You meant "thoroughbred". The thunderbird athlons are older that the XP line that started with the "palominos", IIRC. The thunderbirds were clocked up to 1.4Ghz.
It is funny how people always try to use a linear formula to objectively quantify the quality of things. In a way it is understandable: linear systems are very simple to understand and manipulate mathematically. Unfortunately, sometimes no amount of added terms or tweaking of the coefficients will make it work. Many things are essentially nonlinear and typically, quality is one of them. I remember that in the first engineering lecture I listened to, the professor said:
"Quality means user satisfaction, and in a multicomponent system it is not the average of the quality of the individual components. The overall quality is pretty much associated with the quality of the worst component."
Linear formulas tend not to capture that. A geometric mean could, and it is also simple.
Since desktop computers can suck hundreds of Watts from the outlet to drive powerful CPUs that can execute bloated applications at a reasonable speed, programmers have become very sloppy. In a portable device that is no longer possible. Maybe this will expand a job market for people who know how to run efficient code.
You made a very good point, indeed. However, the terminology you used is not accurate. The entropy of the file does not change after you shuffle the characters (I am assuming a file is a sequence of symbols we call characters). The entropy, as Shannon defined it (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Entropy.html), depends on the relative frequence of each symbol.
111111000000, 101010101010, 100101101100
have all the same entropy and if you compress them using Huffman's algorithm you should get the same length.
What you changed in your example is the Kolmogorov complexity, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/KolmogorovComplexity. html , and some compression algorithms will feel the difference.
I would say it depends a lot on the player. I loved playing Dungeons of Daggorath.
http://members.tripod.com/coco_docs/id19.htm
The text command interface was well thought, considering the limitations imposed by the 16KB? of ram needed. I like "complicated" games, when the complexity comes from having to achieve conflicting goals. When complexity comes from a non-ergonomic design it is another issue. I know some gamers that did not like X-Wing/Freespace etc. simulators because they have too many keys with different functions. Well, all those keys/functions are there for a reason and add "realism". Would it be easier to play a game where there is not engine/shield/weapons energy management? Sure but it would not be as interesting to me. For the same reason I think chess is more fun than tic-tac-toe. YMMV
I am a CS major and about once a week the grad students have a small gathering with food and drinks. Usually a faculty member hosts the "Social" as we call it. This is a fragment of the mail announcing when and where one social was going be: "...and to stimulate social interaction among members".
The first time I read it I understood: "...and to simulate social interaction among members".
Really, how accurate can the estimation be? You can try to get as many statistics as you want, you can model the job market using the best mathematical tools and then what. The next war/liberation/terrorist attack/corporate fraud scandal/change in fiscal policies/inmigration or tax regulations will make all your wonderful computations be ridiculously wrong.
That's my opinion of course. Any experts around? Can anybody point at an article written 7 years ago that predicts the end of the bubble?
My $0.02
Re:I'm for the war... but..
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
This has been said many times but here we go again. Given the nature of chess it is not hard to see that there exist a perfect way of playing and if two perfect players meet the outcame will be always the same. This means: white will always win or black will always win or the game will be always a draw.
AFAIK nowbody has proved which one of the three cases is the answer. Having only ties is a reasonable conjecture, but it does not seem far more possible than the other two.
> Don't expect a computer to ever win a blitz > match, because computer's just don't have the > insight to play well in those circumstances, > which is where human innovation shows through.
That was strange. I would expect computers to become almost undefeatable at blitz matches in the future (10 years maybe). My reasoning is as follows: Current computers can play at the level of the best grandmasters in slow games. I am not a chess player but I guess that the ratio between the times you have to think in "slow"/"fast" games could be about 100 or something of that magnitude. If you consider Moore's law+better clustering+algorithm improvements it is concievable that computers in the future will make moves that are as strong as those made today in "slow" games BUT at blitz match rate. A performace improvement of a factor of 100 is not an impossible jump. I still remember my 486 computer running at 33Mhz and now a P4 can almost do 3Ghz (I know Mhz!=performace don't flame me).
It is hard for me to believe that in about 10 years blitz match players will make moves as strong as current best grandmaster's when they have lots of time to think!. QED:)
FYI integer factoring is trivially in NP. Just
give me the factors as certificate and I can multiply them quickly to verify they are the right
ones. What we don't know is if factoring is NP
complete or not. It could be in P or could be somewhere in the middle of P and NP-complete or
maybe is NP complete.As a professor said it is a
"serious state of ignorance".
