Over the board (OTB) is one thing, but online (c)heating becomes incredibly hard to detect in situ, for pretty obvious reasons. The online chess community has taken a couple of approaches to detect this. For PlayChess Online (a server that hosts online games), they try to detect if your computer is running another process that is a known Chess Engine while you are playing your game. Easily subverted by having two computers, or even a Virtual Box setup.
The most successful way to detect cheating is in postmortem review. I worked with the ICC/FICS Slow Time Control league team (one guy usually) who would run move correlation statistics off suspicious games. There were lots of parameters in his analysis to tweak: ignore book (pre-planned) openings, use endgame tables, tolerance threshold, plys deep to look, how many branches to examine, etc. I was part one of the peer reviewers of the system and an occasional game. The basic idea was to run the moves through a few engines and find out how high the move correlation was for both players. In certain points of the game, the move correlation is very high because good candidate moves are obvious. However, over a single 35move game (avg), GM correlation with any of the popular chess engines (even HIARCS, which supposedly plays more like a human) was around 23%. 1800 level players (club level) were even less. Magnus Carlsen wasn't on the scene yet; he apparently learned more from the computer than any human. Perhaps he'd be higher. The typical cheater scored around 98%.
This of course is not to say that there couldn't be a player who "thought like a computer". But this would put in question the main criticism of game specific AI, and general AI, that they do not actually model how the human brain thinks. Finding a human who thought like a computer would actually be incredibly interesting to the whole field of AI. That being said, the burden at that point is on the cheater to prove because he is well beyond a reasonable doubt.
I went from an old 300W system down to a 7W Bubba II from Excito. Runs debian and all that entails. Also has a nice WebUI interface for most services (which I've never used). Comes in a few HD configurations. Other than the HD it is completely silent. It's also nice looking, if that matters.
Probably the only thing I wish it had was a sound-card.
I've been using this for a year and have loved it. Perfect for my needs.
My college had this back in the 1990s. We used it all the time. Leave a message on a professor's machine at 2am? No problem.
Now, if we could just give people a warning when they have 15seconds left for their message (and only give them 45sec total). Forwarding messages would be great too.
heck, the ASPEN system of the early 1990s had many great features that are just missing today.
One roadblock on the path to acceptance is the color temp or quality of light for these bulbs. As soon as I can secretly replace the bulbs in my house and my wife doesn't walk into the first room screaming at me, "Oh, my eyes!", I'll covert the whole house.
While the all too warm traditional bulb is rather a poor standard, it is what we're used to. CFLs are way too blue. Too cold.
I've tried a few (rather expensive) CFLs. Haven't found one yet that isn't religated to an less travelled part of the house -- usually closets.
For desk lamps the GE "full spectrum" natural light bulbs are the best yet. If the CFLs could put out that light I'd buy them at twice the price.
It's the same reason stamps from England do not have their country named on them; the country that invents the technology gets the prevelidge of being the default. England invented the postal stamp.
Kinda funny, Java started as a language for programming TV cableboxes, and after years of evolving into everything from J2ME to J2EE, it finds itself back home atop the TV in DVD players.
Kodak makes great film (T-MAX 3200P, Tri-X), but their Variable Contrast paper has never really been of Fine-Art quality. The images always seem muddy. I've never really gotten a good print out of Kodak paper, and only really use it for contact prints.
Ilford makes a lot better paper, especially their Fiber VC glossy. And Agfa makes an incredible Resin Coated (RC) VC glossy (MPC 310), with incredible tonal depth.
I just can't wait to burn through my remaining Kodak polycontrast paper.
Nobody serious about B&W printing will miss Kodak. And if anything it will just mean Ilford and Agfa (who are both struggling) will enjoy a larger market-share. Maybe even Oriental will make an American surge.
