In case this actually slips anyone up: NP-hard means that, given a large number of options, and an answer that is a certain combination or ordering of those items, every possible combination or ordering must be evaluated to figure out the correct answer. "NP" stands for "non-polynomial," e.g. an exponential or factorial function of the number of items used.
Not quite right, but close enough for government work.
NP stands for "Non deterministically polynomial". There is a mythical machine called a "non-deterministic Turing Machine". NP refers to problem that can be solved in Polynomial time on such a machine. Compare that to P, which refers to problems that can be solved in Polynomial time on a regular Turing Machine/Computer.
The Great Question is whether P=NP. That is, are all the NP problems also P? There is a group of problems - called NP-Complete - that we know are NP but we don't know whether they are also P, the Traveling Salesman problem being the most famous of these.
NP-Hard means that a problem is at least as hard as the NP-Complete problems - but we're not sure whether it is actually NP or not.
Since, using the best methods we know of, problems that are NP-Complete or NP-Hard take more than polynomial time on all real computers - "Non-Polynomial" is a workable approximation to the real meaning for most non-academic purposes.
If what its leaders called communism has failed a dozen times, then what its leaders call capitalism has failed a hundred times.
The difference is that when capitalism fails we have income inequality or we have government strangling innovation. When communism fails we have real slavery, massive imprisonment of dissenters, and countless executions.
In theory you are rewarded for wisely investing your money in businesses which deliver what people want. In practice you are rewarded for whatever method you find to increase your personal wealth, regardless of how much effort you put in or who benefits.
Also for taking the risks. Many people who aren't wealthy don't lack the hard work or intelligence to get rich, they just prefer to have a stable secure paycheck and prefer not to go through the years of thankless work trying to launch a business when you don't know when or whether it will succeed or fail.
And of course with the modern nanny state many simply prefer not to deal with the piles of regulations that must be followed when running a business.
Well, I wouldn't say China is peaceful. It's just that their wars are mostly fought amongst themselves, deciding who gets to rule China.
And of course "themselves" always includes their latest conquests (China didn't get so large by fighting "amongst themselves") and next conquests "xxx has always been an integral part of China and is strictly an internal affair".
Japanese has one sound that is somewhere between the R and L sound. It isn't exactly either.
It is the Chinese language that substitutes 'L' sounds for 'R' sounds
assuming you mean Mandarin Chinese (the official language of the Chinese empire), there is an L sound, and there are multiple R sounds. Depending on where the speaker is from (which part of China, Singapore, or Taiwan) an R sound might come out sounding like L or it might not be pronounced at all.
In terms of information theory, Japanese is like Binary, English is like Decimal and Chinese is closer to duodecimal. Japanese has very few consonants and vowels, and is limited in how they can be combined to form syllables. So just link binary where you have few symbols, you have to use more symbols to convey information. English has a lot of consonant and vowel sounds, and we have few limitations on how we combine them, so our words and sentences generally have far fewer syllables than the equivalent Japanese. Chinese has a lot of vowels and consonants too. They have some restrictions on how they are combined, but they make up for it by having four tones that can be applied to create different syllables. Chinese sentences and words are - in my opinion - generally slightly shorter than English, and it sometimes sounds like the speaker is having a hard time molding his mouth to make the complex syllables that come out slowly. Meanwhile the Japanese speaker is rolling out one syllable after another so rapidly I can hardly distinguish them - yet both communicate the same information.
22,000 volunteers are a great labor/troop source. 22,000 kidnap victims are a dangerous potential source of unrest, rebellion, and loyalty to the enemy.
You don't have me convinced but you do have me wondering. It's been nice talking with you.
One thing I want to thank you for: some years back I heard a Taiwanese person claim that China had sent a lot of former KMT soldiers to do the fighting in Korea as a way of getting rid of the potentially disloyal troops. I've often wondered how true that claim was. Both the article you linked to and articles I found while looking in to your statements seem to confirm that there were a lot of KMT soldiers in the prison camps, which at least partially answers the question.
