Then maybe it's not appropriate to use a tree. Why not use a graph? Each node could represent one unique layout for the board - with a graph, there would be no need for this kind of redundancy.
There's more to a board position in chess than the layout of the pieces. What moves have been made in reaching the position is essential-- for example, if the king has moved at all during the game makes a difference in many positions (castling is not allowed). Pawn capture "en passant" is only possible immediately after an opponents' pawn has moved two steps. Also, there are rules that allow a player to claim a draw if the same position is reached three times in a game, or the 50-move draw rule (if 50 moves go by without a pawn move or a check, the a player can claim a draw).
It might indeed be possible to find a more compact representation than a game tree-- but certainly the representatio will be much more complicated than a graph of board layouts.
Re:Chess has already been conquered. Humans lose!
on
Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
Computers will calculate longer variations until all possible winnable combinations have been computed. At that point, computers will have determined the game of chess.
Given the complexity of chess, and the heat death of the universe, there will be no such point.
Go watch a blitz chess tournament.
on
Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
If you know enough about the game, watching a blitz (10 min game) tournament with good players can keep you on the edge of the seat.
Instead of a language everyone speaks how about a language NO ONE speaks...
Even better, we can pick languages which are disappearing and revive them as communication languages. I remember a few months back in sci.lang someone proposed Occitan as an interlanguage for Romance speakers. It struck me as a good idea-- Occitan is intermediate between Spanish and French, and resembles Catalan more than any other language, which would make it quite workable for the target audience.
There are more sources of redundancy in English that you don't mention-- word order, and obligatory subjects and objects. In an English sentence, the order of the elements in the sentence is very strict, there has to be a subject
There are languages that don't have some of these requirements. Spanish and Italian, for example, have reasonably free word order (but nothing of the sort like Australian aboriginal languages, some of which allow you to arbitrarily permute words in some sentences). They also allow you to have sentences without subjects-- you can guess the subject from the verb conjugation.
After reading about the people trying to preserve dying languages (Whole Earth, Spring 2000), I came to think that everyone should have a local language that ties them to their own culture and then another regional/global language. Fishman suggests that these languages will have different functions (cultural identity, religion, commerce etc.) If these languages are around children from their early days, then learning these languages will presumably not be the problem it was for me.
This is a widespread attitude among linguists. Most linguists love language variety-- not to mention that we _depend_ on it to do our research.
I am prepared to believe this kind of mental flexibility is an intellectual benefit. But, I would be interested in a comment from/. readers in Quebec or some other heavily bilingual country. I have been given to understand that there are parts of Quebec for which it is difficult to speak in English. Is that true? If so, is it (solely) a cultural resentment of English or is biligualism realy tough for lots of people? Do geeks in Quebec have trouble with multiple languages?
Well, I think I can tell you quite a bit-- I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so my first language is Spanish, did my undergrad degree there in a Spanish speaking institution, read and write English at a very high level, read French very well, speak it and understand it reasonably well, and study linguistics; and my roommate is very much my equivalent from Québec in all of the above, save that his father's side of the family is Armenian, and took care to send him to special schools so that he would learn the language.
Yes, there are parts of Québec where most people don't speak much English, if any at all; these are mostly rural areas. Montreal, for example, is a blilingual city-- nearly everybody speaks good English, though more often than not with a Québecois accent.
Also, Québec French has a lot of loan words from English; there's a record by a band called Les Cowboys Fringants with a very funny song about this, with lines like "J'vas su'l sundeck starter l'charcoal" ("I go on the sundeck to start the charcoal"). But, contrary to popular opinion, this in no way means that French is "transforming into English" by any means. Words are, in a sense, the least important part of a language; new words are invented, and old ones forgotten, all the time. The important bit in a language is how to form words from other words, how to put them together into phrases, and how to figure out what the phrases mean. And certainly, despite the fact that languages all over the world are borrowing English words en masse, they borrow morphology and syntax very little.
