TezlaKoil

There is no credible documentation of EURISKO's achievements. No one has every actually seen EURISKO's source code except for Lenat.

Despite huge advances in technology, in computational power, and in the amount of engineers and grad students thrown at these problems, the magical reasoning feats have never been reproduced by anyone else - not even by Lenat's much more expensive project Cyc.

What's more, Lenat did not give a consistent account of the Traveler tournament. One time he claimed "ninety-six ships in Eurisko’s fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor", other times he would claim the winning strategy was "astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility".

The most probable explanation is that there's more myth than truth in the stories about EURISKO.

(on a less serious note, the jargon file entry for "bogosity" references Lenat; see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.h...)

It depends on what you treat as a complete action. One could equally well decompose it as two actions and two conditionals:

if (volcano_status == GONNA_BLOW) refuel_car(); else if (volcano_status == NO_WORRIES) refuel_car(); else if (volcano_status == UNKNONW) nop();

then later

if (volcano_status == GONNA_BLOW) pack_everything_and_run(); else if (volcano_status == NO_WORRIES) pack_suitcase_and_leave_for_holiday(); else if (volcano_status == UNKNONW) call_to_cancel_holiday();

Then refueling the car is definitely the same action, even if it's followed by different actions later on.

Scientists say that there's a considerable but not overwhelming chance that the volcano on my island might erupt in the next few days.

If I knew that the volcano is going to erupt, then I would drive to the airport (with all my belongings, and leave).

If I knew that the volcano on my island is not going to erupt this month, then I would drive to the airport (to go on a package holiday that I had planned).

However, if the outcome is undetermined, I might prefer to cancel my holiday (I would not enjoy it while worrying about all my stuff potentially being destroyed in a fiery inferno) and wait to see what happens. So I should hesitate from driving to the airport.

> What happens when the only housing available is for drug addicts and you just happen to be poor?

The same thing that happens when the only parking available is reserved for the disabled and you're not disabled?

So what? You could equally well observe that most great scientists were men, but that doesn't mean that STEM education for women can be improved by sex reassignment surgery.

Diffie–Hellman key exchange?

Oh gosh, this feels just like my crypto finals :(

Alas, spending time on writing production-ready software is career suicide in academia. Conferences and journals value novelty, and are not interested in incremental improvements.

If you're really lucky (EvoSuite [1] / Google), BigCompany will take interest in your project and give you some money. The expectation is that you'll hire students to improve your software, and then these students will go on to work for BigCompany.

[1] http://www.evosuite.org/evosuite/

This article about the bracelet is from 2015. No updates since then, and it does not link to anything peer-reviewed. All in all I would take this with a huge grain of salt.

"Mr. LastName was my father's name! Please, call me Dr. LastName."

> I'm a trained mathematician as well.

Mayhap.

>A constructivist would state the result in a variety of ways. But none of them would involve a potentially self-referential construction based on the absolute truth of an infinite number of statements. Which really does rule out Cantor's argument.

But in any case you misunderstand Cantor's argument and constructive mathematics.

mbid is correct; Cantor's diagonalization argument constructively proves the uncountability of the real numbers, see e.g. Bishop-Bridges' CONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS, Theorem 2.19, page 29.

> Buy a hard-sided bag for checking your laptop?

Think before you write?

A hard case makes zero difference (or in some cases actively makes things worse) if the TSA fails to secure your laptop after inspecting it.

> There is very little actual food choice because the market optimizes for profits, not for health.

Hold on! The market consists of both suppliers and customer. One would think that being fat is not profitable for the latter. Meanwhile, only 3% of Japanese people have a BMI over 30, while 32% of Americans do. It must be that Japanese markets don't optimize for profit! Or maybe you got the source of the problem wrong. Guess which one I think it is.

> Mexico has shown that regulation does work, they regulated sugar which has had a positive effect on health.

Hungary has a higher sugar tax, had it for a longer time, and it appears to have no effect on health at all. Go figure.

Clevo is a huge Chinese OEM computer manufacturer which exclusively produces cheap, low-quality laptop computers.

System76 selects Clevo configurations that are more-or-less compatible with Linux, puts a brand on them and sells them at a somewhat-inflated price.

> In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better.

This worked between about 2008 and 2013; but those days are long one. Engines such as Stockfish 8 surpass both humans and human+engine "centaurs". That is, incorporating a human into the loop only makes things worse.

Beware: historian R. J. Evans is known and controversial for having weird theses about Central/Eastern Europe and supporting them with misrepresentative, cherry-picked arguments.

The essay quoted in the article is a prime example:

He compares the humanisic philosophers of Austria to the natural philosophers of the West, while ignoring the significant actual scientific output of the Empire (things like Auenbrugger's invention of percussion as a diagnostic technique, Semmelweis' introduction of antiseptics, Loschmidt's groundbreaking work on ideal gases). He also deliberately mixes events from different time periods into a confused narrative: for example, Baron Chaos' Austria was the massively German-speaking southeastern part of the HRE, which does not fit the description of "too many nationalities, too many fractious nobles and rebellious provinces" more representative of the late, sprawling empire (which, by the way, also had scientific output comparable to the West).

> Even simply the accent is almost impossible to overcome (women seem to have better luck defeating the accent than men and you have a chance up to the age of 17 or so).

Accent reduction does not work for everyone (see e.g. Bela Lugosi), but its success rate is much better than what your post would suggest.

Three of the 2010 illegals (Chapman, Mills and Zottoli) had Russian accents. Their neighbors knew that they were Russian, and said that they never tried to conceal their national background. On the other hand, nobody could tell that Heathfield and Foley weren't real Americans.

Good idea, but badly needs a "wildcard" pattern and some way to generate rules by rotation.

I don't buy this. Everyone had different handwriting in the good old days, and this did not make grading unfair.

They used something called word count.