in fact, i would have just loved it to death if this was a scam, and he lost $100 in his attempt to be clever.
however, in the same spirit, i think that the the chalengee (Mike) should send him the 5K US in whatever the Italian equivalent of the penny is, and send it COD... how many tons of coins would that be?
admit it - you don't even know a mathematician... all mathematicians that i know want to expand KNOWLEDGE. at worst they don't care where it's applied, or who applies it.
I assure you that the sigmoid was not devised in order to provide AIs with a decent activation function, or that boolean algebra was invented to aid with a silicon implementation of the (not yet formalized) concept of a Turing machine.
shame on me for responding to such a troll, and shame of the moderators for not indicating this post as such...
no, it's not even near the reach of current technology to solve the game of chess.
as the other reply mentions, deep blue is mostly heuristics, and highly trained AI (it played against dozens of grandmasters to train the AI initially, and then tweaked the weights in the NN by playing against itself millions of times). it severely prunes the game tree, and then uses predetermined weights to choose it's next move.
the game tree of chess(go, as well) is one of those problems that get computer scientists saying 'given a computer the size of the universe, with a runtime of 20 million years, and as many bits of memory as there are elementary particles...etc...' however, the limited human mind can do pretty well at it
that relates back to my previous point, which was that the original posting is absurd. if you tried to memorize all of the definitions leading up to most proofs, your head would likely explode (or you'd give up interest in math and become a VB programmer). Math, like chess, is an classic example of cognitively 'chunking' concepts. nobody does it from propositional calculus up, because given the way the human brain works, that approach is next to useless.
it's just 10% memorizing the board positions of all of your winning outcomes, 80% memorizing every previous move leading up to the win, and 10% lateral thinking...
something that would provide a bottom-up breakdown of the entire game tree of chess would be irreplacable in my chess book collection, and would replace all of the great books on classic openings, endgames, and overall strategy!
not even close to 'one end of the globe to another in 30 min' - the speed quoted on the NASA page is ~ Mach 5-10, or about a 1-2 mile/sec. It would take an 1-2 hours to reach most strategic areas in the world (of course, assuming it doesn't suck gas like a fully outfitted chevy suburban..)
that being said, 1-2 miles per second blows my mind...
You so thoroughly answer your own question, it's hard to reply to this seriously.
"So? everything is a social product. Let's say you manufacture something. You do not do this in a vacuum. You do pay the people who contribute directly, employees, supplies, etc. But, what about the guy that built the building that you work in, the guy who paved the road that you drive your products over, the folks who built the truck that you use to transport goods. Do you have to include them in a cut of your profits? Do they, therefore have the right to take your goods?
The answer is: no. Those people have already been compensated by you in some manner (you rent or bought the building, you paid taxes to get the road paved, you bought or rent the truck). In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently? The intellectual work performed by someone should be just as valid in the marketplace, and be justly reward, as phsyical labor"
this is precisely what the author meant by compensation.
hah, sure the poor have a chance... and back in the real world, this is how it works:
poor people start out disadvantaged - is this insurmountable? no. but they are disadvantaged - by elementary schooling (poor families cannot live in areas with high property taxes -> high property taxes feed into the school system -> the children of the wealthy generally have the opportunity to have a far superior average schooling). it is more difficult then to get into and pay for college. and they are much less likely to have contacts in industries or be the beneficiaries of nepotism. let's just look... how hard did George W. work?
The rich make money off of corporate profits - the poor make money off of wages. THESE TWO CONCEPTS ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. the wealthy have a vested interest in keeping wages low, so that they themselves make more money. you are so naive!! the wealthy don't make money from wages, they make money from stocks... poor people are paid less and laid off to make the stock prices higher.
to briefly counter your last point, lets take a brief look at China and Europe. Their is one communist state that is doing pretty well, and a whole host of SOCIALIST countries that have consistently higher standards of living than the USA. (oh, let's not overlook canada)
go listen to rush limbaug and let your brain leak out your ears you dittohead... theres some trickle down that's at your level.
It an important argument in any form of discussion like this. Thank you for bringing it up.
I was dying trying to think of the phrase...
Religion does not explain reality.
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
I respect your beliefs, and think that in many, many ways the modern church is a force for positive change in many societies (although not all good, IMHO).
