It's interesting that computers haven't been trained to always win or tie at chess.
Chess is a game of perfect information. Each player knows every detail of the game state at any moment. Therefore, there has to be formula of some sort that can be applied to guarantee one player victory. Reasoning as follows:
Say I construct a lookup table for every possible combination of moves. Then I eliminate every move which doesn't lead to my victory. I am left with a lookup table which contains the proper response to every move my opponent makes.
There are two possibilities: I win the game, or my opponent wins the game. However, in order for my opponent to win, he/she would have to come up with a sequence of moves which is not in my lookup table. Since my lookup table is exhaustive, this is impossible.
Given an infinite amount of processing power and memory, could someone "solve" the game of chess?
If so, could someone use techniques such as genetic programming or neural networks to learn the lookup table in a finite amount of time/space?
This sort of reasoning is why the RIAA/MPAA already won the war. When lawmakers hear stuff like this, they think, "People who want to make MP3s really don't care about laws, just like the RIAA said, so the RIAA must be right." That's not bad logic; it's politics.
There is a world of difference between the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the current copyright fiasco. First of all, they were fighting the government, which is a much less powerful force than the RIAA. Second, they were fighting for their lives; you are fighting for something which you don't need in the first place. Finally, civil rights activists were, for the most part, given much more due process than DMCA violaters.
I hate to say this, but M$ may be on our side on this one. They are damaged by the patent (I vaguely recall having encrypted filesystem as an option when I tried to put win2k on a VMWare system), and they certainly have the money to squish this Maz Technologies like a bug.
The only government entities in this country who have "Sovereign Immunity" are the Supreme Court and the president. The Supreme Court can, however, overturn a prior decision later, and the president can be impeached if the Senate doesn't like him. Before you post semi-ignorant statements like this, go through any site with documentation of federal court cases (my favorite is FindLaw and look at how many are So-and-so v. United States.
Or it could allow them to find MORE people to terrorize.
Secret Police to Judge: "We looked at his monitor emissions and he was reading about terrorism. No, we can't tell you what it was. Why not? National security."
The idea that the 'net can't be censored by anyone is WAY too optimistic. Yes, governments will have a hard time doing it because there's always some other government that makes it legal. But there are a lot of coprorations (AOL-TW, M$, etc) who are more powerful than governments, and will eventually manange to force the replacement of IP with a protocol which only lets you see what they want you to see.
Speaking of better schedulers, something I've been thinking about: What would happen if I made a scheduler that used a neural network to decide process priorities based on past behavior of the processes spawned by a specific program (how much time the process got last time, whether it gave up the CPU voluntarily, blocked for input, or got timer-interrupted, etc)?
Each time a process became runnable, the NN could assign a priority, and the process would be placed on a priority queue (this isn't O(1), but it's better than O(p)). It seems to me like this would work; it would slow down wake_up_process() (i can't remember the exact name; i haven't looked at the scheduler since october) a bit, but the payoff as the NN got trained should make up for it...
(if this is a terrible idea, tell me so before you moderate me down:) )
I'm waiting for someone to use RSA or something similar for copy protection purposes. Then, it will be illegal to do research on prime number theory, because discussing efficient algorithms to factor large numbers will be a violation of the DMCA. Last I heard, this was a semi-hot topic in math research. I for one hope the DMCA makes research illegal, because the media and the public will be MUCH more upset at that than a few hackers who can't get free music anymore. Also, scientists have a much better record of making their voices heard than Russian political prisoners^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h computer programmers.
It was very interesting that they biased the article in favor of critics of the Dimitry nonsense. No mention of the fact that he was held without bail for violating a law that didn't apply in the jurisdiction where he violated it, but the article seemed very anti-DMCA for a large media organization. After reading about evil "hackers" whose primary goal is to steal what people worked hard to make, and Palestinian "freedom fighters" who blow up Israeli civilians (and many children recently) at random in response to targeted military assasinations, it's nice to see an article that doesn't sound like it's being paid for. Now if we could just get someone to write something that wasn't one-sided in general...
