Go programs went through a great leap from 2006 to present,
This is true.
due to the technique of Monte Carlo Tree Search.
This, however, is much more controversial.
True, around about then (I'd have thought a couple of years earlier, but it's not terribly important) a number of game engines did start to incorporate MC engines into their game play, but it was as part of a package of measures. Some used the MC in their move generating engines ; others used MC in their move scoring engines (if you've got a billion plausible moves to analyse, you'd better have a quick engine for assessing the results of those moves, and MC is quick to generate). But all the reasonably effective engines used other algorithms in different parts of their gameplay.
In fact, IIRC one of the big bears of Computer Go (it may have been Nick Wedd - I'll try to remember to ask him next time he beats me at the board) built a pure MC Computer Go engine precisely to use as an opponent for computer Go engines. It's a pretty stupid player, but it does allow other ComputerGo designers to get some sort of benchmark to try their different modules against, because it's a consistently stupid player. And it's computationally very lightweight for Nick's server to run dozens of instances of.
No one has used the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those" Slash-meme yet? Shame, SlashDot, shame!
This still does not guarantee that the result of such play-out is correct.
I think you mean "ideal" or "perfect" rather than "correct". If players play moves which are not illegal (most moves are not illegal, all of the time), then whatever they play is correct, even if it is drastically sub-optimal. The old thing of the novice playing their first 10 stones to surround 12 points in the corner, while their teacher has taken most of the other 49 available points may be perfectly correct, even if drastically sub-optimal (I'm assuming a 9x9 board and a near total novice).
A lot of what makes Go so fascinating (for me) is that feeling of "if only I'd played one stone higher/ one stone lower", "if only..."
Being able to see where you (or your fellow player) could have played differently, and probably more effectively, is a big thing for my enjoyment. YMMV.
Does retreating to chaotic gamespace work in other complex games too?
It might be pertinent to first ask if it works in Go. In my (not trivial) experience, it doesn't. Someone who has run out of ideas and starts playing randomly is going to be shredded in the next handful of moves, unless the other player is deliberately playing a "teaching game". What can seem to the inexperienced player (and I suspect that Kim0 is such - he may only have a few tens of thousands of games under his belt) to be chaotic play normally consists of several mutually entangled threads and does have a structure. Though you might need to be playing at a comparable level to the combatants on the board to see the structure.
"I don't understand this structure" does not equal "this is structureless."
And let's not forget that you play with a given number of stones, so one of the players will eventually run out of stones.
Not true.
In informal play, it's not true because any real (i.e. routinely used) set of stones will have had some stones disappear under the sofa, others will have been shattered by a vigorous opponent (Dave Hall - I'm talking about YOU!).
In formal play (e.g. tournaments), it's not true for exactly the same reason. Plus, if one player finds that they're running low on stones, then it's because there have been a lot of prisoners captured. So there are a lot of prisoners in each player's bowls. So, you take 10 stones from each player's prisoner collections and put them back into the player's bowls. The score DIFFERENCE at the end is preserved, so it doesn't matter.
It is not impossible that with an extremely stubborn learner then you might possibly run out of stones. But that wouldn't last more than a dozen games until the stubborn learner starts to learn how to develop light, resilient groups. At which point, they're well down into the 20s of kyu, and are not beginners any more.
The British championship final game had the running out of stones problem about 5 years ago, solved as described above. The other dozens of sets in the tournament room had been packed away into people's cars, and it was quicker to shuffle stones than to crowbar a spectator out to go and get more stones. There were enough high-end players around that the solution was uncontroversial.
if there was a fire on the plane and you have your ear-buds in (or worse, noise-cancelling headphones), you will likely as not be burned to a crisp,
Not withstanding the rightness or otherwise of this specific case, if someone is so zoned out into whatever they're listening to as to not notice that they're in a plane that's on fire, then perhaps that person is a good candidate for being deleted from the gene pool.
And for what it's worth, most of the time when I fly, the security guard who pats me down (not optional, for anyone ; body scanners haven't been introduced and are unlikely to ever be introduced) will be taking any music players, headphones, telephones or cameras and locking them in security until I return through that airport. No questions allowed ; no discussion ; they're gone. If you don't like it, you're not going to fly and you're going to get fired. Your contract of employment states that you will follow the safety rules in force or you will get the sack. The kid needs a dose of reality.
Seriously, three short lines which clearly convey the entire summary of the story, contains lots of links to both story and background, AND doesn't contain terrible typos! Also, geeky and interesting. This is what slashdot needs more of.
Then get submitting.
If you're not part of the problem, then you're part of the solution. Or something like that.
