They didn't really "invent" this, did they? They just kinda built it from pre-existing ideas-- but bluer.
And to answer what it'll be used for: Releasing a new generation of Blu-Ray players that aren't backwards compatible, forcing everyone who has bought a Blu-Ray to rebuy all their Sony-branded movies. Obviously.
Okay, this is totally off topic-- but could whoever keeps tagging every single story with 'story' please stop? Every story is-- guess what-- a story! Adding a "story" tag is not a useful piece of information. Might as well just tag every story with "IsTagged", too.
Looking at the options[0], it looks like, to paraphrase Joshua, the only intelligent move is not to vote.
Or to paraphrase Henry Rollins, "You're never going to be able to vote for your president the way you'd vote for your favorite rock star. It just isn't going to happen. Instead, you need to use your vote against the guy you don't like. Maybe the next guy will be good, maybe he won't, but at least you're working to changing what's wrong now."
Since people with informed decisions will be voting for a variety of candidates, this line of reasoning has the benefit of simply removing all stupid people from the voting public.
But if you remove all the stupid people, you run into two problems:
You won't have anyone left to run for office
The two remaining people will be forced to run. They will have to vote for themselves, and thus deadlock the country
Though, by that logic, DVDs weren't "here" when a tiny number of wealthy people were shelling out hundreds of dollars for hardware, and $50+ for a tiny selection of discs.
Early adapters are a normal and healthy part of the product life cycle. Once you trick a bunch of people into paying for the initial costs of a product for you, you can use those profits to take advantage of mass production for everyone else.
I'm more interested in the sound bites from the future:
John Jackson: "It's time someone had the courage to stand up and say: I'm against those things that everybody hates." Jack Johnson: "Now, I respect my opponent. I think he's a good man. But quite frankly, I agree with everything he just said." John Jackson: "I say your three cent titanium tax goes too far." Jack Johnson: "And I say your three cent titanium tax doesn't go too far enough."
Even though a whale can make waves multiple times per day, let's put a practical limit of 8 times.
Thus, you'd need about 20 whales to achieve your vat in a day. (Assume you want fresh whale woohoo. Day old might be okay for the purposes of ickiness, but dunking might become difficult over time as it congeals)
Given that you won't want to lose a single drop of the deep ocean geyser to the open waters, this'll be done on land, and manually since whales can't reach otherwise.
That's a lot of Shamu Shucking! Not impossible, mind you, but challenging. You'll need a good team with strong muscles, good aim, and earplugs so they aren't driven mad by the cacophony of "ooOOOo" caused by the whalegasms. You'll also need to ensure that the whales are either sufficiently into this, or you have a good supply of whale porn on hand.
And when you're done, if you haven't found some way to make enough money off this so you'll never have to work again, then you aren't trying hard enough.
This should just about balance out the tax lost when Bono "I'm all about supporting the little guy" NoLastName moved all of U2's holdings out of Ireland
Nah, if he's a System Administrator, might I suggest a live re-enactment of his favorite BOFH episode, with the school's least-favorite vice-principal in the role of the Boss?
I agree with you that AI is a far, far more difficult area of study than anyone gives it credit for. I think that's one of the main ruffling points people have whenever the topic of "intelligence" and "chess playing" comes up. It's a really odd situation. Most people rightfully point out that a computer like Deep Blue isn't really playing chess, it's solving a branching-tree problem. It has no concept of the game it is playing, or what it means to kick back with some mates in a pub and set up a board, or what the overall goals of winning, losing, and honor are, or any of the myriad things that go on in a conscious human's brain. It's just doing a "foreach" loop interspersed with some database lookups.
And even "worse" is that it didn't learn how to do all that itself. Someone wrote the code. Someone programmed in some arbitrary boolean checks that correspond to the rules of the game. It didn't have to learn how knight moves, or what defense means, or the social implications of the word "pawn". All it knows, and all it ever will know, is how to do those pre-programmed tasks. It's a dumb expert. (I've met plenty of those in IT, btw...)
Although, when it comes down to it, a human didn't spontaneously learn to play Chess either. He had to be taught how a knight moves. At some other point in his life he learned what a horse is, how the Pony Express got its start, what it feels like when a fly lands his face, etc. He learned how a pawn moves, the social implications of a pawn, what it means when you let your defense down, how to get money for your unwanted gold and electronics, etc. He learned how to setup a board, how to stuff a napkin under a wobbly table, that Guinness tastes bitter, etc. The game of Chess is part of a massive pastiche of knowledge and experiences that goes beyond just a set of boolean operations.
