The largest requirement for a robot able to recognize objects would be memory/storage. Kind of like those 20 questions programs, it is very simple processing to compare input with a matrix of possibilities.
I'm sorry but that's a gross simplification. Computer recognition of images, especially images of the real 3D world, is a very hard and computationally intense process. This problem is still at the cutting edge of research. Describing it as "simple processing to compare the input with a matrix of possibilities" is on the same level as describing Doom III as "adds a couple of numbers together and displays some colored dots on the screen". It may be at some level accurate but it misses out the hard parts entirely.
To learn more, you could start at CMU's computer vision page. There's a whole world of interesting techniques out there, jump in and try some.
I've seen so many robot articles....Where are they though?... Most of these articles will say that they will be available to consumers in the next year or so.
Bed, Bath and Beyond (and you can't get a lot more consumer than that store) has the Roomba for sale. I saw them at the San Francisco store a couple of weeks ago. With over 450 stores across the US, I'd say they are widely available, at least in the States.
Given that the Thai finance minister had to be rescued from his BMW with sledgehammers after his WinCE powered iDrive computer crashed, methinks I would prefer to fly on open source software.
Unfortunately this seems to be a hoax:
CNET reports that, contrary to rumours that the BMW that trapped a Thai minister inside earlier this week was "the famously glitchy BMW 745i car, and its Windows CE-powered iDrive car computer", it was, according to a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand, the 10-year old BMW 520i model that "suffered a simple electronic failure".
Re:Einstein would be impressed.
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not sure I understand, this means that after you press "record", the DVR travels three to five minutes backward in time and catches you in the loo a few minutes prior? Surely the video would spool to disk 3 to 5 minutes after it was recorded. Maybe I can use one of these after I get pulled over for speeding to travel back in time and brake in advance...
Basically the box will be continually recording into a looped buffer. When you hit the record button it will retrive the last 5 minutes from the buffer and archive that plus everything from the moment you hit record onwards. So you get the minutes before the button is hit as well as everything afterwards.
This is similar to the way TiVo works - it is continually recording TV into a 20 minute looped buffer (until you switch channels) so you can actually "rewind" to a point before you started watching a program.
Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
that's not elitism, it's true. if you can't figure out how to install a program as complex as mysql, which isn't that hard to install in osx, there's a good chance you can't use it.
The reviewer said " if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them" (emphasis added). That surely is elitism of the worst sort. You can be very smart and still not have the knowledge and experience necessary to use MySQL. The word "smart" is horribly elitist in this context. If he had chosen to say "arent' yet knowledgeable enought to..." then it woldn't be an issue.
If I were a non-geek reading that review I would be offended. Hell as a geek who happens not to have learnt that much about administering databases I'm offended.
"Statistics Canada didn't report the number of people who responded Jedi in tables listing response rates for other religions, saying that their analysis did not include the "media-driven'' response, in part because the sample was so small. However, statisticians did when asked produce tables showing a much smaller number of Rastafarians, Scientologists and Satanists."
How do they know that 20,000 Canadians declared themselves to be Jedi? Could it be (gasp) just a number that the web site made up so it could write a story about the NZ and UK census returns?
The PCC (President's Conference Committee) cars just keep going. Most durable streetcars ever built. Designed for the American Conference of Street Railway Presidents to compete with buses, the PCC cars became the standard streetcar in most of North America.
Amen. And the look fabulous too.
Nobody wanted the newer Boeing Vertol cars when San Francisco finally junked them. Some museum in Germany that collects one of each streetcar type got one, and the others were scrapped.
They were pretty unpopular but its not true to say the others were scrapped. Several went to Manchester in England to run on their new light rail system. This had just been extended and they needed new cars, but the clearances and tight radius curves on the new line meant that they couldn't get the specialized cars manufactured in time. Instead they bought several ex-MUNI Vertols for $1 each (plus shipping) and are running those.
f you want a good place to see some authentic PCC streetcars still in active service, visit San Francisco -- they purchased a bunch from Philadelphia for tourist attraction.