Disclaimer : I've not bothered to research your submission history. Nor do I know what the site's averages are, which might be interesting in itself.
Palin Zealots aren't allowed to ride on dinosaurs as dinosaurs where put there by god to test man's ability to deceive itself into believe the earth is only 6000 years old
More importantly, you can't ride dinosaurs because unless you're a Person Of (Severely) Diminished Stature, a small child, or are wearing your antigravity belt, you're likely to put the ostrich's back out, if not kill the poor bloody dinosaur outright.
Or as I missing something.
Palin for Obama's replacement! I wanna see some hot Palin-on-Michelle action. Yeah, baby! Drill, baby, drill!
... is the difference between journalism and what Assange does.
Strange, I thought that it was the difference between underwater welding and what Assange does.
What - you mean to tell me that Assange claims to do as much underwater welding as he does journalism? Well "woosh" to you, too.
[And for the terminally dumb in our midst - WikiLeaks hasn't ever claimed to be a journal staffed by people practising journalism. It's a publishing house and provides a resource that journalists, spooks and voyeurs can use. Which is a totally different thing. I've probably got more journalistic training than Assange (a friend is a professional journalist, and I've researched and written articles for his journals before, under his training), and it's highly likely that I've got more experience relevant to underwater welding (I've done some welding, and some scuba diving), and both are equally relevant because Assange and WikiLeaks don't claim to be either journalists or underwater welders.]
Until these problems can be addressed, this "breakthrough" is just another octanitrocubane.
Awww, shucks. You beat me to it.
But ONC looks fun to a symmetry-phile, and TNA has a similar appeal.
I wonder what their co-polymer would look like? Hopefully, like a hole in the lab bench.
Hmmm, by analogy with Arsenic and Phosphorus, one might hope for a N4 entity. One might also hope that, since hydrazine is so well known as a substitute for water when washing skin too delicate to take DHMO, then analogously N4H4 might have... vigorous... behaviour. Substituting (nitrating), then N4(NO2)4 would be... good for manufacturers of lab benches and fume cupboards. And blast walls.
Almost makes chemistry attractive again. Stuff those biochemists and their tedious jellyfish-based sludge - we want proper chemistry : bangs, flashes and bad smells!
Please don't post useful summaries high up in the comment pile. It discourages useless invective and make it harder to post uninformed rants.
>POP ---sound of tongue being extracted from cheek.
But it is a new level of stupidity (arrogance? weirdness?) to go ahead and post a pic of yourself
There is an old, but depressingly true nonetheless, aphorism that one should not "attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity or incompetence".
s/malice/arrogance/
Like so many old sayings, it has gotten to an old age by continuing to be relevant at frequent intervals (frequent enough to not need re-inventing, just remembering). which would suggest that there are many more stupid or incompetent people than there are truly malicious ones.
(You can tell that my film studies teacher didn't impress me with the benefits of colour over mono, and I think it's still too early to tell if sound was a good move.)
I think I was underwhelmed when I saw a video of the first Terminator movie when it came out and simply haven't chosen to waste time or attention on them since. If they feel the need to recycle catch phrases between movies, then that doesn't sound very enthusing. Wouldn't it have been better to get the first one right than to flog the dead horse again to try to teach it to sing? ("Right" defined in the only way it can be : "interesting, to me".)
Well, that's him earned another bullet in the back of the head from a myriad more rednecks. It'll be getting hard to find room for all the entry and exit wounds.
I'm a tad surprised that Tuesday evening (?) wasn't marked by every second passing nerd in the London area wandering down to Westminster court to pay their loose change in cold hard cash into the court. And to get a receipt. After the first couple of dozen, someone, somewhere in the court would have cottoned on to the fact that there was a problem building up here.
Would have been fun. Flash-mobbing the "justice system".
There's something really, really fishy about the whole case. And I don't mean what the various governments are up to.
There is no way that her and her mom were oblivious to the fact since most standard, off the shelf ibuprofen pills are only 200mg. Something else was going on and I think you were too quick to assume the kid was innocent in this case
FYI - in this country, the UK, 400mg Ibuprofen are an off-the-shelf product.
Sorry for the rant there. Not a native anglophone myself, I still get a kick out of analyzing bad writing.
Being a native anglophone married to a non-native speaker, the incompetence of some people at using what appears to be their own language infuriates me.
The T-1000 is the "liquid metal" terminator from Terminator 2, Skynet is the name of the computer that would start the man/machine war in the future (2004).
I think I saw some of the first Terminator movie - that's the "I'll be back" one? - and consequently haven't bothered to watch any of the rest. Though it's possible that I've been in the TV lounge when some of them have been playing - "liquid metal" rings a bell, and now that I think about it, there's some memory of motorcycle stunts too.
