I know that The Big Bang Theory is filmed in front of a live studio audience. But however they manipulate the laughter from that live studio audience -- be it audience manipulation, audio manipulation, or whatever -- gives a result that, to my ears, is indistinguishable from a laugh track. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.

(Yes, I do hear a difference between the laughter in The Big Bang Theory and the laughter in, for example, The Cosby Show, also filmed in front of a live studio audience, but apparently less manipulated.)

Appreciate your comment. Can you provide some examples of how you would word questions to get a useful answer?

A similar situation exists in the card game bridge. There are three major classes of events: open (men and women), women's (only), and senior (old men and old women). There are some mixed events as well (each partnership must have one man and one woman). Teams including a woman win open events from time to time, including at the highest levels. However, by sheer numbers, most of the top players are male -- notwithstanding the era in which Dorothy Hayden Truscott may have been the best player of either sex in the world.

Other than the obvious Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest (plus Stein these days, apparently): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... I found H. J. Tichy's _Effective Writing for Engineers, Managers, and Scientists_ very useful. I haven't finished _Hacker's Delight_ by Henry S. Warren, Jr., but there's some good stuff in there.

The bombs in the Bojinka Plot were primarily nitroglycerin, with some other ingredients. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Nine Men's Morris is a draw with perfect play. Pentago itself is a draw with perfect play if the first player's first move is constrained to be in the corner (before rotating one of the quadrants). Some variants of Nim are first-player-loses, as are some small-board variants of other games (I seem to recall that Go is a loss for the first player on a handful of the very small boards, like 2x4 or something, but I'd have to go look that up.)

From the title, I thought the article was going to discuss why the real World Chess Champion these days is always a computer, and how they should add a qualifier to the sobriquet for the winner of the Carlsen-Anand match: the Human World Chess Champion.

"Pell's motivation was actually not game generation, but general game playing: by the early 1990s, there was a worry that chess-playing AI had delved too deeply into special-case code that was very specific to chess."

Whereas nowadays, there's a worry that brute force solves all AI game-playing problems. If the search space is small enough, you run alpha-beta with iterative deepening and a few other tweaks. If the search space is too large for that, you run Monte-Carlo Tree Search.

I last chatted with Barney Pell at a AAAI conference in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, by that point, he had given up the METAGAME research, primarily because he couldn't get people interested in it.

Oops, ironically, here I am, a stupid American failing to see the other replies because I'm browsing at +2. Sorry.

I'm certainly not going to defend all American stupidity, but look closely at that image in particular. That's a power strip with Type E electrical receptacles, not Type A/B. The likely countries in which that picture may have been taken are Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Monaco, Poland, and Slovakia; definitely not the USA.

Zhang Shan would like to show you her Olympic gold medal in Skeet Shooting! Oh yeah, she won it in 1992, back when men and women competed together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Shan

In modern parlance in at least some branches of academia, "gender" refers to the male/female identity that a person has, whereas "sex" refers to the male/female biology that a person has. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_gender_distinction

2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission

(Dr.) Gamera: when you care enough to send the very best.