At the risk of being a real light rail geek, actually the San Francisco F-Line PCC cars come from all over, not just Philly. Take a look at the stock list which shows the origins of all the trolleys running in SF. The City by the Bay is indeed a great place to see vintage trolley cars from all over the US and the world, as well as modern streetcars and the Bay Area Rapid Transit. Oh, and we have a few other tourist attractions too:-)
Last month I was going overseas for a vacation so I decided to buy a new CompactFlash card for my digital camera. For about $100 my camera now has 365,000,000 times more memory than my first personal computer had. That's insane.
There are communities for Model T Fords. I once drove to a theme park (Canada's Wonderland) and my jaw dropped when I saw hundred upon hundreds of restored Model T's in the parking lot - the Model T association was having an outing.
Model T's dont compare with today's cars, yet some people still cherish 'em.
I think its a little more complex than just nostalgia, though that certainly plays a part. For example one of my hobbies is the restoration and running of old steam locomotives and railways. This doesn't mean I want to return to this antiquated form of transport or the Victorian world in which they existed. It has a lot to do with the sights, sounds and smells and also the opportunity to do something physical and completely different from my day job in front of a computer.
Interestingly - and hopefully somewhat back on topic - where I do think nostalgia plays in is a harking back to my childhood, when I first saw live steam locomotives at work. I'm not trying to recreate the world of 100 years ago, but I am trying to recapture the awe and excitement I felt 30 years ago when I first saw one of these machines come alive. I suspect that many of the remaining Apple ][ enthusiasts are re-living to some extent their first computer experience. A lot of people in adult life try to recapture some of childhood's sense of wonder through collecting toys or pursuing interests that were first sparked when they were young.
The early pitch for Lindows was it was the Linux distribution that would run the major Windows applications. Later you stopped marketing it this way and instead decided to emphasise Click'n'Run and ease of use.
Why the change? Were the technical problems associated with Wine too great to overcome? Was it fear of legal action from Microsoft?
I would have thought there was a large potential market for Lindows as originally conceived. Why move away from that vision to something much less clearly differentiated from other Linux distributions?
Marketing Linux to the mass market is a good thing. However it seems to me that the name you have chosen for the product is awkward at best and will only slow down potential adoption. Naming products is an important part of effective marketing, especially in the consumer market. Lindows sounds cheesy and is no longer relevant to the product since you switched emphasis from being a Linux/Windows combination. Have you considered changing the name?
Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.
Now that WETA is a large and sophisticated operation, I wonder what they will do once they've finished LoTR. There are only so many special/extended/director's cut DVDs they can release. A group of that size and experience is a major cost and a major opportunity to rival Industrial Light and Magic and other effects houses.
Does anyone know if Jackson plans to keep WETA to himeself or if they are going to do work for other studios or film production companies? I've got to assume the later unless Jackson plans to only do effects-ladened films for the rest of his career.
" When Massive was first tested two armies were pitted against each other to fight it out. Once the scene was rendered, a bug in the program was found. Agents were actually seen running away from the battle field! This simple bug was resolved by adding the rule "If you can't see an enemy, turn around". "
Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no, no enemy in sight! Turn around! Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no...
Actually, funny though your comment is, the bit of the article you quote tells us that the original orc behavior was not them running away from battle. I've seen this mistake made enough times - including on Slashdot - that I'm sure its now a geek urban legend.
The article quote makes it clear that the reason they "ran away" was because they were looking for something to kill, not because they wanted to get away from the battle. The bug was that they just looked in front of them, couldn't see an enemy and so moved forward until one was in their field of vision. This would cause them to move rapidly away from the battle if they somehow ended up with their backs to the fight.
The bug fix described simply changed the behavior so the first thing they did if they couldn't see an enemy was to turn 180 degrees. This meant they charged into the fight, not away from it.
So you would never see the behavior you so humorously described.
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise."
