For tic tac toe or straightforward connect N games, It is impossible to construct a situation where not having a piece in a position is better than having it. Zugzwang is impossible. Thus you know these games are either a first player win or a tie.

But this argument doesn't work for connect-4 (a la Hasbro). There, you sometimes prefer not to have a piece in a position, because your opponent could win by putting one on top of it. As it happens it's still a first player win, but it's tricky to prove without exhausting all possibilities.

Again Go proves superior: Memorizing Go openings is a start. Learning why they work the way they do is required.

Again poor Go players show their silliness. Do you think Carlsen can skip why Caro-Kahn works the way it does?

And yes, I refuse to believe you are a strong go player, because then you'd know how silly that statement was.

the best Go software commercially available

Does it say that on the box? Because I strongly doubt he does. Can your dad beat a top pro with only 4 handicap stones? Because both Zen and Crazy Stone have achieved that.

Maybe he can beat the best commercial go software from 2008 or so. In that case he's still very good, and few people would manage that without being at least club players (and thus ranked).

Go is a perimeter game and is really no more complex than Othello. A simple neural net (I hate that fucking term) algorithm trained against average Go-playing humans will end up being average at playing Go.

How impressive that you can know that without having tried. How do I know you haven't tried it? Because it's totally wrong...

Apparently there is no decent Go computer player in the world that can beat more than an average Go human player.

Not true any longer. Not by far. The best humans are still best, but computers are getting good. Really good. Holding 6 dan at KGS good. That means they are a match for the top club players.

To put it into perspective: If you make Go your only hobby right now, and practice every day for 5 years, and you're a damn smart guy, you're still unlikely to become better than Zen is now - let alone better than Zen will be in 5 years.

Traitorous spies? No, that is false. The law was written to deal with socialists advocating isolationism in WWI.

The dice are there to force you out of your prior expectations, and keep you from going down the same old paths.

This was one of the central messages of Kirk Botula's "Complete book of Villains", IMHO one of the most underestimated RPG accessories of all time. Many bestselling fiction writers would have been better for reading that book.

If you tell a person "make up a hero", or "make up a villain", he might make up an original one - once or twice. Then odds are they'll start to resemble each other, and display lack of interesting diversity. Botula's advice was to use die rolls, and try to make sense of them. So your villain has high intelligence but low wisdom. How can we interpret that?

Or you could roll for a villain's motives. Wealth? Power? The need to feel loved? Or even the need to be seen as the good guy?

And as always, of course, not slavishly follow the die rolls. If every villain is super-complex, you get a soap opera. Some combinations just don't make sense (or, at least, you're going to get a really weird world if you always try to force them to make sense.)

Basically, you use randomness to resist your own biases and predictability, and push the limits of your creativity and imagination.

No, a property transfer has two parties

So you're a libertarian. You think property rights have some sort of objective platonic existence apart from the social framework they exist in. Fair enough, tone flag all you want, but it'd be nice if you adressed my arguments as well.

I gave examples that even people who run bitcoin tumblers, presumably even more hardcore libertarians than you, do in fact object to anonymising some people's payments (namely, the FBI's, or anyone taking money from them). Whereas they earlier had anonymized even known stolen money (from hacks, scams etc.) when the FBI is involved, they suddenly think some people don't have the right to anonymous payments. And we're not just talking the FBI here, we're talking any people getting money the FBI at one time touched - so they can't just say that government is especially evul so normal rules don't apply wrt. them.

People using zerocoin or coinjoin get privacy for their own information-leaking transactions - but at the cost of getting coin that may have been involved in some extremely evil shit. "Well, nobody would care about that since they know you got them blindly", advocates say. Not so. You risk people treating it like stolen goods and demanding its return, just like Jewish families demand the return of art stolen during WW2, or Egyptians demand back stuff from the British Museum.
So you got that stuff good faith? Tough luck, people don't have to be reasonable (and there's a question of how innocent you are, since you participated in a scheme capable of obfuscating even the most vile and illegitimate property transfers).

Property claims don't go away so easily. Much as you would like it, the block chain isn't the final word on who legitimately owns what.

For that matter, it doesn't have to be governments or nice and upstanding citizens demanding return of stolen goods. Picture this scenario: Someone burns a mafia boss for $100000 in bitcoin. He swears that he'll get his revenge on whoever holds the coin, and tells the world (in order that the thief should get as much trouble as possible cashing out, and pay as high a premium as possible). However, the thief uses zerocoin. So do you, because you thought it a little awkward to buy condoms. From Zerocoin you end up with a coin stolen from the mafia boss. Unfortunately, you never heard of the mafia boss' ultimatum, and you get gunned down some weeks after spending the money at a known location. A libertarian martyr, for the thief's inherent right to anonymously transfer stolen money. Worth it? I think not.

