Thanks! I wasn't trolling, actually, just trying to make the following point (after too many beers):
It's kind of ironic that I would try to download movies through ATT Broadband Internet, while ATT provides my TV cable service, and I can get most of what I want already, more conveniently.
As for your questions: yes, those movies are on demand, although I rarely use the service. And, yes, as with most of my/. posts, this one was mostly irrelevant.
All reasonable points. I was being a little facetious. However, substitute "5-year old" with "16-year old", and you may see the point that there may be some legal problems with enforcing the contract.
Hmmm. I get my service from ATT Broadband. Besides Internet service, they supply me with something called cable TV (over the same cable!). This cable TV thing gives me like 60 tele-vision stations with a variety of news and entertainment. I can even order premium movies (for a fee) through this thing called pay-per-view. The quality is pretty much OK when viewed on this relatively cheap gizmo ($200) called "tele-vision set".
It's a contract, and you have to follow it down to the word.
In my household, my 5-year old son buys all the DVDs (he gets a big allowance). AFAIK, he cannot legally enter into a contract agreement. He generously allows his parents to watch his DVDs.
Yes. The problem is of course that today's allies could be tomorrow's enemies. See Iran. However, the alternative is to have no allies at all, at that's a bit problematic as well. Foreign policy is tricky stuff, I guess.
To a certain extent, yes. The only countries that could put something similar in the air to fight the F-22, are US allies. Ironically enough, the US shares modern military technology with its allies.
2. Even if it weren't possible, and a stone was plunked down each time, you'd still have (19x19)! possible moves (a lot, as stated earlier)
I don't follow that math. Possible moves? No, only 19x19 (max) per move, right? Possible positions? That would be 3^(19x19), right? Possible games? Harder to calculate (too lazy). I still don't see the (19x19)!
3. When chess pieces are removed from the board, it collapses the search tree. On a Go board, it expands it.
Yes, correct. But, I think both in Chess and Go, most moves are non-capturing. So, a non-capturing move in Go reduces the number of possibilities, where a non-capturing move in chess probably keeps the number of possibilities the same (on average). Please correct me if I'm missing something.
You cannot just rely on the brute force but rather on hard to formalize concepts of "shape" and "influence". That's what also makes the game fun.
This is true. But the same goes for chess. Contrary to popular misconception, chess programs do not calculate every possible move, most branches are pruned based on early evaluation (an exception is where a computer program is trying to solve a mate-in-x-moves problem). For example, a branch where the computer loses a queen will only be evaluated a few moves deep. The more promising branches will be evaluated more deeply. The fact that computers cannot beat humans in Go (yet), has also to do with the limited amount of research invested in Go playing programs (compared to chess programs). This is simply because chess is a lot more popular than Go (I'm not saying it's "better", or anything like that).
Go does have a much bigger game tree, due to its much large branching factor.
True, although there is only one type of piece in Go, and the branching becomes less as the game progresses. Not that it matters, both the game trees of chess and go are way beyond current computational means. I think I read somewhere that chess has an average of 40 possible moves per ply (half-move). Let's assume that a chess game takes 40 moves, or 80 ply per game (a rather conservative estimate). Then the number of possible games is in the order of 40^80, which is something like 1.46*10^128. The estimated number of atoms in the universe is something like 10^76.
Hmmm. Take tic-tac-toe: it's deterministic, the players move sequentially, and it's always a draw with perfect play (it's quite easy to write down every possible game). I'm a bit puzzled by 'it's illegal to draw'. Do you mean it's illegal to pass a turn (i.e. not move), or do you mean that a drawn game is not allowed? In the latter case, that does not apply to chess.
The F-117 is so far as I know strictly a strike fighter...
No, not a fighter. No air-to-air missiles, no guns.
It probably could be fitted for interceptor duty...
No, that would be very stupid. The whole idea behind it is low observability. An interceptor is typically used over friendly territory, so low observability does not help a lot there. The purpose of the F-117 is to take out enemy radar defenses with HARM (radar seeking) missiles. And it was used that way during the Gulf War.
...the F-15 was the American response, a good bit slower but with a bigger payload and unbelievably superior maneuvaribility.
No, the F-15 is an air superiority fighter, that can also be used as a strike fighter/bomber.
Actually it was an F-117 Stealth Fighter, not a B-2 Stealth Bomber...
