As I said before, the laws of thermodynamics are zero sum.
As a source of heat and light, this is exactly as efficient as every other electical generator of heat and light.
Where do you think the supposedly wasted energy is going?
Ok if you didn't burn all of the hydrogen you liberated, then you'd have an energy leak. But all "wasted" energy in this process is creating heat and light and heat and light are what you wanted in the first place.
I suspect that it's not "a wasteful energy consumer" but that it's simply exactly as efficient as any other electrical source of heat and light.
The laws of thermodynamics are like that when you're increasing entropy - "wasted" energy is converted into heat, but wait, heat is what you wanted in the first place.
There's no where for energy to go in this equation except into heat and light.
Now if you were venting hydrogen unburned, then you could be wasting energy (you spent energy breaking the bonds without getting it back), but why would you design this to burn incompletely?
New marketing for an old product
on
3D Face Cameras
·
· Score: 1
The link wasn't very clear on how this one works, but for years there's been a face/small-object capture device marketed to the game industry that takes a pictures while scanning with an infared lazer and builds models with texture maps.
I see a lot of posts here blaming the war in Iraq for terrorist attacks. I just found this anonymous letter posted on http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ (Harry's place) that explains who is being targetted by whom and why so elequently that I don't dare add anything myself:...I would be interested to know how deep your knowledge or understanding is of Islamism: i.e. political islam. We haven't spoken about politics for some time, so I don't know if you have read any articles or books about the history, philosophy and politics of Islamism at all. If you have, I apologise for what follows.
Perhaps you think that Islamism is the same thing as Islam. Perhaps you think that it is some form of national liberation struggle, or a reaction against imperialism or Bush's failure to sign up to Kyoto.
It is not.
Radical Islamism - in its most important strain - is a political doctrine which was developed principally by two arab thinkers in the first part of the 20th century - Qutb and Banna - who were deeply immersed, not in the culture of the middle east, but in the theoretical perspective of the European romantic movement. It is not an alien, exotic or even really an "oriental" doctrine. It is directly inspired by the same intellectual currents which gave rise to romantic nationalism in the 19th century, and fascism in the mid 20th century.
You might think that its main aim is to oppose military action in the middle east.
It is not.
Its main aim, explicitly, is to restore the Caliphate, abolished by Ataturk when modern Turkey was established. It is not an anti-imperialist movement. It is an imperialist [ http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/05/left_conservatism.php ] movement, yearning for an imagined golden age which it hopes to recreate.
Qutb saw the primary enemy, not as the foreign policy of Western states, but as Modernity: and in particular materialism, liberalism, and democracy. This is the primary reason that London has been bombed: not because it has "attacked muslims" but because they fear that materialism, liberalism and democracy are damaging to the values which Islamists hope to promore: piety and submission to the will of god.
The radical Islamists are not fighting a realisable campaign, in the same sense that the Irish nationalists were. They do not want a Caliphate in the sense that the IRA wanted a united and independent Ireland. They are fighting a battle against the corrupting forces of modernity for the souls of all muslims. Their principal enemies are principally "apostate" muslims, not you or I.
Why do you think a bomb went off in Edgware Road?
Do you think that it was an accident that the home to London's liberal, westernised Arab muslims was targetted?
Many western "liberals" have simply projected their own concerns about US policy onto the radical Islamists. That is not fair to them: they do NOT share your concerns, but have ones of their own which you would do well to respect. They are not fools or mindless religious fanatics: they are philosophers. You should listen, in particular, to what radical Islamists say, and not what you think they ought to be saying.
Islamist movements have been strong, and growing stronger, in the middle east since the 1950s. Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood which was brutally oppressed by Nasser. The survivors fled to Saudi, where in 1961, they established the Islamic University, in Medina. There they developed the Islamist analysis. That generation taught young, unemployed, hopeless Saudi men who went off to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechenia. Those men returned and turned their sites from the "near enemy" - the Saudi royal family who were tainted by unislamic values - to the "far enemy": the west, capitalism, and in particular the Unit
Planned obsolescence of file formats is MS ace in the hole.
