Ah I see you already noted the FLOP thing. My reading comprehension sucks today

That is quite interesting, but I think my point may stand. Remember, standard chess matches last for hours. How long can the phone maintain maximum power before having to throttle to keep itself from burning up? And even if heat isn't an issue and we assume it's plugged in, can it pull enough juice through a USB charger to maintain that power? (My Nexus 7 loses power faster than it charges while I'm playing a graphics intensive game.)

Also, I'm not sure why Deep Blue was rated in terms of FLOPs. I don't see how floating point operations are relevant to discrete problems like chess position analysis.

Is this actually true? I'm aware of the recent grandmaster-in-the-bathroom-with-an-iPhone scandal but I had assumed the phone was tied to a desktop at home doing the analysis. My reasoning was thus: ARM processors aren't as powerful (hz for hz) as x86, the existing ARM-optimized chess codebase is presumably much smaller, and most importantly the processing power of smart phones is limited by both heat dissipation and battery life.

I would be surprised if a high-end smartphone in the world could out-compute a reasonably spec'ed desktop from the early 2000s (which was point at which computers began to rather consistently beat grandmasters.) The lack of CPU fan is the biggest limiting factor of all.

You're a decade too late. Even a modestly budgeted machine will (if not intentionally underpowered) romp over master chess players.

I get what you're saying and I'm sure an arimaa grandmaster, if one existed, could beat that particular program. However, you're ignoring the other side of the coin. There have been orders of magnitude more effort expended on writing chess-playing software vs. arimaa-playing software.

Go is much simpler and deeper (although computers are getting pretty good there, too.)

Arimaa isn't a bad game, but despite the claims of its creator I'm not convinced it's simpler than chess. Chess has a few idiosyncratic and tournament-specific rules (three move repetition, castling, double pawn move and the rare en passant capture, having to "checkmate" the king instead of simply capturing him, etc.), but if you ignore those for a moment... chess has straightforward capture, a static setup, and a single method of winning the game. The only thing you have to actually memorize are the 6 different piece movements, the unique rule about knight movement, the unique rule about pawn movement, and the promotion of pawns bit. That's pretty much it. All of the other rules in chess are there for historical reasons or to improve the pace of gameplay among experts--they don't drastically affect the flavor, tactics or depth of the game. If armiaa became a worldwide pastime played by millions, they would surely develop their own array of minor rule tweaks.

So, compare chess's fundamentals (ignoring the ) these are arimaa's fundamentals:

1. Moving one piece one square (plus pushing/pulling--see below) counts as one move. You make four moves per turn. Not bad. It's only slightly more complicated than "move one piece per turn", yet being able to split up a single turn among multiple pieces or pool it all into a single piece is a great way to add depth. (It's not unlike action points in Fallout.) And other than rabbits the pieces all move the same way--obviously, this is simpler than chess.

2. Piece interaction and capture is, um, involved. First, you have a nested hierarchy of pieces that must be memorized (yes, it's "easy" because it's easy to remember that an elephant is bigger than a horse but I don't think that makes it simpler than chess's "any piece can capture any other piece".) Second, there are four different ways to influence an enemy piece: you can pin, pull, push or blockade (blockades only exist in chess in the special case of pawns.) This influence can be used to maneuver an enemy piece over a special trap square, which is which kills the piece... unless there's a friendly piece nearby to save it.

There's a sort of intuitive, real world justification for what is going on ("you see, the horse is grabbing onto the cat's tail, and these four squares here with stickers on them are actually deep holes..."), but I'm not sure how you can call the actual game mechanics simple as compared to chess.

3. The victory condition is getting a rabbit to the other side of the board or killing all of the opponent's rabbits. Like pawns, they can't move backwards. Let's just consider for a moment a game of chess wherein the goal of "kill the king" (again, we're ignoring all of this checkmate nonsense that grew over the centuries) was changed to "kill all of the opponent's pawns". That this would make the game deeper, I don't doubt... but simpler?

If you are talking, it is rather easy to notice a serious helium leak. If I were working in an area where helium asphyxiation was a risk, I would make it a point to sing out loud while I was doing it.

