This morning, the same damned e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case before a gerund.
Wait, so you're saying that "he is running" should become "his is running"?
Well, a quick Google search didn't turn up any solid numbers, but I don't buy that. Maybe if you include stuff like Chinese Chess and Shogi, but those aren't really quite the same as chess.
Realize that Go was invented (and is widely played) in China, the biggest damn country in the world, whereas Chess is mostly played in western countries which have a relatively small population.
The fact that you don't know a lot of Go players doesn't say anything about worldwide demographics.
Well, I think we have to ask ourselves about the real purpose of the space program. The fact is that space science has few useful applications on Earth (despite the spinoffs which NASA keeps bragging about), and if science were our only goal, we'd be better off spending the money on other projects. Heck, even fusion reactors and particle accelerators would give us more bang for the buck.
No, I think that the real reason to send people into space is so people can be in space. Earth is starting to get too small for us, and there's always the risk of some global disaster, so people should think about colonizing the solar system (and, eventually, other systems). And while sending robots to Mars may teach us a bit about Mars, what we really need to know is how humans could live on Mars, and the simplest way to figure that out is to send a human.
Let me tell you, I'm very impressed. I tried doing this and I could never pull it off. No matter how many diets I tried and how many hours I spent on the treadmill, I could never get down to one attogram. So, to you dedicated researchers who managed to weigh an attogram... congratulations, and good luck in your modeling career.
So, in keeping with the SI obsession with water, I propose that the base unit of time be the length of time it takes for 1 litre of water to reach 100 Centigrade with the application of 1 newton of energy, or something like that...
You did not specify what temperature the water starts at. Also, you should perhaps learn the difference between the concepts of force, energy, and power. The SI unit of energy is the joule (newtons measure force), but what you're looking for is power (watts = joules/second), not energy.
You see the problem here? Power is defined as a function of energy (which is itself dependent on time) and time. You can't measure out one watt power unless you already know how long a second is, and now with your proposal, you can't measure out one second unless you already know what one watt is.
Anyhow, the oscillation of cesius seems to work fine. It's not really very common to get stuck on a desert island with no access to any measuring implements and have to figure out how long a second is.
Just because you remember how to do something does not mean you can do it in constant time. You are only allowed to move one disk at a time, so the total time is proportional to the number of moving operations. The number of moves is 2^n-1.
As for figuring out the exact moves needed, that's easy, and does not affect the order of the time requirement. It's a recursive function: To move n disks from pile A to pile C, simply move N-1 from A to B, move 1 from A to C, and move N-1 from B to C. The special case is for one disk, in which case you just pick it up and move it.
Well, that's not entirely true. Fritz was trained from Kasparov's games to play Anti-Kasparov chess, just like Kasparov was playing Anti-Computer chess.
What do you mean by "official Go rules"? Every organization has their own rules. You're probably referring to the Japanese rules, which are vague and riddled with exceptions.
The Chinese rules are much more simple and precise. The main reason many people tend to prefer Japanese rules is that they allow you to omit certain endgame plays, thus making the game somewhat quicker. AFAIK, all the programs that have solved Go for small board sizes (eg 5x5) were based on Chinese rules.
Here's the difference: In Japanese rules ("territory scoring"), you get a point for every empty intersection you surround, and a point for every stone you kill. In Chinese rules ("area scoring"), you get a point for every empty intersection, and a point for every stone of your color that remains alive.
It may seem like these two rules would generate the same scores, and mostly they do. The differences don't really become noticeable until the end. Once all the territories are delineated, both players pass and agree on which stones are considered "dead." That is, stones which have not actually been captured, but which have no chance to survive make their time.
Of course, the problem is when people disagree on which stones are dead. How can you clearly determine the state of a group? See, the problem with territory scoring is that you can't just keep playing and go ahead and kill the group. If a "dead" stone is inside your territory, you would have to place four stones around it to actually capture it. End result: You have four fewer empty intersections in your territory (because you just filled them up), so you have lost points.
Whereas with area scoring, you can go ahead and kill the stone - place your for stones around it, and there, it's dead. You don't lose any points, because each stone on the board is worth a point. So you're losing one point for each empty intersection that's filled, but gaining one point for each of your stones on the board, and it balances out.
The point is, while generally humans will not want to bother to capture all the stones on the board, and just agree on which ones are dead, you don't have to do that if you want to program an evolving computer Go player or something like that, and you need to automate the process. The simple solution in that case is to just have the computer play out the position until all dead stones are captured, and that's where area scoring comes in handy.
