Since this is an energy-saving technology, surely it has some fatal yet under-appreciated drawback that fully justifies my foregone decision never to change my habits or lifestyle for any reason
In this case the drawback is that they produce a light spectrum that makes you want to stab yourself in the eye after prolonged exposure.
I know, it's a small nit-pick. I'm probably just trying to justify my foregone decision to not change my "not stabbing myself in the eye" habit.
and I am eager to begin a project I'd like to start which would make gp easier for anyone that wanted to pick it up and run with it
Well, good luck with that, though I still suspect that GA (and especially GP) is inherently rather hard, meaning you are unlikely to find a technical solution that will substitute for thorough understanding of the problem domain and lots of practice.
It's not like there aren't already plenty of frameworks that make it next to trivial to get a basic implementation up and running.
Just to be pedantic for a second: Genetic Programming (GP) is a specific application of Genetic Algorithms (GA) where the solution space you are working with is executable programs (or algorithms). So GP is a subset of GA, the two are not interchangeable.
To answer your question, GA is not more popular because for most real-world problems it's difficult to come up with a good solution representation (one that lends itself well to "breeding"). Though they have been used successfully for a long time in several different niches.
Yeah, traditionally "binary search" refers to locating an element in a sorted list, even though here you are searching a (binary) decision tree, calling it a "binary search" is confusing.
If we are talking about 20Q, it's actually a bit more clever: it's using a neural net, rather than a decision tree, so it can work with ambiguous and contradictory data (it's yes/no/maybe/not-relevant rather than just yes/no, and can deal with intentionally wrong answers). And yeah, even the hand-held version is just plain creepy in how well it works.
This is why I'm pretty skeptical of such recommendation schemes.
Our "compatibility" - for example - is SUPER (my last.fm username is the same as here), but just glancing through the charts, it seems we only have the whole prog-melodic-symphonic metal area in common (if I can lump those together for the purpose of this exercise), but that's only about half of what I listen to.
It never seems to recommend anything worthwhile based on, for example, Gogol Bordello; and it's not like they are obscure or anything (10,000,000+ plays). And my whole "Neighborhood" is based around the different metals, since they are more popular, they pretty much drown out everything else.
Seems like some nuance gets lost in the whole process...
If scientists, science fans, and science writers do not use the words correctly how are we to defend the difference when creationists come around misusing the words?
Oh get off it. They are using the word correctly, they are just using it in the common sense, rather than the strictly technical sense. And yes, here it means "hypothesis".
Words can have multiple meanings, you can't always demand that people only use the ones you like.
Do you want them to rename it "Hypothetical Physics", too?
This magnetic field entails a certain quantity of potential energy. E = mc^2. Thus, a bit pattern in fact has mass due to the intrinsic energy of its magnetic fields.
An energy potential has weight now? I don't think that's exactly what's meant by mass-energy equivalence.
Just because he created it wouldn't necessarily imply that he loves it. How do you think Dave Cutler feels? (I'm sure he loves VMS, I mean the other thing)
Side-note: why do people always say 'invented UNIX'? Surely UNIX was 'designed'?
Yeah, I was wondering why common concepts that have been around forever need to be referred to as "Python-like", guess some people have a hardon for Python.
So here are the DLAB rankings that quick googling turns up:
Category I: Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish Category II: German, Indonesian Category III: Belarusian, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Iraqi Arabic, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Tagalog, Thai, Turkic, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese Category IV: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
They seem to match the relative ranking you mentioned pretty well, except these are based on difficulty from the perspective of a native English speaker (so ranking English on the same scale makes no sense), not on internal complexity. I couldn't find any reference to such an "absolute" scale, so I don't know if these categories are what you meant or not.
My "English is considered difficult" is based entirely on my study of other languages, the test mentioned above, and my experiences living with and dealing with other languages and their native speakers.
Yeah, of course no one has difficulty learning their native language, so I really don't think you can have a good point of comparison if English isn't one of the languages that you've learned as an adult.
Ultimately the biggest factor is probably the native language of the person learning it (which is why I specified the IE family in the original reply); I have no idea, for example, if a native Estonian speaker would have an easier time with English or, say, Turkish.
But that's the point, why have it at all - except for things (i.e. living beings) where it matters.
Because you are describing the morphological rules that set of words follows - you could refer to the property as "noun class" if that makes it easier.
Depending on how the word root is constructed, you follow different rules to create the various inflections your language needs (simply so that the end result is pronounceable), for hysterical raisins this categorization is called "gender".
Oh sure, you can often form questions by moving the noun to the front of the sentence, but there punctuation and intonation usually make it quite unambiguous. I wouldn't consider breaking up compound nouns ("word order") to be a change in word order, though maybe I'm wrong about that.
