It takes much less space use strings instead of interger lists, and that is one of the judging criterion. I think I might be able to pack the string tighter, though (then it would just look like garbage).
w:" on the wall";v:r,w,",\n",r,",\nTake one down, pass it around,\n",("L",1_ r:"N bottles of beer"),w,".\n\n";`0:_ssr/[,/_ssr/[v;"NL"]'+($1+s;$ s:|!98);(b,"s";`"0");(b:"1 bottle";"No more")]
I'm sure I can cut at least ten characters off of that. I doubt it will be anywhere close to the smallest, though.
They said that the prints are probably of children about 4-foot-6 using the standard ratio of foot size to height. The prints done appear of good enough quality to tell any more.
How do they know it is from a prehuman species? Is that just speculation taken from the when they are believed to have been formed? There is nothing in the print that points to this, right?
Developed by Arthur Whitney (the creator of A+) and a big name in the APL circles, K uses the ASCII only character set, is even more compact and faster (both in runtime and development time) than Perl, and very flexible.
I doubt that Larry Wall has ever heard of K. It would do his a world of good to learn about it. Many of the concepts are brilliant. It would make Perl a better language and him and better language designer.
(1) The frrther the computer is from the end of the game, the poorer its evaluation.
(2) The more close a position is, the poorer its evaluation.
Whatever loss in opening book a master may have, it is far swamped by what the computer loses. It effectively pushes the computers worst phase of the game up through the opening.
He sees it as a way to bring back creativity into the game and move away from the memorization. I hardly see it as a bad thing. It should be who can play the game best, not who can memorize the lines.
And it does make a difference. IMs/GMs specialize for a couple of reasons, one of them being that it is impossible to memorize all opening lines.
Computer opening books are based on human opening books. There would be so many possible lines, that there would effectively be no more use in memorizing individual opening lines. If there is no human opening open, then there is no computer opening book.
Fischer random would spur research in learning opening lines automatically, but the further you get from the ending, the harder it is to tell the value of a position. Computers may have opening books, but they would probably be so shallow that they aren't worth the effort.
It is almost guarenteed to reset the bar for computers, though.
So as computers slowly overtake the best players, will Fischer random chess draw more attention. In this randomc chess variation, the inital piece configuration is randomly determined (within certain parameters to make it still have some of the same strategic elements of chess) and the same for both players (much as the way it is will regular chess). Bobby Fischer developed it to get rid of the the opening advantage the is gained with massive studying and memorization. It basically eliminates the idea of an opening sequence since there are thousands of different initial boards. However, good opening principles still dominate (piece development, king protection, pawn structure, etc).
I think it is a great idea. It also leaves a huge advantage for good master level players over machines, since an opening book is virtually eliminated.
Most mini-max variations are based around the idea that your opponent will always play perfectly. If there at least one way for you to be mated, the branch is considered a loss (you propogate your minimum score and your opponents maximum score up the tree).
Game tree search is a very well understood problem and most top programs use some version of a null-window negascout (ID-DFS) with opening and closing databases. The most black magic in these systems is in their heuristic evaluation functions.
Backgammon programs used to compete at only a moderate level until Gerald Tesauro's TD-gammon (and predecessors). I wonder if there will ever be a breakthrough of equal proportions in chess? If so, humans would have very little change against computers (I hate to say never, because of absolute freaks like Marion "I am programmed by God" Tinsley).
This is great code that was once lost, but has resurfaced.
Taken from Roger Hui's An Implementation of J:
One summer weekend in 1989, Arthur Whitney visited Ken Iverson at Kiln Farm and produced -- on one page and in one afternoon -- an interpreter fragment on the AT&T 3B1 computer. I studied this interpreter for about a week for its organization and programming style; and on Sunday, August 27, 1989, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, wrote the first line of code that became the implementation described in this document.
