No, you really didn't.
625 karma · joined January 7, 2014
"It's not super amazing. It's…something I guess; you could do better. Try improving your colors. This is at most 3.9/10. #boring"
Yeah, Henri, improve your colors you lazy hack! ;)
OP should consult a lawyer about the relevant legal and licensing requirements for running a recruitment agency.
But your platform is a centralised platform just like most other Web app platforms. It is not at all like what the article is discussing, contrary to your claim.
How would a Facebook or WordPress clone built on your platform be any more decentralised than regular old Facebook or WordPress?
In fact how would it address any of the questions raised?
Is your platform distributed and decentralised?
Is your platform easier for Joe public to publish websites on than wordpress and without a central service provider?
Does your platform prevent government snooping?
Does your platform prevent the accumulation of data in a single information silo?
Does it reinvent the Web, making it, as a whole, inherently less centralised than it already is?
Does it embed key moral principles into the fabric of the Web?
Does it unlock published Web content when copyright expires?
Can it verify financial transactions and authenticate data sources?
Can it do all of the above in a non-centralised way, resilient to network outages, and loss of resources at their original location, across the whole of the Web?
Because those are the things the article describes.
And that doesn't sound at all like your platform, which is another Web application stack, very much the opposite of what is suggested in the article on fact.
You claimed that they were describing your platform.
But in the 'macro' sense, your platform is nothing like that -- it's a different flavour of Web app server, and fits in with the existing paradigm. Yes it may be part of a decentralised system (the Web), but any large Web application developed using it would be exactly the kind of centralised information silo that the people in the article want to avoid. The article is about how the existing paradigm is insufficiently decentralised.
Your platform could be a great Web app platform, but it does nothing to address any of the points raised in the article.
According to your own documentation, you have a traditional centralised client-server architecture. (Albeit one with some bells and whistles.)
e.g. Photochrome on the Atari ST, was especially impressive at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPsY4P8bnVw
The most extreme version I've seen of this was on the ZX Spectrum, which had not only a very limited 15 colour palette, but also limited to 2 colours within each 8x8 block of the screen. Some bright spark came up with the idea of flipping rapidly between R, G, and B frames to give (limited) per-pixel RGB. Unfortunately it did flicker quite badly because of the extreme changes in colour levels (only two levels of each channel), and the fact that it required 3 whole frames to make a single colour virtual frame.
Example here: (not suitable if you have photosenstive epilepsy!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Parrot_rgb3.gif
"An expert may give lectures in their subject area, if they have been invited by a UK Higher Education Institution; or a UK based research or arts organisation provided this does not amount to filling a teaching position for the host organisation."
"A professional artist, entertainer, musician or sports person may carry out an activity directly relating to their profession, if they have been invited by a creative (arts or entertainment) or sports organisation, agent or broadcaster based in the UK."
She doesn't qualify for either. The former because she wasn't invited by any UK institution, nor a Higher Education, Research, or Arts organisation. The latter because she is not a professional artist or entertainer, nor invited by arts or entertainment organisation, agent, or broadcaster based in the UK.
I have to say, the rules are fairly straightforward. I followed the application process online as if I was her, and it's really quite obvious that she'd need to apply for a visa. It tells you to check the list of what you're allowed to be paid for, and what I quoted above is what it says.
Her blog post can be summed up as:
1. Was refused entry to UK because I didn't have the right docs. Will make damn sure I have the right documentation next time!
2. Go back. Oh shoot, I didn't have the right docs this time either.
3. British border control doesn't treat you too nicely when you show up again without the proper visa. Poor me.
4. Well then, I'm never going back. huff
This was especially odd because a lot of the Welsh terms for computing subjects were invented and/or standardised after we took the classes, and different colleges were using different terms for the same concepts.
Needless to say, nobody did the exams in Welsh.
(The only Welsh most of us learned was just enough to fake our way into Clwb Ifor Bach, the welsh-speakers' bar/nightclub!)
Practical implementations that need to achieve good but not perfect play are content to stop at a point before that.
Indeed, but that's not the basic minimax algorithm (which is what I was discussing) and the branching factor of go makes classic minimax infeasible even if you modify it to be forward-looking. Basic minimax is not good for Go. At all. You have to combine it with other techniques for it to be even vaguely effective. You know this, but didn't mention it. So how is anyone supposed to infer that you know it?
I can see now that you have a decent understanding of the actual solution, but that's not at all what you wrote above.
For example, you said to evaluate a game board you need to 'play the game through to the end' -- which hides all that complexity of monte-carlo tree evaluation, etc. Read what you wrote again from the point of view of someone who isn't yourself.
