Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we see a whole bunch of things like steel plants and railroads and fun stuff like that take place and a whole bunch of people got REALLY loaded?
Now, the net. So far, we just had some people get really loaded from overpriced IPOs.
The analogy to the steel plants and railroads of the industrial revolution are the web servers and fiber optic lines of the internet revolution. I'm sure you could find many more examples if you looked.
That might work for cable/sattelite since you could require that subscribers sign something, but for broadcast it would be infeasible since the broadcaster has no method to compel the receiver to sign any license. That and you would only be able to go after individuals because the maker of the PVR obviously wouldnt agree to any license. Besides, you cant require people to watch comercials. You would have to prevent people from fastforwarding through comercials and/or automatically pause the broadcast if the person gets up from the couch during a comercial break.
Thats different. If hes out of a job by December its because people dont like that he sleeps around and lies about it, not because they think he caused the disappearance. If he hadnt slept with the girl and lied about it, hed be fine politically.
I believe that is only applicable with teaching. I have heard many times from teachers that an acusation of rape will cost them their job. But outside of education, I havent heard of any profession that the acusation is enough to lose your job.
Because different states have different laws. Secret cameras can record you in public while you are in Florida, but you cannot secretly record police when they pull you over in Massachusettes. Its not a double standard because the laws were passed by two different legislatures and affect two different groups of people.
Every creature on the Earth has instincts. . . every creature except for humans.
I see that you have never witnessed a human being born. Humans do have several instincts designed for survival. At the precise moment that a baby is born it cries. It does not learn to cry at this moment, it does it out of instinct so that it can inflate its lungs and breathe. Babies that do not cry when first born can have serious problems. Another instinct humans are born is to suckle. We do not show a baby how to do this, only where. Instinct tells them what to do from that point on.
These are two instincts humans have acquired so that when born, we can eat and breathe. Two skills necessary for survival. Modern hospitals have reduced the need for these instincts, but they are still with us. Im sure a good pediatrician could tell you of many other behavioral patterns all human babies are born with or surface as they age and you could try to argue that they are all learned, but no child learns how to cry or suckle.
As for your other statement that fear of death is learned, your examples only go to show that we learn what death is and what causes death, not that we learn to fear death itself. A child does not have a fear of drinking bleach because it doesnt know the effects of drinking bleach or the effects of falling out a window or down stairs.
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 1
Actually, it is not 'free market' either since by definition that implies no government interferrence with the market. Im not sure what the best term for what I want to say is, perhaps 'competition' or some combination of the three (capitalism, competition and free market).
This is not about learning the rules, this is about learning to score the most points. To do this, you will usually have to learn the rules. If this was about learning the rules only, the programs would be asked what all the legal moves are at each time step, not asked to pick the best move from a given list.
How can one consider this contest artificial intelligence?
The idea is that by learning how to play the games, the programs will become more intelligent. And the one that learns the fastest and thus scores the most points will be the most intelligent. This contest is designed mostly for people in the field of machine learning which is usually considered a subset of the field of AI.
That is because some amount of randomness is necessary to get intelligent search algorithms out of local minima. This is why genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, for example, have seen success.
There will probably be fewer than 100 contestants(a typical machine learning conferrence will draw only a few hundred participants including those presenting and I doubt this would atract more attention), and more likely around 20. At 100 contestants, using your other estimates, the time drops to about 114 computer days (at 20 contestants, it drops to about 4 computer days). With 10 computers, thats less than a week. Not unreasonable for something like this.
As they mention in the specs, you will play thousands of rounds for each game. I dont think that they mean that each game will consist of thousands of moves (even with random move selection for both players, chess usually terminates after 200-300 moves), I think they mean that you will play each game thousands of times against each opponent. If you only play a game once, very little learning will be done. This is because all learning requires either instruction or exploration. Since there is no instruction in this contest, all learning must come from exploration and one game would not be enough.
It really doesnt matter so long as the names for the all legal moves are given to you at the beginning. Just think of them as symbols, buttons to push at any given time. You shouldnt be trying to interpret meaning in the moves that are made, only value. It will be impossible to create some kind of high level of understanding about what a move means because the program does not know what the game is. It is possible to learn what values moves have though using some kind of reinforcement learning algorithm. Think of it this way: If your program believes it is in a certain state and its opponent executes a certain move, it should pick the move available to it that maximizes the expected reward
Is the score that's returned after each move the current cumulative score, the score for that move alone, or what?
