In what way? You just argued yourself that brain-wave abilities should not be defined as a prerequisite for life, but then do you take it as a quality to define the value of life? That is, something that is smarter is a "higher form"? Would you then take this down to a meritocracy, where people who are smarter are, in general, more valuable members of society? How do you draw this arbitrary distinction that humans deserve something more than the rest of the universe?
Mostly, yes, I'd have to agree with you, but there are also complicated mechanisms for searching. Designing a good algorithm isn't a simple matter. There are all sorts of problems that come with the basic minimax tree with alpha-beta pruning (the horizon effect being the most obvious of them all). If you think about it, there are actually quite a few different algorithms for chess game-tree searching, negascout and mtd(f) being the most popular. If you really want to see how "simple" chess programs are, try looking at the source to crafty, which is an open source chess program, and consider how it handles all of the different concepts (color domination, open files, king protection, pawn structure, and so on). To beat the top players, a simple minimax tree is not enough.
And these days, people don't really investigate chess as a problem to "solve" (since, it really can't be solved per se). What people should do is use chess as an environment to test various things out (such as neural networks and distributed computing), since it is easy to evaluate efficiency (just have it play a "normal" computer a hundred times or so).
Sorry, but Real's music store won't support iPods. Read the article: "For example, both RealNetworks and iTunes will distribute songs encoded in the AAC format, but Apple's iPod will not be able to play Helix-wrapped songs unless Apple licenses that technology."
This kind of experience, I think, is just a small portion of the actual Mac-using population. If you take a look at the Consumer Reports article posted a while back on Slashdot, Macintosh had, by far, the highest satisfaction and support ratings of any of the computer manufacturers.
Every hardware company has its horror stories about technical support. It's unfortunate that you got picked to suffer it, of all the people who bought Macs, but your own personal experience by no means reflects everyone else's.
1) The stock market doesn't really value the company as is, since movement on the scale of the short term is usually driven by speculation and herd-like fears or desires. The market is stupid, which is why we can make money from it.
2) The price of the stock doesn't determine the value of the company. Think dot-com, or any other over-priced stock.
3) The overall strangeness of the market shows why shorting a "bad" stock is usually much more dangerous than just buying a "good" stock. Sometimes, the market is stupid.
I don't normally nitpick other people's words, but since you nitpicked mine... "And the kipple does in fact appear in the video game"? Hello, we're talking about Ridley Scott's film here. Obviously, you are mistaken as to what medium you're talking about.
This whole argument of yours is like saying that Kubrick's 2001 explains as much Clarke's, motivation-wise. Sure, theoretically you could guess what's going through Dave's mind at the end of the movie, but it's pretty obscure. The whole scene with the breaking glass? In the book, it was a revelation. In the movie, it was a "Huh?" moment.
Of courseBlade Runner has to do with artificial life forms; how can it not, except to really change the book? But there're so many themes in the book that aren't extrapolated in the movie, such as the significance of live animals, and the whole social culture of them. The movie doesn''t extrapolate the true meanings of the Voight-Kampf empathy tests. The random artificial owl and the engineer are left over characters/objects. All of these bare fragments are just relics from the book, devoid of their original meaning and included only as some sort of strange salute to their origins. With so many revisions and stringent editing, even some elements that the movie itself introduces have been gutted. The movie can't capture the entire world of the book. It just has a different scope, a different meaning; it's a completely different story aimed for a completely different purpose. It isn't Dick's "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep." It's too different. The most it borrows is an empty framework in which to dump a bunch of other things. It's only based on Dick's story as much as Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was based on H. G. Well's. These are areas where the movie basically takes the premise of the story, guts it of its plot, changes everything around (including adding new characters, removing others), and then parades it as a derivative. Blade Runner is as much based on Dick's novel as Salvador Dali's "Christ of Saint John of the Cross" is based on Massaccio's "Crucifixion", or Star Wars is based on Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and the other classics. These are stretches. Dick's story was only a loose starting point, a jump-start from which to make their own story.