I think that's what people's main issue is. Is that they do recognize that AI is far beyond a simple, specialized (dare I say "hard coded") machine pumping out the solution to the Chess problem. And I have to agree with them. It's just solving Tic-Tac-Toe on a grander scale. I will be more impressed when there's a computer that knows the rules of the game and nothing more-- and is given access to chess players and the online chess game database-- and on its own becomes a Grand Master. That's a bit more intelligent.
Some people won't be happy until there's a blank slate computer that learns to see and hear on its own, learns what a game is, and in a natural-language conversation with another human, learns to play chess. That would be impressive, given that those tasks are a monumental, multi-year journey for a new born human...
With something like Deep Blue, most of the skill did come from the programmers, it's true. Most of Deep Blue's "intelligence" came from brute-forcing its way through each move. However, since it would take billions of years to work that out, they made sure to shrink the search space; they "taught" Deep Blue about the most common Grand-Master level opening moves, the most desirable end games, and how to recognize unfavorable situations without having to expand the entire tree.
What they effectively taught (or began to teach) Deep Blue was rudimentary pattern recognition-- knowing how a board is going to turn out without having to figure it out on the fly. And really, that's the more interesting bit, because that is exactly what human players do.
When a Grand Master plays a game, there are certainly situations where they are working out a game tree that is a few layers deep. But the limitations of the human brain simply won't allow him to work out an entire tree, or even every move in one layer. It's beyond human wetwear. But what isn't is pattern recognition. The Grand Master has spent hundreds of days pre-processing the information; he's played thousands of games, read books on theory, watched other matches, and so forth. He already knows, for example, leaving a King exposed is going to turn out bad. He can see that positions of his pieces around an opponent's weakness leave for only a small subset of desirable moves (even though there are thousands of possible moves). He can recognize when a subset of moves would be very bad for him and instantly eliminate them without expanding the tree to his inevitable defeat. This instant recognition leaves free cycles for evaluating on-the-fly decisions about the current situation.
A human Grand Master's neural net has been trained to recognize good and bad patters just as surely as anyone else has been trained to recognize hot pan = pain without having to stop and think about it, and that a can of soup needs to be open to be delicious without having to mentally invent the can opener.
The other advantage a human player has over a machine is that our hardware is much, much better. We've got more gigahertz all up ins ours-- and we have the advantage of an amazingly well trained and time-tested neural net built in.
But with enough advancement in computing-- from massively complex neural nets, to distributed computing, to quantum computing, and even better manufacturing techniques to ram more Giga-giga-giga hertz onto a slab of silicone, it's only a matter of time until computers have equal or superior hardware.
From there, it's just a matter of designing a computer that can learn, and giving it the online records of every regulation chess match ever played, and letting it figure out how to be the Grandest Master. Once its learning is in place, it's trivial to copy and redistribute that knowledge.
As for a computer starting with a blank slate and learning the concepts of game, board, opponent, horse, touch, feel, love-- well, that's just an abstraction of the same problem. It's a longer way off, but if a perfect, learning Chess computer is inevitable, why not that?
BTW, highly recommended reading on this topic, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. It also has a bibliography of a few hundred other excellent follow-ups.
And since a Pyrrhic victory can occur in ALL wars, and this war exists in the set of ALL wars, this war can end with a Pyrrhic victory, and thus both sides can lose.
Yes, but I'm not a grammar Nazi. I'm a member of the grammar underground railroad. While I fight for grammar, it's not always within my means (nor is it my intention) to perfectly adhere to it. I correct injustices, but cannot build a new nation. I hide participles in my attic lest they end up hanging, but I must sometimes drop apostrophes less their noise tip off everyone's location.
The final trick: preloading desktop environment files while waiting for the user to type their password."
Thanks for playing, but you're wrong:
Each student is singular -- the is instead of are proves it -- so the colloquial their (a plural) doesn't agree with the verb, and is frowned on by traditionalists. It's common enough in speech -- "A friend of mine called me." "What did they say?" -- but, although many writers have used it (see examples from Jane Austen), it often sets off alarm bells among the fussier readers of formal writing today.
