It's clear to me the post was just saying a better test would focus less on memory and more on problem solving... which would be its point. That the test might use "IQ" colloquially is immaterial.
It would be clearer if the title was "open source alternatives to OO.O" or if the first sentence was "I'm scared of Oracle getting OO.O--are there any open source alternatives?" So, I'd say it can get quite a bit clearer than what was said. Again, though, it's just an impression.
I get the impression the OP wanted free alternatives, since the words "open source" are not very prominent--they're tacked on to the end of the third question more than three quarters of the way through the OP. It seems to be more about alternatives to (the free product) OO.O, and they just typed "open source" carelessly. One free alternative, at least for the use case presented (reading a.doc file), is MS's Office viewers, which are not open source to my knowledge.
Both flop and flops are acronyms, meaning either "FLoating-point OPeration" or "FLoating point OPerations per Second". The summary uses the former.
Since ignoring the words "per second" is unambiguous, I'd say it's mildly incorrect. Since this whole discussion takes the focus off the content (...a near record-breaking Windows cluster...), I'd say it's quite incorrect.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'm glad they killed classic VB. It was far from perfect and getting awfully outdated when it got replaced with.NET. Then again, if the change had caused me unending pain in rewrites, I might think differently.
I'd imagine the above Scheme recommendation could be replaced with any functional language. There are quite a few choices. Personally I find J, a mathematical language, hideous and fascinating at the same time. It would certainly be different from your standard programming.
I'm quite happy with the current MSVC# compiler's errors. Of course, it's the compiler and not the language which gives error messages; I assume you just misspoke when asking for a language. I greatly prefer Haskell to C# philosophically, though.
Yes; sorry, I misspoke. By "I wonder if a brute-force all-branches approach is actually possible or even better than a genetic algorithm", I actually had in mind a system culling branches from the full brute-force approach in the case that it's not possible to try all possibilities. Optimality would be sacrificed for practicality in some manner, and I don't know which algorithm--"most branches" or the GA--would be better. But, the way I said this was unclear.
TFA's method is designed to optimize rush builds, where the goal (ex. 7 roaches ASAP) is specified by the human. It wouldn't work at all for longer games where you have to respond to your opponent, since then your goals depend on what they do. At best, I'd say this method (1) provides strong but inconclusive support for the quality of various opening builds; (2) might find better opening builds that are not commonly known to humans. (2) seems much less likely than (1). I wonder if a brute-force all-branches approach is actually possible or even better than a genetic algorithm. For the first few minutes of SC(2) you don't have many options, so the branches wouldn't become horrifically numerous until several minutes in.
In any case, this method depends on humans to specify its goals and doesn't work in larger situations. I don't think there should be any concern about this type of AI beating "human ingenuity".
Yes, I find the summary comprehensible and know what a genetic algorithm is. I don't know what an explanation of genetic algorithms is doing in the summary, though. Linking the Wikipedia page would be much more effective, since so many readers get nothing out of this explanation (either they already know what a GA is and, like me, are annoyed at the minor waste of time, or they don't and a brief explanation isn't enough).
The article implies its argument doesn't apply to other fields:
Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life.
It just seems like lots of people are missing this point. Another point that's getting missed is
That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth.
This may or may not be true, but many of the counter-arguments I've read take it as given that math courses improve critical thinking.
Personally, I tend to agree with the article, but it doesn't provide enough evidence to truly convince me. That is, I run both inductive and deductive reasoning when considering arguments; my inductive reasoner says "yeah, I think that's right" and my deductive reasoner says "but it's not rigorous enough to really say".
I'd be very interested in the results of a survey of the general population testing their retention of high school chemistry, physics, biology, and math. If that retention is as low as I expect it to be (near zero, really, for the majority), did they need that education? Should they have spent their time on whatever they were interested in, instead?
It's not necessarily enriching for all of society to hear about the difference between the secant and cosine. I'm undecided (not enough data), but I'm leaning towards a system involving more elective choice in high school in hopes of truly enriching people in a way they won't just forget. If a conic sections class a student hates gets replaced with music history they love, I'm alright with that. And I really like conic sections.
To say that most people don't need anything more than the most basic knowledge of math is like saying people don't need the ability to think critically.
