Comment That's nothing . . . (Score 5, Insightful) 250
Apparently none of these parents have heard of Facebook.
Submission + - Mathematical breakthrough sets out rules for more effective teleportation (cam.ac.uk)
dsinc writes: Once considered impossible, in 1993 a team of scientists calculated that teleportation could work in principle using quantum laws. Quantum teleportation harnesses the âentanglementâ(TM) law to transmit particle-sized bites of information across potentially vast distances in an instant.
Entanglement involves a pair of quantum particles such as electrons or protons that are intrinsically bound together, retaining synchronisation between the two that holds whether the particles are next to each other or on opposing sides of a galaxy. Through this connection, quantum bits of information â" qubits â" can be relayed using only traditional forms of classical communication.
Previous teleportation protocols have fallen into one of two camps, those that could only send scrambled information requiring correction by the receiver or, more recently, âoeport-basedâ teleportation that doesnâ(TM)t require a correction, but needs an impractical amount of entanglement â" as each object sent would destroy the entangled state.
Now, physicists from Cambridge, University College London, and the University of Gdansk have developed a protocol to provide an optimal solution in which the entangled state is ârecycledâ(TM), so that the gateway between particles holds for the teleportation of multiple objects.
Entanglement involves a pair of quantum particles such as electrons or protons that are intrinsically bound together, retaining synchronisation between the two that holds whether the particles are next to each other or on opposing sides of a galaxy. Through this connection, quantum bits of information â" qubits â" can be relayed using only traditional forms of classical communication.
Previous teleportation protocols have fallen into one of two camps, those that could only send scrambled information requiring correction by the receiver or, more recently, âoeport-basedâ teleportation that doesnâ(TM)t require a correction, but needs an impractical amount of entanglement â" as each object sent would destroy the entangled state.
Now, physicists from Cambridge, University College London, and the University of Gdansk have developed a protocol to provide an optimal solution in which the entangled state is ârecycledâ(TM), so that the gateway between particles holds for the teleportation of multiple objects.
Submission + - GCW-Zero The Open Source Gaming Handheld
YokimaSun writes: Fans of Emulation and Homebrew have not had much to cheer about over the years, the recent generation of consoles have all pretty much killed off any hacking by constant firmware updates. The days of PSP Homebrew have died a death and consoles like the Caanoo, GP2x and even the mighty Openpandora never really lived up to the massive expectation. There is a glimmer of hope from a team of homebrew developers who have developed a new console called the GCW-Zero, a new Open Source Handheld system which uses the OpenDingux Linux OS, the specs are impressive with a Ingenic JZ4770 1 GHz MIPS processor, Vivante GC860, capable of OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.5 inch LCD with 320x240 pixels; 4:3 aspect ratio, 512 MB DDR2 and 16GB of internal memory which can via external memory card be extended by another 32GB. N64 and PS1 emulation and everything below should be at full speed in time.
Comment Statistical analysis used in online tournaments (Score 5, Interesting) 328
Over the board (OTB) is one thing, but online (c)heating becomes incredibly hard to detect in situ, for pretty obvious reasons. The online chess community has taken a couple of approaches to detect this. For PlayChess Online (a server that hosts online games), they try to detect if your computer is running another process that is a known Chess Engine while you are playing your game. Easily subverted by having two computers, or even a Virtual Box setup.
The most successful way to detect cheating is in postmortem review. I worked with the ICC/FICS Slow Time Control league team (one guy usually) who would run move correlation statistics off suspicious games. There were lots of parameters in his analysis to tweak: ignore book (pre-planned) openings, use endgame tables, tolerance threshold, plys deep to look, how many branches to examine, etc. I was part one of the peer reviewers of the system and an occasional game. The basic idea was to run the moves through a few engines and find out how high the move correlation was for both players. In certain points of the game, the move correlation is very high because good candidate moves are obvious. However, over a single 35move game (avg), GM correlation with any of the popular chess engines (even HIARCS, which supposedly plays more like a human) was around 23%. 1800 level players (club level) were even less. Magnus Carlsen wasn't on the scene yet; he apparently learned more from the computer than any human. Perhaps he'd be higher. The typical cheater scored around 98%.
This of course is not to say that there couldn't be a player who "thought like a computer". But this would put in question the main criticism of game specific AI, and general AI, that they do not actually model how the human brain thinks. Finding a human who thought like a computer would actually be incredibly interesting to the whole field of AI. That being said, the burden at that point is on the cheater to prove because he is well beyond a reasonable doubt.
Comment Bubba II: 7Watts, Silent, Sexy? (Score 1) 697
I went from an old 300W system down to a 7W Bubba II from Excito. Runs debian and all that entails. Also has a nice WebUI interface for most services (which I've never used). Comes in a few HD configurations. Other than the HD it is completely silent. It's also nice looking, if that matters.
Probably the only thing I wish it had was a sound-card.
I've been using this for a year and have loved it. Perfect for my needs.
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