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Comment Japan: legally required to have an ID at all time (Score 5, Interesting) 380

As a foreigner in Japan, law forces me to carry my "Alien Registration Card" at all time. Policemen stop foreigners here once or twice a month to check for visa overstay. I also carry my French ID, in case of an earthquake or nuclear meltdown so I can get assistance from the Embassy. Most of the time I use my Japanese Driver's License though, as this carries less sensitive information. This is the de facto standard ID here to buy booze or cigarets as Japanese do not have ID cards and insurance cards do not have pictures. This plus my IC work card that I use to buy food at the University restaurant :)

Comment American thing? (Score 1) 169

Pardon my ignorance, bu why exactly should today be a grill day? Is it a US thing? I'm just asking because I never heard of a specific day for grilling. P.S. I live in Japan.

Comment Web servers? (Score 1) 296

Depends of the definition of "my computing time". I'm a web developer, so if it means "time spent in front of my computer w.r.t to another computer" then it's almost 100%. If it's the CPU cycles, since I spend a lot of time on a SSH console, it would somewhere around 40%.

Comment Re:Difficulty with non-standard orthography (Score 1) 91

Disclaimer: I work on finding new ways to use machine translation in intercultural collaboration. What happens most of the time with slang is as you say, a simple mapping. The most efficient way to deal with slang syntactically incorrect terms is to use a custom dictionary in the machine translator. For example, "U" is translated as "you". To make it more complete, you might want to use a complete translation memory, not taking single words. To make it short, you just need a custom element in your translation, to adapt to your domain. That's why machine translation such as Google Translate can't work very well since it can't get the context of the content you want to translate.

Comment Next step: Keynesian beauty contest? (Score 1) 292

By clicking on the "See what the computer is thinking" button I think that the AI works with a simple history based algorithm. Assuming that a human player will only remember the immediate previous throws, it takes the last 4 throw pairs and will search what was the subsequent throw among all the human players who played the same sequence. Then it will just pick the move that defeats the human most likely next throw. My explanations might be a bit clumsy, sorry English is not my mother tongue, but click the button and you will understand.

A possible strategy to defeat the AI would then to search for these patterns yourself and pick the throw that would defeat the throw that the AI thinks would defeat the human's. The problem is that if most players start acting like that, the history will change and the AI wil outsmart the human player again. As some commenters noticed before, there is no dominant strategy in RPS and playing at random seems to be the best.

It reminds me of the Keynesian beauty contest where players have to pick not the prettiest contestants but the contestants that most people thought were pretty. I think think the next step for this algorithm would be to not only rely on the total history but also to make a model of the human player and compute how many moves he/she can read ahead of the CPU. For example, a "naive" player will always play according to the history (e.g. human scissors, CPU rock). A human player reading 1 throw ahead would play in order to defeat the CPU, based on the history (e.g. human paper). A human player seeing this strategy defeat could decide to play 2 moves ahead (e.g. human scissors). Since reading 3 moves ahead is equivalent to the naive one, the CPU would only have to make 3 categories of players.

I am not an expert in game theory but I think it could work...

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