The correct answer is "there is no answer". There's plenty of "right" ways that have either fallen out of favor (such as using "type one's password"), or that get repetitive and annoying ("type his' or her's password")
Yeah. I mean, you can always just print out the photos, put them on a wooden table, take pictures of those pictures, then upload the resultant images. Easy.
That's the great thing about DNS servers-- just like a customer of the ISP doesn't need to use the ISP-provided servers, you don't need to a customer of the ISP to use the ISP provided servers.
The OP can still use their plan to hammer the servers without violating their terms of service. Just get a bunch of non-customers to switch their DNS to EvilCorp. Write a script to throw out DNS-error requests. Scoop up all the ad-crap that sluices down the tubes, and poison the results. Once you have all the data you need, you can forge your own "impression" requests. Slap them as background "pixel" requests onto the webpage of your choice, throw a LoLCat on it, and let the teeming millions do the rest of the work for you.
If you're a fan of The Verve, you obviously know the song 'Bittersweet Symphony' from their 1997 album, Urban Hymns. It was the biggest hit of the band's career and the song that helped The Verve sell millions of albums around the world. However, you may also have heard that Verve didn't make a cent on 'Bittersweet Symphony', that is absolutely 100% true. The problem lies in a six-second sample based on a cover version of a Rolling Stones song...let me explain. In the mid-60s, Andrew Loog Oldham was the Stones' manager and producer. He also formed something called 'The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra', which specialized in orchestral versions of pop songs of the day. In June 1966, the Orchestra released something called the Rolling Stones Songbook. Track 11 on the album was an orchestral version of a Stones song called 'The Last Time', this is where the six second sample The Verve used for Bittersweet Symphony came from. Through some monumental screw-ups, The Verve never properly and legally cleared the use of that sample. As a result, Andrew Loog Oldham, who, by this time, was living in Cartagena, Colombia, was moved to sue. He did, and he won, that meant all the royalties generated by 'Bittersweet Symphony' and a chunk of the royalties generated by sales of Urban Hymns were funneled to Andrew's bank account in South America. This also explains why 'Bittersweet Symphony' turned up in a Nike commercial even while the song was still on the charts. It's now Oldham's song to do with what he pleases. The Verve were not amused, and they soon broke up. Did this issue have something to do with it'...do ya think' For adding a few more cents into Andrew Loog Oldham's bank account, and also the accounts of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, The Verve's 'Bittersweet Symphony' is a good lesson kids...clear your samples!
In another show (that I can't find in the transcripts, but I'm sure its there in the archive), Cross explains the "monumental screw-ups". Basically, the legalese read something along the lines of "50% of the royalties of the song go to the song owners", and then defined the owners as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards-- and THEN was worded in a way that said "Mick Jagger, an owner, gets 50%. Keith Richards, an owner, gets 50%". And thus, 100% of royalties for the song went straight to the Olding Stones.
I think he meant that the advice about your sig was off-topic, not that your signature was off-topic. And I think the advice was along the lines of "you just let a hundred thousand bandwidth destroying fucktards know where your publicly vandalizeable web-resource is, so stock up on butt-lube and server-slag-extinguishers, you're in for a ride!"
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't really "invent" this, did they? They just kinda built it from pre-existing ideas-- but bluer.
And to answer what it'll be used for: Releasing a new generation of Blu-Ray players that aren't backwards compatible, forcing everyone who has bought a Blu-Ray to rebuy all their Sony-branded movies. Obviously.
Okay, this is totally off topic-- but could whoever keeps tagging every single story with 'story' please stop? Every story is-- guess what-- a story! Adding a "story" tag is not a useful piece of information. Might as well just tag every story with "IsTagged", too.
You also, but with a color-shifted tie
So what happens when a posse of rustlers comes along with a roll of tin foil?
Or to paraphrase Henry Rollins, "You're never going to be able to vote for your president the way you'd vote for your favorite rock star. It just isn't going to happen. Instead, you need to use your vote against the guy you don't like. Maybe the next guy will be good, maybe he won't, but at least you're working to changing what's wrong now."
But if you remove all the stupid people, you run into two problems:
Though, by that logic, DVDs weren't "here" when a tiny number of wealthy people were shelling out hundreds of dollars for hardware, and $50+ for a tiny selection of discs.
