zero_iq

Page doesn't render correctly for me in Firefox/MacOS, so I had a similar thought... there's probably a couple of things he should add to his list! :D

Perhaps your next project should be called "alexia"...? ;)

Same in Worcestershire when I was growing up there. It seems to vary regionally.

Also yet another language called 'Monkey'.

There's already Monkey C used to develop for Garmin devices, and the Monkey/MonkeyX/Monkey2 family by Mark Sibly (of Amiga Blitz Basic fame).

Maybe cold solder on a component on the mobo. Heat expands the joint slightly making a connection, cold temperature makes the contact points contract away from each other, breaking the connection. I had a similar issue with an LCD dashboard display in my car, resoldering fixed it.

It seems pretty plausible. His tweets give information about why the site crashed, some discussion about how the back-end works, and the company he claims to work for lists the Petitions website as one of their projects.

I don't think the display technology makes much of a difference (except that maybe modern displays have better contrast than older ones). Can happen with CRTs too. I first noticed this as a child with Teletext on British CRT TVs back in the 80s, which often had bright primary coloured text on a black background, much like a terminal.

Only solved in the sense that you can buy additional hardware for ground loop isolation for USB and audio connections. Ground loops and RF interference are a persistent and recurring problem in pretty much all USB audio setups, except perhaps when you're solely using relatively high-end hardware that has been designed specifically for audio (cables included). Without isolation, all it takes is one bad component to ruin the whole setup.

For even a simple USB audio interface setup connected to a single audio source I would recommend isolation and balanced audio cables.

To my knowledge, this depends on the interpretation. Some interpretations consider wave function collapse an actual physical process, some don't, so I don't believe it is possible to make an absolute statement such as yours. There is still some debate about whether or not the process occurs over finite time (at least there was 2-3 years ago -- perhaps things have moved on since then and I haven't caught up. If there have been new developments along these lines, I'd be interested to see it).

Regardless, it can be computed as a process, and this is where I believe the analogy in question arises. Is a perfect analogy? Of course not -- no analogies are. Bubble sort has no bubbles and involves no liquids or gravity, or buoyancy, etc. etc. the analogy still works despite that IMO.

> In other words, this isn't actually a superposition.

Obviously. That was my point: it is but a simple analogy. There are no actual bubbles in bubble sort, either.

As for my theory -- I suspect that whenever quantum physics is mentioned, a certain brigade of users like to take the opportunity to look smart by showing off their (in this case largely irrelevant) knowledge of quantum physics. (While simultaneously showing how they fail to grasp the concept of simple analogies, and so actually appearing the opposite. But then I'm zero_iq, so what do I know...!)

It's simply named only for the analogy with the Copenhagen Interpretation -- everything is in a 'superposition' (all options possible) until a single 'observation' is made, which causes a reduction in the available possibilities, which propagates across the space/structure. That's as far as the analogy goes.

This sort of loose analogy is a perfectly reasonable way to name things IMHO.

I don't hear anyone complaining that bubble sort doesn't consider buoyancy and surface tension, or that the flood fill algorithm doesn't involve any actual fuid dynamics.

I have my own theory on why people like to complain about this particular analogy, but for the sake of not causing offence I will leave it there ;p

Just a quick note to say thanks for posting this: I've had great fun exploring it: it's a simple puzzle to understand, yet harder than it first appears, and a low barrier of entry thanks to your posted code. Genuinely interesting seeing the symmetry appearing in the low-scoring solutions, and also an element of friendly competition and shared discovery as we post our scores. Cheers!

Thanks for keeping track. Quite fascinating how algorithms employing so much randomization can arrive at such structure and symmetry.

Finally got a < 376.0 from my own code using simulated annealing method...

375.998672775885

  [[13 20  7 18  5 10]
   [ 9 15  2 23 12 16]
   [ 4 22 24  1  3 21]
   [17 11  6 19 14  8]]

...only to realise it's the same as yours, but with the rows reversed! Rather surprised, but I now wonder if there is only a small number of very-low-scoring solutions. So perhaps this is less of a coincidence than it first appears.

I'm now using a much more aggressive temperature drop-off to find decent candidates early, followed by a tempering phase to search for nearby solutions, and a final cool-off to refine the final answer. I'm still using only random pair swaps in Python, so probably wasting a lot of cycles, but I'm still quite surprised how quickly it converges to some pretty decent scores. Beyond that I'm just going to try lots of random starting layouts.

I'm interested to see if my method can find any of the other posted solutions or (fingers crossed!) any new ones, but I may need to crunch through a lot more candidates... I will have to translate from Python into something faster to up my game!

Ooh nice! That's the first one I've seen below 376.0

I've gotten close, but not cracked it yet. I was wondering if anyone would break the 376.0 barrier!

Slight improvment to the above:

  [[12, 19,  6, 14,  4,  9],
   [ 8, 17,  1, 24, 22, 16],
   [21,  3, 23, 20,  2, 11],
   [15, 10,  5, 13,  7, 18]]

Score = 376.6144674353488

Found by increasing number of iterations to 100000

Sim.annealing followed by an exhaustive pair-swap search to find the local minimum would have found this more efficiently. Possibly there are some further refinements left -- I haven't run the exhaustive pair search on the above!