It's an interesting read, but difficult to tell what the source is. Part of it seems to be saying that KMT soldiers who had been captured while fighting for the PLA were responsible for the coercion. This seems plausible because coercion is how KMT armies generally recruited and KMT military leaders would consider it normal, especially after being coerced themselves to fight for the Communists. However, the sections claiming that ROC leadership was involved seem more dubious to me. While the ROC was certainly not above the tactics described, the ROC was terrified of a fifth column in Taiwan. Surely they wouldn't want to coerce a 22,000 man fifth column into entering Taiwan!
Your argument that the Chinese rely on imports doesn't change the facts of any of what I said.
But to address your point, China does have a lot of resources at home. They have a lot more in the neighboring back-yard of Russia - resources that a militarily strong China could obtain from a militarily weak Russia with little difficulty. One way to get resources at good prices is to make your neighbors offers they can't refuse. It was thought that the inter-dependencies of trade had ended war in Europe - that was right before WW I.
The steel from Australia to build ships is important, but China will likely build the ships it needs before doing the things that would cause Australia to stop selling the steel. And Australia is small and weak (even fewer people than Taiwan), without assistance Australia would not be able to resist Chinese threats.
China has made its war-like ambitions quite clear. It has regularly threatened Taiwan and even while claiming that relations are improving it continues to deploy more missiles aimed at Taiwan. The claim is made based on similar culture and a history of colonizing Taiwan, a claim similar to those Germany made on Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. Having persuaded most countries and international organizations to shun Taiwan, China has turned its eyes to the South China Sea which China decided had always been an integral part of its territory after oil was discovered there.
While China has made its ambitions clear to anyone willing to listen, what China hasn't made clear is its time-table. They are quite likely simply waiting until they have the upper hand militarily. With a population 4 times that of any other industrialized country, they know that when they get close to per-capita GDP parity, they will have an economy nearly 4 times as large as anyone else in the world. Unless other countries can remain strong and stand united, China will be very dangerous indeed.
By the way, at the time you say this was happening, Republic of China leaders were terrified of Taiwanese nationalists and suspected Communists in Taiwan. They were regularly imprisoning them, torturing them, and even killing them. A few years earlier they had killed some 20,000 people in Taiwan during the 2-28 massacres. It defies logic to think that they would want to bring 22,000 Chinese communists to Taiwan against their will.
You read the Korean War books in China, I assume? How honest has the Chinese government been over the years. Before you tell me the US government has lied too (and it has), how free have your newspapers been to expose the lies and dishonesty of your government?
China has a policy of taking control of Taiwan, peacefully or by force if necessary. How often do you hear or read dissenting opinions in Chinese newspapers, on Chinese radio or on Chinese TV? Don't tell me you don't hear any dissent because the topic is so obvious - it isn't obvious to anyone else. Even in Taiwan where the government spent 50 years telling everyone they were Chinese, opinion is divided over whether Taiwan is part of China.
Contrast the United States where we've been fighting a war in Afghanistan and Iraq. A hot war that is actively being fought. And yet we here and see dissent in our newspapers, radios and TV all the time.
Our opinions are free. And if our government were telling huge lies to us in our textbooks it would be exposed quickly. The same cannot be said of China.
Sadly, you shouldn't trust your government issued history textbooks. Chinese governments, and the PRC especially, have a long record of re-writing history to suppose their political purposes.
So what about the 75,823 Communist personnel who did return home? Also, what about this?
Prisoners who had expressed a desire not to be repatriated were sent to a temporary camp at P'anmunjom. There government representatives were allowed to talk with their respective nationals under the impartial supervision of a five-member Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission. The interviews served to ensure that soldiers had not been coerced into refusing repatriation. They also gave the governments involved the opportunity to try and persuade their nationals to return home. When the interviews were over, each man was free to chose whether or not he wanted to return home.... Of the 359 UN personnel sent to the camp, ten decided to come home, two decided to go to neutral third countries, and the remainder-347-decided to live among the Communists. Included among these were twenty-one Americans who chose to remain with their captors. In contrast, 22,604 Communist soldiers initially chose not to be repatriated. After being processed by the Repatriation Commission, 628 relented and returned home.
"Ceasefire talks had been going on between Communist and UN forces since 1951, with one of the main stumbling blocks being the Communist insistence that all prisoners be returned home, with the UN insisting that prisoners who wished to remain where they were be allowed to do so. After talks dragged on for two years, the Chinese and North Koreans relented on this point...