I think that Arnie's best work was early in his career - starring in gay porn. When he got out of that business his work became comparatively stereotyped and repetitive.
curfew from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am according to the BBC. What a coincidence these are the hours that cover the prime-time news slots
I did wonder what the details of mentioned curfew periods were.
Sounds to me as if a number of news outlets are going to get familiar with a certain living room on Surrey somewhere.
You do not have to post any actual money when you provide a surety in the UK. You only have to show that you have the sum available and are liable for the sum in the event the (alleged) offender breaches bail conditions in some significant manner. See http://www.yourrights.org.uk/yourrights/the-rights-of-defendants/bail.html for a further explanation.
True, but irrelevant (well, only partly relevant) as the court are requiring both sureties AND securities (which it seems have to be paid in cash at the court).
Also THE main reason to get one is for use when you NEED to call outside of standard cell reception areas, for instance in mountian rescue operations. But for those satphones that use geosync sats (not Irridium), it means that you cannot be in the shadow of a north face (in the northern hemisphere). Another BIG DEADLY drawback.
"Iridium" - from iridescence.
When I've used satellite phones within spitting-distance of the Arctic Circle, it's been on the tundra border of the taiga, so no north-faces to worry about.
I was under the impression that the Iridium system used satellites at quite a high orbital inclination. (Checked - Wikipedia gives it as 86.4 deg ; GlobalStar agree on 86.4 deg ; an IEEE paper from 1999... doesn't actually give an inclination, but gives the footprint radius of each satellite as +/-2200km on the ground. The closest that the sub-satellite point of an 86.4deg inclination orbit would get to a pole would be (1-86.4/90)*10000 =~400km. So, I think that is going to add up to pretty good polar coverage.
Yes, I'm sure that in deep valleys you could end up with patchy communications to Iridium, but the same goes for any remote communications system (I'm a caver, and I'm upset that my cell phone doesn't work from 3 miles underground. Booo!)
Can you cite cases where people have had problems with Iridium communications due to proximity to [pole]-facing cliffs? I've not heard of such, and with work coming up in the Arctic, I have a vested interest in keeping my skin intact.
GlobalStar does have a low inclination - 52 deg - and doesn't claim polar coverage.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true.
This, however, is much more controversial.
True, around about then (I'd have thought a couple of years earlier, but it's not terribly important) a number of game engines did start to incorporate MC engines into their game play, but it was as part of a package of measures. Some used the MC in their move generating engines ; others used MC in their move scoring engines (if you've got a billion plausible moves to analyse, you'd better have a quick engine for assessing the results of those moves, and MC is quick to generate). But all the reasonably effective engines used other algorithms in different parts of their gameplay.
In fact, IIRC one of the big bears of Computer Go (it may have been Nick Wedd - I'll try to remember to ask him next time he beats me at the board) built a pure MC Computer Go engine precisely to use as an opponent for computer Go engines. It's a pretty stupid player, but it does allow other ComputerGo designers to get some sort of benchmark to try their different modules against, because it's a consistently stupid player. And it's computationally very lightweight for Nick's server to run dozens of instances of.
No one has used the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those" Slash-meme yet? Shame, SlashDot, shame!
I think you mean "ideal" or "perfect" rather than "correct". If players play moves which are not illegal (most moves are not illegal, all of the time), then whatever they play is correct, even if it is drastically sub-optimal. The old thing of the novice playing their first 10 stones to surround 12 points in the corner, while their teacher has taken most of the other 49 available points may be perfectly correct, even if drastically sub-optimal (I'm assuming a 9x9 board and a near total novice).
A lot of what makes Go so fascinating (for me) is that feeling of "if only I'd played one stone higher/ one stone lower", "if only ..."
Being able to see where you (or your fellow player) could have played differently, and probably more effectively, is a big thing for my enjoyment. YMMV.
It might be pertinent to first ask if it works in Go. In my (not trivial) experience, it doesn't. Someone who has run out of ideas and starts playing randomly is going to be shredded in the next handful of moves, unless the other player is deliberately playing a "teaching game". What can seem to the inexperienced player (and I suspect that Kim0 is such - he may only have a few tens of thousands of games under his belt) to be chaotic play normally consists of several mutually entangled threads and does have a structure. Though you might need to be playing at a comparable level to the combatants on the board to see the structure.
"I don't understand this structure" does not equal "this is structureless."
Not true.
In informal play, it's not true because any real (i.e. routinely used) set of stones will have had some stones disappear under the sofa, others will have been shattered by a vigorous opponent (Dave Hall - I'm talking about YOU!).
