A 5x5 go board has only 847,288,609,443 possible game states, even including impossible boards. Assuming the relatively tame pace of scoring 100,000 boards per second towards completion, which on a board of that size is trivial, this solution takes a simple brute-force time of 98 days.
Ok, the position evaluation needs Benson's algorithm to identify unconditionally alive stones, for which 100,000 positions per second is a realistic pace. So you are right that it is not so surprising that it is doable. Still it is interesting to see how it is done optimally. So for me, the interesting part is not that it got done, but which search optimizations turned out to be useful to cut it down to 4 hours on a single desktop processor.
I wonder how it is that anyone can justify this as something larger than a publicity stunt
Well I am not sure Erik van der Werf claimed it was worth slashdotting:P But it's certainly worth an e-mail to the computer-go mailing list, and a paper in some journal.
If computers can beat chess grandmasters and similar feats, how is this anything special?
Well, on the one hand go is much harder, etc. etc., other people have explained this already. On the other hand, I don't think it surprised anyone seriously interested in computer go, that 5x5 can be done by brute force. Every serious go player can read out quickly that it is a full-board win for black. If Black's starting move is restricted, it takes a little more care to read it out, but I would be confident to read the out the correct play for both sides in a couple of minutes. Further, the essential key algorithm (position evaluation according to so-called "unconditional territory") used by Erik has long been known.
This is not to belittle Erik van der Werf's achievements. In fact to the contrary. His more interesting program is MAGOG, which plays 9x9 go. AFAIK, in the end of the game, it uses the same algorithm as MIGOS, and thus plays perfectly (given enough time, and not too complicated a position). Before that, it combines traditional goal-directed search (tactical search, "life-and-death-search") with a lot of brute force global search. Although his program is pretty young by computer go standards (ALL the top programs started to get developed in the 80's), it has shown to be a serious competitor in recent computer go tournaments.
You know, it's a small step for the world, but it's a big step for GNU...
Until recently, there were was a pretty strong policy against menus in the FSF web page coding standards. The reason the old FSF main web page had the menu on the right instead of on the left as everyone else, was that otherwise "Lynx users would have to scroll down through the menu text until they reach the actual content of a site".
For my part, I am relieved about every teeny-wheeny bit of pragmatism sneaking it's way into the FSF head quarters.
...might find this thread in the svn development list on the switch of Mono to Subversion worth a read. This transition did not go as smoothly as it could have gone, if the Mono guys had prepared this move a little better.
Executive summary:
The only technical regression from CVS to SVN is that 'svn blame' is still a lot slower than 'cvs annotate'.
Let me just quote: No project should ever jump into a new version control system
without experimenting with it first, or assessing the general
impact it will have on development policies. Switching VC systems
is never "just" about learning the syntax of a new program -- it
always involves re-evaluating and re-creating all of your
project's procedures.
By the way, the GCC team is starting to make experiments with svn, and it looks like they might switch in 2 or 3 months.
I think the paragraph just after the one quoted in the/. summary is even better:
...despite the vast disparity between SCO's public accusations and its actual evidence -- or complete lack thereof -- and the resulting temptation to grant IBM's motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgment [in favour of IBM].
I am not even a paralegal, but these seem pretty strong words to make by a judge before he has decided a motion. Sounds like starting to count down the K.O.
Of course, the VAT has already been mentioned (and at least for Germany, if you buy a computer in the US to bring it to Germany, you have to pay the equivalent of VAT at customs).
Not so obvious may be the differences in included warranties. Remember that you get a free 2-year warranty in EU country. That's worth quite a lot, especially for notebooks.
At one point he said, he wants complete openness, everything else is just bad practice. Then he is fine with a short closed period.
He says he never wants to wait applying a fix, because he wants to give users the best kernel possible. Then he says that it probably doesn't matter that the kernel.org kernel gets fixes last, because most users run vendor kernel anyway.
But I think what annoys me most is that he is constantly claiming he is not forcing his (in his own admittance extreme) views on anybody. But this is just not true: In his position, he imposes his view on dealing with security issues on all kernel.org kernel users, and indirectly on vendor kernel users, just by the way he actually deals with them.
