I've read articles (maybe at Gamasutra?) citing surveys of playtesters on the perceived intelligence of AI opponents. I wish I could find the articles to cite them, but since I can't I'll just summarize them here:
Consistently, harder AIs were ranked as "smarter" no matter whether this was due to better algorithms or due to cheating. In fact, gamers tended to rank AIs highly that could do "neat tricks" -- say, tossing your grenades back at you, as in Return to Castle Wolfenstein -- which is something best acheived by writing special scripts for the purpose, not by advanced AI methods.
In general, it was concluded, you will be most successful in creating an AI which is perceived as "smart" if you do it the simple, dumb way: Count on the intelligence of your programmers, not of a machine.
[As someone interested in statistical learning theory (among other things), I found those results somewhat disappointing...]
This is a better explanation. And I remember now that I first heard this parable mentioned in one of Richard Feynman's books; the chapter can be found here.
>OK, maybe that's a little excessive, but learn to play with your computer, break it, fix it, install linux on it, install a different linux on it, download random shit from the internet and run it - work out what it does, how to use it, how it works. Compile stuff, add a feature to it, break it, write shell scripts that do stuff you don't actually need to do. Setup some server applications.
That's a good skill to have, to be sure -- my experience tinkering with 'nix has been consistently useful to me, both as a student, and when working (sometimes seemingly-unrelated) jobs (like VLSI design) -- but I really wouldn't call it C.S.; it's more like what I'd call "I.T." It's like what "learning to weld" is to "mechanical engineering:" It's awesome to know, and immensely practical, but by itself it prepares you neither for academic work nor for a particularly impressive job in the corporate world.
So, he should take your advice, but not at the expense of his maths!
I study electrical engineering, and, though it's fun to play with op-amps, I know that that's not really the point. It's the math -- the systems identification, the signal processing, the control theory -- that really matter. If I want to, I can walk out of school, having learned this math, and get a lucrative job on Wall Street doing economic modeling (mind you, I think that'd be a tragedy when there are so many nobler pursuits, but it illustrates the flexibility I'm talking about). I can't do that if all I know is circuits.
Sarcasm, I assume? Modern currencies generally are not backed by precious metals at all. And in history, things besides gold have been used: the UK's pound used to be backed by silver before it was backed by gold (before it stopped being backed by anything at all), and there were gold-vs-silver debates (the details of which I've forgotten) in American history too.
Really, what's the significance of gold? What good would it do you or anyone else? Why does it have value? It's just mutual agreement and the faith that it has a value that gives it its value.
I could even imagine some sort of public-key cryptographic scheme used to assign value to magic numbers... Think Cryptonomicon.
Heh. It's funny. Cuban-Americans -- they hate Castro. But for some reason a lot of Chinese-Americans (and Chinese people who visit the US or go to school here) are defensive about their government. Why the difference? Even Mao! You know, the guy who killed more Chinese people than Hitler or Stalin killed of theirs? You can't even criticize him. "Cultural Revolution," anyone? One simple explanation might be that those who make it to the US are rich and successful: They benefited from those policies (or their parents did, and they were raised to agree without giving it too much thought). Whereas the poor schmucks in China who got (and get) screwed by the Communist government never set foot in the States.
It's as if Hitler had quietly killed non-"Aryans" inside Germany without invading Poland or otherwise getting his neighbors mad at him, and the Nazi party had remained in power. Who would have then, in a generation or two, had the money to travel to the US? Blond-haired professionals, who, individually blameless but thoroughly brainwashed, would have sung the old Fuhrer's praises.
Of course, please forgive the Godwin violation. But it helps to illustrate my point.
Me, I'll go with the principle of self-determination, on which the UN was supposedly founded: Taiwan is part of China IFF Taiwanese people say it is.
(From my experience with people from Taiwan, using this criterion, Taiwan is then not a part of the People's Republic.)
