Jan

28

Humans 51,749,484,784,784 v. Computers 4

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament

When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to notice. The Wired Campus intends to fix that.

At a Scrabble tournament in Toronto, a piece of software called Quackle triumphed in a best-of-five series over David Boys, a computer programmer who won the world Scrabble championship in 1995. The open-source program’s chief designers include Jason Katz-Brown, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also happens to be one of the top-ranked Scrabble players in the world.

Quackle’s win did not come easily. Mr. Boys leapt out to a quick lead against the software, winning the first two games thanks to words like “pithead” and “redyeing.” But the computer program roared back and took the final three tilts, making a couple of outstanding plays — like “deviating,” placed through two disconnected I’s that were already on the board — that even top-level human players would be hard-pressed to spot.

Quackle earned the right to play Mr. Boys by edging out another Scrabble-playing program, Maven, in a series of games against expert human players. (Quackle finished the Toronto Computer vs. Human Showdown, as the event was called, with a gaudy 32-4 record, while Maven could only muster a 30-6 showing.)

Mr. Boys seemed to have no trouble keeping a sense of perspective after the loss: “It’s still better to be a human than to be a computer,” he said. And as the former world champion undoubtedly realizes, luck plays a much greater role in a Scrabble duel than in a chess match. About a decade ago, Mr. Boys played a perfect game against a more primitive computer program — and he still lost. 

Jan

28

Say No to Microsoft Window Vista

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

Microsoft Windows is a pain to diagnose. However, Run has many of the tools to determine issues. Someone at Microsoft hates it. Can someone tell me why? Finding Run has gotten more and more difficult over time. Now in Vista they hide it by default. :(

Where’s the “Run” dialog box in Windows Vista? » The PC Doctor’s blog

…If you the link back on the Start Menu, right click on the Start button and click Properties.  On the Start Menu tab click Customize.

The Customize Start Menu dialog will then be displayed.

Scroll down to Run command and check the box. 

Finally click OK and OK again.

The link has screenshots.

Jan

18

Something Your Boss Doesn’t Want To Hear

Filed Under Quotes, Work | Leave a Comment

Quote for the day:

I spent all day working on a bad EAR.

Oh, WebLogic and your deplorable… I mean, deployable… applications!

Jan

15

Let There Be Life!

Filed Under Science | Leave a Comment

Discovery Channel :: News - Space :: Did Viking Lander Kill Alien Life?

Last month, scientists excitedly reported that new photographs of Mars showed geologic changes that suggest water occasionally flows there — the most tantalizing sign that Mars is hospitable to life.

In the ’70s, the Viking mission found no signs of life. But it was looking for Earth-like life, in which salt water is the internal liquid of living cells. Given the cold dry conditions of Mars, that life could have evolved on Mars with the key internal fluid consisting of a mix of water and hydrogen peroxide, said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, author of the new research.

That’s because a water-hydrogen peroxide mix stays liquid at very low temperatures (-68 degrees Fahrenheit), doesn’t destroy cells when it freezes, and can suck scarce water vapor out of the air. The Viking experiments of the ’70s wouldn’t have noticed alien hydrogen peroxide-based life and, in fact, would have killed it by drowning and overheating the microbes, said Schulze-Makuch, a geology professor at Washington State University.

One Viking experiment seeking life on Mars poured water on soil. That would have essentially drowned hydrogen peroxide-based life, Schulze-Makuch said. A different experiment heated the soil to see if something would happen, but that would have baked Martian microbes, he said.

So maybe we killed the microbes? Doh! Such Terracentric creatures are we!

Jan

7

No More Public Anonymous Photos

Filed Under Interweb, Philosophy, Photography, Privacy | Leave a Comment

Early in the history of the WWW, people thought a document which did not have an inbound link, a link from some external location to the file, was private. Search engines looked for content on web sites in locations for which there was not a link already pointing. To truly respect the privacy of those sites, these search engines would have only index content from sites which asked to be index AND only indexed content which that web site pointed a link.

Just because SiteB links to a location on SiteA doesn’t mean SiteA wished it to found in a search, an example is deep linking. Note the court cases (1, 2) in which judges rule in favor of the SiteAs who go to court about SiteBs who make such links. Note I made deep links in order to demonstrate the deep links. :)

On Privacy and Polar Rose - Polar Rose Blog : On Privacy and Polar Rose

It should come as little surprise that we believe that Polar Rose adds tremendous value to the photo web. We think we’re as harmful to the photo web, as Altavista, Yahoo!, and Google have been to the text web. By sorting the text web, these search engines exposed the wonderful resource of public documents that web had already become. The side-effect was that information which was not meant for public consumption, but which was kept private by obscurity, was suddenly exposed and searchable.

By Polar Rose’s logic, because people acclimated in general to losing textual anonyminity, they will do the same for facial recognition. Just what does the lack of a label mean? The photographer may be protecting the identity of someone, a minor for example. The uploader may be lazy. The uploader may not know. The uploaded may not own the copyright to the photo.

On the whole, I think facial recognition is a good thing. The cases in which there are likely going to be privacy concerns are going to be more likely uncommon than common. Those who it affects are going to be most upset all the same.

If anything, then I think we have a tendency to underestimate how badly such things are going to violate the privacy of our lives. For example, look how often search engines exposed Social Security Numbers on web sites.

Jan

6

Mirrormask

Filed Under Movies / Films / TV | Leave a Comment

Currently watching Neil Gaiman’s MirrorMask.

Plot Summary for MirrorMask (2005) (IMDB.com):

Helena, a 15-year-old girl in a family of circus entertainers, often wishes she could run off and join real life. After a fight with her parents about her future plans, her mother falls quite ill and Helena is convinced that it is all her fault. On the eve of her mother’s major surgery, she dreams that she is in a strange world with two opposing queens, bizarre creatures, and masked inhabitants. All is not well in this new world - the white queen has fallen ill and can only be restored by the MirrorMask, and it’s up to Helena to find it. But as her adventures continue, she begins to wonder whether she’s in a dream, or something far more sinister.

UPDATE Jan 7, 2006: I liked it. It was very strange, though not that hard to follow.

Jan

4

Ready to Switch?

Filed Under Computers | Leave a Comment

I was disappointed the only IE competitor mentioned was Firefox. Opera, Safari, and Netscape are well known enough that it would behoove a more balanced view to mention them as well.

My only use of IE lately is replicating a user problem I can’t replicate in Firefox and the very, very infrequent case a web site site doesn’t work in Firefox or Netscape. :( Quite frankly, it scares me to surf with IE. Of course, I am the person my friends call about cleaning up their computer when it runs slow because it is a computer virus, spyware, and adware infested mess. So my fears are based on the horror of cleaning up the after effects of using IE.

Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006 - Security Fix

For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.

In a total of ten cases last year, instructions detailing how to leverage “critical” vulnerabilities in IE were published online before Microsoft had a patch to fix them.

Microsoft labels software vulnerabilities “critical” — its most severe rating — if the flaws could be exploited to criminal advantage
without any action on the part of the user, or by merely convincing an IE user to click on a link, visit a malicious Web site, or open a
specially crafted e-mail or e-mail attachment.

The small mention of competitors:

In contrast, Internet Explorer’s closest competitor in terms of market share — Mozilla’s Firefox browser — experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.

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Jan

3

LMAO

Filed Under Fortunes | Leave a Comment

“You are known for being kind and courteous.”

That almost put me on the floor laughing.

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