dfan

9 ms·

61.
by dfan 6y ago
You do lose all the strategic decisions involving the doubling cube, though.
62.
by dfan 6y ago
I'm not sure what's going on with your computer (or with mine), but the lowercase t's (which I assume is what you are noticing) look fine on in my Firefox (75.0 on macos 10.14.5).
63.
by dfan 7y ago
I took two software engineering courses at MIT around 1990 that used CLU as the implementation language (one was a general medium-scale software engineering course, one was on writing compilers). I found it to be a very pleasant language, a
64.
by dfan 7y ago
I'm not aware of a single "official" name for it that everyone uses, like the Hypermodern style of chess in the early 20th century. In English, people say things "AI-inspired" or "AlphaGo style" (although
65.
by dfan 7y ago
I admit that I do not have a quantitative measure to support my claim (as you note, constructing one is difficult). But qualitatively: 1) People have learned a lot from new engines: joseki (corner patterns), general strategy (e.g., moves on
66.
by dfan 7y ago
I am not sure what you mean by "style", but top chess grandmasters certainly play in a different way today compared to, say, 20 years ago. Current play is much more concrete (less based on general strategic principles) and players
67.
by dfan 7y ago
No, it isn't. The top humans are much better at Go than they were four years ago, largely due to learning from the new engines. If it were all just about sampling the phase space zillions of times, this would not be the case.
68.
by dfan 7y ago
He is a smart and thoughtful person, and any given article by him is worth reading (as long as you balance it with other people's takes as well), but he has quite strong opinions on the subject, which is one reason he's always quo
69.
by dfan 7y ago
I assume from the title that this is either written by Gary Marcus or quotes him extensively. (I just checked and was correct.) It would be nice to hear this sort of critique from more than one person.
70.
by dfan 7y ago
You are correct.
71.
by dfan 7y ago
The extent of the Rock Band / Guitar Hero connection is that they were made by a company (Harmonix Music Systems) founded by two people who had been grad students at the Media Lab. They did indeed work on music tech while at the Media
72.
by dfan 7y ago
The Stockfish chess engine [1] is very nice, especially so since chess engines tend to be very kludgy. [1] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
73.
Dialog – A domain-specific language for creating works of interactive fiction(linusakesson.net)
125 points by dfan 7y ago|14 comments
74.
by dfan 7y ago
Sensei's Library is older than Wikipedia. It was a really vibrant place for a while, and is still the first place I go when I want to look something up that's Go-related, but it's pretty static at this point. I'm glad th
75.
by dfan 7y ago
I realize this is classic old-man-yells-at-cloud, but I don't understand why every online article these days, even the technical ones, need to have a giant "amusing" gif every two paragraphs. Do people not pay attention other
76.
by dfan 8y ago
https://towardsdatascience.com/its-only-natural-an-excessive... is another nice overview complementary to this one.
77.
by dfan 8y ago
I am 95% sure we removed it long before ship, unfortunately.
78.
by dfan 8y ago
I don't like calling it "inferior" (and we didn't, at the time). We solved a much more general problem in a slow and only approximately correct way. They found a much more limited problem that they were able to solve per
79.
by dfan 8y ago
I'm the Dan Schmidt mentioned in the article. A few years back I wrote a few anecdotes about the technical side of working on Ultima Underworld: https://dfan.org/blog/2011/02/20/the-dangers-of-self-m
80.
by dfan 8y ago
You left out most of the equation. The whole equation as posted is just an application of Bayes' rule: P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). Your excerpt leaves out everything after P(B|A).
81.
by dfan 8y ago
I was confused too; it has a weird format that I think hurts comprehension rather than aids it by making you think you're not looking straight at the data. Ignore the fact that the "Training Days" axis is drawn diagonally. Th
82.
by dfan 8y ago
I noticed the same thing. I presume it is a typo. Later on f is defined as you would expect.
83.
by dfan 8y ago
I have spent countless hours searching for the perfect programming font, and once I found Go Mono, I never went back.
84.
by dfan 8y ago
There's Quantum Information Science ( https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-information-science-i ) on edX. Pros: - It's an MIT graduate class (this could be a con if you are a beginner in other areas and not just
85.
by dfan 8y ago
When I was a kid, I learned Pascal from a book. We didn't even have a PC at home (it was the 80s) but my mother was a college professor and had access to the mainframe there. I wrote out a whole program to run Conway's Game of Lif
86.
by dfan 8y ago
If I understand your description of the rules correctly, it sounds like that removes any sort of strategy from the game (manipulating the board and the rack), making it a sequence of Scrabble puzzles instead with no between-player interacti
87.
by dfan 8y ago
This has been tried (I think for some US Championship tiebreaks), and I like it a lot. If memory serves, the winning time bids for Black were quite low; people really value draw odds.
88.
by dfan 8y ago
A just has a kind of a buzzy feel to it. It's not something I can really quantify or prove, just a sort of synaesthetic sense. I would say that I feel it the strongest in the two octaves below middle C. It is basically true for any pia
89.
by dfan 8y ago
Mostly I feel like the timbre of an organ note is very consistent from pitch to pitch, whereas, say, an A on a piano sounds buzzy to me while a Bb sounds more smooth and a B natural is kind of liquid. (Of course the timbre probably isn&#x27
90.
by dfan 8y ago
Yeah, but this is sort of like saying "whenever you see red, remember that it's really green instead." It's not like you stop seeing and thinking red.

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