Next thing you know we'll have OCR cameras reading out license plates and giving us tickets for having an average speed over the speed limit. It's happened in other countries. There need to be serious laws passed against cameras used like this. No photo radar! No red-light cameras! No face-recognition cameras! No illegal keystroke wiretaps!
(Quoting parent because someone is bound to have enough sense to mod it Troll)
I think ticketing people who have an average speed above the speed limit is a wonderful idea, and you don't even need cameras to do it. Say I get on the Florida Turnpike (whose exits are numbered by miles and which has a speed limit of 65 MPH where I used to live) at Exit 50 (I know this doesn't exist, but whatever) and use my SunPass to pay the toll at 10:00 AM. I then exit at exit 125 at 11:00 AM. The SunPass people do a little math, and a week or so later, I recieve a ticket for going 75 mph in a 65 mph zone. This isn't anything new, or even technologically advanced (much less so than OCR for licence plates). I wish people would think more when they come up with the newest way the government was violating our "privacy".
(Side note: this would eliminate a lot of racial profiling, since you can't identify someone's skin color through a SunPass transmission)
Speeding is illegal and has been illegal for decades. If you want to argue that this is a bad law, and you can make a decent argument, good for you. But arguing that the police can't use readily available and widely-known technology to enforce existing laws because of possible privacy violations makes you sound like you have an extremely guilty consciounce, and that doesn't help any of us.
It's already happening for Apple. Their last two (at least) top-of-the-line systems have had two processors, and now they have an OS that takes advantage of that. If the dual-processor implementation is as good as Apple seems to think it is, it could be a good way to keep costs down on systems designed for processor-intensive applications like video editing (a market that Apple should want to capture as much of as possible), in addition to solving the die-size limitations.
The good news is that the Puma upgrade to MacOS X looks like it will be awesome, with the speed gremlins totally vanquished.
Looks like it's going to be awesome, in a look-but-don't-touch sort of way. They wouldn't let us near machines with 10.1, all of the demos had some revision of 10.0 (10.0.4?).
More good news is that it looks like most of the vital vendors are fully on target to release OSX applications. We had demos from Adobe, Quark, a few game people Microsoft, and so on. (I must confess that the Microsoft Office demo was surprisingly cool). There will be no lack of software for OSX.
What about VirtualPC? That is the product I was most impressed with. One of the guys there to answer questions showed me a G4 of some sort running Win98 and Win2k at the same time. I'm a bit disappointed that it won't run Solaris yet, but it was still neat. (read: there is no good reason to do this besides that you can)
The new PowerMacs were significant improvements over the old ones, but nothing to make me run over to the store and replace my dual G4/450 straight away. The 733 is now at the bottom of the line, which is a nice bump from the older 466-odd models. The 867 is also nice but less than one would hope. But what's with dual 800s? Why not dual 867s? Surely availability can't be a major problem with the 867s in the mainstream of the line.
Price increases exponentially with relation to processor speed at the top of the line. Last year I was looking to build an x86 box, and the 900 MHz Athlons cost almost 3x as much as the 800 MHz ones. I don't know about you, but I'd rather pay for two 800s in that case. It was probably a similar situation.
The problem is that Microsoft isn't going to allow a free product to dominate over Office, under any circumstances. We know that. What will be really interesting to see is how they manage to stop it in an environment that they don't have absolute control over, ie OSX.
There is a huge question I haven't seen addressed yet:
What happens if it is impossible to identify an anonymous user?
I attend a university which has a large number of public terminals that allow www use. I could go to one of these terminals, whether I attend the university or not, log on to yahoo, and post confidential or defamatory material about my evil employer (disclaimer: this is hypothetical. My employer is NOT evil) WITHOUT logging in to anything but Yahoo. This way, the IP address I leave says nothing about my identity. Who does the company sue then? Could the university be held responsible?