More imformation is available at A Tribute to Roger Hui. Arthur's one-page interpreter fragment is as follows:
typedef char C;typedef long I; typedef struct a{I t,r,d[3],p[2];}*A; #define P printf #define R return #define V1(f) A f(w)A w; #define V2(f) A f(a,w)A a,w; #define DO(n,x) {I i=0,_n=(n);for(;i<_n;++i){x;}} I *ma(n){R(I*)malloc(n*4);}mv(d,s,n)I *d,*s;{DO(n,d[i]=s[i]);} tr(r,d)I *d;{I z=1;DO(r,z=z*d[i]);R z;} A ga(t,r,d)I *d;{A z=(A)ma(5+tr(r,d));z->t=t,z->r=r,mv(z->d,d,r);R z;} V1(iota){I n=*w->p;A z=ga(0,1,&n);DO(n,z->p[i]=i);R z;} V2(plus){I r=w->r,*d=w->d,n=tr(r,d);A z=ga(0,r,d); DO(n,z->p[i]=a->p[i]+w->p[i]);R z;} V2(from){I r=w->r-1,*d=w->d+1,n=tr(r,d); A z=ga(w->t,r,d);mv(z->p,w->p+(n**a->p),n); R z;} V1(box){A z=ga(1,0,0);*z->p=(I)w;R z;} V2(cat){I an=tr(a->r,a->d),wn=tr(w->r,w->d),n=an+wn ; A z=ga(w->t,1,&n);mv(z->p,a->p,an);mv(z->p+an,w->p,w n);R z;} V2(find){} V2(rsh){I r=a->r?*a->d:1,n=tr(r,a->p),wn=tr(w->r,w->d) ; A z=ga(w->t,r,a->p);mv(z->p,w->p,wn=n>wn?wn:n) ; if(n-=wn)mv(z->p+wn,z->p,n);R z;} V1(sha){A z=ga(0,1,&w->r);mv(z->p,w->d,w->r);R z;} V1(id){R w;}V1(size){A z=ga(0,0,0);*z->p=w->r?*w->d:1;R z;} pi(i){P("%d ",i);}nl(){P("\n");} pr(w)A w;{I r=w->r,*d=w->d,n=tr(r,d);DO(r,pi(d[i]));nl() ; if(w->t)DO(n,P("< ");pr(w->p[i]))else DO(n,pi(w->p[i]));nl();}
C vt[]="+{~<#,"; A(*vd[])()={0,plus,from,find,0,rsh,cat}, (*vm[])()={0,id,size,iota,box,sha,0}; I st[26]; qp(a){R a>='a'&&a<='z';}qv(a){R a<'a';} A ex(e)I *e;{I a=*e; if(qp(a)){if(e[1]=='=')R st[a-'a']=ex(e+2);a= st[ a-'a'];} R qv(a)?(*vm[a])(ex(e+1)):e[1]?(*vd[e[1]])(a,ex(e+2) ):(A)a;} noun(c){A z;if(c<'0'||c>'9')R 0;z=ga(0,0,0);*z->p=c-'0';R z;} verb(c){I i=0;for(;vt[i];)if(vt[i++]==c)R i;R 0;} I *wd(s)C *s;{I a,n=strlen(s),*e=ma(n+1);C c; DO(n,e[i]=(a=noun(c=s[i]))?a:(a=verb(c))?a:c);e[n] =0;R e;}
I don't like soccer as much as other sports, and I helped coach a YASO team this year, too.
Some differences beteen soccer and hockey that make hockey much better:
substitutions are plentify in hockey and a rarity in soccer. This allows for specializations and better quality play since everybody isn't dead tired.
40-60 shots on goal per game with a lower chance of scoring. Soccer is the flip, 4-8 shot on goal per game with most of them going in.
In hockey a penalty shot (or any player v. goalie break away) is a slight edge to the goalie. With soccer there is a huge edge towards the player. These last two things reduce random chance. If you rarely get a shot on goal and it almost always goes in and both teams get roughly equal shots on goal, then it is who ever has the bad luck for an instant. With more attempts but fewer successes this balances out more.
