I’m curious as to how many high schools around the world teach complex numbers. In England in the late 80s when I did A level maths (age 17-18) it was part of the syllabus, but now it is only available in the harder A-level further maths, which is often not taught in the standard non-selective non-private schools, making entry to university STEM courses more difficult.
In Portugal it is part of the standard curriculum although in my time they were poorly motivativated and besides solving some classes of quadratic equations no other applications were mentioned.
The Finnish high/secondary school (= years 10 to 12) gives a choice of two alternative math curricula, the more comprehensive option giving a reasonable foundation for university-level math and is usually very much recommended to anyone interested in STEM. It includes complex numbers (at least superficially) as well as a lot of other stuff that the narrow version doesn’t, like limits, integration, basic linear algebra, and analytic geometry.
I think computer bridge will take off soon. LLMs have allowed double-dummy solvers to move from ~0.1sec to microseconds (if you allow 99.9% accuracy) and parsing human bidding system descriptions must either be possible or v close.
>LLMs have allowed double-dummy solvers to move from ~0.1sec to microseconds (if you allow 99.9% accuracy)
I don't know what this is referring to. The ubiquitous dds library, which is AFAIK basically the only double dummy solver, has not seen any real improvements. Neither of those numbers look right to me, I think it's more in the range of ~10ms.
There's a crank who was claiming some magical improvements a little while ago that really just boiled down to AI psychosis (and having absolutely no understanding of what he was claiming). I hope that's not what you're referring to.
I'll concede an order of magnitude for dds, I may not have been using it optimally. The claims made by Lorand Dali for his neural net solver were a thousand times faster with a slight drop in accuracy (99.9%+ I think)
I believe this was used in his 'ben' bridge engine, https://github.com/lorserker/ben/ now maintained by ThorvaldAagaard, though I have to admit it now seems to be heavily dds focussed, so there may have been a rollback along the lines you outlined.
I'm attempting to recreate the concept myself, so should soon have an idea whether its moonshine or not,
I wasn't aware of this although this project had a substantial error rate. Flipping through the YouTube video it only predicted the correct number of tricks 70% of the time--so I'm not sure if your 99.9% is referring to a different project that I'm unable to find, or if you misremembered. I don't think anything like this was ever used in Ben; looking at the commit history, I think Ben has always used the standard dds library.
FWIW I'm pretty confident that you could beat the performance of the project I linked with a fairly straightforward transformer architecture.
Yes - you are right, 70% for a correct answer is what the talk says. Id misremembered the higher (~99%) numbers because for my purpose (simulating many random deals compatible with known cards to get probability distributions on hidden card positions and trick taking possibilities in each suit/notrumps ) a one trick error is quite acceptable. I agree a more straightforward architecture is a promising approach. Once I have generated weights in a form usable in C, I am also curious as to whether they can direct DDS's tree search as a kind of probabilistic oracle.
(There was some Ben code to use a neural net double dummy evaluator, because Ive used it, but it was removed. Ill try and find the git point it was removed.)
also the keras model ben/models/TF2models/RPDD_2024-07-08-E02.keras is still present in the current repo but not apparently used. It was trained on ten million deals where all double dummy info is known.
'Gandalf himself never uses the palantiri that Thiel named his company after, not just due to how incredibly dangerous and powerful they are, but also their corrupting nature.'
Seems a bit harsh. It's chatting to Sauron with them that's the problem.
There's a depressing number who dismiss the benefits of things like learning times tables as 'rote learning' rather than force-multipliers that free your brain for other things.
"There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first."
I don't think FSF would disagree. As I said most parts are fully GPL compatible licenced. However, my comment was about the ideology/philosophical background.
> “Open source” is something different: it has a very different philosophy based on different values. Its practical definition is different too, but nearly all open source programs are in fact free. [0]
I would say that FreeBSD is the prototypical open source OS.
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