Not to mention that it is possible to wear fake fingertips that give you somebody else's fingerprints...
Also a problem with degraded DNA: if you find some DNA at the crime scene that codes for a person with blue eyes, that doesn't mean the blue-eyed DNA is related to the suspect, just that somebody with blue eyes had been there some time in the past...
Control the means of delivery and you control the content. We don't want students wandering aimlessly around the internet, after all, learning things like evolution and climate science.
Ok, so textbooks have DRM now, and education takes place in an MMO style arena. So where are the cheat codes? Har. Anyway it's a format most kids relate to.
Chinese citizen: I love President Obama and his wife Hillary Clinton. I got a "Clinton" at the Olympics. You Americans call that a bj if I recall correctly.
"${subject} ${verb} ${object}," said a source inside the ${CurrentPresident} ${administration} who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Yes, all that is true, but the fact is, it doesn't matter. There's no point in reducing CO2 levels. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 completely, NOW, down to 0%, no combustion of fuel AT ALL, it would still be thousands of years before CO2 levels reached pre-industrial levels. We've made our bed, now we have to sleep in it. Just get used to a radically altered ecosystem. It's too late now to fix it. We'll adapt, maybe live underground breathing taxable air. For billions of years, this is the way it has been. Hey, if the pre-Cambrian biota hadn't irrevocably polluted the atmosphere with oxygen, we wouldn't even have evolved. Tough luck for them, but we're on top now. Oh, the "conservatives" want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to preserve the status quo. Good luck with that, conservatives. It's very expensive and produces no profit that you can use to redecorate your huge Central Park West apartment.
Go is quite nice. The compiler is very fast and strict, catching many errors. It really helps to write bullet proof code. The language itself has many high level constructs, functional programming, multithreading is built in, objects, etc. The runtime catches lots of errors, too, array bounds checking, for example. It's a well thought out language that is designed to help you avoid common mistakes. Yet it also has dynamic types and other powerful features. It's pretty neat.
The big difference that makes this silly is how cheap it is to fix these problems. We've got technical solutions for all security issues, but nobody uses them. Fire the programmers who get caught writing buffer overflow vulnerabilities. This is like firing building contractors who use substandard nails. After the roof blows off it's too late. Don't let your inspectors get away with being bribed. Don't tolerate substandard work. All these problems have been solved, we just have to fire the idiots who don't use them. Liability, anyone? When a building falls down, who is responsible? God? Or the architect and building contractors? Just stop letting your engineers get away with, what we should now consider to be, criminal negligence. Seriously, storing passwords in the clear? You're fired!
Robust, mature, fast, easy to use, side-by-side with.m it wins hands down, really no comparison, use Python. Cython if you need to make it faster for the %5 of code that is too slow.
11982 can be solved with 5 free cells. I don't know about "all" of them. There are too many to check all. Certainly most. That's the kind of thing you'd need a more sophisticated proof for, since brute-force is still too slow. (patsolve can run with any number.) Another interesting question is which games can be solved with NO free cells. #164, #892, #1012, #1081, and #1150 are the first 5 that can be. There are only 207 in the first 100,000 games (using MS numbering).
The logic here is that a given solver "might have a bug" and therefore not provide a correct answer. Just throwing 5 or 8 different programs at it therefore might be suspect.
However. Freecell is really a very simple game. A computer program is very much like a mathematical proof, ask any programmer who has also written proofs. All of the solvers use optimizations to keep the search size down, but each of these optimizations is really a theorem stating that certain segments of the game tree do not have to be searched. A stronger statement would be that just one program found a given game unsolvable, and that program uses only prunes (theorems) that have been proved to be correct. I happen to know that even with only very simple prunes that are quite trivial to show to be correct, game 11982 is not solvable. The proofs I used to arrive at this conclusion have been checked by others, too. I'm not sure anybody has published a formal document anywhere, but you are welcome to look at the code.
Of course, you can win if you cheat.:-)
(Even a "mathematical" proof might be shown to be wrong, in a way that even many experts might have missed. This doesn't really apply here, though, because the game tree for 11982 is actually quite small.)
