Tibor the HunThe system is fascinated with 1/16ths and 1/32s which gets really hard to work with
Hogwash McFlyYour Geek Pass has been revoked. You have one hour to clear your desk and leave the building. Thank you for your co-operation.
simcop2387i could understand this if it was just 16's and 32's but 1/16 and 1/12 and 1/32 and 1/5280 can be kinda annoying, at least compared to.1.001.00001 and 100
But it is just 0.0001 and 0.00001, in binary.
Of course a base 12 system would help on the 1/12 and 1/5280s:
1/12 dec = 0.1 duodecimal
1/16 dec = 0.09
1/32 dec = 0.4223
1/5280 dec = Doh! Where'd that factor 5 come from?
Hey!! I know those guys!! At least I met two of those three back when they worked at Marimba, the Java based software/content distribution tool (good design behind the product, were it not for the adherence to a non-standard GUI (Bongo), even after Swing finally came out). And before that, worked at Sun developing much of the original Java APIs. If you look through the Java sources, you can still find several references to @author Arthur van Hoff.
I don't know what the previous author's experience, but I've never heard of serious side effects. I've been on them off and on. It takes weeks to a month for them to take effect. In my case, the effect was so subtle that I barely noticed the good. Thus the need for a jounral and therapist to make me aware of day-to-day successes occuring over longer periods. I've been on two SSRI, both with the same effects. That said, I stopped last summer only to fall back into the pits of darkness.
On the day I just threw out a pile of game boxes stacked to my waist, I say good riddance. It just marketing trinkets that don't add to the game. Did anyone actually put on the head band pictured every time they decided to play Moebius?
Now don't get me wrong. I like a good manual, and I appreciate a well designed tech-tree poster or map. These things enhance game play by adding what amounts to a second screen for cheap. But most of the things mentioned are so useless they are forgotten about by the second day of game play.
You are married (I assume from having a daughter), and your wife still allows you not just one, but four 24/7 computers in the bedroom? Sound like the bigger home fund is getting ignored for the computer/tech fund.
Wow, you must get a lot of job offers with that on your resume!!
And how is that quality to be quantified and judged, without interjecting a more than superficial understanding of the game? Through evolution? You're going to be spending a lot of time evolving there, to some equally ludicrous number.
The "understanding" of the game is broken into two parts. First, the legal sequence of board states, and thus turn-based nature of the game is written into the state selection mechanism (hence before any neural net evaluation) of the A* algorithm. The more qualitative state of a given board are what the neural net "understands", albeit not in any easily extractable form. The layered nature of a feed-forward neural net explicitly allows for "radically different [evaluations] based upon a single stone". If it didn't, the whole architecture would not work since the board positions compared often only differ by one or two squares. It's worth noting that the structure of the neural net has a lot of influence on the possible "concepts" in the neural net. In the blondie24 example, they explicitly wired nodes for every 5x5, 4x4, 3x3, and 2x2 square to allow the system to recognize spatial concepts such as corners and adjacency.
As for time evolving: Yes, it does take a while. Blondie24 took six months (24/7 on a single CPU). But in six month, it evolved the skill to occassionally beat master checkers player. It's a lot of time, but it is definitely possible. Go would take even more CPU time, but machines are cheap.
"Neural nets will solve everything" or "evolutionary programming will solve everything." Sorry, they have limitations.
I never said either, and don't believe it either. I just made reference to an existing successful example in a strongly related field. But I do believe similar problems (exceeding wide yet finite search space with definitive win conditions) problems are well matched to the GA+NN solution. Genetic algorthims simulate searching the state space and maximize the use of partial solutions, while neural nets provide quick state evaluation function that is capable of generalizing qualities of between states.
And is it any surprise that my comment was modded interesting? Slashdot moderators always fall for really big numbers.
Ugh... I can't believe people modded you up on that BS. Do you realize you arguments apply against human understanding of Go, let alone an AI's understanding of checkers (both proven to work)? Stop thinking anyone is going to consider and memoirze every possible move. That is why procedural programming does not work.
