Well gee, the top half of this story threads are wrecked, so I'll reply to you.
According to the (non-optimized) version I learned, you're not wrong. The Bottom Middle Non-Corners were the bear of the solution. You had both rotation and orientation to worry about. The Rotation was 18 moves long and the Orientation was 18 moves long.
So one fun prank was to take display cubes and throw them off by the 18 move orientation move, and know that "it looks so close" but no one could fix it, then they have the minor guilt of leaving a "almost solved" cube in shambles! : )
But the various modern tricks make sure you have an easier time when you get there, but like someone else said elsewhere, my horribly clunky method was enough, so I never felt the interest to super-optimize it.
Reversing the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment, this particular article is noticeably short of the backing science paper for the detail hounds to pore over. The meager analysis presented is too simple - "so if this species dies, another one will just step up the food chain", like maybe that Asian Tiger Mosquito. So then just rinse and repeat a second time. "Kill all the mosquitoes and we win."
Unlike things like the Africanized Killer Bee, which as I understand it was greed gone wrong, there's a life and death upside to winning this attempt, so I'm being careful with my words. So straight up, what *could* possibly go wrong? My best guess is something like knocking a hole in the ecology chain and getting unlucky that we did three rounds, celebrated a couple years of victory, and then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.
But the snark question is also a fast shorthand for containability risk. Unlike a problem say with a temporary dominance of destructive wolves, making a mistake with insects could be really hard to fix.
"And you are all missing (surprinsingly) the ability to add things such as 3d printed guns, knives, hooks, crossbows, dildos to your hand. Why settle for just a boring old hand when you can become inspector gadget?!"
Yours is the most general comment I've seen, so I'll reply to you.
Slashdot comment chains run in themes, so once about five themes get going plus some flamebait, that's about where the discussion centers.
But for you, I'll remark that a couple of science fiction writers did stories on 3d printing. For a while that stayed science fiction rather longer than some of the other candidates such as cell phones. But now here we are - a few stories down again today, the 3d gun topic came up. So it's really going to be thrashed out heavily now for the next six years.
"Now here's an easy question to give me a straight answer to: What's the process you follow for submitting these? Are you just filling out the submission form like anyone else and for some mysterious reason the editors post it?"
Just sayin', I noticed you're trying to pin down the question we've all been wondering for years, but he'll keep wriggling around it. Clearly yes he is "affiliated" because there's whatever "infinitely" (to use his favorite synonym of Very Large) close to zero statistical random chance that the only blog posts are his. We just don't know the exact nature of the transactions involved.
Meanwhile in the context of this particular piece, he does seem to be making lots of mistakes. So maybe he thinks "what's the value to me to shake out my reasoning if the commenters will do it for me?" There's no downside for him because we all say our bit, he adds some unclear replies, then he gets to start all over the next week.
"Actually, given the size of the Slashdot audience, I'd wager anything that doesn't amount to mere gibberish will spark some discussion."
Your wager is correct, so I'm not taking it! : )
An easy way to show this is that if someone posts an attempt at a insightful/informative note in the comments, *especially early enough*, it does two things. The "discussion sparked" is directly trackable because the subsequent replies tend to carry that subject title X far down in the threaded format, stopping at the next "highest level node of the tree". Then yes while there are *other* ways, a good post tends to eventually get noticed by the mods and gets at least a couple +1's.
The other thing is if you get a good early start in the thread before the humorists show up, the whole thread becomes better because we don't care as much about those memes farther down after a story is X hours old with 180 comments.
This feature is actually a killer app on the dating phone apps. When you're logged in it encourages meeting new people directly because the apps shows you two are close by, (or not). It's a huge icebreaker to say "hey, looks like you're about five blocks from me, wanna get coffee?"
So for the Facebook aspect I'd focus on the implementation of the Opt-In (to make sure no Facebook silliness is going on), then the key is you *toggle* it on and off all day.
Taking you seriously, this is one of Nostalgia's finest moments.
A ton of us were *exactly* in the right range to use of the three or four Commodore comps from the mid 80's to change the worldview outlook forever. We don't pretend to do much more than hobby projects with them now. But those are the comps that *made us*. It was back when computing, and a little light hacking, was fun. The NSA wasn't (overly) noticeably destroying computer infrastructure. You could get a few long distance calls. Make a few Maze games. Make a couple of Eliza clones. Play seven Pacman clones. Ultimate Wizard. Bang out a homework essay and even get it to print.
