We're not so sure about that, though. Poker is a very complicated game incorporating not only mathematical betting and statistical odds but also the important skills of expectation, observation and learning, psychology and deception, intimidation and subterfuge.
So to break it down:
Expectation - This is a "statistical odds" issue.
Observation and Learning - Yes, and this is a program designed by the Machine Learning group at UoA.
Psychology and Deception - Deception is simply varying your play by making it probabilistic rather than static. Psychology is only necessary if you wish to take advantage of your opponents' in order to maximize your own play, it has nothing to do with a game theoretical approach. Also, the computer has no such psychological weaknesses.
Intimidation and Subterfuge - Subterfuge basically goes back to deception again. Intimidation in the world of online poker is essentially proper bet sizing, timing, and position.
An AI player has very little downside here, except for the fact that hold'em is a very computationally intensive game. The UoA team has spent the last decade developing better algorithms and game theoretic approximations to combat this.
All that said, they are still a long way from being able to sign their laptop up for the main event at the WSOP, or sit it down at the Bellagio's high stakes table.
Also, the competition is in July (i.e. right now), not June like the article says.
For one of our homework assignments in my data mining class, we had to come up with some interesting insights about the netflix database. One of the things I noticed was that movies rated on the weekends were significantly more likely to be rated a 1 or a 5 than during the week. My conjecture was that this is because people are more likely to watch movies with other people on the weekends and the mob mentality takes over, causing good movies to become great and bad movies to become horrible.
Any thoughts on how to keep goods from leaving the store unauthorized, without violating someone's rights? Sure. You can ask your customers to present a photo ID before purchasing anything, and if they exercise their right to refuse to provide the identification, then you exercise your right to refuse service. Once you have the photo ID, you can find out you can examine your surveillance videos and if you notice they did anything suspicious, you can forward the information to the police.
Now, you might say that such a tactic is crazy as no one wants to provide an ID just to buy a DVD or a video game. And you're right. So as a store owner, you have to try to balance your level of security with the level of customer satisfaction. In the end, the more cautious you are, the more customers you lose. However, a certain level of security is necessary so that the stolen goods don't outweigh the extra money made from the increase in customers.
The point is that it isn't the job of the law to make sure that the store is protecting its goods. If you want to put every piece of merchandise you have behind bullet proof glass and force customers to ask a salesperson to open the case, then you will certainly decrease the amount of theft. You'll also decrease the amount of sales. Deal with it.
I think the media is focused on the wrong industry. Most people here would agree that internet-based companies today are much more solid and the sky isn't about to fall on the IT industry like it did earlier in the decade.
However, I do think there's a bust over the horizon, but just in another industry: entertainment. Think about the millions of dollars spent on producing video games, movies, and music. I'd argue that a push is happening among consumers away from expensive graphics-intense games (Nintendo Wii's success and PS 3's stumble), special effects-intense films (movies like Spiderman 3 are seeing rising production costs with falling profit margins), and one-hit-wonder artists' albums (iTunes' success is mostly due to the ability to purchase single tracks).
So what I would imagine we'll see in a few years isn't another IT-industry bust, but an entertainment-industry bust. When production costs start to creep really close to product sales, the industry is going to go nuts. This isn't a bad thing though. Just like the dot-com bust forced companies to stop rehashing ideas with a new face, an entertainment bust would force companies to actually produce novel content rather than making sequel after sequel.
I'm just curious, but is the inside of this thing roomy enough for a person to easily get in there and replace a part? I know that node failures happen on a very regular basis with clusters and the box doesn't look very wide.
Look, you can't just go and read what someone says on some website and think they actually mean it. You've never even met these people, you can't trust them or believe a single word they say. They could be sexual predators for god's sake (and we've seen already that a large number of them are)! These people have no reason to tell you the truth, they just lie to get what they want from you--sometimes that means harming you.
And that's just in the Senate. Imagine what could happen on the internet!
The "Graham" is Paul Graham. From his website bio:
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998...
He has a really interesting essay-blog at his website which is worth checking out.
Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street From my window I'm staring while my coffee grows cold Look over there! (Where?) There's a lady that I used to know She's married now, or engaged, or something, so I am told
Is she really going out with him? Is she really gonna take him home tonight? Is she really going out with him? 'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me, There's something going wrong around here
Aside: the Poker Players Alliance actually solicits donations to support its cause. Wow. Give them money so they can fight for your right to lose money.