Considering how that's been around for thousands of years, interesting that no one's really done much about it until now. Maybe no one thinks they're a sluggard.;-)
Actually there is a long and fascinating history of research into swarm/colony intelligence in ants, from the groundbreaking work of EO Wilson to the more recent work of Deborah Gordon whose insights into the relationship between ant colonies as single organisms and the way that human intelligence emerges from the biology of the brain are startling. The study of ants and colony behavior is an exciting field that can inform many fields from weather systems to crowd behavior to artificial intelligence.
One of the interesting results of the Chinese experience is that consumers no longer pay for the music. This would seem on the surface to be a good thing, after all informationm wants to be free. Of course the musicians are still paid - but by a few large corporate sponsors rather than individuals.
This is certainly a different business model than the one in Europe and the US. Is it better? Perhaps: the artists still get paid and consumers get free or very cheap music. But it may have a downside. Instead of the economic power being in the hands of the people who want the music it is transfered to large corporations.
Are we just trading one set of large corporate interests (the RIAA) for another (corporate sponsors)?
Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.
Of course there is absolutely no reason why a graphical startup can't (perhaps optionally) display all the usual POST test messages. A good example of this is Mac OS X: by default you don't see the Open Firmware messages during startup but you can turn them on and get all the information you would expect.
If you're not [a geek], just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...
Some text-mode BIOSes already do this. The issue is not text vs. graphics, its what features and options does your particular EFI or BIOS vendor give you.
I do think he should get a nomination, but aren't these things supposed to be related to actual performance by the actor compared to his contemporaries, and not crooked lobbying?
Nothing crooked about it. Jackson was just pointing out that Serkis deserved to be entered into the competition. The choice amongst the nominees is supposed to be about the actual performances [*], but if you aren't nominated you aren't even in the race. I think Jackson did exactly the right thing in arguing forecefully that Serkis should have been nominated.
[*] of course this isn't what really happens. You can certainly complain about dubious lobbying to get a particular nominated film/actor/whatever the little golden man. Sadly.
Is this game fun? Probably not.:) But that doesn't take away from the fact that an intelligent human could look at a source printout and figure out if it halted or not, but no general algorithm can be deduced that would do so. Thus, for a computer to win at this game, it would actually have to show intelligence, and not raw computational skill.
I was with you right up to the end. However it is most certainly not shown that a human can solve the halting problem. It is proven that (in the general case) no algorithm can say whether a program halts. The only way a human can prove whether an algorithm halts is by using mathematical formalisms that are also limited.
What people can often do is make an "intelligent" guess about whether a program halts. In fact computers can do this too: you can provide a machine with a set of heuristics (rules of thumb) that it can use to estimate the likelihood that a program will halt. That program could do better than random, just as a human could. But that is not the same as proving the program does or does not halt.
I have never seen any evidence to suggest that humans can solve the halting problem for the class of unsolvable programs.
Nevertheless you are right that there are unsolvable games. In fact there are an infinite number of them.
The point being that chess is a, theoretically, *solvable* game.
Interesting. Is there a formal proof of this somewhere? I don't recall having seen one.
The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.
I agree that chess computers are computing from empirical data. The really interesting question is whether this is all that humans do. You distinguish "computing" from "thinking", but that involves a large and contentious assumption that these are different things. It is quite possible that "computing" is "all" the human mind is doing.
A (simplification of this) behavioralist view of AI is:
1) Computers only compute 2) If computers can do things that humans can (e.g. play chess), then: 3) All humans are doing is compute
In other words, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
If Red Hat's decision had been "obviously right", it wouldn't have been "controversial".
Timing is everything. Lots of ideas that we come to believe are "obviously right" are indeed highly "controversial" when they are first put forward. Obvious examples include almost everything Einstein wrote, Darwin's theory of evolution, Copernicus' theories of astronomy, Newton's laws of gravity. Indeed most major scientific advances were controversial when introduced.
So I disagree. Red Hat's decision can be both obviously right (especially in hindsight) and controversial.
And PLEASE, tell me how you pronounce YOUR NAME, gwerwol?
Fair point - although its gwernol not gwerwol:-) Its a nickname derived from a Welsh placename, so its pretty obscure. Its actually pronounced much as its spelt: two syllables "gwer-nol".