However, 'bomber' is more correct to describe an F-117, since it doesn't have any means to shoot down an enemy plane. No missiles, no guns. It's not a fighter plane.
If the MiG 25 or 31 could get close to an F-117 the F-117 is going down.
Or a MiG-15 or MiG-21 for that matter. The F-117 is completely defenseless, no air-to-air missiles or even a gun... The 'F' designation has always puzzled me.
The MiG-25 is a defensive aircraft. Very fast, and nothing else going for it. It's only purpose is as an interceptor to shoot down incoming bombers (as you said).
Your post is mostly correct. A few remarks, though.
The principles of stealth are extremely complex and hard ot understand for even the experts...
Um, no. The principles are just basic physics, and not all that hard to understand. It's the fact that most of the details are kept secret that makes it such an obscure business.
Basically you can never make an aircraft 'disappear' off of radar for a number of reasons. Radar works by sending out frequency pulses and then reading the returns . The key is to reduce those returns to nearly nothing by reducing the planes RCS (radar cross section? something like that).
Correct. The official term for 'stealth' is Low Observability (not 'No Observability'). 'Stealthy' airplanes are harder to detect, therefore the effective range of defensive radar becomes much smaller, allowing a plane to fly 'between' defensive radar stations.
Operating at perfection in ideal conditions the B-2 is about as small a radar cross section as a hummingbird or so.
Somehow I doubt this. Lockheed Martin claimed that the F-117 had a RCS of a 'bird', but that claim is thought to be exaggerated. Given that, plus the fact that the B-2 is quite a bit larger than the F-117, plus the fact that radar technology has improved over the last 20 years (F-117 first flight was in 1983 if I'm not mistaken), would lead me to believe the RCS is a bit larger than a hummingbird.
The air force ain't stupid and wouldn't send a flight of b-2's into a potentionall hostile target enviroment unless they where fairly sure they would come out on top w/o any losses (1 billion a plane makes you do that =).
True, and that's also the B-2's Achilles heel. The rationale for developing and building the B-2 was the Cold War. The plane was designed as a nuclear weapons delivery platform that could penetrate deep into the Soviet Union. For present day conflicts, it's way overkill. Fifty year old B-52s are way more efficient in present day conflicts, since they can just drop a whole lot of bombs on countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, after air superiority has been established. You don't risk a 1 billon dollar plane (or is it 2 billion?) to drop a few conventional bombs on a country with less than sophisticated air defenses.
Finally consider the new F-22 raptor fighter. Extremely stealthy (nearly as much as a B-2) with AMRAAM fire-and-forget missles, supersonic cruise ability... quite simply nothing can touch it - and I mean nothing.
Again, all true. And again, way overkill. The F-22 is an air superiority fighter, and it will probably achieve that goal, but at tremendous cost (in dollars). Not really essential when fighting modern-day conflicts.
JSF is in the Engineering, Manufacturing, and Development (EMD) phase. This involves a few hundred millon dollars. Production does not start until 2007-2008. A lot can happen until then (changes in politics, change in military doctrine, lessons learned in a possible war with Iraq, etc.). I think the Air Force already scaled down their projections of the number of needed JSF aircraft. Nothing is cast in stone yet.
Currently, opinion is siding with Kramnik. GMs Nigel Short and Raymond Keene predict a Kramnik win.
That does not mean anything. I think they honestly believe that, but their judgement might be clouded by emotions. Nobody likes to be confronted with the fact that a machine is better at their job then they are.
When Kasparov lost his crucial game against Deep Blue, he openly stated that he thought the Deep Blue team was cheating, because the decisive move could never have been made by a computer (it was too good a move).
Kramnik may have outsmarted DeepFritz with his Berlin Wall, but that only buys him a draw (!). If they should ever play anything else, he better make sure he does not slip up , because I suspect that DeepFritz will capitalize on the slightest mistake.
Fast games require insight and innovation (and fastly-changing strategies), something which computers simply can't do.
No. Fast games require not making mistakes like giving away a piece. Computer programs (even $40 PC programs) have the annoying habit of not making such mistakes. Humans do, especially under time pressure.
I would expect computers to become almost undefeatable at blitz matches in the future (10 years maybe).
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I think computers already are almost invincible in blitz games. I think the reason is twofold:
1. Computer programs have very deep opening books in their database. So do most chess players, but I doubt that a human can beat a computer at simple lookups.