Early adapters are a normal and healthy part of the product life cycle. Once you trick a bunch of people into paying for the initial costs of a product for you, you can use those profits to take advantage of mass production for everyone else.
http://www.gotfuturama.com/Multimedia/EpisodeSounds/2ACV03/16.mp3
I'm more interested in the sound bites from the future:
According to the best research I can find in as much as I dared:
That's a lot of Shamu Shucking! Not impossible, mind you, but challenging. You'll need a good team with strong muscles, good aim, and earplugs so they aren't driven mad by the cacophony of "ooOOOo" caused by the whalegasms. You'll also need to ensure that the whales are either sufficiently into this, or you have a good supply of whale porn on hand.
And when you're done, if you haven't found some way to make enough money off this so you'll never have to work again, then you aren't trying hard enough.
This should just about balance out the tax lost when Bono "I'm all about supporting the little guy" NoLastName moved all of U2's holdings out of Ireland
Nah, if he's a System Administrator, might I suggest a live re-enactment of his favorite BOFH episode, with the school's least-favorite vice-principal in the role of the Boss?
I agree with you that AI is a far, far more difficult area of study than anyone gives it credit for. I think that's one of the main ruffling points people have whenever the topic of "intelligence" and "chess playing" comes up. It's a really odd situation. Most people rightfully point out that a computer like Deep Blue isn't really playing chess, it's solving a branching-tree problem. It has no concept of the game it is playing, or what it means to kick back with some mates in a pub and set up a board, or what the overall goals of winning, losing, and honor are, or any of the myriad things that go on in a conscious human's brain. It's just doing a "foreach" loop interspersed with some database lookups.
And even "worse" is that it didn't learn how to do all that itself. Someone wrote the code. Someone programmed in some arbitrary boolean checks that correspond to the rules of the game. It didn't have to learn how knight moves, or what defense means, or the social implications of the word "pawn". All it knows, and all it ever will know, is how to do those pre-programmed tasks. It's a dumb expert. (I've met plenty of those in IT, btw...)
Although, when it comes down to it, a human didn't spontaneously learn to play Chess either. He had to be taught how a knight moves. At some other point in his life he learned what a horse is, how the Pony Express got its start, what it feels like when a fly lands his face, etc. He learned how a pawn moves, the social implications of a pawn, what it means when you let your defense down, how to get money for your unwanted gold and electronics, etc. He learned how to setup a board, how to stuff a napkin under a wobbly table, that Guinness tastes bitter, etc. The game of Chess is part of a massive pastiche of knowledge and experiences that goes beyond just a set of boolean operations.
I think that's what people's main issue is. Is that they do recognize that AI is far beyond a simple, specialized (dare I say "hard coded") machine pumping out the solution to the Chess problem. And I have to agree with them. It's just solving Tic-Tac-Toe on a grander scale. I will be more impressed when there's a computer that knows the rules of the game and nothing more-- and is given access to chess players and the online chess game database-- and on its own becomes a Grand Master. That's a bit more intelligent.
Some people won't be happy until there's a blank slate computer that learns to see and hear on its own, learns what a game is, and in a natural-language conversation with another human, learns to play chess. That would be impressive, given that those tasks are a monumental, multi-year journey for a new born human...
With something like Deep Blue, most of the skill did come from the programmers, it's true. Most of Deep Blue's "intelligence" came from brute-forcing its way through each move. However, since it would take billions of years to work that out, they made sure to shrink the search space; they "taught" Deep Blue about the most common Grand-Master level opening moves, the most desirable end games, and how to recognize unfavorable situations without having to expand the entire tree.
What they effectively taught (or began to teach) Deep Blue was rudimentary pattern recognition-- knowing how a board is going to turn out without having to figure it out on the fly. And really, that's the more interesting bit, because that is exactly what human players do.
When a Grand Master plays a game, there are certainly situations where they are working out a game tree that is a few layers deep. But the limitations of the human brain simply won't allow him to work out an entire tree, or even every move in one layer. It's beyond human wetwear. But what isn't is pattern recognition. The Grand Master has spent hundreds of days pre-processing the information; he's played thousands of games, read books on theory, watched other matches, and so forth. He already knows, for example, leaving a King exposed is going to turn out bad. He can see that positions of his pieces around an opponent's weakness leave for only a small subset of desirable moves (even though there are thousands of possible moves). He can recognize when a subset of moves would be very bad for him and instantly eliminate them without expanding the tree to his inevitable defeat. This instant recognition leaves free cycles for evaluating on-the-fly decisions about the current situation.