Half of the time in soccer is wasted around midfield, too, kicking the ball back and forth. Really boring. In hockey most of the action occurs around the net in some fashion.
Soccer also has the added negative that diving is tolerated and expected. A bunch of whiney babies if you ask me.
I post diaries over at Kuro5hin. They cover football basics and include play analysis after games. I was too drunk during this game, so there will be no Superbowl analysis.
Here are a couple (they used to go on my website, and they will go back up there next season):
However, even Perl's utility isn't born out of anything special in the language. There are other laguages are clearer, simpler, more concise, and more powerful. However, it is all the intangibles that make Perl (and C) like VHS: market penetration, large libraries, and perceived quality is good enough. If you try to evaluate Perl on an single metric, it is clearly inferior to almost any competitor, it is only when you view th language and all that it provide holistically that you get a clear picture of why people use it, and many of these aggregate factors are not even techniccal or unique to Perl.
for concision, clarity, and simplicity...
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 1
He's right... He's wrong...
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
He says that geeks don't understand about the total package and that technical ability isn't the only thing. He's right in that is what geeks say. However, geeks do realize this, but they just don't know it.
From an example taken from The Other Site in the last day: programming languages. People will willingly use broken languages, not as superior, because they interface to more things, can be applied to more general purpose situations (even when they shouldn't be), or have bigger libraries. You only need to look to Perl and C.
Perl is an attrocious language judging on purely technical merits, however CPAN and all the sugar it has are what give people reason to use it. You will often hear the C or Perl apologist say, "it does what I need good enough" or "I get work done in it." This is almost the same decision calculous that the author is expousing: people chose VHS because it did what they needed (recording a two hour movie unattended) and it did it well enough (they couldn't tell the difference in image quality).
He argues that Betamax was actually more popular when it began, and they had a "defacto monopoly from tape incompatabilities." The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced (and was cheaper, but only after losing market too much market share to matter).
His point wasn't that you can look at a single factor (e.g., popularity), but you have to weight products more holistically.
Other column-oriented databases? Yes, there is Sybase IQM and Alterian. Sometimes they are mistakenly called tokenized dabatases, but is that a misnomer (it is really an orthogonal feature as Aruna shows being a tokenized databased, but not column-oriented). KDB is the fastest, smallest, and simpliest though (most of the time this simplicity is good, but sometimes it is bad). I don't know of any free versions. It might make a good project, since they are (I think) conceptually easier than the standard row-oriented B-Tree based systems.
Why are we saddled with low-level languages? 10 million lines should almost never be necessary.
Even the highest level language used in industry, Java, is pathetic: test a value, if it is equal to something then skip forward a few line, if it isn't then go to the next line, multiply another value and assign it, increment the first value, skip back a couple of line,....
That is horrible! Even your geeks beloved beloved Perl (including the upcoming Perl 6) falls into the same traps. You have to deal with explicit control flow; you have to manually program things as simple as finding all the unique elements in a list or grouping them.
Why is it that everybody is content to use these pieces of crap when not necessary? Developers cling to their beloved C++ writing hundreds of times more code that they need. Of course hitting 10 millions lines if going to be difficult, but why should you never need to write that much. The fastest relational database that I know of is rumored to be written in just a thousands of lines, instead of millions. Why? Because it is written in something that allows abstraction and not of the Object Oriented kind! Think about your tools. Find betters ones that push your limits and the limits of expressiblity. Don't be happy to sit and pound out 2000 lines of Java one day when you could have done it in 4 lines of something else.
There really isn't any performance or load issues, so PostgreSQL is just something that work. I would imagine that MySQL would also work just as well in this situation, too.
Slashdot Mirror
It takes much less space use strings instead of interger lists, and that is one of the judging criterion. I think I might be able to pack the string tighter, though (then it would just look like garbage).
I'm sure I can cut at least ten characters off of that. I doubt it will be anywhere close to the smallest, though.
They said that the prints are probably of children about 4-foot-6 using the standard ratio of foot size to height. The prints done appear of good enough quality to tell any more.