Exactly. They are a realistic lobbying organization that understands you need muscle in Washington if you want your voice to be heard. Also, the donations they solicited from people was normally done in conjunction with poker sites. The poker sites would request you sign up and pay a $20 membership fee in exchange for a $25 deposit bonus. That sounds like a win-win to me.
Poker is a form of entertainment like any other. You should have the right to waste your time and money on it just like strip clubs, pornography, or slashdot. (No matter how sleazy and disgusting slashdot may be.)
Golf is particularly bad, as even the slightest swing will have the game registering 'too much force' on the ball.
I admit golf probably has the least pick-up-and-play controls, but it is really true in real life also. The controls reflect the ease of their real life sports. Bowling's controls are easiest because bowling is an easy sport. Tennis is easy to start but hard to master. Golf, however, is very hard to start up in real life...I don't know many people who can pick up and start swinging for 100+ yards without major accuracy problems.
So yes, golf has sensitive controls but if you put in the time you can develop precision with them.
The final game, boxing, is much the same. Using the Wiimote and the nunchuck, you can deliver one-two punches to your opponent's Mii... if you can get your flailing arms to work right. I've personally found boxing to be highly enjoyable, despite its lack of precision.
Now this is just plain not true. I've put in probably 40 hours to Wii Boxing, it makes a great workout game. The punches aren't easy to throw accurately, that's true. There are some tricks to the game...like developing rhythm, knowing when you're leaning in the right direction to be able to throw a certain punch, etc. Those are all things that are true to real boxing.
Again, boxing is a sport that it's easy to pick up the gloves and "flail" your arms around, but if you want to be good at it you have to practice and start thinking about your moves. However, the controls in boxing do seem to be the least precise of all the games (though as I said, they aren't bad), and I'd like to see a full fledged boxing game that has a little more time put into it.
[quote]a judge in Miami ruled that Take Two Interactive, makers of the controversial title Bully, must hand over a copy of the soon to be released game to the court within 24 hours[/quote]
Or else the judge will have to admit he forgot his son's birthday and didn't get him anything.
The freshmen level OOP class that I took taught us by using BlueJ and Karel. I loved it, thought it was fun and easy to use, and really helped teach solid OO concepts. I recommend it highly.
Amazing how 30 years ago, Nixon knows about some burglary and some audio tapes being stolen, and he is forced to resign. Then 10 years ago, Clinton gets a few BJs and has a 3 year investigation leading to an impeachment and a 3000 page report filed. And now, all these things are going on--most of which are orders of magnitude worse-- and they get hardly any news coverage, the president is under no real pressure about them, and the bulk of Americans couldn't care less.
All I can think now is that line from V for Vendetta: "There's something terribly wrong with this country."
This is actually a fairly old field of statistics. The story goes that a mathematician at a state fair saw there was a contest to see who could guess the weight of a pile of recently slaughtered beef. Everyone was allowed to guess at it: farmers, house wives, butchers, etc. In the end, the experts (i.e. the butchers) didn't win, and their answer was off by about 10%. However, the total of all the answers, averaged, was off by only.2 lbs.
This sparked the idea that the knowledge of the whole group can lead to better answers than the knowledge of a select group of experts. It's also been shown to be true with things like artificial intelligence and mathematical proof programs.
So it seems like hollywood and the like have just finally realized that the entire group of people can do better at predicting movie success than just some panel of marketing experts.
You'd be amazed how much better you work at 65 degrees than say 72. The building my employer recently moved into is new, and was designed for normal 9-5 business days, so after 5:30, the AC cuts off and by 7 the temperature is around 75 degrees. Since I'm much more of a night person, I come in around 1pm every day and stay til around midnight--or at least I did until we moved into the building.
The few of us who stay past 7 have all come to the conclusion that heat will make your brain slow down a LOT. It's gotten to the point where I just started going home at 8 or so because I would accomplish absolutely nothing by being there.
So my advice is to make sure you keep your work environment at a slightly-less than relaxing temperature, just to make sure you stay on your toes.
Security clearances aren't just about checking if a person is a spy. They're about making sure a person is capable of keeping secrets. When you are in the process of getting one, they ask all kinds of questions about you to your neighbors-- do you do drugs, do you drink a lot, etc. They are trying to ascertain whether or not you can be trusted with information that needs to remain confidential.
From an industry standpoint, knowing that about a person is crucial if you're going to be dealing with trade secrets.