What we know for sure is: breaking RSA cannot be
harder than factoring. It could be easier but
nobody knows how to solve it. We also know factorization is not harder that NP complete problems.P=NP would mean breaking RSA is in P.
I could not agree more on this, but I will try to
put your opinion in more explicit terms.
There are some well known very secure cryptosystems out there. Implementing them is VERY easy. Any competent programmer can do it. Disallowing encrypted traffic thru the net is impossible or at least insanely hard. Even if the structure of the internet were completely changed, so you could use only a well known services and you were limited to "official" protocols you could use covert channels. Modulating information is EASY. Option bits in packets, delay between packets, checksums, IP addresses... almost anything can represent a string of bits. Using very draconian measures in the net you may limit the banwidth of this covert channels a lot, but such a network would be so damn rigid, inefficient and expensive that the entire US economy would suffer it.
I believe most people involved in the poll is absolutely uneware of these facts.
FYI, I am a computer scientist and I work with two experts in cryptography (although it's not my field of research)
And you cannot take a mule out of the country unless the army authorizes you to do so. It's not a joke, there is such a law. Nobody cares about it anyway.
Thanks for posting all definitions. They were quite precise and it's a good thing. However, IMHO, there is a small mistake in your post. Proving NP=P would imply that you can break RSA in polynomial time. It goes this way.
RSA relies on intractability of factoring a product of two big prime numbers. If you can do it fast then the rest of the breaking is straightforward. Maybe there is a more involved approach but it does not matter here. The factorization problem I described is clearly in NP. The certificate is just the pair of prime numbers. If P turns out to be the same as NP then
you can for sure do the factorization in polytime and the rest of the procedure is also "fast" so the overall running time is polynomial.
Just before someone complains, my reasoning does not depend on the factorization problem being NP-complete (nobody knows that BTW). Just being in NP is all we need.
Another interesting point is that RSA could be broken in polynomial time EVEN if P!=NP. This is
because breaking RSA could be not NP-complete. We just don't have a decent lower bound for its complexity.
Re:In practice, useful NP hard problems can be sol
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
As far as I can remember, nobody has proved that
Graph isomorphism problem is NP-hard. It is
trivially in NP but that's a different thing.
Actually many researchers think that graph iso-
morphism can be solved in polytime. This means
it would in P. This is a conjecture however.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not just fly the other drection and stay in the sunlight?
:)
1- You cannot fly fast enough. (as many other posters said)
2- If you are thinking about enjoying a longer day, consider that you will also suffer a longer night
Just nitpicking:
You meant "thoroughbred". The thunderbird athlons are older that the XP line that started with the "palominos", IIRC. The thunderbirds were clocked up to 1.4Ghz.
http://www.pricewatch.com/ ?
Or just google for "How to prove it"
"Quality means user satisfaction, and in a multicomponent system it is not the average of the quality of the individual components. The overall quality is pretty much associated with the quality of the worst component."
Linear formulas tend not to capture that. A geometric mean could, and it is also simple.
Since desktop computers can suck hundreds of Watts from the outlet to drive powerful CPUs that can execute bloated applications at a reasonable speed, programmers have become very sloppy. In a portable device that is no longer possible. Maybe this will expand a job market for people who know how to run efficient code.
You made a very good point, indeed. However, the terminology you used is not accurate. The entropy of the file does not change after you shuffle the characters (I am assuming a file is a sequence of symbols we call characters). The entropy, as Shannon defined it (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Entropy.html), depends on the relative frequence of each symbol.
. html , and some compression algorithms will feel the difference.
111111000000, 101010101010, 100101101100
have all the same entropy and if you compress them using Huffman's algorithm you should get the same length.
What you changed in your example is the Kolmogorov
complexity, http://mathworld.wolfram.com/KolmogorovComplexity
I would say it depends a lot on the player. I loved playing Dungeons of Daggorath.
http://members.tripod.com/coco_docs/id19.htm
The text command interface was well thought, considering the limitations imposed by the 16KB? of ram needed. I like "complicated" games, when the complexity comes from having to achieve conflicting goals. When complexity comes from a non-ergonomic design it is another issue. I know some gamers that did not like X-Wing/Freespace etc. simulators because they have too many keys with different functions. Well, all those keys/functions are there for a reason and add "realism". Would it be easier to play a game where there is not engine/shield/weapons energy management? Sure but it would not be as interesting to me. For the same reason I think chess is more fun than tic-tac-toe. YMMV
I am a CS major and about once a week the grad students have a small gathering with food and drinks. Usually a faculty member hosts the "Social" as we call it. This is a fragment of the mail announcing when and where one social was going be:
:)
"...and to stimulate social interaction among members".