Over 22,600 Communist soldiers, the majority of whom were former Republic of China soldiers who fought against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War, declined repatriation. Much to the surprise of the UN forces, 23 Americans and one Briton, along with 333 Korean UN soldiers, also declined repatriation."
WWII was started by two countries that, though historically capable of supporting strong militaries, had not taken advantage of the colonial age due to circumstances - Germany due to disunity and Japan due to a period of shutting itself off from the outside world. Both countries were looking to take their rightful place on the world stage. Both believed themselves racially superior but victims of historical wrongs committed against them. Germany at least, did not claim its initial moves were aggressive but were merely recovering what should have been theirs all along, in particular areas where German culture existed.
One issue that I think one needs to be careful with when teaching children programming is that most programming languages allow you to write things like "a=a+1". The age where children can handle programming concepts like variables is about the same age where they can handle algebraic concepts like variables. Learning programming while learning algebraic concepts could be confusing and hamper the understanding of math.
It would help a lot, I think, to use a language where assignment is not "=". Instead, the pascal notation ":=" which can be read "becomes equal to" instead of "equals" would be very important to early learners.
Discover, v. "To make known to the both the discovered and those who support the discoverer." Columbus is credited with discovering America not because he was the first person to find America or even the first white person to find America (the Vikings beat him to it), but because he made both the Europeans and the American Indians aware of each others existence - something neither had known before.
But hey, don't let the facts interfere with your racist jokes. Keep making fun of white people.
Look a the shapes and resources of those nations. Our biggest current issue, the border with Mexico, is far smaller compared to our GDP and resources than what South Korea and Israel have to defend from North Korea and terrorist attacks.
There is no reasonable way to seal US borders.
There are 12,034 km of land boarders and 19,924 km of coastline.
Even if our entire military people was stationed at the borders smugglers could still fly over or tunnel under.
I guess this is why the wall Israel built has been such a huge failure [sarcasm] and why South Korea has removed all obstacles and stopped patrolling along their border with North Korea [more sarcasm].
In WWII, the US was at war with Japan, and Taiwan was part of Japan. The Qing Empire had given Taiwan to Japan back in 1895 (a few years before he Spanish Empire lost Cuba). Since Taiwan was part of Japan, America was at war with Taiwan. Americans fought Taiwanese in the Pacific and Americans conducted bombing raids in Taiwan.
America was allied with the Republic of China which is why when the war ended the Republica of China was able to occupy Taiwan. The Republic of China immediately began trying to erase Japanese history (for example, most major and minor streets had their Japanese and Taiwanese names removed; in most cities you'll find street names like Chungshan, Nanjing, Mingchuan...either named after places in China or named to reflect Republic of China propaganda). But despite Republic of China efforts to erase the past, the past is what it is (er, was).
As for Nixon, he did the exact opposite of what you describe. Prior to Nixon America and the UN recognized the government of Taiwan as "China". However, to get the real China on our side to isolate the USSR, Nixon negotiated with China and America stopped recognizing the Republic of China (which governed Taiwan) and began to recognize the People's Republic of China (which governed China) as "China".
In recent years Taiwan has become a democracy and its identity (is it part of "China"?) has been a subject of much debate. The international political situation has it largely locked into a position of officially claiming to be part of "China" even those many or even most of its people do not believe it to be so.
The Tea Party was an attempt to rise up. So the corporate news organizations did everything they could to paint them as racists - and on pretty flimsy evidence. Now Herman Cain is one of the Tea Party favorites.
The Tea Party has some clear goals - limit the power of government - follow the Constitution - cut government spending (and thus government control of the economy).
What are the goals of these Wall Street demonstrators? If they really are trying to put limits on government what makes you think the corporate news orgs (who can afford lobbyists) will allow it?
It's just that when it comes to restricting free speech rights it seems like it's usually the Democrats who are doing it. (Before you bring up flag burning, skin on TV, etc note that those aren't actual speech - Republicans are objecting to the behaviors, Republicans aren't objecting to the use of words to communicate ideas the way Democrats do.)
Slashdot Mirror
In case this actually slips anyone up: NP-hard means that, given a large number of options, and an answer that is a certain combination or ordering of those items, every possible combination or ordering must be evaluated to figure out the correct answer. "NP" stands for "non-polynomial," e.g. an exponential or factorial function of the number of items used.
