Science!

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13165
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Sat Sep 16, 2017 12:23 pm

Image

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Sep 21, 2017 12:17 pm

Image

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 03, 2017 9:07 pm

Cosmos Magazine In a surprising and unexpected find, scientists debunk the possibility that we're all simulations in a computer somewhere, fairly strongly too

I mean, you can still press on with "Well, maybe the "computer" is [**magic**]", but certainly this pushes the theory from the practical and possible into mere imagination.
Image

User avatar
IGNORE ME
Woah Dangsaurus
Posts: 3679
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 2:40 pm

Re: Science!

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Oct 03, 2017 10:21 pm

The pair initially set out to see whether it was possible to use a technique known as quantum Monte Carlo to study the quantum Hall effect


That is the nerdiest sentence I've read in a long time.

Now, the finding is technically that the known universe cannot be simulated by any computing device capable of existing in the known universe, but I think begging the question at that point is getting into some sort of ENIAC of the Gods scenario.

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Tue Oct 03, 2017 10:39 pm

Yeah, I mean, it's at the "religion" stage now, where a truly stubborn type just handwave an explanation and say "a higher power does it with [unknowable stuff]".

And I mean, hey maybe they're right - you never know! But you can say that about most religions.
Image

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Wed Nov 01, 2017 5:42 pm



No worries Scott, they're working on fixing that!

Image

I'd make a joke about that just being the way West Virginia looks all the time anyway, but uh, this is pretty bleak. If there's any benzene in that smoke (and there's a fair chance there is), everyone in that town is going to die a horrible cancerous death.

To say nothing of what happens when all that crap goes into the Ohio valley waters and then the Mississippi.
Image

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Nov 02, 2017 11:48 pm

Image

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Fri Nov 24, 2017 2:37 pm

WaPo: Expanding on previous research, Yale study not only confirms a very basic biological difference between conservatives and liberals, but has found a way to override it

Essentially, they argue that turning conservatives into liberals is most easily achieved by making people feel safe.

Arguably, the reverse process has been well used for some time, as conservatives have already naturally intuited how to make liberals conservative is by terrifying them.

It's probably not all as simple as this, but if it holds up, it'd balance out the conservative noise machine fear factory at least.
Image

User avatar
Thad
Posts: 13165
Joined: Tue Jan 21, 2014 10:05 am
Location: 1611 Uranus Avenue
Contact:

Re: Science!

Postby Thad » Fri Nov 24, 2017 3:16 pm

You mean a liberal isn't a conservative who just spent the night in jail?

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Fri Nov 24, 2017 3:22 pm

Thad wrote:You mean a liberal isn't a conservative who just spent the night in jail?

If the study's to be believed, it's close to the opposite - oddly enough!
Image

User avatar
Büge
Posts: 5440
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:56 pm

Re: Science!

Postby Büge » Sat Dec 02, 2017 6:35 pm

Image

User avatar
atog
Posts: 589
Joined: Tue Jun 06, 2017 1:49 pm

Re: Science!

Postby atog » Sat Dec 02, 2017 9:19 pm

62°24", 13°48"
Placeholder for something witty that doesn't make me sound like an asshole

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Mon Dec 04, 2017 1:48 am

Image

User avatar
Yoji
Posts: 1440
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2016 4:12 pm
Location: Screamtown

Re: Science!

Postby Yoji » Mon Dec 04, 2017 2:17 am

Heh, I remember seeing those in a middle school textbook. Never saw the internal mechanism until now, though.
Image: Mention something from KPCC or Rachel Maddow
Image: Go on about Homeworld for X posts

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Thu Dec 07, 2017 3:17 pm

A new machine learning engine apparently is now the world's best Chess/Go/Etc player after 8 or so hours of iterations.

https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-futur ... arns-chess

Since AlphaZero did not benefit from any chess knowledge, which means no games or opening theory, it also means it had to discover opening theory on its own. And do recall that this is the result of only 24 hours of self-learning. The team produced fascinating graphs showing the openings it discovered as well as the ones it gradually rejected as it grew stronger!

We can see that in the early games, AlphaZero was quite enthusiastic about playing the French Defense, but after two hours (this so humiliating) began to play it less and less.

The Caro-Kann fared a good deal better, and held a prime spot in AlphaZero's opening choices until it also gradually filtered it out. So what openings did AlphaZero actually like or choose by the end of its learning process? The English Opening and the Queen's Gambit!

The paper also came accompanied by ten games to share the results. It needs to be said that these are very different from the usual fare of engine games. If Karpov had been a chess engine, he might have been called AlphaZero. There is a relentless positional boa constrictor approach that is simply unheard of. Modern chess engines are focused on activity, and have special safeguards to avoid blocked positions as they have no understanding of them and often find themselves in a dead end before they realize it. AlphaZero has no such prejudices or issues, and seems to thrive on snuffing out the opponent’s play. It is singularly impressive, and what is astonishing is how it is able to also find tactics that the engines seem blind to.
Image

User avatar
Grath
Posts: 2387
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 7:34 pm

Re: Science!

Postby Grath » Thu Dec 07, 2017 4:44 pm

I, for one, welcome our new machine learning overlords.

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jan 06, 2018 8:27 pm

Image

User avatar
zaratustra
Posts: 1665
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:45 pm

Re: Science!

Postby zaratustra » Sun Jan 07, 2018 9:53 am

so... just regular parrots.

User avatar
Bal
Posts: 761
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 9:13 pm

Re: Science!

Postby Bal » Sun Jan 07, 2018 5:42 pm

It's always the quiet ones.

User avatar
Mongrel
Posts: 21290
Joined: Mon Jan 20, 2014 6:28 pm
Location: There's winners and there's losers // And I'm south of that line

Re: Science!

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 09, 2018 6:51 pm

https://www.theguardian.com/science/200 ... ch.science
All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.
Image

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 28 guests