Every month or so, we'll get small updates. Then it will be within a year of release, and the updates will become more frequent. Then finally when release is only 4 months away, it will be revealed.
Every magazine will be covered with headlines about...
it was probably the fact that my grades were ~3.5 GPA out of 4.0 & I've never been published.
If you've never been published, can we assume that you didn't do a master's thesis (opting to go the route of just taking classes instead)?
If that is the case, that is probably a HUGE strike against you. An MS in any field where you simply take classes will only look slightly better than a BS. However, if you do a thesis and get published, you give yourself a lot of room for leverage.
To the submitter: I'm in a similar situation--I want to go into evolutionary computation and neural networks, and have talked to many faculty about it. The bright side is this: AI is the field that most scientists in other fields say they wish they could be in. You can do some great things with it once you reach the right level of knowledge and respect.
Now the bad news. A large portion of what you do may end up requiring a PhD in order to 'prove yourself' to the 'big dogs.' Part of the issue with getting a PhD is that you really have to be in it for the science and not be concerned with making money equal to your efforts. If you are interested in money, 6 years of industry experience will likely get you farther than 6 years working on your doctorate. If you ask your professors, I'm sure most of them will tell you that AI has the reputation of being both the hardest area of CS and the one with the least job potential.
Speaking of professors, are you talking to them? How many people have you talked to at your university about this? For that matter, what university are you currently going to? It's a big drop from Stanford to Ga Tech, and a really big drop from Ga Tech to some out of the way school. If you're interested in robotics (or AI in general), you NEED to get to a top tier school. Talk to your professors about how that you can do that, and what you need to do right now.
I would doubt that a degree from MIT with a specialization in robotics would be taken lightly (especially if you have published in some prestigious conferences).
I think it's pretty obvious they're here to repair our poor fashion sense! Remember, dressing like an extra from Revenge of the Nerds is the first step towards mastering your computer!
Is this even enforceable? Last time I remember checking, facebook didn't provide any way to check that a person's registered profile is actually them, outside of saying the email is from the actual school. Last year my friend registered himself as Kwami Brown and started poking all the guys on the hall.
What's to stop someone from taking a Kent State player's identity and creating a fake profile of them?
Slashdot Mirror
http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/
First match was a draw.
We're not so sure about that, though. Poker is a very complicated game incorporating not only mathematical betting and statistical odds but also the important skills of expectation, observation and learning, psychology and deception, intimidation and subterfuge.
So to break it down:
Expectation - This is a "statistical odds" issue.
Observation and Learning - Yes, and this is a program designed by the Machine Learning group at UoA.
Psychology and Deception - Deception is simply varying your play by making it probabilistic rather than static. Psychology is only necessary if you wish to take advantage of your opponents' in order to maximize your own play, it has nothing to do with a game theoretical approach. Also, the computer has no such psychological weaknesses.
Intimidation and Subterfuge - Subterfuge basically goes back to deception again. Intimidation in the world of online poker is essentially proper bet sizing, timing, and position.
An AI player has very little downside here, except for the fact that hold'em is a very computationally intensive game. The UoA team has spent the last decade developing better algorithms and game theoretic approximations to combat this.
All that said, they are still a long way from being able to sign their laptop up for the main event at the WSOP, or sit it down at the Bellagio's high stakes table.
Also, the competition is in July (i.e. right now), not June like the article says.
For one of our homework assignments in my data mining class, we had to come up with some interesting insights about the netflix database. One of the things I noticed was that movies rated on the weekends were significantly more likely to be rated a 1 or a 5 than during the week. My conjecture was that this is because people are more likely to watch movies with other people on the weekends and the mob mentality takes over, causing good movies to become great and bad movies to become horrible.
Now, you might say that such a tactic is crazy as no one wants to provide an ID just to buy a DVD or a video game. And you're right. So as a store owner, you have to try to balance your level of security with the level of customer satisfaction. In the end, the more cautious you are, the more customers you lose. However, a certain level of security is necessary so that the stolen goods don't outweigh the extra money made from the increase in customers.
The point is that it isn't the job of the law to make sure that the store is protecting its goods. If you want to put every piece of merchandise you have behind bullet proof glass and force customers to ask a salesperson to open the case, then you will certainly decrease the amount of theft. You'll also decrease the amount of sales. Deal with it.
I think the media is focused on the wrong industry. Most people here would agree that internet-based companies today are much more solid and the sky isn't about to fall on the IT industry like it did earlier in the decade.