I think Ramanathan addressed your point more than you think. From the article, "That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth." Granted, without a citation this itself is an unsubstantiated claim. If true, though, your argument falls apart and his remains valid, at least on this issue.
Fundamentally I agree with you, but I don't think many people actually get "an understanding of the importance of logical reasoning" and such from math courses. I think they pick up study habits that include cramming and intentionally forgetting what they learned, along with a proverbial bad taste in their mouths when they think of math.
Technical nitpicking: math can't entirely prove it's own validity. It can't prove the consistency of arbitrary axioms. At a fundamental level math takes itself on faith. (This deeply bothers me, but such is life.) Math does, however, "prove the validity of theoretical tools that you use to build a bridge" to a level of rigor almost anyone is perfectly happy with.
I have difficulty conceiving of someone understanding derivatives without understanding limits. Perhaps the grandparent's poster had a bad experience with a class that spent too long on limits? For a fuzzy high-school-esque explanation of the derivative itself, you certainly don't need the full formality of limits (epsilon-delta, for instance; other equivalent definitions exist).
Also, high school calculus is an absolute den of lies and falsehoods. Rigorous formulations of calculus involving mathematical analysis weren't thought up for over a century after Newton and Leibnitz created it, and these most definitely aren't taught in the standard high school calculus course. Incidentally, Newton and Leibnitz were very hand-wavey on many of the details, but everyone agreed their results were intuitive enough to be true so... everyone went along with it. In fact, their version of calculus wasn't made precise until the 1960's with the invention of non-standard analysis.
(Fun fact--the surreal numbers are related to non-standard analysis, and have an awesome name.)
I would want to create/discover math itself instead of literature and music, given unbounded free time. I study and research it because I enjoy it. I'm happy to help people out with math, but I'm very much not an applied math person. Give me a Hilbert space and I'll create the world--in my mind, at least, and I'm fine leaving it there.
What we need now is something as approachable as a thesaurus, but for the math world.
I think the analogy broke down. Do you really want entries like the following:
Invertible matrix - containing no 0 eigenvalues; columns (rows) form a basis of the ambient space; matrix is an endomorphism;...
That's a simple example, too, and I cut it way short. To adequately explain every statement ends up making the "mathesaurus" into an insanely long textbook. One major difference is that most people know the general meaning of thousands of standard vocabulary words, so you can afford to be very brief in a thesaurus. Few people know the meaning of a fraction of "real" math words. An undergraduate text reads like Greek to most of my relatives, for instance. Well-written Wikipedia pages are probably the best you're going to get for quick math references.
That's a good point, though it doesn't change reality as it currently stands, where, for instance, not a single relative I can think of would want to program their phone.
I'm just curious, what repetitive tasks have you seen?
After all, the users might start thinking that they have some kind of right to run software that was not approved, and next thing you know, they'll be wanting to write programs
How many people are linear algebra experts? Even have a clue what it is? By the same token, how many people even want to program their machines (phone, desktop, etc.)? A few, certainly, but designing for those few is a terrible business decision. Remember, if you're reading this, you're almost certainly good at telling computers what to do; most people aren't. Don't expect what you want to be what everyone wants.
throwing out the Axiom of Choice also throws out Lebesgue integrals which you need for modern physics
Throwing out AC doesn't destroy Lebesgue integrals entirely. Taking countable choice should suffice, at the least, which is somewhat better and should break Banach-Tarski. (Take this with a grain of salt, though--I haven't carefully verified these statements.)
I agree about infinite numbers of choices being very fishy from a computational perspective. At least theoretically, a quantum state in Hilbert space should have countably many degrees of freedom (each a real number), so God should be able to encode infinitely large objects in them. I question if it's possible to manipulate such a thing into an arbitrary state--it'd probably take countably many operations, which would probably take infinite time. Of course, something similar can be said of the usual Cartesian model of position--you should be able to encode countably many digits into a real number, if you're God, at least:).
Slashdot Mirror
So, what's your point?
It's clear to me the post was just saying a better test would focus less on memory and more on problem solving... which would be its point. That the test might use "IQ" colloquially is immaterial.
Gynoid is so much less common than android I didn't want to use it. Android, on the other hand, is quite common.
