Speaking for myself: I doubt the scientific quality of the article since it is unlikely that anyone can prove a link from something like global warming to the evolution of a squirrel. On the other hand, I will not deny that global climate changes exist and that they may have great consequences (whether it is all caused by pollution and whether all these changes are 'evil' is a whole different discussion). So please don't put me in the "not global warming" 'camp' just because I doubt this one article!!
What i dont get: where did they get the information that these changes are "due to global warming" ?? It's not like you can interrogate a squirrel to ask them why his genes are different.
Probably the scientists saw the correlation with the changing climate and wrote that this would be 'a possible cause for that'. Journalists normally twist the meaning and content of scientific reports to make a nice headline, eventuakky becoming "Squirrels Evolving to Suit Global Warming".
Generally, one cannot claim that species evolve for some purpose, and even if it would be so, then how do you prove that any change in genes is due to some cause??? It's all just correlations and some hopeful guesses, if you ask me.
for your information: all links are in dutch, but on the site of the e-mailgids you can find the conditions for use in english.
I guess that the judge made his decision because it is very evident that the service provided by this site is not meant for harvesting & spam, and what is more, this it mentioned in the conditions.
Furthermore, it reads above the search box "Door in de gids te zoeken stemt u in met de voorwaarden", which translates to something like "by searching our database you agree with the conditions of use". So i guess the judge has a point here...
if you think logically about this, it doesnt prove anything. Even if you can trigger any experience in some way, that doesnt mean it is in any way related to 'real' outer-body experiences.
Not that i am trying to deliver some spiritual viewpoint here; i am just trying to say that if you can create something that looks very much like something we know, that doesnt mean it is the same thing or that it came to be in the same way.
So however interesting this may be, it can never be an argument in any science vs. spirituality discussion.
as far as i understand, this is not really about a "new family" of black holes, it is just about a certain size of black holes (medium size). Its like french fries: order them small, medium or large, that doesnt make any difference as to the kind of object a french fry is, right? So it isnt about a new family of objects at all.
I personally rate improvement of the interface much (yes, very much) higher than performance improvement. I stick to Mozilla because i like its look and feel, even though opera might be a little faster, but i dont like the interface.
Having many features and good accessibility is far more important if you want to reach a big crowd of users. IMHO it's mostly the techies and programmers who keep whining about it being too slow or too big.
Yes, i can imagine my mother complaining about speed, but only if there is a very excessive lag (which is not the case in moz.), and even then she would probably blame it on the connection or so. Something like a memory footprint would never even come up in the mind of most regular users. It is easy handling, accessibility and standards support that will make mozilla a big player, and the type ahead feature is just one of the things i was waiting for.
Fixing performance can wait, companies like MS and Apple know this (remember releases of Win95, 98, OS X etc)...
Re:more about the game
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This is more commonly known as Mancala in the US.
Actually, there are many (i believe i heard something like 1200) different varieties of the game being played all around Africa, sometimes different games with the same name, sometimes different names for one game. As it says in the article, this particular variant is also known as wari, owari, awale, etc. etc.
Some of the variants feature bigger boards, and some even include the possibility of endless moves. Many of those are more complex or have bigger search spaces than the game from the article.
So it seems there is still hope for mancala fanatics...
what is the matter with you guys?
on
Type With Your Eyes
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
sometimes the messages here at/. really piss me off. Now here is some really nice idea, a new kind of interface for entering text which is interactive and uses an adaptive, interactive language model. And all you guys whine about is how _fast_ it is!
Please try to appreciate that this is just a try-out for another kind of interface, as an alternative to static, dumb keyboards. Personally, i think that trying to make computer interfaces more interactive, simple, and contex-sensitive is at least as important as the speed at which you can input text. If the horrible colours and wobbly interface (it really feels like some ancient arcade shooter) would be developed into something a little less tiresome to use, i think this might really be of use. For example, what about using it with children that are just learning to write? They have to form the words themselves, but are not limited by their (slow) writing/typing skills... And Dasher teaches you to spell correctly, too...
By the way, i personally know a lot of people who would actually be a lot faster and have more fun when using a dasher-like interface...
This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage.
This reminds me a bit of what they said to one of my ancestors, when he invented the wheel: "what good is that? What we REALLY need is something to fly, this 'riding' thing is just too slow and way too bumpy. Besides, where do you want to go anyway?"
It's this kind of mindless (an really cheap) new-idea-bashing that really irritates me...
Movie companies sued over VCR manufacturing and blank video sales, with Jack Valenti (Motion Picture Association of America chairman) testifying to Congress that the VCR is to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone at night - and yet, video sales now account for more industry profit than movies themselves.