For those of you who are curious about what traditional photography has over digital in an age where digital is approaching (and soon exceeding) the resolution of film, it mostly has to do with art, and the feel of the print. For journalism, tourist shots, birthdays, and pr0n, you won't get much for the hassle of chemicals. But there's an organic quality that digitial is missing, which affects artistic expression.
It's kinda like this: a CD of Jazz music played over a solid-state stereo has a completely different feel than a staticy record of Jazz music played over vacuum tubes.
This was exactly the reaction to the first Usenet spam back in 1992(?). The advert was for a USA Visa. It was cross-posted to all Usenet groups. The nerd community of the time decided to make their solicitations expensive by contacting the lawyers who put out the ad requesting more information via snail mail. The idea was that $0.23xReply would kill the business -- and also mask legit responses in a clutter of bogus ones.
The response was deliciously diabolical. I thought it kill the profitability of spam in its infancy. Unfortunately, history proved different.
Well, how else are the tall people going to pay for the more food they need to keep a larger body going, the higher cost of getting tailored suits where the sleaves don't inch up to your elbows and the pants don't make you look like you're expecting a flood, and the SUV (or Honda Element, Saab) they need so they don't keep ramming their head into the ceiling of a sub-compact, or the custom made sneakers so they can fit their size 16 feet, or extra long matress so they their feet don't hang over the edge of the bed etc etc etc.
There are a lot of hidden cost this money is going for. Not sure it all strictly balances out, but that's not 700$ net we're talking about.
While working as an instructor for Sun I'd often have students using IM on the workstations while I was lecturing. The tip-tap typing wasn't all that much of a problem. And probably if they were only IMing each other about the lecture it wouldn't be that bad, but the students didn't confine themselves to IMing only in the classroom. They'd IM people at work, their wife/husband, their gf/bf etc.
The result was repeatedly dumb questions being asked. And before you start with that non-sense of "there is no dumb question" let me define it. If I say "X is a Y", then you stop your typing and ask "Is X a Y?" then it is a DUMB question. And there was lots of that while there was IM access. Students would hear something [me] in the backround mention some idea and when they were done typing their after-work bar crawl negociations they'd have an itch to ask a question about that idea.
I resolved to doing two things. I'd often ask other students to answer the question -- hoping to make it obvious that I just went over that. Or I'd disconnect the room from the firewall. Since most IMs aren't P2P this worked fine. The typing stopped. Attention was back on the guy in the front of the room.
Unless the class is huge, I don't see the point of back-channeling as helping the students get questions answered. Most professors hope to hear questions from the students, because the question is a good indicator if the prof has gotten his point across. Wthout that feedback lecture quality deteriorates.
-- For good mental hygiene, shave with Occam's Razor twice daily
And where's the link for the petition against the petition?
The only people who could benefit from this are not people, they're corporations. The guy/gal with the original idea is dead and buried in the multi-million dollar casket his royalties afforded him.
I was a volunteer in 2000 for GeekCorps. And I can affirm most of what this guy was talking about is true. My job was to teach one guy how to code in Perl or PHP in 3 months. No problem, right? Heh.
For one thing the educational system in Ghana is completely based on rhote memorization. In programming you never see the exact same thing twice. Oh, you might see something similar, but never the exact same thing. Well, my Ghanian counterpart would sit there in front of a problem and just blindly try to apply the last thing I taught him. It took a lot of drawn out silences and lots of me sitting on my hands to get him to be a beginner programmer. But this was a success story, a year later he got into an American university for CS. And this year competed in an ACM contest. Wow.
Other things that the article doesn't really go into are aspects of doing business w/o contract law, not getting paid for 4 months, and often work only comes if you're aligned with the political party in vogue at the moment.
And getting a straight business plan or a requirements document out of Ghanians is impossible. These people want to do video conferencing via 14.4k modem, real-time purchases w/o credit cards, and door-to-door shipping when no place has a street address.
but don't get me wrong, best 4 months I ever spent. I'd go back in a second.
If you want to know more about it, check out: Geekhalla.org.