2. Blitz games are very 'tactical'. Computer programs are relatively good at this type of play. To put it another way: subtle stategical nuances in a position usually don't become very obvious unless you think deep (i.e. a long time). Humans don't have this time in a blitz game. Also, consider the way Kramnik got his draw: with a type of game that was very strategic, and not very tactical.
Until a completely different strategy can be identified, top human players will continue to have nothing to worry about from computers in Go for the forseeable future.
Hmmm. That's what they said 20 years ago about chess. Note that chess programs do not calculate every possible move, they weed out branches as early as possible. The evaluation algorithm is what counts, as well as the fact that computers have become much, much faster in the past 20 years.
What I find telling about this match, is that the DeepFritz team was disappointed with the draw! Not so long ago, a draw against the world champion was regarded as a huge victory!
Also, consider that chess is a more popular game than Go, and that a lot of research has been done with regard to chess algorithms. If the same amount of effort were to be invested in development of Go algorithms, then I'm not so sure that a computer could not beat humans at Go in the forseeable future.
However, my primary concern is in the longevity of the data. Sure, the bits themselves may last, but would CDRs be readable by computers 50 years from now? I mean, even disks from 20 years ago (such as an 8-inch floppy) may still have good data, but you'd have a hard time getting the data off it today (who has an 8-inch drive anymore?).
The beauty of digital data is that you can copy it as many times as you like, without loss of quality. So, if you are worried about data degrading on a CD-R, copy and burn it on a new CD-R every 5 years. Or on another type of storage, should that become popular in the future.
As for your 8-inch floppy example: you could have copied the data onto 5 1/4 inch floppies. Then onto 3 1/2 inch floppies. Then onto ZIP disks. Then onto CD-Rs. Etcetera. And if you're too lazy to do that, then you don't care much about the data, right;-) ?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm. I would say it increases tremendously in value the moment it takes off. Who wants to buy a satellite that's on the ground rather than in space?
If slashdot could give measurements in SI units?
Agree. Also, provide the base for the '112' visitors. Is is 112 decimal, or 112 hex, or even 112 octal, or possible even stranger?
Nice troll.
/. posts, this one was mostly irrelevant.
Thanks! I wasn't trolling, actually, just trying to make the following point (after too many beers):
It's kind of ironic that I would try to download movies through ATT Broadband Internet, while ATT provides my TV cable service, and I can get most of what I want already, more conveniently.
As for your questions: yes, those movies are on demand, although I rarely use the service.
And, yes, as with most of my
All reasonable points. I was being a little facetious. However, substitute "5-year old" with "16-year old", and you may see the point that there may be some legal problems with enforcing the contract.
Hmmm. I get my service from ATT Broadband. Besides Internet service, they supply me with something called cable TV (over the same cable!). This cable TV thing gives me like 60 tele-vision stations with a variety of news and entertainment. I can even order premium movies (for a fee) through this thing called pay-per-view. The quality is pretty much OK when viewed on this relatively cheap gizmo ($200) called "tele-vision set".
It's a contract, and you have to follow it down to the word.
In my household, my 5-year old son buys all the DVDs (he gets a big allowance). AFAIK, he cannot legally enter into a contract agreement. He generously allows his parents to watch his DVDs.
Yes. The problem is of course that today's allies could be tomorrow's enemies. See Iran. However, the alternative is to have no allies at all, at that's a bit problematic as well.
Foreign policy is tricky stuff, I guess.
To a certain extent, yes. The only countries that could put something similar in the air to fight the F-22, are US allies. Ironically enough, the US shares modern military technology with its allies.
We are rapidly approaching a time when most cars will be coming out with zero or near-zero emissions systems. Some are already out now.
Unfortunately cars still emit CO2 (and H2O), unless Congress Suspends the laws of physics.
Chess has at most 40 legal moves possible for the first move;...
20 for white and 20 for black, to be exact. It becomes more after the first moves, of course...
Umm...
2. Even if it weren't possible, and a stone was plunked down each time, you'd still have (19x19)! possible moves (a lot, as stated earlier)
I don't follow that math. Possible moves? No, only 19x19 (max) per move, right? Possible positions? That would be 3^(19x19), right? Possible games? Harder to calculate (too lazy). I still don't see the (19x19)!