I think it's funny, in fact, how successful the CPP has been at cultivating a kind of ethno-nationalism that supports it. It illustrates what ethnic and national identity really are (the two have been so heavily conflated in history that there's no point teasing them apart as we look back). Once upon a time, some badass with a sword and a sociopathic genius for killing people who got in his way decided to call himself "king," and told your ancestors (so that they would unite behind him), "From now on, you are all British!" -- or "Turkish," "Chinese," or what-have-you. And with time, people listened. This is what group identity is made of! It is the mark of the conqueror's boot, of the sword waved at our ancestors -- and we, like that first woman with the bank robber after whom Stickholm syndrome was named, get a warm fuzzy feeling from embracing it.
Science is about applying the scientific method. It's about hypotheses and experiments. What experiments do you do in CS? Computer Science is not an observational discipline. It's applied math.
Insightful. To think of it that way hadn't occurred to me.
I'll still say that an obsession with tests is not a good thing. Hard work should pay off, and intelligence should pay off, but a one-time test I see as a poor way to measure people. I normally do quite well on those sorts of things, but I could definitely see myself cracking if my whole life depended on a few hours at a desk.
And... on second thought, I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing. That China is more of a meritocracy than the US? I can definitely think of examples that point to American problems: George W. Bush, for starters. But the way I see it, money buys success everywhere. This same ex, for instance, told me that it was common practice back home for parents to bribe their students' teachers -- and hers did. At first, I said, "Oh, well sometimes parents give teachers gifts in the U.S. It's sort of brown-nosing, but it's not a big deal. You just mean like that?" "No," she said; "you have to do it or else they won't pay attention to you in class." So, what happens in the U.S. may be insidious, but in many places the power of money is straight-out explicit.
And yes -- you need to work hard -- but life is too short to be stressed out through. You're not going to be creative if you've got tunnel-vision for the finish line. Most of what I know about computer science, and about practical programming, I learned because I had free time and wasn't stressing about an exam.
>Ok, Passing children over because "they don't want to learn" or "their parrents don't care" is exactly what this no child left behind act is designed to stop! It is easy to get success from people who are successful. It is also easy to dismiss those who aren't and move on without them. And this process is a crock. It is probably why you school is doing so "good". It only concentrates on student who are succesful.
People often whine that Americans' test scores are lower than those of kids from other countries.*
You want to know what those countries do? Exactly that! They heavily track their educational systems, and they put their kids through a gauntlet of tests -- tests that kids take in mortal terror of failing. They know that if they do poorly, they will go to a second-rate [junior high/high school/insert-'next-step'-here], and they will never get a well-paying job. It's not always fair, and smart kids can and do get screwed** -- but people have a reason to work.
I'm not advocating this approach. I don't think an obsession with tests breeds creative problem solving. But I do think that the above shows that, though we don't want to leave children so behind they get eaten by wolves, we do need to let them run at different speeds. Honors programs are a good thing, for starters.
(* As for the test scores: Actually, upper-middle-class, suburban American students in public schools do about as well as their South Korean and Singaporean counterparts.)
(** I dated a girl from Shanghai once-upon-a-time for six months [sweet girl, but it was a mistake -- I couldn't connect with her as she was all about money and shoes and sexy parties and Wall Street (but that's a topic for another day)]: She managed to score above the required thresholds on her tests, go to the 'good schools,' and ended up going to college at an Ivy League university in the US. But she told me about her friends, some of whom did as well in class as -- or better than -- she did, who happened to screw up one of the tests. They're stuck on a track to nowhere, and can look forward to crappy jobs. I feel like we don't have the same stakes here [mind you, that's a good thing; It's hard to actually think when you have the shit scared out of you -- but some kids do need incentives!])
>I don't think any of you, especially the males understand the enormity of impact this vaccine could have
I was excited to hear about this vaccine. I'm a guy, and after learning about HPV (and how common it is), I got scared -- first, because I might carry a disease for which there is no (male) test -- and second, because I could easily and unwittingly give someone cancer. Try thinking that thought!