That's why everyone will have to buy MS Office over and over and over.
The reason you can't reuse the license to MS office is that in 5 or 10 years everyone with a new seat will be using a version of MS office that creates files that are incompatible with your old version.
MS won't sell upgrades too quickly, but they'll use planned obsolescence bleed ever company slowly forever!
What's so interesting to me is that there may turn out to be valuable patterns that can be found by processing the way evalution has changed over time.
I've always thought that in poetry, the way your perception of the meaning of phrases changes as you get the next word and the next is important.
An algorithm that processes over time, and process the play of its own states (to some lesser exent) over time seem much more like human consciousness than anything that's been tried.
I wonder what Douglas Hoffstadter could do by adding time to his processing models. I'm sure this could lead to new algorithms. They may be dog-slow algorithms, but perhaps they'll turn out to be more powerful than the one's we're using - at least when backed up with enough silicon.
Given quantum conditions, nothing can do better than approximate levels of gray because when you try to get too accurate, quantum uncertainty kicks in and overwhelms you with randomness.
Oops I shouldn't have posted as HTML... Let's try "EVERTHING about poker can be analysed mathematically" again, but with paragraph breaks.
Sorry. It was my first post.
That's right.
Most people think that bluffing, slow playing etc. are beyond mathematics, but actually they're part of the strategy of games of incomplete information.
In order to play any game where you can profit by your opponent's misreading of your hand, you have to bluff and slow-play (act as if your hand is worse than it is) some percentage of the time otherwise your actions give away too much information.
Any good strategy for Poker doesn't specify that you should have a given action in a given situation, but rather specifies that in a given situation you should have a given probability distribution of actions so as to maximize the trade off between taking advantage of probabilities and the advantage of not being readable.
Beyond this there are two kinds of strategies:
1. Strategies that involve trying to figure out your opponent's method of play (ie. guess the algorithm) and take advantage of it's weaknesses.
This is called a maximal strategy. Obvious finding a maximal strategy is a very very hard problem.
2. Finding best strategy that doesn't depend on your opponent's strategy. This is called an "optimal" strategy. It has the following properties: a) It's an equilibrium in that there is no strategy that beats it on average. b) It's the best strategy that you can use while still telling your opponent exactly what your own strategy is. c) As I said in the intro it's the best strategy that doesn't take the opponent's strategy into account.
Note that Chess programs and the like try to find optimal strategies not maximal strategies - which I think makes them a bit boring. A good chess player can take advantage of my weaknesses as a chess player and humiliate me much faster and more completely than a chess program that assumes that I may make a brilliant move at any second, despite all past experience!
Anyway there are programs out there that find optimal strategies for games like poker. Texas hold um is a bit large a game to analyze that way but no doubt there will be programs that find optimal strategies for hold em or at least almost optimal ones.
But opponent modeling and maximal strategies are more interesting...
Beyond that there's a whole level to table stakes poker (is that what it's called?) that makes it hard to analyze. The fact that the range of bets you can make is so large is hard to analyze...
Also I think the math that's been used breaks down for more than two players at a table.
Beyond that there's analysis of the flow of money around the table over multiple hands. For instance it's better to lose to a loose player than to a tight player because you're more likely to get your money back from a loose player (this may not matter for tournament rules where you play till only one contestant is left).
That's right.
Most people think that bluffing, slow playing etc. are beyond mathematics, but actually they're part of the strategy of games of incomplete information.
In order to play any game where you can profit by your opponent's misreading of your hand, you have to bluff and slow-play (act as if your hand is worse than it is) some percentage of the time otherwise your actions give away too much information.
Any good strategy for Poker doesn't specify that you should have a given action in a given situation, but rather specifies that in a given situation you should have a given probability distribution of actions so as to maximize the trade off between taking advantage of probabilities and the advantage of not being readable.
