I added a Reversi (a.k.a. Othello) game to my site. The AI will improve in a few weeks, once the genetic algorithm I've written has had time to optimize the parameters.
There's a new page about my favorite illustrators, a page about my Java games (although it's difficult to get Java applets to run in browsers nowadays), I've added a cake recipe (in Swedish), and there's a new image in the portfolio.
I've made some corrections to the site code; some minor functions are still missing, but as of this update, the site seems to be working more or less as it should, and I'll start concentrating on adding more content.
Also: It turns out I had forgotten to include the file responsible for saving portfolio image ratings. Go rate my portfolio images!
I received a package today! For the first time in a long while, I've ordered comics from Yesasia and Amazon, including Åsa Ekström's new book about culture clashes and misadventures in Japan. Now all I need to do is to learn these stupid languages.
I decided to switch to a new layout before everything was ready, partly to force myself to finally get it done, and partly to stress myself out for no good reason. Come back in a week or so, and I'll have much more content up. You should probably be celebrating Christmas now anyway.
A new site design for Trädfällning och Trädgård with a specially adapted CMS; eg you can drag an image to the CMS, and it will automatically upload it, resize it, create thumbnails and add it to a lightbox gallery.
Some graphics for the game Forgotten Lands: First Colony
Calculus Made Easy is a book on calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject.
“The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning–in common-sense terms–of the two principal symbols that are used in calculating.
These dreadful symbols are:
(1) d which merely means “a little bit of.”
(2) ∫ which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “the sum of.”
Thus ∫dx means the sum of all the little bits of x.
Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life.
When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is exactly like that seen in real-world societies: 80 percent of the population owns only 20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent owns 80 percent of the same capital.
That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it.
So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.
Canadian camouflage manufacturer Hyperstealth Biotechnology has applied for patents on its ‘Quantum Stealth’ material.
“The reason no government wants you to think about all this is because there is no serious humanitarian response possible to a nuclear explosion. There’s no way to really help the immediate victims of a nuclear attack. This is not a hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, or nuclear accident — it is all of these things at once, but worse. No nation on earth is prepared to deal with it.
“This is a regularly updated guide to abstract strategy games: what they are, which are the best, and where to learn, play, buy, and discuss them.
This GPT-2 based text generator, which can generate relatively plausible-sounding text from a short prompt, has been upgraded with a larger model. Would you even notice if I let the generator write the rest of this link description?
“Over the space of two months Pavur sent out 150 GDPR requests in his fiancée's name, asking for all and any data on her. Of the responses, 24 per cent simply accepted an email address and phone number as proof of identity and sent over any files they had on his fiancée. A further 16 per cent requested easily forged ID information.
“OpenAI's GPT-2 scored a 70.7% back in February, and that was 7 points ahead of second place. At the time, that was a scarcely believable jump forward in the state of the art and one reason why everyone was so amazed by the network.
So a 70.7% success rate is great compared to what AI could do. It's still severely crippled compared to what humans can do. The human success rate for the Winograd Schema challenge is 95%.
Microsoft's latest endeavor, however, completely smashes through everything we thought we could do, resting at about 89%. This is unbelievable.
“We’ve created MuseNet, a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles. MuseNet was not explicitly programmed with our understanding of music, but instead discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style by learning to predict the next token in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. MuseNet uses the same general-purpose unsupervised technology as GPT-2, a large-scale transformer model trained to predict the next token in a sequence, whether audio or text.