Based on the example used in the specs, I would imagine that the score is for the most recent action if given after each action or cumulative if given only once at the very end. Either way, it will be relevant in the global context of the entire contest since the program with the highest overall score after playing all games against all opponents will be the winner.
The system is still underspecified. Without knowing what 'score' means, and whether it is an estimate or a deterministic function
I think its better to think of score like a reward or a penalty. The idea is to accumulate the most reward or the least penalty. As they say in the specs, the program with the highest score is the winner. If chess were to be one of the games(which I doubt it will due to its complexity), the score would probably be 1 for a win, 0.5 for a draw and 0 for a loss, just like at any chess tournament. There would be no intermediate score for taking a queen or getting into a strong position because those things are meaningless after the game is finished.
coding is not an effort of skill.
This contest is not about coding, its about learning. They dont care how good you are at writing programs, only at how good you are at designing a robust system that learns quickly. And as I hinted at before, this problem is just screaming for contestants to use a reinforcement learning algorithm.
Actually, this sounds more appropriate for some sort of multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm. Anytime someone mentions actions, rewards and learning in the same sentance, the first thing that comes to my mind is reinforcement learning.
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
on
Dan Gillmor on WinXP
·
· Score: 1
I dont think you really understand capitalism. Capitalism is not the same thing as big business. Capitalists hate monopolies because they mean less choice for consumers. In a truly capitalist economy, there would be lots of choices for consumers. Businesses that produced products with the highest quality to cost ratio would succeed and businesses that produced products with low quality to cost ratios would fail. Businesses are forced to become more efficient and constantly improve their products to compete in this kind of market place.
While big business agrees with most of pure capitalism, it does not, however, like pure capitalism. Big business likes monopolies and doesnt want to have to constantly improve products to be successful. Government intervention is only necessary when businesses try to alter the market place to eliminate competition(ie. via monopolies, collusion, etc).
What you should be worried about is that people believe that big business will create whats best for the consumer, not that people think that capitalism will create whats best for the consumer. If you change all your references of 'capitalism' to 'big business' I agree with you completely.
I stand corrected. Though they dont really say that the minors and majors use the same rules, the "Official Playing Rules for Professional Baseball" link on www.minorleaguebaseball.com takes you to the rule book on www.mlb.com. Next time I wont be so trusting of how well ESPN columnists know the rules. Thanks for the correction.
Not to be too nit-picky, but MLB is the only league that has outlawed aluminum bats. In fact, aluminum bats are used all the way from t-ball to triple-A. The only time I've seen an aluminum bat outlawed from a game was when it had a crack in it.
Can you be more specific on which Little League you are referring to because its sounds to me like you are either mis-spoken or making this up.
Your implication does not always hold. The power of this tool is that you dont have to have the filter. If you do, dont bother with the learner. If for some reason you dont have the filter, then this will be very useful. Look at some of the paint by numbers examples. They are a very good demonstration of the power of this tool.
This may not be exactly what the previous poster was talking about, but heres a more specific situation.
Im from Alaska and there are alot of environmentalists here. Now back when the pipeline was first put in, Alaska was making alot more money then even the politicians could spend (sounds crazy but its true) so they invested the money and now give the yearly interest to all residents of the state. Last year I received a check for nearly $2000. This money is the direct result of the oil industry. The same industry that is supposedly leaving such a big scar on the wild life here. Now do the environmentalists here return the checks and say "No thank you. That money was generated by raping Mother Nature."? Nope. They say "Thank you. Now where shall I spend this?" Are they lobbying the politicians to use the money to clean up after the oil companies? No again. When the politicians try to take the money away, guess whos there along with every one else making sure they dont. Granted, there may be some who dont take the money, and there may be some who use it for environmental purposes, but the vast majority use it for Christmas gifts (we receive the money in October) and vacations.
Like I say, this is not exactly what the previous poster was talking about, but it is a more specific illustration of environmentalists who criticize an industry, but only so far as it wont hurt their pocket book.
As for the thing about congress, its was more of a crude attempt at humor/irony since technically congress has the authority to define how long a second is and how much a pound weighs(article 1 section 8 of the constitution).