How do they know it is from a prehuman species? Is that just speculation taken from the when they are believed to have been formed? There is nothing in the print that points to this, right?
Developed by Arthur Whitney (the creator of A+) and a big name in the APL circles, K uses the ASCII only character set, is even more compact and faster (both in runtime and development time) than Perl, and very flexible.
Here is a short introduction I wrote for the people at Kuro5hin.
I doubt that Larry Wall has ever heard of K. It would do his a world of good to learn about it. Many of the concepts are brilliant. It would make Perl a better language and him and better language designer.
Who was the big winner? Was it some teen sex idol? No. It was the daughter of a sitar player.
(1) The frrther the computer is from the end of the game, the poorer its evaluation.
(2) The more close a position is, the poorer its evaluation.
Whatever loss in opening book a master may have, it is far swamped by what the computer loses. It effectively pushes the computers worst phase of the game up through the opening.
He sees it as a way to bring back creativity into the game and move away from the memorization. I hardly see it as a bad thing. It should be who can play the game best, not who can memorize the lines.
And it does make a difference. IMs/GMs specialize for a couple of reasons, one of them being that it is impossible to memorize all opening lines.
Computer opening books are based on human opening books. There would be so many possible lines, that there would effectively be no more use in memorizing individual opening lines. If there is no human opening open, then there is no computer opening book.
Fischer random would spur research in learning opening lines automatically, but the further you get from the ending, the harder it is to tell the value of a position. Computers may have opening books, but they would probably be so shallow that they aren't worth the effort.
It is almost guarenteed to reset the bar for computers, though.
So as computers slowly overtake the best players, will Fischer random chess draw more attention. In this randomc chess variation, the inital piece configuration is randomly determined (within certain parameters to make it still have some of the same strategic elements of chess) and the same for both players (much as the way it is will regular chess). Bobby Fischer developed it to get rid of the the opening advantage the is gained with massive studying and memorization. It basically eliminates the idea of an opening sequence since there are thousands of different initial boards. However, good opening principles still dominate (piece development, king protection, pawn structure, etc).
I think it is a great idea. It also leaves a huge advantage for good master level players over machines, since an opening book is virtually eliminated.
Most mini-max variations are based around the idea that your opponent will always play perfectly. If there at least one way for you to be mated, the branch is considered a loss (you propogate your minimum score and your opponents maximum score up the tree).
Game tree search is a very well understood problem and most top programs use some version of a null-window negascout (ID-DFS) with opening and closing databases. The most black magic in these systems is in their heuristic evaluation functions.
Backgammon programs used to compete at only a moderate level until Gerald Tesauro's TD-gammon (and predecessors). I wonder if there will ever be a breakthrough of equal proportions in chess? If so, humans would have very little change against computers (I hate to say never, because of absolute freaks like Marion "I am programmed by God" Tinsley).
I don't like soccer as much as other sports, and I helped coach a YASO team this year, too.
Some differences beteen soccer and hockey that make hockey much better:
substitutions are plentify in hockey and a rarity in soccer. This allows for specializations and better quality play since everybody isn't dead tired.
40-60 shots on goal per game with a lower chance of scoring. Soccer is the flip, 4-8 shot on goal per game with most of them going in.
In hockey a penalty shot (or any player v. goalie break away) is a slight edge to the goalie. With soccer there is a huge edge towards the player. These last two things reduce random chance. If you rarely get a shot on goal and it almost always goes in and both teams get roughly equal shots on goal, then it is who ever has the bad luck for an instant. With more attempts but fewer successes this balances out more.
Half of the time in soccer is wasted around midfield, too, kicking the ball back and forth. Really boring. In hockey most of the action occurs around the net in some fashion.
Soccer also has the added negative that diving is tolerated and expected. A bunch of whiney babies if you ask me.
I post diaries over at Kuro5hin. They cover football basics and include play analysis after games. I was too drunk during this game, so there will be no Superbowl analysis.
