For example, tic-tac-toe can be easily proven to have this type of solution, and chess might has well.
Well, that cinches it, everyone knows if you try to get a computer to play Tic-Tac-Toe against itself it will overload and shutdown, thus averting nuclear war.
In a story long long ago on Slashdot, this topic came up, and here was one interesting reply. Apologies to RobertFisher for reposting this without permission.
Re:Hardware (Score:2)
by RobertFisher on Thursday January 17, @11:43PM (#2860138)
(User #21116 Info | http://astron.berkeley.edu/~bobf) While I agree that this is strictly true, the hardware used does not vary dramatically -- most every one is a 1 GHz - 2 GHz machine. Considering that the branching in the tree of game possibilities is a combinatoral explosion, the differences in hardware alone will not allow researchers to explore to a significantly greater depth. The main problem in computational chess playing is not so much in the brute force with which you can explore the tree, but in how one prunes a branch when the option starts looking unpromising. That is really an algorithmic question, and I would be willing to bet that the best algorithm will in fact win in a competition of this sort. It is a bit analogous to taking two comparable, but unequal hardware machines, and running bubble sort on one, and quick sort on the other. Quick sort will always win, hands down, because it is the far superior algorithm. What did surprise me was that there were no parallel machines on the list -- not even an SMP. I do think that with enough processors and a reasonably sophisticated algorithm, an amateur team could in fact stand to beat a more sophisticated algorithm. But that isn't the case here. Bob
It has to be either accepted or taught in schools to children at an early age that these practices are not ok.
In other words, brainwashing and indoctrination at a young age, to protect commercial interests... hmm where have I see that before... Oh yeah... that great work, that is now in the public domain, and I will quote large sections of here.
INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.
The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in.
"Set out the books," he said curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
"Now bring in the children."
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
"Put them down on the floor."
The infants were unloaded.
"Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books."
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. "Excellent!" he said. "It might almost have been done on purpose."
The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, "Watch carefully," he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
"And now," the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), "now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock."
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever.
The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
"We can electrify that whole strip of floor," bawled the Director in explanation. "But that's enough," he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
"Offer them the flowers and the books again."
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily- coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
"Observe," said the Director triumphantly, "observe."
http://somaweb.org/w/sub/Brave%20New%20World%20f ul ltext.html
You didn't read the article, and you really don't know anything about this whole thing, do you?
Echostar is a major stockholder in Starband, and they comitted fraud by entering into an agreement with Starband, and then backing out after they got what they could.
The Echostar agreement was that Echostar would sell starband bundled with Dish network packages, and then in Febuary, they were supposed to turn the accounts over the Starband, so that Starband could actually get some revenue. They never turned the accounts over, because they are interested in buying Hughes, which will come with its own satellite Internet, free from pesky things like having to compensate someone you were in a contract with.
Starband filed a suit against Echostar, but when they failed to get an injunctive order to get the accounts, they withdrew the suit. Starband was fucked over by Echostar through deception and fraud. Objectivism does not support fraud and deception, so your drivel is totally baseless.
I have only lose satellite contact when it is really really pouring, like NWS Severe Storm Warning type weather. Of course the power usually gets flaky from the resulting lightning of the storm, so I'm not usually trying to hard to use the Internet anyway.
P2P isn't banned, it just doesn't work very well. OpenNap servers work well though.
It has to do with upstream bandwidth only being about 64kbits/sec. You can't do P2P very well with such a limited upstream.
You get a full, uncensored, unlimited, usenet feed though, and to me, that more than makes up for it.
Starband is not something to get if you want to do any serving or uploading. It is primarily a download-only broadband solution, just like all other consumer satellite products. The advantage is that Starband doesn't tie up your phoneline for the upstream like others do.
You could do it the legal way and get a Starband installer cert, it's not hard, and it will make sure you don't blow away satellite TV for the whole eastern seaboard. Some guy with an RV got a starband installer cert for that same reason.
As a side note, you can still do all this if you are so inclined. They are still selling Starband, and this message is being posted from it.
Great reply. I actually submitted it twice, my first submission was a rather long one, explaining "Starband satellite internet service" and their relationship with Echostar, which is why they are in bankruptcy, but it was before they filed Ch11, it was a week before when they asked the judge for an injunction against Echostar, which was denied. (Apparently they just filed the suit to see if they could get the injunction, and didn't plan to carry through on it)
I then tried to shorten it, once they filed Ch11. I didn't mention a lot of unrelated open-souce programs, so that is probably what happened.