For example, look at the song line I quoted above: there's the word "starter", which obviously comes from English "start"; the "-er" ending that appears in this word here is the French infinitive ending, as in "parler" (to speak), "rêver" (to dream), etc., so you can conjugate it just like you conjugate French regular verbs from the 1st group.
Another example is a line from another song in the same record, which goes "J'ai un job steady" (I have a steady job). Note that in English, "steady" has to go before "job"; however, in French it has to be the other way around.
I can't say how much difficulty geeks in Québec have with English-- I can say that, although I and many of my friends when I lived in Puerto Rico spoke excellent English, we'd speak in Spanish for everything. If we didn't know a word in Spanish for something, well, we just used the English word. I suspect it is pretty much the same for Quebecers.
If someone speaks three languages they are trilingual, if they speak two languages they are bilingual, if they only speak one language they are American.
An interesting fact to go along with that joke-- most people in the world can communicate (but not necessarily speak very well) in some language different from their native tounge. So pure monolinguals are a minority.
Feel free to email me if you'd like to ask me something.
These numbers are population figures of countries where English is official-- not figures of actual English speakers, native or L2.
The original poster cited the SIL Ethnologue, which is known for being very rigorous in compiling such data-- they have the strictest criteria in deciding what are separate languages.
For example, counts of second language speakers of English have been known to be inflated by the inclusion of English-based pidgins and creoles, which are not interintelligible with English (for example, Singlish).
It is not trivial to know how many people are second language speakers-- often the decision as to whether some particular person counts as one is arbitrary.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics's publication on the languages of th world, the Ethnologue, gives 470 million first and second language speakers. One usually sees higher numbers claimed, like 1 billion-- the SIL, however, has quite strict criteria in its work.
Those who call have the choice whether or not the take the job.
Those who run the business have the choice whether or not to offer that kind of job. People who take the job need the money.
People need to learn personal responsibility for their own actions.
Yes, but for some strange reason you may fail to comprehend, some people find that feeding themselves and their family takes priority over that.
Really, what's up with you and the other poster who replied to me? Have y'all never suffered through having hardly any money, and having to take a stupid job to survive?
No, they have a moral obligation to society to get another job.
I will be charitable and assume you are not being serious.
I case you are being serious, then I will assume you believe society has a moral obligation to offer everybody an alternative job to making telemarketing calls.
I've had friends who have had to get this kind of job to survive.
My question is, if they were rude enough to call me in the first place, i think i have the right to be a complete ass to them, no?
You gain nothing by being rude to the caller. He/she is just someone making not much money, and will no power to make it stop. The ones who pay for this kind of stupid show are happily isolated from all your abuse if you attack the poor chap who makes the call.
Also, before you Debian fascists speak up, I'd just like to say that I'd like to have a setup that I *didn't* have to use a package manager, but could if I wanted to.
Well, I might fall under your definition of 'Debian facist', but really, no distribution should stop you from grabbing source tarballs, building stuff, and installing it on/usr/local/. Preferably using GNU Stow to manage the packages.
Anyway, let me be just a bit of a facist: since I switched to Debian from RedHat, I've hardly ever had to muck around with anything to get it to install. I've had to do it a couple of times, but mind you, I run the unstable tree.
Well, I don't know what a "counterstrike server" is, but I should not that I run Debian Potato on a Toshiba 486 laptop with a 200MB hard disk-- I only use it to display X windows apps over ssh nowadays, but I once used to have emacs 19 and LaTeX running on it (but that was on Debian 2.1).
I have about 48 megs free HD on the 160 MB linux partition, so the install is only about 110MB (there's also a 24 MB swap partition and a 12MB dos partition). If you can do without X windows, you should be able to save about 12 MB more. So I'd say that if you set up 64 MB swap space, you could fit a reasonably complete Debian 2.2 system in 170MB.
Of course, by picking a bare-bones distro, or rolling your own, you'd be able to save a lot more space, so you might still wish to consider that.
At risk of sounding harsh, then they shouldn't have posted them to start with.
This does not erase the ethical issues with further republishing mateial that might contain identifying detail. We're talking about the possibility of someone being harmed by the even wider publication of this.