Like the movie industry did with VCR, I think the music business will have to try and live with things like files sharing and the internet. Copyright laws should change to incorporate it too. At the moment money-hungry companies and lobby-controlled governments are trying very very hard to stop/control/forbid these new kinds of information exchange, while (IMHO) it is embarrasingly obvious that the current structures for enforcing and earning money from copyrights will break down. You just cannot stop these changes from happening.
It might not be entirely clear yet how to make money with open source software, or how to use p2p file sharing in the music industry, but i think it will become clear. If not, the industry will break down and something new will appear. This has occurred in history many times, and it will occur again.
For now, i (want to) believe in open source. As for the music industry: i'm not sure yet...
you are not really right about this. Sight is not a truly 2-dimensional sense because we have 2 eyes. This makes it possible, for example, to determine which one of two objects is the furthest away from you. So our brain does have some 3d-information from that. Because we do not get a complete 3d-picture, I would rather call sight a 'partly 3D' sense.
Besides that, we also get some 3d information form hearing (yes we do!) and proprioception (which is kind of like feeling your body's position & balance). And then, when you move your head, you can very effectively add information about the 3d layout of your surroundings.
Like someone argued before me, the real problem is that we try to make a picture of a 4-dimensional object by projecting a 3d projection of it onto a 2d surface (paper or screen). We really should use a 3d-printer that just 'prints' the 3d projection. The fourth dimension could then be added by colour, or time, or whatever.
by the way, i do believe those 3d-printing devices exist.
Actually, "intuition" is not that hard to define: intuition is the ability to leap to useful conclusions with inadequate data.
Yes, and I could define God like "someone with the ability to create a universe", but that doesn't mean I know _what it is_, right?
If you're only looking ahead a half-dozen ply or so, what possible difference could it make if the game takes 300 moves or even 3000?
Well, i was just talking about the over-all tree size. But the depth of the tree is significant. For example, in chess we see attempts to just solve an end-game by calculating all possible positions and putting them in a database. For go, this is not possible because of both the depth and width of the tree.
Still, even searching a half-dozen ply for the whole board is an extremely heavy computing task, much more so than for chess.
In fact, there are quite a large number of reasons why Go is harder for computers than chess.
First, there is the board size and the fact that you can play (almost) anywhere on the board, which accounts for the large branching factor (number of possible moves in each position) for the search tree.
Next, there is the fact that games take more moves to finish (about 300 ply, i think, for about 80 for a chess game), which makes the search tree even more staggeringly big. Many many millions of times bigger than that of chess, even when you do a shallow search.
Then there is the difficulty of deciding when the game is over. In go, this happens when both players pass, so this means you have to know when there are no sensible moves anymore. This turns out to be a major problem, whereas in chess the end of a game is more clearly defined.
In fact, it is even very difficult to determine the score for a game when both players have passed. Especially in human expert games, end positions require a great amount of understanding of the game to determine the score.
These, and many other reasons, make Go a very difficult game for a computer. Many (brute force) search/evaluation methods we use in chess and checkers are really not up to the task of playing Go. So we try and figure out some more 'intelligent' methods...
BTW,
I have not read the NYT article, but i really doubt they can say anything sensible about 'intuition'. We don't know what intuition is, and even if we would, I think the strenghts of computers lie elsewhere. Let people do what they are good at (intuition, fuzzyness), let computers do what they are good at (count really really fast)...
There is nothing a license SHOULD prohibit that currently existing law does not already prohibit.
The whole POINT of a software license was originally to keep people from making illegal copies...hence the 'book' licenses of yore. I am not a legal expert, nor do I know very much about copyright and things like that, but... IMHO, the thoughts and ideas that are behind copyright and the idea of 'intellectual property' have become outdated. In the era of digital information it seems to me that any kind of claim to the property of some kind of (digital) information, be it a program or a document, is very hard to inforce. We see, both in music and software industry, that it becomes very difficult to prevent people from making 'illegal' copies. But then, any law that cannot be reinforced, should be reconsidered, not? So would it not be time to conceive of a new kind of intellectual property, and maybe let go of the idea of copyright ? Personally, I think legislation on copyright and intellectual property will make place for something entirely new within a few decades. We have seen how major companies struggle to prevent illegal copying, mostly without result. I would not be surprised if some old structures were to break down and make place for a totally new kind of legislation. My point being, why are they still trying to make new laws (with many flaws, that everyone can see) , when it is quite clear that those laws will not withstand the tide of technological advance?
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking for myself: I doubt the scientific quality of the article since it is unlikely that anyone can prove a link from something like global warming to the evolution of a squirrel. On the other hand, I will not deny that global climate changes exist and that they may have great consequences (whether it is all caused by pollution and whether all these changes are 'evil' is a whole different discussion). So please don't put me in the "not global warming" 'camp' just because I doubt this one article!!