Instead, you start with a random sampling and just see how well they perform. Obviously they start bad, but the mutation process pushes the better perfromers forward.
The neural net is just a convient evaluation function that is both extremely flexible and is fairly straight forward to serialize in a genome.
Additionally, the feed forward neural nets used in the book don't store anything about future board states, let alone "a pre-stored list of the best next moves". The neural net just computes a single number, which an higher architecture inteprets as how good a board position is. Compare the evaluation numbers of a few board positions, and board after them in an A* fashion as time permits. You should be able to compare a few tens-of thousands of _significant_ board possibilities on a single processor (number out of my ass) in a minute of turn consideration. Memory is only needed to store which turn lead to what evaluation number (and maybe last calculate board position to compute possible following turns). And as I said before, the architecture is VERY easy to parallelize.
The problem here is the neural nets don't encounter a variety of end-game scenerios, and thus their performance in the end-game is critical. The book details one game where the AI that trained for 6 months lost in a series of very stupid end-game mistakes.
I've seen some amazing Go games in my life (while I lived in Tokyo) and I know that the Go mojo is not something you're going to just up and code without being really, really good yourself
Not necessarily. Pick of a copy of Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (ISBN: 058-3743638-9346720). It details how a couple of grad student wrote a genetically design neural network to play very good checkers online. Not only did the programmer not know how to play good checkers, but they were very careful to not design hints into the system.
Now, checkers is a lot simpler than go, but the possibility that it could be done is not impossible. The size of the board the number of possible and number of moves per turn would grow the problem significantly, but the students in the book worked off a single PII 400 throughout their entire project. The design detailed in the book would be very easy to distribute (the neural net evaluate each possible board position at the next turn, multiple machines could evaluate multiple boards in parallel).
The market EQ stuff is small, nay tiny, because it consists of those willing to pay beyond the monthly fee. In other words, other EQ junkies.
In contrast, Linden Labs is passing Second Labs revenue on to content creators without any additional cost the average users. This dramatically increases the market for the creations. To the point of being incomparable with EQ.
Not mention, as many times in previous stories, Second Lifers are real content creators, not just stat pushers.
I would think that it would easy enough to send a spider to the referrer page and search for the referred page. If you don't find it, delete it from the log. In fact, you wouldn't even need the spider because the link should be the exact page anyway.
This also becomes a means to maintain the blacklists other have mentioned.
It seems to me that the real source of the problem is in an assumption by Google, and most other search engines, that they can provide a purely string based search without any semantic context.
For the issue at hand, the new filtered results implicitly assume no site can legitimately grab too many links above some threshold for non-trademarked words. But in the case of a shelving provider being referenced as "shelving" (as exampled in the second article), that is not the case. The result is commercial entities with a high PageRank are filtered out.
This is fine for users looking up info about shelving, but not for user looking to buy shelving. Hence my comment on semantic context. In this case, a simple drop down of search prefixes ("I want info about...", "I want to buy...",...) that select the a particular customized search algorithm in the Google engine. This proviudes enough info to direct the user to a customized algorithm tailored for the users expected type of results. In some respects, this is what Froogle and the other google specialty searches are about, except through the front page interface. This also provides a legitimate hook into bringing blogs back into the fold without interfering other users by looking for reviews and/or user comments.
And in traditional Google fashion, Google could provide links to possible alternative searches in other semantic contexts, just like they already do with spelling and the like.
The prefix approach is only one possibility. Maybe a sentence parser would be better (if you can convince current users to convert from keyword searches).
As a moderator, the best I could do is mark it Troll or flamebait. I chose troll. Some negative moderation suggestions to slashdot:
Didn't RTFA
Misinformation
Or something... Even "Pulling out of ass" would be better.
Released:
The Sims Online (not a traditional RPG, but definately 'role' playing)
Star Wars Galaxies
Incoming:
The Matrix Online
City of Heroes
Tony Hawk Underground
I'm sure there are more. This is just off the top of my head.
It seems to me, the article author is already too narrow in his definition of what a RPG if he can't consider The Sims Online (which he must have heard of) or Tony Hawk Underground.
