Re:Simplfy the game and the AI gets better
on
Most Impressive Game AI?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually chess masters don't evaluate every move and every counter move in the manner that a computer program does. A lot of their analysis is based on familiar patterns, recognising promising lines by this method.
Witness Kramnik's missing of a mate-in-one in the recent match against Deep Fritz. It was such an unusual pattern (opposing knight on the eighth rank) that he just completely missed it.
Chess programs are much more about brute force. They've got so good at brute force that it looks pretty intelligent now.
1. American directors have a legal responsibility to defend their shareholders' interests.
2. Ballmer says that Linux is infringing and therefore damaging other shareholders' interests.
Ballmer has no obligation to defend the interests of any shareholders other than Microsoft's.
I've got an X20 that's six years old and has been used daily for work. It's still 100% perfect (apart from battery replacement). In particular, the keyboard is still absolutely perfect.
Frankly, I'm amazed. I've seen a lot of notebooks and never seen one last like this.
Agreed. We've got two core requirements for our calendar app: integration with email and pda sync. Oh, and Windows support; make that three.
Email integration means sending meeting invites that you can accept or decline from within the mail client, and if accepting it automatically gets added to your calendar.
Free/busy scheduling would be nice too.
I've tried Sunbird/Lightning and Evolution in earnest and found them both pretty clunky in this regard. Evolution was a lot slower generally (connecting to an Exchange Server) than I expected so maybe I had some setting incorrect. It would lock up on a regular basis. Something I can't tell my CEO to put up with.
I run a linux desktop in a mostly Windows shop so a non-Outlook/Exchange solution would be a godsend to me but I don't think it exists. Right now I keep a WinXP laptop on my desk just for this purpose.
we watched in awe as the graphics programs for Windows began to nose up on their Mac counterparts
You watched in awe of Windows graphics???
I am often reminded of the affection I and so many others had for MS 15 years ago
I must move in different circles to you because I've never known anyone to feel affection for MS. And I'm talking right back to Bill's first compilers for CP/M.
When you've got a lot of voters you've also got a lot of people that can count the votes. Australian elections are numerically smaller (maybe 10 million or so voters) but we get the result on the night of the election with hand-counting and I don't see any reason why this wouldn't scale.
Another method that would work on broadcast channels in Australia a few years ago was to detect a special signal sent in the vertical blank whenever the ads were on so that regional stations could put in their own ads.
I don't know if it's still there but I imagine it is.
In the "About SCO" section at the bottom they say:
"Headquartered in Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of more than 11,000 resellers and 4,000 developers."
4000 developers? That seems hard to believe. That would be a payroll of something like $400 million a year (allowing for some overheads). They must be counting all the Linux contributors:-)
SCO are undoubtedly revelling in the fact that every time their marketing droids put pen to paper, their output is mirrored on/., newsforge, linux.com and any number of similar sites.
I don't think they would be revelling in the fact that their output is mirrored alongside a large number of, generally well constructed, refutations. If they were then surely we would see evidence of this revelling.
They have bragged about the column inches of their press releases but (AFAIK) they haven't bragged about the coverage of those press releases.
I expect they use this coverage to show their investors how seriously the community takes SCO's business
That strikes me as completely groundless speculation. Any evidence of them presenting things to their investors this way?
We as a community should not be furthering this action. SCO proved long ago that their statements do very little to reflect reality, and that they are not averse to publishing absurd comments in order to try and gain a few share points.
So you believe that these absurd statements should not be publically refuted. The general public does not know they are absurd without the refutation.
Indeed, at the time IBM showed us what a large organisation of UNIX-types should do in such a situation; they ignored SCO.
IBM is involved in a legal battle with SCO. In such situations it is usually considered prudent to say little until it reaches the courts. The rest of the community is not (at present) going to the courts therefore public forums such as this are the best place to make public statements.
However, regular statements by ESR and others, alongside frequent coverage on sites such as this or Newsforge, have shown that the Open Source community cannot help but to rise to a troll's bait.
So you are saying that ESR's demonstration that the only code currently shown by SCO was from ancient Unix, and almost certainly in the public domain, was a bad thing. That SCO's statement that the malloc code was theirs should have remained unchallenged.
Now while I'm not advocating restrictions to free speech, I do think that such publications or announcements should be self-vetted to consider whether or not they are helping the very people who wish to harm our winderfully open community.
I've heard this argument before but I'm yet to see the slightest shred of evidence, or even a well-reasoned argument, that the community's refutation of SCO statements is helping SCO and hurting the community.