The real point is I'm not trying to promote my nickname. Its just a silly identifier chosen because it was available on Slashdot. Xmingwin are trying (I hope) to promote their technology and gain acceptance for it. That's why it doesn't matter that I have a stupid handle on Slashdot but it is a concern that the Xmingwin developers have a project name that might actually discourage its adoption in the broad business community.
This sounds like intriguing functionality, but really can't they find a better name than Xmingwin? Its a horrible name, practically unpronounceable, difficult to remember and spell, easy to confuse with other similar projects.
I know this might sound like a troll but I'm serious about this. Projects do themselves no favors by adopting badly thought out names. A confusing name makes it less likely that I will use or evangelize this software. When someone asks me for a recommendation for a software platform for generating Windows executables on our Linux servers I'll be embarassed to say Xmingwin (I work in a corporate environment). Its hard to say, hard for someone to understand when said and worse it sounds amateurish. Its almost as bad as Ogg Vorbis: very geek-cool to use Klingon but the kiss of death in a serious corporate environment.
This isn't a slam on open source - god knows there are too many dumb names in the closed source world - but a plea for developers to think about naming. Its an important part of getting your technology talked about and accepted.
...a biological compound that fools their brain into thinking that black, bitter coffee is as smooth as a milky double latte
Can I really be the only human left on earth who belives coffee should be black and bitter? If you want a drink that tastes like warm milk, I'd suggest a nice cup of warm milk, or perhaps some hot chocolate. Coffee is meant to be alarmingly black and strong.
Slashdot Mirror
The largest requirement for a robot able to recognize objects would be memory/storage. Kind of like those 20 questions programs, it is very simple processing to compare input with a matrix of possibilities.
I'm sorry but that's a gross simplification. Computer recognition of images, especially images of the real 3D world, is a very hard and computationally intense process. This problem is still at the cutting edge of research. Describing it as "simple processing to compare the input with a matrix of possibilities" is on the same level as describing Doom III as "adds a couple of numbers together and displays some colored dots on the screen". It may be at some level accurate but it misses out the hard parts entirely.
To learn more, you could start at CMU's computer vision page. There's a whole world of interesting techniques out there, jump in and try some.
I've seen so many robot articles....Where are they though? ... Most of these articles will say that they will be available to consumers in the next year or so.
Bed, Bath and Beyond (and you can't get a lot more consumer than that store) has the Roomba for sale. I saw them at the San Francisco store a couple of weeks ago. With over 450 stores across the US, I'd say they are widely available, at least in the States.
Given that the Thai finance minister had to be rescued from his BMW with sledgehammers after his WinCE powered iDrive computer crashed, methinks I would prefer to fly on open source software.
Unfortunately this seems to be a hoax:
CNET reports that, contrary to rumours that the BMW that trapped a Thai minister inside earlier this week was "the famously glitchy BMW 745i car, and its Windows CE-powered iDrive car computer", it was, according to a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand, the 10-year old BMW 520i model that "suffered a simple electronic failure".
(from Looswire)
Not sure I understand, this means that after you press "record", the DVR travels three to five minutes backward in time and catches you in the loo a few minutes prior? Surely the video would spool to disk 3 to 5 minutes after it was recorded. Maybe I can use one of these after I get pulled over for speeding to travel back in time and brake in advance...
Basically the box will be continually recording into a looped buffer. When you hit the record button it will retrive the last 5 minutes from the buffer and archive that plus everything from the moment you hit record onwards. So you get the minutes before the button is hit as well as everything afterwards.
This is similar to the way TiVo works - it is continually recording TV into a 20 minute looped buffer (until you switch channels) so you can actually "rewind" to a point before you started watching a program.
that's not elitism, it's true. if you can't figure out how to install a program as complex as mysql, which isn't that hard to install in osx, there's a good chance you can't use it.
The reviewer said " if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them" (emphasis added). That surely is elitism of the worst sort. You can be very smart and still not have the knowledge and experience necessary to use MySQL. The word "smart" is horribly elitist in this context. If he had chosen to say "arent' yet knowledgeable enought to..." then it woldn't be an issue.