The first time I read it I understood:
"...and to simulate social interaction among members".
I gotta get a life
That's my opinion of course. Any experts around? Can anybody point at an article written 7 years ago that predicts the end of the bubble?
My $0.02
Don't be impatient. We are getting there.
This has been said many times but here we go again. Given the nature of chess it is not hard to see that there exist a perfect way of playing and if two perfect players meet the outcame will be always the same. This means: white will always win or black will always win or the game will be always a draw.
AFAIK nowbody has proved which one of the three cases is the answer. Having only ties is a reasonable conjecture, but it does not seem far more possible than the other two.
> Don't expect a computer to ever win a blitz
:)
> match, because computer's just don't have the
> insight to play well in those circumstances,
> which is where human innovation shows through.
That was strange. I would expect computers to become almost undefeatable at blitz matches in the future (10 years maybe). My reasoning is as follows: Current computers can play at the level of the best grandmasters in slow games. I am not a chess player but I guess that the ratio between the times you have to think in "slow"/"fast" games could be about 100 or something of that magnitude. If you consider Moore's law+better clustering+algorithm improvements it is concievable that computers in the future will make moves that are as strong as those made today in "slow" games BUT at blitz match rate. A performace improvement of a factor of 100 is not an impossible jump. I still remember my 486 computer running at 33Mhz and now a P4 can almost do 3Ghz (I know Mhz!=performace don't flame me).
It is hard for me to believe that in about 10 years blitz match players will make moves as strong as current best grandmaster's when they have lots of time to think!. QED
give me the factors as certificate and I can multiply them quickly to verify they are the right
ones. What we don't know is if factoring is NP
complete or not. It could be in P or could be somewhere in the middle of P and NP-complete or
maybe is NP complete.As a professor said it is a
"serious state of ignorance".
What we know for sure is: breaking RSA cannot be
harder than factoring. It could be easier but
nobody knows how to solve it. We also know factorization is not harder that NP complete problems.P=NP would mean breaking RSA is in P.
There are some well known very secure cryptosystems out there. Implementing them is VERY easy. Any competent programmer can do it. Disallowing encrypted traffic thru the net is impossible or at least insanely hard. Even if the structure of the internet were completely changed, so you could use only a well known services and you were limited to "official" protocols you could use covert channels. Modulating information is EASY. Option bits in packets, delay between packets, checksums, IP addresses... almost anything can represent a string of bits. Using very draconian measures in the net you may limit the banwidth of this covert channels a lot, but such a network would be so damn rigid, inefficient and expensive that the entire US economy would suffer it.
I believe most people involved in the poll is absolutely uneware of these facts.
FYI, I am a computer scientist and I work with two experts in cryptography (although it's not my field of research)
And you cannot take a mule out of the country unless the army authorizes you to do so. It's not a joke, there is such a law. Nobody cares about it anyway.
Thanks for posting all definitions. They were quite precise and it's a good thing. However, IMHO, there is a small mistake in your post. Proving NP=P would imply that you can break RSA in polynomial time. It goes this way. RSA relies on intractability of factoring a product of two big prime numbers. If you can do it fast then the rest of the breaking is straightforward. Maybe there is a more involved approach but it does not matter here. The factorization problem I described is clearly in NP. The certificate is just the pair of prime numbers. If P turns out to be the same as NP then you can for sure do the factorization in polytime and the rest of the procedure is also "fast" so the overall running time is polynomial. Just before someone complains, my reasoning does not depend on the factorization problem being NP-complete (nobody knows that BTW). Just being in NP is all we need. Another interesting point is that RSA could be broken in polynomial time EVEN if P!=NP. This is because breaking RSA could be not NP-complete. We just don't have a decent lower bound for its complexity.
As far as I can remember, nobody has proved that Graph isomorphism problem is NP-hard. It is trivially in NP but that's a different thing. Actually many researchers think that graph iso- morphism can be solved in polytime. This means it would in P. This is a conjecture however.