Here are a couple (they used to go on my website, and they will go back up there next season):
An Analysis of 2 Raiders Plays That Beat the Titans
Zone Blitz
The Cover 2 Shell
People here are too busy trying to say that football is homoerotic. They aren't allowed to touch another man or they may be gay! Losers.
I played football for years all up through high school. I showed with guys and got my ass hit. Big fucking deal.
However, even Perl's utility isn't born out of anything special in the language. There are other laguages are clearer, simpler, more concise, and more powerful. However, it is all the intangibles that make Perl (and C) like VHS: market penetration, large libraries, and perceived quality is good enough. If you try to evaluate Perl on an single metric, it is clearly inferior to almost any competitor, it is only when you view th language and all that it provide holistically that you get a clear picture of why people use it, and many of these aggregate factors are not even techniccal or unique to Perl.
read http://kx.com/a/k/readme.txt and be amazed
He says that geeks don't understand about the total package and that technical ability isn't the only thing. He's right in that is what geeks say. However, geeks do realize this, but they just don't know it.
From an example taken from The Other Site in the last day: programming languages. People will willingly use broken languages, not as superior, because they interface to more things, can be applied to more general purpose situations (even when they shouldn't be), or have bigger libraries. You only need to look to Perl and C.
Perl is an attrocious language judging on purely technical merits, however CPAN and all the sugar it has are what give people reason to use it. You will often hear the C or Perl apologist say, "it does what I need good enough" or "I get work done in it." This is almost the same decision calculous that the author is expousing: people chose VHS because it did what they needed (recording a two hour movie unattended) and it did it well enough (they couldn't tell the difference in image quality).
He argues that Betamax was actually more popular when it began, and they had a "defacto monopoly from tape incompatabilities." The author says that the reason Betamax lost the market was that it didn't do what the consumer wanted, to be able to record an entire movie unattended due to their one hour tape versus the VHS two hour tape. He has some other arguments, such as the Betamax was originally higher priced (and was cheaper, but only after losing market too much market share to matter).
His point wasn't that you can look at a single factor (e.g., popularity), but you have to weight products more holistically.
Other column-oriented databases? Yes, there is Sybase IQM and Alterian. Sometimes they are mistakenly called tokenized dabatases, but is that a misnomer (it is really an orthogonal feature as Aruna shows being a tokenized databased, but not column-oriented). KDB is the fastest, smallest, and simpliest though (most of the time this simplicity is good, but sometimes it is bad). I don't know of any free versions. It might make a good project, since they are (I think) conceptually easier than the standard row-oriented B-Tree based systems.
Here is an older article on KDB and a high-level view of some of the tricks that it uses: Kx Systems: The Lord Nelson Of Software Companies?
Why are we saddled with low-level languages? 10 million lines should almost never be necessary.
....
t : {?,/&:'m@x}/p
Even the highest level language used in industry, Java, is pathetic: test a value, if it is equal to something then skip forward a few line, if it isn't then go to the next line, multiply another value and assign it, increment the first value, skip back a couple of line,
That is horrible! Even your geeks beloved beloved Perl (including the upcoming Perl 6) falls into the same traps. You have to deal with explicit control flow; you have to manually program things as simple as finding all the unique elements in a list or grouping them.
Why is it that everybody is content to use these pieces of crap when not necessary? Developers cling to their beloved C++ writing hundreds of times more code that they need. Of course hitting 10 millions lines if going to be difficult, but why should you never need to write that much. The fastest relational database that I know of is rumored to be written in just a thousands of lines, instead of millions. Why? Because it is written in something that allows abstraction and not of the Object Oriented kind! Think about your tools. Find betters ones that push your limits and the limits of expressiblity. Don't be happy to sit and pound out 2000 lines of Java one day when you could have done it in 4 lines of something else.
ten_rows_of_Pascals_triangle: 10{+':0,x,0}\1
transitive_closure_of_map_at_poin
There really isn't any performance or load issues, so PostgreSQL is just something that work. I would imagine that MySQL would also work just as well in this situation, too.