(Ideologies battle it out in my head. It was around that time that 'Biological Realism' met 'Sexual Positivism' and landed an uppercut.)
My question then is -- what about this vaccine makes it good for women but not for men? HPV also causes testicular cancer -- and, most generally, the more people you have vaccinated, epedemiologically, the fewer unvaccinated people you expect to get the disease. Am I missing something? Is there some risk-benefit equation for taking this vaccine that comes out positive for women but negative for men?
>Algebra comes from the "Al-jabr" the Arabic word for reunion
IIRC, algebra was like the 'Arabic numerals' (which other posters have mentioned) in that it came to the Arabs through trade with India.
Then, thanks to the Arabs, algebra was developed and preserved, and then communicated to the West. Then, when the British colonized India, they presumably set up schools that taught the subject... (Funny, these circles).
Algebra survived because the societies that understood it stayed in contact with one another; this was necessary in order for it to spread. Knowledge get passed around -- and each society that holds the baton for a bit tends to add something useful to it.
Moral of the story: extroverted societies learn more; xenophobia hurts knowledge.
The encryption is crackable only so long as there is not special hardware doing the decoding. Once the keys are hidden in embedded ROM inside integrated circuits, you won't be able to get to them without delaminating the IC -- which nobody but a chipmaker has the facilities to do.
We will only succeed at cracking DRM so long as it is done in software, or we can look at the signals on PCB traces. Once this stuff happens inside a single chip, we really are screwed.
Have you noticed that corporate advertisers have also forgotten how to hit [SHIFT]?
(I've got nothing against the OP; in fact, I didn't even notice his post was all lower until you pointed it out -- because it's a Slashdot post on the web, and that's a medium where I'm used to it. It's more elsewhere that it bothers me.)
It's as though the companies are trying desperately to say, "i'm so cool and unpretentious that i don't even use capital letters. see how awesome i am?" So they ask not,
I was taking a mechanical design class, and I wanted to know the coordinates of a bunch of screwholes in a mounting plate. I looked at it for a second, grinned, and darted to the nearest computer with a scanner -- as my teammates shook their heads (and micrometers) at me, saying "damnit, you're being impractical; it'll never work." (They thought I was too interested in theory and not enough in turning the cranks on lathes and mills; though we generally got along, we did have -- philosophical differences.) Scanning took a few seconds, after which I took a minute to note the pixel coordinates of the hole centers in a spreadsheet. Then I measured one edge of the part with the micrometer to get a pixel-to-inch scale, popped that number into the spreadsheet, and out came the x,y coordinates of all the holes in the part. When we CNCed the new plate with those hole locations, they all lined up with the part-to-be-mounted perfectly -- at which point they were pretty much forced to admit that maybe the kid knew what the hell he was doing!
I've thought since then that some software designed for the task (with edge-recognition algorithms, measurement features, etc) could turn consumer-grade scanners into decent reverse-engineering tools (for planar parts).
Slashdot Mirror
I've read articles (maybe at Gamasutra?) citing surveys of playtesters on the perceived intelligence of AI opponents. I wish I could find the articles to cite them, but since I can't I'll just summarize them here:
Consistently, harder AIs were ranked as "smarter" no matter whether this was due to better algorithms or due to cheating. In fact, gamers tended to rank AIs highly that could do "neat tricks" -- say, tossing your grenades back at you, as in Return to Castle Wolfenstein -- which is something best acheived by writing special scripts for the purpose, not by advanced AI methods.
In general, it was concluded, you will be most successful in creating an AI which is perceived as "smart" if you do it the simple, dumb way: Count on the intelligence of your programmers, not of a machine.
[As someone interested in statistical learning theory (among other things), I found those results somewhat disappointing...]