Not only do antics like this do more damage then they prevent, they don't get the point across. Blowing up a car dealership isn't going to make people buy less SUVs, it's just going to piss off law enforcement. Massive social engineering that makes those hybrid gas-electric cars "cool" instead of SUVs will make people buy less SUVs. If those 'eco-terrorists' really wanted to make a difference, they'd be putting up billboards on I-95 about how much more likely you are to die in an accident in an SUV. It's never going to be cool to die in a car accident.
1 hr per work unit has to be possible on a fast enough processor. I can get 8.5 hrs/wu on my 750 MHz Athlon, and there have to be computers out there that are 8.5 times as powerful as that.
I would think cheating would be much less detectible if the cheater reported reasonable processing times. Since processing times are reported by the client (it usually takes me about 12 hours to do a wu but the client still reports 8.5 hrs because of the way Win2k distributes processor time), there's no reason a user couldn't return a wu every minute and say it took 8 hours to process each one. You'd get 1.3 years of processing time per day, but there's no way to verify that you weren't just using a lot of machines.
I have exactly the opposite experience with SETI. My Athlon 750 box running Win2k blows my brother's G4/400 (with MacOS 9.01) out of the water. I can process a wu in about 8.5 hrs with numerous other processes running (playing DVDs, AIM, etc), but he's taking 11.5 hrs running SETI only when the rest of the system is idle. This sort of performance is sad given how much faster the G4 is in general.
No big suprises here. Bundling MSN Messenger is an attack on AOL Instant Messenger, no question. I would stay with AIM just because that's where the people I chat with are. It will be interesting to see if M$ can really chip away at the user base of AOL, which (along with ICQ) pretty much has a monopoly on chat programs. If AIM continues to work under XP, I would continue to use it. If MSN Messenger causes AIM to fail, that's anticompetitive.
What worries me much more is the part about having somoene troubleshoot your computer over the internet. If they can get the kind of access to your data over the internet, who knows what they're going to do with it? I've gotten used to the fact that anyone can find out anything they want about me, but I'm still uncomfortable with letting people do it easily. Does anyone know if there are any laws in place that could interfere with software like this?
Overall, it will be interesting to see how well XP actually runs. My computer came with WinME, which was awful. I upgraded to Win2k because my computer was crashing 3 times/day, and now I haven't rebooted since April 17. If XP can maintain this stability and include the power of Win2k in an OS that has decent multimedia features and doesn't break my old software, I might take a look. But my goal is still to be able to afford a box that can run OSX:)
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero..."
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting that computers haven't been trained to always win or tie at chess.
Chess is a game of perfect information. Each player knows every detail of the game state at any moment. Therefore, there has to be formula of some sort that can be applied to guarantee one player victory. Reasoning as follows:
Say I construct a lookup table for every possible combination of moves. Then I eliminate every move which doesn't lead to my victory. I am left with a lookup table which contains the proper response to every move my opponent makes.
There are two possibilities: I win the game, or my opponent wins the game. However, in order for my opponent to win, he/she would have to come up with a sequence of moves which is not in my lookup table. Since my lookup table is exhaustive, this is impossible.
Given an infinite amount of processing power and memory, could someone "solve" the game of chess?
If so, could someone use techniques such as genetic programming or neural networks to learn the lookup table in a finite amount of time/space?
"A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more money than a hundred men with guns." --The Godfather
This is probably illegal if any of the donated computers had Windoze.
He'll be 100 on dec 5 though. That's kinda cool.
Sorry, you only get +4 Insightful. nice try though.
This sort of reasoning is why the RIAA/MPAA already won the war. When lawmakers hear stuff like this, they think, "People who want to make MP3s really don't care about laws, just like the RIAA said, so the RIAA must be right." That's not bad logic; it's politics.
There is a world of difference between the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the current copyright fiasco. First of all, they were fighting the government, which is a much less powerful force than the RIAA. Second, they were fighting for their lives; you are fighting for something which you don't need in the first place. Finally, civil rights activists were, for the most part, given much more due process than DMCA violaters.
I hate to say this, but M$ may be on our side on this one. They are damaged by the patent (I vaguely recall having encrypted filesystem as an option when I tried to put win2k on a VMWare system), and they certainly have the money to squish this Maz Technologies like a bug.
