Chinook, the strongest checkers program currently out there can search deeper than chess programs, because checkers has a smaller branching factor. As this article suggests, the rule of thumb in chess was that benefit from extra lookahead grows linearly. But what was found by the Chinook team, was that it starts to grow linearly, but after a point, that benefit starts to taper off. It's just likely that the tapering point hasn't been reached in chess yet.
So, while 10 move lookahead may give much better results than 5 move lookahead, 25 vs 20 offers much less advantage. This seems to be the case with othello, in my experience, where strong programs can do 24+ midgame searches (where the game is only 60 moves long).
Speaking of Othello, it's interesting to note that right about the same time as the '97 Kasparov-Deep Blue match, the Othello world champion, Takeshi Murakami (and champion again as of 2000), played a 6 game match against the program Logistello. Logistello won that match 6 games to 0.
Don't forget that the U.S. Navy built the Mark I in 1944. It used electromechanical relays to as switches and could multiply 2 10-digit numbers in 3 seconds (!).
But even before that, Konrad Zuse built the Z1 in 1936, that also used relays and read input from punched film.
Larry Gonnick's The Cartoon Guide to the Computer has some interesting info about this history.
If you're interested in John Cramer's stuff, or physics in general, etc, check out Schrodinger's Kittens by John Gribbin (I think). It's a very good book that gives an overview of Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics. You can find the detailed stuff on his site as well, which I don't remember off the top of my head, and lost my bookmark for anyway.
Re:Oh no, not another Winmodem...
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WinDSL Coming?
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No, you can't update the firmware on a software modem. You can update firmware on a hardware modem though. Software modems don't have firmwares. They do have drivers that control the modulation/demodulation of the signal, etc though. And the fact that you can update a winmodem's drivers, has absolutely nothing to do with anything when it comes to their performance. I used to work tech support at a large ISP, and yes, I know what unreliable beasts they are. But not because you can update them. Also, yes, getting an external modem will generally guarantee that it is not a software based one, but there are hardware based internal modems as well, that are cheaper and just as reliable. You just have to know what you're looking for.
No, the universe is not infinite, and is not infinitely old. Most estimates for the age range somewhere in the 8-20 billion year range. There is also quite a finite amount of matter and energy (and thus information) in our dear universe.
My sentiments, I'm sure, have already been expressed some, but I need a little go at a few things in that article.
That the genetic code may inhabit the quantum multiverse has startling implications. Mutations are the driving force of evolution; it is they that provide the variation that is honed by natural selection into evolutionary paths.
First, mutation isn't necissarily the driving force behind evolution. There's a little something called recombination that's also amazingly important. Go read up on genetic algorithms, and you'll find it's generally more important than mutation is.
Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have arisen by chance alone.
Here we go, it's our old friend the creationist argument against the origin of life. If I thought that the first living thing was a fully formed modern cell, I sure wouldn't believe that it could have arisen by chance either. But the first living thing wasn't going to have been a fully formed cell. Much much simpler things can reproduce themselves. And even simpler things show the right dynamics of life, like autocatalytic networks of chemicals.
Besides all these glaring inaccuracies in the article, it seems as if the author is trying to push a voodoo science. One in which analogy and important sounding words take the place of real science. Unfortunately, I'd have to see the actual book to see how well the reviewer really reviwed it. There really is a grain of something interesting down there, but if it's really got all the hype and hooplah of the review, it'll be pretty useless.
No, our bodies certainly don't need any methanol. The stuff is quite poisonous, and has a nasty habit of making you blind. The stuff you drink is ethanol (C2H5OH), not methanol (CH3OH). The metabolism of which still takes quite a toll on your liver in the long term.
Not to mention, this has absolutely nothing to do with the article, which was about converting CO2 to CH3OH.
Sorry to rant, but I get annoyed when people post stuff they don't know anything about, which has nothing to do with anything.
