I am not a great fan of MDI in general, but it really works in a browser. If the windows had polluted my taskbar instead, I would have a much harder time navigating. Different pages are not, philosophically, different apps and thus should be grouped somewhere else and in a more specialized way than on my taskbar. More importantly, the resources used are much more conservative. This was the reason why Opera beat IE hands down on Win. The windows in a non-MDI app, for some reason, hogs more of my resources. I have not made the same tests on Linux, but my guess is that the memory consumption of ten mozilla windows running amok on my desktop would not be pretty.
I do realize the benefits of Konqueror as a file manager, but what is a browser doing managing files in the first place?
I have no intention of starting a browser war here. Konqueror is an OK browser.
I never understood what the/. fetish with Mozilla is about, though. To me it just looks ugly and far behind the competition in features, not really a small footprint or lightning fast rendering either. Are there any hidden features that I have missed? Guile-scriptability?
Neverthless, let us get real here. Nothing compares to Opera. This is a browser that kicked IE's ass so badly already a few years ago, that those who knew about it changed their windows-browser, even with the hassle involved (had to find serialz for it back then;). It is the _only_ non-Open Source app that I am currently running (I don't even have a working win-partition anymore). It has a slick download manager, stunning support for keyboard-browsing, plenty of configurability, built-in google bar (of sorts) and most important of all, the browser windows are displayed as children within the same MDI-app. I currently have 10 browser children open, just because it is so convenient. In spite of my Opera zeal, it would seem that Konqueror would be comparable if only it had the MDI-feature. How come no Open Source team takes that path?
There is nothing strange about sqrt of NOT, except its name. They could just have called it something completely mundande, but where would the fun be in that? Think of it as a range of probabilities from NOT^0 to NOT^1. A completely mixed state of 50% 0 and 50% 1 would hence be accomplished by the application of NOT^0.5 to a completely determined state. In reality this can be accomplished in many different ways.
The only crazy thing about quantum computing is the implications from a many-worlds interpretation point of view. What is actually happening is that an exponentially rising quantity of universa collaborates and shares the results! Sort of the Open Source of physics.
A lot of people seems to be overlooking that this is not "just" GP. It is GP with a feedback loop unto itself. Now, the difficult thing with this is: How do you make a fitness-function that measures how good your program is at improving itself? This is a damn hard problem, which the page does not even try to explain. But since the notion of "Seed-AI", as Eliezer
would call it, is so tantalizing, there are more and more people trying to accomplish it.
I have done some work on how to solve it, on the swedish University of Chalmers. An overview of how we think it can be solved, using some concepts from information theory (together with a small introduction to strong AI in general), can be found here.
Please mail me if you have any thoughts/comments regarding the text in the previous link.
I have seen this before...
I honestly thought that those who posted it did it so we all could get a hearty laugh at the poor analysis ability of some army redneck.
I am sure that the "pacifists" in this case would not mind kicking your ass, calling the police or whatever. What they would mind is getting so frustrated when you run away and hide, that they go and torch the entire apartment building in the ghetto where you live, hoping to get at you, while not caring about the other people who live there. NOBODY ever said "Let us forget this whole thing, smoke some peace pot and not bring the guilty (but only those) to justice".
Civilians will most likely be hurt badly by these bombings. For example, an estimated 500 000 children died in Iraq, because of the post-war embargo... But then again... Perhaps the international effort will actually help the people of Afghanistan. This is ultimately what we all want, right? Imagine being terrorized by the Taliban daily. WTC was small stuff compared to that.
Oh great... Now we have another mysterium. Is Miguel Greengard, the legendary commentator, really reading Slashdot (and posting without somebody modding him up)? Or is it some elaborate hoaxer with a Mig-AI...
OK, I have been competing in chess for most of my life, so I am a pretty decent player (not a GM or anything). Most of the comments here have clearly been by patzers. Here comes my take on the whole thing.
I played through the alleged Fisher-games against the IMs (unfortunately Short's games are nowhere to be found), I also read the full Google Groups article that someone posted.