A human Grand Master's neural net has been trained to recognize good and bad patters just as surely as anyone else has been trained to recognize hot pan = pain without having to stop and think about it, and that a can of soup needs to be open to be delicious without having to mentally invent the can opener.
The other advantage a human player has over a machine is that our hardware is much, much better. We've got more gigahertz all up ins ours-- and we have the advantage of an amazingly well trained and time-tested neural net built in.
But with enough advancement in computing-- from massively complex neural nets, to distributed computing, to quantum computing, and even better manufacturing techniques to ram more Giga-giga-giga hertz onto a slab of silicone, it's only a matter of time until computers have equal or superior hardware.
From there, it's just a matter of designing a computer that can learn, and giving it the online records of every regulation chess match ever played, and letting it figure out how to be the Grandest Master. Once its learning is in place, it's trivial to copy and redistribute that knowledge.
As for a computer starting with a blank slate and learning the concepts of game, board, opponent, horse, touch, feel, love-- well, that's just an abstraction of the same problem. It's a longer way off, but if a perfect, learning Chess computer is inevitable, why not that?
BTW, highly recommended reading on this topic, "The Age of Spiritual Machines" by Ray Kurzweil. It also has a bibliography of a few hundred other excellent follow-ups.
New tag: idlehasnopants
(feeding the trolls, I know)...
And since a Pyrrhic victory can occur in ALL wars, and this war exists in the set of ALL wars, this war can end with a Pyrrhic victory, and thus both sides can lose.
Yes, but I'm not a grammar Nazi. I'm a member of the grammar underground railroad. While I fight for grammar, it's not always within my means (nor is it my intention) to perfectly adhere to it. I correct injustices, but cannot build a new nation. I hide participles in my attic lest they end up hanging, but I must sometimes drop apostrophes less their noise tip off everyone's location.
With all due respect to Mr. Kissinger, King Pyrrhus would like to disagree.
Thanks for playing, but you're wrong:
Each student is singular -- the is instead of are proves it -- so the colloquial their (a plural) doesn't agree with the verb, and is frowned on by traditionalists. It's common enough in speech -- "A friend of mine called me." "What did they say?" -- but, although many writers have used it (see examples from Jane Austen), it often sets off alarm bells among the fussier readers of formal writing today.
The correct answer is "there is no answer". There's plenty of "right" ways that have either fallen out of favor (such as using "type one's password"), or that get repetitive and annoying ("type his' or her's password")
I suggest brushing up on your Grammar Youth Movement handbook at http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Writing/s.html#sexist
Yeah. I mean, you can always just print out the photos, put them on a wooden table, take pictures of those pictures, then upload the resultant images. Easy.
That's the great thing about DNS servers-- just like a customer of the ISP doesn't need to use the ISP-provided servers, you don't need to a customer of the ISP to use the ISP provided servers.
The OP can still use their plan to hammer the servers without violating their terms of service. Just get a bunch of non-customers to switch their DNS to EvilCorp. Write a script to throw out DNS-error requests. Scoop up all the ad-crap that sluices down the tubes, and poison the results. Once you have all the data you need, you can forge your own "impression" requests. Slap them as background "pixel" requests onto the webpage of your choice, throw a LoLCat on it, and let the teeming millions do the rest of the work for you.
Thank you we are the Cantina Band. If you have any requests shout them out.
(Throws voice) Play that same song again.
Same song, here we go.
It's true. Turning to the Ongoing History of New Music transcripts (which, for some reason, are bizarrely out of format...):
In another show (that I can't find in the transcripts, but I'm sure its there in the archive), Cross explains the "monumental screw-ups". Basically, the legalese read something along the lines of "50% of the royalties of the song go to the song owners", and then defined the owners as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards-- and THEN was worded in a way that said "Mick Jagger, an owner, gets 50%. Keith Richards, an owner, gets 50%". And thus, 100% of royalties for the song went straight to the Olding Stones.
I think he meant that the advice about your sig was off-topic, not that your signature was off-topic. And I think the advice was along the lines of "you just let a hundred thousand bandwidth destroying fucktards know where your publicly vandalizeable web-resource is, so stock up on butt-lube and server-slag-extinguishers, you're in for a ride!"
Maybe he was dictating?