The truth seems to be, the Aussies managed to trap a manganese (Mn) catalyst in an unusual photolytic reaction in a membrane, hardly analogous to using a magnesium (Mg) atom in a photon sensitive chlorophyll molecule. Somebody's PR department decide to dumb it down for us masses, did they?
Personally, I'd have critiqued my optimism concerning Mogo's chances of beating everybody without taking a handicap by this time next year. But I appreciate your assessment that professional Go ratings are bunk:-)
Myungwan Kim, 8P, went on to win the 2008 U. S. Go Congress, where that MoGo demonstration was staged. He was unbeaten, IIRC. He also played and won several blitz rounds with MoGo and won those contests handily. It will be interesting to see the rematch next year.
You must be thinking about that episode in Hikaru no Go where whatsizname, Toya Akira, the kid pro not Hikaru, is forced to play the mayor of Podunk-cho and three of his chums, only one of whom can play a competent amateur game, and the pro lets them all win by exactly the same amount? Heh. The only 7-dans I know aren't so kind, just... ahh... polite... when they take your head off:-)
Evolution proceeds on the scale of entire ecosystems following Taoist principles, oddly enough. The system distorts eventually, so DNA, always morphing and oozing around like a glob of warm wax anyway, gets glommed and poured into the nearest available low spot. The excess bits are sliced off by the razor-sharp edges of those "niches" everyone seems to think are so comfortable.
Hence, wolves remain wolves, but dogs (with 98% wolf DNA) are just about any sloppy shape humans can think of. In the plant kingdom, the relevant clades are even more revealing — evolution frequently converges on similar shapes, but the DNA forced into those unforgiving niches is wildly divergent. Hence, the closest genetic kin to lotus blossoms turns out to be plane trees (sycamores, to us western hemisphere types). Or just like the closest living relative of Spanish Moss is pineapples. DNA is supple stuff.
It would be interesting to follow the precedents of a human-machine mashup like the Borg. Maybe the closest thing to a Borg amoeba would indeed turn out to be MoGo.
Ignore the noise of geeks falling over themselves and expostulating into thin air with gestures, but instead consider the following excellent introduction to the world's best game at IGS-Pandanet:
http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/learning_go/learning_go_1.html
I don't know the specifics of handicapping in go...
With Mogo taking a nine-stone handicap, our Korean 8-dan professional should have been favored to win by mere slaughter, instead of nuclear annihilation. Instead, the pro lost. This result is astonishing.
Anyone who has ever played Mogo (the program is freely available at http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo_Download.htm ) will instantly recognize Mogo's 1.5 point advantage as typical of the program's usual conservative style in the endgame. It always plays to win by the least amount necessary and takes no chances.
MoGo improves with search time. The dimension is valid. This can be Q.E.D.'d by running Sylvain Gelly's code on your own PC. Give it orders of magnitude more time per move, considering the limitations of the average geek hardware.
Handicap is a feature of the game of Go. It simply provides an even contest, to the extent of 9 stones — at least in "polite" games. Myungwan Kim should have had a 50-50 chance or better to beat the program, but he didn't. Also, the 9 stone handicap figure is interesting in one other regard — it has taken less than about 24 months to bring MoGo up to the 9 stone level, and if the trend continues, MoGo should be able to mop up all amateur players and maybe even shodan players in about a year while playing without a handicap.
MoGo has a very deliberate and conservative playing style and always plays for the minimum win possible, usually winning by half a point or so.
This is one of the maddening characteristics of the program, that it can beat you without bothering to seem human. MoGo's play in the beginning can seem chaotic, but the game quickly reduces to machine-like robotic precision.
Vista wouldn't reinstall from OEM discs on my Dell notebook, because I was running GRUB?? That just about gold-plates my hunch. Now, Vista won't run on ANY computer I own because Ubuntu 8.04 is my operating system of choice. It simply does not pay to trust an OS whose future operation is subject to policy whims and random paranoid vagaries by a third party, in this case, Microsoft. I would be happy to join any class action lawsuit that result from this disclosure, but no inducement is sufficient to make me trust Vista again.