Sure. My best so far is:

    np.matrix('12 19 6 14 4 9; 8 17 1 24 22 16; 21 3 23 2 20 11; 15 10 5 13 18 7')

which has a score of 376.899. This was produced in 20K swaps with the line:

    best, score = anneal(n=10000)

which was then further refined with:

    best, score = anneal(start_temp=0.2, advent=best, n=10000)

where anneal() is defined here: https://pastebin.com/xBVGJfQd

The score() function is a bit slow at the moment. If I get some time later, I might see if I can speed it up a bit, which will allow for some faster experimentation.

EDIT: replaced code with pastebin link to save space in comments

That's a lot of swaps! I played around with a simulated annealing approach in my lunch break which consistently gets down to 383.xx with about 10000 swaps, or 379.xx in 100000 swaps. I've yet to tweak the annealing parameters to see if I can get down to (or beat) the 378 example in the article.

It's basically the same as the swap() function in advent.py except you sometimes allow swaps that result in worse scores according to an ever-decreasing probability ("temperature"). The added controlled randomness allows you to break out of local minima at the start and hone in on the local optimum towards the end.

EDIT: after a little tweaking of the temperature schedule I got 377.59 after 10K swaps.

Alternative possibility: given the simple, traceable, almost begging-to-be-caught nature of the malware, and that it so easily led researchers to a name and address of a potential author, perhaps its goal is actually to frame someone... to take out a rival hacker, revenge, lulz, ...?

Not saying it's what's actually happening here, but it's something that has crossed my mind before about malware - that it would be comparatively easy to lead one or more false trails to shift blame for whatever reason, and I wonder how many pieces of malware have actually managed to pull this off, and pinned the blame on an obvious target, e.g. Chinese government, "russian hackers", etc.

Indeed. But to become an EU citizen you have to meet the citizenship requirements, the common standard for which the UK has previously negotiated and agreed along with the other members, PLUS additional requirements and limitations can be imposed by the UK for other kinds of long term residential statuses. It's not like one member state is allowed really lax citizenship laws, so people can choose to sneak in through there, and restrictions can be imposed even by the UK for a limited period.

The UK manages to both have influence over EU immigration policies AND also have exemption to it for non-EU immigration, AND can apply its own limitations even for when immigrants get citizenship for a limited period. Yet many brexiters spout on about how the EU just dictates everything to us and it's all out of our control. Absolute rubbish.

I'm referring to common immigration policy, i.e. from outside the EU into the EU. This is distinct from freedom-of-movement for EU citizens within the EU. Such freedom-of-movement does not apply to non-EU citizens.

You are talking nonsense.

The UK has (and always has had) complete exemption from EU common immigration policy. The EU is not able to dictate immigration controls to the UK. If you have a problem with how the UK handles non-EU immigration then it is the fault of UK government policy, not the EU.

The complete exception from common immigration policy of the UK (along with Ireland and in some matters Denmark) is laid out in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (2009).

EDIT: to clarify -- I am referring to non-EU immigration here, not freedom-of-movement for EU citizens.

I remember in the 90s tuning into "space night" on a German satellite channel when I got home from the pub. Just continuous video feeds from low earth orbit with electronica/chillout playing over the top. Was really relaxing to have on in the background.

I can imagine working from home with something like that on in the background and occasionally looking up to "see where we are now" - would give me some sense of travelling and seeing something new, rather than just feeling like I've been stuck at home coding in front of my laptop all day.

At least four things were admitted: that you received the information, somebody processed it, the approximate time you received/processed, and the intention to take action.

I would hope any well-intentioned and reputable company would not mind, but some might not want to admit any of that! Plenty of ammo for anyone who subsequently blames you if you then fail to remedy the situation in a timely fashion.

Just as an FYI: if anyone here is near to or planning a trip to Oxford (UK), there is currently a free Tolkien exhibition that includes many original maps (and working drafts) at the Weston Library.

In Sweden I was surprised at the the gambling games aimed at kids at fairs/theme parks. Roulette/wheel of fortune gambling to win big bags of sweets and chocolates. In the UK I think you'd at least have to introduce an element of skill into the game. (Also I've never seen so much candy for sale as in Sweden! It's amazing Swedes have any teeth left.).

You could multiplex multiple adpative-rate encrypted video streams into a single stream per viewer, keeping the content of each encrypted and choosing which bitrate streams to include in the multiplexed output according to current bandwidth. There's no need to actually decode them, you just have to know which encrypted streams are which. All composition would then be done on the clients. This is just a possibility for how it could be done, I have no idea how Apple actually does it. For best results, you'd probably need some non-encrypted metadata about the streams too, e.g. timing information.

Oh hi. I'm, uh, calling to arrange the manufacture of a large quantity of paperclips for a client...

Brigade Engine, for example: https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/

You don't even need any fancy image optimizer, just loading and resaving it in a basic paint program is enough to reduce it to <400K.

I'm guessing the image file on the site has been saved without compression enabled. It's noticeably slow to load. Not only that, but it reloads every time I visit the page, so they might want to sort out their caching policy too.

All sorts of anti-debugging tricks, self modifying code, runtime checksums, network traffic obfuscation, etc.

http://www.secdev.org/conf/skype_BHEU06.handout.pdf

http://runtux.com/files/download/skype.4.pdf