Beyond this there are two kinds of strategies:
1. Strategies that involve trying to figure out your opponent's method of play (ie. guess the algorithm) and take advantage of it's weaknesses.
This is called a maximal strategy. Obvious finding a maximal strategy is a very very hard problem.
2. Finding best strategy that doesn't depend on your opponent's strategy. This is called an "optimal" strategy. It has the following properties:
a) It's an equilibrium in that there is no strategy that beats it on average.
b) It's the best strategy that you can use while still telling your opponent exactly what your own strategy is.
c) As I said in the intro it's the best strategy that doesn't take the opponent's strategy into account.
Note that Chess programs and the like try to find optimal strategies not maximal strategies - which I think makes them a bit boring. A good chess player can take advantage of my weaknesses as a chess player and humiliate me much faster and more completely than a chess program that assumes that I may make a brilliant move at any second, despite all past experience!
Anyway there are programs out there that find optimal strategies for games like poker. Texas hold um is a bit large a game to analyze that way but no doubt there will be programs that find optimal strategies for hold em or at least almost optimal ones.
But opponent modeling and maximal strategies are more interesting...
Beyond that there's a whole level to table stakes poker (is that what it's called?) that makes it hard to analyze. The fact that the range of bets you can make is so large is hard to analyze...
Also I think the math that's been used breaks down for more than two players at a table.
Beyond that there's analysis of the flow of money around the table over multiple hands. For instance it's better to lose to a loose player than to a tight player because you're more likely to get your money back from a loose player (this may not matter for tournament rules where you play till only one contestant is left).
Slashdot Mirror
As I said before, the laws of thermodynamics are zero sum.
As a source of heat and light, this is exactly as efficient as every other electical generator of heat and light.
Where do you think the supposedly wasted energy is going?
Ok if you didn't burn all of the hydrogen you liberated, then you'd have an energy leak. But all "wasted" energy in this process is creating heat and light and heat and light are what you wanted in the first place.
I suspect that it's not "a wasteful energy consumer" but that it's simply exactly as efficient as any other electrical source of heat and light.
The laws of thermodynamics are like that when you're increasing entropy - "wasted" energy is converted into heat, but wait, heat is what you wanted in the first place.
There's no where for energy to go in this equation except into heat and light.
Now if you were venting hydrogen unburned, then you could be wasting energy (you spent energy breaking the bonds without getting it back), but why would you design this to burn incompletely?
The link wasn't very clear on how this one works, but for years there's been a face/small-object capture device marketed to the game industry that takes a pictures while scanning with an infared lazer and builds models with texture maps.
I have a strange reaction to that question "How would you move Mt. Fuji?"
I love technical challenges - the harder the better, but the idea of moving Mt. Fuji offends me so much that I have trouble even thinking about it.
No doubt I'd fail the interview because my answer would have to be, "You shouldn't even joke about moving Mt. Fuji!"
Funny how a link (and excerpt) of one of the most informative and thoughtful analysis I've ever read got modded down as a troll in mere minutes.
Jesus, the troll mod is meant for thoughtless provacators not for reasoned analysis.
Please mod the parent up enough to be visible. I hope meta moderators bite the fool who mis-moderated.
I see a lot of posts here blaming the war in Iraq for terrorist attacks. I just found this anonymous letter posted on http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ (Harry's place) that explains who is being targetted by whom and why so elequently that I don't dare add anything myself: ...I would be interested to know how deep your knowledge or understanding is of Islamism: i.e. political islam. We haven't spoken about politics for some time, so I don't know if you have read any articles or books about the history, philosophy and politics of Islamism at all. If you have, I apologise for what follows.
/05/left_conservatism.php ] movement, yearning for an imagined golden age which it hopes to recreate.
Perhaps you think that Islamism is the same thing as Islam. Perhaps you think that it is some form of national liberation struggle, or a reaction against imperialism or Bush's failure to sign up to Kyoto.