From the discussion it turned out that the vanilla kernel often lacks security fixes because of Linus' complete refusal to work with vendor-sec. (2.6.10 got released with holes that had been fixed in 2.6.9-ac for a while.) And on the other hand, Alan Cox blamed him for quietly applying security fixes to his tree all the time; he actually said he is constantly reviewing the patches for this (since the blackhats obviously are doing the same).
I think the full discussion is worth reading. It's an interesting clash of culture between people like Alan Cox, Marcelo Tosati etc. who have been working for a vendor for a long time and feel responsible for their users, and have thus adopted a rather pragmatic view, and the more fundamentalist full-disclosure of people arguing on Linus' side.
Anyway, I am sure they will find a middle ground, because all agree that there is a need for
a) a linux kernel security contact point (which will probably be a new closed mailing list with rather short disclosure timeline), and b) an established channel for announcing security holes (and maintaining security-fixes-only 2.x.y.z kernels).
While covering news related to the kernel development (with lots of good technical articles that make it well worth to subscribe if you are interested that) is certainly the core of "Linux Weekly News", it isn't restricted to that. It roughly covers what a GNU/Linux-based free software developer or technically interested users would want to know about. That includes software patent issues, IP issues as far as they related to free software, everything concerning security of GNU/Linux systems, platform-independant free software etc.
And this is not a Linux kernel timeline, but an LWN timeline.
If you list support for "executables", aehm, doesn't that meant that the search tool just does
the indexed equivalent of 'strings filename | grep "searchterm"'? That makes me wonder about the quality "support" for some of the file formats, too.
It's a straight fight so far in the Privilege Escalation match in the past year, so let's look in on our contenders:
Windows (all versions) 100
Linux 1
Sorry, this "1" is so much off-base it's not even funny. I hope you are not responsible for patching any Linux system. I don't think last year was a good year wrt linux kernel security.
LWN article about some more local security holes in Linux published today. The advisory does contain some harsh words about Linux security as well.
I'd really like to know what's being done about this pitiful trend of
Linux security, where it's 10x as easy to find a vulnerability in the
kernel than it is in any app on the system, where isec releases at
least one critical vulnerability for each kernel version.
And given his description of how he found these problems, plus his frustration about getting Linus and akpm to reply, his tone is even somewhat understandable.
According to German press articles, many more newspapers recommend to vote for Kerry this time, than did support Gore in 2000. Is this true? If so, is this a trend in the more intellectual America? Is this a division between the more intellectual America reading and writing newspapers, and the popular opinion? Or is there another explanation for the fact that this tendency is not reflected in the popular opinion (according to polls)?
...where you visit 3rd party sites. Obviously, it's not Microsoft's fault, but the fault of the 3rd party when you PC gets infected. So maybe IE just shouldn't be used except when visiting Microsoft's update site? Use another browser for anything else? I find myself in a surprising agreement with Gates...
This may not be a popular opinion, but I think many software applications could benefit from me, the benevolent dictator, declaring a seven-year complete ban on FAQs.
When a question about how to do s.th. with a software is asked frequently, then this clearly shows that the user interface has not been made obvious enough, and you should f**ing fix the UI instead of putting an explanation in the FAQ. An application with a perfect GUI should never leave the user with a question, and a well-made one would at least avoid the frequently asked questions.
To prove my point, I decided to google for "FAQ mozilla" and got to the Thunderbird FAQ, and it wonderfully proves my point. After some questions about what Thunderbird/Mozilla is, etc., the first technical question is: How do I start the profile manager?. And the answer has to explain how to run "C:\Program Files\Thunderbird\Thunderbird.exe" -p... Lots of other questions in that FAQ show issues where it is simply not obvious enough how to do s.th. within Thunderbird.
After this seven-year ban on FAQs, I may reconsider the situation, and possibly reallow FAQs, but the only questions allowed would be those clearing up general confusion about what a certain software can do/cannot do, i.e. the sort of question you would want to have answered before downloading/installing the software. But I would only do so if I no longer have to run "Thunderbird.exe -p" to start the profile manager of thunderbird...