As for the fertility thing, im not sure what the difference between In vitro and In vivo is, but im referring to normal human reproduction after the egg has been fertilized. So, assuming that a couple (or a woman and a test tube) have successfully fertalized an egg and the egg has successfully been implanted into the woman(in the case of woman and test tube), what are the odds that the egg will survive for the next nine months and be born. I understand that this is partly a function of the mother's standard of living but for normal healthy mothers, it should be similar. Do you have a reference or suggestions for places to look for this information?
As for being alive and under their own steam, young humans are not capable of survival without a host(parent or woman with a womb if you prefer) untill they are several years old. They rely on their host to feed and protect them untill they are capable of doing this on their own. Without a host, the child will die. Saying that they are fully functional at birth is simply not correct. Arguing that they are not people until they are born is just a semantic difference. Kicking a child out of the womb is no different than leaving your kid in the woods alone. If they are fully functional at that time, they will survive, if not, they will die.
Actually, there are even more moves since the knights can move to two spaces each. That makes it 16+4=20 moves for each player or 400 possible states after the first round.
I would imagine that my computer would be pretty grateful to the "health care" that I have been giving it. Lets see, faster brain(cpu) every couple years, more short term memory(ram) and long term memory(hard drive) every year, vocal cord(sound card) upgrade every couple years, new ears and eyes(microphone and PC camera), not to mention a facelift(video card and monitor). That and the endless supply of toys(software) I install every week, onsite medical(tech) support, and a fully stocked fridge(electrical outlet). There arent any humans living in that kind of luxury so if my computer cant live with that lifestyle, Ill go find one that can.
I can just see MS using this more and more in the future.
"Due to security reasons we do not allow nor do we have a feature to delete Microsoft Windows from your system. Rest assured that if you do not access your computer within 12 months your hard drive will automatically be reformatted."
. Constant supervision is most certainly not a responsible way to raise a child.
You are confusing constant supervision with dictation of action. Supervising a child does not remove individuality from them. Supervising a child does not mean that you have to prevent them from making their own decisions. Supervising a child does not mean that you have to prevent them from making mistakes. Supervision means being aware of the environment that your child is in. Constant supervision is necessary in any environment untill the child is capable of handling the environment on their own. Whether that is the living room, the back yard, school, their friends house, etc. While it is not irresponsible to allow children to play in the woods in grade school, it is irresponsible to not go with them untill they learn how to survive in the woods on their own.
A responsible parent ensures that a mistake that a child makes becomes fixed and that the child learns from it. Whether it is fixed by the child, when possible, or by the parent, when the child cant. A parent cannot fix the mistakes their child makes if they are not around. If the child has not been taught how to fix their own mistakes when not supervised, serious accidents can happen.
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Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't we see a whole bunch of things like steel plants and railroads and fun stuff like that take place and a whole bunch of people got REALLY loaded?
Now, the net. So far, we just had some people get really loaded from overpriced IPOs.
The analogy to the steel plants and railroads of the industrial revolution are the web servers and fiber optic lines of the internet revolution. I'm sure you could find many more examples if you looked.
That might work for cable/sattelite since you could require that subscribers sign something, but for broadcast it would be infeasible since the broadcaster has no method to compel the receiver to sign any license. That and you would only be able to go after individuals because the maker of the PVR obviously wouldnt agree to any license. Besides, you cant require people to watch comercials. You would have to prevent people from fastforwarding through comercials and/or automatically pause the broadcast if the person gets up from the couch during a comercial break.
I know, thats what I was saying. The post you replied to was about Rep Condit and his afair with Chandra Levy.
Thats different. If hes out of a job by December its because people dont like that he sleeps around and lies about it, not because they think he caused the disappearance. If he hadnt slept with the girl and lied about it, hed be fine politically.
I believe that is only applicable with teaching. I have heard many times from teachers that an acusation of rape will cost them their job. But outside of education, I havent heard of any profession that the acusation is enough to lose your job.
Because different states have different laws. Secret cameras can record you in public while you are in Florida, but you cannot secretly record police when they pull you over in Massachusettes. Its not a double standard because the laws were passed by two different legislatures and affect two different groups of people.