It is not.
Radical Islamism - in its most important strain - is a political doctrine which was developed principally by two arab thinkers in the first part of the 20th century - Qutb and Banna - who were deeply immersed, not in the culture of the middle east, but in the theoretical perspective of the European romantic movement. It is not an alien, exotic or even really an "oriental" doctrine. It is directly inspired by the same intellectual currents which gave rise to romantic nationalism in the 19th century, and fascism in the mid 20th century.
You might think that its main aim is to oppose military action in the middle east.
It is not.
Its main aim, explicitly, is to restore the Caliphate, abolished by Ataturk when modern Turkey was established. It is not an anti-imperialist movement. It is an imperialist [ http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07
Qutb saw the primary enemy, not as the foreign policy of Western states, but as Modernity: and in particular materialism, liberalism, and democracy. This is the primary reason that London has been bombed: not because it has "attacked muslims" but because they fear that materialism, liberalism and democracy are damaging to the values which Islamists hope to promore: piety and submission to the will of god.
The radical Islamists are not fighting a realisable campaign, in the same sense that the Irish nationalists were. They do not want a Caliphate in the sense that the IRA wanted a united and independent Ireland. They are fighting a battle against the corrupting forces of modernity for the souls of all muslims. Their principal enemies are principally "apostate" muslims, not you or I.
Why do you think a bomb went off in Edgware Road?
Do you think that it was an accident that the home to London's liberal, westernised Arab muslims was targetted?
Many western "liberals" have simply projected their own concerns about US policy onto the radical Islamists. That is not fair to them: they do NOT share your concerns, but have ones of their own which you would do well to respect. They are not fools or mindless religious fanatics: they are philosophers. You should listen, in particular, to what radical Islamists say, and not what you think they ought to be saying.
Islamist movements have been strong, and growing stronger, in the middle east since the 1950s. Banna established the Muslim Brotherhood which was brutally oppressed by Nasser. The survivors fled to Saudi, where in 1961, they established the Islamic University, in Medina. There they developed the Islamist analysis. That generation taught young, unemployed, hopeless Saudi men who went off to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechenia. Those men returned and turned their sites from the "near enemy" - the Saudi royal family who were tainted by unislamic values - to the "far enemy": the west, capitalism, and in particular the Unit
Planned obsolescence of file formats is MS ace in the hole. That's why everyone will have to buy MS Office over and over and over. The reason you can't reuse the license to MS office is that in 5 or 10 years everyone with a new seat will be using a version of MS office that creates files that are incompatible with your old version. MS won't sell upgrades too quickly, but they'll use planned obsolescence bleed ever company slowly forever!
What's so interesting to me is that there may turn out to be valuable patterns that can be found by processing the way evalution has changed over time.
I've always thought that in poetry, the way your perception of the meaning of phrases changes as you get the next word and the next is important.
An algorithm that processes over time, and process the play of its own states (to some lesser exent) over time seem much more like human consciousness than anything that's been tried.
Your last post was an interesting one by the way.
the article didn't say brains work more like NN, it said brains continue to reevaluate over time.
How many NN implementations do you know of that have reprocessing over time? None in my experience!
I wonder what Douglas Hoffstadter could do by adding time to his processing models. I'm sure this could lead to new algorithms. They may be dog-slow algorithms, but perhaps they'll turn out to be more powerful than the one's we're using - at least when backed up with enough silicon.
can *really* do shades of gray.
Given quantum conditions, nothing can do better than approximate levels of gray because when you try to get too accurate, quantum uncertainty kicks in and overwhelms you with randomness.
Oops I shouldn't have posted as HTML... Let's try
"EVERTHING about poker can be analysed mathematically" again, but with paragraph breaks.
Sorry. It was my first post.
That's right.
Most people think that bluffing, slow playing etc. are beyond mathematics, but actually they're part of the strategy of games of incomplete information.