You know how/. get's miffed when the media use "Hackers" to mean "Crackers". Well, same thing here.
"Begging the Question" does not mean "Begs us to ask the question." It means you are making a conclusion based on information that is in still in question.
An NPR article a few years ago reported how music companies decide which Country Music songs will be played on the radio. They cold call people and have them listen to 5 seconds of the song. This tortured person is then asked to rate the song 1-5. The music industry then takes all the songs that get 1s and 5s and discards them. It turns out that often when one group rates a song a 5 another will really hate the song and rate it a 1. So what the industry is really looking for is songs that score 3s.
The reasoning behind all this is that if you hear a song that you'd rate a 1 (hate) you're likely to turn the radio dial. But if you hear a 3 you're not likely to have any particular response at all -- thus you'll stay tuned in for more comercials.
Pop is probably done the exact same way. I guess that's why when you listen to "Classic hits of the [6-9]0s" you hear the same tripe over and again.
Actually, in Fischer Random the opening book would not be eliminated just expanded to a size where no human could keep it in his/her head. It wouldn't be all that bad for a computer, necesarily since storage of data isn't really a problem.
Opening books, however, are created and tailored by GMs doing theory. AFAIK there is no computer algorythm to determine correct opening play from scratch. Thus, for a while the computer would be off kilter, but only until the humans had developed some opening theory for each of the setups.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently none of these parents have heard of Facebook.
Over the board (OTB) is one thing, but online (c)heating becomes incredibly hard to detect in situ, for pretty obvious reasons. The online chess community has taken a couple of approaches to detect this. For PlayChess Online (a server that hosts online games), they try to detect if your computer is running another process that is a known Chess Engine while you are playing your game. Easily subverted by having two computers, or even a Virtual Box setup.
The most successful way to detect cheating is in postmortem review. I worked with the ICC/FICS Slow Time Control league team (one guy usually) who would run move correlation statistics off suspicious games. There were lots of parameters in his analysis to tweak: ignore book (pre-planned) openings, use endgame tables, tolerance threshold, plys deep to look, how many branches to examine, etc. I was part one of the peer reviewers of the system and an occasional game. The basic idea was to run the moves through a few engines and find out how high the move correlation was for both players. In certain points of the game, the move correlation is very high because good candidate moves are obvious. However, over a single 35move game (avg), GM correlation with any of the popular chess engines (even HIARCS, which supposedly plays more like a human) was around 23%. 1800 level players (club level) were even less. Magnus Carlsen wasn't on the scene yet; he apparently learned more from the computer than any human. Perhaps he'd be higher. The typical cheater scored around 98%.
This of course is not to say that there couldn't be a player who "thought like a computer". But this would put in question the main criticism of game specific AI, and general AI, that they do not actually model how the human brain thinks. Finding a human who thought like a computer would actually be incredibly interesting to the whole field of AI. That being said, the burden at that point is on the cheater to prove because he is well beyond a reasonable doubt.
I went from an old 300W system down to a 7W Bubba II from Excito. Runs debian and all that entails. Also has a nice WebUI interface for most services (which I've never used). Comes in a few HD configurations. Other than the HD it is completely silent. It's also nice looking, if that matters.
Probably the only thing I wish it had was a sound-card.
I've been using this for a year and have loved it. Perfect for my needs.
"If 269 votes make such a big difference there is a good reason to change the system."
Of course, this opinion runs counter to the US myth that the reason to vote is because "You can make a difference!"
If there was a history of one vote separating the winner, I think you'd see a lot more participation.
My college had this back in the 1990s. We used it all the time. Leave a message on a professor's machine at 2am? No problem.
Now, if we could just give people a warning when they have 15seconds left for their message (and only give them 45sec total). Forwarding messages would be great too.
heck, the ASPEN system of the early 1990s had many great features that are just missing today.