No, you can provably search the entire game tree. It has been done for all 32000 of the "original MS" games, and many more. Most of them are quite small and easily handled on even a modest computer.
Unsolvable deals often have very small game trees. You get stuck very quickly, and there are no more moves. So showing something to be unsolvable is usually rather easy. It's easy to search the ENTIRE game tree. That's a proof. A bunch of people trying for a long time might not search every possible position, but in this case, the computer can do it, provably.
If the solver takes days and days and days and still hasn't found a solution either way, then you have no proof of anything. Even if "most" unsolvable games have small trees, there could be some that are large. We don't know, and searching all 52! deals hasn't been done yet.:-)
(Yes, I know, there aren't really that many, due to symmetry.)
Most of the existing solvers make use of theorems about certain move sequences to prune the tree. For example, it is trivial to get into a loop of repeated moves, and in this sense game trees can be "infinite". But those are obvious optimizations. What would be interesting is to find theorems concerning more complicated positions that allow you to prune huge branches. This is the only way to attack some problems. You probably won't find a "theorem" that applies to the starting position, but I'm sure there are many positions where you can apply some reasoning, rather than simply trying all possible combinations. For example, don't move the same card twice in a row, don't move card A and then card B and then card A again, if the moves are not related, and in general don't make a move that brings a position back to one that you've been in before. And so on. Some of these theorems might be very complex, and there might even be some set of them that always make the game tree "small". That's the kind of thing you really want, if you want to "prove" that you can or can't solve a game.
That said, most Freecell games have small game trees and are easily solved.
Slashdot Mirror
Relativity. Large masses bend space. I guess you never heard about that?
You're right.
Not to mention that it is possible to wear fake fingertips that give you somebody else's fingerprints ...
Also a problem with degraded DNA: if you find some DNA at the crime scene that codes for a person with blue eyes, that doesn't mean the blue-eyed DNA is related to the suspect, just that somebody with blue eyes had been there some time in the past ...
You'll be hard pressed to find a single peer reviewed study that shows finger prints to be a valid means of identification
challenge accepted
http://lpr.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/2/87.short
Barbarian: “How do you want to die?”
Tyrion Lannister: “In bed, when I’m 80, with a belly full of wine and woman’s mouth on my cock.”
Control the means of delivery and you control the content. We don't want students wandering aimlessly around the internet, after all, learning things like evolution and climate science.
Ok, so textbooks have DRM now, and education takes place in an MMO
style arena. So where are the cheat codes? Har. Anyway it's a format most kids
relate to.
"Hey you, stop texting in class!"
Chinese citizen: I love President Obama and his wife Hillary Clinton. I got a "Clinton" at the Olympics.
You Americans call that a bj if I recall correctly.
I like how FIPS-140 isn't mentioned as a supported standard.
Yeah, use our cloud, it's probably secure.
low power, high frequency, rugged, ... I say, these things might be useful
Is Mudge still available?
"${subject} ${verb} ${object}," said a source inside the ${CurrentPresident} ${administration} who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Yes, all that is true, but the fact is, it doesn't matter. There's no point in reducing CO2 levels. Even if we stopped emitting CO2 completely, NOW, down to 0%, no combustion of fuel AT ALL, it would still be thousands of years before CO2 levels reached pre-industrial levels. We've made our bed, now we have to sleep in it. Just get used to a radically altered ecosystem. It's too late now to fix it. We'll adapt, maybe live underground breathing taxable air. For billions of years, this is the way it has been. Hey, if the pre-Cambrian biota hadn't irrevocably polluted the atmosphere with oxygen, we wouldn't even have evolved. Tough luck for them, but we're on top now. Oh, the "conservatives" want to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to preserve the status quo. Good luck with that, conservatives. It's very expensive and produces no profit that you can use to redecorate your huge Central Park West apartment.
Go is quite nice. The compiler is very fast and strict, catching many errors. It really helps to write bullet proof code.
The language itself has many high level constructs, functional programming, multithreading is built in, objects, etc.
The runtime catches lots of errors, too, array bounds checking, for example. It's a well thought out language that is designed to help you avoid common mistakes. Yet it also has dynamic types and other powerful features. It's pretty neat.