...is that in a German web poll, nearly 70% of the voters believed that John Kerry will win the election. (And I believe that to be representative, it coincides with the general sentiment around here.)
So whereas Europeans (rightfully!!! --Added so that someone can mod me flamebait if he wants to) like to blame US citizens for their ignorance of the rest of the world, this shows that my fellow Germans are not much better informed about US politics.
My laptop has a 1920x1200 LCD monitor, and so I know too well about the problem you are describing...
Interesting enough, this seems to be solved much better in X than in Windows. All my KDE apps etc. have just normally sized fonts out of the box; whereas in Windows I have to manually adjust many font sizes, and many apps cannot be adjusted at all.
The only problem in X are programs that assume to know how many pixels their text messages use up, with the result of having text boxes etc. in which the text just doesn't fit in at all...
Sigh, Andrew Morton seemed to be right...
on
Database File System
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...when he said on LKML, slightly paraphrased: "The only reason I see to put filesystem semantic enhancements into the kernel, is that it would be socially hard to get people to agree an a single userspace library."
(In the course of the heated discussion about Reiser4.)
I think the change is overstated. It's not 2.6 which is the development tree, it is 2.6-mm, and this is how it really has been since 2.6.0. As a matter of fact, there is no single patch flying around that wouldn't fit into this model. Nothing really disruptive is planned that would need a 2.7 kernel and years of stabilizing to get accepted.
And so far, 2.6 has done very well with this development model. It has acquired quite a lot of features that were still necessary, but has been a lot more stable than 2.4 in the early days.
Even for stability it might be a win. The kernel will be a lot closer to the kernels distributors are shipping (because they don't have to apply big patches for necessary features), which means that all their stabilization work can immediately be ported to the vanilla kernel.
Short summary: Andrew doesn't like big forks. I don't see how this gives up the idea of Free Software, as has been stated in many comments. Just to the contrary, IMHO.
To me, the idea that a good journalist just professionally presents both sides, stays completely unpartisan, and never lets the reader know his own opinion (unless he is writing an editorial), is a very American one. Of course, I understand its merit, especially in the polarized situation of American politics, but I have my serious doubts on it.
A journalist knows a lot more about the subject he is writing than I do, and can attain considerable expertise in it if works on the same topics for several years, and as such I, as a reader, think he is fully entitled to his own opinion. Maybe the American journalism is more idealistic: It assumes that the reader is educated enough to come to his own conclusions and doesn't need help with that. But reality is otherwise.
Instead of having to pick between two experts debating on CNN, I would rather develop my own opinion step-by-step by getting to know the opinion of many journalist-experts, each of them adding a stone here and there to the complete mosaic.
Journalism without opinion means an overly big influence by the side which can (partly) dictate the rhythm of the news, is holding the press conferences, and which can spin the right images (i.e. usually the government). It means that having opinions is left to general-purpose columnists that may have little knowledge of finer points in the matter. It means that Bush can still claim that "Yes there was a link between Saddam an Al Quaida." without the journalists in front of him bursting out laughing, although pretty much no one seriously informed on this subject would still maintain this opinion. It means that no American journalist in Iraq has communicated back home how badly the interaction between the occupying forces and the Iraqis is going, until the biased Michael Moore goes and films it.
I would really wish American mainstream journalists would more often take their own stance on a matter, make Michael Moore unnecessary and generally laugh the overly partisan partisan followers out of the room, instead of professionally presenting even their more hilarious opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, the position evaluation needs Benson's algorithm to identify unconditionally alive stones, for which 100,000 positions per second is a realistic pace. So you are right that it is not so surprising that it is doable. Still it is interesting to see how it is done optimally. So for me, the interesting part is not that it got done, but which search optimizations turned out to be useful to cut it down to 4 hours on a single desktop processor.
I wonder how it is that anyone can justify this as something larger than a publicity stunt
Well I am not sure Erik van der Werf claimed it was worth slashdotting :P But it's certainly worth an e-mail to the computer-go mailing list, and a paper in some journal.