The opening moves that "Fischer" used are not a "secret weapon" that he has been working on all these years. They are simply designed to give the opponent an advantage. They are also absurd enough to give quite the psychological advantage if your oponent does not exploit them. Psychology is important in chess. More than most players realize. If you get your ass kicked from some unknown guy who plays such an opening, you are going to be unsure of yourself and play much, much weaker than when you are on a streak. (see for example Kasparov vs Deep Blue)
A computers are notoriously good at shorter timelimits (programmers reading this ought to understand why throwing more time at an exponential problem leads to marginal increase in playing strength). This could very well be some bored IM or something, that is playing some weird moves in the opening and then uses the computer to defend super-humanly, confusing the opponent and finally winning simply because there are so much messy tactics on the board (which a computer will always like).
Fortunately there are good statistical tests, used for checking for people cheating with computers. These are based on the fact that most programs make the same moves in the same position. If Short were to show his games, they could be analyzed by the standard ICC-algorithm.
The knowledge that "Fischer" showed in the chat between the games could have been generated with fast google-searches, as has been previously stated.
However... The games against the IMs are pretty damn impressive. And 8-0 against Short?! A guy manually operating a computer would most likely be too slow to manage that. The improbable thing about this story is not that Fischer plays chess on the internet (why would he not?). The improbable thing is that he would still be that good. I know that he is an american legend, but is it humanly possible? Short gives it a 99% probability because his ego is involved, because he really wants it to be true and because he probably is not aware of how easy it is to use the internet to get information fast (such as the 1970-thing). I just don't know what to think. I think that my final verdict is that Short probably did play Fischer, but that the excitement and psychology of the strange openings made him play less well than he normally would. I cannot believe that Fischer would still be the best chess-player in the world.
Beating the tit-for-tat is easy when you are allowed to submit many entries. Submit a lot of fake progs that defect against everyone who does not reply to a specific ID string (transmitted by the early moves).
The real prog answers an ID string with something similar and voíla the fake entries becomes nice cooperators. (see my also my earlier post)
The point is not to decline playing against the other real programs, just for the fake progs to play to the best of their ability against everyone but you.
Sending ID will most likely mean making a commitment, but for long and somewhat stochastic games (which I have a feeling that we will be dealing with here), this early commitment will (hopefully) not be enough of a handicap for the fake progs. They will still get points (provided that your algorithm is any good in the first place).
The real program will only reply an ID string when it is statistically sure that its opponent is a "buddy", thus the real program gets the unfair advantage of getting a few/many easy wins that the programs made by the other contestants will not get, but sacrifices nothing. You will still need a good program to win. This is just how one could (if one were so inclined;) give it that extra boost.
Seems to me that since it is a round-robin for all contestants (the site was/.ed, but I saw another post claiming that this was the case), all you have to do is team up with a lot of friends and have them enter fake programs into the contest (i.e cheating).
These programs will start by identifying themselves with an "ID-string", consisting of, say, the first 10 replies (this can obviously be done generically even with unkown rules, just pick the moves randomly with the same seed). When my program sees this ID it replies a similar code. When the fake programs sees this, they start cooperating with my program (by playing as badly as they can muster). If the fake programs does not get this reply, they start playing as well as they can and will (since there will probably be large element of luck in each game) steal a considerable amount of points from the pool. The "real" program never risks anything since it never sends its own ID before being statistically sure that the opponent indeed is a fake.
This method was inspired by a similar trick in the famous Prisoner's dilemma game.
Everyone who uses mail has access to a browser, right? All you need to mail is a link to a webpage containing your mail (this works best if you've got your own webserver). The webpage has to be autogenerated to have, for example, a reply-link. After it is read you take it down, and anyone intercepting the mail will conceivably have a much longer reading-lag than the person you sent it to.
You all know which country Nokia is from, right?
Finland. (Finland - linux, does any connection come to mind?) Bearing this in mind, it would seem quite natural for Finlands largest company to bet some money on Linux.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion..
