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Comment It did well for about 50% of the tested games (Score 1) 148

Of the 49 games tested there were about half which it did not do as well as a human player. They rated the performance of the AI against random play which equals 0 and a fairly skilled human player at 100%. The games the DQN agent did poorly at were:

  • Montezuma's revenge 0%
  • Private Eye 2%
  • Gravitar 5%
  • Frostbite 6%
  • Asteroids 7%
  • Ms. Pac-Man 13%
  • Bowling 14%
  • Double Dunk 17%
  • Seaquest 25%
  • Venture 32%
  • Alien 42%
  • Amidar 43%
  • Zaxxon 54%
  • ...

It would be interesting to compare the games it did well at Vs those it did poorly at. Unfortunately I do not know my Atari games well enough to comment,

Comment Re:How about energy conservation? (Score 3, Interesting) 288

While others have stated that though conversation of energy is one of the main axioms of physics it does not necessarily apply to the creation of the Universe, only what is within it. However many physicist believe that the net energy of the Universe is zero as the potential energy of gravity is negative, balancing out the positive energy in the Universe.

Comment Nutrition is a minefield (Score 1) 958

In a way the differing ever changing advice regarding nutrition is no surprise. Conducting studies on people who you can't really control poses lots of problems when collecting and analysing the data. This can create a situation where different studies seem to come up with different results and then journalists or people with a vested interest can run away with the results they favour, over blowing the facts to fit their agenda.

Now I will contradict myself and say that really nutrition advice hasn't changed, well at least science based nutrition. Eat a varied diet, avoid overly processed foods and simple carbohydrates, more importantly do lots of exercise. Only then worry about what number of eggs are optimal for health.

What really bugs me about nutrition is a new wave of "scientific based" advice which is contrarian to most other previous advice. A good example is the idea that saturated fats are good for you and carbohydrates and vegetable fats are bad. A number of highly moderated posts above link to the article The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease by Nina Teicholz. The article is a condensed version of her book which gets an absolute pasting The Big Fat Surprise: A Critical Review; Part 1. She accuses scientists of bad practice and hiding data, yet quote mines studies leaving out the conclusions which undermine her thesis.

Comment My Experience (Score 3, Insightful) 467

I have tried a few paid options and a number of free antivirus. Nothing as yet has convinced me to use a paid option.
For Windows 8 there is no need as Microsoft Security Essentials, renamed Windows Defender, is good enough. Otherwise I use Avast, which seems to work well and comes with a few handy options like a software updater and the option to run a scan at boot time. Though it can be annoying recently as it reminds you of other paid features like VPN tunnels.

Steer clear of Norton for God's sake, it seems as bad as the disease itself. I dislike Symentec and had problems in the past with AVG. A few years back an update prevented browsers from accessing the internet.

If you think you may be infected try running a scan of the free version of Malwarebytes, it gives a good second opinion and is great at cleaning up some infections.

Comment I wish (Score 1) 1

The E-Cat would be an amazing device if it worked as claimed, it goes against what most experts reckon about nuclear fusion so its evidence has to be very good. In the report the most interesting piece of evidence are the isotope changes in the spent fuel, which point to some sort of nuclear reaction. Even though no radiation was detected coming from the device, how is that possible?

The dummy reactor was switched on at 12:20 PM of 24 February 2014 by Andrea Rossi who gradually brought it to the power level requested by us. Rossi later intervened to switch off the dummy, and in the following subsequent operations on the E-Cat: charge insertion, reactor startup, reactor shutdown and powder charge extraction.

Oh. More independent research without Rossi's involvement please! Yeah I don't believe it works but I am open to changing my mind if the evidence warrants it which this report does not.

Submission + - Andrea Rossi's E-Cat cold fusion reactor 'verified' by third-party researchers 1

zzats writes: Extremetech is running an article of Italian inventor Andrea Rossi's cold fusion reactor E-Cat having been verified by a third-party research group. Rossi has claimed having a working cold fusion reactor before, which the audience Slashdot has received with quite a bit of skepticism in the past. "Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat — the device that purports to use cold fusion to generate massive amounts of cheap, green energy – has been verified by third-party researchers, according to a new 54-page report. The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or “far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.” The article also adds that "The researchers are very careful about not actually saying that cold fusion/LENR is the source of the E-Cat’s energy, instead merely saying that an “unknown reaction” is at work. "

Comment Comparable Intervention (Score 1) 588

The abstract says, "A low-carbohydrate (<40 g/d) or low-fat ( >30% of daily energy intake from total fat [>7% saturated fat]) diet.".

If I am reading this correctly the low carbohydrate diets only had 40 grams of carbohydrate, or less, per day. This is a major change from the typical American diet, one medium size potato contains about 40 grams of carbohydrate. With such a low bar the usual habit of eating lots of bread, pasta, potatoes and rice is not possible and you really have to try changing your diet. As one of the major failings of the modern Western diet is too much processed, simple to digest carbohydrates the changes they made were probably exactly the right ones to make.

While the low fat diet stipulates less than 30% fat, the average American diet gets about 35% of their calories from fat. I can imagine that these people only slightly tweaked their diet. Maybe they ate as before but consumed lower fat versions of the same meals, a recipe to eat more sugars and other processed carbohydrates.

So I am not convinced by the simple description that this study shows more fat is better, I think it is really shows that too many simple carbohydrates are bad.

Well that is how I read the study, what actually happened may be different.

Comment Unfashionable (Score 1) 686

Current cosmology theories suggest that only 5% of the energy content of the Universe is matter. We assume that dark matter which accounts for 84% of matter is boring stuff that only interacts with gravity. What if we are missing out on most of the Universe because dark matter has its own dark forces meaning that dark matter is as varied as our matter?

In this case most aliens are made of dark matter, we can't see them and they can't see us.

Comment Re:[citation needed] (Score 1) 355

"That's why the south pole is colder than the north pole; it's farther away from the sun in winter than the north pole is in its winter."

The main reason why Antarctica is colder is because Antarctica is land and therefore elevated. Combined with its one mile thick ice sheet it is the highest elevated continent on earth. The lack of land at the Arctic means the ice is less stable and therefore makes it much harder for that amount of ice to accumulate. The difference in sunlight reaching the Earth due to its elliptical orbit is about 7% so not a large factor.

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