Comment If there were a Mt. Rushmore of computer gaming... (Score 1) 163
John Carmack's head would not only be on it, it would have the highest polygon count.
Umm, what about Shigeru Miyamoto?
Ahh, wait, no, his head would be built out of sprites.
Comment $1.900.000.000 for a building (Score 1) 87
Haven't heard of real estate prices like this since pre-bubble Tokyo. What's going on here? Are a bunch of fiber cables really that valuable?
Submission + - Paypal withdraw Wikileaks donation service (bbc.co.uk)
ItsIllak writes: The BBC are reporting that Paypal are the latest company to abandon Wikileaks. The list now includes their DNS providers (EveryDNS) and their hosts (Amazon). Paypal's move is unlikely to result in many more people boycotting the company as most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years for a wide variety of abusive practices!
Submission + - PayPal cuts off Wikileaks (domaincensorship.com)
lothos writes: PayPal has released a statement on their blog: “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.”
This move comes right on the heels of Amazon cutting off hosting for wikileaks.org and EasyDNS.net terminating DNS services for wikileaks.org.
This move comes right on the heels of Amazon cutting off hosting for wikileaks.org and EasyDNS.net terminating DNS services for wikileaks.org.
Comment A subset of PDF files? (Score 1) 179
Couldn't they have just required that the text portions of a PDF files are actually text?
Comment Re:Chess (Score 1) 418
Then it seems to me you have an odd notion of what's primitive. Aren't the most intelligent (and arguably the least primitive) agents those who arrive at optimal decisions through the least amount of work and resources? In other words, adaptable efficient agents that avoid redundant steps. How well then does an agent based on a min/max algorithm fare if it can't even beat a human agent with less computational resources at a game of go?
Humans would never have evolved into intelligent beings if intelligence involved spending a lot of resources, as they would've been overrun by more energy efficient species.
Humans would never have evolved into intelligent beings if intelligence involved spending a lot of resources, as they would've been overrun by more energy efficient species.
Submission + - 60 years of Hamming codes (cio.com.au)
swandives writes: In 1950 Bell Labs researcher Richard W. Hamming made a discovery that would lay an important foundation for the modern computing and communications industries — coming up with a method for performing computing operations on a large scale without errors. Hamming wrote about how self-checking circuits help eliminate errors in telephone central offices. He speculated the “special codes” he proposed — which became known as Hamming codes — would only need to be applied to systems requiring unattended operation for long periods or “extremely large and tightly integrated” systems where a single failure would incapacitate the entire installation.
Hamming code was the first discovery in an immense field called coding theory. This article looks back on the history of Hamming codes, their applications, and includes interviews with Todd Moon, Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Utah State University and David MacKay, Professor of natural philosophy in the department of Physics at the University of Cambridge and chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. An interesting read, about a little-known but fundamental element of information theory.
Hamming code was the first discovery in an immense field called coding theory. This article looks back on the history of Hamming codes, their applications, and includes interviews with Todd Moon, Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Utah State University and David MacKay, Professor of natural philosophy in the department of Physics at the University of Cambridge and chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change. An interesting read, about a little-known but fundamental element of information theory.
Submission + - Upcoming wikileaks release to stress american ties (www.cbc.ca)
mirix writes: CBC reports that the US has told Canada that an impending wikileaks release may cause a negative impact on US ties with foreign nations.
Apparently the US is also informing other nations of the release — It could be pretty damning if they are bothering to notify foreign ministers beforehand.
Apparently the US is also informing other nations of the release — It could be pretty damning if they are bothering to notify foreign ministers beforehand.
Comment Re:Chess (Score 2, Insightful) 418
In fact, 'go's impermeability to computerized victory is attributed more to a lack of computational power. Make a game small enough and min/max trees will make it impossible to win against the computer.
Absolutely not. A min/max tree as a primary method of strategy is a primitive brute force hack approach to game theory. We humans don't nearly rely as much on computational brute force because we simply don't have the capacity for it (mostly because our brain's short term memory has a very high write latency). The fact that one trick pony computer programs are quite successful in chess is the exact reason why I find it less stimulating: it mostly just requires a lot of 'looking ahead'. Go, on the other hand, requires a player to combine that skill with keen pattern recognition abilities and showcases how a combination of diverse skills ability enables a very long lurning curve (the difference between a high kyuu and a high dan in Go is truly a marvel). The go tree branches so quickly that no Moore's law in the foreseeable future is going to be of much help, without developing more intelligent AI / game theory, in particular (probabilistic) pattern recognition. So yes, the state of computer theory and the intellectual depth of a game are very much related, I believe.
Comment Re:Chess (Score 2, Informative) 418
Oh, I know, but I was trying to be motivational. If I was replying to BadAnalogyGal, I would have said: "Real women play go."
Comment Re:Chess (Score 1, Informative) 418
Dude, chess is child's play. Real men play go.
Comment Re:Elephant in the room (Score 1) 140
From Japan's point of view, it makes sense to augment society's ability to cope with the increased workload by developing robots capable of doing a lot of the work.
Capable androids require NLP. Maybe a car analogy might help you: they're trying to invent an automobile by designing windshields and dashboards, instead of developing a working engine.
Comment Elephant in the room (Score 4, Interesting) 140
I don't understand why Japan is so obsessed with creating androids, while (arguably) the most essential technology behind enabling interaction with humans; the AI field of Natural Language Processing is being glossed over (or at least not getting the amount of attention it deserves). Not just computers, but humans too (and Japanese people in particular) tend to have great difficulty handling the barriers that foreign languages pose to vast amounts of useful foreign data. A successful grammar independent NLP framework for data representation, now that should be a goal to focus on. Everywhere, but in particular in insular countries like Japan. Sorry for wandering off topic...
Submission + - Case of abusive treatment by US border gestapo (salon.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Another case of abusive treatment by US border gestapo involving air travel — #acta #coica #dmca #eff #fsf #geek
Comment Re:In this case I really doubt it (Score 1) 738
And yet, I hear the same comments about China I heard about Japan in the 70s and early 80s: they just copy, they don't innovate, and have a mediocre directed economy. And then they ate our lunch. I expect the same to happen with China. They will eat our lunch, because we're only looking at where they are, not where they're going.
The Japanese have been doing little lunch eating since their bubble economy burst two decades ago though. Must have ruined their appetite...