Not quite right, but close enough for government work.
NP stands for "Non deterministically polynomial". There is a mythical machine called a "non-deterministic Turing Machine". NP refers to problem that can be solved in Polynomial time on such a machine. Compare that to P, which refers to problems that can be solved in Polynomial time on a regular Turing Machine/Computer.
The Great Question is whether P=NP. That is, are all the NP problems also P? There is a group of problems - called NP-Complete - that we know are NP but we don't know whether they are also P, the Traveling Salesman problem being the most famous of these.
NP-Hard means that a problem is at least as hard as the NP-Complete problems - but we're not sure whether it is actually NP or not.
Since, using the best methods we know of, problems that are NP-Complete or NP-Hard take more than polynomial time on all real computers - "Non-Polynomial" is a workable approximation to the real meaning for most non-academic purposes.
I have a brother in Alaska. Nome? Sure, he's my brother. I mean Nome in Alaska. I'd know 'em anywhere! (Thank you Abbott and Costello)
If what its leaders called communism has failed a dozen times, then what its leaders call capitalism has failed a hundred times.
The difference is that when capitalism fails we have income inequality or we have government strangling innovation. When communism fails we have real slavery, massive imprisonment of dissenters, and countless executions.
In theory you are rewarded for wisely investing your money in businesses which deliver what people want. In practice you are rewarded for whatever method you find to increase your personal wealth, regardless of how much effort you put in or who benefits.
Also for taking the risks. Many people who aren't wealthy don't lack the hard work or intelligence to get rich, they just prefer to have a stable secure paycheck and prefer not to go through the years of thankless work trying to launch a business when you don't know when or whether it will succeed or fail.
And of course with the modern nanny state many simply prefer not to deal with the piles of regulations that must be followed when running a business.
While outside my family we encourage democracy and equality, inside our family it is authoritarian communist dicatatorship - as it should be.
Yes, rather than genocide for everyone, now it's only for those who aren't Chinese. That's a 20% improvement, I guess.
Well, I wouldn't say China is peaceful. It's just that their wars are mostly fought amongst themselves, deciding who gets to rule China.
And of course "themselves" always includes their latest conquests (China didn't get so large by fighting "amongst themselves") and next conquests "xxx has always been an integral part of China and is strictly an internal affair".
It is the Chinese language that substitutes 'L' sounds for 'R' sounds
assuming you mean Mandarin Chinese (the official language of the Chinese empire), there is an L sound, and there are multiple R sounds. Depending on where the speaker is from (which part of China, Singapore, or Taiwan) an R sound might come out sounding like L or it might not be pronounced at all.
In terms of information theory, Japanese is like Binary, English is like Decimal and Chinese is closer to duodecimal. Japanese has very few consonants and vowels, and is limited in how they can be combined to form syllables. So just link binary where you have few symbols, you have to use more symbols to convey information. English has a lot of consonant and vowel sounds, and we have few limitations on how we combine them, so our words and sentences generally have far fewer syllables than the equivalent Japanese. Chinese has a lot of vowels and consonants too. They have some restrictions on how they are combined, but they make up for it by having four tones that can be applied to create different syllables. Chinese sentences and words are - in my opinion - generally slightly shorter than English, and it sometimes sounds like the speaker is having a hard time molding his mouth to make the complex syllables that come out slowly. Meanwhile the Japanese speaker is rolling out one syllable after another so rapidly I can hardly distinguish them - yet both communicate the same information.
22,000 volunteers are a great labor/troop source. 22,000 kidnap victims are a dangerous potential source of unrest, rebellion, and loyalty to the enemy.
You don't have me convinced but you do have me wondering. It's been nice talking with you.
One thing I want to thank you for: some years back I heard a Taiwanese person claim that China had sent a lot of former KMT soldiers to do the fighting in Korea as a way of getting rid of the potentially disloyal troops. I've often wondered how true that claim was. Both the article you linked to and articles I found while looking in to your statements seem to confirm that there were a lot of KMT soldiers in the prison camps, which at least partially answers the question.