One roadblock on the path to acceptance is the color temp or quality of light for these bulbs. As soon as I can secretly replace the bulbs in my house and my wife doesn't walk into the first room screaming at me, "Oh, my eyes!", I'll covert the whole house.
While the all too warm traditional bulb is rather a poor standard, it is what we're used to. CFLs are way too blue. Too cold.
I've tried a few (rather expensive) CFLs. Haven't found one yet that isn't religated to an less travelled part of the house -- usually closets.
For desk lamps the GE "full spectrum" natural light bulbs are the best yet. If the CFLs could put out that light I'd buy them at twice the price.
explain me just one thing: why http://www.whitehouse.gov/ points to something that should be http://www.whitehouse.gov.us/ ?
It's the same reason stamps from England do not have their country named on them; the country that invents the technology gets the prevelidge of being the default. England invented the postal stamp.
Film.
Kinda funny, Java started as a language for programming TV cableboxes, and after years of evolving into everything from J2ME to J2EE, it finds itself back home atop the TV in DVD players.
Kodak makes great film (T-MAX 3200P, Tri-X), but their Variable Contrast paper has never really been of Fine-Art quality. The images always seem muddy. I've never really gotten a good print out of Kodak paper, and only really use it for contact prints.
Ilford makes a lot better paper, especially their Fiber VC glossy. And Agfa makes an incredible Resin Coated (RC) VC glossy (MPC 310), with incredible tonal depth.
I just can't wait to burn through my remaining Kodak polycontrast paper.
Nobody serious about B&W printing will miss Kodak. And if anything it will just mean Ilford and Agfa (who are both struggling) will enjoy a larger market-share. Maybe even Oriental will make an American surge.
For those of you who are curious about what traditional photography has over digital in an age where digital is approaching (and soon exceeding) the resolution of film, it mostly has to do with art, and the feel of the print. For journalism, tourist shots, birthdays, and pr0n, you won't get much for the hassle of chemicals. But there's an organic quality that digitial is missing, which affects artistic expression.
It's kinda like this: a CD of Jazz music played over a solid-state stereo has a completely different feel than a staticy record of Jazz music played over vacuum tubes.
Which is better? Well, it's purely subjective.
-j
--
photos @ http://www.ghostmanonfirst.com/
Oh, and before you go to sleep, one last thing. You're running out of air. Pleasant dreams.
This was exactly the reaction to the first Usenet spam back in 1992(?). The advert was for a USA Visa. It was cross-posted to all Usenet groups. The nerd community of the time decided to make their solicitations expensive by contacting the lawyers who put out the ad requesting more information via snail mail. The idea was that $0.23xReply would kill the business -- and also mask legit responses in a clutter of bogus ones.
The response was deliciously diabolical. I thought it kill the profitability of spam in its infancy. Unfortunately, history proved different.
Well, how else are the tall people going to pay for the more food they need to keep a larger body going, the higher cost of getting tailored suits where the sleaves don't inch up to your elbows and the pants don't make you look like you're expecting a flood, and the SUV (or Honda Element, Saab) they need so they don't keep ramming their head into the ceiling of a sub-compact, or the custom made sneakers so they can fit their size 16 feet, or extra long matress so they their feet don't hang over the edge of the bed etc etc etc.
There are a lot of hidden cost this money is going for. Not sure it all strictly balances out, but that's not 700$ net we're talking about.
For anyone wondering why interference due to power line broadband is considered a bad thing, well, there ya go.
I'm guessing that won't be a problem when the power goes out and we actually have a need again for Ham.
Did anyone else see "Ben Afleck" and stop reading?
While working as an instructor for Sun I'd often have students using IM on the workstations while I was lecturing. The tip-tap typing wasn't all that much of a problem. And probably if they were only IMing each other about the lecture it wouldn't be that bad, but the students didn't confine themselves to IMing only in the classroom. They'd IM people at work, their wife/husband, their gf/bf etc.