I obviously have, just mispoken. The entire business of artificial animals is almost completely missing in the movie. The fact that the main character is ashamed about having a faux animal, and the whole scene at the end with the frog, is essential to the point of the novel. The movie has nothing about this sort of thing. Nothing. No mercerism, no kipple, no lead cod-pieces, no mood machine, nothing.
Actually, IIRC, the shooting screenplay wasn't directly based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep." Ridley Scott took the then-current screenplay adaptation (like the 12th generation or something) of the story and gave it to another screenwriter. He told that one not to read Philip Dick's short story at all, only to adapt from the screenplay given him. This explains, of course, why there are so many huge changes from the short story.
I don't know about you, but Mozart wrote maybe less than 5 songs for the sake of "art in itself." Everything else was on commission, for money, usually up front. Similar things with Beethoven, and Bach, and all the other big composers of the classical era. Music was, is, and always will be a business-driven endeavor. Maybe there is some art for art's sake, but that is rare and far between.
But SCO said that, while ancestral Unix versions have earlier versions of the code, the code was refined in SVR4.1, and it's the later version of the code - still proprietary to SCO - that appears in Linux.
Those ancestral versions are BSD, the Unix that Caldera released, and such, right? So...doesn't this statement (if true) make their "refined" code a derivative work of the open Unix sources (according to their definition of derivative work)?
Although future professions is an important thing to consider in choosing a college (especially if you know, hands down, what you want to do, which you seem to), it isn't always the most important thing. The important thing is to enjoy what you're learning...if you are, you learn more, if you aren't, you learn less.
Don't completely rule out a school because it doesn't specialize in computer software design or engineering. You can get those skills through interning and doing things hands-on later. Almost any good college will give you the necessary foundations to be able to aquire skills well.
Ignore the rumors about snobbishness, geekiness, or such. These perceived trends are mostly the result of a smallish group of people, whom you can mostly avoid or join as you wish.
The biggest decision-makers are: price, classes offered, size, location, and general atmosphere, not necessarily in that order. The top schools, perhaps, have better connection-making possibilities, which can be useful later on. And, of course, dropping a top-name-school onto a resume can look quite impressive.
Actually, this is exactly how I started to learn programming. I'd messed with a little bit of BASIC and LOGO when I was in elementary school, mostly on Apple IIe's, but I'd forgotten all of it by middle school.
I started with HTML (it was a relatively simple matter to find tutorials and look at page sources), and then moved on to JavaScript. From there, I decided to try CGI, and learned PERL, and then graduated to C++. This only took me 2 years in middle school, and I enjoyed it every step of the way.
Mostly, the key should be learning to program interactively. For little kids, it's boring to program with static programs. Get them started with HTML, making web pages on things they like, have them put JavaScript gimmicks on their webpages (the more annoying the gimmick, the more the kid seems to like it). Have them try to put a web-page counter on their site, show them how JavaScript is inadequate, and then try to get them to learn PERL. Encourage a "do it yourself" attitude upon them, and soon they'll be learning by themselves.
I am very confused with the naming system now. Is Phoenix the same thing as Firebird? What about Thunderbird? What's the difference between them and SeaMonkey?
People need to get rid of the elitest, snobbish look on Chess programs as "not really AI". What is AI, if this is not? I've said most of what follows in a variety of posts, but I'm going to put them together into a cohesive one.
Chess playing is a form of AI.
People object that chess programs "just search". Well, don't humans do the same? When we have a problem, we look at all of the possibilities and evaluate what we think is the best move for us. Isn't this what Minimax is all about, to an abstracted level? So what if computers are "calculating"? We calculate too, using neurons that fire with very deterministic chain reactions of chemicals in our brains. Our minds are simply the movements of sodium and potassium ions, with the help of ATP, calcium, neurotransmitters, etc. Where is the "intelligence" in that? At what point does our parallel "data-processing" turn into subject?