I was at the crucial intersection of age, difficulty, and timing between C64 and C128. C64 proved too difficult to Non-Genius me at 9. C128's extra commands allowed me at 12 to create some thirty programs, just enough to taste programming, but still hit Go64 to play the old games. A couple times in the passing decades Commodore Basic was the only language I could whip up a quick test experiment without learning entire new languages. RIP C128.
"I maintain my stance that Windows 9.5 will be the version that changes everything, with Windows 9.8 mostly getting it right."
Nice joke, but I'm actually hoping for this. It would be poetic justice.
Microsoft's new CEO (with a tough to remember name!) Satya Nadella at least seems to be coming from an engineering perspective rather than Steve B's pure marketing. So after he gets settled, I in fact really am hoping he'll be the next Dave Cutler who pulls a stunning new revision to Windows that really makes *almost everyone* happy. Then maybe it will get a Win95-98-2000-2001-Win7 type cleanup but in record time and set the tech world abuzz.
I swear I've learned more 4th hand about Aussie Law on Slashdot than any year in college!
So the way this site works, we get about *eleven* countries chipping in!
USA of course, Australia apparently, Germany, three Scandinavian countries, four people from China and Iran as AC, Britain, Ireland, and your choice of four more!
"I'd heard that it may literally have had to do with the handwriting: the man's handwriting was, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and it takes considerable effort to decipher. His son Christopher devoted a lifetime to it. John Rateliff, who did similar work for drafts of The Hobbit, consulted with a Tolkien graphologist in the process. (He was able to get a rough dating for one scrawl based on the details of the handwriting.) The fact that there even exists such a thing as a "Tolkien graphologist" is absurdly wonderful".
Given Tolkien's use of proper nouns every twelve words, this sounds fascinating!
"The fact that the Lord of the Rings has appendices with back stories, histories, evolution of languages, and sorts of other little interesting tidbits quite clearly show Tolkien was not only an author but a scholar as well."
I was of an odd age that fell between the right ages to truly appreciate Tolkien's efforts. But with a still-young appreciation for finesse, I *did* notice all those appendices. To this day High Fantasy hits a spot that I can't read, but I absolutely noticed the sixty pages (!) of appendices!
I agree, but to abuse a concept from intelligence, (which I also call the No True Scotsman theme), the "Singularity" is when *everybody's* partial approaches "rise and must converge" (Flannery O'Connor).
So you stick a modded Watson on General Knowledge, a chess program, a med diagnostic program, *three* chatterbots with an arbiter meta-module to sync and/or tiebreak, some special custom "awareness" modules, and your pick of twelve skillsets, 14 "hobbies", some self-mod programming, and... you're getting something interesting. Because then you *reverse search* someone with that set of skills and ask the person, "okay, what else makes you intelligent and interesting?"
It used to be called "God of the Gaps" in religious contexts. We're way closer to it all than 2029. Since I know that 70% of y'all are way smarter than lil' ol' me, I just need "someone"... wait for it... ("something"?)... to talk to.
Still calling out to work with someone on a custom modded Chatterbot. "All" we need to do is give it a bunch more modules and then we have a nice experiment on our hands, at least as good as the stuff we've been seeing in the Articles.
Terrifyingly, "The Hate" might be one of the easier first things to simulate in AI!
The reason is that it's often demonstrated with a far lower level "skillset" than the smart comments.
See for example the (thinning?) pure troll posts here. Despite the rise in lots of other things, I'm noticing fewer pure troll posts of the worst vicious kind. I wondered idly why they got here so regularly. Anyone remember the ones that went:
"so you sukerz ya haterz loosers you take it and shove it?"
Any 1000 of you could write a 100 line program that can run circles around that!
I still do one day wish to work with any Chattterbot programmer who wants to try some custom mods.
This is one of the approaches I've been poking at off and on for a while as noted in my remarks over the years in these stories.
To me an instructive experiment is to go all the way to the top and give the program some initial values not unlike Asimovian ones, and then it builds a "like/dislike" matrix of people and things.
It's not that far off from college dorm discussions! : )
So then going back to basics, you feed it info about people doing things, it runs those against its "like/dislike" systems, and updates what it thinks about "people and stuff".