I wish it was true, but the "Director's Seating" is still a 100+ seat theater. Certainly comfy (reclining leather seats), and a way to avoid the teenagers, yet not even close to worth the price. However, if you happen to get a free admission ticket (I did for a movie delayed by technical difficulties), there is no surcharge to the Director's seating.
Others have said it elsewhere in this article. You can drop 20-30 buck for a years worth. (Monthly isn't worth it; 5-6/month becomes 60-72$ per year!)
I've used mail.com for three or four years now with much success. It was great for my Europe trip and other times when I didn't have my laptop with me.
Others have mentioned domain hosts that offer similar services, but then you're also paying nearly as much for the domain. Regarding that issue, you can look to your local community domain. For Los Angeles, I only pay one time fees (8$?) to update the registry database, which is rare after the initial setup. With domains, the biggest bonus is the number of mail boxes you can set up to help filter out unwanted mail.
To all those recommending google, since when does google have a good-ometer? It gives you hints, and might even come up with a list of all MUD clients available, but usually it is the product/project pages and not reviews.
As for freshmeat and version tracker, yes they have ratings, and for that they are good place to start. But when you get to niche software like this, the best place is to ask the community surrounding the niche.
While slashdot readers do overlap, you best answers will be from more focused mailing list (or, in this case, those you meet in the MUDs). The same could be said of most Ask Slashdot questions. But, then again, if we did that, we'd never ask slashdot dot.
If you're going to reply "ask google" to every "ask slashdot", then please just edit your slashdot profile to ignore the section. We don't need your comments or your moderations.
I don't see how you expect the slashdot communicty to by knowledgable about a device that isn't even out. From their store, they claim it is due out on Tuesday (30th Sept.).
INSPIRATION: "I drink an obscene amount of coffee and spend way too much time on a computer. After breaking my third coffeemaker in one year, I decided to combine the two."
Slashdot Mirror
But it is just 0.0001 and 0.00001, in binary.
Of course a base 12 system would help on the 1/12 and 1/5280s:
1/12 dec = 0.1 duodecimal
1/16 dec = 0.09
1/32 dec = 0.4223
1/5280 dec = Doh! Where'd that factor 5 come from?
Anm
Hey!! I know those guys!! At least I met two of those three back when they worked at Marimba, the Java based software/content distribution tool (good design behind the product, were it not for the adherence to a non-standard GUI (Bongo), even after Swing finally came out). And before that, worked at Sun developing much of the original Java APIs. If you look through the Java sources, you can still find several references to @author Arthur van Hoff.
Anm
I don't know what the previous author's experience, but I've never heard of serious side effects. I've been on them off and on. It takes weeks to a month for them to take effect. In my case, the effect was so subtle that I barely noticed the good. Thus the need for a jounral and therapist to make me aware of day-to-day successes occuring over longer periods. I've been on two SSRI, both with the same effects. That said, I stopped last summer only to fall back into the pits of darkness.
Anm
On the day I just threw out a pile of game boxes stacked to my waist, I say good riddance. It just marketing trinkets that don't add to the game. Did anyone actually put on the head band pictured every time they decided to play Moebius?
Now don't get me wrong. I like a good manual, and I appreciate a well designed tech-tree poster or map. These things enhance game play by adding what amounts to a second screen for cheap. But most of the things mentioned are so useless they are forgotten about by the second day of game play.
Anm
Let me get this straight:
You are married (I assume from having a daughter), and your wife still allows you not just one, but four 24/7 computers in the bedroom? Sound like the bigger home fund is getting ignored for the computer/tech fund.
Anm
Is anyone else disturbed by all that talk of tieing down dollies and banging dollies.
Just to calm you down, it dolly rented with a Uhaul truck.
Anm
Wow, you must get a lot of job offers with that on your resume!!