McLaughlin casts the debate over sitefinder in terms of 'innovation' versus the status quo and threatens that stifling 'innovation' will lead to a weaker internet.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Does anybody else see the story change? I'm getting two different versions if I reload. One with the additional lines:
"The order of words matters also, with motorcycle candle revealing different results to candle motorcycle."
"Read the Search Basics, compare your notes to GoogleWhack's"
and one without.
Complete text of the two versions are:
"There are always going to be oddities with any big online service, but this one seems to be persisting. Join the discussion in trying to figure out a pattern. For several weeks at least, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but certain two-word combinations of common words like candle truck or speaker bracelet are affected. The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Have fun looking for patterns but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers."
and
"There are always going to be oddities with any big online service, but this one seems to be persisting. Join the discussion in trying to figure out a pattern. For several weeks at least, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but there are certain two-word combinations of common words like candle truck or speaker bracelet. Reversing the order can affect searches too: motorcycle candles vs. candles motorcycle. The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Read the Search Basics, compare your notes to GoogleWhack's, have fun looking for patterns, but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers."
What you can do is come up with a fixed rate based on the value that your work will have to the company. Even if the client still thinks in terms of 100 hours at $40 an hour, you know it will take you 50 hours and therefore you just doubled your take.
Except that most clients will think the other way, that the project that will take you 50 hours is only a 25 hour project.
Other clients may not consider the labor involved at all: they'll approach like a resale. In other words, it cost them $10k for a website that will gross them $50k in sales the first year alone. Put it to them that way and they will see it's a bargain.
Trouble here is that it's unlikely that even the client, with all their internal knowledge, really knows how much the project will gross for them. For you as an outsider to try to make that estimate... Do you have their customer list? Their current turnover? Do you even know a lot (I mean a lot) about their business?
Case in point: I'm doing some small web-work for a guy that puts phone voice recorders in car dealerships. No problem for me to do the work but I have no idea what his profits or margins are.
Slashdot Mirror
The original seems to have gone off-line but I found Susan Polgar's commentary: http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2006/11/recap-of-d eep-fritz-kramnik-game-2.html
Actually chess masters don't evaluate every move and every counter move in the manner that a computer program does. A lot of their analysis is based on familiar patterns, recognising promising lines by this method.
Witness Kramnik's missing of a mate-in-one in the recent match against Deep Fritz. It was such an unusual pattern (opposing knight on the eighth rank) that he just completely missed it.
Chess programs are much more about brute force. They've got so good at brute force that it looks pretty intelligent now.
From the site:
"Last modified: February 15, 2005."
1. American directors have a legal responsibility to defend their shareholders' interests.
2. Ballmer says that Linux is infringing and therefore damaging other shareholders' interests.
Ballmer has no obligation to defend the interests of any shareholders other than Microsoft's.
I broke my collarbone in fourth grade when heavily tagged by Beth Hemmings, the cutest girl in the class. Happiest moment of my primary school career.
> Uh, WTF does this have to do with "News for Nerds"?
Try "Stuff that matters"
Pretty sure it was Bill Bryson that wrote that in "Down Under"
I'll jump on this band-wagon.
I've got an X20 that's six years old and has been used daily for work. It's still 100% perfect (apart from battery replacement). In particular, the keyboard is still absolutely perfect.
Frankly, I'm amazed. I've seen a lot of notebooks and never seen one last like this.
Agreed. We've got two core requirements for our calendar app: integration with email and pda sync. Oh, and Windows support; make that three.
Email integration means sending meeting invites that you can accept or decline from within the mail client, and if accepting it automatically gets added to your calendar.
Free/busy scheduling would be nice too.
I've tried Sunbird/Lightning and Evolution in earnest and found them both pretty clunky in this regard. Evolution was a lot slower generally (connecting to an Exchange Server) than I expected so maybe I had some setting incorrect. It would lock up on a regular basis. Something I can't tell my CEO to put up with.
I run a linux desktop in a mostly Windows shop so a non-Outlook/Exchange solution would be a godsend to me but I don't think it exists. Right now I keep a WinXP laptop on my desk just for this purpose.
Flamebait? This should be +5 Funny.
Just one intervening post? Have the editors ever done better than this?
Congratulations CowboyNeal. Slashdotters everywhere salute you.
Oh for modpoints. That's the funniest comment I've read in a long while.
Yeah. Not bad. You'll have to work just a little harder on this piece though before it's actually convincing that you did any such work.
I'll give it a C+.
You watched in awe of Windows graphics???
I am often reminded of the affection I and so many others had for MS 15 years ago
I must move in different circles to you because I've never known anyone to feel affection for MS. And I'm talking right back to Bill's first compilers for CP/M.