And, as I understand it, Katz also intends to publish some email messages, which were _not_ posted to/.
If it were really too personal, then it shouldn't have been posted to a public forum like Slashdot. Pure and simple.
But the way I understood it, Katz is also publishing email messages he received.
Anything that has been said in a public forum is fair game to be quoted -- many cases of that are covered by "fair use." The only question is whether the book-producers had the right to quote without attributing the quotations.
Fair use allows you to take others people work and _reference_ and _cite_ it in _your own work_. What Katz intends on doing is not that-- it is reproducing _other_ people's work.
If they can do this under fair use, I can reproduce any copyrighted work in the whole and claim fair use.
No way he was an NT supporter-- don't you remember the frantic anti-GUI rants, and the claims that if you didn't have an idea how a computer works, you shouldn't be using one?
Yeah yeah, so the posters "obviously" had an intent to "get their story out", which "justifies" the inclusion of their stories in the book.
But the article does not address the issue its own title raises _at all_ beyond suggesting the emails/posts _should_ be in the public domain.
So, really, who owns the posts?
And what if one of the featured decides that the published version is too personal, and, despite of the alterations for privacy, all too personal and identifiable?
Can you remember what was the name of this controversial 18 year old from Russia who believed GUIs were a conspiracy from hell? I remember being outraged at the treatment he got from Slashbots-- when the moderation thing was being started, there were tons of guys basically asking for him to be banned from/. The guy was a jerk, but he just expressed his opinions fervently and defended them very actively.
Yeah, I remember the good old times where the closest thing to disruption in Slashdot was Meeeept, the first first post messages (which I though were funny, and was totally mystified at people who hated them from the very beginning), BoReDAtWoRk (not sure you got the caps right) and his cluestick, KDE and Gnome developers flaming each other publicly in/., and so on...
Necessity says I need to earn money to pay my bills and feed my family and the same applies to them.
What sense of "necessity" do you mean?
It is the current social and economic relations which say that you need to earn money by wage or salaried work (in which process someone else who owns the means of production benefits more than you) to pay your bills (which again, exist because of particular social and economic relations) and feed your family (which, of course, you ought to do, whatever the social and economic relations may be).
It is also because of the standing social and economic relations that, while you possibly can get a well paid job with many conveniences, for most people in the world their only way of feeding their families is through sweatshop labor.
And there is nothing necessary about those relations. They are the result of the interaction of past people and relations.
I am sure that some time over the course of my collegiate career I photocopied something that I should not have legally done....besides isn't plagiarism the sincerest form of flattery??
Photocopying something is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking someone else's work and attributing it to yourself (for example, reading someone's research paper, and putting the person's ideas in your work, without citation, implying they are your ideas). It is not a form of flattery, but one of the very lowest behaviors by academic standards.
(PSYOPS) guys in newsrooms. These guys jobs in many cases is to find out how news agencies work, for the intention of using that information in other countries.
Or their own, for that matter. Which is precisely a big part of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There's more to a board position in chess than the layout of the pieces. What moves have been made in reaching the position is essential-- for example, if the king has moved at all during the game makes a difference in many positions (castling is not allowed). Pawn capture "en passant" is only possible immediately after an opponents' pawn has moved two steps. Also, there are rules that allow a player to claim a draw if the same position is reached three times in a game, or the 50-move draw rule (if 50 moves go by without a pawn move or a check, the a player can claim a draw).
It might indeed be possible to find a more compact representation than a game tree-- but certainly the representatio will be much more complicated than a graph of board layouts.
Given the complexity of chess, and the heat death of the universe, there will be no such point.
If you know enough about the game, watching a blitz (10 min game) tournament with good players can keep you on the edge of the seat.
Even better, we can pick languages which are disappearing and revive them as communication languages. I remember a few months back in sci.lang someone proposed Occitan as an interlanguage for Romance speakers. It struck me as a good idea-- Occitan is intermediate between Spanish and French, and resembles Catalan more than any other language, which would make it quite workable for the target audience.
Yiddish is a germanic language with about 3 million native speakers, which originated among Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe.
