61–70 of 103 posts
This is from the same gentleman who (among other things) demonstrated that printf() is Turing complete and wrote a first person shooter in 13kB of Javascript. https://github.com/HexHive/printbf https://github.com/carlini/js13k2019-yet-another-doom-clone
I was somewhat disappointed to realize they used WebGL for rendering the graphics.
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It’s very fun and impressive but it’s absolutely not a single call.
Maybe a generous interpretation of the comment and a realisation that common language isn't always 100% precise would be better than pointless arguments about semantics. There is only a single printf written in the source code.
``` function printg(arg) { printf(arg); } ```
This is seriously brilliant.
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Yeah, I agree that humans can indeed check some non-regular languages. That doesn't however mean that humans are inherently capable for checking all non-regular languages, as they are severely limited in the working memory size. Most if not all divisibility rules are a set of least significant digits or weighted running sums because they are subject to the same constraint, so they are indeed necessarily regular.
I'll happily admit that there is (to me) no reason to believe that humans can do things that a Turing machine could not, or that we are magically exempt from stuff like the halting theorem or have special insights in NP-complete problems. I am only arguing that we are unarguably more powerful than FSMs, and with some pen and paper (or perhaps an endless string of tape...) we are not as limited by our working memory s…
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Somewhat surprisingly (given the creator's regex chops) capital letters are not accepted. My guess is that your autocorrect changed the move to A2a3. Bad news if you're almost done with a game and enter a move with the wrong case.
I'm on PC (firefox) and can reproduce it, no capital letters in my input
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This makes me wonder whether I could achieve such a thing if I removed all my preoccupations of other stuff. For me what I take out of it is the power to sit down, focus your mind on something then who knows the lengths of what is possible. That, and the author is clearly very talented/skilled and creative.
Apparently it takes more than skill but also persistence and concentration. Not many schools of thought explain this well .
It's like the problem of solving the Rubik's cube. If you look at it in terms of geometry and spatial intuition it's intractable. If you treat it as an abstract algebra problem and break it down into "solve the top of the cube, solve the middle row of the cube, solve the bottom of the cube" and then develop a set of operators that will let you permute certain parts of the cube it takes a moderate amount of skill, persistence and concentration.
CS students do exercises such as writing moderately complex programs for a Turing machine and it's an exercise like what he did.
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Funny my project last month was a chess engine. For a long time I'd wondered if I could make a decent MCTS chess engine but someone close to me has been getting serious about chess (usually wins against the random person, usually loses at the chess club, is fighting hard to get up the bracket) so writing a program that was a match for him seemed like a fun and meaningful project and I decided to try the conventional route of alpha-beta search.
If you tried to write a chess engine from zero you'd probably struggle, but the lifetime value you get out of education (CS or otherwise) is looking things up the literature, learning from other people's experiences, and putting it to work. So this has been my guide
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Main_Page
I started out with Python with the goal of making something tiny and stylish and started out with a move generator from
https://python-chess.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
and once I got the signs right in alpha-beta negamax (when I had them wrong it discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fool%27s_mate) it beat my tester several times before he regrouped, traded a knight for a good pawn structure, and got his first win.
The next goal is to take it to the chess club which means it has to respect time control. I switched to Java because its faster and because it is easy to have a comms thread interrupt a think thread. The first try wasn't faster because my move ordering was terrible. I was much faster implementing it though because I could cut and paste the test cases I had in Python and if I knew anything at this point it was the signs in negamax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_deepening_depth-firs... is not only good for time control but gets better move ordering and I'm in the middle of implementing that. It would take me years to find out that Iterative Deepening works a lot better than you might expect, the Killer Heuristic, etc. Reading is my superpower.
Kudoa for this, but it feels like there should be a more direct way? I mean, he first invented basically a general-purpose execution platform. That in itself is cool, but the fact that it then can execute a chess program is not actually that surprising. What about directly encoding the rules of the game plus some basic strategy?
In chess the word "strategy" is used for something different than "tactics". My tester can decide to sacrifice a knight to get pawns the way he wants (strategy), my chess program on the other hand is better at tactics (looking ahead a few moves and setting up a fork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(chess)
Lasker's famous quote is "better a bad plan than no plan at all" but chess engines play superhuman chess with superior tactics and no strategy. There's nothing like the "basic strategy" in blackjack, rather you can make a very strong chess program by the exhaustive search he's using, but you have to optimize it a lot.
This is truly impressive, I'm in complete awe. I do think there are some bugs based on playing a game against it. It has a tendency to give up its queen and other pieces. and it blundered mate in 1 at the end of the game when it had moves that led to mate in 2 or 3. Usually even a 2-ply engine should avoid these mistakes unless the evaluation function is completely silly, which may be the case here, I don't know. I t…
I got the signs wrong and it managed to fool's mate itself!
I struggled with testing for a while because when it makes bad moves you don't know if you correctly coded a bad chess engine or incorrectly coded a bad chess engine. Eventually I started using chess puzzles
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Test-Positions
which are not unit tests because they take seconds to run, but unlike a real game where there is no right move, there really is a right solution. BK.01 from
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Bratko-Kopec_Test
is a particularly nice one because it runs quickly!
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This makes me wonder whether I could achieve such a thing if I removed all my preoccupations of other stuff. For me what I take out of it is the power to sit down, focus your mind on something then who knows the lengths of what is possible. That, and the author is clearly very talented/skilled and creative.
Apparently it takes more than skill but also persistence and concentration. Not many schools of thought explain this well .
d2d4 d7d5 c2c4 d5d4 e2e4 d8d4 !? d1d4