In formal play (e.g. tournaments), it's not true for exactly the same reason. Plus, if one player finds that they're running low on stones, then it's because there have been a lot of prisoners captured. So there are a lot of prisoners in each player's bowls. So, you take 10 stones from each player's prisoner collections and put them back into the player's bowls. The score DIFFERENCE at the end is preserved, so it doesn't matter.
It is not impossible that with an extremely stubborn learner then you might possibly run out of stones. But that wouldn't last more than a dozen games until the stubborn learner starts to learn how to develop light, resilient groups. At which point, they're well down into the 20s of kyu, and are not beginners any more.
The British championship final game had the running out of stones problem about 5 years ago, solved as described above. The other dozens of sets in the tournament room had been packed away into people's cars, and it was quicker to shuffle stones than to crowbar a spectator out to go and get more stones. There were enough high-end players around that the solution was uncontroversial.
Not withstanding the rightness or otherwise of this specific case, if someone is so zoned out into whatever they're listening to as to not notice that they're in a plane that's on fire, then perhaps that person is a good candidate for being deleted from the gene pool.
And for what it's worth, most of the time when I fly, the security guard who pats me down (not optional, for anyone ; body scanners haven't been introduced and are unlikely to ever be introduced) will be taking any music players, headphones, telephones or cameras and locking them in security until I return through that airport. No questions allowed ; no discussion ; they're gone. If you don't like it, you're not going to fly and you're going to get fired. Your contract of employment states that you will follow the safety rules in force or you will get the sack. The kid needs a dose of reality.
Then get submitting.
If you're not part of the problem, then you're part of the solution. Or something like that.
Disclaimer : I've not bothered to research your submission history. Nor do I know what the site's averages are, which might be interesting in itself.
More importantly, you can't ride dinosaurs because unless you're a Person Of (Severely) Diminished Stature, a small child, or are wearing your antigravity belt, you're likely to put the ostrich's back out, if not kill the poor bloody dinosaur outright.
Or as I missing something.
Palin for Obama's replacement! I wanna see some hot Palin-on-Michelle action. Yeah, baby! Drill, baby, drill!
Strange, I thought that it was the difference between underwater welding and what Assange does.
What - you mean to tell me that Assange claims to do as much underwater welding as he does journalism? Well "woosh" to you, too.
[And for the terminally dumb in our midst - WikiLeaks hasn't ever claimed to be a journal staffed by people practising journalism. It's a publishing house and provides a resource that journalists, spooks and voyeurs can use. Which is a totally different thing. I've probably got more journalistic training than Assange (a friend is a professional journalist, and I've researched and written articles for his journals before, under his training), and it's highly likely that I've got more experience relevant to underwater welding (I've done some welding, and some scuba diving), and both are equally relevant because Assange and WikiLeaks don't claim to be either journalists or underwater welders.]
Considerably dangerously, I hope.
The scanner?
Awww, shucks. You beat me to it.
But ONC looks fun to a symmetry-phile, and TNA has a similar appeal.
I wonder what their co-polymer would look like? Hopefully, like a hole in the lab bench.
Hmmm, by analogy with Arsenic and Phosphorus, one might hope for a N4 entity. One might also hope that, since hydrazine is so well known as a substitute for water when washing skin too delicate to take DHMO, then analogously N4H4 might have ... vigorous ... behaviour. Substituting (nitrating), then N4(NO2)4 would be ... good for manufacturers of lab benches and fume cupboards. And blast walls.
Almost makes chemistry attractive again. Stuff those biochemists and their tedious jellyfish-based sludge - we want proper chemistry : bangs, flashes and bad smells!
Some of us were trying to get to work when the story came out.
"Goodies!
Goody goody, yum yum!"
(Image )
Please don't post useful summaries high up in the comment pile. It discourages useless invective and make it harder to post uninformed rants. >POP ---sound of tongue being extracted from cheek.
But it is a new level of stupidity (arrogance? weirdness?) to go ahead and post a pic of yourself
There is an old, but depressingly true nonetheless, aphorism that one should not "attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity or incompetence".
s/malice/arrogance/
Like so many old sayings, it has gotten to an old age by continuing to be relevant at frequent intervals (frequent enough to not need re-inventing, just remembering). which would suggest that there are many more stupid or incompetent people than there are truly malicious ones.
Isn't that a nice thought?
No, not really.
(You can tell that my film studies teacher didn't impress me with the benefits of colour over mono, and I think it's still too early to tell if sound was a good move.)
