Without disputing your main point about how philosophers typically behave, I want to clarify the is-water-H2O argument. As I understand it, it's making a point about how we use language: people have been using the word "water" to refer to various puddles, lakes, oceans, beverages, etc for a long time before electrolysis was discovered. We know now that all those instances have being-H2O in common, but it's not a necessary property for the word "water" to apply: if some other chemical fulfilled the everyday requirements for water (being clear, wet, thirst-quenching, etc) without being H2O, it would be "water," and if a particular variation of H2O doesn't fulfill those requirements (^2H2O, heavy water, is poisonous) then it's not water. See "Water is Not H2O" (Michael Weisberg, 2003). http://www.phil.upenn.edu/~weisberg/papers/waterfinal.pdf
The way to give helpful tips, as opposed to best possible moves, is to be more vague, not to recommend a specific less-than-optimal move. Imprecise help like "hold onto your high cards" or "don't gamble on drawing one particular rank" could work, but if the Auto-Hold feature is advertised as a faster way to hold onto an optimal set of cards, then that's what it should be.
It would be neat to add some randomness-measuring statistics of the last N bits: like counts of 1s and 0s; digraph counts for 00, 01, 10, and 11; length of longest 0/1 repetitions; or more sophisticated tests.
Or, setUpInstance looks like it's the setter for an upInstance variable, whereas setupInstance has an obvious connection to the "setup" action even if it's grammatically incorrect.
"Some grammar knowledge" probably also tells you the structure of the verb, namely TREAT+ING(V,present progressive). "TREAT" is the 1,118th most common word, so that gives you:
WNPHMMVF FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING CUYROVGVF
And then some contextual knowledge of what sort of things get treated tells you that CUYROVGVF is a disease or injury, and WNPHMMVF is a medicine or therapy. So knowing 2,000 words and some grammar isn't quite fluent, but it's around the level of a middle-school child who has to ask what lots of nouns are.
Too many of these are quibbles about minor language warts and constructs that shouldn't be used in the first place. For example:
Python: There is no "do ... until <condition>". Most languages don't have this either.
C#: i++.ToString works, but ++i.ToString does not. When would you ever need this?
Ruby: Suffix-conditions after whole blocks of code. Just don't do that.
Java: unused keywords, such as goto and const. Do you really need to name your variables goto and const?
Some criticisms do point out fundamental limitations and flaws, but most of the time this is by design and the solution is to use a different language. For instance, C has manual memory management, Python uses indentation for nesting, and Haskell uses lazy evaluation. Only a few are potential fixes in future language versions or forks (e.g. HashMap literals for Java... which I thought had been introduced in version 8, but I guess not).
There used to be a shirt with Tantek Çelik's box model hack (voice-family: "\"}\"";) for sale somewhere online. (I screen-printed my own copy on an old T-shirt.) This was back when IE5.5 was still in use. I wonder if this site was inspired by that shirt.
If it were programmed to keep itself clean, and had an algorithm to do that ("scrape the dirty area against a shrub"), I see no reason why it couldn't pass the mirror test.
Paying for rights to the space behind a seat may not be a great solution, but at least it's a solution, and debating about its merits may lead to a better one. The current situation is that there is no right answer: neither the seat-recliner nor the space-requester can be objectively said to be in the right, so who gets the space comes down to who is less polite and more assertive. If everyone agrees that whoever bought the ticket can claim the space or sell it to the person behind them, then that's an objective property right one can appeal to without having to just say "Well, I want the space, I don't care that you want it too, and I can be more of a jerk than you about it."
I'm stuck on set 1 challenge 4, detecting single-character XOR. I know how the cipher works, having solved challenge 3, but when I brute-forced all 327 hex strings in their challenge data with each of the 256 possible one-byte keys, none of them deciphered to anything like English. I suspect a typo in their data, since one line -- 1c3df1135321a8e9241a5607f8305d571aa546001e3254555a11511924 -- actually has 58 hex digits, not 60. Has anyone else run into this problem?
Edit: Of course I would solve this right after a post saying I can't. I was only looking at the (string, key) pairs which deciphered to all-printable plain text, but forgot that \r, \n, and \t count as printable ASCII characters.
This article rightly points out that violence isn't actually much simpler to simulate than social interaction; it's just that players accept crude simulation because it's still fun. Space Invaders is essentially a game of Breakout with reskinned sprites, but just providing those skins lets the player imagine the details of an alien invasion.
Maybe a similarly crude level of simulation could work for social games, if the artwork allows players to get immersed in the game and fill in details with their imagination. Japanese relationship games and dating sims get part of the way there; since they're "visual novels," they can convey subtleties of character through narration, instead of having to come up with game mechanics for everything. The actual mechanics are little more than a single love/hate score for each girl, with the player successfully dating one when their score gets high enough (and getting a "bad end" if all are low -- or if too many are high).
Chris Crawford on Game Design mentioned that for the game Gossip, he simulated relationships as a network of springs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_%28computer_game%29) The closer Alice is to Bob, the more she can influence his opinion of (distance from) Carol. Another spring-based AI by Michael Heasell (Wizard Dude) won CodeCombat's programming tournament. (http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion-stateme...) This "system of springs" could be the core of a social game the way "collision detection" is the core of shooters.