Well, on the one hand go is much harder, etc. etc., other people have explained this already. On the other hand, I don't think it surprised anyone seriously interested in computer go, that 5x5 can be done by brute force. Every serious go player can read out quickly that it is a full-board win for black. If Black's starting move is restricted, it takes a little more care to read it out, but I would be confident to read the out the correct play for both sides in a couple of minutes. Further, the essential key algorithm (position evaluation according to so-called "unconditional territory") used by Erik has long been known.
This is not to belittle Erik van der Werf's achievements. In fact to the contrary. His more interesting program is MAGOG, which plays 9x9 go. AFAIK, in the end of the game, it uses the same algorithm as MIGOS, and thus plays perfectly (given enough time, and not too complicated a position). Before that, it combines traditional goal-directed search (tactical search, "life-and-death-search") with a lot of brute force global search. Although his program is pretty young by computer go standards (ALL the top programs started to get developed in the 80's), it has shown to be a serious competitor in recent computer go tournaments.
It also seems to help if they have drunk quite a lot first...
Until recently, there were was a pretty strong policy against menus in the FSF web page coding standards. The reason the old FSF main web page had the menu on the right instead of on the left as everyone else, was that otherwise "Lynx users would have to scroll down through the menu text until they reach the actual content of a site".
For my part, I am relieved about every teeny-wheeny bit of pragmatism sneaking it's way into the FSF head quarters.
Executive summary:
By the way, the GCC team is starting to make experiments with svn, and it looks like they might switch in 2 or 3 months.
I am not even a paralegal, but these seem pretty strong words to make by a judge before he has decided a motion. Sounds like starting to count down the K.O.
Isn't it rather brave to wait with installing a security update...
Not so obvious may be the differences in included warranties. Remember that you get a free 2-year warranty in EU country. That's worth quite a lot, especially for notebooks.
The pointer to the fish seems especially silly as there is a more up-to-date version of this article in the english version of Heise news.
He says he never wants to wait applying a fix, because he wants to give users the best kernel possible. Then he says that it probably doesn't matter that the kernel.org kernel gets fixes last, because most users run vendor kernel anyway.
But I think what annoys me most is that he is constantly claiming he is not forcing his (in his own admittance extreme) views on anybody. But this is just not true: In his position, he imposes his view on dealing with security issues on all kernel.org kernel users, and indirectly on vendor kernel users, just by the way he actually deals with them.
From the discussion it turned out that the vanilla kernel often lacks security fixes because of Linus' complete refusal to work with vendor-sec. (2.6.10 got released with holes that had been fixed in 2.6.9-ac for a while.) And on the other hand, Alan Cox blamed him for quietly applying security fixes to his tree all the time; he actually said he is constantly reviewing the patches for this (since the blackhats obviously are doing the same).
I think the full discussion is worth reading. It's an interesting clash of culture between people like Alan Cox, Marcelo Tosati etc. who have been working for a vendor for a long time and feel responsible for their users, and have thus adopted a rather pragmatic view, and the more fundamentalist full-disclosure of people arguing on Linus' side.
Anyway, I am sure they will find a middle ground, because all agree that there is a need for a) a linux kernel security contact point (which will probably be a new closed mailing list with rather short disclosure timeline), and b) an established channel for announcing security holes (and maintaining security-fixes-only 2.x.y.z kernels).
And this is not a Linux kernel timeline, but an LWN timeline.
If you list support for "executables", aehm, doesn't that meant that the search tool just does the indexed equivalent of 'strings filename | grep "searchterm"'? That makes me wonder about the quality "support" for some of the file formats, too.
Sorry, this "1" is so much off-base it's not even funny. I hope you are not responsible for patching any Linux system. I don't think last year was a good year wrt linux kernel security.
I'd really like to know what's being done about this pitiful trend of Linux security, where it's 10x as easy to find a vulnerability in the kernel than it is in any app on the system, where isec releases at least one critical vulnerability for each kernel version.
And given his description of how he found these problems, plus his frustration about getting Linus and akpm to reply, his tone is even somewhat understandable.
According to German press articles, many more newspapers recommend to vote for Kerry this time, than did support Gore in 2000. Is this true? If so, is this a trend in the more intellectual America? Is this a division between the more intellectual America reading and writing newspapers, and the popular opinion? Or is there another explanation for the fact that this tendency is not reflected in the popular opinion (according to polls)?
