dfan

15 ms·

121.
by dfan 10y ago
Pull requests are regularly rejected for increasing the size of the codebase, even if they slightly improve the strength of the engine. It's hard to argue with the results.
122.
by dfan 10y ago
I went through all of these a few years ago, including the homework, and it was a great experience.
123.
by dfan 10y ago
The defecating duck robot also features heavily in Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon.
124.
by dfan 10y ago
The Stockfish chess engine: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish I learned a ridiculous amount from reading the source code to TeX ( https://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-B-TeX-Program&
125.
by dfan 10y ago
The other books mentioned here are also great, but I think Cat's Cradle is the best book to start with.
126.
by dfan 10y ago
That's what regularization is for. You probably know that too, so pretend that was just for the benefit of the onlookers.
127.
by dfan 10y ago
> which is a weakness in the theory because how can more neurons cause more problems? In exactly the same way that adding more terms to a polynomial fit causes more problems. The is one of the most fundamental results in the theory of st
128.
by dfan 10y ago
1800 is _mastering_ the basics of chess. That seems about right to me.
129.
by dfan 10y ago
When I started coding for a living in the early 1990s (in an environment where efficiency was paramount), Writing Efficient Programs was gold. I still have it, and I'm glad that to see that it's still valued.
130.
by dfan 10y ago
Bluffing seems like a human tactic but in fact is completely mathematically justified and is absolutely required for optimal play. A bot that bluffs will destroy a bot that doesn't.
131.
by dfan 10y ago
Well, stouset is talking about chess, but in Go, Monte Carlo Tree Search plays out all the way to the end of the game; it just does so in a much less exhaustive way, for exactly the reason you mention.
132.
by dfan 10y ago
DeepMind has set their sights on StarCraft II next: https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-star...
133.
by dfan 10y ago
Their Nature paper says "We trained the policy network p_sigma to classify positions according to expert moves played in the KGS data set. This data set contains 29.4 million positions from 160,000 games played by KGS 6 to 9 dan human
134.
by dfan 10y ago
Human moves tend to fit a narrative and be explainable, although often for very concrete reasons. For example: "I am sketching out territory while attacking an opponent group." "I am making my group safe so that I will not ha
135.
by dfan 10y ago
One thing that isn't made clear in this writeup is that Master plays in a very nonhuman style, as opposed to the version of AlphaGo that beat Lee Sedol, which mostly played like a strong human except for a few surprising moves. My firs
136.
by dfan 10y ago
Yeah, when I did the Coursera course I supplemented it with the CS229 materials to get more of the theory behind everything, which worked great. If you want more math rather than less, it's the way to go.
137.
by dfan 10y ago
> Apparently after graduating from university 42% of people never read another book. Ever! Now I have no idea how accurate that statistic is, but if it is anywhere near remotely close to the truth, that’s amazing. is not really the bes
138.
by dfan 10y ago
There are so many AV setups, we had to leave calibration to the user (we tried with auto-calibration but it could not always be perfect). The fundamental problem is that there are two independent delays that both depend on your individual s
139.
by dfan 10y ago
When you are making videogames, a (video) frame of latency is a big deal. When I worked on Guitar Hero and Rock Band, we worried about sub-frame latency (timing is more important when you're hitting a drum than when you're firing
140.
by dfan 10y ago
Another enthusiastic thumbs-up for A Geometry of Music. I wouldn't take all his conclusions as far as he does, but it's all very thought-provoking and he's obviously a really sharp guy. (Some prior music theory knowledge is p
141.
by dfan 10y ago
There is about a 3-stone difference between 9p and 1p, 1p is probably about 8d, and there is about a 3-stone difference between 8d and 5d. So in total 6+ stones (AlphaGo may be stronger than 9p, of course). The version of AlphaGo that beat
142.
by dfan 10y ago
No, it would be equivalent to LeBron James going head to head with a talented amateur basketball player. Of course he would still win every time, but it would at least be a game of basketball.
143.
by dfan 10y ago
Sure. Keep in mind that the top GMs have ratings of 2700 and above, while some GMs have ratings as low as the 2400s. So a top-level GM still has a large amount of age-related distance to fall before he won't be a match for a "low-
144.
by dfan 10y ago
My password manager currently has 153 passwords in it. I was surprised too once it started filling up.
145.
by dfan 10y ago
This article slightly overstates how disruptive the strategy is. Of course top-level Scrabble players already knew about rack management and defensive plays, and would not always just greedily play the highest-scoring word. It's more a
146.
by dfan 10y ago
This looks very nice. Is there any editor support yet (Emacs, vim)? Or do you currently just edit Stanza files in text mode?
147.
by dfan 10y ago
I do this with chess. I take positions from tournament games in which I made a correctable mistake (generally not positions in which there was just a lot of calculation to be done and I wasn't up to the task) and add them as flashcards
148.
by dfan 10y ago
Yeah, the headline should really be "Stanford archaeologist traces the origins of authority in the Andes of Peru".
149.
by dfan 10y ago
As a member of the Ultima Underworld team, I'm looking forward to seeing what Jimmy has to say about it. It's been really fun to watch him cover the stories behind the games of my youth.
150.
by dfan 11y ago
Julia lets you use Unicode in your code as well, and it's great. I use Julia for math a lot and it's really nice to go straight from your equations to code with variables named α and ϵ instead of alpha and epsilon. The vim and ema

More ›