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Comment Re:Just give the option to turn it off... (Score 2) 823

Even at 10 mph you can clearly hear the tires of an electric car. Especially blind people who usually have excellent hearing.

Now, of course, if you compare an electric car to a Ford Mustang, people are probably more likely to notice the sound of the latter. Compare it to a Rolls Royce, though, and you'll find a much smaller difference if any at all. They'll have us add noise to electric cars to actually let them noisier than some conventional cars, it's ridiculous.

Please, can we just have quieter roads? Does everything have to make noise all the time to warn the idiots who don't pay attention? I would just like to hear the birds sing.

Comment Re:Perfect? Really? (Score 1) 340

The big difference with rock/paper/scissors is that in poker, your opponent's actions are input to your own decision. In cases where you have the advantage, they may let your algorithm think it has a disadvantage by betting in a different, unexpected way. But if you don't take your opponent's actions into account, you're throwing information away AND you're giving them information based on your bets. Apparently this amount of information is small enough in limit poker.

Comment Re:Perfect? Really? (Score 1) 340

The robot doesn't bet $100 every time it thinks it has a 73% chance of winning. Its algorithm will be something like "if I have a 73% of winning, I will pick a random number and make certain bets with certain predetermined probablilities. For some cards, it could bet 60% of the time and fold 40% of the time, determined by chance. Strategies that couple fixed actions to certain scenarios have no chance of beating a player or bot with an optimal randomized strategy.

It's called a Nash equilibrium. The only problem is that the other player's actions are part of your input, and they can therefore influence your decisions. This complicates things enormously.

Comment Re:Perfect? Really? (Score 1) 340

So are you saying that a bot that ONLY looks at the visible cards and not at the actions of the other players, will beat human players? Because that's what you seem to be saying and it goes against everything I know about poker (which is, admittedely, not that much). Poker is all about deception, getting people to join in instead of folding when you have a good hand, betting big with bad cards if you suspect the opponents also have bad cards, but not too often so they don't call your bluff, etc. It's an extremely complex psychological game. If you just play by the mathematical odds of the known cards, and especially if the opponent knows that you're playing that way, you're simply a fish. They can tell what cards you have by the amount you bet, and this gives them a huge advantage.

The only reason why the researchers were able to "solve" the game (or at least claim they did) is because they played a very limited variant with a low number of possiblities for bets, drastically reducing the opportunity for psychological games so that math can indeed prevail.

Comment Re:I guess that means ... (Score 1) 340

Actually, consistently winning at blackjack is perfectly possible. The problem is that the strategy is so obvious that you get thrown out of the casino. Basically the house advantage depends on the cards remaining in the deck. You play with low bets until a relatively rare situation occurs where, based on the cards you have already seen and counted, you can determine that the advantage with the current remaining deck is temporarily for the player. Then you take out the big chips. And then a few minutes later a guy in a black suit kindly asks you to leave.

Comment Re:Man vs Machine? (Score 1) 289

Yes, why can't we just decree that, instead of 12:00:00 UTC on two very specific days of the year corresponding to the time when the sun is precisely overhead some specific point in Greenwich, it will now be precisely overhead some point a few hundred meters east of that point (still in Greenwich)? Or, for all I care, over Southend-on-Sea (several hundred years from now)? WIll that make any difference at all in people's lives? People wielding sextants can just compensate for the difference, I don't see how that would be a problem. It would be a small correction that only changes slowly over time.

At some point we can make time zone changes without touching UTC. Time zones have been shifted so many times in the recent past, I don't see how it could be a huge problem to make such a change once every few hundred years. And computers should be using UTC anyway, converting to and from local time for user display and time entry only.

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