3. When chess pieces are removed from the board, it collapses the search tree. On a Go board, it expands it.
Yes, correct. But, I think both in Chess and Go, most moves are non-capturing. So, a non-capturing move in Go reduces the number of possibilities, where a non-capturing move in chess probably keeps the number of possibilities the same (on average). Please correct me if I'm missing something.
You cannot just rely on the brute force but rather on hard to formalize concepts of "shape" and "influence". That's what also makes the game fun.
This is true. But the same goes for chess. Contrary to popular misconception, chess programs do not calculate every possible move, most branches are pruned based on early evaluation (an exception is where a computer program is trying to solve a mate-in-x-moves problem).
For example, a branch where the computer loses a queen will only be evaluated a few moves deep. The more promising branches will be evaluated more deeply.
The fact that computers cannot beat humans in Go (yet), has also to do with the limited amount of research invested in Go playing programs (compared to chess programs). This is simply because chess is a lot more popular than Go (I'm not saying it's "better", or anything like that).
Go does have a much bigger game tree, due to its much large branching factor.
True, although there is only one type of piece in Go, and the branching becomes less as the game progresses. Not that it matters, both the game trees of chess and go are way beyond current computational means. I think I read somewhere that chess has an average of 40 possible moves per ply (half-move). Let's assume that a chess game takes 40 moves, or 80 ply per game (a rather conservative estimate). Then the number of possible games is in the order of 40^80, which is something like 1.46*10^128. The estimated number of atoms in the universe is something like 10^76.
Hmmm. Take tic-tac-toe: it's deterministic, the players move sequentially, and it's always a draw with perfect play (it's quite easy to write down every possible game). I'm a bit puzzled by 'it's illegal to draw'. Do you mean it's illegal to pass a turn (i.e. not move), or do you mean that a drawn game is not allowed? In the latter case, that does not apply to chess.
No, not a fighter. No air-to-air missiles, no guns.
It probably could be fitted for interceptor duty...
No, that would be very stupid. The whole idea behind it is low observability. An interceptor is typically used over friendly territory, so low observability does not help a lot there. The purpose of the F-117 is to take out enemy radar defenses with HARM (radar seeking) missiles. And it was used that way during the Gulf War.
No, the F-15 is an air superiority fighter, that can also be used as a strike fighter/bomber.
Actually it was an F-117 Stealth Fighter, not a B-2 Stealth Bomber...
However, 'bomber' is more correct to describe an F-117, since it doesn't have any means to shoot down an enemy plane. No missiles, no guns. It's not a fighter plane.
If the MiG 25 or 31 could get close to an F-117 the F-117 is going down.
Or a MiG-15 or MiG-21 for that matter. The F-117 is completely defenseless, no air-to-air missiles or even a gun... The 'F' designation has always puzzled me.
The MiG-25 is a defensive aircraft. Very fast, and nothing else going for it. It's only purpose is as an interceptor to shoot down incoming bombers (as you said).
Your post is mostly correct. A few remarks, though.
The principles of stealth are extremely complex and hard ot understand for even the experts...
Um, no. The principles are just basic physics, and not all that hard to understand. It's the fact that most of the details are kept secret that makes it such an obscure business.
Basically you can never make an aircraft 'disappear' off of radar for a number of reasons. Radar works by sending out frequency pulses and then reading the returns . The key is to reduce those returns to nearly nothing by reducing the planes RCS (radar cross section? something like that).
Correct. The official term for 'stealth' is Low Observability (not 'No Observability'). 'Stealthy' airplanes are harder to detect, therefore the effective range of defensive radar becomes much smaller, allowing a plane to fly 'between' defensive radar stations.
Operating at perfection in ideal conditions the B-2 is about as small a radar cross section as a hummingbird or so.
Somehow I doubt this. Lockheed Martin claimed that the F-117 had a RCS of a 'bird', but that claim is thought to be exaggerated. Given that, plus the fact that the B-2 is quite a bit larger than the F-117, plus the fact that radar technology has improved over the last 20 years (F-117 first flight was in 1983 if I'm not mistaken), would lead me to believe the RCS is a bit larger than a hummingbird.
The air force ain't stupid and wouldn't send a flight of b-2's into a potentionall hostile target enviroment unless they where fairly sure they would come out on top w/o any losses (1 billion a plane makes you do that =).