It's not really obvious that aux verbs are easier than tenses, both have their own spooky weirdnesses.
Yeah, maybe not. I think it maybe just that other languages treat tense formation more explicitly and the speaker is forced to think about the underlying concepts more. For example, I remember my Greek professor having a hell of a time explaining verb aspect to the English speakers, and I can't recall any similar difficulty with basic linguistic concepts when learning English (could've just been a particularly dense group, for all I know).
If word order didn't matter, then you could naturally say "to my mother often talk I" and people would understand you without having to think about it.
I didn't say word order didn't matter, I said that most of the time it doesn't significantly alter the basic meaning of the sentence. Your example demonstrates this perfectly - it's entirely incorrect, yet any English speaker would, in fact, understand what you are trying to say. As long as you don't break up the prepositional phrase, you can shuffle the words in that sentence in any way you want, and it will still be understandable.
And yes, I realize that English grammar has rules, the point was that they tend to be a lot more streamlined than in most other languages.
Question: Does your car have sexual organs? Then why are you giving it a gender?
Grammatical gender is mostly unrelated to biological gender. Words can evolve to have different, separate meanings - it's not really that difficult a concept, is it?
Also we have don't have the (IMHO ridiculous) gender system for all nouns
Grammatical gender is mostly just a way to classify different morphological classes of nouns, there's nothing ridiculous about it.
In English you can just slap a bunch of random phonemes together, and if the end result is pronounceable, it's a perfectly cromulent word. In languages with more complex noun inflection, you have to make sure that you can form all the required forms in some (more or less) sane way.
Slashdot Mirror
Since this is an energy-saving technology, surely it has some fatal yet under-appreciated drawback that fully justifies my foregone decision never to change my habits or lifestyle for any reason
In this case the drawback is that they produce a light spectrum that makes you want to stab yourself in the eye after prolonged exposure.
I know, it's a small nit-pick. I'm probably just trying to justify my foregone decision to not change my "not stabbing myself in the eye" habit.
and I am eager to begin a project I'd like to start which would make gp easier for anyone that wanted to pick it up and run with it
Well, good luck with that, though I still suspect that GA (and especially GP) is inherently rather hard, meaning you are unlikely to find a technical solution that will substitute for thorough understanding of the problem domain and lots of practice.
It's not like there aren't already plenty of frameworks that make it next to trivial to get a basic implementation up and running.
Just to be pedantic for a second: Genetic Programming (GP) is a specific application of Genetic Algorithms (GA) where the solution space you are working with is executable programs (or algorithms). So GP is a subset of GA, the two are not interchangeable.
To answer your question, GA is not more popular because for most real-world problems it's difficult to come up with a good solution representation (one that lends itself well to "breeding"). Though they have been used successfully for a long time in several different niches.
Yeah, traditionally "binary search" refers to locating an element in a sorted list, even though here you are searching a (binary) decision tree, calling it a "binary search" is confusing.
If we are talking about 20Q, it's actually a bit more clever: it's using a neural net, rather than a decision tree, so it can work with ambiguous and contradictory data (it's yes/no/maybe/not-relevant rather than just yes/no, and can deal with intentionally wrong answers). And yeah, even the hand-held version is just plain creepy in how well it works.
This is why I'm pretty skeptical of such recommendation schemes.
Our "compatibility" - for example - is SUPER (my last.fm username is the same as here), but just glancing through the charts, it seems we only have the whole prog-melodic-symphonic metal area in common (if I can lump those together for the purpose of this exercise), but that's only about half of what I listen to.
It never seems to recommend anything worthwhile based on, for example, Gogol Bordello; and it's not like they are obscure or anything (10,000,000+ plays). And my whole "Neighborhood" is based around the different metals, since they are more popular, they pretty much drown out everything else.
Seems like some nuance gets lost in the whole process...
The word you were looking for is "nascent".
If scientists, science fans, and science writers do not use the words correctly how are we to defend the difference when creationists come around misusing the words?
Oh get off it. They are using the word correctly, they are just using it in the common sense, rather than the strictly technical sense. And yes, here it means "hypothesis".
Words can have multiple meanings, you can't always demand that people only use the ones you like.
Do you want them to rename it "Hypothetical Physics", too?
This magnetic field entails a certain quantity of potential energy. E = mc^2. Thus, a bit pattern in fact has mass due to the intrinsic energy of its magnetic fields.
An energy potential has weight now? I don't think that's exactly what's meant by mass-energy equivalence.
Um, what?
Here's the actual paper (pdf).
Although, of course, posting the piece of pap that explains how many processors my machine has makes so much more sense.