That's an extreme example. But it shows that the whole premise of tumblers, decentralized (like zerocoin) or not, is that people will give up their claims on an asset just because it's passed through many oblivious hands. That is a flawed premise. Only people who don't get that will be dumb enough to put clean money into tumblers.

Yes, that's not surprising as elections aren't very democratic:

It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election. -- Aristotle

It does matter that the coins are dirty. If you purchase a painting, and that painting turns out to have been stolen by Nazis from a Jewish family during the Holocaust, you're out of luck - even though the war was 70 years ago, you will probably have to return it. Where the painting has been in the meantime, and how many hands it's went through, doesn't matter.

Bitcoin differ from regular currency in that they are not homogenous, and are forever traceable, like works of art. More so than works of art, in fact, which can be forged or defaced (removing signatures, etc.).

The people coming after you might have a reasonably just cause, like people seeking the return of stolen artifacts. Or they may have an unjust cause - the government, or the mob, might decide to make an example of you for trading with people who've stolen from them, even if you did so unwittingly.

Protocols such as coinjoin or zerocoin don't solve the participation problem. There's still nothing in it for people with clean coin.

I'm of the opinion that property transfers shouldn't in general be a private matter. A property transfer has three parties: the two people exchanging property, and the society which agrees to respect the property transfer as valid (so that if they find the lost wallet or runaway slave, they return it to Bob and not Alice. Hey, who says property rights are always right?). Libertarians tend to think the third party isn't there, that property somehow has independent existence apart from the society which institutes and respects it. It's messy, this society party, but unfortunately it can't be disregarded.

Sometimes we (as part of this messy third party, society) might want to permit anonymous property transfers. But then, it's usually because the property transfer leaks information about something else, that we do recognize as being a private matter ("Oh, he's buying condoms?")

Even people who on paper support anonymous payments turn out to have scruples. Silk Road did not permit trading in child porn or hit contracts (although DPR tried to buy the latter himself). The guy who runs the bitcoinfog tumbler has allegedly blacklisted the FBI-seized coins (which is darkly funny to me as he had no qualms about helping trying to launder e.g. the coins stolen from Sheep Marketplace - and taking a cut for it). So really we all agree: not ALL payments ought to be anonymous. We just quibble on the details.

So what you're going to see if zerocoin/coinjoin takes off, is tiers. Your coin may be dirty, but there are coins that are dirtier. You don't want to stand shoulder to sholder with child pornographers, murderers or (gasp!) FBI agents just because you want to buy prevention privately.

They don't work as presently designed, because only an idiot would put clean money in. You might get back coin associated with a crime, and what would be in that for you? All risk and no gain.

The only way to make tumblers work is to bribe the people with clean coin, give them a hefty premium for participating. That's how money laundering works in the offline work as well. Sure, there's money to be made as a mule ... for a little while.

Legal notification of infringement is an example of a speech act that does more than convey information. Like giving a marriage vow, signing a painting or entering the password to your net bank, it has a function outside conveying information (formal commitment in the first case, asserting authorship and identity in the next).

Using free speech as an argument to defend that is idiotic. They might as well argue that they have a constitutional right to lie on their tax forms, or to their shareholders.

The healthy person isn't part of a potentially doomed set unless you harvest his organs.

Well, I suppose you anonymous cowards live forever, but I don't assume that I will.

No, it is not. To quote Thoreau: "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders."

The first imperative is that you don't do anything evil yourself. If you fail to distinguishing between doing something and "letting something happen", you can be scared into supporting any injustice or atrocity by the intangible ghosts of ever greater ones.

We are not masters of the world of outcomes. You can pull the lever any way you choose, and in the real world, as opposed to trolly problems, you don't know what will happen. This is especially important if it relies on another person's decision, but even if it's not, it's still true.

We are, however, masters of our own decisions (or it is at least morally imperative to assume we are). You can choose to divert the trolley from the one, or the five; as long as your intent is to divert the trolley away from one (and not towards the other) then you cannot be morally condemned for either. Nor can you be condemned for doing nothing and letting the universe explode (or whatever the trolly problem writer dreamed up for that eventuality).