The big difference that makes this silly is how cheap it is to fix these problems. We've got technical solutions for all security issues, but nobody uses them. Fire the programmers who get caught writing buffer overflow vulnerabilities. This is like firing building contractors who use substandard nails. After the roof blows off it's too late. Don't let your inspectors get away with being bribed. Don't tolerate substandard work. All these problems have been solved, we just have to fire the idiots who don't use them. Liability, anyone? When a building falls down, who is responsible? God? Or the architect and building contractors? Just stop letting your engineers get away with, what we should now consider to be, criminal negligence. Seriously, storing passwords in the clear? You're fired!
Ron Paul issues executive order to bring all troops home. It is ignored.
Obama issued an executive order closing gitmo, almost his first act as president. It wasn't obeyed
Ah yes, the British Empire. And how well did that work out?
People who have to look up FORTRAN on Wikipedia to find out what it is have no business recommending it.
Robust, mature, fast, easy to use, side-by-side with .m it wins hands down, really no comparison, use Python.
Cython if you need to make it faster for the %5 of code that is too slow.
import numpy
import pylab
11982 can be solved with 5 free cells. I don't know about "all" of them. There are too many to check all. Certainly most.
That's the kind of thing you'd need a more sophisticated proof for, since brute-force is still too slow.
(patsolve can run with any number.)
Another interesting question is which games can be solved with NO free cells. #164, #892, #1012, #1081, and #1150
are the first 5 that can be. There are only 207 in the first 100,000 games (using MS numbering).
Kim Jong Un was later heard to say, "should I not have eaten that?"
The logic here is that a given solver "might have a bug" and therefore not provide a correct answer.
Just throwing 5 or 8 different programs at it therefore might be suspect.
However. Freecell is really a very simple game. A computer program is very much like a mathematical proof, ask any programmer who has also written proofs. All of the solvers use optimizations to keep the search size down, but each of these optimizations is really a theorem stating that certain segments of the game tree do not have to be searched. A stronger statement would be that just one program found a given game unsolvable, and that program uses only prunes (theorems) that have been proved to be correct. I happen to know that even with only very simple prunes that are quite trivial to show to be correct, game 11982 is not solvable. The proofs I used to arrive at this conclusion have been checked by others, too. I'm not sure anybody has published a formal document anywhere, but you are welcome to look at the code.
Of course, you can win if you cheat. :-)
(Even a "mathematical" proof might be shown to be wrong, in a way that even many experts might have missed. This doesn't really apply here, though, because the game tree for 11982 is actually quite small.)
No, you can provably search the entire game tree. It has been done for all 32000 of the "original MS" games, and many more. Most of them are quite small and easily handled on even a modest computer.
Unsolvable deals often have very small game trees. You get stuck very quickly, and there are no more moves. So showing something to be unsolvable is usually rather easy. It's easy to search the ENTIRE game tree. That's a proof. A bunch of people trying for a long time might not search every possible position, but in this case, the computer can do it, provably.
If the solver takes days and days and days and still hasn't found a solution either way, then you have no proof of anything. Even if "most" unsolvable games have small trees, there could be some that are large. We don't know, and searching all 52! deals hasn't been done yet. :-)
(Yes, I know, there aren't really that many, due to symmetry.)
Most of the existing solvers make use of theorems about certain move sequences to prune the tree. For example, it is trivial to get into a loop of repeated moves, and in this sense game trees can be "infinite". But those are obvious optimizations.
What would be interesting is to find theorems concerning more complicated positions that allow you to prune huge branches.
This is the only way to attack some problems. You probably won't find a "theorem" that applies to the starting position, but I'm sure there are many positions where you can apply some reasoning, rather than simply trying all possible combinations. For example, don't move the same card twice in a row, don't move card A and then card B and then card A again, if the moves are not related, and in general don't make a move that brings a position back to one that you've been in before. And so on.
Some of these theorems might be very complex, and there might even be some set of them that always make the game tree "small". That's the kind of thing you really want, if you want to "prove" that you can or can't solve a game.
That said, most Freecell games have small game trees and are easily solved.
Email me if you want some harder ones.