If I were a non-geek reading that review I would be offended. Hell as a geek who happens not to have learnt that much about administering databases I'm offended.
Blasphemer!
Everything you read on the Internet is true!
In which case, my assertion that the original report was dodgy must also be true.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm off to dissappear up my own contradiction.
So if as the article claims:
"Statistics Canada didn't report the number of people who responded Jedi in tables listing response rates for other religions, saying that their analysis did not include the "media-driven'' response, in part because the sample was so small. However, statisticians did when asked produce tables showing a much smaller number of Rastafarians, Scientologists and Satanists."
How do they know that 20,000 Canadians declared themselves to be Jedi? Could it be (gasp) just a number that the web site made up so it could write a story about the NZ and UK census returns?
The PCC (President's Conference Committee) cars just keep going. Most durable streetcars ever built. Designed for the American Conference of Street Railway Presidents to compete with buses, the PCC cars became the standard streetcar in most of North America.
Amen. And the look fabulous too.
Nobody wanted the newer Boeing Vertol cars when San Francisco finally junked them. Some museum in Germany that collects one of each streetcar type got one, and the others were scrapped.
They were pretty unpopular but its not true to say the others were scrapped. Several went to Manchester in England to run on their new light rail system. This had just been extended and they needed new cars, but the clearances and tight radius curves on the new line meant that they couldn't get the specialized cars manufactured in time. Instead they bought several ex-MUNI Vertols for $1 each (plus shipping) and are running those.
f you want a good place to see some authentic PCC streetcars still in active service, visit San Francisco -- they purchased a bunch from Philadelphia for tourist attraction.
:-)
At the risk of being a real light rail geek, actually the San Francisco F-Line PCC cars come from all over, not just Philly. Take a look at the stock list which shows the origins of all the trolleys running in SF. The City by the Bay is indeed a great place to see vintage trolley cars from all over the US and the world, as well as modern streetcars and the Bay Area Rapid Transit. Oh, and we have a few other tourist attractions too
Over time, the growth in capacity is awesome.
Last month I was going overseas for a vacation so I decided to buy a new CompactFlash card for my digital camera. For about $100 my camera now has 365,000,000 times more memory than my first personal computer had. That's insane.
I love living in these times.
There are communities for Model T Fords. I once drove to a theme park (Canada's Wonderland) and my jaw dropped when I saw hundred upon hundreds of restored Model T's in the parking lot - the Model T association was having an outing.
Model T's dont compare with today's cars, yet some people still cherish 'em.
I think its a little more complex than just nostalgia, though that certainly plays a part. For example one of my hobbies is the restoration and running of old steam locomotives and railways. This doesn't mean I want to return to this antiquated form of transport or the Victorian world in which they existed. It has a lot to do with the sights, sounds and smells and also the opportunity to do something physical and completely different from my day job in front of a computer.
Interestingly - and hopefully somewhat back on topic - where I do think nostalgia plays in is a harking back to my childhood, when I first saw live steam locomotives at work. I'm not trying to recreate the world of 100 years ago, but I am trying to recapture the awe and excitement I felt 30 years ago when I first saw one of these machines come alive. I suspect that many of the remaining Apple ][ enthusiasts are re-living to some extent their first computer experience. A lot of people in adult life try to recapture some of childhood's sense of wonder through collecting toys or pursuing interests that were first sparked when they were young.
The early pitch for Lindows was it was the Linux distribution that would run the major Windows applications. Later you stopped marketing it this way and instead decided to emphasise Click'n'Run and ease of use.
Why the change? Were the technical problems associated with Wine too great to overcome? Was it fear of legal action from Microsoft?
I would have thought there was a large potential market for Lindows as originally conceived. Why move away from that vision to something much less clearly differentiated from other Linux distributions?