The only government entities in this country who have "Sovereign Immunity" are the Supreme Court and the president. The Supreme Court can, however, overturn a prior decision later, and the president can be impeached if the Senate doesn't like him. Before you post semi-ignorant statements like this, go through any site with documentation of federal court cases (my favorite is FindLaw and look at how many are So-and-so v. United States.
Or it could allow them to find MORE people to terrorize.
Secret Police to Judge: "We looked at his monitor emissions and he was reading about terrorism. No, we can't tell you what it was. Why not? National security."
The idea that the 'net can't be censored by anyone is WAY too optimistic. Yes, governments will have a hard time doing it because there's always some other government that makes it legal. But there are a lot of coprorations (AOL-TW, M$, etc) who are more powerful than governments, and will eventually manange to force the replacement of IP with a protocol which only lets you see what they want you to see.
Each time a process became runnable, the NN could assign a priority, and the process would be placed on a priority queue (this isn't O(1), but it's better than O(p)). It seems to me like this would work; it would slow down wake_up_process() (i can't remember the exact name; i haven't looked at the scheduler since october) a bit, but the payoff as the NN got trained should make up for it...
(if this is a terrible idea, tell me so before you moderate me down
I'm waiting for someone to use RSA or something similar for copy protection purposes. Then, it will be illegal to do research on prime number theory, because discussing efficient algorithms to factor large numbers will be a violation of the DMCA. Last I heard, this was a semi-hot topic in math research. I for one hope the DMCA makes research illegal, because the media and the public will be MUCH more upset at that than a few hackers who can't get free music anymore. Also, scientists have a much better record of making their voices heard than Russian political prisoners^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h computer programmers.
It was very interesting that they biased the article in favor of critics of the Dimitry nonsense. No mention of the fact that he was held without bail for violating a law that didn't apply in the jurisdiction where he violated it, but the article seemed very anti-DMCA for a large media organization. After reading about evil "hackers" whose primary goal is to steal what people worked hard to make, and Palestinian "freedom fighters" who blow up Israeli civilians (and many children recently) at random in response to targeted military assasinations, it's nice to see an article that doesn't sound like it's being paid for. Now if we could just get someone to write something that wasn't one-sided in general...
(Quoting parent because someone is bound to have enough sense to mod it Troll)
I think ticketing people who have an average speed above the speed limit is a wonderful idea, and you don't even need cameras to do it. Say I get on the Florida Turnpike (whose exits are numbered by miles and which has a speed limit of 65 MPH where I used to live) at Exit 50 (I know this doesn't exist, but whatever) and use my SunPass to pay the toll at 10:00 AM. I then exit at exit 125 at 11:00 AM. The SunPass people do a little math, and a week or so later, I recieve a ticket for going 75 mph in a 65 mph zone. This isn't anything new, or even technologically advanced (much less so than OCR for licence plates). I wish people would think more when they come up with the newest way the government was violating our "privacy".
(Side note: this would eliminate a lot of racial profiling, since you can't identify someone's skin color through a SunPass transmission)
Speeding is illegal and has been illegal for decades. If you want to argue that this is a bad law, and you can make a decent argument, good for you. But arguing that the police can't use readily available and widely-known technology to enforce existing laws because of possible privacy violations makes you sound like you have an extremely guilty consciounce, and that doesn't help any of us.
It's already happening for Apple. Their last two (at least) top-of-the-line systems have had two processors, and now they have an OS that takes advantage of that. If the dual-processor implementation is as good as Apple seems to think it is, it could be a good way to keep costs down on systems designed for processor-intensive applications like video editing (a market that Apple should want to capture as much of as possible), in addition to solving the die-size limitations.
Looks like it's going to be awesome, in a look-but-don't-touch sort of way. They wouldn't let us near machines with 10.1, all of the demos had some revision of 10.0 (10.0.4?).