Sounds like one too many what-ifs got pruned from the decision tree. Nice. Probably saved a couple million bucks on the ground, got the pup out the door, and sent it all the way to Mars before it flushed its entire budget into thin air. Speaking as a taxpayer, at least the show's been entertaining.
SETI is "listening for aliens," yeah, right! Like Howard Hughes' old Glomar Explorer was mining manganese nodules? The SETI paradigm is so implausible, given the rate at which noise to signal ratios approach infinity as distance from Earth approaches two or three lightyears, that it seems far more likely that all those SETI@Home screensavers are doing something else.
If Ed Mitchell is right, they're listening for the return of the Mother Ship coming back to Roswell to pick up the survivors, and we'll be lucky if we notice it coming through the Oort Cloud.
My personal guess is more mundane. All that distributed processing power has been harnessed to help Echelon listen for Al Qaeda.
SETI is absurd on the merits, though. If aliens are out there, if aliens are advanced, if Einstein was right and quantum mechanics is righter, why would aliens use something as feeble as the electromagnetic spectrum? They're probably doing something we can't even imagine, like knocking on the walls between universes.
My experience installing it over Windows XP on a Hewlett Packard notebook was exactly the same as buying it installed on a Dell notebook — within a month, both OS's went south and crashed hard. So hard, in fact, that reinstalling Vista was impossible on the Dell, since the machine could not boot at all, could not get past IPL, even though boot diagnostics reported the hardware in perfect working order.
I threw away the HP as the bloated piece of crap it was, and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the Dell. Hardy Heron has problems too, of course — about like the old OS 8 or 9 Macintosh — nothing, in other words, that I can't deal with or work around using Simple Backup Config/Restore.
Recapitulate phylogeny and do for programming what the Rennaissance did for medicine: Institutionalize open source for anyone who can afford the education, drive the charlatans (including Microsoft certification) beyond the pale, and stop wearing funny bird masks in times of pestilence, plague and peril. Train a generation of mothers that "My son, the programmer" means something good.
Developers are notorious for having a two-year attention span. Once version 1.0 is out the door, experienced coders know better than to hang around for iterations n+1. They want UP or OUT, and there's no sideways. New hires and Recent College Grads (a second level caste, at best) come in to maintain and expand a codebase that took the original developers a lifetime of experience to shape, command and release into the world. The result? Information entropy, institutional amnesia, competing visions of ultimate goals, anarchy, chaos, death marches and bankruptcy. I'm really beginning to think that the only folks who get their own paradigm right are gamers: After 10 minutes of Wind Waker or 10 hours of Metroid Prime, you've explored all there is to know about Game Cube, and it's off to Wii, where the synergies are obvious and not a single user has to be told how.
Just out of curiosity, what bit of rigor ensures that those "extrasolar planets" we're detecting so many lightyears from home are actually resolved images, and not averages of four or five similar, but smaller, objects? It's really unclear to me that the Galilean moons of Jupiter could ever be resolved as four objects and not one "giant moon" from as far away as a half a lightyear.
Just out of curiosity, what necessarily connects speaking to thinking? Is "thought" defined as chattering inside your head as though you talk quietly and someone else quietly listens, like the constant drip-drip of a faucet or the incessant hydrodynamic neap of a leaky toilet? In my personal experience, somewhat limited I'll admit, but not personally insignificant since I raised a family on it, creativity suddenly appears out of a black, thoughtless void -- whether that translates into poetry, videogames or Zen. You prepare and perspire and sacrifice yourself to an agony of doubt. Then the brilliance arrives unbidden and unconscious, as though the quiet 90% of your brain has been laboring like the proverbial million monkeys in the dark.
Elegant, beautiful systems in nature tend to have evolved over very long time scales. For example, feathered flight, elaborate bird song and courtship behaviors, indispensible symbiotic pollination regimes between honebees and radically disparate families of the angiosperms, whale echolocation, or possibly the weirdest tetrapods of them all, snakes.
