. It's not $20/month.
You'll either need a tracking dish, which will be expensive,
We never even considered that - too bulky for the lab-roof system I was speccing. But given that you can get the motors and bearings for a modest roboticised astronomical telescope for a couple of thousand dollars, I don't think it's wildly expensive.
It may work for niche cases for low-bandwidth applications in remote areas. I'm guessing the uplink hardware will be so expensive that you'll have micro-ISPs serving small areas.
For "low bandwidth" being a few dozens of times the internet speed I had at home until 2005 being a "niche", along with being more than 5 miles from a telephone cable, or being a couple of hundred miles from a mobile phone signal. None of these are particularly "niche", and local "micros-ISPs" is exactly what people do.
There are at least two competing players in this market already, who will resist "disruption" of their businesses, which will ruin a third entrant's profit margins. It's not an empty market.
I didn't think there were many people left who were willing to admit to being a sand-botherer in public. Not since the convictions of the pavement-masturbator.
Not one of the above concepts is invented - all real "kinks".
What if the "stange alloys" where baffling scientists because the material was showing negative mass
That would be easily recognised due to it bein stuck, hard, against the room's ceiling. This is a property which does not require sophisticated measurement devices or interpretation.
Or perhaps dense beyond how we normally pack our atoms together.
Equally, it's stuck to the floor, more so than anything well-known and that small. This property does require slightly more complex measurement - two weighings and a bucket of water - but is also not rocket science to detect. Anything higher than 23000 kg/cu.m is unusual, but I wouldn't fall off my chair if someone had an Os-Ir bimetallic compound which reached 25000 kg/cu.m. 50000kg/cu.m would be really interesting. And really obvious.
If we're just using our standard periodical table, there ought be nothing here to confuse us.
You have the cart and the horse in complete disarray. The "standard (or non-standard) periodic table is an utterly unimportant way of dealing with student's unwillingness to sit down and memorise data (like, the physical and chemical properties of all 92 naturally-common elements) ; it expresses the important underlying truths about the properties of integer numbers, the stability rules for nuclei, and the exclusion rules for the arrangement of electrons in orbitals. You can change your standard periodic table for one embodying the same relations on the surface of a priapic porcupine and that won't in the slightest change the underlying reality of physics and chemistry.
I take it from your fetishisation of symbols (e.g., the periodic table) over substantial properties, that you studied art not science?
Well, not from that source anyway. Whether my wife whispers Russian propaganda into my ear as I sleep is a bit harder to be sure about. Then again, since she has chosen (for the time being) to live in the West, she's not got a lot of reason to propagandise.
Your echo, not mine. I might consider buying into this "IoT" thing several years after I've not heard of a single major flaw in any such devices. It's not as if anyone has come up with an interesting application for it yet. Or at least, not that I've heard of.
If your phone is compromised or your phone provider is evil, it's game over.
Depends on if you have anything interesting in your phone. That's what ink-on-paper is good for.
Bizarre. Next thing you'll tell me is that people listen to music without choosing what they're going to hear. Could never figure out how that works. Or why you'd want to.
Second the bus system apparently doesn't have much of a maintenance budget
That's another one I never did understand. My school's bus maintenance budget was a total of 0$, 0£, 0s and 0d per millennium. Children who lived more than 3 miles from the school got a pass each term for the regular bus services between their village and the school (which also meant that those villages got at least 2 buses a day, more often 1 an hour because once you've brought the buses and hired the drivers, you might as well use them). Everyone else walked to school. The car park would accommodate 6 cars IIRC and the other 30-odd teaching, cooking, cleaning and technical staff got the choice of walking to work or finding parking within walking distance of the school. The bike sheds were only allowed for pupils who had passed their cycling proficiency test and presented the certificate.
Was it ever possible to buy these chipsets without the ME? Not as far as I understand it. New chipset, new features ; if you want the new features, you get them all, whether you want them or not.If you don't want the new fetures, buy a different chipset. If Intel have stopped supplying previous similar (but not the same) chipsets AND you have a contract with them to supply the old chipsets, feel free to sic your lawyers onto them. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel still make a few thousand (e.g.) radiation-hardened 386s a year for NASA, the NSA and military. They probably don't have the ME enabled.
If you don't like the Intel ME, don't buy machines with Intel chipsets. It ain't rocket science. Let Intel go bust and wouldn't even change the side of the paper I wipe my arse with.
History has two big prominent examples: Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Ghandi succeeded in peacefully decolonising the nation of India from the British Empire ? I thought that he failed because immediately on separation there was one of the biggest bouts of ethnic cleansing in recorded history, and the schism of the nation into three (currently, possibly 4 or 5 eventually) separate nations. Certainly, he considered it a failure - that's why he went through ll those fasts to try to stop people killing other people because of their religions - and failed.