More good news is that it looks like most of the vital vendors are fully on target to release OSX applications. We had demos from Adobe, Quark, a few game people Microsoft, and so on. (I must confess that the Microsoft Office demo was surprisingly cool). There will be no lack of software for OSX.
What about VirtualPC? That is the product I was most impressed with. One of the guys there to answer questions showed me a G4 of some sort running Win98 and Win2k at the same time. I'm a bit disappointed that it won't run Solaris yet, but it was still neat. (read: there is no good reason to do this besides that you can)
The new PowerMacs were significant improvements over the old ones, but nothing to make me run over to the store and replace my dual G4/450 straight away. The 733 is now at the bottom of the line, which is a nice bump from the older 466-odd models. The 867 is also nice but less than one would hope. But what's with dual 800s? Why not dual 867s? Surely availability can't be a major problem with the 867s in the mainstream of the line.
Price increases exponentially with relation to processor speed at the top of the line. Last year I was looking to build an x86 box, and the 900 MHz Athlons cost almost 3x as much as the 800 MHz ones. I don't know about you, but I'd rather pay for two 800s in that case. It was probably a similar situation.
The problem is that Microsoft isn't going to allow a free product to dominate over Office, under any circumstances. We know that. What will be really interesting to see is how they manage to stop it in an environment that they don't have absolute control over, ie OSX.
What happens if it is impossible to identify an anonymous user?
I attend a university which has a large number of public terminals that allow www use. I could go to one of these terminals, whether I attend the university or not, log on to yahoo, and post confidential or defamatory material about my evil employer (disclaimer: this is hypothetical. My employer is NOT evil) WITHOUT logging in to anything but Yahoo. This way, the IP address I leave says nothing about my identity. Who does the company sue then? Could the university be held responsible?
Not only do antics like this do more damage then they prevent, they don't get the point across. Blowing up a car dealership isn't going to make people buy less SUVs, it's just going to piss off law enforcement. Massive social engineering that makes those hybrid gas-electric cars "cool" instead of SUVs will make people buy less SUVs. If those 'eco-terrorists' really wanted to make a difference, they'd be putting up billboards on I-95 about how much more likely you are to die in an accident in an SUV. It's never going to be cool to die in a car accident.
I would think cheating would be much less detectible if the cheater reported reasonable processing times. Since processing times are reported by the client (it usually takes me about 12 hours to do a wu but the client still reports 8.5 hrs because of the way Win2k distributes processor time), there's no reason a user couldn't return a wu every minute and say it took 8 hours to process each one. You'd get 1.3 years of processing time per day, but there's no way to verify that you weren't just using a lot of machines.
I have exactly the opposite experience with SETI. My Athlon 750 box running Win2k blows my brother's G4/400 (with MacOS 9.01) out of the water. I can process a wu in about 8.5 hrs with numerous other processes running (playing DVDs, AIM, etc), but he's taking 11.5 hrs running SETI only when the rest of the system is idle. This sort of performance is sad given how much faster the G4 is in general.
No big suprises here. Bundling MSN Messenger is an attack on AOL Instant Messenger, no question. I would stay with AIM just because that's where the people I chat with are. It will be interesting to see if M$ can really chip away at the user base of AOL, which (along with ICQ) pretty much has a monopoly on chat programs. If AIM continues to work under XP, I would continue to use it. If MSN Messenger causes AIM to fail, that's anticompetitive. What worries me much more is the part about having somoene troubleshoot your computer over the internet. If they can get the kind of access to your data over the internet, who knows what they're going to do with it? I've gotten used to the fact that anyone can find out anything they want about me, but I'm still uncomfortable with letting people do it easily. Does anyone know if there are any laws in place that could interfere with software like this? Overall, it will be interesting to see how well XP actually runs. My computer came with WinME, which was awful. I upgraded to Win2k because my computer was crashing 3 times/day, and now I haven't rebooted since April 17. If XP can maintain this stability and include the power of Win2k in an OS that has decent multimedia features and doesn't break my old software, I might take a look. But my goal is still to be able to afford a box that can run OSX :)
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero..."