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vmilneron What goes into making an animated film?

Ive always got Harlan Ellisons (IMHO wonderful) unmade screenplay for Asimovs 'I Robot' in mind when I read discussions of AI produced films. Id love to know how feasible it would be to have the screenplay converted , preferably with a style inspired by Mark Zugs illustrations.

https://www.amazon.com/Robot-Illustrated-Screenplay-Harlan-E...

vmilneron The compiler was supposed to end programming too

I remember the uk papers being full of the Last One ads in 1981.

vmilneron Notes on the Complex Roots of Unity

I’m curious as to how many high schools around the world teach complex numbers. In England in the late 80s when I did A level maths (age 17-18) it was part of the syllabus, but now it is only available in the harder A-level further maths, which is often not taught in the standard non-selective non-private schools, making entry to university STEM courses more difficult.

vmilneron With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now

https://github.com/lorserker/ben/tree/78c3690f34ed945f95f3c1... (look at SingleDummyEstimates.ipynb )

also the keras model ben/models/TF2models/RPDD_2024-07-08-E02.keras is still present in the current repo but not apparently used. It was trained on ten million deals where all double dummy info is known.

vmilneron With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now

Yes - you are right, 70% for a correct answer is what the talk says. Id misremembered the higher (~99%) numbers because for my purpose (simulating many random deals compatible with known cards to get probability distributions on hidden card positions and trick taking possibilities in each suit/notrumps ) a one trick error is quite acceptable. I agree a more straightforward architecture is a promising approach. Once I have generated weights in a form usable in C, I am also curious as to whether they can direct DDS's tree search as a kind of probabilistic oracle.

(There was some Ben code to use a neural net double dummy evaluator, because Ive used it, but it was removed. Ill try and find the git point it was removed.)

vmilneron With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now

I'll concede an order of magnitude for dds, I may not have been using it optimally. The claims made by Lorand Dali for his neural net solver were a thousand times faster with a slight drop in accuracy (99.9%+ I think)

I believe this was used in his 'ben' bridge engine, https://github.com/lorserker/ben/ now maintained by ThorvaldAagaard, though I have to admit it now seems to be heavily dds focussed, so there may have been a rollback along the lines you outlined.

I'm attempting to recreate the concept myself, so should soon have an idea whether its moonshine or not,

vmilneron With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now

I think computer bridge will take off soon. LLMs have allowed double-dummy solvers to move from ~0.1sec to microseconds (if you allow 99.9% accuracy) and parsing human bidding system descriptions must either be possible or v close.

vmilneron GNU Radio in the browser

New textbook may help

https://www.gnuradio.org/news/2025-01-29-gnuradio-textbook/

vmilneron Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem

Formalisation of the classification of finite simple groups must be on someone’s ‘moonshot’ list.

vmilneron A group of Gandalfs protest outside the home of Peter Thiel in Argentina

'Gandalf himself never uses the palantiri that Thiel named his company after, not just due to how incredibly dangerous and powerful they are, but also their corrupting nature.'

Seems a bit harsh. It's chatting to Sauron with them that's the problem.

vmilneron AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

There's a depressing number who dismiss the benefits of things like learning times tables as 'rote learning' rather than force-multipliers that free your brain for other things.

vmilneron AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them

"There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first."

  Sherlock Holmes, 'A Study in Scarlet'

vmilneron The Zilog Z80 has turned 50

Takes me back to the ZX Spectrum 1980s when 128KB RAM was an unaffordable luxury. (Bit like today...)

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000237/Book/Mastering...

http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/zxspectrum/docs/Comple...

vmilneron FreeBSD 16 Retires the Last of Its GPL Code from Its Base System

> FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software

The FSF disagree:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD

vmilneron EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on

Yes Minister on point as usual

https://youtu.be/x-HBsT6GmMs?t=69

vmilneron Mechanical Watch (2022)

Does anyone have recommendations for cheapish mechanical watches that don't cost a fortune to service? (UK based) Secondhand or new.

vmilneron The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings (2025)

"In the morning Fatty was mildly unnerved to see the other hobbits painting a large sign outside the little house with 'Frodo lives here' and 'Sauron sucks!' on it."

vmilneron The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings (2025)

Fatty Bolger?

vmilneron Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

I remember when Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Mix of 'Choose your own adventure' and solo D+D adventure) were big in the UK in the 80s, and teachers were sniffy about them not being proper reading. I bet they'd love their kids to be reading them now.

vmilneron A Gentle Introduction to Lattice-Based Cryptography [pdf]

It's a superficial point but this relatively newer style (La)TeX layout makes me much more keen to read documents for some reason.

vmilneron Confidence Scores for Exam Questions

I seem to remember some medical related multiple choice tests in the UK use a mechanism of +1 for correct , 0 for unanswered , -1 for incorrect.

vmilneron Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore

I enjoyed reading Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden after reading that in the early 90s. Also the C standard from the time and the attached 'Rationale' document https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub160.pdf (The rationale is 234 pages in). Also this 1995 book version of the comp.lang.c FAQ https://c-faq.com/book/ and https://c-faq.com/

vmilneron Pen pal programs endure in a digital age

Are there no posted birthday cards in Denmark any more?

vmilneron Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

"Pricematch" is also common in the UK for traditional stores like Sainsburys Tesco competing with Lidl and Aldi 'discounters'.

vmilneron Maryland becomes first state to ban surveillance pricing in grocery stores

Isn't it common for state sales taxes to be added at the till? (I don't live in the US but that seemed to be what happened on my visits there)

vmilneron Jennifer Aniston and Friends Cost Us 377GB and Broke Ext4 Hardlinks

It's not as good as ed: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

vmilneron Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols.

https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

vmilneron Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'

vmilneron JPEG Compression

The weirdest thing to me is that the quantisation matrix isn’t symmetrical in the top left to bottom right diagonal.

vmilneron Lost Doctor Who episodes found

“Secret Army” (the “straight” inspiration of the comedy “Allo Allo”) - a dramatised version of the Belgian Comete line that returned allied airmen to Britain still stands up as a superb series from the 70s.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ae0po