jmdc - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Is chess solved, or were these guys midlevel? (Score 1) 295

by jmdc on Friday March 25, 2011 @09:00PM (#35618716) Attached to: Top French Chess Players Suspended For Cheating

Apparently these are grandmaster level players being accused.

Your comment intrigued me, so I googled chess program strength. The impression that I got was that chess programs have gotten significantly better in just the past few years at evaluating the strength of a position, allowing them to be very aggressive in pruning the search tree.

This is pulled from wikipedia:

Chess engines continue to improve. In 2009 chess engines running on slower hardware have reached the grandmaster level. A mobile phone won a category 6 tournament with a performance rating 2898: chess engine Hiarcs 13 running inside Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina with 9 wins and 1 draw on August 4–14, 2009.[16] Pocket Fritz 4 searches fewer than 20,000 positions per second.[17] This is in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue that searched 200 million positions per second.

Life Found In Deepest Layer of Earth's Crust 335

Posted by Soulskill on Friday November 19, 2010 @02:01PM from the gabbroic-added-to-spellchecker dept.

michaelmarshall writes "For the first time, life has been found in the gabbroic layer of the crust. The new biosphere is all bacteria, as you might expect, but they are different from the bacteria in the layers above; they mostly feed on hydrocarbons that are produced by abiotic reactions deep in the crust. It could mean that similar microbes are living even deeper, perhaps even in the mantle."

Comment Re:I don't really get all the Vista hatred (Score 1) 692

by jmdc on Saturday May 24, 2008 @12:31PM (#23528706) Attached to: Ballmer Says Vista Selling Really Well

I'm one of the people who don't use it that rip on it. However, I'm not totally unreasonable. My impression is that Vista is basically XP with the addition of

DirectX10
UAC
Aero

I don't want any of those features. since

I don't play games, but even if I did, I've seen more than one article critical of the performance, quality and cost - here's an example: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/09/0244212
You yourself turned off UAC, and
Aero is pretty, but I probably don't need video hardware that can run it for anything else (I spend almost all my time in emacs and a web browser, so I never waste money on a powerful video card) So the choice is either turn it off or spend a lot on unnecessary hardware

What it boils down to is I would turn off all the new features that I know of in Vista. If I'm going to do that, I might as well run XP (If I have to run windows that is). Since you're happy with vista, I'd be interested to know what new features you use. Thanks in advance.

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