Considering the social importance of vocalization in both Old World and New World primates, it would come as no surprise to learn that our prehuman ancestors used their talented larynges to warn, woo and war, creating the impression (and indeed the reality) of synergistic social cohesion which could easily take on rivals, herd prey or coordinate defense against predators. It's not hard to predict that a fire-using promethean like Homo erectus may well have been far more than a simple Hollywood grunting dunce. Finding the evidence to demonstrate it is another matter.
One of the outfits I interviewed with was having problems, so they asked me to "look over our guy's shoulder" and tell her what she's doing wrong. That made me nervous. I'm an autodidact, she was trained in C.S., so we don't speak the same language although we were both using Visual Studio C++ and MFC. But we dove in, and pretty soon it was obvious what the matter was: She'd declared a huge object in stack space, instead of using a pointer, and was overwriting her own return address with some sloppy bounds checking, but there was no way I could explain that. Like almost every pro I've worked with, she was trained in "Microsoft's way" of thinking abstractly and had an awe of the tools which bordered on reverence. She had, in other words, never done any serious assembler work in her life and had no idea what the MACHINE was doing on the stack. I floundered, trying to explain. My mouth doesn't program, my hands do. But the guy who sat next to her "got it." She was in good hands. So I left. Didn't get hired. Didn't pursue it. That was the first job interview I ever seriously considered billing for my time.
That's like a Democrat proclaiming no self-respecting conservative Republican could ever vote for John McCain because he's abandoned everything conservatives stand for.
Fact #1: Obama is new hotness.
Fact #2: McCain is the old war horse in the park that pigeons poop on.
So lighten up. Nobody cares about Fisa except a few alleged "Slashdot voters" (if there is such a thing) who couldn't fill Wrigley Field on free caps day.
Slashdot Mirror
How does "photosynthesis" crack hydrogen?
You can use the animated crib sheet here http://www.johnkyrk.com/photosynthesis.html for all those pesky enzyme and phosphor details.
The truth seems to be, the Aussies managed to trap a manganese (Mn) catalyst in an unusual photolytic reaction in a membrane, hardly analogous to using a magnesium (Mg) atom in a photon sensitive chlorophyll molecule. Somebody's PR department decide to dumb it down for us masses, did they?
1970 coeds chatting in a bookstore: "That's quite a compliment from someone who believes in eugenics!"
Personally, I'd have critiqued my optimism concerning Mogo's chances of beating everybody without taking a handicap by this time next year. But I appreciate your assessment that professional Go ratings are bunk :-)
Myungwan Kim, 8P, went on to win the 2008 U. S. Go Congress, where that MoGo demonstration was staged. He was unbeaten, IIRC. He also played and won several blitz rounds with MoGo and won those contests handily. It will be interesting to see the rematch next year.
I stupid. What is zis "microformat" ting?
You must be thinking about that episode in Hikaru no Go where whatsizname, Toya Akira, the kid pro not Hikaru, is forced to play the mayor of Podunk-cho and three of his chums, only one of whom can play a competent amateur game, and the pro lets them all win by exactly the same amount? Heh. The only 7-dans I know aren't so kind, just... ahh... polite ... when they take your head off :-)
Evolution proceeds on the scale of entire ecosystems following Taoist principles, oddly enough. The system distorts eventually, so DNA, always morphing and oozing around like a glob of warm wax anyway, gets glommed and poured into the nearest available low spot. The excess bits are sliced off by the razor-sharp edges of those "niches" everyone seems to think are so comfortable.
Hence, wolves remain wolves, but dogs (with 98% wolf DNA) are just about any sloppy shape humans can think of. In the plant kingdom, the relevant clades are even more revealing — evolution frequently converges on similar shapes, but the DNA forced into those unforgiving niches is wildly divergent. Hence, the closest genetic kin to lotus blossoms turns out to be plane trees (sycamores, to us western hemisphere types). Or just like the closest living relative of Spanish Moss is pineapples. DNA is supple stuff.
It would be interesting to follow the precedents of a human-machine mashup like the Borg. Maybe the closest thing to a Borg amoeba would indeed turn out to be MoGo.