This is a better explanation. And I remember now that I first heard this parable mentioned in one of Richard Feynman's books; the chapter can be found here.
>a lost ship was located by tabulating/averaging the guesses from individuals (most with no search and rescue experience).
I... don't believe this. This sounds exactly like the "Emperor's Nose" fallacy. See this.
>OK, maybe that's a little excessive, but learn to play with your computer, break it, fix it, install linux on it, install a different linux on it, download random shit from the internet and run it - work out what it does, how to use it, how it works. Compile stuff, add a feature to it, break it, write shell scripts that do stuff you don't actually need to do. Setup some server applications.
That's a good skill to have, to be sure -- my experience tinkering with 'nix has been consistently useful to me, both as a student, and when working (sometimes seemingly-unrelated) jobs (like VLSI design) -- but I really wouldn't call it C.S.; it's more like what I'd call "I.T." It's like what "learning to weld" is to "mechanical engineering:" It's awesome to know, and immensely practical, but by itself it prepares you neither for academic work nor for a particularly impressive job in the corporate world.
So, he should take your advice, but not at the expense of his maths!
I study electrical engineering, and, though it's fun to play with op-amps, I know that that's not really the point. It's the math -- the systems identification, the signal processing, the control theory -- that really matter. If I want to, I can walk out of school, having learned this math, and get a lucrative job on Wall Street doing economic modeling (mind you, I think that'd be a tragedy when there are so many nobler pursuits, but it illustrates the flexibility I'm talking about). I can't do that if all I know is circuits.
>Oh geez, not another American colonists/English flamewar. I thought we had this all settled in 1812? Let me check the timestamps...
Don't you remember? We settled it by agreeing to deride the French! Nothing brings the British and the Americans together like a good frog joke!
(Funny that, what with the French having fought our war for us.)
>Windows Genuine Advantage
No, that's a feature that acts like a bug. ;-)
Sarcasm, I assume? Modern currencies generally are not backed by precious metals at all. And in history, things besides gold have been used: the UK's pound used to be backed by silver before it was backed by gold (before it stopped being backed by anything at all), and there were gold-vs-silver debates (the details of which I've forgotten) in American history too.
Really, what's the significance of gold? What good would it do you or anyone else? Why does it have value? It's just mutual agreement and the faith that it has a value that gives it its value.
I could even imagine some sort of public-key cryptographic scheme used to assign value to magic numbers... Think Cryptonomicon.
Heh. It's funny. Cuban-Americans -- they hate Castro. But for some reason a lot of Chinese-Americans (and Chinese people who visit the US or go to school here) are defensive about their government. Why the difference? Even Mao! You know, the guy who killed more Chinese people than Hitler or Stalin killed of theirs? You can't even criticize him. "Cultural Revolution," anyone? One simple explanation might be that those who make it to the US are rich and successful: They benefited from those policies (or their parents did, and they were raised to agree without giving it too much thought). Whereas the poor schmucks in China who got (and get) screwed by the Communist government never set foot in the States.
It's as if Hitler had quietly killed non-"Aryans" inside Germany without invading Poland or otherwise getting his neighbors mad at him, and the Nazi party had remained in power. Who would have then, in a generation or two, had the money to travel to the US? Blond-haired professionals, who, individually blameless but thoroughly brainwashed, would have sung the old Fuhrer's praises.
Of course, please forgive the Godwin violation. But it helps to illustrate my point.
Me, I'll go with the principle of self-determination, on which the UN was supposedly founded: Taiwan is part of China IFF Taiwanese people say it is.
(From my experience with people from Taiwan, using this criterion, Taiwan is then not a part of the People's Republic.)
