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Comment Re:I'm not exactly impressed... (Score 1) 190

That's way too much if you're planning on scanning the entire population looking for autism, but as this article notes it could be useful for diagnosis:

The first thing to remember is that this is a scientific paper, and this result is first and foremost of research interest: it provides clues towards the biology, and ultimately the causes, of autism.

But let's suppose you're a clinician and you have someone who you suspect may have autism, but you're not sure. They're a tricky one, a borderline case. You use this system on their brain and it says they are autistic. Should that factor into your decision? It depends. The fact is that rather than an either-or result, the SVM returns a distance from the hyperplane for each brain. You can see this clearly in the plot above.

In my opinion, if you have a borderline case, and the machine says he's borderline, then that's not much help, and it doesn't matter if he's just over the line, or not quite over it. You already knew he was borderline.

But if the machine says that he's deep into the autism space, then I think that is something. It tells you that his brain is very typical of people with autism.

Comment Re:Profit? (Score 1) 216

Although modded funny, parent actually has a good point.

Sure, some people might have a strong preference for a specific drink, but others would likely not really care: they're thirsty, want something to drink from the machine, but don't really care what, and the recommendation is probably easiest to order, so they go with that.

And of course the machine might be influenced a bit by customer demographics, but a smart machine would try to sell more expensive drinks, or the ones it has most left of, saving on refilling costs.

Comment Re:Why approximate numbers? (Score 1) 309

They only solved each position in 20 moves or less, not necessarily in the least possible moves for that position. Since there already was a known position that takes 20 moves this was sufficient to prove 20 moves is the maximum needed, and this sped up the solving by a factor of 1000ish.

Comment Re:It's not cosmic. It's from the die/package (Score 1) 277

There are actual radioactive lead isotopes, and they can interfere with sensitive particle experiments, so neutrino hunters are apparently very happy with roman lead.

I've never heard of it being a problem in supercomputers though, and if your computer flips bits from the tiny bit of radiation lead produces I'd imagine you might be doing something wrong.

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