Ignore the noise of geeks falling over themselves and expostulating into thin air with gestures, but instead consider the following excellent introduction to the world's best game at IGS-Pandanet: http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/learning_go/learning_go_1.html
It was a 19x19 game and a perfectly normal 9 stone handicap. See http://www.usgo.org/congress/2008/myungwan-mogo.sgf
With Mogo taking a nine-stone handicap, our Korean 8-dan professional should have been favored to win by mere slaughter, instead of nuclear annihilation. Instead, the pro lost. This result is astonishing.
Anyone who has ever played Mogo (the program is freely available at http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo_Download.htm ) will instantly recognize Mogo's 1.5 point advantage as typical of the program's usual conservative style in the endgame. It always plays to win by the least amount necessary and takes no chances.
MoGo improves with search time. The dimension is valid. This can be Q.E.D.'d by running Sylvain Gelly's code on your own PC. Give it orders of magnitude more time per move, considering the limitations of the average geek hardware.
Handicap is a feature of the game of Go. It simply provides an even contest, to the extent of 9 stones — at least in "polite" games. Myungwan Kim should have had a 50-50 chance or better to beat the program, but he didn't. Also, the 9 stone handicap figure is interesting in one other regard — it has taken less than about 24 months to bring MoGo up to the 9 stone level, and if the trend continues, MoGo should be able to mop up all amateur players and maybe even shodan players in about a year while playing without a handicap.
MoGo has a very deliberate and conservative playing style and always plays for the minimum win possible, usually winning by half a point or so. This is one of the maddening characteristics of the program, that it can beat you without bothering to seem human. MoGo's play in the beginning can seem chaotic, but the game quickly reduces to machine-like robotic precision.
Burned all my mod points on Ubertroll, or that would get a +1 for informative. Thanks.
Ya. Erase Vista and try to reinstall it from OEM disks. That's the issue.
Vista wouldn't reinstall from OEM discs on my Dell notebook, because I was running GRUB?? That just about gold-plates my hunch. Now, Vista won't run on ANY computer I own because Ubuntu 8.04 is my operating system of choice. It simply does not pay to trust an OS whose future operation is subject to policy whims and random paranoid vagaries by a third party, in this case, Microsoft. I would be happy to join any class action lawsuit that result from this disclosure, but no inducement is sufficient to make me trust Vista again.
Sounds like one too many what-ifs got pruned from the decision tree. Nice. Probably saved a couple million bucks on the ground, got the pup out the door, and sent it all the way to Mars before it flushed its entire budget into thin air. Speaking as a taxpayer, at least the show's been entertaining.
SETI is "listening for aliens," yeah, right! Like Howard Hughes' old Glomar Explorer was mining manganese nodules? The SETI paradigm is so implausible, given the rate at which noise to signal ratios approach infinity as distance from Earth approaches two or three lightyears, that it seems far more likely that all those SETI@Home screensavers are doing something else.
If Ed Mitchell is right, they're listening for the return of the Mother Ship coming back to Roswell to pick up the survivors, and we'll be lucky if we notice it coming through the Oort Cloud.
My personal guess is more mundane. All that distributed processing power has been harnessed to help Echelon listen for Al Qaeda.
SETI is absurd on the merits, though. If aliens are out there, if aliens are advanced, if Einstein was right and quantum mechanics is righter, why would aliens use something as feeble as the electromagnetic spectrum? They're probably doing something we can't even imagine, like knocking on the walls between universes.
My experience installing it over Windows XP on a Hewlett Packard notebook was exactly the same as buying it installed on a Dell notebook — within a month, both OS's went south and crashed hard. So hard, in fact, that reinstalling Vista was impossible on the Dell, since the machine could not boot at all, could not get past IPL, even though boot diagnostics reported the hardware in perfect working order.
I threw away the HP as the bloated piece of crap it was, and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on the Dell. Hardy Heron has problems too, of course — about like the old OS 8 or 9 Macintosh — nothing, in other words, that I can't deal with or work around using Simple Backup Config/Restore.