Marketing Linux to the mass market is a good thing. However it seems to me that the name you have chosen for the product is awkward at best and will only slow down potential adoption. Naming products is an important part of effective marketing, especially in the consumer market. Lindows sounds cheesy and is no longer relevant to the product since you switched emphasis from being a Linux/Windows combination. Have you considered changing the name?
Weta was founded by Peter Jackson to handle the special effects for his previous movies, which were very gory action movies involving zombies and aliens (Bad Taste, Dead Alive) and required a lot of prosthetics, face masks, etc. so he started Weta with a few friends to handle that.
Now that WETA is a large and sophisticated operation, I wonder what they will do once they've finished LoTR. There are only so many special/extended/director's cut DVDs they can release. A group of that size and experience is a major cost and a major opportunity to rival Industrial Light and Magic and other effects houses.
Does anyone know if Jackson plans to keep WETA to himeself or if they are going to do work for other studios or film production companies? I've got to assume the later unless Jackson plans to only do effects-ladened films for the rest of his career.
" When Massive was first tested two armies were pitted against each other to fight it out. Once the scene was rendered, a bug in the program was found. Agents were actually seen running away from the battle field! This simple bug was resolved by adding the rule "If you can't see an enemy, turn around". "
Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no, no enemy in sight! Turn around! Oh no! I'm going to be killed! Run away! Oh no...
Actually, funny though your comment is, the bit of the article you quote tells us that the original orc behavior was not them running away from battle. I've seen this mistake made enough times - including on Slashdot - that I'm sure its now a geek urban legend.
The article quote makes it clear that the reason they "ran away" was because they were looking for something to kill, not because they wanted to get away from the battle. The bug was that they just looked in front of them, couldn't see an enemy and so moved forward until one was in their field of vision. This would cause them to move rapidly away from the battle if they somehow ended up with their backs to the fight.
The bug fix described simply changed the behavior so the first thing they did if they couldn't see an enemy was to turn 180 degrees. This meant they charged into the fight, not away from it.
So you would never see the behavior you so humorously described.
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise."
;-)
Considering how that's been around for thousands of years, interesting that no one's really done much about it until now. Maybe no one thinks they're a sluggard.
Actually there is a long and fascinating history of research into swarm/colony intelligence in ants, from the groundbreaking work of EO Wilson to the more recent work of Deborah Gordon whose insights into the relationship between ant colonies as single organisms and the way that human intelligence emerges from the biology of the brain are startling. The study of ants and colony behavior is an exciting field that can inform many fields from weather systems to crowd behavior to artificial intelligence.
One of the interesting results of the Chinese experience is that consumers no longer pay for the music. This would seem on the surface to be a good thing, after all informationm wants to be free. Of course the musicians are still paid - but by a few large corporate sponsors rather than individuals.
This is certainly a different business model than the one in Europe and the US. Is it better? Perhaps: the artists still get paid and consumers get free or very cheap music. But it may have a downside. Instead of the economic power being in the hands of the people who want the music it is transfered to large corporations.
Are we just trading one set of large corporate interests (the RIAA) for another (corporate sponsors)?
Machines that give you a graphical startup are annoying because you don't see the POST test etc, and if you're messing about with the hardware that's a real nuisance; you're never sure what's gone wrong.
Of course there is absolutely no reason why a graphical startup can't (perhaps optionally) display all the usual POST test messages. A good example of this is Mac OS X: by default you don't see the Open Firmware messages during startup but you can turn them on and get all the information you would expect.
If you're not [a geek], just watch it scroll by and think about how cool it is in a Matrix sort of way. But don't cover it over with a manufacturer's logo and a Microsoft ad...
Some text-mode BIOSes already do this. The issue is not text vs. graphics, its what features and options does your particular EFI or BIOS vendor give you.
I do think he should get a nomination, but aren't these things supposed to be related to actual performance by the actor compared to his contemporaries, and not crooked lobbying?
Nothing crooked about it. Jackson was just pointing out that Serkis deserved to be entered into the competition. The choice amongst the nominees is supposed to be about the actual performances [*], but if you aren't nominated you aren't even in the race. I think Jackson did exactly the right thing in arguing forecefully that Serkis should have been nominated.