I suspect that one could create a relationship simulator with an emergent storyline by modeling the characters' relations towards each other (not just having a love/hate counter for their relations with the protagonist), and by having a skilled writer create dramatic scenarios triggered on certain conditions and "everyday" scenarios to move the plot along and provide chances to adjust the relationships. The standard plot tree of a dating sim would become a plot graph. It's still a far cry from real human interaction, but Call of Duty is far from real warfare and it sells anyway. The hard part is modeling just the interesting parts and making an entire playthrough be "fun."
An iPhone-sized computer that can wirelessly connect to a monitor and keyboard could itself act as a mouse (with gesture recognition like Apple's Magic Mouse), a touchpad, a chorded keyboard, or any other peripheral that can be emulated with a touchscreen and some hardware buttons on the side. (Volume up/down could act like back/forward on a mouse, for instance.) This would be great for accessing your own data and applications from anywhere, without relying on cloud storage.
People would probably underfund boring but necessary programs like the interstate highway system and industrial regulations, and would mostly check boxes for a few highly visible programs that fit with their politics (NASA, the EPA, new fighter jets, etc). I expect that a lot of programs would end up being designated as "necessary", with choices allowed for only a few which are deemed inessential. And of course, drones would end up being classified as necessary.
Brain damage can lower intelligence, and I see no reason why it could not be raised as well. Even if genes provide something "defaults" or "limits," environmental effects are still relevant.
Do you mean that "moral" should mean "someone who cooperates with others" and "immoral" should mean "someone who does not cooperate with others"? Then "moral" and "immoral" would just mean "cooperative" and "uncooperative," which we already have words for. Plus, morality shouldn't require you to cooperate with immoral people (although whether you should actively punish them or not is the eigenJesus-eigenMoses question).
I wonder what would happen in a similar experiment where a large sign makes it clear how high-status the violinist is. Would people be persuaded to stop, or are the passers-by in a Metro station naturally going to be too busy and hurried to take in a performance?
The first one, "Crebase", turned out to be a Pokemon, but that's its Japanese name (クレベース); it's Avalugg in English, which sounds a lot less like actual technologies like Couchbase or Graphbase.
I got to "You are dead. (Solve: -Body)" and was slightly cheered up by the fact that I would still have Hope left. Then it says "You are forgotten. (Solve: -Hope)". Great. Just great. Very realistic for such a simple game.
My strategy was to give the AI a single 2 at the beginning, then only 4s. When the board fills up enough, there will probably be a space where you can put a second 2 to make it lose before it can combine them.
On some sites I see numeric ReCAPTCHAS, which are easy to solve. Others, though, have the sometimes-impossible alphabetical ones. Does the site developer have any control over which type shows up?
For the common cases of "import foo" and "from foo import bar", having a keyword avoids repeating the module/function name, as in "foo = import('foo')" and "bar = import('foo').bar".
Ignoring this detail, "import" could be simply a function, like "print" and "exec" in Python 3. And with lazy evaluation, even statements could be made into function calls: "if(True, 42, 1/0)" would evaluate to 42 without causing a ZeroDivisionError. The same can be done for assignment: "locals().__setitem__('x', 3)" instead of "x = 3". Keep this up and programs might start to look like this:
Aren't the employees' sales a useful contribution to the stock market? They're turning private knowledge about upcoming SEC actions into public information, assuming that the public bothers to correlate stock sales with SEC employee lists. (If either of those pieces of information isn't publically known, then an SEC employee selling stock doesn't contribute any more information than any random shareholder's sale.)
I'm not sure that democratic consensus is the same as democratic government. If the Silk Road 2 community grows and its new users have different ideals than the old ones -- maybe they don't support this kind of retribution against thieves, or they're against selling certain goods on Silk Road -- then a government would require new users to abide by the old rules, whereas a consensual arrangement would acknowledge that the consensus has changed.
If you do think that Silk Road 2 has some form of government, what kind is it? That is, how do they define and maintain their code of behavior? An oligarchy of old and influential users might claim to have authority; DPR 2 might act as a monarch; a majority of users might claim that everyone accepted a "social contract" just by joining Silk Road. But a de facto agreement among members on how to behave isn't enforced: it's de facto, so it happens to be the case, but it could change as easily as it formed.
This list seems to exemplify Alfred Whitehead's statement that "the safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." (With many of those footnotes by Aristotle.)
Richard Feynman mentions these in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
> One mechanical engineer at Frankfort was always trying to design things and could never get everything right. One time he designed a box full of gears, one of which was a big, eight-inch-diameter gear wheel that had six spokes. The fella says excitedly “Well, boss, how is it? How is it?”
> “Just fine!” the boss replies. “All you have to do is specify a shaft passer on each of the spokes, so the gear wheel can turn!” The guy had designed a shaft that went right between the spokes!
> The boss went on to tell us that there was such a thing as a shaft passer (I thought he must have been joking). It was invented by the Germans during the war to keep the British minesweepers from catching the cables that held the German mines floating under water at a certain depth. With these shaft passers, the German cables could allow the British cables to pass through as if they were going through a revolving door. So it was possible to put shaft passers on all the spokes, but the boss didn’t mean that the machinists should go to all that trouble; the guy should instead just redesign it and put the shaft somewhere else.
Is AIXI capable of recognizing itself? If an AIXI agent were controlling a robot body, would it realize that the body's actions correlate with its own intentions? Would it pass the mirror test?
"The proper way"? Not only is it less familiar than the usual "i = 0; i < n; i++" idiom, requiring the reader to examine exactly what it's doing, but now i goes from n to 1 instead of 0 to n-1. What's so bad about caching the strlen result in a variable beforehand?