Even with open source software, unless you compiled the code yourself (or at least were present when it was compiled), how do you know that the "open" code is actually what they installed on the machine?
Jos Stam's stable fluids (SIGGRAPH 99) was one instance of a technique that looked better but wasn't exactly more accurate (specifically, Stam presented an unconditionally stable solver based on the Hodge-Helmholtz decomposition principle. Great for graphics, horrible numerical dissipation). Desbrun et al are solving Euler's equations for inviscid flow. The new thing is that their formulation of the equation on a discrete setting (solving it on a simplicial mesh instead of on a continuous field) provably conserves vorticity exactly, without numerical dissipation. The paper is available on their Caltech page, just google for it.
Re:No trying to troll but is safari ever better?
on
Mapping Google Maps
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· Score: 1
Are users simply using safari because it ships on their mac?
Are users simply using IE because it ships on their Windows boxes?
A bit of coding could give you the optimal lighting conditions everyday, all day. Passive cooling/heating, too. The thing turns 360 degrees per hour, which should be more than enough spinning to adjust to the sun position.
NP is not equal to NP-Complete. I know this is a common misconception, but it helps not to spread the confusion.
Factoring _is_ in NP. What is not known is whether factoring is NP-Complete or not. A problem is in NP if the corresponding decision problem is in P. In other words, if you can check if a solution for a problem is valid in polynomial time, the original problem is P.
NP doesn't mean non-polynomial: it means non-deterministically polynomial, which means you can build a non-deterministic Turing Machine that solves the problem in polynomial time.
It is easy to see that NP is a superset of P. What is not proven yet is if it is a _proper_ superset, that is: if there are problems in NP that aren't in P.
Well, not really. The current interpretation of Einstein's general relativity theory is that information cannot travel FTL. So, in the case of the famous entanglement experiment, as though the entangled photons do change their state simultaneously, there is no way for information to travel from one photon to the other without another photon being emitted. Since photons travel at c, there's no violation.
I don't have my quantum computing book nearby to fill out the details, but that's the main idea.
One of the really good reasons to develop software to a console is that you know exactly the hardware you're developing your games.
I wonder how many hack-patch cycles will it take for MS to break already released games or at least to make one of the great advantages of developing to a console go away.
This could easily be avoided with careful planning of the changes, but given MS track record, I don't think this is what we should expect.
Well, actually, if the Quantum Physics laws still hold, it is not possible to transmit information in FTL speeds. The phenomenon of qubit teleportation exists, but to achieve it you have to transmit a bit of information through classical means, and so you get bitten by the light speed limit.
For more information, see Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, by Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang
An interesting side effect was that as a strain of 'DNA' evolved it became longer and longer. Upon tracing advanced mutations I found large sections of the genes to go completely unused.
The growth of the proportion of introns (genetic code which does not directly influence the fitness function) to exons ("relevant" genetic information) as the fitness of the individual grows is a reasonably well-documented phenomenon in GP communities, and is commonly called bloat.
"Relevant" because, despite conclusive evidence, most researchers believe that the introns are also relevant to the individual, even if not directly.
For example, mutations can occur on introns without any direct change to the individual. As introns are comprised essentially of copies or parts of original genetic code, they probably provide a place where mutations to possibly beneficial (albeit inactive) genes can occur safely.
Besides that, as bloat increases, the active genetic code decreases in proportion, and as a result you get a kind of 'clustering' of active genes, which is a good thing, because the chances of a disrupting crossing-over go down.
A great book on the subject is Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs, by Zbigniew Michalewicz (but I'm not sure if he covers bloat in the text). I remember reading a paper on bloat in one of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes on Computer Science about Genetic Programming.
Now, to see some really wacky and interesting things, the book to read is Evolutionary Design by Computers, edited by Peter Bentley, with lots of nice papers to read (and a kickass foreword from THE MAN Richard Dawkins)
Links for the paranoid:
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=3540606769&vm=
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=155860605X&vm=
How can something designed, programmed, and worked on hard by humans become better than the capacity of the human(s)' mind/intelligence that designed it?