That said, it is also an organization with an agenda that has evolved sustantially over the years, in response to lost conflicts with science. In every case, the church has lost. Remember, the church held a strict view of the origin of the earth - that it was roughly 15000 years old, and was created in 7 days... That view is held now only by scientifically ignorant people. The church also held that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun, planets, and heavens revolved around us. That was shown to be false (and accepted by the church). The church opposed evolution - a scientific fact which is opposed by groups standing on increasingly shaky scientific ground... I don't need to go on.
I don't think I need to name the speaker of 'Leave unto Ceasar what is Ceasar's, leave unto God which is God's' (I apologize for any misquoting, I only mean to capture the spirit).
Religion deals with the spiritual. If you understand the analogy, religion's place in reality has behaved like the class of statements between provably false and provably true statements in Intuitionistic logic. It is only getting smaller as more knowledge is gained. As scientific knowledge increases, religion can only temporarily give explanations to unknown phenomenon before these phenomenon are explained by science.
I feel that an unnecessary conflict has been generated by religion attempting to dictate fact - fact will be explained by science. religion will not predict the weather, discover a substance that is ideal for artificial hearts, or explain how DNA and protein interact to give us 5 fingers rather than 6. science will never comfort a dying person, explain why hurting someone else is wrong, or help us cope with the nature of self and soul.
Please, your explanation has no basis. Accept religion for what it is, which is wondrous and beautiful sometimes, and accept science for what it is as well.
Although I still enjoy the site, I've been really dismayed over Slashdot's (increasingly?) poor coverage of non-Programming/Electrical Engineering science.
This is terrible. Really, there are great, reliable sites for real science news on the web. Nature, Sci. American, and the NYTimes seems to have decent coverage.
you are expendable, too. the only difference is that you won't have somebody fighting to keep your job when whomever is paying your bills decides to outsource all of their programming to India or Russia.
i can't believe that/.'s fiercely independent political environment can bash unions without recognizing the reason for their existence, which is corporate abuse. Why do corporations want to pay workers less? because the people who run the company own large quantities of stock, which is more valuable if the company is more profitable. do you rely on the charitability of your boss with his own money? of course not.
if corporations treated workers better (ie stock options, better pay relative to management), then the need for and power base of unions would evaporate.
do some unions abuse their power? of course they do. are they harder to work with? yes. would they exist if there was a good relationship with management in all companies? no...
no, engineers and programmers are more apt to start up their own companies because of this ridiculous VC climate/economy that enabled them to in the past couple of years, coupled with the fact that it is a young industry.
has nothing to do with the quality of the people in the industry, thanks.
and i will guarantee that programmers/sysadmins/etc will be unionizing down the road as the demand for them decreases, pay goes down, and employer demands reach the point where they are unreasonable, as has happened in most skilled labor pools throughout history.
yeah, you can code c++, assembly, and script in perl - but you can't fix your carburetor i'm guessing...
i know i'm giving up karma for this, but i don't care. my girlfriend's mother works at delphi, and makes cooling systems for car air conditioners. my girlfriend works in public policy. i code. but at least i know you don't have to be able to program to be smart, motivated, or creative.
shame on you, for being insular and prejudiced against people for the field they work in.
I really have to fundamentally disagree with your point that web sites are equivalent to mail order catalogues...
I agree with the idea that most business people are slightly out of touch with reality. It is there job to be. You are not hired to be the president of a corporation only to pronounce their product as useless and redundant. you say that it is 'revolutionary' and 'fundamentally will change the way business X is run'. they are hired as evangelists.
it is the investors job to evaluate and analyze the pronouncements of business people, and come to their own conclusions about the validity and potential about a company. that is where the failure occurred in the market in '99 (i leave it simplified... i'm not ignorant of the fact this was a complex phenomenon, but there is a time & place...)
