bucy wrote:

In the continuing quest to see if humans can outpace their electronic creations, the humans have lost another, perhaps decisive, round.

Since you have recommended this, maybe you can shed light on what makes this noteworthy. (I've not studied computer chess in detail.)

What, in layman's terms, are the computers actually doing? Predictive analysis based on lookup tables of all historical chess matches it has played and/or notable chess matches throughout history? If so, it seems that as Moore's Law increases the effectiveness of computation, any logic based game that begins in the same state will be won by the computer as a matter of calculation capacity.

Not quite analogous to saying, "computers can perform long division millions of times faster than a human," but saying, "computers can analyze every possible outcome in less time than it takes to move a chess piece" will some day be true.

I guess the secret sauce is in the "analyze" part of the statement I made. Guess that's what I don't really comprehend.

RE: Once Again, Machine Beats Human Champion at Chess - New York Times

Dagmar wrote:
Someone's basically got a very interesting video feedback loop protection going on a table in some nightclub.

Talk about setting a mantrap for people on hallucinogens...

Messed around with some similar things in Linux last year:

http://effectv.sourceforge.net/

http://waterworks.sourceforge.net/

There's a lot of good code out there. A bunch of pd (kind of an open source MAX/MSP) stuff that I haven't yet messed with as well that looks like it could pull this off no prob.

Wouldn't surprise me if they're using MAX/MSP under the hood for these installations.

RE: Better Reality Through Technology (demonstrations!)

Heliodisplay images are not holographic although they are free-space, employing a rear projection system in which images are captured onto a nearly invisible plane of transformed air. What the viewer sees is floating mid-air image or video. These projected images and video are two-dimensional, (i.e. planar) but appear 3D since there is no physical depth reference. While conventional displays have the benefit of being attached to a physical substrate, Heliodisplay projections are suspended in air, so you will notice some waviness to the quality of the projections.

...

No telling how much this costs, but yeah, I want one. Hooked up to an R2D2 droid.

Heliodisplay: Free Floating Images

Perusing the 2.6.14 kernel changelog, ran across "DCCP." Hadn't heard of this before.

This sounds like a good thing for VOIP, especially on wireless networks. An attempt at a connection oriented datagram protocol.

I like this idea. Instead of everybody and their brother custom coding their own congestion workarounds into the apps, have it built into the protocol. Would make network troubleshooting a lot easier. Instead of having to understand each app's quirks, you know one common method.

I'd like to see a UDP vs. DCCP bakeoff. Maybe take Asterisk, VideoLan and Quake3 builds, one using UDP, the other DCCP, and run them through standardized network congestion scenarios. See how UDP vs. DCCP fares in each app.

Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of "Telephone"? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!

...

This is pretty funny. I remember doing this manually when Bablefish first came out to show how twisted the translations became. Someone has done the hard work for you now.

Translation:

The allegro is to something. Memory to do to me to this manually when Bablefish to go away before the moment for the aspect, like the wheel the translations if one became. Somebody has to him covering for that the loaded hard work for is full.

Multi-Babel

Acidus wrote:
] The complete commented source code of Robert Morris's worm,
] which brought the Internet to its knees in 1988

That's kind of funny, they didn't scrub this IP:

128.32.137.13

RE: Morris's Internet Worm Source Code

WHAT WOULD JESUS USE FOR EFFECTS PROCESSING?

The Jesusonic CrusFX 1000 is designed to offer all of the flexibility of a general purpose computer for its effects, without the traditional computer side effects (The CrusFX has (nearly) no moving parts, short boot times, rock solid stability and minimal latency for live performances)

For those who are not yet ready to acquire the CrusFX 1000, or those who want to integrate the Jesusonic effects into their computer-based work environment, can try the Jesusonic Software, which offers much of the same feature set and extensive interoperability with the CrusFX 1000.

...

I thought this was a big joke until I started reading the forums. People are actually using this. WTF?

JESUSONIC - Effects for the Enlightened

Final image dimensions: 78.797 x 31.565 pixels
Number of pixels in final image: 2,487,227,305 (2.5 gigapixel)
Final image file format: 24-bit colour bitmap
Final image file size: 7.5 GBytes
Number of source images: 600
Number of pixels in source images: 3,537,408,000 (600 images * 3008*1960)
Lens focal length: 400 mm (equivalent to 600 mm on a 35 mm camera)
Aperture: F22, Shutter speed: 1/100, ISO: 125
Horizontal field of view of final image: 93 degrees
Time required to capture component images: 1 hour and 12 minutes
Time required to match overlapping images: 20 hours
Time required to optimise project: 4 hours
Time required to compose the image: 3 full days using 5 high-end pcs
Time required to blend seams / correct misalignments / finalise image: 2 days

...

Check out the bus on the avenue to the right of center. There are other interesting artifacts from seaming the picture like disembodied torsos hovering down the sizewalk, etc. I even found someone picking their nose.

2.5 gigapixel photo montage with zoomer

So now Phil Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.

...

Ouch. No love lost there.

Bitter, are we?

How it works
Motor spins drum with 16 mirrors around at about 20-30 rev/second. The mirrors are tilted differently, so that they draw one line each on the screen. Rotation time is measured by the reading fork and divided by 16*32=512. This is the pixel clock. When the reading fork senses that the wire attached to the mirror drum passes, a new frame starts, and the pixel clock starts. For each pixel, the laser is turned on or off. Simple as that! Each line contains 32 pixels, but only 16 are used. The remaining 16 pixels on a line do either represent the gap between mirrors, or, they are used for calibration. Oh, yes. The calibration. I won't be attempting that again any day soon. Each mirror is calibrated in the Y-direction by tediously moving them physically. T-e-d-i-o-u-s-l-y. Did I mention that? The X-direction calibration is done with a lookup-table in software. Ahhh... software... :) And there's your picture. Making video is the easy part. That's just a matter of changing the picture every 4 or 5 frames or so.

...

This is pretty spiffy. How hard would this be to make?

DIY Laser Video Projector