BTW, if you prefer to count the number of captures instead of the number of stones on the board, the AGA uses an alternative to Chinese rules which has the same effect as area scoring: When you pass, you have to give one of your stones to your opponent, as a capture. This is called a "pass stone." Then you score as in Japanese rules - one point per capture, and one point per intersection. This idea seemed weird to me at first, but it makes sense if you think about it. If you have to kill a stone in your territory with four stones, you place your first stone (thus losing 1 point of territory). Now it's your opponent's turn. He can either add another stone (which will, eventually, give you 1 point when you capture it), or he can pass (and just give you the 1 point right away). It evens out, so you don't lose any points when you capture the piece.
Someone makes this argument every time slashdot posts an article about chess. That it's really a contest between a programmer and a chess player.
Quite frankly, this is bullshit. Or at least the programmer has a massive advantage. It's like saying that a race between an olympic runner and a car is really a test of skill between the runner and the driver. Well, it isn't. I doesn't take nearly as much skill and dedication to drive a car as it does to run a mile in four minutes. Writing a chess program isn't all that hard either.
Yeah, yeah, I know, developing a grandmaster-level chess program is no piece of cake. But it takes a lot less time than it takes to become a grandmaster.
Maybe this is gonna come off as trolling, but honestly, programmers just aren't that special. There are millions of programmers in the world. There are only a few thousand professional chess players, and they have to study constantly if they are to have any hope to compete.
On the other hand, all you coders can feel good about yourselves: Your job is actually useful, as opposed to chess;-)
a gigabyte when refering to frequencies, (ie processor speeds, electrical bus speeds, or network conection speeds 10baseT) are 10 based and completly different.
That's funny. I always thought frequency was measured in Hertz.
That discussion is from 1995, though. They are not talking about using carbon nanotubes to make the elevator. Their cable is much thicker than the ones being discussed now.
Slashdot Mirror
This morning, the same damned e-mail kept coming back to me with a pesky notation claiming I needed to use a pronoun's possessive case before a gerund.
Wait, so you're saying that "he is running" should become "his is running"?
but there are far more chess players
Well, a quick Google search didn't turn up any solid numbers, but I don't buy that. Maybe if you include stuff like Chinese Chess and Shogi, but those aren't really quite the same as chess.
Realize that Go was invented (and is widely played) in China, the biggest damn country in the world, whereas Chess is mostly played in western countries which have a relatively small population.
The fact that you don't know a lot of Go players doesn't say anything about worldwide demographics.
Um, that last "9" in your sig should be a "6".
I find this amazing
Then you'd love this: the DC-X.
Well, considering that teaching is something you do, the more logical conclusion is that those who can't teach will teach in the education department.
He is his name!
There is no light side of the moon.
Okay, I'll bite. What do pendants have to do with anything?
Mod parent (read: immediate ancestor) up (read: -1 times the gravity vector).
Well, I think we have to ask ourselves about the real purpose of the space program. The fact is that space science has few useful applications on Earth (despite the spinoffs which NASA keeps bragging about), and if science were our only goal, we'd be better off spending the money on other projects. Heck, even fusion reactors and particle accelerators would give us more bang for the buck.
No, I think that the real reason to send people into space is so people can be in space. Earth is starting to get too small for us, and there's always the risk of some global disaster, so people should think about colonizing the solar system (and, eventually, other systems). And while sending robots to Mars may teach us a bit about Mars, what we really need to know is how humans could live on Mars, and the simplest way to figure that out is to send a human.
Oh yeah, and in response to your sig:
The Problem with Instant Runoff Voting
Condorcet: A Better Election Method
Let me tell you, I'm very impressed. I tried doing this and I could never pull it off. No matter how many diets I tried and how many hours I spent on the treadmill, I could never get down to one attogram. So, to you dedicated researchers who managed to weigh an attogram... congratulations, and good luck in your modeling career.
How?
Aren't elephants scared of mice?
Maybe use a pig instead of a mouse...
Not with signed integers.
So, in keeping with the SI obsession with water, I propose that the base unit of time be the length of time it takes for 1 litre of water to reach 100 Centigrade with the application of 1 newton of energy, or something like that...
You did not specify what temperature the water starts at. Also, you should perhaps learn the difference between the concepts of force, energy, and power. The SI unit of energy is the joule (newtons measure force), but what you're looking for is power (watts = joules/second), not energy.
You see the problem here? Power is defined as a function of energy (which is itself dependent on time) and time. You can't measure out one watt power unless you already know how long a second is, and now with your proposal, you can't measure out one second unless you already know what one watt is.
Anyhow, the oscillation of cesius seems to work fine. It's not really very common to get stuck on a desert island with no access to any measuring implements and have to figure out how long a second is.
