In todays formula one races, there really are only 3 times where you have a good chance of defeating your oponent: the start and the (usually) 2 pit-stops. I believe that it would be very simple to train a computer to perform almost perfectly in these situations. For the rest of the race, the robot would only have to keep Schumacher at bay, which is still tough, but possible even if you're not quite as good as he is.
I think that this challenge is somehow dumb. It won't be long till some genius claims he can build a robot that can run faster than any human, or even do a better job at adding 312893 numbers with 7942 digits each.
Now, if you would read the article carefully, you would have noticed that the expansion refers to other properties of the solutions: the distance between any two joints (vertices) never shrinks during the process, and the same holds true for the area of the polygon.
It is actually not hard to see why the problem is quite simple to solve if expansions would be allowed:
First, note that allowing expansions is equivalent to allowing contractions.
Then, realize that each polygon has at least two adjacent edges A-B, B-C that define a triangle A-B-C, which is completely on the inside of the polyon. By moving the center vertex B to the midpoint of A-C, one vertex of the polygon is eliminated (in general, this causes two contractions). Proceed till only a triangle ist left.
Why was this post moderated down? The AC had a damn valid point here, and a (Score: 5, Insightful) would be much more deserved than (Score: 0), because most people simply missed this and went straight for the flamefest...
While it is true that nowadays the vast majority of linux users is happily using one of the mainstream distros (RedHat, Suse, TurboLinux), I also believe that more and more Linux users simply use it for its technical merits, not because they believe in free software.
Assuming this, do you believe that the freeware spirit is still strong in RedHat and its followers, or has this community already become something very different that the bunch of nerds that installed their first slackware distro from 20 disks back in the old days?
I hope this doesn't come across as flamebait, but... if you're not capable of getting the sources to compile, are you really sure you have what it takes to work on stuff like this?
Ah, now this is interesting, I didn't know about the %n thingy. I guess I've been writing too much C++ code for the last couple of years:-)
But then again, don't most unix systems (including Linux) have separate memory segments for code and data, and isn't the code-segment read-only? And if this is so, wouldn't that mean that it is very difficult to mess with a program using this locale weakness?
Although I know my way around in assembly language pretty well, I'm a newbie when it comes to security questions. I just have the feeling some vulnerabilities are wildly overrated. I mean, you probably have to know a great deal to gain any advantage from this locale weakness, while other security holes (a la Outlook) seem to be much easier to exploit once they are known. Or am I just naive?
I have enough imagination to see how this can be used to crash the program, but how would you get it to execute code?
I assume that printf simply reads the memory of the process, and dumps data to stdout. Nothing executed here.
Someone claimed that a wrong number of %s can corrupt the stack. How so? In C, the caller is responsible for cleaning up the parameters from the call stack, i.e. there's no problem with this either.
So, enlightened hacker/crackers of Slashdot... how does the exploit actually work?
Re:how large is the chess tree? infinite!
on
Solving Chess?
·
· Score: 1
Coming closer, but not quite there yet I think.
1) If the same position is repeated three times, or
2) If there hasn't been any capture and no move of a pawn for 50 moves...
the player to move next has the right to call it a draw, but doesn't have to.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but perhaps against Schumacher, Häkkinen or Villeneuve?
I think that this challenge is somehow dumb. It won't be long till some genius claims he can build a robot that can run faster than any human, or even do a better job at adding 312893 numbers with 7942 digits each.
So what, I'm exp!
It is actually not hard to see why the problem is quite simple to solve if expansions would be allowed:
-
First, note that allowing expansions is equivalent to allowing contractions.
-
Then, realize that each polygon has at least two adjacent edges A-B, B-C that define a triangle A-B-C, which is completely on the inside of the polyon. By moving the center vertex B to the midpoint of A-C, one vertex of the polygon is eliminated (in general, this causes two contractions). Proceed till only a triangle ist left.
q.e.d.Why was this post moderated down? The AC had a damn valid point here, and a (Score: 5, Insightful) would be much more deserved than (Score: 0), because most people simply missed this and went straight for the flamefest...
Assuming this, do you believe that the freeware spirit is still strong in RedHat and its followers, or has this community already become something very different that the bunch of nerds that installed their first slackware distro from 20 disks back in the old days?
I hope this doesn't come across as flamebait, but... if you're not capable of getting the sources to compile, are you really sure you have what it takes to work on stuff like this?
Ah, now this is interesting, I didn't know about the %n thingy. I guess I've been writing too much C++ code for the last couple of years :-)
But then again, don't most unix systems (including Linux) have separate memory segments for code and data, and isn't the code-segment read-only? And if this is so, wouldn't that mean that it is very difficult to mess with a program using this locale weakness?
Although I know my way around in assembly language pretty well, I'm a newbie when it comes to security questions. I just have the feeling some vulnerabilities are wildly overrated. I mean, you probably have to know a great deal to gain any advantage from this locale weakness, while other security holes (a la Outlook) seem to be much easier to exploit once they are known. Or am I just naive?
Someone claimed that a wrong number of %s can corrupt the stack. How so? In C, the caller is responsible for cleaning up the parameters from the call stack, i.e. there's no problem with this either.
So, enlightened hacker/crackers of Slashdot... how does the exploit actually work?
1) If the same position is repeated three times, or
2) If there hasn't been any capture and no move of a pawn for 50 moves...
the player to move next has the right to call it a draw, but doesn't have to.