...anyway, i do believe that there has been a new business concept that has been created in all of this mess. your analogy of mail order catalogues is good, but flawed in the sense that a company must possess a list of people to send the catalogues to. but i can buy a yahoo storefront, or build my own site, and then let people hear about my site (or _uck_ let marketing get the word out). it is accessible to everyone, without needing to know the customers in advance.
so it has that fundamental advantage, but also - and you may dispute this - a web site can be interactive in a totally different manner than a catalogue, and in ways that are useful. as much as amazon is despise here, they demonstrate this remarkably well with the automated suggestion, wish lists, user 'suggest reading' pages, user reviews, etc...
now, has it been done right? maybe not too often. but the potential is there. maybe a guy driving a porsche boxter, with a $1500 suit, who doesn't even know SQL won't be able to exploit the possibility of online business, but some people willing to work hard will.
unions were formed in response to unbearable working conditions that were prevailent in the early 20th, late 19th century. child labor, unlivable wages, 7 day work weeks, and 15 hour days. there was no concept of 'benefits'...
your mistake is an egregious error that is made altogether too commonly... you ignore back breaking work of people who came before you, while enjoying the fruits of their labors.
you should be ashamed of yourself. i doubt you have worked single day of your life as hard as the average day was for a laborer in 1910, and you've been brainwashed by reaganesque rhetoric to blame the very same people who improved your standard of living.
blaming all unions for the actions of a few greedy/corrupt ones is wrong. and sad. i pity your lack of perspective.
Microsoft is interested in profits. Their angle on the XBox is that they will make money in the games and licensing fees, i presume.
If, after 2 months, MS finds that everyone's buying the hardware (at negative margins for MS) and not buying any software (and using Apache, nonetheless) - they'll do something to block this practice, or raise the prices to the point where this will become profitable.
the second will not happen either, as MS will be very disinclined to make inroads into the server for fear of anti-trust legislation (okay, OS, software, hardware... that'd do it...) and industry alliances with vendors who pre-package windows.
great idea, but like napster, has a critical mass beyond which it will become it's own worst enemy.
Slashdot Mirror
this wasn't science, it was the CS equivalent of a bad joke. neither of them deserves anything, and the whole situation is pathetic.
what a loser.
you know, i wouldn't give patrick the 5k either
in fact, i would have just loved it to death if this was a scam, and he lost $100 in his attempt to be clever.
however, in the same spirit, i think that the the chalengee (Mike) should send him the 5K US in whatever the Italian equivalent of the penny is, and send it COD... how many tons of coins would that be?
okay, math isn't about using math, it is about discovering more math.
the fact that you received an A+ in philosophy only show that (as most of us knew already) philosophy professors grade easily...
good luck trying to drill that point through here... seems like the false assumption of intelligence and mind blowing arrogance go hand in hand...
only on /. does a post like yours get modded up...
admit it - you don't even know a mathematician... all mathematicians that i know want to expand KNOWLEDGE. at worst they don't care where it's applied, or who applies it.
I assure you that the sigmoid was not devised in order to provide AIs with a decent activation function, or that boolean algebra was invented to aid with a silicon implementation of the (not yet formalized) concept of a Turing machine.
shame on me for responding to such a troll, and shame of the moderators for not indicating this post as such...
no, it's not even near the reach of current technology to solve the game of chess.
as the other reply mentions, deep blue is mostly heuristics, and highly trained AI (it played against dozens of grandmasters to train the AI initially, and then tweaked the weights in the NN by playing against itself millions of times). it severely prunes the game tree, and then uses predetermined weights to choose it's next move.
the game tree of chess(go, as well) is one of those problems that get computer scientists saying 'given a computer the size of the universe, with a runtime of 20 million years, and as many bits of memory as there are elementary particles...etc...' however, the limited human mind can do pretty well at it
that relates back to my previous point, which was that the original posting is absurd. if you tried to memorize all of the definitions leading up to most proofs, your head would likely explode (or you'd give up interest in math and become a VB programmer). Math, like chess, is an classic example of cognitively 'chunking' concepts. nobody does it from propositional calculus up, because given the way the human brain works, that approach is next to useless.
it's just 10% memorizing the board positions of all of your winning outcomes, 80% memorizing every previous move leading up to the win, and 10% lateral thinking...
something that would provide a bottom-up breakdown of the entire game tree of chess would be irreplacable in my chess book collection, and would replace all of the great books on classic openings, endgames, and overall strategy!
how easy is that!
yeah, math is arbitrary...
how big is an int in c++? are they little or big endian? hm...
be thankful for the little things.
they're reccomending w2k, but selling the machine with caldera. would you rather it be the other way around?
not even close to 'one end of the globe to another in 30 min' - the speed quoted on the NASA page is ~ Mach 5-10, or about a 1-2 mile/sec. It would take an 1-2 hours to reach most strategic areas in the world (of course, assuming it doesn't suck gas like a fully outfitted chevy suburban..)
that being said, 1-2 miles per second blows my mind...