In order to play any game where you can profit by your opponent's misreading of your hand, you have to bluff and slow-play (act as if your hand is worse than it is) some percentage of the time otherwise your actions give away too much information.
Any good strategy for Poker doesn't specify that you should have a given action in a given situation, but rather specifies that in a given situation you should have a given probability distribution of actions so as to maximize the trade off between taking advantage of probabilities and the advantage of not being readable.
Beyond this there are two kinds of strategies:
1. Strategies that involve trying to figure out your opponent's method of play (ie. guess the algorithm) and take advantage of it's weaknesses.
This is called a maximal strategy. Obvious finding a maximal strategy is a very very hard problem.
2. Finding best strategy that doesn't depend on your opponent's strategy. This is called an "optimal" strategy. It has the following properties:
a) It's an equilibrium in that there is no strategy that beats it on average.
b) It's the best strategy that you can use while still telling your opponent exactly what your own strategy is.
c) As I said in the intro it's the best strategy that doesn't take the opponent's strategy into account.
Note that Chess programs and the like try to find optimal strategies not maximal strategies - which I think makes them a bit boring. A good chess player can take advantage of my weaknesses as a chess player and humiliate me much faster and more completely than a chess program that assumes that I may make a brilliant move at any second, despite all past experience!
Anyway there are programs out there that find optimal strategies for games like poker. Texas hold um is a bit large a game to analyze that way but no doubt there will be programs that find optimal strategies for hold em or at least almost optimal ones.
But opponent modeling and maximal strategies are more interesting...
Beyond that there's a whole level to table stakes poker (is that what it's called?) that makes it hard to analyze. The fact that the range of bets you can make is so large is hard to analyze...
Also I think the math that's been used breaks down for more than two players at a table.
Beyond that there's analysis of the flow of money around the table over multiple hands. For instance it's better to lose to a loose player than to a tight player because you're more likely to get your money back from a loose player (this may not matter for tournament rules where you play till only one contestant is left).
That's right. Most people think that bluffing, slow playing etc. are beyond mathematics, but actually they're part of the strategy of games of incomplete information. In order to play any game where you can profit by your opponent's misreading of your hand, you have to bluff and slow-play (act as if your hand is worse than it is) some percentage of the time otherwise your actions give away too much information. Any good strategy for Poker doesn't specify that you should have a given action in a given situation, but rather specifies that in a given situation you should have a given probability distribution of actions so as to maximize the trade off between taking advantage of probabilities and the advantage of not being readable. Beyond this there are two kinds of strategies: 1. Strategies that involve trying to figure out your opponent's method of play (ie. guess the algorithm) and take advantage of it's weaknesses. This is called a maximal strategy. Obvious finding a maximal strategy is a very very hard problem. 2. Finding best strategy that doesn't depend on your opponent's strategy. This is called an "optimal" strategy. It has the following properties: a) It's an equilibrium in that there is no strategy that beats it on average. b) It's the best strategy that you can use while still telling your opponent exactly what your own strategy is. c) As I said in the intro it's the best strategy that doesn't take the opponent's strategy into account. Note that Chess programs and the like try to find optimal strategies not maximal strategies - which I think makes them a bit boring. A good chess player can take advantage of my weaknesses as a chess player and humiliate me much faster and more completely than a chess program that assumes that I may make a brilliant move at any second, despite all past experience! Anyway there are programs out there that find optimal strategies for games like poker. Texas hold um is a bit large a game to analyze that way but no doubt there will be programs that find optimal strategies for hold em or at least almost optimal ones. But opponent modeling and maximal strategies are more interesting... Beyond that there's a whole level to table stakes poker (is that what it's called?) that makes it hard to analyze. The fact that the range of bets you can make is so large is hard to analyze... Also I think the math that's been used breaks down for more than two players at a table. Beyond that there's analysis of the flow of money around the table over multiple hands. For instance it's better to lose to a loose player than to a tight player because you're more likely to get your money back from a loose player (this may not matter for tournament rules where you play till only one contestant is left).