Like always, I was extremely frustrated at reading his piece. Why? Because as usual, there's a grain of a very good point buried deep in there. Unfortunately, instead of being thought-provoking and discussing it intellegently, he just whips up a bunch of scare mongering sound bites.
I won't even get too much into his horribly inaccurate sysnopsis of Gattaca (I wonder if he's actually watched it, or just read some reviews).
But let's discuss this notion of creating life briefly. To me, it's not terribly amazing. Why? Because we're not creating life. We're just taking an organism, seeing which genes are absolutely necessary, and erasing the rest. This really isn't so amazing if you think about it. It's nothing more than trial-and-error really. Well, a bit more, but even still. We're doing nothing novel. We're not making these genes from scratch; we're just playing with what's already there.
But as I said at first, there really is a good point buried down there. That is about really honestly considering the full implications of it all. DDT would probably have been a good example, but Gattaca was not. I loved the movie, but it was just a movie. It was science fiction, good science fiction, but it was not a documentary, no matter what JonKatz says. --Frustrated Reader
First of all, this seems incredibly flaky. It's possible that it just is because it's a New Scientist article though.
But really, there are several different arrows of time. It seems the one he's talking about is the thermodynamic arrow of time, in which entropy increases from past to future. Another is the psychological arrow of time. That's the one that where we actually perceive time flowing from past to future.
Now comes the interesting part. Unfortunately, I have to admit I didn't come up with this on my own. I think I saw this in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, but it's been a while so I can't be sure. But the idea is that these two arrows are always pointing in the same direction.
That being the case, this seems even more flaky. Especially the part where the author mentions that "backwards time" areas could collide with "normal time" areas and make an area of space that didn't have any arrow of time at all.
I'm by no means an expert on this stuff, but from the little I do know, it seems extremely hard to swallow.
There's a difference between SETI@Home, and this. Climate models are quite dependent on the initial conditions you give them (read chaotic). You could dedicate all the computer power in the world to something like this; you'll extend the time frame we can give reliable results somewhat, but after a while, they'll be just as meaningless as if you used a single computer.
I think I'll stick to some other things like this.
"The action we took clarifies, so there is no equivocation, that the leading theory of how the Earth was created has to do with evolution," board president Flora Sanchez said. "Other ideas may be part of classroom discussion and inquiry, but (the state) does not require their teaching."
While the school board may have come to more or less a good overall decision, Sanchez's statement shows that she does not understand the basics of evolution either.
Evolution has absolulutely nothing to do with how the Earth was created. Evolution has to do with how species change. And calling the evolution the leading theory of how the earth was created (or even if we describe it more accurately, in terms of species changing) is like calling gravity the leading theory of why things fall to the Earth.
I guess you can't expect politicians to understand science.
The red shift (or even blue shift possibly) doesn't measure the actual colors of stars. It instead measures the wavelengths of absorbtion lines in star spectra. These will be offset a certain amount due to the doppler affect. And by measuring the shift, we can get the star's/glaxy's relative speed to us. And from that, we can measure it's approximate distance.
Insightful? How about melodromatic. I have not forgotten the moon landing, and I'm 23 years old; I wasn't even alive for it. I may not have been born yet when JFK was shot, but I still remember where I was when the Challenger exploded.
Personally, I'm sick of all these anniversaries for this and for that. Does it really matter that we put on a big show? Would it make you feel better if a bunch of morning news shows put on a slew of feel-good segments just because something happened some arbitrary number of years ago?
It's funny that you mention Star Trek and its popularity. There have been quite a number of very popular and very successful scifi shows lately, some pretty soap opera-esque, some not. We've had Star Trek: TNG, Voyager, DS9, Babylon 5, Stargate just to name a few.
CNN still airs every shuttle launch we have. We still have quite a public interest in space. We live in a different society than that from the Cold War, and as such, that interest takes on a different form. It's much more scientific, not patriotic.