I think it's funny, in fact, how successful the CPP has been at cultivating a kind of ethno-nationalism that supports it. It illustrates what ethnic and national identity really are (the two have been so heavily conflated in history that there's no point teasing them apart as we look back). Once upon a time, some badass with a sword and a sociopathic genius for killing people who got in his way decided to call himself "king," and told your ancestors (so that they would unite behind him), "From now on, you are all British!" -- or "Turkish," "Chinese," or what-have-you. And with time, people listened. This is what group identity is made of! It is the mark of the conqueror's boot, of the sword waved at our ancestors -- and we, like that first woman with the bank robber after whom Stickholm syndrome was named, get a warm fuzzy feeling from embracing it.
>Next study! People who date teenage girls are risky drivers!
"Damn! There go my insurance rates!" -- Moe, age 40.
Science is about applying the scientific method. It's about hypotheses and experiments. What experiments do you do in CS? Computer Science is not an observational discipline. It's applied math.
>I think you mean "He", shithead
Clearly one of our more spiritual Slashdot readers...
>It's the worst analogy of the day!
No... surely it's no worse than a leaky screwdriver?
Insightful. To think of it that way hadn't occurred to me.
I'll still say that an obsession with tests is not a good thing. Hard work should pay off, and intelligence should pay off, but a one-time test I see as a poor way to measure people. I normally do quite well on those sorts of things, but I could definitely see myself cracking if my whole life depended on a few hours at a desk.
And... on second thought, I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing. That China is more of a meritocracy than the US? I can definitely think of examples that point to American problems: George W. Bush, for starters. But the way I see it, money buys success everywhere. This same ex, for instance, told me that it was common practice back home for parents to bribe their students' teachers -- and hers did. At first, I said, "Oh, well sometimes parents give teachers gifts in the U.S. It's sort of brown-nosing, but it's not a big deal. You just mean like that?" "No," she said; "you have to do it or else they won't pay attention to you in class." So, what happens in the U.S. may be insidious, but in many places the power of money is straight-out explicit.
And yes -- you need to work hard -- but life is too short to be stressed out through. You're not going to be creative if you've got tunnel-vision for the finish line. Most of what I know about computer science, and about practical programming, I learned because I had free time and wasn't stressing about an exam.
>Ok, Passing children over because "they don't want to learn" or "their parrents don't care" is exactly what this no child left behind act is designed to stop! It is easy to get success from people who are successful. It is also easy to dismiss those who aren't and move on without them. And this process is a crock. It is probably why you school is doing so "good". It only concentrates on student who are succesful.
People often whine that Americans' test scores are lower than those of kids from other countries.*
You want to know what those countries do? Exactly that! They heavily track their educational systems, and they put their kids through a gauntlet of tests -- tests that kids take in mortal terror of failing. They know that if they do poorly, they will go to a second-rate [junior high/high school/insert-'next-step'-here], and they will never get a well-paying job. It's not always fair, and smart kids can and do get screwed** -- but people have a reason to work.
I'm not advocating this approach. I don't think an obsession with tests breeds creative problem solving. But I do think that the above shows that, though we don't want to leave children so behind they get eaten by wolves, we do need to let them run at different speeds. Honors programs are a good thing, for starters.
(* As for the test scores: Actually, upper-middle-class, suburban American students in public schools do about as well as their South Korean and Singaporean counterparts.)
(** I dated a girl from Shanghai once-upon-a-time for six months [sweet girl, but it was a mistake -- I couldn't connect with her as she was all about money and shoes and sexy parties and Wall Street (but that's a topic for another day)]: She managed to score above the required thresholds on her tests, go to the 'good schools,' and ended up going to college at an Ivy League university in the US. But she told me about her friends, some of whom did as well in class as -- or better than -- she did, who happened to screw up one of the tests. They're stuck on a track to nowhere, and can look forward to crappy jobs. I feel like we don't have the same stakes here [mind you, that's a good thing; It's hard to actually think when you have the shit scared out of you -- but some kids do need incentives!])
Patented algorithms:
Example 1: Marching cubes.
(Ok, so it's the table that maps voxel combinations to triangles that's patented, not the recursive idea, but still...)