Recapitulate phylogeny and do for programming what the Rennaissance did for medicine: Institutionalize open source for anyone who can afford the education, drive the charlatans (including Microsoft certification) beyond the pale, and stop wearing funny bird masks in times of pestilence, plague and peril. Train a generation of mothers that "My son, the programmer" means something good.
Developers are notorious for having a two-year attention span. Once version 1.0 is out the door, experienced coders know better than to hang around for iterations n+1. They want UP or OUT, and there's no sideways. New hires and Recent College Grads (a second level caste, at best) come in to maintain and expand a codebase that took the original developers a lifetime of experience to shape, command and release into the world. The result? Information entropy, institutional amnesia, competing visions of ultimate goals, anarchy, chaos, death marches and bankruptcy. I'm really beginning to think that the only folks who get their own paradigm right are gamers: After 10 minutes of Wind Waker or 10 hours of Metroid Prime, you've explored all there is to know about Game Cube, and it's off to Wii, where the synergies are obvious and not a single user has to be told how.
Just out of curiosity, what bit of rigor ensures that those "extrasolar planets" we're detecting so many lightyears from home are actually resolved images, and not averages of four or five similar, but smaller, objects? It's really unclear to me that the Galilean moons of Jupiter could ever be resolved as four objects and not one "giant moon" from as far away as a half a lightyear.
Just out of curiosity, what necessarily connects speaking to thinking? Is "thought" defined as chattering inside your head as though you talk quietly and someone else quietly listens, like the constant drip-drip of a faucet or the incessant hydrodynamic neap of a leaky toilet? In my personal experience, somewhat limited I'll admit, but not personally insignificant since I raised a family on it, creativity suddenly appears out of a black, thoughtless void -- whether that translates into poetry, videogames or Zen. You prepare and perspire and sacrifice yourself to an agony of doubt. Then the brilliance arrives unbidden and unconscious, as though the quiet 90% of your brain has been laboring like the proverbial million monkeys in the dark.
Elegant, beautiful systems in nature tend to have evolved over very long time scales. For example, feathered flight, elaborate bird song and courtship behaviors, indispensible symbiotic pollination regimes between honebees and radically disparate families of the angiosperms, whale echolocation, or possibly the weirdest tetrapods of them all, snakes.
Considering the social importance of vocalization in both Old World and New World primates, it would come as no surprise to learn that our prehuman ancestors used their talented larynges to warn, woo and war, creating the impression (and indeed the reality) of synergistic social cohesion which could easily take on rivals, herd prey or coordinate defense against predators. It's not hard to predict that a fire-using promethean like Homo erectus may well have been far more than a simple Hollywood grunting dunce. Finding the evidence to demonstrate it is another matter.
One of the outfits I interviewed with was having problems, so they asked me to "look over our guy's shoulder" and tell her what she's doing wrong. That made me nervous. I'm an autodidact, she was trained in C.S., so we don't speak the same language although we were both using Visual Studio C++ and MFC. But we dove in, and pretty soon it was obvious what the matter was: She'd declared a huge object in stack space, instead of using a pointer, and was overwriting her own return address with some sloppy bounds checking, but there was no way I could explain that. Like almost every pro I've worked with, she was trained in "Microsoft's way" of thinking abstractly and had an awe of the tools which bordered on reverence. She had, in other words, never done any serious assembler work in her life and had no idea what the MACHINE was doing on the stack. I floundered, trying to explain. My mouth doesn't program, my hands do. But the guy who sat next to her "got it." She was in good hands. So I left. Didn't get hired. Didn't pursue it. That was the first job interview I ever seriously considered billing for my time.
That's like a Democrat proclaiming no self-respecting conservative Republican could ever vote for John McCain because he's abandoned everything conservatives stand for.
Fact #1: Obama is new hotness.
Fact #2: McCain is the old war horse in the park that pigeons poop on.
So lighten up. Nobody cares about Fisa except a few alleged "Slashdot voters" (if there is such a thing) who couldn't fill Wrigley Field on free caps day.