This is one of the areas where Stephen Wolfram's idea of "computational complexity" starts to show up. Feed Info, Evaluate, Update Opinions.
David Gerrold got closer than maybe we think with his SciFi book "When Harlie was one". It's easy for us to get bogged down in arrogance when we have all of experience to trick the machine with Loebner questions, but if we start simple enough, a Chatterbot armed with pre-processed 100 million articles on 100,000 topics and 100,000 people and some expert systems subroutine modules starts to come close enough for me as a "useful entity" to study!
This is where that young boy becomes the youngest Seeker in school history, and then later sends messages via his Superb Owl! Then later Hermione studies hard because she wants to pass her Ordinary Wizard Levels!
Thank you for echoing the angle I have been concerned about for a while now!
We have almost been tricked into believing there are "different classes of copyrights"!
Not counting the cases the courts have specifically ruled on, there's no intrinsic difference between a photo and a song in the copyright sense. Flannery O'Connor had the right idea: "Everything that rises must converge".
So thanks to the Music Industry deciding that Copyrights are Big Biz, then... a student's photos are too. Check out the key phrase from the Color Run suit: "The lawsuit argues that Jackson "gave the Color Run an implied license" to use his pictures and that it "inadvertently" used them in print promotions."
Slashdot Mirror
Well gee, the top half of this story threads are wrecked, so I'll reply to you.
According to the (non-optimized) version I learned, you're not wrong. The Bottom Middle Non-Corners were the bear of the solution. You had both rotation and orientation to worry about. The Rotation was 18 moves long and the Orientation was 18 moves long.
So one fun prank was to take display cubes and throw them off by the 18 move orientation move, and know that "it looks so close" but no one could fix it, then they have the minor guilt of leaving a "almost solved" cube in shambles! : )
But the various modern tricks make sure you have an easier time when you get there, but like someone else said elsewhere, my horribly clunky method was enough, so I never felt the interest to super-optimize it.
Reversing the "what could possibly go wrong" sentiment, this particular article is noticeably short of the backing science paper for the detail hounds to pore over. The meager analysis presented is too simple - "so if this species dies, another one will just step up the food chain", like maybe that Asian Tiger Mosquito. So then just rinse and repeat a second time. "Kill all the mosquitoes and we win."
Unlike things like the Africanized Killer Bee, which as I understand it was greed gone wrong, there's a life and death upside to winning this attempt, so I'm being careful with my words. So straight up, what *could* possibly go wrong? My best guess is something like knocking a hole in the ecology chain and getting unlucky that we did three rounds, celebrated a couple years of victory, and then discovering that mosquito eating bats are in trouble and then damaging the balance of ecology with whatever eats those or something.
But the snark question is also a fast shorthand for containability risk. Unlike a problem say with a temporary dominance of destructive wolves, making a mistake with insects could be really hard to fix.
(Extra CamelCaps mine for emphasis)
I got tired of the caps in HughPickensDOTcom so I finally punched it in...
And there isn't a site! Instead, it's a rewrite to PoncaCityWeLoveYou.com of PoncaCityWeLoveYou fame previously here on Slashdot.
Anyone know why he rebranded into a shell redirect name away from the old one?
As for not mentioning things, it's typical lax editorial policy allowing their favorite submitters to slam stuff through.
"And you are all missing (surprinsingly) the ability to add things such as 3d printed guns, knives, hooks, crossbows, dildos to your hand.
Why settle for just a boring old hand when you can become inspector gadget?!"
Yours is the most general comment I've seen, so I'll reply to you.
Slashdot comment chains run in themes, so once about five themes get going plus some flamebait, that's about where the discussion centers.
But for you, I'll remark that a couple of science fiction writers did stories on 3d printing. For a while that stayed science fiction rather longer than some of the other candidates such as cell phones. But now here we are - a few stories down again today, the 3d gun topic came up. So it's really going to be thrashed out heavily now for the next six years.
Yeah, but not since the original days of Libraries has there been a chance for Library/Staples option to "rent a 3d printer".
That could bring down the price to print something to say $100 + materials and Bring Your Own Design.
"Now here's an easy question to give me a straight answer to: What's the process you follow for submitting these? Are you just filling out the submission form like anyone else and for some mysterious reason the editors post it?"
