Due to real-life issues, I’ve had less time to devote to the contest that I’d expected so my progress has been slow. I should have more time from here on out so hopefully I’ll be able to do better. Most people haven’t been as lazy as me however and more people have entered than I expected. As of the time of the writing, there are over 6,600 entrants. The contestant count for last year’s contest peaked at less than 5,000.
As a rough gauge of the quality of the competition, I recently climbed to the first place for Malaysians, but my overall ranking is only 800+. By contrast, the user named Jacks who self-identifies as from TM Berhad held the Malaysian top spot for over a month but in the overall rankings he peaked in the 500s and has since gradually declined to the 1,400s. This suggests a combination of very good new entrants and users who have been actively improving their bots.
Continue reading AI Challenge 2011 Update →
Way back at the beginning of this year, I wrote a post on the first chapter of the Wheel of Time series that was handed off to Brandon Sanderson. Now as 2011 draws to a close, it’s time to do the same for the penultimate chapter of a saga that first started over twenty years ago. As usual for the series, this is a massive tome, with my paperback version clocking in at an incredible 1,200+ pages. I like to think that it’s so massive that even the printers have a hard time with these books, as a good portion of the pages from my copy have faded ink. Be warned that spoiler abound, in case you’re the type to get squeamish about such things.
As with The Gathering Storm, old plotlines are resolved at a furious pace. One of the main ones in particular dates all the way back to the very first book in the series, The Eye of the World, where Perrin Aybara killed two Children of the Light in a frenzy of bloodlust. Another deals with the nigh invulnerable gholam which has been hunting Mat Cauthon since book seven. For the fans, I believe this book also ends all of the will they or won’t they romantic threads left dangling. Just about every major character gets a romantic partner. This includes not just the long expected pairing of Egwene al’Vere and Gawyn Trakand, but also such characters as Morgase Trakand, Thom Merrilin and even Berelain of Mayene!
Continue reading Towers of Midnight →
Only a couple of articles for this month and one of them is a general feature about a subject rather than a recent discovery. But anyway:
- The feature in question is an article on how intelligent octopuses are from Orion Magazine. There are interesting anecdotes in there about how they can recognize and form relationships with humans, solve puzzles and engage in playful behavior with toys. My favorite part is how three-fifths of their neurons aren’t in their brain at all but in their arms, which allows the arms to act independently even when severed from the main body.
- The other article is from The Economist and is about how happiness not only has a genetic component but that due to genetics, different races may have different levels of ingrained tendencies to be happy. The mechanism the team in question fingered is a gene that encodes the serotonin-transporter protein. This gene comes in two variants, a long one and a short one, and the team found that those with the long versions were more likely to report themselves as being happy. Where things get really interesting is that different ethnic groups tend to more of one variant of the gene than the other. Black Americans for example tend to favor the long version of the gene while Asian Americans tend to mostly have the short version. ‘Lo and behold this blends in nicely with observations that newly rich Asia reports far lower levels of happiness than their GDP per person figures suggest. This also adds weight to earlier findings that societies composed of people with the short version of the genes lean towards collectivist political systems that emphasize social harmony and de-emphasize individual independence and freedom.
The unexamined life is a life not worth living