Martin Luther King succeeded in emancipating the blacks of America from white political and economic oppression? That's not the news we're seeing in Europe. Do you have different news sources in America?
Or did you enclose the [sarcasm] tags in [invisible] tags?
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Last year's progress was more like 15 or 20 points. Which was a hell of a surprise. A hell of a surprise.
Fusion, on the other hand, has been an established fact for around 13 billion years. That we don't know how to do it using less than around 10^30 kilogrammes of hydrogen is our technological problem, not an existential problem for fusion. Hail the excited state of carbon-12!
The logistic pyramid you describe is not simple. Many people have died as they have broken down. Just because it's not rocket science, doesn't mean that it's a piece of piss.
Probably. The return leg of an entangled system would be able to pass the data back at effectively infinite speed, one bit at a time. But each of those bits would have to be created at the source as an entangled pair, then one half of each entangled pair pair would have to be physically shipped from source to destination (at a speed capped by c, and probably a lot lower), before the bit is used. The bits cannot be re-used (measurement disentangles the pair). So your average communication speed is no better than c/2.
Faster than light anything is fiction at this time, and theory only has some very contentious holes by which it could become fact. For example, maintaining quantum entanglement between two particles for more than a few minutes is currently beyond our ken.
Pretty hard to do on it's own. But since the proposal only requires the "launching lasers" to fire for a few months (until the probe is out in the Kuiper Belt) ... would you really only launch one probe then dismantle the lot?
Of course you woudn't - you'd launch a whole series of probes. Some at (say) 2.01 c, 1.99 c, 1.98 c, 1.97 c, ... (and not necessarily in that order) so that you havve multiple probes slowly separating in distance from Earth. The closer probes can then act as information relays for the more distant probes.
Perhaps you have to build your "launching lasers" on an asteroid - so at some times of the year it's line of fire would pass inconveniently close to the Sun (or Earth, or Jupiter ... or Planet 9 (of Brown & Batygin 2016) for several months. So, you leave it un-used? Or you launch the first batch of probes towards Procyon?
Hmmm, New Horizons? I don't see this being a big problem. Communications back to base being a bigger problem. And there wouldn't be a single probe anyway.
Very low probability. And also utterly irrelevant. Decades before the probe arrives in the target system, the "launching lasers" would have put a flickering brilliant light in the sky of the target. Further reading : first dozen or so chapters of "The Mote in God's Eye", 1991 by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, Publisher: Pocket Books (March 1, 1991) Language: English ISBN-10: 0671741926.
So?
You don't do that. If you think it is important to send the genetics of humans to Alpha Centauri, then that's fine and good. Send the information. It's a small fraction of a gramme if you encode it as DNA molecules, probably less if you send it in some other encoding. You'll also need to send the information to build an incubation system, and to build the necessary infrastructure, but those are tasks that are under research already. Long before the "landing lasers" (opposite end of the "launching lasers" for Breakthrough Starshot) get ground-broken, you could have humans growing in artificial wombs over there.
Lather, rinse and repeat for the next star system out. A generation time of a century or two per colonisation is within the bounds of possibility. Each generation halves the probability of the human species dieing out. The odds of any human ever dieing in a different star system to the one in which they were born will remain small.
Star Trek it ain't, but it doesn't break the laws of physics.
"Goldilocks Zone"? Meh. We don't know for certain that it is possible to generate life in the sub-surface oceans of icy moons, but we do know that it is possible to combine chemical energy, liquid water and extended periods of time in such an environment. To discount such environments would be rash. It would make a mockery of any pretensions we have to being rational organisms.
At the costs of such an expedition, it would be ludicrous to not send something that can stay and report back to Earth. If that means more than doubling the mission length (to centuries, not multiple decades), then we should bite that bullet to get a first-version of a vonNeumann machine into another system. Once that has starting to build a space-bourn industry, then the human species is one large step closer to spreading through the rest of the universe. We may not be a wonderful species, but to the best of our knowledge, we're the only self-aware species in the universe. That's a big egg to have in one basket.
Doing (whatever they're planning) within a human lifetime wasn't part of the design specification.
If you have a mentality that cannot conceive of starting a project that neither you nor any children you choose to have (and can afford to be-sprog) will live to see the end of, and that, then clearly you are a person who is severely lacking in ambition. People like you will never be the progenitors (genetically, or psychologically) of the first human-derivative to see the Milky Way from the outside.
It also happens to fall into the range of events that are (1) not impossible, and (2) broadly within the range of technologies which we have reasonable control over. It's doable.
But I don't think that you're the person to lead the project. With some effort, you might be worthy to clean up the dead coffee cups. When they're using paper, not ceramic.