Just sayin', I noticed you're trying to pin down the question we've all been wondering for years, but he'll keep wriggling around it. Clearly yes he is "affiliated" because there's whatever "infinitely" (to use his favorite synonym of Very Large) close to zero statistical random chance that the only blog posts are his. We just don't know the exact nature of the transactions involved.
Meanwhile in the context of this particular piece, he does seem to be making lots of mistakes. So maybe he thinks "what's the value to me to shake out my reasoning if the commenters will do it for me?" There's no downside for him because we all say our bit, he adds some unclear replies, then he gets to start all over the next week.
"Actually, given the size of the Slashdot audience, I'd wager anything that doesn't amount to mere gibberish will spark some discussion."
Your wager is correct, so I'm not taking it! : )
An easy way to show this is that if someone posts an attempt at a insightful/informative note in the comments, *especially early enough*, it does two things. The "discussion sparked" is directly trackable because the subsequent replies tend to carry that subject title X far down in the threaded format, stopping at the next "highest level node of the tree". Then yes while there are *other* ways, a good post tends to eventually get noticed by the mods and gets at least a couple +1's.
The other thing is if you get a good early start in the thread before the humorists show up, the whole thread becomes better because we don't care as much about those memes farther down after a story is X hours old with 180 comments.
This feature is actually a killer app on the dating phone apps. When you're logged in it encourages meeting new people directly because the apps shows you two are close by, (or not). It's a huge icebreaker to say "hey, looks like you're about five blocks from me, wanna get coffee?"
So for the Facebook aspect I'd focus on the implementation of the Opt-In (to make sure no Facebook silliness is going on), then the key is you *toggle* it on and off all day.
Taking you seriously, this is one of Nostalgia's finest moments.
A ton of us were *exactly* in the right range to use of the three or four Commodore comps from the mid 80's to change the worldview outlook forever. We don't pretend to do much more than hobby projects with them now. But those are the comps that *made us*. It was back when computing, and a little light hacking, was fun. The NSA wasn't (overly) noticeably destroying computer infrastructure. You could get a few long distance calls. Make a few Maze games. Make a couple of Eliza clones. Play seven Pacman clones. Ultimate Wizard. Bang out a homework essay and even get it to print.
It's about the Simpler Time. Nothing _____.
Awww, I gotta chime in here too.
I was at the crucial intersection of age, difficulty, and timing between C64 and C128. C64 proved too difficult to Non-Genius me at 9. C128's extra commands allowed me at 12 to create some thirty programs, just enough to taste programming, but still hit Go64 to play the old games. A couple times in the passing decades Commodore Basic was the only language I could whip up a quick test experiment without learning entire new languages. RIP C128.
I gotta chime in on this one.
Luckily I was a young enough whippersnapper that I didn't know better. But "Keypunch Software" took the IgNoble-80's prize.
They were notorious for using *Ascii* graphics moved by keystroke in their games!
"I maintain my stance that Windows 9.5 will be the version that changes everything, with Windows 9.8 mostly getting it right."
Nice joke, but I'm actually hoping for this. It would be poetic justice.
Microsoft's new CEO (with a tough to remember name!) Satya Nadella at least seems to be coming from an engineering perspective rather than Steve B's pure marketing. So after he gets settled, I in fact really am hoping he'll be the next Dave Cutler who pulls a stunning new revision to Windows that really makes *almost everyone* happy. Then maybe it will get a Win95-98-2000-2001-Win7 type cleanup but in record time and set the tech world abuzz.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Bravo. Truly a Mod-Limit buster.
I even saved a copy to my computer. : )
It's been in development for months, but some middle manager decided that the day that XP died was the day to push this out.
Offtopic: Does anyone know of a Day the Music Died song parody called something like "Day my XP Died"?
But you think you're being cute about "Internet Exploder", right?
But go visit the page yourself!
Did they get hacked? The blue link button ACTUALLY SAYS "Internet Exploder"!!?
So what kind of mixed message is that?!
P.S. I saved a copy of the page in case it's actually a hack that gets reverted later. Such reversions could be post-April-Fools...
Meta joke of the day: Imagine Kate Mulgrew reciting that post! : )
She was also a regent on Warehouse 13.
I swear I've learned more 4th hand about Aussie Law on Slashdot than any year in college!
So the way this site works, we get about *eleven* countries chipping in!
USA of course, Australia apparently, Germany, three Scandinavian countries, four people from China and Iran as AC, Britain, Ireland, and your choice of four more!