People also complain that the Chess heuristics are all programmed by humans, and therefore not really AI. What people don't realize is that we are preprogrammed, too. We have rules that guide how we work in nature. We don't have to learn how to see, how to move our hands, how to recognize faces (we can learn faces, but we have the ability to recognize faces inborn). Even the ability to speak languages is, to some extent, an inborn ability. In chess, learning is limited during the actual play of the game. You can use your mistakes in one game to improve your overall play for future games, but you don't usually apply such knowledge in the current game itself (unless you are a rank beginner and forget how the knight moves, for instance). So, computer programs are legitimized in not always including learning algorithms for current games.
AI is simply a designation for the field of trying to model various aspects of the human mind, whether it be learning, emotions, language, game-playing, recognition, or "common sense" heuristics. Even something as simple as a Finite State Machine could be considered an AI agent; whether it is an accurate, flexible, or complex model is an entirely different issue from whether it is AI at all.
If a computer puts up the appearence of intelligence, for all intents and purposes, it is intelligent, and if it seems dumb, it is dumb, in the context of whatever you're testing. A chess program has zilch intelligence for anything besides chess, much like a savant that can calculate primes sometimes even without the know-how of basic arithmetic. The human brain is, at the current state, too complicated to model on a holistic level. I think everyone in the AI field would agree. So, why pompously and snobbishly deride computer chess as "un-AI" while claiming that (for example) "Only Learning is AI"? If someone has Retrograde Amnesia, does that mean that the person is unintelligent? No! AI covers a vast range of sub-fields, and only one of them is AI.
"but a search in itself is nothing remarkable -- especially since the hieristics will likely be programmed in by the programmer, not learned by the chess program."
There are many different ideas about AI. One is having the computer learn most of the significant things on its own, and the other is to have things preprogrammed (not that the two are exactly mutually-exclusive). But there's nothing wrong with either viewpoint, except when it denies the other side. We humans learn, of course, but the majority of our minds are pre-programmed by the DNA and the chemical processes initiated even from fertilization. We don't have to learn to see. We don't learn to recognize faces (we learn faces, but not the ability to recognize faces). We have the ability for language fairly built-in as an instinct. On the other hand, we learn vocabularies, we learn table-manners (some of us, anyway), we learn how to take derivatives and type.
I don't think you can really critique Chess Computing by saying that the heuristics were "pre-programmed" by others, since we have heuristics that are programmed into us. I don't think anyone had to sit down and figure out that a good strategy to playing chess is to read out several moves and reject the moves that weren't as good. Minimax is simply an abstraction of how we actually play. Just because we programmed it doesn't mean it isn't a valid model, and models are what AI are all about.
Of course, learning is an integral part of how we function, but very little "learning" actually happens during a chess game, for instance, that is reapplied during that chess game itself. So, in this context, learning would only be another way to "program", not a way for the program to run.
Err, simpler rules? Perhaps at the basic level, but there are so many different "official" variations dealing with komi (the point compensation to White for Black having first-move advantage) and ko/super-ko (an exceptional position which has to have special rules). Sure, for most games the end result is the same, and the positions in which the rule-variations make a score difference are often a bit contrived, but to iron out all of go's small little rule kinks seems almost Herculean.
And how can you say that we are not "rule driven"? Aren't we running an "algorithm"? The stimulus of words drives certain reactions in our minds; certain neurons fire, and then an output is produced. How is this different from an advanced "computer"? I think we are quite rule driven, just on a deeper level. How else would children learn languages, or the meanings of words. You don't think they memorize them?
I'm sorry, but I fail to see what you would call AI, then. Where do you distinguish between AI and not AI? At what point does a computer, processing information at an extraordinarily high rate, "become" intelligent?
Consider Searle's Chinese Room problem. You feed someone (written) Chinese under the door, and they have an extremely complete book of rules for "translating" one set of Chinese characters into another. The person then feeds a written "reply" in Chinese back under the door. Do the people in the room know Chinese? To the people outside, it appears that they do. What if the person memorizes all of the rules. Can that person now be considered to "know" Chinese?