And flamebait aside, talking about your 'Geek Lobby' has to be one of the most braindead things I've heard in a long time. You want/.'ers to fill up suggestion boxes? You'll probably find them full of: "Make the shuttle run Linux!" or "Let's make a beowulf cluster out of these!"
Aye, as someone who works in tech support for an internet provider, I'm somewhat amazed at the kinds of calls we sometimes get asking us to support totally off the wall things. Every time I get the urge to say something like, "Umm yeah, I just put a steering wheel cover on a few weeks ago, and now my car won't start...maybe I'll call the folks that made the cover and see if they can help me." But back to the original post, I found the site pretty interesting at least. And there were some great pictures in there. I'm not sure how useful any of the maps/mapping programs really were, but they were at least enjoyable to look at.
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So, while 10 move lookahead may give much better results than 5 move lookahead, 25 vs 20 offers much less advantage. This seems to be the case with othello, in my experience, where strong programs can do 24+ midgame searches (where the game is only 60 moves long).
Speaking of Othello, it's interesting to note that right about the same time as the '97 Kasparov-Deep Blue match, the Othello world champion, Takeshi Murakami (and champion again as of 2000), played a 6 game match against the program Logistello. Logistello won that match 6 games to 0.
This is high school math here folks. :)
But even before that, Konrad Zuse built the Z1 in 1936, that also used relays and read input from punched film.
Larry Gonnick's The Cartoon Guide to the Computer has some interesting info about this history.
If you're interested in John Cramer's stuff, or physics in general, etc, check out Schrodinger's Kittens by John Gribbin (I think). It's a very good book that gives an overview of Cramer's Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics. You can find the detailed stuff on his site as well, which I don't remember off the top of my head, and lost my bookmark for anyway.
No, you can't update the firmware on a software modem. You can update firmware on a hardware modem though. Software modems don't have firmwares. They do have drivers that control the modulation/demodulation of the signal, etc though. And the fact that you can update a winmodem's drivers, has absolutely nothing to do with anything when it comes to their performance. I used to work tech support at a large ISP, and yes, I know what unreliable beasts they are. But not because you can update them. Also, yes, getting an external modem will generally guarantee that it is not a software based one, but there are hardware based internal modems as well, that are cheaper and just as reliable. You just have to know what you're looking for.
No, the universe is not infinite, and is not infinitely old. Most estimates for the age range somewhere in the 8-20 billion year range. There is also quite a finite amount of matter and energy (and thus information) in our dear universe.
That the genetic code may inhabit the quantum multiverse has startling implications. Mutations are the driving force of evolution; it is they that provide the variation that is honed by natural selection into evolutionary paths.
First, mutation isn't necissarily the driving force behind evolution. There's a little something called recombination that's also amazingly important. Go read up on genetic algorithms, and you'll find it's generally more important than mutation is.
Most biologists try to understand this event in terms of conventional chemistry -- the random chaotic motion of billions of particles. But even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have arisen by chance alone.
Here we go, it's our old friend the creationist argument against the origin of life. If I thought that the first living thing was a fully formed modern cell, I sure wouldn't believe that it could have arisen by chance either. But the first living thing wasn't going to have been a fully formed cell. Much much simpler things can reproduce themselves. And even simpler things show the right dynamics of life, like autocatalytic networks of chemicals.
Besides all these glaring inaccuracies in the article, it seems as if the author is trying to push a voodoo science. One in which analogy and important sounding words take the place of real science. Unfortunately, I'd have to see the actual book to see how well the reviewer really reviwed it. There really is a grain of something interesting down there, but if it's really got all the hype and hooplah of the review, it'll be pretty useless.
-Dan
Not to mention, this has absolutely nothing to do with the article, which was about converting CO2 to CH3OH.
Sorry to rant, but I get annoyed when people post stuff they don't know anything about, which has nothing to do with anything.