However, I do think there's a bust over the horizon, but just in another industry: entertainment. Think about the millions of dollars spent on producing video games, movies, and music. I'd argue that a push is happening among consumers away from expensive graphics-intense games (Nintendo Wii's success and PS 3's stumble), special effects-intense films (movies like Spiderman 3 are seeing rising production costs with falling profit margins), and one-hit-wonder artists' albums (iTunes' success is mostly due to the ability to purchase single tracks).
So what I would imagine we'll see in a few years isn't another IT-industry bust, but an entertainment-industry bust. When production costs start to creep really close to product sales, the industry is going to go nuts. This isn't a bad thing though. Just like the dot-com bust forced companies to stop rehashing ideas with a new face, an entertainment bust would force companies to actually produce novel content rather than making sequel after sequel.
I'm just curious, but is the inside of this thing roomy enough for a person to easily get in there and replace a part? I know that node failures happen on a very regular basis with clusters and the box doesn't look very wide.
Look, you can't just go and read what someone says on some website and think they actually mean it. You've never even met these people, you can't trust them or believe a single word they say. They could be sexual predators for god's sake (and we've seen already that a large number of them are)! These people have no reason to tell you the truth, they just lie to get what they want from you--sometimes that means harming you.
And that's just in the Senate. Imagine what could happen on the internet!
The "Graham" is Paul Graham. From his website bio:
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998...
He has a really interesting essay-blog at his website which is worth checking out.
Pretty women out walking with gorillas down my street
From my window I'm staring while my coffee grows cold
Look over there! (Where?)
There's a lady that I used to know
She's married now, or engaged, or something, so I am told
Is she really going out with him?
Is she really gonna take him home tonight?
Is she really going out with him?
'Cause if my eyes don't deceive me,
There's something going wrong around here
It's amazing how accurate Joe Jackson can be.
Aside: the Poker Players Alliance actually solicits donations to support its cause. Wow. Give them money so they can fight for your right to lose money.
Exactly. They are a realistic lobbying organization that understands you need muscle in Washington if you want your voice to be heard. Also, the donations they solicited from people was normally done in conjunction with poker sites. The poker sites would request you sign up and pay a $20 membership fee in exchange for a $25 deposit bonus. That sounds like a win-win to me.
Poker is a form of entertainment like any other. You should have the right to waste your time and money on it just like strip clubs, pornography, or slashdot. (No matter how sleazy and disgusting slashdot may be.)
So he knows how to get things done in DC. Good.
Golf is particularly bad, as even the slightest swing will have the game registering 'too much force' on the ball.
... if you can get your flailing arms to work right. I've personally found boxing to be highly enjoyable, despite its lack of precision.
I admit golf probably has the least pick-up-and-play controls, but it is really true in real life also. The controls reflect the ease of their real life sports. Bowling's controls are easiest because bowling is an easy sport. Tennis is easy to start but hard to master. Golf, however, is very hard to start up in real life...I don't know many people who can pick up and start swinging for 100+ yards without major accuracy problems.
So yes, golf has sensitive controls but if you put in the time you can develop precision with them.
The final game, boxing, is much the same. Using the Wiimote and the nunchuck, you can deliver one-two punches to your opponent's Mii
Now this is just plain not true. I've put in probably 40 hours to Wii Boxing, it makes a great workout game. The punches aren't easy to throw accurately, that's true. There are some tricks to the game...like developing rhythm, knowing when you're leaning in the right direction to be able to throw a certain punch, etc. Those are all things that are true to real boxing.
Again, boxing is a sport that it's easy to pick up the gloves and "flail" your arms around, but if you want to be good at it you have to practice and start thinking about your moves. However, the controls in boxing do seem to be the least precise of all the games (though as I said, they aren't bad), and I'd like to see a full fledged boxing game that has a little more time put into it.
I think a lot of [other companies] are spending even more money.
Yeah, but the other companies pay their employees overtime.
According to her analysis, the ideal slashdot web design is this.
[quote]a judge in Miami ruled that Take Two Interactive, makers of the controversial title Bully, must hand over a copy of the soon to be released game to the court within 24 hours[/quote]
Or else the judge will have to admit he forgot his son's birthday and didn't get him anything.
The freshmen level OOP class that I took taught us by using BlueJ and Karel. I loved it, thought it was fun and easy to use, and really helped teach solid OO concepts. I recommend it highly.