You can't just blanketly designated computer chess-playing as unintelligent, because we don't really have effective ways of designating whether something is "intelligent" or "human-like" other than gut-feeling or statistical analysis of "performance" (i.e. outward appearence). Turing had the right idea when he gave his version of the Test, in that the true test for intelligence is just the appearence of it.
Escape Velocity is by the far the most addictive. One more shipment...10,000 more credits...
Zork was by far the most frustrating game I'd ever played. I loved it!
Metal Gear Solid comes close, but I'd have to agree with the FFVII people for the best storyline.
Don't know if this counts, since it isn't exactly a computer game, but Diplomacy...you never trust anyone ever again.
This reminds me of a section in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, where he (Feynman), along with all of the other scientists, had his letters censored at Los Alamos during WWII. They didn't want him talking about security procedures, but he kept finding ways to circumvent the rules...
One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate began to wonder what was happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in? And of course, his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole.
You see, I was always trying to straighten people out. And so I made a bet with somebody that I could tell about the hole in the fence in a letter, and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said, You should see the way they administer this place (that's what we were allowed to say). There's a hole in the fence seventy-one feet away from such-and-such a place, that's this size and that size, that you can walk through.
Now, what can they do? They can't say to me that there is no such hole. I mean, what are they going to do? It's their own hard luck that there's such a hole. They should fix the hole. So I got that one through.
Slashdot Mirror
In what way? You just argued yourself that brain-wave abilities should not be defined as a prerequisite for life, but then do you take it as a quality to define the value of life? That is, something that is smarter is a "higher form"? Would you then take this down to a meritocracy, where people who are smarter are, in general, more valuable members of society? How do you draw this arbitrary distinction that humans deserve something more than the rest of the universe?
And these days, people don't really investigate chess as a problem to "solve" (since, it really can't be solved per se). What people should do is use chess as an environment to test various things out (such as neural networks and distributed computing), since it is easy to evaluate efficiency (just have it play a "normal" computer a hundred times or so).
Sorry, but Real's music store won't support iPods. Read the article: "For example, both RealNetworks and iTunes will distribute songs encoded in the AAC format, but Apple's iPod will not be able to play Helix-wrapped songs unless Apple licenses that technology."
Every hardware company has its horror stories about technical support. It's unfortunate that you got picked to suffer it, of all the people who bought Macs, but your own personal experience by no means reflects everyone else's.
2) The price of the stock doesn't determine the value of the company. Think dot-com, or any other over-priced stock.
3) The overall strangeness of the market shows why shorting a "bad" stock is usually much more dangerous than just buying a "good" stock. Sometimes, the market is stupid.
This whole argument of yours is like saying that Kubrick's 2001 explains as much Clarke's, motivation-wise. Sure, theoretically you could guess what's going through Dave's mind at the end of the movie, but it's pretty obscure. The whole scene with the breaking glass? In the book, it was a revelation. In the movie, it was a "Huh?" moment.
Of course Blade Runner has to do with artificial life forms; how can it not, except to really change the book? But there're so many themes in the book that aren't extrapolated in the movie, such as the significance of live animals, and the whole social culture of them. The movie doesn''t extrapolate the true meanings of the Voight-Kampf empathy tests. The random artificial owl and the engineer are left over characters/objects. All of these bare fragments are just relics from the book, devoid of their original meaning and included only as some sort of strange salute to their origins. With so many revisions and stringent editing, even some elements that the movie itself introduces have been gutted. The movie can't capture the entire world of the book. It just has a different scope, a different meaning; it's a completely different story aimed for a completely different purpose. It isn't Dick's "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep." It's too different. The most it borrows is an empty framework in which to dump a bunch of other things. It's only based on Dick's story as much as Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was based on H. G. Well's. These are areas where the movie basically takes the premise of the story, guts it of its plot, changes everything around (including adding new characters, removing others), and then parades it as a derivative. Blade Runner is as much based on Dick's novel as Salvador Dali's "Christ of Saint John of the Cross" is based on Massaccio's "Crucifixion", or Star Wars is based on Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and the other classics. These are stretches. Dick's story was only a loose starting point, a jump-start from which to make their own story.