You so thoroughly answer your own question, it's hard to reply to this seriously.
"So? everything is a social product. Let's say you manufacture something. You do not do this in a vacuum. You do pay the people who contribute directly, employees, supplies, etc. But, what about the guy that built the building that you work in, the guy who paved the road that you drive your products over, the folks who built the truck that you use to transport goods. Do you have to include them in a cut of your profits? Do they, therefore have the right to take your goods?
The answer is: no. Those people have already been compensated by you in some manner (you rent or bought the building, you paid taxes to get the road paved, you bought or rent the truck). In the case of intellectual property, why would we treat anything differently? The intellectual work performed by someone should be just as valid in the marketplace, and be justly reward, as phsyical labor"
this is precisely what the author meant by compensation.
hah, sure the poor have a chance... and back in the real world, this is how it works:
poor people start out disadvantaged - is this insurmountable? no. but they are disadvantaged - by elementary schooling (poor families cannot live in areas with high property taxes -> high property taxes feed into the school system -> the children of the wealthy generally have the opportunity to have a far superior average schooling). it is more difficult then to get into and pay for college. and they are much less likely to have contacts in industries or be the beneficiaries of nepotism. let's just look... how hard did George W. work?
The rich make money off of corporate profits - the poor make money off of wages. THESE TWO CONCEPTS ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. the wealthy have a vested interest in keeping wages low, so that they themselves make more money. you are so naive!! the wealthy don't make money from wages, they make money from stocks... poor people are paid less and laid off to make the stock prices higher.
to briefly counter your last point, lets take a brief look at China and Europe. Their is one communist state that is doing pretty well, and a whole host of SOCIALIST countries that have consistently higher standards of living than the USA. (oh, let's not overlook canada)
go listen to rush limbaug and let your brain leak out your ears you dittohead... theres some trickle down that's at your level.
Both are wrong, but it's obviously better to steal from the rich.
i agree totally, this didn't deserve to be a full fledged article. this is a interesting tidbit at best.
Nobody here's talking about disproving god you little troll. Only that he has nothing to do with the phenotypic manifestation of genotypic traits.
It an important argument in any form of discussion like this. Thank you for bringing it up.
I was dying trying to think of the phrase...
I respect your beliefs, and think that in many, many ways the modern church is a force for positive change in many societies (although not all good, IMHO).
That said, it is also an organization with an agenda that has evolved sustantially over the years, in response to lost conflicts with science. In every case, the church has lost. Remember, the church held a strict view of the origin of the earth - that it was roughly 15000 years old, and was created in 7 days... That view is held now only by scientifically ignorant people. The church also held that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun, planets, and heavens revolved around us. That was shown to be false (and accepted by the church). The church opposed evolution - a scientific fact which is opposed by groups standing on increasingly shaky scientific ground... I don't need to go on.
I don't think I need to name the speaker of 'Leave unto Ceasar what is Ceasar's, leave unto God which is God's' (I apologize for any misquoting, I only mean to capture the spirit).
Religion deals with the spiritual. If you understand the analogy, religion's place in reality has behaved like the class of statements between provably false and provably true statements in Intuitionistic logic. It is only getting smaller as more knowledge is gained. As scientific knowledge increases, religion can only temporarily give explanations to unknown phenomenon before these phenomenon are explained by science.
I feel that an unnecessary conflict has been generated by religion attempting to dictate fact - fact will be explained by science. religion will not predict the weather, discover a substance that is ideal for artificial hearts, or explain how DNA and protein interact to give us 5 fingers rather than 6. science will never comfort a dying person, explain why hurting someone else is wrong, or help us cope with the nature of self and soul.
Please, your explanation has no basis. Accept religion for what it is, which is wondrous and beautiful sometimes, and accept science for what it is as well.
Although I still enjoy the site, I've been really dismayed over Slashdot's (increasingly?) poor coverage of non-Programming/Electrical Engineering science.
This is terrible. Really, there are great, reliable sites for real science news on the web. Nature, Sci. American, and the NYTimes seems to have decent coverage.
you know what?