This person is clearly doing both - IQ and shoe size in the same low numerical range.
There are things called computers that are good at doing this sort of routine calculation. Have you heard of them?
They've already got Iridium systems in place. Desktop systems for routine use, and a couple of hand-helds for emergency use - one in the drilling office, one in the life support office (sine life support is a critical operation in arctic work). The wife's worksite had a GLONASS system too - carried on orders from the Russian military.
It may be a nightmare, but it's a solved nightmare. The last time I was looking at ground stations for such systems at work (where you live on site for months, because it takes days to get to the site), you could get change out of $10000 for hardware costs, or change from $15000 if you wanted solidly-built equipment. It's not cheap, but it's not horrendous either. It's not $20/month.
We never even considered that - too bulky for the lab-roof system I was speccing. But given that you can get the motors and bearings for a modest roboticised astronomical telescope for a couple of thousand dollars, I don't think it's wildly expensive.
For "low bandwidth" being a few dozens of times the internet speed I had at home until 2005 being a "niche", along with being more than 5 miles from a telephone cable, or being a couple of hundred miles from a mobile phone signal. None of these are particularly "niche", and local "micros-ISPs" is exactly what people do.
There are at least two competing players in this market already, who will resist "disruption" of their businesses, which will ruin a third entrant's profit margins. It's not an empty market.
I didn't think there were many people left who were willing to admit to being a sand-botherer in public. Not since the convictions of the pavement-masturbator.
Not one of the above concepts is invented - all real "kinks".
That would be easily recognised due to it bein stuck, hard, against the room's ceiling. This is a property which does not require sophisticated measurement devices or interpretation.
Equally, it's stuck to the floor, more so than anything well-known and that small. This property does require slightly more complex measurement - two weighings and a bucket of water - but is also not rocket science to detect. Anything higher than 23000 kg/cu.m is unusual, but I wouldn't fall off my chair if someone had an Os-Ir bimetallic compound which reached 25000 kg/cu.m. 50000kg/cu.m would be really interesting. And really obvious.
You have the cart and the horse in complete disarray. The "standard (or non-standard) periodic table is an utterly unimportant way of dealing with student's unwillingness to sit down and memorise data (like, the physical and chemical properties of all 92 naturally-common elements) ; it expresses the important underlying truths about the properties of integer numbers, the stability rules for nuclei, and the exclusion rules for the arrangement of electrons in orbitals. You can change your standard periodic table for one embodying the same relations on the surface of a priapic porcupine and that won't in the slightest change the underlying reality of physics and chemistry.
I take it from your fetishisation of symbols (e.g., the periodic table) over substantial properties, that you studied art not science?
But Jeffty Is Five, Harlan!
Unless we move back.
Your echo, not mine. I might consider buying into this "IoT" thing several years after I've not heard of a single major flaw in any such devices. It's not as if anyone has come up with an interesting application for it yet. Or at least, not that I've heard of.
Depends on if you have anything interesting in your phone. That's what ink-on-paper is good for.
Bizarre. Next thing you'll tell me is that people listen to music without choosing what they're going to hear. Could never figure out how that works. Or why you'd want to.
That's another one I never did understand. My school's bus maintenance budget was a total of 0$, 0£, 0s and 0d per millennium. Children who lived more than 3 miles from the school got a pass each term for the regular bus services between their village and the school (which also meant that those villages got at least 2 buses a day, more often 1 an hour because once you've brought the buses and hired the drivers, you might as well use them). Everyone else walked to school. The car park would accommodate 6 cars IIRC and the other 30-odd teaching, cooking, cleaning and technical staff got the choice of walking to work or finding parking within walking distance of the school. The bike sheds were only allowed for pupils who had passed their cycling proficiency test and presented the certificate.
Don't American DVRs come with fast-forward buttons?
Grant and Naylor addressed that question decades ago.
If you don't like the Intel ME, don't buy machines with Intel chipsets. It ain't rocket science. Let Intel go bust and wouldn't even change the side of the paper I wipe my arse with.
Ghandi succeeded in peacefully decolonising the nation of India from the British Empire ? I thought that he failed because immediately on separation there was one of the biggest bouts of ethnic cleansing in recorded history, and the schism of the nation into three (currently, possibly 4 or 5 eventually) separate nations. Certainly, he considered it a failure - that's why he went through ll those fasts to try to stop people killing other people because of their religions - and failed.
Martin Luther King succeeded in emancipating the blacks of America from white political and economic oppression? That's not the news we're seeing in Europe. Do you have different news sources in America?
Or did you enclose the [sarcasm] tags in [invisible] tags?
What I don't get is why Christians celebrate the (alleged) birth of a strictly observant Jew? Regardless of the specific date.
Which is the purpose of the wall anyway - killing poor brown people.