dfan

8 ms·

31.
by dfan 4y ago
If this article gets even one author to stop using < and > when they mean \langle and \rangle, it will be worth it.
32.
by dfan 4y ago
This is not purely an AI phenomenon, although AIs are less likely to feel guilty about it. A game from the European Go Championship in 2002 was decided by just this sort of rules-lawyering ("obviously" dead stones were not technic
33.
by dfan 4y ago
I disagree with the second paragraph but not enough to get into a public debate about it. But it is worth pointing out that Carlsen's 53-game streak was a non-loss streak, not a win streak. Many of those games were draws.
34.
by dfan 4y ago
The Elo system is calibrated so that that the expected value from playing a player 200 points stronger than you is 0.24. This is true independent of the strength of the players. If you are scoring 0.10 against players 200 points stronger th
35.
by dfan 4y ago
You may be interested in Quantum Chess ( https://quantumchess.net/how-to-play/ ).
36.
by dfan 4y ago
Inform 7 is the closest thing I can think of to "everything is a graph". Basically, objects in the world are vertices and relations are edges. When you first encounter relations they don't necessarily seem that exciting, but
37.
by dfan 4y ago
Think of it this way. The article presents a random-gap list with only five entries, and it looks terrible; the most common page occurs 9 times as often as the least common. Now think about a random-gap list with five million entries. With
38.
by dfan 5y ago
There was a fun Hacker News post last year that consisted just of searching HN comments for the phrase "why not simply": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27415725
39.
by dfan 5y ago
I was very surprised to see a headline involving "Harvard mathematician" and "chess problem" and find that the article was not about Noam Elkies.
40.
by dfan 5y ago
You might enjoy the extra challenge of hard mode (access it through the gear icon), where every guess you make has to be a potential solution based on the existing history.
41.
by dfan 5y ago
Well over a decade ago, I spent an afternoon in a stationery store trying out as many pens as I could. I fell in love with the Pentel EnerGel NV 0.5mm (smooth, dark, consistent, feels nice in the hand) and haven't looked back since. I&
42.
by dfan 5y ago
Kenneth Regan's work on Intrinsic Performance Ratings includes estimated ratings for Morphy, which vary widely from event to event but average around 2300, which I think matches the intuitive perception of his strength that modern stro
43.
by dfan 5y ago
I associate some pitch classes with colors and I think it's because of a toy glockenspiel I had when I was a kid.
44.
by dfan 5y ago
I'd start considering players to be "pro" at around 2600 lichess rapid, which is a pretty normal rating for an International Master. (Mine is over 2200 and I just consider myself to be pretty good.) 1800 is still in the &quot
45.
by dfan 5y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19692418
46.
by dfan 5y ago
You could probably perform some sort of math personality test by asking which proof the respondent likes best! I was particularly charmed by #5 (construct a volume of revolution, then slice it two ways).
47.
by dfan 5y ago
I don't remember hearing about other developers doing the same thing. I think it was just that I had a lot of experience debugging deterministic programs (like command-line tools) and it was infinitely more pleasant than trying to debu
48.
by dfan 5y ago
For the DOS game Terra Nova (1996) I made our game engine fully deterministic. I guess this was a year before Age of Empires but well after you. It was amazing how much easier this made debugging. The effect was so great that I can't e
49.
by dfan 5y ago
"Does it take into account the additional co2 that fishing boats emit?" Yes. "Unlike previous studies that have largely overlooked the downstream processing activities associated with Alaskan pollock, this study examined all
50.
by dfan 6y ago
I used Sibelius for years and am happy to have switched to Dorico.
51.
by dfan 6y ago
Dorico is indeed better, and definitely not a copy of Sibelius UI-wise. Not only was the team starting over with a lot more experience under their belt, but they also had a much better idea of what didn't scale (from a user interface p
52.
by dfan 6y ago
This is my favorite "easily explainable to someone who doesn't know math but still very interesting" problem.
53.
by dfan 6y ago
Underworld developer here. We certainly started it before we got the deal with Origin, but a lot of the design was done afterwards with the fact that it was an Ultima in mind. I'll grant that its Ultima-ness was thinner compared to man
54.
by dfan 6y ago
In chess, at least, all calculations in a single tournament are indeed batched.
55.
by dfan 6y ago
It's worth noting that this approach, of training a neural net on human games of a certain level and not doing tree search, has been around for a few years in the Go program Crazy Stone ( https://www.remi-coulom.fr/Crazy
56.
by dfan 6y ago
Good call! I love Tichu. I'd put it just a touch behind the other games I listed.
57.
by dfan 6y ago
I've spent thousands of hours of my life playing and studying chess and go. There are very few games that are rich enough to come close to holding my interest as much as those; poker, Titan, and Diplomacy are the only ones that immedia
58.
by dfan 6y ago
The terminology associated with chess challenges [to use a neutral term] is unfortunate. "Chess problem" is a term of art that refers to an artificial composed position with a unique solution that is constructed to both be a chall
59.
by dfan 6y ago
It was very common in the past for composers to learn the craft by copying out the musical scores of the masters. This is also why I always type in all the examples from programming books instead of cutting and pasting.
60.
by dfan 6y ago
She goes into detail about this in the article that is linked to later in the paragraph you quote.

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