The Geminoid-F is an android, i.e. made to strongly resemble humans. When I first read the summary I thought it meant something like Asimo acting.
It would be clearer if the title was "open source alternatives to OO.O" or if the first sentence was "I'm scared of Oracle getting OO.O--are there any open source alternatives?" So, I'd say it can get quite a bit clearer than what was said. Again, though, it's just an impression.
You completely missed the point and your post got modded up?
I get the impression the OP wanted free alternatives, since the words "open source" are not very prominent--they're tacked on to the end of the third question more than three quarters of the way through the OP. It seems to be more about alternatives to (the free product) OO.O, and they just typed "open source" carelessly. One free alternative, at least for the use case presented (reading a .doc file), is MS's Office viewers, which are not open source to my knowledge.
Again, this is just my impression.
Both flop and flops are acronyms, meaning either "FLoating-point OPeration" or "FLoating point OPerations per Second". The summary uses the former.
Since ignoring the words "per second" is unambiguous, I'd say it's mildly incorrect. Since this whole discussion takes the focus off the content (...a near record-breaking Windows cluster...), I'd say it's quite incorrect.
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I'm glad they killed classic VB. It was far from perfect and getting awfully outdated when it got replaced with .NET. Then again, if the change had caused me unending pain in rewrites, I might think differently.
I'd imagine the above Scheme recommendation could be replaced with any functional language. There are quite a few choices. Personally I find J, a mathematical language, hideous and fascinating at the same time. It would certainly be different from your standard programming.
I'm quite happy with the current MSVC# compiler's errors. Of course, it's the compiler and not the language which gives error messages; I assume you just misspoke when asking for a language. I greatly prefer Haskell to C# philosophically, though.
Yes; sorry, I misspoke. By "I wonder if a brute-force all-branches approach is actually possible or even better than a genetic algorithm", I actually had in mind a system culling branches from the full brute-force approach in the case that it's not possible to try all possibilities. Optimality would be sacrificed for practicality in some manner, and I don't know which algorithm--"most branches" or the GA--would be better. But, the way I said this was unclear.
TFA's method is designed to optimize rush builds, where the goal (ex. 7 roaches ASAP) is specified by the human. It wouldn't work at all for longer games where you have to respond to your opponent, since then your goals depend on what they do. At best, I'd say this method (1) provides strong but inconclusive support for the quality of various opening builds; (2) might find better opening builds that are not commonly known to humans. (2) seems much less likely than (1). I wonder if a brute-force all-branches approach is actually possible or even better than a genetic algorithm. For the first few minutes of SC(2) you don't have many options, so the branches wouldn't become horrifically numerous until several minutes in.
In any case, this method depends on humans to specify its goals and doesn't work in larger situations. I don't think there should be any concern about this type of AI beating "human ingenuity".
Yes, I find the summary comprehensible and know what a genetic algorithm is. I don't know what an explanation of genetic algorithms is doing in the summary, though. Linking the Wikipedia page would be much more effective, since so many readers get nothing out of this explanation (either they already know what a GA is and, like me, are annoyed at the minor waste of time, or they don't and a brief explanation isn't enough).
Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life.
It just seems like lots of people are missing this point. Another point that's getting missed is
That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth.
This may or may not be true, but many of the counter-arguments I've read take it as given that math courses improve critical thinking. Personally, I tend to agree with the article, but it doesn't provide enough evidence to truly convince me. That is, I run both inductive and deductive reasoning when considering arguments; my inductive reasoner says "yeah, I think that's right" and my deductive reasoner says "but it's not rigorous enough to really say".
I'd be very interested in the results of a survey of the general population testing their retention of high school chemistry, physics, biology, and math. If that retention is as low as I expect it to be (near zero, really, for the majority), did they need that education? Should they have spent their time on whatever they were interested in, instead?
It's not necessarily enriching for all of society to hear about the difference between the secant and cosine. I'm undecided (not enough data), but I'm leaning towards a system involving more elective choice in high school in hopes of truly enriching people in a way they won't just forget. If a conic sections class a student hates gets replaced with music history they love, I'm alright with that. And I really like conic sections.
To say that most people don't need anything more than the most basic knowledge of math is like saying people don't need the ability to think critically.
