Viewing profile — dfan

Ha, I didn't realize that I was replying to the person who wrote the post! The audience I had in mind when writing it was people who were already quite experienced in playing inter…

As the author of For A Change, I am astonished that anyone would think it was a good testbed for an LLM text adventure solver. It's fun that they tried, though.

The paragraph on Go AI looked accurate to me. Go AI research spent decades trying to incorporate human-written rules about tactics and strategy. None of that is used any more, alth…

Even when Google Translate got pretty good I was not really able to effectively translate Chinese or Japanese text about Go (the game). I had similar issues to the ones mentioned i…

I agree with all of the above, including the hypothesis that the OP likely had absolute pitch to some degree as a child and not thought about it. Everyone I personally know with pe…

The Letterman bit must have been parodying Mummenschanz, an avant-garde Swiss theater group that was pretty popular (as those things go) at the time. They do feel a bit in the same…

Another recent discovery of plagiarism in the classical music world: https://www.unsungcomposers.com/forum/index.php/topic,6910.0... (No one has written up an article about Franke …

The thing that finally made me very confident that I had aphantasia (back in 1998, before it was A Thing) is that I realized that my ability to "hallucinate" sounds is excellent. I…

Same here! I think whatever compensatory mechanisms I've come up with turn out to be real advantages in some ways. One interesting thing that I've found is that my approach to phys…

As an addendum, when I calculate variations in chess or Go I sometimes close my eyes because my "board database access" can be easier to operate when everything is purely in my hea…

IM David Pruess has aphantasia and can play multiple simultaneous blindfold games. Pretty much everyone at my level (2000 USCF) can play blindfold. I always assumed that I was comp…

One issue with this is that it encourages collusion. If you're a top GM playing someone of equal skill, it's +EV to agree to flip a coin beforehand to determine who will win (and t…

It kind of predicted LLMs too! According to the framing story, the text of the novel was supposedly created by feeding in lots of source material and then having the computer WESCA…

"Weakly solving" a game is a technical term. If you have weakly solved a game, you can play perfectly (achieve the optimal result) when the game starts from its initial position. I…

I enthusiastically recommend Chess Tempo ( https://chesstempo.com/ ), which will give you interactive chess puzzles from real games that are tailored to your level. Someone else me…

This is exactly what I miss about modern computer-typeset sheet music. There's a lovely organicness to the very slightly splotchy noteheads etc. in old sheet music, and modern scor…

That really stuck out to me too. Given the author's care with other things and the fact that the quote marks in the dissertation itself look fine, I assume it's just an unfortunate…

Brief followup to replies: we were all figuring it out as we went along. When you're doing something for the first time, it tends not to be optimal. People here have noted the jank…

I am one of the developers of the original game and I would not want to play it in 2023.

This is an annoying Substack thing. Click on "Continue reading" (if you wish to).

My guess is that the majority of Haskell programmers who are comfortable enough with the forall keyword to use it in practice would find the symbol ∀ to be more readable than the k…

From the introduction: "The only background required of the reader is a good knowledge of advanced calculus and linear algebra. If the reader has seen basic mathematical analysis (…

I still possess my grandfather's 1911 Encylopedia Britannica. I didn't fully realize just how old it was until I looked up Nicholas II and the entry began by identifying him as the…

I am familiar with the game and I cannot explain it. Go is not typically rated with the Elo system, and the quality of top-level human play has increased since 2016.

I assume the following quote was not meant to be precise: > The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to p…