Simply saying 'Play the game through to the end' by itself is neither correct nor accurate. Because that implies evaluating the rest of the game to its conclusion. i.e. every board state. You omitted any other detail or reference. So I descibed how and why it's not feasible (which you now discount as going off at a tangent). You gave no prior indication of understanding this.
Another example: in a previous comment I described how backward looking techniques like the minimax algorithm are not feasible for go, and you said:
"That's exactly how AlphaGo works though".
But it isn't at all:
Classic minimax is backward-looking (starts at end states and works backwards -- this is what I was talking about, and what I described); AlphaGo (and the paper you linked to) is forward-looking (starts at current root and works forwards).
Classic minimax is full-tree evaluation; AlphaGo is partially-evaluating.
Minimax is deterministic; AlphaGo is stochastic/random sampling.
Minimax uses a simple single-value single-direction evaluation function; AlphaGo uses a complex bi-directional multi-value evaluation.
I could go on.
Read any treatise or any introduction to AI for Go and pretty much the first chapter will be describing how classic minimax is not suitable without heavy modification.
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oXyibEgJr0
AlphaGo uses some of the same concepts, but applied very differently, as you appear to already know. Yet after I mentioned minimax (which is well-known as an infeasible algorithm for go), you responded:
"That's exactly how AlphaGo works though".
Which is not at all true.
And then you link to a paper that describes precisely how it's not how it works, and why minimax-related techniques alone don't work, in stark contradiction to yourself.
I'm not intentionally misinterpreting what you wrote: I'm taking a reasonable interpretation of what you actually wrote, which appears to show a lack of understanding on your part. I don't think there is a lack of understanding, now, but it's hard to come to a different conclusion based on what you wrote before.
Nope. You could play out to one or several ends, but there is a huge number of possible end games at any given point. Simply saying 'play out the game to the end' is a gross simplification.
The average branching factor is something like 200, so just to fully evaluate just 5 moves ahead would require traversing 320 billion game states. Go games are 100-200 moves per game, so 5 moves ahead doesn't even get you close to the end of a game. At the first move there are 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935 legal board states you'd have traverse to reach all end games. Yes, that's an exact figure. (http://tromp.github.io/go/legal.html)
How big is that figure? If you counted up the number of fundamental particles in the entire universe, and for each fundamental particle there was another complete universe of fundamental particles and you counted all of those too, and then do all of that once for every person in the USA add up their answers, you'd be at about 3% of the way to that value.
You simply cannot do a full evaluation to the end of the game: it's computationally infeasible.
That's exactly how AlphaGo works though (minimax)
No, it's not. Minimax requires working back from all end-game states, and there are too many end-game states to be evaluated. I suggest you read the paper yourself. It's about doing random partial evaluations and forward-looking searches of the game space, and choosing clever subsets to evaluate, precisely because you can't evaluate them all. The 'backing up' referred to in the paper is backing evaluation values up the tree after you've looked ahead a while, not starting at all possible end games and backing up from there, as in classic minimax. Some of the basic concepts are similar to classic tic-tac-toe or chess algorithms, but combining them in new ways.
AlphaGo uses the same technique, just optimized a bit more.
And a fighter jet uses the same technique as a paper aeroplane, only optimized a bit more...
Even evaluating a single play state is a difficult problem, let alone looking forwards to 'simply taking the route giving max probability of success'. That's not simple at all.
Go is fiendishly difficult to evaluate. The traditional techniques that work in chess don't work well in Go (if at all). All the pieces have the same 'value'. More or less pieces isn't necessarily better or worse, it depends on the board layout. It's not at all easy to say who's winning or losing at most points in the game, or if there even is a winner or a loser. There is no mathematically-obvious way to compare two play states and say one is better than the other. The branching factor is huge, making the usual forward-looking techniques extraordinarily expensive. The number of possible legal boards states is something like 90 orders of magnitude greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, making backward-looking techniques like minimax impossible, even if you could easily assign an evaluation function to each state.
There is no excuse these days for not protecting your users' data. It should be taken down and secured ASAP.
It would be interesting to see what, if anything, they've changed in the game to make it harder for a computer to play.
Also, have you thought about doing some basic colour balancing on the uploaded images to match the environment in the image, or overlaying some subtle alpha-channel reflections? (Both of which would greatly increase the realism)
Mac OS X's exposé does some funky stuff to that image :)
Brutal and cruel acts include:
* Killing of child immediately after birth
* Killing of child whilst being born, e.g. in birth canal during birth
* Termination of pregnancy as late as 8.5 months
* Forced abortions (incorporating kidnapping and assault)
All of these things have happened routinely as part of enforcement of the "one child" policy in China and have been widely reported on by human rights organisations. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#Human_rights_...
The policy has also encouraged infanticide/gendercide, corruption, child abandonment, neglect, and abuse.