/.'s fiercely independent political environment can bash unions without recognizing the reason for their existence, which is corporate abuse. Why do corporations want to pay workers less? because the people who run the company own large quantities of stock, which is more valuable if the company is more profitable. do you rely on the charitability of your boss with his own money? of course not.
you are expendable, too. the only difference is that you won't have somebody fighting to keep your job when whomever is paying your bills decides to outsource all of their programming to India or Russia.
i can't believe that
if corporations treated workers better (ie stock options, better pay relative to management), then the need for and power base of unions would evaporate.
do some unions abuse their power? of course they do. are they harder to work with? yes. would they exist if there was a good relationship with management in all companies? no...
no, engineers and programmers are more apt to start up their own companies because of this ridiculous VC climate/economy that enabled them to in the past couple of years, coupled with the fact that it is a young industry.
has nothing to do with the quality of the people in the industry, thanks.
and i will guarantee that programmers/sysadmins/etc will be unionizing down the road as the demand for them decreases, pay goes down, and employer demands reach the point where they are unreasonable, as has happened in most skilled labor pools throughout history.
big difference in the level of 'arrogant prick'.
yeah, you can code c++, assembly, and script in perl - but you can't fix your carburetor i'm guessing...
i know i'm giving up karma for this, but i don't care. my girlfriend's mother works at delphi, and makes cooling systems for car air conditioners. my girlfriend works in public policy. i code. but at least i know you don't have to be able to program to be smart, motivated, or creative.
shame on you, for being insular and prejudiced against people for the field they work in.
I really have to fundamentally disagree with your point that web sites are equivalent to mail order catalogues...
...anyway, i do believe that there has been a new business concept that has been created in all of this mess. your analogy of mail order catalogues is good, but flawed in the sense that a company must possess a list of people to send the catalogues to. but i can buy a yahoo storefront, or build my own site, and then let people hear about my site (or _uck_ let marketing get the word out). it is accessible to everyone, without needing to know the customers in advance.
I agree with the idea that most business people are slightly out of touch with reality. It is there job to be. You are not hired to be the president of a corporation only to pronounce their product as useless and redundant. you say that it is 'revolutionary' and 'fundamentally will change the way business X is run'. they are hired as evangelists.
it is the investors job to evaluate and analyze the pronouncements of business people, and come to their own conclusions about the validity and potential about a company. that is where the failure occurred in the market in '99 (i leave it simplified... i'm not ignorant of the fact this was a complex phenomenon, but there is a time & place...)
so it has that fundamental advantage, but also - and you may dispute this - a web site can be interactive in a totally different manner than a catalogue, and in ways that are useful. as much as amazon is despise here, they demonstrate this remarkably well with the automated suggestion, wish lists, user 'suggest reading' pages, user reviews, etc...
now, has it been done right? maybe not too often. but the potential is there. maybe a guy driving a porsche boxter, with a $1500 suit, who doesn't even know SQL won't be able to exploit the possibility of online business, but some people willing to work hard will.
just my 2 cents...
corporations are greedy.
...
never, ever, forget that.
unions were formed in response to unbearable working conditions that were prevailent in the early 20th, late 19th century. child labor, unlivable wages, 7 day work weeks, and 15 hour days. there was no concept of 'benefits'
your mistake is an egregious error that is made altogether too commonly... you ignore back breaking work of people who came before you, while enjoying the fruits of their labors.
you should be ashamed of yourself. i doubt you have worked single day of your life as hard as the average day was for a laborer in 1910, and you've been brainwashed by reaganesque rhetoric to blame the very same people who improved your standard of living.
blaming all unions for the actions of a few greedy/corrupt ones is wrong. and sad. i pity your lack of perspective.
And don't forget Giant Glass!
Microsoft is interested in profits. Their angle on the XBox is that they will make money in the games and licensing fees, i presume.
If, after 2 months, MS finds that everyone's buying the hardware (at negative margins for MS) and not buying any software (and using Apache, nonetheless) - they'll do something to block this practice, or raise the prices to the point where this will become profitable.
the second will not happen either, as MS will be very disinclined to make inroads into the server for fear of anti-trust legislation (okay, OS, software, hardware... that'd do it...) and industry alliances with vendors who pre-package windows.
great idea, but like napster, has a critical mass beyond which it will become it's own worst enemy.