There are quite a few examples of endeavours in which the human mind designed things that outsmarted it. Although it is controversial to do it, you simply can't say that Deep Blue does not play chess better than any human that designed it.
But the example I always like to give when such discussions are held is that of genetic programming. Genetic programming is an area of evolutionary computation that tries to achieve automatic programming. It basically uses GA techniques to evolve programs. There are reported cases of results in which the program outsmarted human beings quite nicely. One great book in the subject is Evolutionary Design by Computers, a collection of texts and papers in the subject, edited by Peter Bentley.
All in all, most AI criticisms seem to degenerate in anthropocentric pseudo-arguments. Another good book to be read is Dreyfus' What computers (still) can't do. Dreyfus gives good reasons for why AI may be far from the present, but does so without (for the most part, at least) resorting to the argument that "I'm human and want to be the only smart being here". It is interesting that AI criticism may be the last island of anthropocentrism. First, the Sun does not go around the earth, but otherwise. Then, me and that disgusting worm are made of the same genetic stuff. Now, a bunch of transistors beats me at chess and wants to think? Then again, this is just me.
The links are here for the paranoid:
http://www.genetic-programming.org
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=155860605X&vm=
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp ?theisbn=0262540673&vm=
"Say goodbye to TCP/IP and to anonymous connections of any kind. Hello
to Hailstorm, tracking everything down to the last mile, and a more
business-friendly Internet with prioritized packet-handling."
Now, this does sound a bit too paranoid, doesn't it? 'Tracking everything down', 'Say goodbye to TCP/IP and anonymous connections...'. Kind of seems like prophetizing.
On to the real question. "Prioritized packet-handling". Who would have priority? I really don't know much about the workings of the protocols and how could priority handling be implemented, but the real question is: Who should deserve priority, and who should decide it? Should routers be set-up in any way people want, and backbones be controlled? Maybe there could be an independent committee to grant priorities according to some previous criteria.
My concern is that, as he puts himself, prioritizing packets would degenerate the net (my view) into being "more business-friendly". Degenerate because invariably companies have more money than universities, ergo companies have priority.
I just think that prioritized packets is something very prone to commercial abuse. Just my random thoughts, btw.
The way I "expanded the command line" in the W2K at work was by going "g bash for windows download":)
Actually, we started looking for BASH for Windoze as a joke, and I thought, oh well, google might as well find anything, so let's give it a shot. Get binutils and grep for win with it and slowly turn your windoze shell into something useful. Scripts, anyone?
Carlos
Slashdot Mirror
Even with open source software, unless you compiled the code yourself (or at least were present when it was compiled), how do you know that the "open" code is actually what they installed on the machine?
It's worse than that, actually.
Jos Stam's stable fluids (SIGGRAPH 99) was one instance of a technique that looked better but wasn't exactly more accurate (specifically, Stam presented an unconditionally stable solver based on the Hodge-Helmholtz decomposition principle. Great for graphics, horrible numerical dissipation). Desbrun et al are solving Euler's equations for inviscid flow. The new thing is that their formulation of the equation on a discrete setting (solving it on a simplicial mesh instead of on a continuous field) provably conserves vorticity exactly, without numerical dissipation. The paper is available on their Caltech page, just google for it.
Are users simply using safari because it ships on their mac?
Are users simply using IE because it ships on their Windows boxes?
Oh so cool.
Factoring _is_ in NP. What is not known is whether factoring is NP-Complete or not. A problem is in NP if the corresponding decision problem is in P. In other words, if you can check if a solution for a problem is valid in polynomial time, the original problem is P.
NP doesn't mean non-polynomial: it means non-deterministically polynomial, which means you can build a non-deterministic Turing Machine that solves the problem in polynomial time.
It is easy to see that NP is a superset of P. What is not proven yet is if it is a _proper_ superset, that is: if there are problems in NP that aren't in P.
I don't have my quantum computing book nearby to fill out the details, but that's the main idea.
This could easily be avoided with careful planning of the changes, but given MS track record, I don't think this is what we should expect.