There are languages that don't have some of these requirements. Spanish and Italian, for example, have reasonably free word order (but nothing of the sort like Australian aboriginal languages, some of which allow you to arbitrarily permute words in some sentences). They also allow you to have sentences without subjects-- you can guess the subject from the verb conjugation.
Why do you say that linguists agree that English is easy? I've never heard a linguist say such a thing.
This is a widespread attitude among linguists. Most linguists love language variety-- not to mention that we _depend_ on it to do our research.
I am prepared to believe this kind of mental flexibility is an intellectual benefit. But, I would be interested in a comment from /. readers in Quebec or some other heavily bilingual country. I have been given to understand that there are parts of Quebec for which it is difficult to speak in English. Is that true? If so, is it (solely) a cultural resentment of English or is biligualism realy tough for lots of people? Do geeks in Quebec have trouble with multiple languages?
Well, I think I can tell you quite a bit-- I was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so my first language is Spanish, did my undergrad degree there in a Spanish speaking institution, read and write English at a very high level, read French very well, speak it and understand it reasonably well, and study linguistics; and my roommate is very much my equivalent from Québec in all of the above, save that his father's side of the family is Armenian, and took care to send him to special schools so that he would learn the language.
Yes, there are parts of Québec where most people don't speak much English, if any at all; these are mostly rural areas. Montreal, for example, is a blilingual city-- nearly everybody speaks good English, though more often than not with a Québecois accent.
Also, Québec French has a lot of loan words from English; there's a record by a band called Les Cowboys Fringants with a very funny song about this, with lines like "J'vas su'l sundeck starter l'charcoal" ("I go on the sundeck to start the charcoal"). But, contrary to popular opinion, this in no way means that French is "transforming into English" by any means. Words are, in a sense, the least important part of a language; new words are invented, and old ones forgotten, all the time. The important bit in a language is how to form words from other words, how to put them together into phrases, and how to figure out what the phrases mean. And certainly, despite the fact that languages all over the world are borrowing English words en masse, they borrow morphology and syntax very little.
For example, look at the song line I quoted above: there's the word "starter", which obviously comes from English "start"; the "-er" ending that appears in this word here is the French infinitive ending, as in "parler" (to speak), "rêver" (to dream), etc., so you can conjugate it just like you conjugate French regular verbs from the 1st group.
Another example is a line from another song in the same record, which goes "J'ai un job steady" (I have a steady job). Note that in English, "steady" has to go before "job"; however, in French it has to be the other way around.
I can't say how much difficulty geeks in Québec have with English-- I can say that, although I and many of my friends when I lived in Puerto Rico spoke excellent English, we'd speak in Spanish for everything. If we didn't know a word in Spanish for something, well, we just used the English word. I suspect it is pretty much the same for Quebecers.
If someone speaks three languages they are trilingual, if they speak two languages they are bilingual, if they only speak one language they are American.
An interesting fact to go along with that joke-- most people in the world can communicate (but not necessarily speak very well) in some language different from their native tounge. So pure monolinguals are a minority.
Feel free to email me if you'd like to ask me something.
The original poster cited the SIL Ethnologue, which is known for being very rigorous in compiling such data-- they have the strictest criteria in deciding what are separate languages.
For example, counts of second language speakers of English have been known to be inflated by the inclusion of English-based pidgins and creoles, which are not interintelligible with English (for example, Singlish).
It is not trivial to know how many people are second language speakers-- often the decision as to whether some particular person counts as one is arbitrary.
The Summer Institute of Linguistics's publication on the languages of th world, the Ethnologue, gives 470 million first and second language speakers. One usually sees higher numbers claimed, like 1 billion-- the SIL, however, has quite strict criteria in its work.
Those who run the business have the choice whether or not to offer that kind of job. People who take the job need the money.
People need to learn personal responsibility for their own actions.
Yes, but for some strange reason you may fail to comprehend, some people find that feeding themselves and their family takes priority over that.
Really, what's up with you and the other poster who replied to me? Have y'all never suffered through having hardly any money, and having to take a stupid job to survive?