I think I was underwhelmed when I saw a video of the first Terminator movie when it came out and simply haven't chosen to waste time or attention on them since. If they feel the need to recycle catch phrases between movies, then that doesn't sound very enthusing. Wouldn't it have been better to get the first one right than to flog the dead horse again to try to teach it to sing? ("Right" defined in the only way it can be : "interesting, to me".)
I'm a tad surprised that Tuesday evening (?) wasn't marked by every second passing nerd in the London area wandering down to Westminster court to pay their loose change in cold hard cash into the court. And to get a receipt. After the first couple of dozen, someone, somewhere in the court would have cottoned on to the fact that there was a problem building up here.
Would have been fun. Flash-mobbing the "justice system".
There's something really, really fishy about the whole case. And I don't mean what the various governments are up to.
There is no way that her and her mom were oblivious to the fact since most standard, off the shelf ibuprofen pills are only 200mg. Something else was going on and I think you were too quick to assume the kid was innocent in this case
FYI - in this country, the UK, 400mg Ibuprofen are an off-the-shelf product.
Indeed. I actually think it would be quite fun to live in. It would be a chance to start something anew.
A volunteer!
[/self gets chair, food, drink and a telescope]
This is going to be fun.
Perhaps I should get a bigger telescope and move back a bit.
Sorry for the rant there. Not a native anglophone myself, I still get a kick out of analyzing bad writing.
Being a native anglophone married to a non-native speaker, the incompetence of some people at using what appears to be their own language infuriates me.
The T-1000 is the "liquid metal" terminator from Terminator 2, Skynet is the name of the computer that would start the man/machine war in the future (2004).
I think I saw some of the first Terminator movie - that's the "I'll be back" one? - and consequently haven't bothered to watch any of the rest. Though it's possible that I've been in the TV lounge when some of them have been playing - "liquid metal" rings a bell, and now that I think about it, there's some memory of motorcycle stunts too.
I think that Arnie's best work was early in his career - starring in gay porn. When he got out of that business his work became comparatively stereotyped and repetitive.
curfew from 10am-2pm and 10pm-2am according to the BBC. What a coincidence these are the hours that cover the prime-time news slots
I did wonder what the details of mentioned curfew periods were. Sounds to me as if a number of news outlets are going to get familiar with a certain living room on Surrey somewhere.
You do not have to post any actual money when you provide a surety in the UK. You only have to show that you have the sum available and are liable for the sum in the event the (alleged) offender breaches bail conditions in some significant manner. See http://www.yourrights.org.uk/yourrights/the-rights-of-defendants/bail.html for a further explanation.
True, but irrelevant (well, only partly relevant) as the court are requiring both sureties AND securities (which it seems have to be paid in cash at the court).
You get what you pay for, with those websites. The free ones are like leper colonies.
You almost make them sound tempting.
unless it's an Apple satphone, then you can't replace the battery.
This is scary -(and enlightening)- on so many levels.
I don't - really don't - know where to start.
You live amongst fools who would go into an 'empty' area without appropriate practice and experience.
Sharkfood.
meaning LandSharks.
This is not a compliment.
Also THE main reason to get one is for use when you NEED to call outside of standard cell reception areas, for instance in mountian rescue operations. But for those satphones that use geosync sats (not Irridium), it means that you cannot be in the shadow of a north face (in the northern hemisphere). Another BIG DEADLY drawback.
"Iridium" - from iridescence.
When I've used satellite phones within spitting-distance of the Arctic Circle, it's been on the tundra border of the taiga, so no north-faces to worry about.
I was under the impression that the Iridium system used satellites at quite a high orbital inclination. (Checked - Wikipedia gives it as 86.4 deg ; GlobalStar agree on 86.4 deg ; an IEEE paper from 1999 ... doesn't actually give an inclination, but gives the footprint radius of each satellite as +/-2200km on the ground. The closest that the sub-satellite point of an 86.4deg inclination orbit would get to a pole would be (1-86.4/90)*10000 =~400km. So, I think that is going to add up to pretty good polar coverage.
Yes, I'm sure that in deep valleys you could end up with patchy communications to Iridium, but the same goes for any remote communications system (I'm a caver, and I'm upset that my cell phone doesn't work from 3 miles underground. Booo!)
Can you cite cases where people have had problems with Iridium communications due to proximity to [pole]-facing cliffs? I've not heard of such, and with work coming up in the Arctic, I have a vested interest in keeping my skin intact.
GlobalStar does have a low inclination - 52 deg - and doesn't claim polar coverage.
Would be nice to do a hybrid system. Wifi(SIP) calls indoors, Sat outdoors/outside of Wifi coverage
Do you want to carry the extra battery to power that?