So time stops on tidally-locked planets? Awesome!
Just because you remember how to do something does not mean you can do it in constant time. You are only allowed to move one disk at a time, so the total time is proportional to the number of moving operations. The number of moves is 2^n-1.
As for figuring out the exact moves needed, that's easy, and does not affect the order of the time requirement. It's a recursive function: To move n disks from pile A to pile C, simply move N-1 from A to B, move 1 from A to C, and move N-1 from B to C. The special case is for one disk, in which case you just pick it up and move it.
Here's one I made up.
Did you hear about the gay chemist? He's a homo-geneous.
uh, except x d/dx is 1, not 0.
This is just circularly-polarized light, isn't it? Shine a laser through a polarizer and a quarter-wave plate, and that's what you get.
Well, that's not entirely true. Fritz was trained from Kasparov's games to play Anti-Kasparov chess, just like Kasparov was playing Anti-Computer chess.
Depends on your ruleset.
What do you mean by "official Go rules"? Every organization has their own rules. You're probably referring to the Japanese rules, which are vague and riddled with exceptions.
The Chinese rules are much more simple and precise. The main reason many people tend to prefer Japanese rules is that they allow you to omit certain endgame plays, thus making the game somewhat quicker. AFAIK, all the programs that have solved Go for small board sizes (eg 5x5) were based on Chinese rules.
Here's the difference: In Japanese rules ("territory scoring"), you get a point for every empty intersection you surround, and a point for every stone you kill. In Chinese rules ("area scoring"), you get a point for every empty intersection, and a point for every stone of your color that remains alive.
It may seem like these two rules would generate the same scores, and mostly they do. The differences don't really become noticeable until the end. Once all the territories are delineated, both players pass and agree on which stones are considered "dead." That is, stones which have not actually been captured, but which have no chance to survive make their time.
Of course, the problem is when people disagree on which stones are dead. How can you clearly determine the state of a group? See, the problem with territory scoring is that you can't just keep playing and go ahead and kill the group. If a "dead" stone is inside your territory, you would have to place four stones around it to actually capture it. End result: You have four fewer empty intersections in your territory (because you just filled them up), so you have lost points.
Whereas with area scoring, you can go ahead and kill the stone - place your for stones around it, and there, it's dead. You don't lose any points, because each stone on the board is worth a point. So you're losing one point for each empty intersection that's filled, but gaining one point for each of your stones on the board, and it balances out.
The point is, while generally humans will not want to bother to capture all the stones on the board, and just agree on which ones are dead, you don't have to do that if you want to program an evolving computer Go player or something like that, and you need to automate the process. The simple solution in that case is to just have the computer play out the position until all dead stones are captured, and that's where area scoring comes in handy.
BTW, if you prefer to count the number of captures instead of the number of stones on the board, the AGA uses an alternative to Chinese rules which has the same effect as area scoring: When you pass, you have to give one of your stones to your opponent, as a capture. This is called a "pass stone." Then you score as in Japanese rules - one point per capture, and one point per intersection. This idea seemed weird to me at first, but it makes sense if you think about it. If you have to kill a stone in your territory with four stones, you place your first stone (thus losing 1 point of territory). Now it's your opponent's turn. He can either add another stone (which will, eventually, give you 1 point when you capture it), or he can pass (and just give you the 1 point right away). It evens out, so you don't lose any points when you capture the piece.
Someone makes this argument every time slashdot posts an article about chess. That it's really a contest between a programmer and a chess player.
Quite frankly, this is bullshit. Or at least the programmer has a massive advantage. It's like saying that a race between an olympic runner and a car is really a test of skill between the runner and the driver. Well, it isn't. I doesn't take nearly as much skill and dedication to drive a car as it does to run a mile in four minutes. Writing a chess program isn't all that hard either.
Yeah, yeah, I know, developing a grandmaster-level chess program is no piece of cake. But it takes a lot less time than it takes to become a grandmaster.
Maybe this is gonna come off as trolling, but honestly, programmers just aren't that special. There are millions of programmers in the world. There are only a few thousand professional chess players, and they have to study constantly if they are to have any hope to compete.
On the other hand, all you coders can feel good about yourselves: Your job is actually useful, as opposed to chess ;-)
a gigabyte when refering to frequencies, (ie processor speeds, electrical bus speeds, or network conection speeds 10baseT) are 10 based and completly different.
That's funny. I always thought frequency was measured in Hertz.
That discussion is from 1995, though. They are not talking about using carbon nanotubes to make the elevator. Their cable is much thicker than the ones being discussed now.