When you've got a lot of voters you've also got a lot of people that can count the votes. Australian elections are numerically smaller (maybe 10 million or so voters) but we get the result on the night of the election with hand-counting and I don't see any reason why this wouldn't scale.
I've got to ask, for something as important as an election, what's wrong with paper and pencil and manual counting?
Another method that would work on broadcast channels in Australia a few years ago was to detect a special signal sent in the vertical blank whenever the ads were on so that regional stations could put in their own ads.
I don't know if it's still there but I imagine it is.
It's not all about the search space, it's also about evaluating the position once you reach the end of your search.
(that said, I have no idea how hard it is to evaluate a Go position)
"Headquartered in Lindon, Utah, SCO has a worldwide network of more than 11,000 resellers and 4,000 developers."
4000 developers? That seems hard to believe. That would be a payroll of something like $400 million a year (allowing for some overheads). They must be counting all the Linux contributors :-)
If your "free speech" involves mass-mailing millions of people that have no connection what-so-ever to you then I'd be pleased to see that stifled.
SCO are undoubtedly revelling in the fact that every time their marketing droids put pen to paper, their output is mirrored on /., newsforge, linux.com and any number of similar sites.
I don't think they would be revelling in the fact that their output is mirrored alongside a large number of, generally well constructed, refutations. If they were then surely we would see evidence of this revelling.
They have bragged about the column inches of their press releases but (AFAIK) they haven't bragged about the coverage of those press releases.
I expect they use this coverage to show their investors how seriously the community takes SCO's business
That strikes me as completely groundless speculation. Any evidence of them presenting things to their investors this way?
We as a community should not be furthering this action. SCO proved long ago that their statements do very little to reflect reality, and that they are not averse to publishing absurd comments in order to try and gain a few share points.
So you believe that these absurd statements should not be publically refuted. The general public does not know they are absurd without the refutation.
Indeed, at the time IBM showed us what a large organisation of UNIX-types should do in such a situation; they ignored SCO.
IBM is involved in a legal battle with SCO. In such situations it is usually considered prudent to say little until it reaches the courts. The rest of the community is not (at present) going to the courts therefore public forums such as this are the best place to make public statements.
However, regular statements by ESR and others, alongside frequent coverage on sites such as this or Newsforge, have shown that the Open Source community cannot help but to rise to a troll's bait.
So you are saying that ESR's demonstration that the only code currently shown by SCO was from ancient Unix, and almost certainly in the public domain, was a bad thing. That SCO's statement that the malloc code was theirs should have remained unchallenged.
Now while I'm not advocating restrictions to free speech, I do think that such publications or announcements should be self-vetted to consider whether or not they are helping the very people who wish to harm our winderfully open community.
I've heard this argument before but I'm yet to see the slightest shred of evidence, or even a well-reasoned argument, that the community's refutation of SCO statements is helping SCO and hurting the community.
Such evidence would be welcome.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Does anybody else see the story change? I'm getting two different versions if I reload. One with the additional lines:
"The order of words matters also, with motorcycle candle revealing different results to candle motorcycle."
"Read the Search Basics, compare your notes to GoogleWhack's"
and one without.
Complete text of the two versions are:
"There are always going to be oddities with any big online service, but this one seems to be persisting. Join the discussion in trying to figure out a pattern. For several weeks at least, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but certain two-word combinations of common words like candle truck or speaker bracelet are affected. The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Have fun looking for patterns but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers."
and
"There are always going to be oddities with any big online service, but this one seems to be persisting. Join the discussion in trying to figure out a pattern. For several weeks at least, Google has been returning zero results or "1-1 of about xxx,000" for common searches. One-word searches seem unaffected, but there are certain two-word combinations of common words like candle truck or speaker bracelet. Reversing the order can affect searches too: motorcycle candles vs. candles motorcycle. The strange thing is that usually the 1 or 2 results found are to commerce sites. Read the Search Basics, compare your notes to GoogleWhack's, have fun looking for patterns, but remember that Google always returns slightly different results for different IP numbers."
Strange.
Agreed. You can move the bar up and down a lot based on the client.
Except that most clients will think the other way, that the project that will take you 50 hours is only a 25 hour project.
Other clients may not consider the labor involved at all: they'll approach like a resale. In other words, it cost them $10k for a website that will gross them $50k in sales the first year alone. Put it to them that way and they will see it's a bargain.
Trouble here is that it's unlikely that even the client, with all their internal knowledge, really knows how much the project will gross for them. For you as an outsider to try to make that estimate... Do you have their customer list? Their current turnover? Do you even know a lot (I mean a lot) about their business?
Case in point: I'm doing some small web-work for a guy that puts phone voice recorders in car dealerships. No problem for me to do the work but I have no idea what his profits or margins are.