I won't even get too much into his horribly inaccurate sysnopsis of Gattaca (I wonder if he's actually watched it, or just read some reviews).
But let's discuss this notion of creating life briefly. To me, it's not terribly amazing. Why? Because we're not creating life. We're just taking an organism, seeing which genes are absolutely necessary, and erasing the rest. This really isn't so amazing if you think about it. It's nothing more than trial-and-error really. Well, a bit more, but even still. We're doing nothing novel. We're not making these genes from scratch; we're just playing with what's already there.
But as I said at first, there really is a good point buried down there. That is about really honestly considering the full implications of it all. DDT would probably have been a good example, but Gattaca was not. I loved the movie, but it was just a movie. It was science fiction, good science fiction, but it was not a documentary, no matter what JonKatz says. --Frustrated Reader
But really, there are several different arrows of time. It seems the one he's talking about is the thermodynamic arrow of time, in which entropy increases from past to future. Another is the psychological arrow of time. That's the one that where we actually perceive time flowing from past to future.
Now comes the interesting part. Unfortunately, I have to admit I didn't come up with this on my own. I think I saw this in Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, but it's been a while so I can't be sure. But the idea is that these two arrows are always pointing in the same direction.
That being the case, this seems even more flaky. Especially the part where the author mentions that "backwards time" areas could collide with "normal time" areas and make an area of space that didn't have any arrow of time at all.
I'm by no means an expert on this stuff, but from the little I do know, it seems extremely hard to swallow.
I think I'll stick to some other things like this.
While the school board may have come to more or less a good overall decision, Sanchez's statement shows that she does not understand the basics of evolution either.
Evolution has absolulutely nothing to do with how the Earth was created. Evolution has to do with how species change. And calling the evolution the leading theory of how the earth was created (or even if we describe it more accurately, in terms of species changing) is like calling gravity the leading theory of why things fall to the Earth.
I guess you can't expect politicians to understand science.
-Dan
The red shift (or even blue shift possibly) doesn't measure the actual colors of stars. It instead measures the wavelengths of absorbtion lines in star spectra. These will be offset a certain amount due to the doppler affect. And by measuring the shift, we can get the star's/glaxy's relative speed to us. And from that, we can measure it's approximate distance.
Insightful? How about melodromatic. I have not forgotten the moon landing, and I'm 23 years old; I wasn't even alive for it. I may not have been born yet when JFK was shot, but I still remember where I was when the Challenger exploded.
/.'ers to fill up suggestion boxes? You'll probably find them full of: "Make the shuttle run Linux!" or "Let's make a beowulf cluster out of these!"
Personally, I'm sick of all these anniversaries for this and for that. Does it really matter that we put on a big show? Would it make you feel better if a bunch of morning news shows put on a slew of feel-good segments just because something happened some arbitrary number of years ago?
It's funny that you mention Star Trek and its popularity. There have been quite a number of very popular and very successful scifi shows lately, some pretty soap opera-esque, some not. We've had Star Trek: TNG, Voyager, DS9, Babylon 5, Stargate just to name a few.
CNN still airs every shuttle launch we have. We still have quite a public interest in space. We live in a different society than that from the Cold War, and as such, that interest takes on a different form. It's much more scientific, not patriotic.
And flamebait aside, talking about your 'Geek Lobby' has to be one of the most braindead things I've heard in a long time. You want
Please, I'm trying to eat my lunch here.
-Dan
Aye, as someone who works in tech support for an internet provider, I'm somewhat amazed at the kinds of calls we sometimes get asking us to support totally off the wall things. Every time I get the urge to say something like, "Umm yeah, I just put a steering wheel cover on a few weeks ago, and now my car won't start...maybe I'll call the folks that made the cover and see if they can help me." But back to the original post, I found the site pretty interesting at least. And there were some great pictures in there. I'm not sure how useful any of the maps/mapping programs really were, but they were at least enjoyable to look at.