The result was repeatedly dumb questions being asked. And before you start with that non-sense of "there is no dumb question" let me define it. If I say "X is a Y", then you stop your typing and ask "Is X a Y?" then it is a DUMB question. And there was lots of that while there was IM access. Students would hear something [me] in the backround mention some idea and when they were done typing their after-work bar crawl negociations they'd have an itch to ask a question about that idea.
I resolved to doing two things. I'd often ask other students to answer the question -- hoping to make it obvious that I just went over that. Or I'd disconnect the room from the firewall. Since most IMs aren't P2P this worked fine. The typing stopped. Attention was back on the guy in the front of the room.
Unless the class is huge, I don't see the point of back-channeling as helping the students get questions answered. Most professors hope to hear questions from the students, because the question is a good indicator if the prof has gotten his point across. Wthout that feedback lecture quality deteriorates.
--
For good mental hygiene, shave with Occam's Razor twice daily
And where's the link for the petition against the petition?
The only people who could benefit from this are not people, they're corporations. The guy/gal with the original idea is dead and buried in the multi-million dollar casket his royalties afforded him.
-j
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Ugh.
Well, I guess that's a good priviledge to pay for, hitting the machine hosting the referenced article before it melts.
I was a volunteer in 2000 for GeekCorps. And I can affirm most of what this guy was talking about is true. My job was to teach one guy how to code in Perl or PHP in 3 months. No problem, right? Heh.
For one thing the educational system in Ghana is completely based on rhote memorization. In programming you never see the exact same thing twice. Oh, you might see something similar, but never the exact same thing. Well, my Ghanian counterpart would sit there in front of a problem and just blindly try to apply the last thing I taught him. It took a lot of drawn out silences and lots of me sitting on my hands to get him to be a beginner programmer. But this was a success story, a year later he got into an American university for CS. And this year competed in an ACM contest. Wow.
Other things that the article doesn't really go into are aspects of doing business w/o contract law, not getting paid for 4 months, and often work only comes if you're aligned with the political party in vogue at the moment.
And getting a straight business plan or a requirements document out of Ghanians is impossible. These people want to do video conferencing via 14.4k modem, real-time purchases w/o credit cards, and door-to-door shipping when no place has a street address.
but don't get me wrong, best 4 months I ever spent. I'd go back in a second.
If you want to know more about it, check out: Geekhalla.org.
-j
So, this begs the questions...
/. get's miffed when the media use "Hackers" to mean "Crackers". Well, same thing here.
/. grammar
You know how
"Begging the Question" does not mean "Begs us to ask the question." It means you are making a conclusion based on information that is in still in question.
--
-2 Pendantic -3 Correcting
Nah. The Froggies will burn the US Flag.
That would be a pretty good trick -- in space.
Wonder if Europe and China will start a "king of the hill" by knocking over the U.S. flag and posting their own when they get there.
An NPR article a few years ago reported how music companies decide which Country Music songs will be played on the radio. They cold call people and have them listen to 5 seconds of the song. This tortured person is then asked to rate the song 1-5. The music industry then takes all the songs that get 1s and 5s and discards them. It turns out that often when one group rates a song a 5 another will really hate the song and rate it a 1. So what the industry is really looking for is songs that score 3s.
The reasoning behind all this is that if you hear a song that you'd rate a 1 (hate) you're likely to turn the radio dial. But if you hear a 3 you're not likely to have any particular response at all -- thus you'll stay tuned in for more comercials.
Pop is probably done the exact same way. I guess that's why when you listen to "Classic hits of the [6-9]0s" you hear the same tripe over and again.
Actually, in Fischer Random the opening book would not be eliminated just expanded to a size where no human could keep it in his/her head. It wouldn't be all that bad for a computer, necesarily since storage of data isn't really a problem.
Opening books, however, are created and tailored by GMs doing theory. AFAIK there is no computer algorythm to determine correct opening play from scratch. Thus, for a while the computer would be off kilter, but only until the humans had developed some opening theory for each of the setups.
-j