Carlos
Carlos
For more information, see Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, by Michael A. Nielsen, Isaac L. Chuang
Carlos
The growth of the proportion of introns (genetic code which does not directly influence the fitness function) to exons ("relevant" genetic information) as the fitness of the individual grows is a reasonably well-documented phenomenon in GP communities, and is commonly called bloat. "Relevant" because, despite conclusive evidence, most researchers believe that the introns are also relevant to the individual, even if not directly.
For example, mutations can occur on introns without any direct change to the individual. As introns are comprised essentially of copies or parts of original genetic code, they probably provide a place where mutations to possibly beneficial (albeit inactive) genes can occur safely.
Besides that, as bloat increases, the active genetic code decreases in proportion, and as a result you get a kind of 'clustering' of active genes, which is a good thing, because the chances of a disrupting crossing-over go down.
A great book on the subject is Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures = Evolution Programs, by Zbigniew Michalewicz (but I'm not sure if he covers bloat in the text). I remember reading a paper on bloat in one of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes on Computer Science about Genetic Programming.
Now, to see some really wacky and interesting things, the book to read is Evolutionary Design by Computers, edited by Peter Bentley, with lots of nice papers to read (and a kickass foreword from THE MAN Richard Dawkins)
Links for the paranoid:p ?theisbn=3540606769&vm=p ?theisbn=155860605X&vm=
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.as
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.as
Carlos
How can something designed, programmed, and worked on hard by humans become better than the capacity of the human(s)' mind/intelligence that designed it?
There are quite a few examples of endeavours in which the human mind designed things that outsmarted it. Although it is controversial to do it, you simply can't say that Deep Blue does not play chess better than any human that designed it.
But the example I always like to give when such discussions are held is that of genetic programming. Genetic programming is an area of evolutionary computation that tries to achieve automatic programming. It basically uses GA techniques to evolve programs. There are reported cases of results in which the program outsmarted human beings quite nicely. One great book in the subject is Evolutionary Design by Computers, a collection of texts and papers in the subject, edited by Peter Bentley.
All in all, most AI criticisms seem to degenerate in anthropocentric pseudo-arguments. Another good book to be read is Dreyfus' What computers (still) can't do. Dreyfus gives good reasons for why AI may be far from the present, but does so without (for the most part, at least) resorting to the argument that "I'm human and want to be the only smart being here". It is interesting that AI criticism may be the last island of anthropocentrism. First, the Sun does not go around the earth, but otherwise. Then, me and that disgusting worm are made of the same genetic stuff. Now, a bunch of transistors beats me at chess and wants to think? Then again, this is just me.
The links are here for the paranoid:p ?theisbn=155860605X&vm=p ?theisbn=0262540673&vm=
http://www.genetic-programming.org
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.as
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.as
Carlos
Semper ubi sub ubi
"Say goodbye to TCP/IP and to anonymous connections of any kind. Hello to Hailstorm, tracking everything down to the last mile, and a more business-friendly Internet with prioritized packet-handling."
Now, this does sound a bit too paranoid, doesn't it? 'Tracking everything down', 'Say goodbye to TCP/IP and anonymous connections...'. Kind of seems like prophetizing.
On to the real question. "Prioritized packet-handling". Who would have priority? I really don't know much about the workings of the protocols and how could priority handling be implemented, but the real question is: Who should deserve priority, and who should decide it? Should routers be set-up in any way people want, and backbones be controlled? Maybe there could be an independent committee to grant priorities according to some previous criteria.
My concern is that, as he puts himself, prioritizing packets would degenerate the net (my view) into being "more business-friendly". Degenerate because invariably companies have more money than universities, ergo companies have priority.
I just think that prioritized packets is something very prone to commercial abuse. Just my random thoughts, btw.
Carlos
The way I "expanded the command line" in the W2K at work was by going "g bash for windows download" :)
Actually, we started looking for BASH for Windoze as a joke, and I thought, oh well, google might as well find anything, so let's give it a shot. Get binutils and grep for win with it and slowly turn your windoze shell into something useful. Scripts, anyone?
Carlos