Yes I saw that; my criticism was mostly directed at the author of the New Scientist article. Anyway, I'm glad you agree :)
What i dont get: where did they get the information that these changes are "due to global warming" ?? It's not like you can interrogate a squirrel to ask them why his genes are different.
Probably the scientists saw the correlation with the changing climate and wrote that this would be 'a possible cause for that'. Journalists normally twist the meaning and content of scientific reports to make a nice headline, eventuakky becoming "Squirrels Evolving to Suit Global Warming".
Generally, one cannot claim that species evolve for some purpose, and even if it would be so, then how do you prove that any change in genes is due to some cause??? It's all just correlations and some hopeful guesses, if you ask me.
the right URL is:
. html
http://ugweb.cs.ualberta.ca/~uacs/events/shredder
for your information: all links are in dutch, but on the site of the e-mailgids you can find the conditions for use in english. I guess that the judge made his decision because it is very evident that the service provided by this site is not meant for harvesting & spam, and what is more, this it mentioned in the conditions. Furthermore, it reads above the search box "Door in de gids te zoeken stemt u in met de voorwaarden", which translates to something like "by searching our database you agree with the conditions of use". So i guess the judge has a point here...
correct me if i'm wrong, but it's quite easy to store this text, including the code to extract it to ASCII, in a lot less than 55 bytes...
quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes...
Sorry for nagging, but I have to correct you here. It was the greek who built the Trojan horse...
if you think logically about this, it doesnt prove anything. Even if you can trigger any experience in some way, that doesnt mean it is in any way related to 'real' outer-body experiences.
Not that i am trying to deliver some spiritual viewpoint here; i am just trying to say that if you can create something that looks very much like something we know, that doesnt mean it is the same thing or that it came to be in the same way.
So however interesting this may be, it can never be an argument in any science vs. spirituality discussion.
as far as i understand, this is not really about a "new family" of black holes, it is just about a certain size of black holes (medium size). Its like french fries: order them small, medium or large, that doesnt make any difference as to the kind of object a french fry is, right? So it isnt about a new family of objects at all.
I personally rate improvement of the interface much (yes, very much) higher than performance improvement. I stick to Mozilla because i like its look and feel, even though opera might be a little faster, but i dont like the interface.
Having many features and good accessibility is far more important if you want to reach a big crowd of users. IMHO it's mostly the techies and programmers who keep whining about it being too slow or too big.
Yes, i can imagine my mother complaining about speed, but only if there is a very excessive lag (which is not the case in moz.), and even then she would probably blame it on the connection or so. Something like a memory footprint would never even come up in the mind of most regular users. It is easy handling, accessibility and standards support that will make mozilla a big player, and the type ahead feature is just one of the things i was waiting for.
Fixing performance can wait, companies like MS and Apple know this (remember releases of Win95, 98, OS X etc)...
This is more commonly known as Mancala in the US.
Actually, there are many (i believe i heard something like 1200) different varieties of the game being played all around Africa, sometimes different games with the same name, sometimes different names for one game. As it says in the article, this particular variant is also known as wari, owari, awale, etc. etc.
Some of the variants feature bigger boards, and some even include the possibility of endless moves. Many of those are more complex or have bigger search spaces than the game from the article.
So it seems there is still hope for mancala fanatics...
sometimes the messages here at /. really piss me off. Now here is some really nice idea, a new kind of interface for entering text which is interactive and uses an adaptive, interactive language model. And all you guys whine about is how _fast_ it is!
Please try to appreciate that this is just a try-out for another kind of interface, as an alternative to static, dumb keyboards. Personally, i think that trying to make computer interfaces more interactive, simple, and contex-sensitive is at least as important as the speed at which you can input text. If the horrible colours and wobbly interface (it really feels like some ancient arcade shooter) would be developed into something a little less tiresome to use, i think this might really be of use. For example, what about using it with children that are just learning to write? They have to form the words themselves, but are not limited by their (slow) writing/typing skills... And Dasher teaches you to spell correctly, too...
By the way, i personally know a lot of people who would actually be a lot faster and have more fun when using a dasher-like interface...
what evolution took millions of years to achieve
Well, at least evolution succeeded in making birds that weren't too heavy for their own wings...
Seems to me that this project was not really as exciting as they would like us to believe...
call me stupid, I know about API's, but what exactly is an ABI ?????
I'm not really into this kind of tv/vcr/pvr thing, but u havent heard of anything like it in the Netherlands yet...
This isn't actually very useful : what we want is atomic scale logic gates, not data storage.
This reminds me a bit of what they said to one of my ancestors, when he invented the wheel: "what good is that? What we REALLY need is something to fly, this 'riding' thing is just too slow and way too bumpy. Besides, where do you want to go anyway?"
It's this kind of mindless (an really cheap) new-idea-bashing that really irritates me...