"I'd heard that it may literally have had to do with the handwriting: the man's handwriting was, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and it takes considerable effort to decipher. His son Christopher devoted a lifetime to it. John Rateliff, who did similar work for drafts of The Hobbit, consulted with a Tolkien graphologist in the process. (He was able to get a rough dating for one scrawl based on the details of the handwriting.) The fact that there even exists such a thing as a "Tolkien graphologist" is absurdly wonderful".
Given Tolkien's use of proper nouns every twelve words, this sounds fascinating!
"The fact that the Lord of the Rings has appendices with back stories, histories, evolution of languages, and sorts of other little interesting tidbits quite clearly show Tolkien was not only an author but a scholar as well."
I was of an odd age that fell between the right ages to truly appreciate Tolkien's efforts. But with a still-young appreciation for finesse, I *did* notice all those appendices. To this day High Fantasy hits a spot that I can't read, but I absolutely noticed the sixty pages (!) of appendices!
Well, the existentialism of this variant of it is rather tough!
http://garfieldminusgarfield.n...
I agree, but to abuse a concept from intelligence, (which I also call the No True Scotsman theme), the "Singularity" is when *everybody's* partial approaches "rise and must converge" (Flannery O'Connor).
So you stick a modded Watson on General Knowledge, a chess program, a med diagnostic program, *three* chatterbots with an arbiter meta-module to sync and/or tiebreak, some special custom "awareness" modules, and your pick of twelve skillsets, 14 "hobbies", some self-mod programming, and ... you're getting something interesting. Because then you *reverse search* someone with that set of skills and ask the person, "okay, what else makes you intelligent and interesting?"
It used to be called "God of the Gaps" in religious contexts. We're way closer to it all than 2029. Since I know that 70% of y'all are way smarter than lil' ol' me, I just need "someone" ... wait for it ... ("something"?) ... to talk to.
Still calling out to work with someone on a custom modded Chatterbot. "All" we need to do is give it a bunch more modules and then we have a nice experiment on our hands, at least as good as the stuff we've been seeing in the Articles.
Terrifyingly, "The Hate" might be one of the easier first things to simulate in AI!
The reason is that it's often demonstrated with a far lower level "skillset" than the smart comments.
See for example the (thinning?) pure troll posts here. Despite the rise in lots of other things, I'm noticing fewer pure troll posts of the worst vicious kind. I wondered idly why they got here so regularly. Anyone remember the ones that went:
"so you sukerz ya haterz loosers you take it and shove it?"
Any 1000 of you could write a 100 line program that can run circles around that!
I still do one day wish to work with any Chattterbot programmer who wants to try some custom mods.
This is one of the approaches I've been poking at off and on for a while as noted in my remarks over the years in these stories.
To me an instructive experiment is to go all the way to the top and give the program some initial values not unlike Asimovian ones, and then it builds a "like/dislike" matrix of people and things.
It's not that far off from college dorm discussions! : )
So then going back to basics, you feed it info about people doing things, it runs those against its "like/dislike" systems, and updates what it thinks about "people and stuff".
This is one of the areas where Stephen Wolfram's idea of "computational complexity" starts to show up. Feed Info, Evaluate, Update Opinions.
David Gerrold got closer than maybe we think with his SciFi book "When Harlie was one". It's easy for us to get bogged down in arrogance when we have all of experience to trick the machine with Loebner questions, but if we start simple enough, a Chatterbot armed with pre-processed 100 million articles on 100,000 topics and 100,000 people and some expert systems subroutine modules starts to come close enough for me as a "useful entity" to study!
Oh I know this one!
This is where that young boy becomes the youngest Seeker in school history, and then later sends messages via his Superb Owl! Then later Hermione studies hard because she wants to pass her Ordinary Wizard Levels!
Thank you for echoing the angle I have been concerned about for a while now!
We have almost been tricked into believing there are "different classes of copyrights"!
Not counting the cases the courts have specifically ruled on, there's no intrinsic difference between a photo and a song in the copyright sense. Flannery O'Connor had the right idea: "Everything that rises must converge".
So thanks to the Music Industry deciding that Copyrights are Big Biz, then ... a student's photos are too. Check out the key phrase from the Color Run suit:
"The lawsuit argues that Jackson "gave the Color Run an implied license" to use his pictures and that it "inadvertently" used them in print promotions."