I obviously have, just mispoken. The entire business of artificial animals is almost completely missing in the movie. The fact that the main character is ashamed about having a faux animal, and the whole scene at the end with the frog, is essential to the point of the novel. The movie has nothing about this sort of thing. Nothing. No mercerism, no kipple, no lead cod-pieces, no mood machine, nothing.
Actually, IIRC, the shooting screenplay wasn't directly based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep." Ridley Scott took the then-current screenplay adaptation (like the 12th generation or something) of the story and gave it to another screenwriter. He told that one not to read Philip Dick's short story at all, only to adapt from the screenplay given him. This explains, of course, why there are so many huge changes from the short story.
I don't know about you, but Mozart wrote maybe less than 5 songs for the sake of "art in itself." Everything else was on commission, for money, usually up front. Similar things with Beethoven, and Bach, and all the other big composers of the classical era. Music was, is, and always will be a business-driven endeavor. Maybe there is some art for art's sake, but that is rare and far between.
Those ancestral versions are BSD, the Unix that Caldera released, and such, right? So...doesn't this statement (if true) make their "refined" code a derivative work of the open Unix sources (according to their definition of derivative work)?
Don't completely rule out a school because it doesn't specialize in computer software design or engineering. You can get those skills through interning and doing things hands-on later. Almost any good college will give you the necessary foundations to be able to aquire skills well.
Ignore the rumors about snobbishness, geekiness, or such. These perceived trends are mostly the result of a smallish group of people, whom you can mostly avoid or join as you wish.
The biggest decision-makers are: price, classes offered, size, location, and general atmosphere, not necessarily in that order. The top schools, perhaps, have better connection-making possibilities, which can be useful later on. And, of course, dropping a top-name-school onto a resume can look quite impressive.
How much money do you need to short? All you need to pay is commission, right?
...Richard Feynman? He still had quite a productive scientific and intellectual life even after he married. And married. And married.
I started with HTML (it was a relatively simple matter to find tutorials and look at page sources), and then moved on to JavaScript. From there, I decided to try CGI, and learned PERL, and then graduated to C++. This only took me 2 years in middle school, and I enjoyed it every step of the way.
Mostly, the key should be learning to program interactively. For little kids, it's boring to program with static programs. Get them started with HTML, making web pages on things they like, have them put JavaScript gimmicks on their webpages (the more annoying the gimmick, the more the kid seems to like it). Have them try to put a web-page counter on their site, show them how JavaScript is inadequate, and then try to get them to learn PERL. Encourage a "do it yourself" attitude upon them, and soon they'll be learning by themselves.
I am very confused with the naming system now. Is Phoenix the same thing as Firebird? What about Thunderbird? What's the difference between them and SeaMonkey?
Is this version still beta then, since they didn't number it 1.4.1?
Er....I mean.... ...only one of them is Learning.
Chess playing is a form of AI.
People object that chess programs "just search". Well, don't humans do the same? When we have a problem, we look at all of the possibilities and evaluate what we think is the best move for us. Isn't this what Minimax is all about, to an abstracted level? So what if computers are "calculating"? We calculate too, using neurons that fire with very deterministic chain reactions of chemicals in our brains. Our minds are simply the movements of sodium and potassium ions, with the help of ATP, calcium, neurotransmitters, etc. Where is the "intelligence" in that? At what point does our parallel "data-processing" turn into subject?
People also complain that the Chess heuristics are all programmed by humans, and therefore not really AI. What people don't realize is that we are preprogrammed, too. We have rules that guide how we work in nature. We don't have to learn how to see, how to move our hands, how to recognize faces (we can learn faces, but we have the ability to recognize faces inborn). Even the ability to speak languages is, to some extent, an inborn ability. In chess, learning is limited during the actual play of the game. You can use your mistakes in one game to improve your overall play for future games, but you don't usually apply such knowledge in the current game itself (unless you are a rank beginner and forget how the knight moves, for instance). So, computer programs are legitimized in not always including learning algorithms for current games.