EchoStar: Entered into marketing agreement with Starband and owns 30% of stock. Failed to perform on marketing agreement (which was to sell starband bundled with Dish Network collect the payments for a while, and then turn over the accounts to Starband in Feburary). Their failure to perform on this agreement has driven Starband into bandruptcy, because Starband does not know who to bill for their service, and thus, has basically zero revenue.
Echostar wants to kill Starband, because they are trying to buy Hughes, who owns DirectTV and has their own Satellite Internet product, which would make Echostar a lot more money than their arrangement with Starband does.
Echostar held several board seats at Starband, until they got interested in buying Hughes.
Other major shareholders: Gilat - Provides the satellite network and services. Don't know if there is any sleezy goings on here.
Microsoft - Apparently pressured Starband into not allowing open source developers access to the protocols needed to build anything other than a Windows client for Starband. Starband is very Linux friendly, they even will provide the software you need to do Internet connection sharing, so that you can use Starband with non-MS computers, but they refuse to release the specs, for suspicious reasons.
Starband has nothing to lose by ditching the scum that makes up it's major shareholders.
How could you possibly get meaningful marketing data from that game, other than the names and addresses? People are going to buy what they think will be popular, not what they like.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there's some of that good Libertarianism leaking out of you, Dan. We could really get along, as long as MSFT doesn't come up in conversation. :)
I know you're all thinking - "why don't you just sync your PDA to a PC and THEN print out labels..."
No, I'm thinking "Why don't you carry around a little notebook full of labels, and write their address directly on the label in the first place."
Battery lasts for about three weeks under heavy usage.
Man, they have that today, it just weighs about 80 pounds, and you have to keep track of that suitcase of lead acid batteries.
This is the same old troll, it's the same line of thinking, "Why spend money on this when there are starving kids still out there".
Surprising a moderator fell for it.
For example, tic-tac-toe can be easily proven to have this type of solution, and chess might has well.
Well, that cinches it, everyone knows if you try to get a computer to play Tic-Tac-Toe against itself it will overload and shutdown, thus averting nuclear war.
In a story long long ago on Slashdot, this topic came up, and here was one interesting reply. Apologies to RobertFisher for reposting this without permission.
Re:Hardware (Score:2)
by RobertFisher on Thursday January 17, @11:43PM (#2860138)
(User #21116 Info | http://astron.berkeley.edu/~bobf)
While I agree that this is strictly true, the hardware used does not vary dramatically -- most every one is a 1 GHz - 2 GHz machine. Considering that the branching in the tree of game possibilities is a combinatoral explosion, the differences in hardware alone will not allow researchers to explore to a significantly greater depth.
The main problem in computational chess playing is not so much in the brute force with which you can explore the tree, but in how one prunes a branch when the option starts looking unpromising. That is really an algorithmic question, and I would be willing to bet that the best algorithm will in fact win in a competition of this sort. It is a bit analogous to taking two comparable, but unequal hardware machines, and running bubble sort on one, and quick sort on the other. Quick sort will always win, hands down, because it is the far superior algorithm.
What did surprise me was that there were no parallel machines on the list -- not even an SMP. I do think that with enough processors and a reasonably sophisticated algorithm, an amateur team could in fact stand to beat a more sophisticated algorithm. But that isn't the case here.
Bob
The people that blindly spread urban myths really do only use 10% of their brain, which ironically makes it true, at least for them.
It has to be either accepted or taught in schools to children at an early age that these practices are not ok.
f ul ltext.html
In other words, brainwashing and indoctrination at a young age, to protect commercial interests... hmm where have I see that before... Oh yeah... that great work, that is now in the public domain, and I will quote large sections of here.
INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.
The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.
The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in.
"Set out the books," he said curtly.
In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.
"Now bring in the children."
They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.
"Put them down on the floor."
The infants were unloaded.
"Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books."
Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
The Director rubbed his hands. "Excellent!" he said. "It might almost have been done on purpose."
The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, "Watch carefully," he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal.
The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.
There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.
"And now," the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), "now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock."
He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever.
The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.
"We can electrify that whole strip of floor," bawled the Director in explanation. "But that's enough," he signalled to the nurse.
The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.
"Offer them the flowers and the books again."
The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily- coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
"Observe," said the Director triumphantly, "observe."
http://somaweb.org/w/sub/Brave%20New%20World%20
The sad thing is that I could have bought about 20 PETs from this guy who won some surplus auction, for $100 in 1996.
I passed them up and got the IBM PC/XT/286s instead, and sold them at the flea market to make my money back.
If I had bought those PETs and sold them today on eBay, they would have gotten several hundred dollars a piece.
