vmilner

Ive always got Harlan Ellisons (IMHO wonderful) unmade screenplay for Asimovs 'I Robot' in mind when I read discussions of AI produced films. Id love to know how feasible it would be to have the screenplay converted , preferably with a style inspired by Mark Zugs illustrations.

https://www.amazon.com/Robot-Illustrated-Screenplay-Harlan-E...

I remember the uk papers being full of the Last One ads in 1981.

I’m curious as to how many high schools around the world teach complex numbers. In England in the late 80s when I did A level maths (age 17-18) it was part of the syllabus, but now it is only available in the harder A-level further maths, which is often not taught in the standard non-selective non-private schools, making entry to university STEM courses more difficult.

https://github.com/lorserker/ben/tree/78c3690f34ed945f95f3c1... (look at SingleDummyEstimates.ipynb )

also the keras model ben/models/TF2models/RPDD_2024-07-08-E02.keras is still present in the current repo but not apparently used. It was trained on ten million deals where all double dummy info is known.

Yes - you are right, 70% for a correct answer is what the talk says. Id misremembered the higher (~99%) numbers because for my purpose (simulating many random deals compatible with known cards to get probability distributions on hidden card positions and trick taking possibilities in each suit/notrumps ) a one trick error is quite acceptable. I agree a more straightforward architecture is a promising approach. Once I have generated weights in a form usable in C, I am also curious as to whether they can direct DDS's tree search as a kind of probabilistic oracle.

(There was some Ben code to use a neural net double dummy evaluator, because Ive used it, but it was removed. Ill try and find the git point it was removed.)

I'll concede an order of magnitude for dds, I may not have been using it optimally. The claims made by Lorand Dali for his neural net solver were a thousand times faster with a slight drop in accuracy (99.9%+ I think)

I believe this was used in his 'ben' bridge engine, https://github.com/lorserker/ben/ now maintained by ThorvaldAagaard, though I have to admit it now seems to be heavily dds focussed, so there may have been a rollback along the lines you outlined.

I'm attempting to recreate the concept myself, so should soon have an idea whether its moonshine or not,

I think computer bridge will take off soon. LLMs have allowed double-dummy solvers to move from ~0.1sec to microseconds (if you allow 99.9% accuracy) and parsing human bidding system descriptions must either be possible or v close.

New textbook may help

https://www.gnuradio.org/news/2025-01-29-gnuradio-textbook/

Formalisation of the classification of finite simple groups must be on someone’s ‘moonshot’ list.

'Gandalf himself never uses the palantiri that Thiel named his company after, not just due to how incredibly dangerous and powerful they are, but also their corrupting nature.'

Seems a bit harsh. It's chatting to Sauron with them that's the problem.

There's a depressing number who dismiss the benefits of things like learning times tables as 'rote learning' rather than force-multipliers that free your brain for other things.

"There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first."

  Sherlock Holmes, 'A Study in Scarlet'

Takes me back to the ZX Spectrum 1980s when 128KB RAM was an unaffordable luxury. (Bit like today...)

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2000237/Book/Mastering...

http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/zxspectrum/docs/Comple...

> FreeBSD despite its title never had something to do with Free Software

The FSF disagree:

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD

Yes Minister on point as usual

https://youtu.be/x-HBsT6GmMs?t=69

Does anyone have recommendations for cheapish mechanical watches that don't cost a fortune to service? (UK based) Secondhand or new.

"In the morning Fatty was mildly unnerved to see the other hobbits painting a large sign outside the little house with 'Frodo lives here' and 'Sauron sucks!' on it."

Fatty Bolger?

I remember when Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks (Mix of 'Choose your own adventure' and solo D+D adventure) were big in the UK in the 80s, and teachers were sniffy about them not being proper reading. I bet they'd love their kids to be reading them now.

It's a superficial point but this relatively newer style (La)TeX layout makes me much more keen to read documents for some reason.

I seem to remember some medical related multiple choice tests in the UK use a mechanism of +1 for correct , 0 for unanswered , -1 for incorrect.

I enjoyed reading Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets by Peter van der Linden after reading that in the early 90s. Also the C standard from the time and the attached 'Rationale' document https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub160.pdf

Are there no posted birthday cards in Denmark any more?

"Pricematch" is also common in the UK for traditional stores like Sainsburys Tesco competing with Lidl and Aldi 'discounters'.

Isn't it common for state sales taxes to be added at the till? (I don't live in the US but that seemed to be what happened on my visits there)

It's not as good as ed: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols.

https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/

Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'

The weirdest thing to me is that the quantisation matrix isn’t symmetrical in the top left to bottom right diagonal.

“Secret Army” (the “straight” inspiration of the comedy “Allo Allo”) - a dramatised version of the Belgian Comete line that returned allied airmen to Britain still stands up as a superb series from the 70s.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8ae0po