What in the name of god is bible study?

[Seedle]

I love Apolyton. A thread that started as a simple question about an (apparently American) religious practice becomes a debate about Episcopalians, the history of both the Orthodox church and the English monarchy, and game theory.

And I'm serious. Most board's mods and admins are doublepost/stay-on-topic nazis. Here they let discussions just happen.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Seedle
I love Apolyton. A thread that started as a simple question about an (apparently American) religious practice becomes a debate about Episcopalians, the history of both the Orthodox church and the English monarchy, and game theory.

And I'm serious. Most board's mods and admins are doublepost/stay-on-topic nazis. Here they let discussions just happen.

I agree, it is nice. It took a lot of work over the years to wear down the admins, but we did it.

Now they're mostly hands off.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Asher
I agree, it is nice. It took a lot of work over the years to wear down the admins, but we did it.

Now they're mostly hands off.

That, and people can take what was really nothing more than a glib quote and make it into a multi-paragraph debate.

[Imran Siddiqui]

That, and not even the admins want to read Ben's posts.

[TheStinger]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


There is unbroken succession from that point onwards, although interrupted during the Interregnum.

The Conquerer wasn't in the line prior and neither were the Danes.

What are you talking about.

Thats not the point, there was an English monarchy before 1066 and there was afterwards, it's just that 1066 saw Feudalism introduces into England and it's intergration into the western european power struggles of the next 900 years.

It has nothing to do with unbroken succession. What do you call the glorious revolution or the war of the roses, if they are unbroken succesion then so was Harold II -William 1

[Pekka]

This is getting heated, but I'll just say that Go is an awesome game and last week I ordered it. Too bad I don't have anyoen to play it with face to face, but it's a GREAT game. Spent many nights playing Go at my local student pub few years ago. Beer, nuts and Go

[Nikolai]

Incredible how every religion threads at some point end in Asher calling someone Flanders and everybody else piling on poor Ben.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Nikolai
Incredible how every religion threads at some point end in Asher calling someone Flanders and everybody else piling on poor Ben.

In fairness, Boris hasn't been involved lately.

[Elok]

"Poor Ben" usually asks for it by posting on matters he knows nothing about and trying to bareface his way through it when he gets caught. Not that I haven't done that from time to time--we all have--but Ben really is a consummate professional about it.

And if you want, we'll call it "Nikolai's Law": "As the religion thread continues, the probability of Asher calling someone Flanders approaches one."

[Lul Thyme]

Asher:

From a theoretical point of view, Go is in the same bag as chess and checkers. It's just a matter of size of search space.

From the game theory point of view, all of these games are trivial. They have perfect information and no simultaneous decisions. It is simply a matter of drawing the tree and running alpha-beta. This certainly not an area of "game theory" where there is tremendous progress. Most game theorists wouldn't even consider this game theory.


From a practical point of view, what was recently solved is more properly called "english draughts". You are correct that while only the starting position was solved, other positions could be solved with "not too much more" work.

By comparison, chess or "international draughts" have still a huge way to go. Your comment that chess is "not really far behind" english draught is incorrect.

I don't want to get into technical details unless you want to but most people working in the field estimate that, even taking into account increased storage capacity and computing power, it would take at the very least another 100 years until chess's starting position is solved. Unless this is what you meant by "not far behind" you are probably wrong.

Here's what your favorite Professor (Schaeffer) had to say about it, for example.

"I have been asked many times when chess will be solved and I refuse to say anything other than it can't be done for a very long time unless there is a fundamentally new breakthrough. The computing models that we have today -- even if they are a billion times faster -- won't make a dent in chess. We need something *much* better. The answer might be quantum computing, but this technology is still in its infancy and remains unproven."

[Asher]

Originally posted by Nikolai
Incredible how every religion threads at some point end in Asher calling someone Flanders and everybody else piling on poor Ben.

You are the original Flanders.

And Ben invites it by posting nothing but stupidity day in and day out. It's not so much piling on as charity -- we're encouraging Ben to stop talking for his own good, and the good of the world.

I'm sorry that you don't care enough about Ben or the world to help.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Lul Thyme
Asher:

From a theoretical point of view, Go is in the same bag as chess and checkers. It's just a matter of size of search space.

Yes, but Go is to Chess what Chess is to Checkers.

From the game theory point of view, all of these games are trivial. They have perfect information and no simultaneous decisions. It is simply a matter of drawing the tree and running alpha-beta. This certainly not an area of "game theory" where there is tremendous progress. Most game theorists wouldn't even consider this game theory.

I'm referring about the progress towards these games being "solved", which has seen tremendous progress. I've made that very clear, I thought.

By comparison, chess or "international draughts" have still a huge way to go. Your comment that chess is "not really far behind" english draught is incorrect.

I don't want to get into technical details unless you want to but most people working in the field estimate that, even taking into account increased storage capacity and computing power, it would take at the very least another 100 years until chess's starting position is solved. Unless this is what you meant by "not far behind" you are probably wrong.

I'd be very interested to know what kind of person made that estimate and if they took into account the standard Moore's law (as Ben has), or if they actually knew about scientific computation and understand projected future advancements and even current advancements (eg, Larrabee/GPGPU/Cell) which provide orders of magnitude of performance improvements over the period of a year or two.

I make the claim that chess isn't far behind not terms of computational power to compute it all (though I think it's far closer than 100 years), but in terms of understanding how we can approach solving it. We pretty much know how to do it, it just needs the computational horsepower to do it, which really is only a matter of time.

Here's what your favorite Professor (Schaeffer) had to say about it, for example.

"I have been asked many times when chess will be solved and I refuse to say anything other than it can't be done for a very long time unless there is a fundamentally new breakthrough. The computing models that we have today -- even if they are a billion times faster -- won't make a dent in chess. We need something *much* better. The answer might be quantum computing, but this technology is still in its infancy and remains unproven."

Yes, and we've already had several fundamental breakthroughs since he's made this comment years ago. We no longer have single-core CPUs like the Pentium 4 that are emphasizing MHz over parallel processing. Retrograde analysis massively benefits from parallel processing, and the strives made in recent years do genuinely end up as being considered breakthroughs. Schaeffer used 200 PCs to calculate checkers, most of which were Pentium or Pentium IIs. There are far better ways to do this now -- look at Folding@Home. Look at their initial estimates for how long it'd take to simulate protein folding, and then look how much they have been absolutely shattered by having a popular distributed computing application, then look how much they've been further shattered by the introduction of PS3 clients (~30 times faster than PCs) and GPGPU clients (~110 times faster than PCs). The growth in computational horsepower for such applications -- of which retrograde analysis for chess is an ideal candidate -- is absolutely astounding and far beyond what people had predicted.

That's not even mentioning quantum computing, which is "unproven" but very much a likely platform that is on its way.

(BTW, he wasn't my professor -- I worked with him in a professional capacity at IBM. I didn't go to school at UofA).

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Asher

You are the original Flanders.

And Ben invites it by posting nothing but stupidity day in and day out. It's not so much piling on as charity -- we're encouraging Ben to stop talking for his own good, and the good of the world.

I'm sorry that you don't care enough about Ben or the world to help.

No wonder Ben thinks Canada is totalitarian.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kidicious


No wonder Ben thinks Canada is totalitarian.

The US rewards stupidity by making stupid people President and Vice-President. In Canada, we just ship them to Texas.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Asher


The US rewards stupidity by making stupid people President and Vice-President. In Canada, we just ship them to Texas.

The difference is that we are much more critical of all of our politicians. You seem to think you have all the smart politicians, just like you think MS is so great, when in fact it's just another corporation.