I will be charitable and assume you are not being serious.
I case you are being serious, then I will assume you believe society has a moral obligation to offer everybody an alternative job to making telemarketing calls.
I've had friends who have had to get this kind of job to survive.
You gain nothing by being rude to the caller. He/she is just someone making not much money, and will no power to make it stop. The ones who pay for this kind of stupid show are happily isolated from all your abuse if you attack the poor chap who makes the call.
Well, I might fall under your definition of 'Debian facist', but really, no distribution should stop you from grabbing source tarballs, building stuff, and installing it on /usr/local/. Preferably using GNU Stow to manage the packages.
Anyway, let me be just a bit of a facist: since I switched to Debian from RedHat, I've hardly ever had to muck around with anything to get it to install. I've had to do it a couple of times, but mind you, I run the unstable tree.
I have about 48 megs free HD on the 160 MB linux partition, so the install is only about 110MB (there's also a 24 MB swap partition and a 12MB dos partition). If you can do without X windows, you should be able to save about 12 MB more. So I'd say that if you set up 64 MB swap space, you could fit a reasonably complete Debian 2.2 system in 170MB.
Of course, by picking a bare-bones distro, or rolling your own, you'd be able to save a lot more space, so you might still wish to consider that.
This does not erase the ethical issues with further republishing mateial that might contain identifying detail. We're talking about the possibility of someone being harmed by the even wider publication of this.
And, as I understand it, Katz also intends to publish some email messages, which were _not_ posted to /.
But the way I understood it, Katz is also publishing email messages he received.
Anything that has been said in a public forum is fair game to be quoted -- many cases of that are covered by "fair use." The only question is whether the book-producers had the right to quote without attributing the quotations.
Fair use allows you to take others people work and _reference_ and _cite_ it in _your own work_. What Katz intends on doing is not that-- it is reproducing _other_ people's work.
If they can do this under fair use, I can reproduce any copyrighted work in the whole and claim fair use.
No way he was an NT supporter-- don't you remember the frantic anti-GUI rants, and the claims that if you didn't have an idea how a computer works, you shouldn't be using one?
But the article does not address the issue its own title raises _at all_ beyond suggesting the emails/posts _should_ be in the public domain.
So, really, who owns the posts?
And what if one of the featured decides that the published version is too personal, and, despite of the alterations for privacy, all too personal and identifiable?
Can you remember what was the name of this controversial 18 year old from Russia who believed GUIs were a conspiracy from hell? I remember being outraged at the treatment he got from Slashbots-- when the moderation thing was being started, there were tons of guys basically asking for him to be banned from /. The guy was a jerk, but he just expressed his opinions fervently and defended them very actively.
Yeah, I remember the good old times where the closest thing to disruption in Slashdot was Meeeept, the first first post messages (which I though were funny, and was totally mystified at people who hated them from the very beginning), BoReDAtWoRk (not sure you got the caps right) and his cluestick, KDE and Gnome developers flaming each other publicly in /., and so on...
What sense of "necessity" do you mean?
It is the current social and economic relations which say that you need to earn money by wage or salaried work (in which process someone else who owns the means of production benefits more than you) to pay your bills (which again, exist because of particular social and economic relations) and feed your family (which, of course, you ought to do, whatever the social and economic relations may be).
It is also because of the standing social and economic relations that, while you possibly can get a well paid job with many conveniences, for most people in the world their only way of feeding their families is through sweatshop labor.
And there is nothing necessary about those relations. They are the result of the interaction of past people and relations.
Well, it really said that. This is Slashdot, where stupider things are said in all seriousness every hour ;-)
Photocopying something is not plagiarism. Plagiarism is taking someone else's work and attributing it to yourself (for example, reading someone's research paper, and putting the person's ideas in your work, without citation, implying they are your ideas). It is not a form of flattery, but one of the very lowest behaviors by academic standards.
Or their own, for that matter. Which is precisely a big part of the problem.
The things you say are all true. However, you have the benefit of hindsight.