It's an interesting read, but difficult to tell what the source is. Part of it seems to be saying that KMT soldiers who had been captured while fighting for the PLA were responsible for the coercion. This seems plausible because coercion is how KMT armies generally recruited and KMT military leaders would consider it normal, especially after being coerced themselves to fight for the Communists. However, the sections claiming that ROC leadership was involved seem more dubious to me. While the ROC was certainly not above the tactics described, the ROC was terrified of a fifth column in Taiwan. Surely they wouldn't want to coerce a 22,000 man fifth column into entering Taiwan!
Your argument that the Chinese rely on imports doesn't change the facts of any of what I said.
But to address your point, China does have a lot of resources at home. They have a lot more in the neighboring back-yard of Russia - resources that a militarily strong China could obtain from a militarily weak Russia with little difficulty. One way to get resources at good prices is to make your neighbors offers they can't refuse. It was thought that the inter-dependencies of trade had ended war in Europe - that was right before WW I.
The steel from Australia to build ships is important, but China will likely build the ships it needs before doing the things that would cause Australia to stop selling the steel. And Australia is small and weak (even fewer people than Taiwan), without assistance Australia would not be able to resist Chinese threats.
China has made its war-like ambitions quite clear. It has regularly threatened Taiwan and even while claiming that relations are improving it continues to deploy more missiles aimed at Taiwan. The claim is made based on similar culture and a history of colonizing Taiwan, a claim similar to those Germany made on Austria and part of Czechoslovakia. Having persuaded most countries and international organizations to shun Taiwan, China has turned its eyes to the South China Sea which China decided had always been an integral part of its territory after oil was discovered there.
While China has made its ambitions clear to anyone willing to listen, what China hasn't made clear is its time-table. They are quite likely simply waiting until they have the upper hand militarily. With a population 4 times that of any other industrialized country, they know that when they get close to per-capita GDP parity, they will have an economy nearly 4 times as large as anyone else in the world. Unless other countries can remain strong and stand united, China will be very dangerous indeed.
By the way, at the time you say this was happening, Republic of China leaders were terrified of Taiwanese nationalists and suspected Communists in Taiwan. They were regularly imprisoning them, torturing them, and even killing them. A few years earlier they had killed some 20,000 people in Taiwan during the 2-28 massacres. It defies logic to think that they would want to bring 22,000 Chinese communists to Taiwan against their will.
You read the Korean War books in China, I assume? How honest has the Chinese government been over the years. Before you tell me the US government has lied too (and it has), how free have your newspapers been to expose the lies and dishonesty of your government?
China has a policy of taking control of Taiwan, peacefully or by force if necessary. How often do you hear or read dissenting opinions in Chinese newspapers, on Chinese radio or on Chinese TV? Don't tell me you don't hear any dissent because the topic is so obvious - it isn't obvious to anyone else. Even in Taiwan where the government spent 50 years telling everyone they were Chinese, opinion is divided over whether Taiwan is part of China.
Contrast the United States where we've been fighting a war in Afghanistan and Iraq. A hot war that is actively being fought. And yet we here and see dissent in our newspapers, radios and TV all the time.
Our opinions are free. And if our government were telling huge lies to us in our textbooks it would be exposed quickly. The same cannot be said of China.
Sadly, you shouldn't trust your government issued history textbooks. Chinese governments, and the PRC especially, have a long record of re-writing history to suppose their political purposes.
Prisoners who had expressed a desire not to be repatriated were sent to a temporary camp at P'anmunjom. There government representatives were allowed to talk with their respective nationals under the impartial supervision of a five-member Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission. The interviews served to ensure that soldiers had not been coerced into refusing repatriation. They also gave the governments involved the opportunity to try and persuade their nationals to return home. When the interviews were over, each man was free to chose whether or not he wanted to return home. ... Of the 359 UN personnel sent to the camp, ten decided to come home, two decided to go to neutral third countries, and the remainder-347-decided to live among the Communists. Included among these were twenty-one Americans who chose to remain with their captors. In contrast, 22,604 Communist soldiers initially chose not to be repatriated. After being processed by the Repatriation Commission, 628 relented and returned home.
The Korean War: Years of Stalemate
Please tell me why you believe the information here is wrong:
Operation Big Switch
"Ceasefire talks had been going on between Communist and UN forces since 1951, with one of the main stumbling blocks being the Communist insistence that all prisoners be returned home, with the UN insisting that prisoners who wished to remain where they were be allowed to do so. After talks dragged on for two years, the Chinese and North Koreans relented on this point...