[*] of course this isn't what really happens. You can certainly complain about dubious lobbying to get a particular nominated film/actor/whatever the little golden man. Sadly.
Is this game fun? Probably not. :) But that doesn't take away from the fact that an intelligent human could look at a source printout and figure out if it halted or not, but no general algorithm can be deduced that would do so. Thus, for a computer to win at this game, it would actually have to show intelligence, and not raw computational skill.
I was with you right up to the end. However it is most certainly not shown that a human can solve the halting problem. It is proven that (in the general case) no algorithm can say whether a program halts. The only way a human can prove whether an algorithm halts is by using mathematical formalisms that are also limited.
What people can often do is make an "intelligent" guess about whether a program halts. In fact computers can do this too: you can provide a machine with a set of heuristics (rules of thumb) that it can use to estimate the likelihood that a program will halt. That program could do better than random, just as a human could. But that is not the same as proving the program does or does not halt.
I have never seen any evidence to suggest that humans can solve the halting problem for the class of unsolvable programs.
Nevertheless you are right that there are unsolvable games. In fact there are an infinite number of them.
The point being that chess is a, theoretically, *solvable* game.
Interesting. Is there a formal proof of this somewhere? I don't recall having seen one.
The chess computers rely on this empirical data, not on thinking. They *compute.* Big deal.
I agree that chess computers are computing from empirical data. The really interesting question is whether this is all that humans do. You distinguish "computing" from "thinking", but that involves a large and contentious assumption that these are different things. It is quite possible that "computing" is "all" the human mind is doing.
A (simplification of this) behavioralist view of AI is:
1) Computers only compute
2) If computers can do things that humans can (e.g. play chess), then:
3) All humans are doing is compute
In other words, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
If Red Hat's decision had been "obviously right", it wouldn't have been "controversial".
Timing is everything. Lots of ideas that we come to believe are "obviously right" are indeed highly "controversial" when they are first put forward. Obvious examples include almost everything Einstein wrote, Darwin's theory of evolution, Copernicus' theories of astronomy, Newton's laws of gravity. Indeed most major scientific advances were controversial when introduced.
So I disagree. Red Hat's decision can be both obviously right (especially in hindsight) and controversial.
And PLEASE, tell me how you pronounce YOUR NAME, gwerwol?
:-) Its a nickname derived from a Welsh placename, so its pretty obscure. Its actually pronounced much as its spelt: two syllables "gwer-nol".
Fair point - although its gwernol not gwerwol
The real point is I'm not trying to promote my nickname. Its just a silly identifier chosen because it was available on Slashdot. Xmingwin are trying (I hope) to promote their technology and gain acceptance for it. That's why it doesn't matter that I have a stupid handle on Slashdot but it is a concern that the Xmingwin developers have a project name that might actually discourage its adoption in the broad business community.
This sounds like intriguing functionality, but really can't they find a better name than Xmingwin? Its a horrible name, practically unpronounceable, difficult to remember and spell, easy to confuse with other similar projects.
I know this might sound like a troll but I'm serious about this. Projects do themselves no favors by adopting badly thought out names. A confusing name makes it less likely that I will use or evangelize this software. When someone asks me for a recommendation for a software platform for generating Windows executables on our Linux servers I'll be embarassed to say Xmingwin (I work in a corporate environment). Its hard to say, hard for someone to understand when said and worse it sounds amateurish. Its almost as bad as Ogg Vorbis: very geek-cool to use Klingon but the kiss of death in a serious corporate environment.
This isn't a slam on open source - god knows there are too many dumb names in the closed source world - but a plea for developers to think about naming. Its an important part of getting your technology talked about and accepted.
...a biological compound that fools their brain into thinking that black, bitter coffee is as smooth as a milky double latte
Can I really be the only human left on earth who belives coffee should be black and bitter? If you want a drink that tastes like warm milk, I'd suggest a nice cup of warm milk, or perhaps some hot chocolate. Coffee is meant to be alarmingly black and strong.