True, and that's also the B-2's Achilles heel. The rationale for developing and building the B-2 was the Cold War. The plane was designed as a nuclear weapons delivery platform that could penetrate deep into the Soviet Union. For present day conflicts, it's way overkill. Fifty year old B-52s are way more efficient in present day conflicts, since they can just drop a whole lot of bombs on countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, after air superiority has been established. You don't risk a 1 billon dollar plane (or is it 2 billion?) to drop a few conventional bombs on a country with less than sophisticated air defenses.
Finally consider the new F-22 raptor fighter. Extremely stealthy (nearly as much as a B-2) with AMRAAM fire-and-forget missles, supersonic cruise ability... quite simply nothing can touch it - and I mean nothing.
Again, all true. And again, way overkill. The F-22 is an air superiority fighter, and it will probably achieve that goal, but at tremendous cost (in dollars). Not really essential when fighting modern-day conflicts.
JSF is in the Engineering, Manufacturing, and Development (EMD) phase. This involves a few hundred millon dollars. Production does not start until 2007-2008. A lot can happen until then (changes in politics, change in military doctrine, lessons learned in a possible war with Iraq, etc.). I think the Air Force already scaled down their projections of the number of needed JSF aircraft. Nothing is cast in stone yet.
Currently, opinion is siding with Kramnik. GMs Nigel Short and Raymond Keene predict a Kramnik win.
That does not mean anything. I think they honestly believe that, but their judgement might be clouded by emotions. Nobody likes to be confronted with the fact that a machine is better at their job then they are.
When Kasparov lost his crucial game against Deep Blue, he openly stated that he thought the Deep Blue team was cheating, because the decisive move could never have been made by a computer (it was too good a move).
Kramnik may have outsmarted DeepFritz with his Berlin Wall, but that only buys him a draw (!). If they should ever play anything else, he better make sure he does not slip up , because I suspect that DeepFritz will capitalize on the slightest mistake.
Fast games require insight and innovation (and fastly-changing strategies), something which computers simply can't do.
No. Fast games require not making mistakes like giving away a piece. Computer programs (even $40 PC programs) have the annoying habit of not making such mistakes. Humans do, especially under time pressure.
I would expect computers to become almost undefeatable at blitz matches in the future (10 years maybe).
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I think computers already are almost invincible in blitz games. I think the reason is twofold:
1. Computer programs have very deep opening books in their database. So do most chess players, but I doubt that a human can beat a computer at simple lookups.
2. Blitz games are very 'tactical'. Computer programs are relatively good at this type of play. To put it another way: subtle stategical nuances in a position usually don't become very obvious unless you think deep (i.e. a long time). Humans don't have this time in a blitz game. Also, consider the way Kramnik got his draw: with a type of game that was very strategic, and not very tactical.
Until a completely different strategy can be identified, top human players will continue to have nothing to worry about from computers in Go for the forseeable future.
Hmmm. That's what they said 20 years ago about chess. Note that chess programs do not calculate every possible move, they weed out branches as early as possible. The evaluation algorithm is what counts, as well as the fact that computers have become much, much faster in the past 20 years.
What I find telling about this match, is that the DeepFritz team was disappointed with the draw! Not so long ago, a draw against the world champion was regarded as a huge victory!
Also, consider that chess is a more popular game than Go, and that a lot of research has been done with regard to chess algorithms. If the same amount of effort were to be invested in development of Go algorithms, then I'm not so sure that a computer could not beat humans at Go in the forseeable future.
However, my primary concern is in the longevity of the data. Sure, the bits themselves may last, but would CDRs be readable by computers 50 years from now? I mean, even disks from 20 years ago (such as an 8-inch floppy) may still have good data, but you'd have a hard time getting the data off it today (who has an 8-inch drive anymore?).
;-) ?
The beauty of digital data is that you can copy it as many times as you like, without loss of quality. So, if you are worried about data degrading on a CD-R, copy and burn it on a new CD-R every 5 years. Or on another type of storage, should that become popular in the future.
As for your 8-inch floppy example: you could have copied the data onto 5 1/4 inch floppies. Then onto 3 1/2 inch floppies. Then onto ZIP disks. Then onto CD-Rs. Etcetera.
And if you're too lazy to do that, then you don't care much about the data, right
...Also, you can't throw a new type of sensor into a camera for a special effect. You can do that with film....
Err, I think digital has a few advantages over film when it comes to special effects...