Over 22,600 Communist soldiers, the majority of whom were former Republic of China soldiers who fought against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War, declined repatriation. Much to the surprise of the UN forces, 23 Americans and one Briton, along with 333 Korean UN soldiers, also declined repatriation."
WWII was started by two countries that, though historically capable of supporting strong militaries, had not taken advantage of the colonial age due to circumstances - Germany due to disunity and Japan due to a period of shutting itself off from the outside world. Both countries were looking to take their rightful place on the world stage. Both believed themselves racially superior but victims of historical wrongs committed against them. Germany at least, did not claim its initial moves were aggressive but were merely recovering what should have been theirs all along, in particular areas where German culture existed.
Does any of this not apply to China?
One issue that I think one needs to be careful with when teaching children programming is that most programming languages allow you to write things like "a=a+1". The age where children can handle programming concepts like variables is about the same age where they can handle algebraic concepts like variables. Learning programming while learning algebraic concepts could be confusing and hamper the understanding of math.
It would help a lot, I think, to use a language where assignment is not "=". Instead, the pascal notation ":=" which can be read "becomes equal to" instead of "equals" would be very important to early learners.
Discover, v. "To make known to the both the discovered and those who support the discoverer." Columbus is credited with discovering America not because he was the first person to find America or even the first white person to find America (the Vikings beat him to it), but because he made both the Europeans and the American Indians aware of each others existence - something neither had known before.
But hey, don't let the facts interfere with your racist jokes. Keep making fun of white people.
Look a the shapes and resources of those nations. Our biggest current issue, the border with Mexico, is far smaller compared to our GDP and resources than what South Korea and Israel have to defend from North Korea and terrorist attacks.
There is no reasonable way to seal US borders. There are 12,034 km of land boarders and 19,924 km of coastline.
Even if our entire military people was stationed at the borders smugglers could still fly over or tunnel under.
I guess this is why the wall Israel built has been such a huge failure [sarcasm] and why South Korea has removed all obstacles and stopped patrolling along their border with North Korea [more sarcasm].
Where are you getting this from?
In WWII, the US was at war with Japan, and Taiwan was part of Japan. The Qing Empire had given Taiwan to Japan back in 1895 (a few years before he Spanish Empire lost Cuba). Since Taiwan was part of Japan, America was at war with Taiwan. Americans fought Taiwanese in the Pacific and Americans conducted bombing raids in Taiwan.
America was allied with the Republic of China which is why when the war ended the Republica of China was able to occupy Taiwan. The Republic of China immediately began trying to erase Japanese history (for example, most major and minor streets had their Japanese and Taiwanese names removed; in most cities you'll find street names like Chungshan, Nanjing, Mingchuan...either named after places in China or named to reflect Republic of China propaganda). But despite Republic of China efforts to erase the past, the past is what it is (er, was).
As for Nixon, he did the exact opposite of what you describe. Prior to Nixon America and the UN recognized the government of Taiwan as "China". However, to get the real China on our side to isolate the USSR, Nixon negotiated with China and America stopped recognizing the Republic of China (which governed Taiwan) and began to recognize the People's Republic of China (which governed China) as "China".
In recent years Taiwan has become a democracy and its identity (is it part of "China"?) has been a subject of much debate. The international political situation has it largely locked into a position of officially claiming to be part of "China" even those many or even most of its people do not believe it to be so.
The Tea Party was an attempt to rise up. So the corporate news organizations did everything they could to paint them as racists - and on pretty flimsy evidence. Now Herman Cain is one of the Tea Party favorites. The Tea Party has some clear goals - limit the power of government - follow the Constitution - cut government spending (and thus government control of the economy). What are the goals of these Wall Street demonstrators? If they really are trying to put limits on government what makes you think the corporate news orgs (who can afford lobbyists) will allow it?
Good post.
It's just that when it comes to restricting free speech rights it seems like it's usually the Democrats who are doing it. (Before you bring up flag burning, skin on TV, etc note that those aren't actual speech - Republicans are objecting to the behaviors, Republicans aren't objecting to the use of words to communicate ideas the way Democrats do.)