ramgorur

This might also be relevant, http://www.human-competitive.org/

This is an annual competition on evolving "human competitive" solutions to difficult real world problems.

But I used to know GAs don't need gradient information, right? The algorithm is supposed to discover the gradient by itself, if there is any.

Exactly, GA suffered very badly during the AI winter to be more specific, but it's coming to the scene again. In fact, GAs don't need gradient information at all. If you want to do some weird stuffs like evolving deep networks, multi-objective optimizations or large scale black-box optimization, GAs (and friends) are the only way.

I think I've also read somewhere about a bug in the java Random class, it was something about after N iterations, the number starts from iteration 1 where N is not very big (i.e. clearly visible pattern/cyclic repeat in the numbers). But I can't find it anymore, if someone knows its whereabouts, please let me know.

no c++/g++ ??

the biggest difference, in academia you code on sunday night and actually, a very small number of people read your code. But in industry, you write a code and then it goes through a pipeline of multiple reviews, so you end up spending most of your time addressing all those comments, and also you do the same for the codes written by other people.

>"computational class above and beyond Turing"

what does it mean?

It's strange that the article does not mention anything about hydraulic macroeconomics and MONIAC, they were once widely used to verify theories in economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_macroeconomics

What about a stochastic optimization techniques like this one described here?

http://www.human-competitive.org/sites/default/files/deb-myb...

The paper describes a real parameter function optimization problem, but the Gosplan was I think more of a combinatorial one. According to the author, the method described there can also be parallelized.

The colouring algorithm is very interesting, what if we give a dinosaur image as an input after learning the network with images from all the 10,000 reptile species?

Interestingly, bat penis looks astoundingly similar to that of human. Of course, that has nothing to do with phylogeny, but with convergent evolution.

Some interesting folk remedies prevalent in the south east asia:

1. don't eat lychee, tamarind, unripe mango in empty stomach, always eat them after rice or bread.

2. don't mix pineapple and milk, or don't take them one after the other, otherwise your stomach will get sick.

3. eating the raw batter of palmyra palm causes fever and stomach pain.

Looks like these are factual knowledge that have been gathered and retained over thousands of years came from observed causal relationships.

I have seen a couple of news on communal violence (resulted in death) originating from a facebook post, is there any statistics on that?

interestingly, the antenna optimizer (AO) software uses genetic algorithm to find the right the antenna topology, therefore, this antenna is not designed, it's evolved. more details can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna

amazing, but what kind of display is that? how does an LCD render the white noise so smoothly? very strange.

80's Japanese electronics were way ahead, my dad had one casio FX-602p calculator, I think still we have that one at home. It had an interface on the top and you could attach the calculator to a box like device and that device had 3 audio outputs. Then you can plug those audio jacks into a cassette player to save and load programs.

btw, the word "seiko" means "starchild"

I had one friend who convinced me to believe that there is a very small difference between facebook and a public restroom. I am out of facebook from 2009 and I am not isolated.

razer blade pro has a different touchpad placement, it's on the right side of the keyboard. I also have some difficulties with the touchpad of my current laptop, I click it all the time.

hydraulic analog computing machines used to be one of many ways to perform economic simulations, and there is a whole discipline came out of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_macroeconomics

Should we say that the space programs in the 60s and the 70s were more successful? specially, if we consider the communication and the control technologies available at that time. For example, vikings had Honeywell 24 bit cpu with 18K memory. What about those Argon computers used in the soviet venera programs?

Or may be, a very fast/accurate computation is not that necessary?

I don't think 550$ is too steep, if you compare with phones like samsung s7 (670$), huwaei p9 (500$), 1plus3 (600$).

solar panels in mars did not turn out to be very efficient. After couple of days, all those panels get covered with dust, and you need a wiper to clean that up, which will again drain a lots of battery power.

there is brittle base underneath the lander, when it drops that base breaks into pieces to absorb the shock, interesting.

I am not sure about the gourmet scenes in tokyo (I am a poor grad student), but in terms of groceries, they are the best. You can get extremely good quality beef from shops like daiei.

the most unusual stuff I have seen was in 7/11, I don't know how they cook such good quality oden, and even they keep very good quality sandwiches, weird, because to eat something quick and cheap people generally don't mind the quality so much, and the bathrooms are squeaky clean (the public hygiene sense in the us is still primitive if you compare with japan's). 7/11s also keep good onigiris, kara-ages.

tokyo street foods are also amazing, but a dinner at a mediocre restaurant will rip off your pocket.

"orion's death" (page 6-7) says it all, we might be able to see something like orion by today if there were no ban on the nuclear tests, and there wouldn't be any "ban" if there were no "nuclear attack in 1945".

not everything in nature is very smart, like vestibular system in the inner ear, so easy to temper with. Actually human can make far more cool things than that.

I have seen many papers on arxiv that are typeset without latex turned out to be a shoddy research work. I don't know there might be a correlation.

there is a response from berkeley SETI: https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf

I do not think so. the spectra from the europa's vapour plumes does not show such signature. But still experts think there might be some bio-chemical reactions going on in the europa's sub-surface ocean.

the first statement is obvious, isn't it? replace the aphrodisiacs with anything, like 'hammer', it still holds.

the second one is interesting, but I didn't quite get how this can be deduced from the first statement.

the answer here has more background:

http://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/10175/how-many-...