10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Tablebases
t. In 1977, Thompson showed up at the World Computer Chess Championship th a new creation, a database that played the king and queen versus king and rook endgame perfectly. (KQKR is the abbreviation.) It wasn'1 an engine; there was no thinking required. Thompson had generated a database that essentially solved chess backwards, what we call retrograde analysis. It started from checkmate and worked its way back until it contained every single possible position with that material balance. Then i...Folksonomies: asymmetrical thinking
Folksonomies: asymmetrical thinking
1 
notes
notes10 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Kasparov was the John Henry of Chess
HE NINETEENTH-CENTURY African American folk legend of John Henry I pits the "steel-driving man" in a race against a new invention, a steam-powered hammer, bashing a tunnel through a mountain of rock. It was my blessing and my curse to be the John Henry of chess and artificial intelligence, as chess computers went from laughably weak to nearly unbeatable during my twenty years as the world's top chess player.
As we will see, this is a pattern that has repeated over and over for centuries. Pe...Folksonomies: automation
Folksonomies: automation
1 notes
notes05 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
The Farmer Hypothesis
The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire... 1 notes
notes29 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
1/9998 Produces Binary Output
The pattern will break down once you get past 8192, which is 2^13. That means that the pattern continues for an impressive 52 significant figures (well, it actually breaks down on the 52nd digit, which will be a 3 instead of a 2).
The reason it works is that 9998 = 10^4 - 2. You can expand as
1 / (10^n - 2) = 1/10^n * 1/(1 - 2/10^n)
= 1/10^n * (1 2/10^n 2^2 /10^2n 2^3 /10^3n ...)
which gives the observed pattern. It breaks down when 2^k has more than n digi... 1 notes
notes24 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Stones are Chaos
The difference between a piece of stone and an atom is that an atom is highly organised, whereas the stone is not. The atom is a pattern, and the molecule is a pattern, and the crystal is a pattem; but the stone, although it is made up of these pattems, is just a mere confusion. It's only when life appears that you begin to get organisation on a larger scale. Life takes the atoms and molecules and crystals; but, instead of making a mess of them like the stone, it combines them into new and mo...
1 Despite being made up of atoms, molecules, and crystals, which are organization.
26 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Mathematics Lies Outside Ourselves
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our
function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we
prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our "creations," are
simply the notes of our observations.
* * *
Let us suppose that I am giving a lecture on some system of
geometry, such as the ordinary Euclidean geometry, and that I draw figures
on the blackboard to stimulate the imagination of my audience, rough
drawings of straight lines or ... 1 notes
notesWhen teaching mathematics, it does not matter how nice the drawings or the teaching space, the ideas are what's important and they are independent of the teaching method.
24 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
Benefits of Even Casual Meditation
In 2011, researchers from the
University of Wisconsin studied a group
of people who were not in the habit of
meditating and instructed them in the
following manner: relax with your eyes
closed and focus on the flow of your
breath at the tip of your nose; if a random
thought arises, acknowledge the thought
and then simply let it go by gently bringing
your attention back to the flow of your
breath. For fifteen minutes, the
participants attempted to follow these
guidelines. Then they were broken...Folksonomies: science meditation
Folksonomies: science meditation
Even introductory mediation pushed practitioners into the left-brain(?) and positive/approach-oriented emotional states.
23 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
What Drives the Mind of a Science Writer?
The design of a book is the pattern of reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact. And yet the impulse which drives a man to poetry will send a man into the tide pools and force him to report what he finds there. Why is an expedition to Tibet undertaken, or a sea bottom dredged? Why do men, sitting at the microscope, examine the calcareous plates of a sea cucumber and give th... 1 notes
notesWe understand that fictional books are crafted to present a worldview, but we forget the same is true of nonfiction.
18 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Jupiter's Pattern in the Night Sky
Every 12 years Jupiter returns to the same position in the sky; every 370 days it disappears in the fire of the Sun in the evening to the west, 30 days later it reappears in the morning to the east...Folksonomies: astronomy
Folksonomies: astronomy
1 notes
notes4th Century BC observation from Gan De.
30 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Illusion of Taste
When carbon (C), Oxygen (o) and hydrogen (H) atoms bond in a certain way to form sugar, the resulting compound has a sweet taste. The sweetness resides neither in the C, nor in the O, nor in the H; it resides in the pattern that emerges from their interaction. It is an emergent property. Moreover, strictly speaking, is not a property of the chemical bonds. It is a sensory experience that arises when the sugar molecules interact with the chemistry of our taste buds, which in turns causes a set... 1 notes
notesWhen we taste sweetness, our tongues are not responding to the C, O, or H, but to the molecule.