-- Henry David Thoreau
Slashdot Mirror
"Galaxy grey"!? Since when are galaxies grey? I suppose if you are the sort of guy that wears PDAs and mobile phones in their belt (a bit of the galaxy-coloring is visible around the buttons), things like fashion and colors tend to become a blur.
I am not a great fan of MDI in general, but it really works in a browser. If the windows had polluted my taskbar instead, I would have a much harder time navigating. Different pages are not, philosophically, different apps and thus should be grouped somewhere else and in a more specialized way than on my taskbar. More importantly, the resources used are much more conservative. This was the reason why Opera beat IE hands down on Win. The windows in a non-MDI app, for some reason, hogs more of my resources. I have not made the same tests on Linux, but my guess is that the memory consumption of ten mozilla windows running amok on my desktop would not be pretty.
I do realize the benefits of Konqueror as a file manager, but what is a browser doing managing files in the first place?
I have no intention of starting a browser war here. Konqueror is an OK browser.
/. fetish with Mozilla is about, though. To me it just looks ugly and far behind the competition in features, not really a small footprint or lightning fast rendering either. Are there any hidden features that I have missed? Guile-scriptability?
;). It is the _only_ non-Open Source app that I am currently running (I don't even have a working win-partition anymore). It has a slick download manager, stunning support for keyboard-browsing, plenty of configurability, built-in google bar (of sorts) and most important of all, the browser windows are displayed as children within the same MDI-app. I currently have 10 browser children open, just because it is so convenient. In spite of my Opera zeal, it would seem that Konqueror would be comparable if only it had the MDI-feature. How come no Open Source team takes that path?
I never understood what the
Neverthless, let us get real here. Nothing compares to Opera. This is a browser that kicked IE's ass so badly already a few years ago, that those who knew about it changed their windows-browser, even with the hassle involved (had to find serialz for it back then
The only crazy thing about quantum computing is the implications from a many-worlds interpretation point of view. What is actually happening is that an exponentially rising quantity of universa collaborates and shares the results! Sort of the Open Source of physics.
A lot of people seems to be overlooking that this is not "just" GP. It is GP with a feedback loop unto itself. Now, the difficult thing with this is: How do you make a fitness-function that measures how good your program is at improving itself? This is a damn hard problem, which the page does not even try to explain. But since the notion of "Seed-AI", as Eliezer would call it, is so tantalizing, there are more and more people trying to accomplish it.
I have done some work on how to solve it, on the swedish University of Chalmers. An overview of how we think it can be solved, using some concepts from information theory (together with a small introduction to strong AI in general), can be found here.
Please mail me if you have any thoughts/comments regarding the text in the previous link.
I have seen this before...
I honestly thought that those who posted it did it so we all could get a hearty laugh at the poor analysis ability of some army redneck.
I am sure that the "pacifists" in this case would not mind kicking your ass, calling the police or whatever. What they would mind is getting so frustrated when you run away and hide, that they go and torch the entire apartment building in the ghetto where you live, hoping to get at you, while not caring about the other people who live there. NOBODY ever said "Let us forget this whole thing, smoke some peace pot and not bring the guilty (but only those) to justice".
Civilians will most likely be hurt badly by these bombings. For example, an estimated 500 000 children died in Iraq, because of the post-war embargo... But then again... Perhaps the international effort will actually help the people of Afghanistan. This is ultimately what we all want, right? Imagine being terrorized by the Taliban daily. WTC was small stuff compared to that.
They were obviously talking between the games. Also this is sort of a famous game, since Fisher lost. A Fisher-fan would know that.
Oh great... Now we have another mysterium. Is Miguel Greengard, the legendary commentator, really reading Slashdot (and posting without somebody modding him up)? Or is it some elaborate hoaxer with a Mig-AI...
OK, I have been competing in chess for most of my life, so I am a pretty decent player (not a GM or anything). Most of the comments here have clearly been by patzers. Here comes my take on the whole thing.