The "understanding" of the game is broken into two parts. First, the legal sequence of board states, and thus turn-based nature of the game is written into the state selection mechanism (hence before any neural net evaluation) of the A* algorithm. The more qualitative state of a given board are what the neural net "understands", albeit not in any easily extractable form. The layered nature of a feed-forward neural net explicitly allows for "radically different [evaluations] based upon a single stone". If it didn't, the whole architecture would not work since the board positions compared often only differ by one or two squares. It's worth noting that the structure of the neural net has a lot of influence on the possible "concepts" in the neural net. In the blondie24 example, they explicitly wired nodes for every 5x5, 4x4, 3x3, and 2x2 square to allow the system to recognize spatial concepts such as corners and adjacency.
As for time evolving: Yes, it does take a while. Blondie24 took six months (24/7 on a single CPU). But in six month, it evolved the skill to occassionally beat master checkers player. It's a lot of time, but it is definitely possible. Go would take even more CPU time, but machines are cheap.
I never said either, and don't believe it either. I just made reference to an existing successful example in a strongly related field. But I do believe similar problems (exceeding wide yet finite search space with definitive win conditions) problems are well matched to the GA+NN solution. Genetic algorthims simulate searching the state space and maximize the use of partial solutions, while neural nets provide quick state evaluation function that is capable of generalizing qualities of between states.
Touche.
Ugh... I can't believe people modded you up on that BS. Do you realize you arguments apply against human understanding of Go, let alone an AI's understanding of checkers (both proven to work)? Stop thinking anyone is going to consider and memoirze every possible move. That is why procedural programming does not work.
Instead, you start with a random sampling and just see how well they perform. Obviously they start bad, but the mutation process pushes the better perfromers forward.
The neural net is just a convient evaluation function that is both extremely flexible and is fairly straight forward to serialize in a genome.
Additionally, the feed forward neural nets used in the book don't store anything about future board states, let alone "a pre-stored list of the best next moves". The neural net just computes a single number, which an higher architecture inteprets as how good a board position is. Compare the evaluation numbers of a few board positions, and board after them in an A* fashion as time permits. You should be able to compare a few tens-of thousands of _significant_ board possibilities on a single processor (number out of my ass) in a minute of turn consideration. Memory is only needed to store which turn lead to what evaluation number (and maybe last calculate board position to compute possible following turns). And as I said before, the architecture is VERY easy to parallelize.
The problem here is the neural nets don't encounter a variety of end-game scenerios, and thus their performance in the end-game is critical. The book details one game where the AI that trained for 6 months lost in a series of very stupid end-game mistakes.
Anm
Not necessarily. Pick of a copy of Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI (ISBN: 058-3743638-9346720). It details how a couple of grad student wrote a genetically design neural network to play very good checkers online. Not only did the programmer not know how to play good checkers, but they were very careful to not design hints into the system.
Now, checkers is a lot simpler than go, but the possibility that it could be done is not impossible. The size of the board the number of possible and number of moves per turn would grow the problem significantly, but the students in the book worked off a single PII 400 throughout their entire project. The design detailed in the book would be very easy to distribute (the neural net evaluate each possible board position at the next turn, multiple machines could evaluate multiple boards in parallel).
Anm
Grid services, which extend SOAP based web services, does provide for this sort of subscriber model.
Check out: http://www.globus.org/ogsa/ and the globus toolkit.
Anm
Been there.. done that...
http://www.booble.com/
The market EQ stuff is small, nay tiny, because it consists of those willing to pay beyond the monthly fee. In other words, other EQ junkies.
In contrast, Linden Labs is passing Second Labs revenue on to content creators without any additional cost the average users. This dramatically increases the market for the creations. To the point of being incomparable with EQ.
Not mention, as many times in previous stories, Second Lifers are real content creators, not just stat pushers.
Anm
I would think that it would easy enough to send a spider to the referrer page and search for the referred page. If you don't find it, delete it from the log. In fact, you wouldn't even need the spider because the link should be the exact page anyway.
This also becomes a means to maintain the blacklists other have mentioned.
Isn't this simple to do?
It seems to me that the real source of the problem is in an assumption by Google, and most other search engines, that they can provide a purely string based search without any semantic context.
...) that select the a particular customized search algorithm in the Google engine. This proviudes enough info to direct the user to a customized algorithm tailored for the users expected type of results. In some respects, this is what Froogle and the other google specialty searches are about, except through the front page interface. This also provides a legitimate hook into bringing blogs back into the fold without interfering other users by looking for reviews and/or user comments.
