dfan

6 ms·

1.
by dfan 1y ago
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 interactive fiction and could then be challenged in a new wa
2.
by dfan 1y ago
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.
3.
by dfan 2y ago
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, although human knowledge is leveraged a bit in the strongest pro
4.
by dfan 2y ago
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 in this post. Many Chinese and Japanese words (e.g., "k
5.
by dfan 2y ago
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 perfect pitch (including myself) started engaging with music s
6.
by dfan 2y ago
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 corner of the arts universe as the Residents...
7.
by dfan 2y ago
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 to my knowledge, so if you'r
8.
by dfan 2y ago
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 can re-hear songs in my head, I can compose music
9.
by dfan 2y ago
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 physics and math problems is often extremely geometric
10.
by dfan 2y ago
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 head, as opposed to performing mental diffs on the ph
11.
by dfan 2y ago
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 completely unable to because of my aphantasia, but when I heard
12.
by dfan 2y ago
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 then play a fake game) rather than playing it for r
13.
by dfan 2y ago
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 WESCAC generate a plausible first-person account of the protagoni
14.
by dfan 3y ago
"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. If you have strongly solved it, you can play perfec
15.
by dfan 3y ago
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 mentioned the similar system on lichess, which
16.
by dfan 3y ago
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 scores feel very antiseptic to me by comparison.
17.
by dfan 3y ago
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 accidental error and not the result of ignorance.
18.
by dfan 3y ago
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 janky controls in particular. Even for things where we did
19.
by dfan 3y ago
I am one of the developers of the original game and I would not want to play it in 2023.
20.
by dfan 3y ago
This is an annoying Substack thing. Click on "Continue reading" (if you wish to).
21.
by dfan 3y ago
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 keyword, rather than less. (This is not snark, it's my a
22.
by dfan 3y ago
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 (e.g., norms, convergence, elementary topology), and bas
23.
by dfan 3y ago
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 current Tsar of Russia.
24.
by dfan 3y ago
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.
25.
by dfan 3y ago
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 practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, bu
26.
by dfan 3y ago
This is really cool! There are two motions in particular that pianists use constantly that don't seem to be represented in the robot model, if you're looking to get closer to the way that human limbs and digits operate. (Naturally
27.
by dfan 4y ago
I use Octave to run other people's MATLAB code.
28.
by dfan 4y ago
You are probably thinking of https://dustri.org/b/horrible-edge-cases-to-consider-when-de... .
29.
by dfan 4y ago
This is a good advertisement for the approach I came up with eventually: if you don't see a trivial way to the next square, find a sequence that will lead to it that starts in the lower right quadrant, then go to that quadrant and get
30.
by dfan 4y ago
This is different from the other answers, but it does answer your question: When I was a kid I had tons of math and logic puzzle books. Two I remember specifically are "Aha! Insight" and "Aha! Gotcha" by Martin Gardner.

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