Amazing how 30 years ago, Nixon knows about some burglary and some audio tapes being stolen, and he is forced to resign. Then 10 years ago, Clinton gets a few BJs and has a 3 year investigation leading to an impeachment and a 3000 page report filed. And now, all these things are going on--most of which are orders of magnitude worse-- and they get hardly any news coverage, the president is under no real pressure about them, and the bulk of Americans couldn't care less.
All I can think now is that line from V for Vendetta: "There's something terribly wrong with this country."
This is actually a fairly old field of statistics. The story goes that a mathematician at a state fair saw there was a contest to see who could guess the weight of a pile of recently slaughtered beef. Everyone was allowed to guess at it: farmers, house wives, butchers, etc. In the end, the experts (i.e. the butchers) didn't win, and their answer was off by about 10%. However, the total of all the answers, averaged, was off by only .2 lbs.
This sparked the idea that the knowledge of the whole group can lead to better answers than the knowledge of a select group of experts. It's also been shown to be true with things like artificial intelligence and mathematical proof programs.
So it seems like hollywood and the like have just finally realized that the entire group of people can do better at predicting movie success than just some panel of marketing experts.
You'd be amazed how much better you work at 65 degrees than say 72. The building my employer recently moved into is new, and was designed for normal 9-5 business days, so after 5:30, the AC cuts off and by 7 the temperature is around 75 degrees. Since I'm much more of a night person, I come in around 1pm every day and stay til around midnight--or at least I did until we moved into the building.
The few of us who stay past 7 have all come to the conclusion that heat will make your brain slow down a LOT. It's gotten to the point where I just started going home at 8 or so because I would accomplish absolutely nothing by being there.
So my advice is to make sure you keep your work environment at a slightly-less than relaxing temperature, just to make sure you stay on your toes.
Security clearances aren't just about checking if a person is a spy. They're about making sure a person is capable of keeping secrets. When you are in the process of getting one, they ask all kinds of questions about you to your neighbors-- do you do drugs, do you drink a lot, etc. They are trying to ascertain whether or not you can be trusted with information that needs to remain confidential.
From an industry standpoint, knowing that about a person is crucial if you're going to be dealing with trade secrets.
The hype has just started.
Every month or so, we'll get small updates.
Then it will be within a year of release, and the updates will become more frequent.
Then finally when release is only 4 months away, it will be revealed.
Every magazine will be covered with headlines about...
Daikatana Online!
If you've never been published, can we assume that you didn't do a master's thesis (opting to go the route of just taking classes instead)?
If that is the case, that is probably a HUGE strike against you. An MS in any field where you simply take classes will only look slightly better than a BS. However, if you do a thesis and get published, you give yourself a lot of room for leverage.
To the submitter:
I'm in a similar situation--I want to go into evolutionary computation and neural networks, and have talked to many faculty about it. The bright side is this: AI is the field that most scientists in other fields say they wish they could be in. You can do some great things with it once you reach the right level of knowledge and respect.
Now the bad news. A large portion of what you do may end up requiring a PhD in order to 'prove yourself' to the 'big dogs.' Part of the issue with getting a PhD is that you really have to be in it for the science and not be concerned with making money equal to your efforts. If you are interested in money, 6 years of industry experience will likely get you farther than 6 years working on your doctorate. If you ask your professors, I'm sure most of them will tell you that AI has the reputation of being both the hardest area of CS and the one with the least job potential.
Speaking of professors, are you talking to them? How many people have you talked to at your university about this? For that matter, what university are you currently going to? It's a big drop from Stanford to Ga Tech, and a really big drop from Ga Tech to some out of the way school. If you're interested in robotics (or AI in general), you NEED to get to a top tier school. Talk to your professors about how that you can do that, and what you need to do right now.
I would doubt that a degree from MIT with a specialization in robotics would be taken lightly (especially if you have published in some prestigious conferences).
I think it's pretty obvious they're here to repair our poor fashion sense! Remember, dressing like an extra from Revenge of the Nerds is the first step towards mastering your computer!
Is this even enforceable? Last time I remember checking, facebook didn't provide any way to check that a person's registered profile is actually them, outside of saying the email is from the actual school. Last year my friend registered himself as Kwami Brown and started poking all the guys on the hall.
What's to stop someone from taking a Kent State player's identity and creating a fake profile of them?
Finally I can buy a 24 pack of dish detergent AND get free shipping!