The C64 was just as fast to the READY prompt. It was loading anything off the slow ass 1541 that took forever.
I guess mp3.com and epitonic.com and the like aren't nationwide?
...or maybe they just think an open source driver is a good way to spam a million ads on your screen every time you go onto the web.
:)
Have you been to weather.com lately?
SmithsoniaN
I could deal with one person getting it wrong, but two is too many.
Cycorp... Is that pronounced like psi-core?
Interesting, very interesting.
-Captain John Sheridan
The auction listing refers to one repaired section, involving the armrest. This seems to correspond to your experience. This is the real deal.
FOX news is just using this as a play for credibility I'm sure.
FOX News Manager: Is there anyone that screws up as bad as we do?
Reporter: Well this China newspaper reported a parody story as true...
Manager: That's great! It'll make us look like a real news outlet compared to them, lets milk this like a presidential scandal.
Reporter: I'm on it. I think I'll interview random Slashdotters first.
What the fuck.
You didn't read the article, and you really don't know anything about this whole thing, do you?
Echostar is a major stockholder in Starband, and they comitted fraud by entering into an agreement with Starband, and then backing out after they got what they could.
The Echostar agreement was that Echostar would sell starband bundled with Dish network packages, and then in Febuary, they were supposed to turn the accounts over the Starband, so that Starband could actually get some revenue. They never turned the accounts over, because they are interested in buying Hughes, which will come with its own satellite Internet, free from pesky things like having to compensate someone you were in a contract with.
Starband filed a suit against Echostar, but when they failed to get an injunctive order to get the accounts, they withdrew the suit. Starband was fucked over by Echostar through deception and fraud. Objectivism does not support fraud and deception, so your drivel is totally baseless.
I have only lose satellite contact when it is really really pouring, like NWS Severe Storm Warning type weather. Of course the power usually gets flaky from the resulting lightning of the storm, so I'm not usually trying to hard to use the Internet anyway.
P2P isn't banned, it just doesn't work very well. OpenNap servers work well though.
It has to do with upstream bandwidth only being about 64kbits/sec. You can't do P2P very well with such a limited upstream.
You get a full, uncensored, unlimited, usenet feed though, and to me, that more than makes up for it.
Starband is not something to get if you want to do any serving or uploading. It is primarily a download-only broadband solution, just like all other consumer satellite products. The advantage is that Starband doesn't tie up your phoneline for the upstream like others do.
You could do it the legal way and get a Starband installer cert, it's not hard, and it will make sure you don't blow away satellite TV for the whole eastern seaboard. Some guy with an RV got a starband installer cert for that same reason.
As a side note, you can still do all this if you are so inclined. They are still selling Starband, and this message is being posted from it.
Haha.
Great reply. I actually submitted it twice, my first submission was a rather long one, explaining "Starband satellite internet service" and their relationship with Echostar, which is why they are in bankruptcy, but it was before they filed Ch11, it was a week before when they asked the judge for an injunction against Echostar, which was denied. (Apparently they just filed the suit to see if they could get the injunction, and didn't plan to carry through on it)
I then tried to shorten it, once they filed Ch11. I didn't mention a lot of unrelated open-souce programs, so that is probably what happened.
Major Shareholders:
EchoStar: Entered into marketing agreement with Starband and owns 30% of stock. Failed to perform on marketing agreement (which was to sell starband bundled with Dish Network collect the payments for a while, and then turn over the accounts to Starband in Feburary). Their failure to perform on this agreement has driven Starband into bandruptcy, because Starband does not know who to bill for their service, and thus, has basically zero revenue.
Echostar wants to kill Starband, because they are trying to buy Hughes, who owns DirectTV and has their own Satellite Internet product, which would make Echostar a lot more money than their arrangement with Starband does.
Echostar held several board seats at Starband, until they got interested in buying Hughes.
Other major shareholders:
Gilat - Provides the satellite network and services. Don't know if there is any sleezy goings on here.
Microsoft - Apparently pressured Starband into not allowing open source developers access to the protocols needed to build anything other than a Windows client for Starband. Starband is very Linux friendly, they even will provide the software you need to do Internet connection sharing, so that you can use Starband with non-MS computers, but they refuse to release the specs, for suspicious reasons.
Starband has nothing to lose by ditching the scum that makes up it's major shareholders.
2002-06-02 12:46:12 Starband files Chapter 11 (articles,news)(rejected)
News for nerds, stuff that's at least two weeks old.
How could you possibly get meaningful marketing data from that game, other than the names and addresses? People are going to buy what they think will be popular, not what they like.
The traditional form of that sig uses Solaris ping:
$ping god
god is dead
$