I see that you have never witnessed a human being born. Humans do have several instincts designed for survival. At the precise moment that a baby is born it cries. It does not learn to cry at this moment, it does it out of instinct so that it can inflate its lungs and breathe. Babies that do not cry when first born can have serious problems. Another instinct humans are born is to suckle. We do not show a baby how to do this, only where. Instinct tells them what to do from that point on.
These are two instincts humans have acquired so that when born, we can eat and breathe. Two skills necessary for survival. Modern hospitals have reduced the need for these instincts, but they are still with us. Im sure a good pediatrician could tell you of many other behavioral patterns all human babies are born with or surface as they age and you could try to argue that they are all learned, but no child learns how to cry or suckle.
As for your other statement that fear of death is learned, your examples only go to show that we learn what death is and what causes death, not that we learn to fear death itself. A child does not have a fear of drinking bleach because it doesnt know the effects of drinking bleach or the effects of falling out a window or down stairs.
Actually, it is not 'free market' either since by definition that implies no government interferrence with the market. Im not sure what the best term for what I want to say is, perhaps 'competition' or some combination of the three (capitalism, competition and free market).
How can one consider this contest artificial intelligence?
The idea is that by learning how to play the games, the programs will become more intelligent. And the one that learns the fastest and thus scores the most points will be the most intelligent. This contest is designed mostly for people in the field of machine learning which is usually considered a subset of the field of AI.
That is because some amount of randomness is necessary to get intelligent search algorithms out of local minima. This is why genetic algorithms and simulated annealing, for example, have seen success.
There will probably be fewer than 100 contestants(a typical machine learning conferrence will draw only a few hundred participants including those presenting and I doubt this would atract more attention), and more likely around 20. At 100 contestants, using your other estimates, the time drops to about 114 computer days (at 20 contestants, it drops to about 4 computer days). With 10 computers, thats less than a week. Not unreasonable for something like this.
As they mention in the specs, you will play thousands of rounds for each game. I dont think that they mean that each game will consist of thousands of moves (even with random move selection for both players, chess usually terminates after 200-300 moves), I think they mean that you will play each game thousands of times against each opponent. If you only play a game once, very little learning will be done. This is because all learning requires either instruction or exploration. Since there is no instruction in this contest, all learning must come from exploration and one game would not be enough.
It really doesnt matter so long as the names for the all legal moves are given to you at the beginning. Just think of them as symbols, buttons to push at any given time. You shouldnt be trying to interpret meaning in the moves that are made, only value. It will be impossible to create some kind of high level of understanding about what a move means because the program does not know what the game is. It is possible to learn what values moves have though using some kind of reinforcement learning algorithm. Think of it this way: If your program believes it is in a certain state and its opponent executes a certain move, it should pick the move available to it that maximizes the expected reward
Is the score that's returned after each move the current cumulative score, the score for that move alone, or what?
Based on the example used in the specs, I would imagine that the score is for the most recent action if given after each action or cumulative if given only once at the very end. Either way, it will be relevant in the global context of the entire contest since the program with the highest overall score after playing all games against all opponents will be the winner.
The system is still underspecified. Without knowing what 'score' means, and whether it is an estimate or a deterministic function
I think its better to think of score like a reward or a penalty. The idea is to accumulate the most reward or the least penalty. As they say in the specs, the program with the highest score is the winner. If chess were to be one of the games(which I doubt it will due to its complexity), the score would probably be 1 for a win, 0.5 for a draw and 0 for a loss, just like at any chess tournament. There would be no intermediate score for taking a queen or getting into a strong position because those things are meaningless after the game is finished.
coding is not an effort of skill.
This contest is not about coding, its about learning. They dont care how good you are at writing programs, only at how good you are at designing a robust system that learns quickly. And as I hinted at before, this problem is just screaming for contestants to use a reinforcement learning algorithm.
Actually, this sounds more appropriate for some sort of multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm. Anytime someone mentions actions, rewards and learning in the same sentance, the first thing that comes to my mind is reinforcement learning.
While big business agrees with most of pure capitalism, it does not, however, like pure capitalism. Big business likes monopolies and doesnt want to have to constantly improve products to be successful. Government intervention is only necessary when businesses try to alter the market place to eliminate competition(ie. via monopolies, collusion, etc).
What you should be worried about is that people believe that big business will create whats best for the consumer, not that people think that capitalism will create whats best for the consumer. If you change all your references of 'capitalism' to 'big business' I agree with you completely.