...where you visit 3rd party sites. Obviously, it's not Microsoft's fault, but the fault of the 3rd party when you PC gets infected. So maybe IE just shouldn't be used except when visiting Microsoft's update site? Use another browser for anything else? I find myself in a surprising agreement with Gates...
When a question about how to do s.th. with a software is asked frequently, then this clearly shows that the user interface has not been made obvious enough, and you should f**ing fix the UI instead of putting an explanation in the FAQ. An application with a perfect GUI should never leave the user with a question, and a well-made one would at least avoid the frequently asked questions.
To prove my point, I decided to google for "FAQ mozilla" and got to the Thunderbird FAQ, and it wonderfully proves my point. After some questions about what Thunderbird/Mozilla is, etc., the first technical question is: How do I start the profile manager?. And the answer has to explain how to run "C:\Program Files\Thunderbird\Thunderbird.exe" -p... Lots of other questions in that FAQ show issues where it is simply not obvious enough how to do s.th. within Thunderbird.
After this seven-year ban on FAQs, I may reconsider the situation, and possibly reallow FAQs, but the only questions allowed would be those clearing up general confusion about what a certain software can do/cannot do, i.e. the sort of question you would want to have answered before downloading/installing the software. But I would only do so if I no longer have to run "Thunderbird.exe -p" to start the profile manager of thunderbird...
...would be good enough for me. I find it really annoying how many of the bookmarks I don't use often are broken after about a year or so.
So whereas Europeans (rightfully!!! --Added so that someone can mod me flamebait if he wants to) like to blame US citizens for their ignorance of the rest of the world, this shows that my fellow Germans are not much better informed about US politics.
as "Greek Olympics Code for Gold" and was wondering why /. would report on doping recipes...
Interesting enough, this seems to be solved much better in X than in Windows. All my KDE apps etc. have just normally sized fonts out of the box; whereas in Windows I have to manually adjust many font sizes, and many apps cannot be adjusted at all.
The only problem in X are programs that assume to know how many pixels their text messages use up, with the result of having text boxes etc. in which the text just doesn't fit in at all...
(In the course of the heated discussion about Reiser4.)
...if this "Spy in the Dashboard" can not even win the award in its category.
And so far, 2.6 has done very well with this development model. It has acquired quite a lot of features that were still necessary, but has been a lot more stable than 2.4 in the early days.
Even for stability it might be a win. The kernel will be a lot closer to the kernels distributors are shipping (because they don't have to apply big patches for necessary features), which means that all their stabilization work can immediately be ported to the vanilla kernel.
Short summary: Andrew doesn't like big forks. I don't see how this gives up the idea of Free Software, as has been stated in many comments. Just to the contrary, IMHO.
A journalist knows a lot more about the subject he is writing than I do, and can attain considerable expertise in it if works on the same topics for several years, and as such I, as a reader, think he is fully entitled to his own opinion. Maybe the American journalism is more idealistic: It assumes that the reader is educated enough to come to his own conclusions and doesn't need help with that. But reality is otherwise.
Instead of having to pick between two experts debating on CNN, I would rather develop my own opinion step-by-step by getting to know the opinion of many journalist-experts, each of them adding a stone here and there to the complete mosaic.
Journalism without opinion means an overly big influence by the side which can (partly) dictate the rhythm of the news, is holding the press conferences, and which can spin the right images (i.e. usually the government). It means that having opinions is left to general-purpose columnists that may have little knowledge of finer points in the matter. It means that Bush can still claim that "Yes there was a link between Saddam an Al Quaida." without the journalists in front of him bursting out laughing, although pretty much no one seriously informed on this subject would still maintain this opinion. It means that no American journalist in Iraq has communicated back home how badly the interaction between the occupying forces and the Iraqis is going, until the biased Michael Moore goes and films it.
I would really wish American mainstream journalists would more often take their own stance on a matter, make Michael Moore unnecessary and generally laugh the overly partisan partisan followers out of the room, instead of professionally presenting even their more hilarious opinions.