I think Ramanathan addressed your point more than you think. From the article, "That courses such as "Quantitative Reasoning" improve critical thinking is an unsubstantiated myth." Granted, without a citation this itself is an unsubstantiated claim. If true, though, your argument falls apart and his remains valid, at least on this issue.
Fundamentally I agree with you, but I don't think many people actually get "an understanding of the importance of logical reasoning" and such from math courses. I think they pick up study habits that include cramming and intentionally forgetting what they learned, along with a proverbial bad taste in their mouths when they think of math.
Technical nitpicking: math can't entirely prove it's own validity. It can't prove the consistency of arbitrary axioms. At a fundamental level math takes itself on faith. (This deeply bothers me, but such is life.) Math does, however, "prove the validity of theoretical tools that you use to build a bridge" to a level of rigor almost anyone is perfectly happy with.
I have difficulty conceiving of someone understanding derivatives without understanding limits. Perhaps the grandparent's poster had a bad experience with a class that spent too long on limits? For a fuzzy high-school-esque explanation of the derivative itself, you certainly don't need the full formality of limits (epsilon-delta, for instance; other equivalent definitions exist).
Also, high school calculus is an absolute den of lies and falsehoods. Rigorous formulations of calculus involving mathematical analysis weren't thought up for over a century after Newton and Leibnitz created it, and these most definitely aren't taught in the standard high school calculus course. Incidentally, Newton and Leibnitz were very hand-wavey on many of the details, but everyone agreed their results were intuitive enough to be true so... everyone went along with it. In fact, their version of calculus wasn't made precise until the 1960's with the invention of non-standard analysis.
(Fun fact--the surreal numbers are related to non-standard analysis, and have an awesome name.)
I would want to create/discover math itself instead of literature and music, given unbounded free time. I study and research it because I enjoy it. I'm happy to help people out with math, but I'm very much not an applied math person. Give me a Hilbert space and I'll create the world--in my mind, at least, and I'm fine leaving it there.
Ah, forgive me, I meant bijective endomorphism.
What we need now is something as approachable as a thesaurus, but for the math world.
I think the analogy broke down. Do you really want entries like the following:
Invertible matrix - containing no 0 eigenvalues; columns (rows) form a basis of the ambient space; matrix is an endomorphism; ...
That's a simple example, too, and I cut it way short. To adequately explain every statement ends up making the "mathesaurus" into an insanely long textbook. One major difference is that most people know the general meaning of thousands of standard vocabulary words, so you can afford to be very brief in a thesaurus. Few people know the meaning of a fraction of "real" math words. An undergraduate text reads like Greek to most of my relatives, for instance. Well-written Wikipedia pages are probably the best you're going to get for quick math references.
Most schools I've heard of require less math than basic calculus for non-technical majors. Some sort of stats or basic algebra is the norm.
That's a good point, though it doesn't change reality as it currently stands, where, for instance, not a single relative I can think of would want to program their phone. I'm just curious, what repetitive tasks have you seen?
After all, the users might start thinking that they have some kind of right to run software that was not approved, and next thing you know, they'll be wanting to write programs
How many people are linear algebra experts? Even have a clue what it is? By the same token, how many people even want to program their machines (phone, desktop, etc.)? A few, certainly, but designing for those few is a terrible business decision. Remember, if you're reading this, you're almost certainly good at telling computers what to do; most people aren't. Don't expect what you want to be what everyone wants.
throwing out the Axiom of Choice also throws out Lebesgue integrals which you need for modern physics
Throwing out AC doesn't destroy Lebesgue integrals entirely. Taking countable choice should suffice, at the least, which is somewhat better and should break Banach-Tarski. (Take this with a grain of salt, though--I haven't carefully verified these statements.)
I agree about infinite numbers of choices being very fishy from a computational perspective. At least theoretically, a quantum state in Hilbert space should have countably many degrees of freedom (each a real number), so God should be able to encode infinitely large objects in them. I question if it's possible to manipulate such a thing into an arbitrary state--it'd probably take countably many operations, which would probably take infinite time. Of course, something similar can be said of the usual Cartesian model of position--you should be able to encode countably many digits into a real number, if you're God, at least :).