AI is simply a designation for the field of trying to model various aspects of the human mind, whether it be learning, emotions, language, game-playing, recognition, or "common sense" heuristics. Even something as simple as a Finite State Machine could be considered an AI agent; whether it is an accurate, flexible, or complex model is an entirely different issue from whether it is AI at all.
If a computer puts up the appearence of intelligence, for all intents and purposes, it is intelligent, and if it seems dumb, it is dumb, in the context of whatever you're testing. A chess program has zilch intelligence for anything besides chess, much like a savant that can calculate primes sometimes even without the know-how of basic arithmetic. The human brain is, at the current state, too complicated to model on a holistic level. I think everyone in the AI field would agree. So, why pompously and snobbishly deride computer chess as "un-AI" while claiming that (for example) "Only Learning is AI"? If someone has Retrograde Amnesia, does that mean that the person is unintelligent? No! AI covers a vast range of sub-fields, and only one of them is AI.
"but a search in itself is nothing remarkable -- especially since the hieristics will likely be programmed in by the programmer, not learned by the chess program." There are many different ideas about AI. One is having the computer learn most of the significant things on its own, and the other is to have things preprogrammed (not that the two are exactly mutually-exclusive). But there's nothing wrong with either viewpoint, except when it denies the other side. We humans learn, of course, but the majority of our minds are pre-programmed by the DNA and the chemical processes initiated even from fertilization. We don't have to learn to see. We don't learn to recognize faces (we learn faces, but not the ability to recognize faces). We have the ability for language fairly built-in as an instinct. On the other hand, we learn vocabularies, we learn table-manners (some of us, anyway), we learn how to take derivatives and type. I don't think you can really critique Chess Computing by saying that the heuristics were "pre-programmed" by others, since we have heuristics that are programmed into us. I don't think anyone had to sit down and figure out that a good strategy to playing chess is to read out several moves and reject the moves that weren't as good. Minimax is simply an abstraction of how we actually play. Just because we programmed it doesn't mean it isn't a valid model, and models are what AI are all about. Of course, learning is an integral part of how we function, but very little "learning" actually happens during a chess game, for instance, that is reapplied during that chess game itself. So, in this context, learning would only be another way to "program", not a way for the program to run.
I think the book that that story appeared in was "The Mind's I", but I'm not sure.
Err, simpler rules? Perhaps at the basic level, but there are so many different "official" variations dealing with komi (the point compensation to White for Black having first-move advantage) and ko/super-ko (an exceptional position which has to have special rules). Sure, for most games the end result is the same, and the positions in which the rule-variations make a score difference are often a bit contrived, but to iron out all of go's small little rule kinks seems almost Herculean.
And how can you say that we are not "rule driven"? Aren't we running an "algorithm"? The stimulus of words drives certain reactions in our minds; certain neurons fire, and then an output is produced. How is this different from an advanced "computer"? I think we are quite rule driven, just on a deeper level. How else would children learn languages, or the meanings of words. You don't think they memorize them?
Consider Searle's Chinese Room problem. You feed someone (written) Chinese under the door, and they have an extremely complete book of rules for "translating" one set of Chinese characters into another. The person then feeds a written "reply" in Chinese back under the door. Do the people in the room know Chinese? To the people outside, it appears that they do. What if the person memorizes all of the rules. Can that person now be considered to "know" Chinese?
You can't just blanketly designated computer chess-playing as unintelligent, because we don't really have effective ways of designating whether something is "intelligent" or "human-like" other than gut-feeling or statistical analysis of "performance" (i.e. outward appearence). Turing had the right idea when he gave his version of the Test, in that the true test for intelligence is just the appearence of it.
Escape Velocity is by the far the most addictive. One more shipment...10,000 more credits... Zork was by far the most frustrating game I'd ever played. I loved it! Metal Gear Solid comes close, but I'd have to agree with the FFVII people for the best storyline. Don't know if this counts, since it isn't exactly a computer game, but Diplomacy...you never trust anyone ever again.