I stand corrected. Though they dont really say that the minors and majors use the same rules, the "Official Playing Rules for Professional Baseball" link on www.minorleaguebaseball.com takes you to the rule book on www.mlb.com. Next time I wont be so trusting of how well ESPN columnists know the rules. Thanks for the correction.
Can you be more specific on which Little League you are referring to because its sounds to me like you are either mis-spoken or making this up.
Which begs the question: How much has microsoft spent on making Windows XP?
Your implication does not always hold. The power of this tool is that you dont have to have the filter. If you do, dont bother with the learner. If for some reason you dont have the filter, then this will be very useful. Look at some of the paint by numbers examples. They are a very good demonstration of the power of this tool.
Im from Alaska and there are alot of environmentalists here. Now back when the pipeline was first put in, Alaska was making alot more money then even the politicians could spend (sounds crazy but its true) so they invested the money and now give the yearly interest to all residents of the state. Last year I received a check for nearly $2000. This money is the direct result of the oil industry. The same industry that is supposedly leaving such a big scar on the wild life here. Now do the environmentalists here return the checks and say "No thank you. That money was generated by raping Mother Nature."? Nope. They say "Thank you. Now where shall I spend this?" Are they lobbying the politicians to use the money to clean up after the oil companies? No again. When the politicians try to take the money away, guess whos there along with every one else making sure they dont. Granted, there may be some who dont take the money, and there may be some who use it for environmental purposes, but the vast majority use it for Christmas gifts (we receive the money in October) and vacations.
Like I say, this is not exactly what the previous poster was talking about, but it is a more specific illustration of environmentalists who criticize an industry, but only so far as it wont hurt their pocket book.
As for the fertility thing, im not sure what the difference between In vitro and In vivo is, but im referring to normal human reproduction after the egg has been fertilized. So, assuming that a couple (or a woman and a test tube) have successfully fertalized an egg and the egg has successfully been implanted into the woman(in the case of woman and test tube), what are the odds that the egg will survive for the next nine months and be born. I understand that this is partly a function of the mother's standard of living but for normal healthy mothers, it should be similar. Do you have a reference or suggestions for places to look for this information?
As for being alive and under their own steam, young humans are not capable of survival without a host(parent or woman with a womb if you prefer) untill they are several years old. They rely on their host to feed and protect them untill they are capable of doing this on their own. Without a host, the child will die. Saying that they are fully functional at birth is simply not correct. Arguing that they are not people until they are born is just a semantic difference. Kicking a child out of the womb is no different than leaving your kid in the woods alone. If they are fully functional at that time, they will survive, if not, they will die.
Actually, there are even more moves since the knights can move to two spaces each. That makes it 16+4=20 moves for each player or 400 possible states after the first round.
I would imagine that my computer would be pretty grateful to the "health care" that I have been giving it. Lets see, faster brain(cpu) every couple years, more short term memory(ram) and long term memory(hard drive) every year, vocal cord(sound card) upgrade every couple years, new ears and eyes(microphone and PC camera), not to mention a facelift(video card and monitor). That and the endless supply of toys(software) I install every week, onsite medical(tech) support, and a fully stocked fridge(electrical outlet). There arent any humans living in that kind of luxury so if my computer cant live with that lifestyle, Ill go find one that can.
"Due to security reasons we do not allow nor do we have a feature to delete Microsoft Windows from your system. Rest assured that if you do not access your computer within 12 months your hard drive will automatically be reformatted."
You are confusing constant supervision with dictation of action. Supervising a child does not remove individuality from them. Supervising a child does not mean that you have to prevent them from making their own decisions. Supervising a child does not mean that you have to prevent them from making mistakes. Supervision means being aware of the environment that your child is in. Constant supervision is necessary in any environment untill the child is capable of handling the environment on their own. Whether that is the living room, the back yard, school, their friends house, etc. While it is not irresponsible to allow children to play in the woods in grade school, it is irresponsible to not go with them untill they learn how to survive in the woods on their own.
A responsible parent ensures that a mistake that a child makes becomes fixed and that the child learns from it. Whether it is fixed by the child, when possible, or by the parent, when the child cant. A parent cannot fix the mistakes their child makes if they are not around. If the child has not been taught how to fix their own mistakes when not supervised, serious accidents can happen.