For the issue at hand, the new filtered results implicitly assume no site can legitimately grab too many links above some threshold for non-trademarked words. But in the case of a shelving provider being referenced as "shelving" (as exampled in the second article), that is not the case. The result is commercial entities with a high PageRank are filtered out.
This is fine for users looking up info about shelving, but not for user looking to buy shelving. Hence my comment on semantic context. In this case, a simple drop down of search prefixes ("I want info about...", "I want to buy...",
And in traditional Google fashion, Google could provide links to possible alternative searches in other semantic contexts, just like they already do with spelling and the like.
The prefix approach is only one possibility. Maybe a sentence parser would be better (if you can convince current users to convert from keyword searches).
Ughh.... edit preview edit (no-preview) submit => still bad HTML.
Sorry all, but the links are valid.
Up in Los Angeles, I have similar interests in what is going on. Here are some links...
Broad overview by the National forest Service
Excellent PDF of California, updated more than daily
Satellite imagery (Forest Service, very amazing)
More satellite imagery (NOAA, false colored with fires highlighted)
National Interagency Fire Centers wildfire reports
Interactive (zoomable) airspace restrictions map
And this is just the tip of the iceberg/what I happened to bookmark.
Anm
As a moderator, the best I could do is mark it Troll or flamebait. I chose troll. Some negative moderation suggestions to slashdot:
Didn't RTFA
Misinformation
Or something... Even "Pulling out of ass" would be better.
Anm
Released:
The Sims Online (not a traditional RPG, but definately 'role' playing)
Star Wars Galaxies
Incoming:
The Matrix Online
City of Heroes
Tony Hawk Underground
I'm sure there are more. This is just off the top of my head.
It seems to me, the article author is already too narrow in his definition of what a RPG if he can't consider The Sims Online (which he must have heard of) or Tony Hawk Underground.
I wish it was true, but the "Director's Seating" is still a 100+ seat theater. Certainly comfy (reclining leather seats), and a way to avoid the teenagers, yet not even close to worth the price. However, if you happen to get a free admission ticket (I did for a movie delayed by technical difficulties), there is no surcharge to the Director's seating.
More info: The Bridge
(Obviously I do patronize this place, as one of the best theaters in LA. Quite an honor for a movie town. Besides, it only a few miles from work)
Others have said it elsewhere in this article. You can drop 20-30 buck for a years worth. (Monthly isn't worth it; 5-6/month becomes 60-72$ per year!)
I've used mail.com for three or four years now with much success. It was great for my Europe trip and other times when I didn't have my laptop with me.
Others have mentioned domain hosts that offer similar services, but then you're also paying nearly as much for the domain. Regarding that issue, you can look to your local community domain. For Los Angeles, I only pay one time fees (8$?) to update the registry database, which is rare after the initial setup. With domains, the biggest bonus is the number of mail boxes you can set up to help filter out unwanted mail.
Anm
Yes, I understand this. This is exactly why you get the product pages rather than the reviews.
To all those recommending google, since when does google have a good-ometer? It gives you hints, and might even come up with a list of all MUD clients available, but usually it is the product/project pages and not reviews.
As for freshmeat and version tracker, yes they have ratings, and for that they are good place to start. But when you get to niche software like this, the best place is to ask the community surrounding the niche.
While slashdot readers do overlap, you best answers will be from more focused mailing list (or, in this case, those you meet in the MUDs). The same could be said of most Ask Slashdot questions. But, then again, if we did that, we'd never ask slashdot dot.
If you're going to reply "ask google" to every "ask slashdot", then please just edit your slashdot profile to ignore the section. We don't need your comments or your moderations.
Anm
I don't see how you expect the slashdot communicty to by knowledgable about a device that isn't even out. From their store, they claim it is due out on Tuesday (30th Sept.).
Anm
For those of you who might have missed the reference to Philip K. Dick, the short story that became Total Recall was entitled...
We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale
And how much will the forth cost to replace?