This technique doesn't work so well with argon or nitrogen. That was the only point I was trying to make there.

Yes, I've already made that point. My question isn't about discomfort; it's about how the onset could be so fast. The only explanation I've seen so far is that your body actively expels O2 from your bloodstream while breathing an inert gas (vs. simply exhaling the contents of your lungs and then not inhaling), but I still have an extremely hard time seeing how this could lead to 10 seconds of consciousness *maximum* as TFS says.

That's still limited by the amount of blood in contact with your lung tissues. 10 seconds (given as a maxmium!) is a really short amount of time. How can all of your blood deoxygenate so quickly?

I know from experience that it takes at least 4-5 seconds or so to choke someone out (this has nothing to do with breathing--this means cutting off the blood flow to the head by applying pressure to the sides of the neck.) Hell, supposedly it takes 5+ seconds for a guillotined head to lose consciousness. In the absence of hard and detailed data, I have a very hard time believing anoxia from inert gas would be only twice as long as near-instantaneous hypovolemic anoxia. I don't think our cardiopulmonary system is so efficient at expelling O2.

Still, we used to hold our breath for sport as kids, sometimes mixing up it by requiring a complete exhalation first. Try it yourself; you should be able to hit 30 seconds even if you're out of shape. I'm not understanding how "less than ten seconds" (i.e. ten seconds as a maximum time, not a minimum) is realistic, especially given a convict who is consciously trying to conserve his oxygen supply.

It's weird how many people bring up the guillotine as the gold standard, given we're pretty sure that the head will remain conscious for some seconds afterwards.

Shooting in the head with a shotgun would be much more humane, but as others have noted there has always been an intentional conflation of "humane" and "comfort level of the spectators."

As the parent noted, it's not as dangerous (in the sense of being undetectable) if people in the room are talking. Argon would be just as dangerous.

Um, what? How the hell does that work? When I was a kid I tried to sing an entire song while doing multiple helium inhales in a row, not stopping for air. It was over a minute before the room suddenly went a little dark and spin-y.

It wasn't at all painful. I didn't notice anything different at all until seconds before I was (presumably) going to pass out. If it were deemed uncomfortable, the condemned could be given an oral or gaseous anesthetic first.

The death penalty is wrong and stupid in many ways, but I hope we can at least put aside the quibbling over method now. It has been a ridiculous distraction from the real issues.

I will donate $1000 to the first Super PAC willing to make federal gyrocopter subsidy a top priority. (Seriously those things are awesome, but we still don't have a good tipjet solution.)

I mean this is what...15 years after Napster? We've had Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark, Slacker, etc. for years now. Plus iTunes, Google Play and Amazon MP3. And the exceptionally lazy/cheap can use Youtube for all their music needs.

But no, now is the moment that we will make those motherfuckers in radio pay.

Not that I've any love of Clear Channel, but still. Terrestrial radio is already an almost unbearable promotional and self-promotional machine (I know this because I have an old car without an audio line in or even CD player.) Satellite radio, while having some nice content, is more expensive than all of their internet competitors while being much less flexible and having a much smaller selection.

This isn't going to give the artists a significant amount of money, but it is going to waste a significant amount of time.

There is already a known method of creating cheap, clean hydrogen using thermal electrolysis powered by a large breeder nuclear reactor. This is tragically doomed because of the hysterical nuclear taboo, but geothermal and thermal solar might be doable.

Storage and transport might be bigger issues, as hydrogen doesn't always sit still and behave itself when pressurized and stored in an ordinary metal tank. If battery tech ever improves, high voltage D/C is going to be a much method of transport vs. screwing around with hydrogen. But the cheap and/or durable batteries have yet to materialize, so hydrogen remains worth thinking about.

Either way, batteries or hydrogen, it's intellectually dishonest to claim it ties us to fossil fuels in the same manner as gasoline. Hydrogen can be made from electricity and there are many, many different ways to make electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lover_Come_Back_%281961_film%29

Alcoholic candy. (Spoiler alert?) And their version was going to be banned as well.

It's pretty good if you like screwball comedies.