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User: RidRash

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  1. 386 crores on India Plans Moon Mission by 2008 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    that is 96.5 million dollars (assuming 1 dollar is 40 rupees). "Titanic" - movie cost more than twice as much. Lets hope that this does better than the titanic. 1 crore = 100 lakhs. 10 lakhs = 1 million.

  2. In anticipation of /. effect on Darwinian Poetry: From Bad to Verse · · Score: 3, Informative

    Darwinian Poetry
    Welcome to Darwinian Poetry! The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.

    Huh?

    Ok, here's the idea: starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,000) randomly generated groups of words (our "poems"), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the "bad" ones and breeding the "good" ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge.

    The cool part is that YOU are the arbiter of what constitutes "good" and "bad" poetry. Once you start, you will be presented with two poems. In all likelihood they will both be abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That's ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you happen to like. It doesn't matter. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy.

    Once you choose a poem, your vote will be recorded and two more poems will appear. Keep doing this for as long as you like, and definitely come back frequently.

    Over time the poems picked by you, and I hope by thousands of other people, will interbreed and more and more interesting poems will emerge. It could take a while. Weeks...months...I don't know. It all depends on how many people participate, and how often.

    Keep coming back, for (I hope) the population will evolve steadily, so each day could bring increasingly interesting poems.

    That's it. Just click on the "Get Started" link below to dive right in. Or click the "Get Report" link to find out what the current highest rated poem is, as well as to see other statistics.

    THE HOW IT WORKS PAGE:

    How it Works
    "Many poems were butchered in the making of this site."

    The Darwinian Poetry software relies primarily on a mechanism called "crossover", similar to the process that operates on chromosomes in biological evolution, except that here the basic genetic units are words rather than nucleic acids. When the program sees that there is room in the population for new poems (because some unfit poems were...um...culled from the herd) it randomly chooses two surviving poems to serve as parents. These two poems are then crossed over, producing two new offspring.

    Here is an example to illustrate. These are two poems that I just grabbed off a test version of the site (color coded for convenience):

    forest storefront semifinished decrees confirmed
    scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
    sceptered not of miffs syncretism
    lose the but longer floor

    the of but judgeship the
    forty troweling him sufficing lysolecithin
    of from when esurience they
    rest timely wounded the perpend

    If these two poems were chosen for breeding, the first thing the program would do is decide how many "snip" points to use. Currently this number ranges between one and five. Let's say 2 came up randomly. Now each poem gets randomly cut in two places. Note that this is different than biological crossover in that the cut points vary between the parents. Whereas real chromosomes need to maintain a constant length, our poems will evolve in length as well as content.

    forest storefront SNIP! semifinished decrees confirmed
    scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
    sceptered not SNIP! of miffs syncretism
    lose the but longer floor

    the of but judgeship the
    forty troweling him SNIP! sufficing lysolecithin
    of from when esurience SNIP! they
    rest timely wounded the perpend

    Now the software performs the crossover operation resulting in two new poems:
    forest storefront suffcing lysolecithin
    of from when esurience of miffs syncretism
    lose the but longer floor
    the of but judgeship the
    forty troweling him semifinished decrees confirmed
    scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
    sceptered not they
    rest timely wounded the perpend

    That's

  3. Guess painter missed this movie on Should You Hire a Hacker? · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Catch me if you can -- This is not a sig.

  4. for those who cant wait on Quantum Computing Programming Language · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/qcl.html

  5. Re:A specific case of a general problem on Psychology of a Programmer · · Score: 1

    >The army is a good example of an environment where individuals dress, act and perform in a bland, stringent and uniform manner and yet are highly productive (in their specified field).

    Or highly destructive, depending on how you look at it.