Wasn't Slashdot supposed to be for a semi-technical audience? Hell, even a semi-literate one.
For that matter, why are we still defining code chunks via brackets instead of the indentation that's already there?
For someone who's apparently half way through his first "Intro to Programming" class, that's a pretty bold leap into the Holy War.
(for the record: some of us like brackets - get over it)
Just because he created it wouldn't necessarily imply that he loves it. How do you think Dave Cutler feels? (I'm sure he loves VMS, I mean the other thing)
Side-note: why do people always say 'invented UNIX'? Surely UNIX was 'designed'?
I think they just chose the name so they can use their page numbering convention for future versions:
version 2: Goo
version 3: Gooo
etc.
I will probably mature around the time Goooooo comes out - can't wait to use it!
Yeah, I was wondering why common concepts that have been around forever need to be referred to as "Python-like", guess some people have a hardon for Python.
I don't know why Timothy felt the need to make the comment other than to put a negative spin on the release;
If it has a tendency to crash, that's relevant information, not "spin".
Wait, this is the final release and it crashed within a few hours?
That's... not good.
I mean really posting news isn't even blogging, because blog is short for weblog, not webnewscaster.
I agreed. The obvious name for what he is doing is Analog Twitter.
(ok, that made me hate myself)
Their plan is to eventually confuse consumers by advertising "X KiloCores! (* KC = 1000 cores)" when everyone expects a KiloCore to be 1024 cores.
So here are the DLAB rankings that quick googling turns up:
Category I: Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish
Category II: German, Indonesian
Category III: Belarusian, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Iraqi Arabic, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Tagalog, Thai, Turkic, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese
Category IV: Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
They seem to match the relative ranking you mentioned pretty well, except these are based on difficulty from the perspective of a native English speaker (so ranking English on the same scale makes no sense), not on internal complexity. I couldn't find any reference to such an "absolute" scale, so I don't know if these categories are what you meant or not.
My "English is considered difficult" is based entirely on my study of other languages, the test mentioned above, and my experiences living with and dealing with other languages and their native speakers.
Yeah, of course no one has difficulty learning their native language, so I really don't think you can have a good point of comparison if English isn't one of the languages that you've learned as an adult.
Ultimately the biggest factor is probably the native language of the person learning it (which is why I specified the IE family in the original reply); I have no idea, for example, if a native Estonian speaker would have an easier time with English or, say, Turkish.
But that's the point, why have it at all - except for things (i.e. living beings) where it matters.
Because you are describing the morphological rules that set of words follows - you could refer to the property as "noun class" if that makes it easier.
Depending on how the word root is constructed, you follow different rules to create the various inflections your language needs (simply so that the end result is pronounceable), for hysterical raisins this categorization is called "gender".
Yes, that is a gross oversimplification.
Oh sure, you can often form questions by moving the noun to the front of the sentence, but there punctuation and intonation usually make it quite unambiguous. I wouldn't consider breaking up compound nouns ("word order") to be a change in word order, though maybe I'm wrong about that.
It's not really obvious that aux verbs are easier than tenses, both have their own spooky weirdnesses.
Yeah, maybe not. I think it maybe just that other languages treat tense formation more explicitly and the speaker is forced to think about the underlying concepts more. For example, I remember my Greek professor having a hell of a time explaining verb aspect to the English speakers, and I can't recall any similar difficulty with basic linguistic concepts when learning English (could've just been a particularly dense group, for all I know).
If word order didn't matter, then you could naturally say "to my mother often talk I" and people would understand you without having to think about it.
I didn't say word order didn't matter, I said that most of the time it doesn't significantly alter the basic meaning of the sentence. Your example demonstrates this perfectly - it's entirely incorrect, yet any English speaker would, in fact, understand what you are trying to say. As long as you don't break up the prepositional phrase, you can shuffle the words in that sentence in any way you want, and it will still be understandable.
And yes, I realize that English grammar has rules, the point was that they tend to be a lot more streamlined than in most other languages.
Question: Does your car have sexual organs? Then why are you giving it a gender?
Grammatical gender is mostly unrelated to biological gender. Words can evolve to have different, separate meanings - it's not really that difficult a concept, is it?
Yup, using speech as a social status marker is what aristocrats use to make sure that everyone around knows what they are.
So true. On the other hand, some people take an interest in the language they speak every day.
Go figure.
Also we have don't have the (IMHO ridiculous) gender system for all nouns
Grammatical gender is mostly just a way to classify different morphological classes of nouns, there's nothing ridiculous about it.
In English you can just slap a bunch of random phonemes together, and if the end result is pronounceable, it's a perfectly cromulent word. In languages with more complex noun inflection, you have to make sure that you can form all the required forms in some (more or less) sane way.