Movie companies sued over VCR manufacturing and blank video sales, with Jack Valenti (Motion Picture Association of America chairman) testifying to Congress that the VCR is to the movie industry what the Boston Strangler is to a woman alone at night - and yet, video sales now account for more industry profit than movies themselves.
Like the movie industry did with VCR, I think the music business will have to try and live with things like files sharing and the internet. Copyright laws should change to incorporate it too. At the moment money-hungry companies and lobby-controlled governments are trying very very hard to stop/control/forbid these new kinds of information exchange, while (IMHO) it is embarrasingly obvious that the current structures for enforcing and earning money from copyrights will break down. You just cannot stop these changes from happening.
It might not be entirely clear yet how to make money with open source software, or how to use p2p file sharing in the music industry, but i think it will become clear. If not, the industry will break down and something new will appear. This has occurred in history many times, and it will occur again.
For now, i (want to) believe in open source. As for the music industry: i'm not sure yet...
you are not really right about this. Sight is not a truly 2-dimensional sense because we have 2 eyes. This makes it possible, for example, to determine which one of two objects is the furthest away from you. So our brain does have some 3d-information from that. Because we do not get a complete 3d-picture, I would rather call sight a 'partly 3D' sense.
Besides that, we also get some 3d information form hearing (yes we do!) and proprioception (which is kind of like feeling your body's position & balance). And then, when you move your head, you can very effectively add information about the 3d layout of your surroundings.
Like someone argued before me, the real problem is that we try to make a picture of a 4-dimensional object by projecting a 3d projection of it onto a 2d surface (paper or screen). We really should use a 3d-printer that just 'prints' the 3d projection. The fourth dimension could then be added by colour, or time, or whatever.
by the way, i do believe those 3d-printing devices exist.
Actually, "intuition" is not that hard to define: intuition is the ability to leap to useful conclusions with inadequate data. Yes, and I could define God like "someone with the ability to create a universe", but that doesn't mean I know _what it is_, right?
If you're only looking ahead a half-dozen ply or so, what possible difference could it make if the game takes 300 moves or even 3000? Well, i was just talking about the over-all tree size. But the depth of the tree is significant. For example, in chess we see attempts to just solve an end-game by calculating all possible positions and putting them in a database. For go, this is not possible because of both the depth and width of the tree. Still, even searching a half-dozen ply for the whole board is an extremely heavy computing task, much more so than for chess.
In fact, there are quite a large number of reasons why Go is harder for computers than chess.
First, there is the board size and the fact that you can play (almost) anywhere on the board, which accounts for the large branching factor (number of possible moves in each position) for the search tree.
Next, there is the fact that games take more moves to finish (about 300 ply, i think, for about 80 for a chess game), which makes the search tree even more staggeringly big. Many many millions of times bigger than that of chess, even when you do a shallow search.
Then there is the difficulty of deciding when the game is over. In go, this happens when both players pass, so this means you have to know when there are no sensible moves anymore. This turns out to be a major problem, whereas in chess the end of a game is more clearly defined.
In fact, it is even very difficult to determine the score for a game when both players have passed. Especially in human expert games, end positions require a great amount of understanding of the game to determine the score.
These, and many other reasons, make Go a very difficult game for a computer. Many (brute force) search/evaluation methods we use in chess and checkers are really not up to the task of playing Go. So we try and figure out some more 'intelligent' methods...
BTW, I have not read the NYT article, but i really doubt they can say anything sensible about 'intuition'. We don't know what intuition is, and even if we would, I think the strenghts of computers lie elsewhere. Let people do what they are good at (intuition, fuzzyness), let computers do what they are good at (count really really fast)...
There is nothing a license SHOULD prohibit that currently existing law does not already prohibit. The whole POINT of a software license was originally to keep people from making illegal copies...hence the 'book' licenses of yore.
I am not a legal expert, nor do I know very much about copyright and things like that, but...
IMHO, the thoughts and ideas that are behind copyright and the idea of 'intellectual property' have become outdated. In the era of digital information it seems to me that any kind of claim to the property of some kind of (digital) information, be it a program or a document, is very hard to inforce. We see, both in music and software industry, that it becomes very difficult to prevent people from making 'illegal' copies.
But then, any law that cannot be reinforced, should be reconsidered, not? So would it not be time to conceive of a new kind of intellectual property, and maybe let go of the idea of copyright ? Personally, I think legislation on copyright and intellectual property will make place for something entirely new within a few decades. We have seen how major companies struggle to prevent illegal copying, mostly without result. I would not be surprised if some old structures were to break down and make place for a totally new kind of legislation.
My point being, why are they still trying to make new laws (with many flaws, that everyone can see) , when it is quite clear that those laws will not withstand the tide of technological advance?