I played through the alleged Fisher-games against the IMs (unfortunately Short's games are nowhere to be found), I also read the full Google Groups article that someone posted.
The opening moves that "Fischer" used are not a "secret weapon" that he has been working on all these years. They are simply designed to give the opponent an advantage. They are also absurd enough to give quite the psychological advantage if your oponent does not exploit them. Psychology is important in chess. More than most players realize. If you get your ass kicked from some unknown guy who plays such an opening, you are going to be unsure of yourself and play much, much weaker than when you are on a streak. (see for example Kasparov vs Deep Blue)
A computers are notoriously good at shorter timelimits (programmers reading this ought to understand why throwing more time at an exponential problem leads to marginal increase in playing strength). This could very well be some bored IM or something, that is playing some weird moves in the opening and then uses the computer to defend super-humanly, confusing the opponent and finally winning simply because there are so much messy tactics on the board (which a computer will always like).
Fortunately there are good statistical tests, used for checking for people cheating with computers. These are based on the fact that most programs make the same moves in the same position. If Short were to show his games, they could be analyzed by the standard ICC-algorithm.
The knowledge that "Fischer" showed in the chat between the games could have been generated with fast google-searches, as has been previously stated.
However... The games against the IMs are pretty damn impressive. And 8-0 against Short?! A guy manually operating a computer would most likely be too slow to manage that. The improbable thing about this story is not that Fischer plays chess on the internet (why would he not?). The improbable thing is that he would still be that good. I know that he is an american legend, but is it humanly possible? Short gives it a 99% probability because his ego is involved, because he really wants it to be true and because he probably is not aware of how easy it is to use the internet to get information fast (such as the 1970-thing). I just don't know what to think. I think that my final verdict is that Short probably did play Fischer, but that the excitement and psychology of the strange openings made him play less well than he normally would. I cannot believe that Fischer would still be the best chess-player in the world.
The real prog answers an ID string with something similar and voíla the fake entries becomes nice cooperators. (see my also my earlier post)
The point is not to decline playing against the other real programs, just for the fake progs to play to the best of their ability against everyone but you.
Sending ID will most likely mean making a commitment, but for long and somewhat stochastic games (which I have a feeling that we will be dealing with here), this early commitment will (hopefully) not be enough of a handicap for the fake progs. They will still get points (provided that your algorithm is any good in the first place).
The real program will only reply an ID string when it is statistically sure that its opponent is a "buddy", thus the real program gets the unfair advantage of getting a few/many easy wins that the programs made by the other contestants will not get, but sacrifices nothing. You will still need a good program to win. This is just how one could (if one were so inclined ;) give it that extra boost.
Seems to me that since it is a round-robin for all contestants (the site was /.ed, but I saw another post claiming that this was the case), all you have to do is team up with a lot of friends and have them enter fake programs into the contest (i.e cheating).
These programs will start by identifying themselves with an "ID-string", consisting of, say, the first 10 replies (this can obviously be done generically even with unkown rules, just pick the moves randomly with the same seed). When my program sees this ID it replies a similar code. When the fake programs sees this, they start cooperating with my program (by playing as badly as they can muster). If the fake programs does not get this reply, they start playing as well as they can and will (since there will probably be large element of luck in each game) steal a considerable amount of points from the pool. The "real" program never risks anything since it never sends its own ID before being statistically sure that the opponent indeed is a fake.
This method was inspired by a similar trick in the famous Prisoner's dilemma game.
Everyone who uses mail has access to a browser, right? All you need to mail is a link to a webpage containing your mail (this works best if you've got your own webserver). The webpage has to be autogenerated to have, for example, a reply-link. After it is read you take it down, and anyone intercepting the mail will conceivably have a much longer reading-lag than the person you sent it to.
You all know which country Nokia is from, right? Finland. (Finland - linux, does any connection come to mind?) Bearing this in mind, it would seem quite natural for Finlands largest company to bet some money on Linux.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion..
-- Henry David Thoreau