Example 2: MP3
(Is it still?)
Example 2.1: Basically everything implemented by VLC. ;-)
>I don't think any of you, especially the males understand the enormity of impact this vaccine could have
I was excited to hear about this vaccine. I'm a guy, and after learning about HPV (and how common it is), I got scared -- first, because I might carry a disease for which there is no (male) test -- and second, because I could easily and unwittingly give someone cancer. Try thinking that thought!
(Ideologies battle it out in my head. It was around that time that 'Biological Realism' met 'Sexual Positivism' and landed an uppercut.)
My question then is -- what about this vaccine makes it good for women but not for men? HPV also causes testicular cancer -- and, most generally, the more people you have vaccinated, epedemiologically, the fewer unvaccinated people you expect to get the disease. Am I missing something? Is there some risk-benefit equation for taking this vaccine that comes out positive for women but negative for men?
>Algebra comes from the "Al-jabr" the Arabic word for reunion
IIRC, algebra was like the 'Arabic numerals' (which other posters have mentioned) in that it came to the Arabs through trade with India.
Then, thanks to the Arabs, algebra was developed and preserved, and then communicated to the West. Then, when the British colonized India, they presumably set up schools that taught the subject... (Funny, these circles).
Algebra survived because the societies that understood it stayed in contact with one another; this was necessary in order for it to spread. Knowledge get passed around -- and each society that holds the baton for a bit tends to add something useful to it.
Moral of the story: extroverted societies learn more; xenophobia hurts knowledge.
The encryption is crackable only so long as there is not special hardware doing the decoding. Once the keys are hidden in embedded ROM inside integrated circuits, you won't be able to get to them without delaminating the IC -- which nobody but a chipmaker has the facilities to do.
We will only succeed at cracking DRM so long as it is done in software, or we can look at the signals on PCB traces. Once this stuff happens inside a single chip, we really are screwed.
Dirty sex "probably increases aggregate welfare?"
Have you noticed that corporate advertisers have also forgotten how to hit [SHIFT]?
(I've got nothing against the OP; in fact, I didn't even notice his post was all lower until you pointed it out -- because it's a Slashdot post on the web, and that's a medium where I'm used to it. It's more elsewhere that it bothers me.)
It's as though the companies are trying desperately to say, "i'm so cool and unpretentious that i don't even use capital letters. see how awesome i am?" So they ask not,
"How can UPS help you?"
but
"what can brown do for you?"
It bothers me the slightest bit.
Yeah, seen that one once upon a time in history class. Thanks tho'.
>The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of virgins.
Tell me... is this a reference to satanism, or... the first time?
This reminds me of Chrono Trigger, in the future...
>I would see their height staying relative to the chinese ppl there based on the food they eat and life style they lead.
Given what they made their pipes out of, what they sprinkled in their wine, and what just generally got in their food, I'll say that's pbunny.
I was taking a mechanical design class, and I wanted to know the coordinates of a bunch of screwholes in a mounting plate. I looked at it for a second, grinned, and darted to the nearest computer with a scanner -- as my teammates shook their heads (and micrometers) at me, saying "damnit, you're being impractical; it'll never work." (They thought I was too interested in theory and not enough in turning the cranks on lathes and mills; though we generally got along, we did have -- philosophical differences.) Scanning took a few seconds, after which I took a minute to note the pixel coordinates of the hole centers in a spreadsheet. Then I measured one edge of the part with the micrometer to get a pixel-to-inch scale, popped that number into the spreadsheet, and out came the x,y coordinates of all the holes in the part. When we CNCed the new plate with those hole locations, they all lined up with the part-to-be-mounted perfectly -- at which point they were pretty much forced to admit that maybe the kid knew what the hell he was doing!
I've thought since then that some software designed for the task (with edge-recognition algorithms, measurement features, etc) could turn consumer-grade scanners into decent reverse-engineering tools (for planar parts).