TechCrunch had an insightful post Fear House dvdrip about why MySpace and Facebook are failing in Japan.

I had a glimmering of Facebook’s potential problems in Japan when I noticed that my son Ko was spending the great majority of his time online on Japanese social networking site Mixi

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The Last Confession of Alexander Pearce hd . He even pays money for the service, although only a few dollars a month. Imagine how many Facebook subscribers would remain if they had to pay.

The reason given in the post for Facebook’s failure is its lack of cultural sensitivity and late entry. But the broader reason is simply hubris, or more kindly, a poor analysis of its real strengths and how to leverage them in Japan. (more…)

Branching sequences

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are common in real life. For instance, a recipe

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can be represented as a sequence of steps, with branches corresponding to variations. Games of go or chess

Carver rip Dorothy Mills hd Humpday dvd , of course, are the classic example of branching sequences, where branches handle the “could have/should have played there” comments. Branching sequences can even be used to handle linear text, with branches used for optional or alternate material.

If we have complete control over the programming environment we can implement branching sequences in any way we want, most of them quite obvious. But in today’s web-based world, there are good reasons to represent such structures using XML (for transformations, interoperability, or even storage in XML databases) and HTML (for display). What is the best way to do so?

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According to a post

to the computer-go mailing list, Tei Meikou 9-dan (pictured; GoBase bio Storm Watch rip ), known for his expertise in computer go, characterized the Monte Carlo-style go program Crazy Stone (earlier post Dog Tags full movie

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) as “at least 1-dan”, based on its winning performance at the First UEC Cup Computer Go Tournament

. This is a huge milestone. Tei characterized moves 86 and 88 as “almost professional level” (see SGF game record Anne of the Indies move

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Welcome to the next generation of JavaScript! The ECMAScript Edition 4.0 (ES4)Working Group has been hard at work and on Oct. 22, 2007 put out an overview. Their proposals give new meaning to the concept of “kitchen sink” and “design by committee”. The only thing they forgot was to rename the language Javathon++. Luckily, ES4 is no more likely to take root than the previous abortive proposal issued in 2003.

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Why is everything Google makes so UGLY

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?

Take your pick. Google Maps. Google Reader. iGoogle. GMail. Every single page is relentlessly, fixately UGLY

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.

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Feng-hsiung Hsu, one of the key contributors to Deep Blue (Wikipedia

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) and now at Microsoft Research Asia, has published a manifesto proposing that go can be cracked by chess-like brute force techniques. Really?

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I just found out that Ted Nelson is continuing his decades-long, quixotic quest to reinvent the world’s basic document model, in the form of XanaduSpace 1.0 The Lion King dvdrip , a recently released 3D document viewer that lets you see pan and zoom around a document universe with the transclusive relationships between documents represented as colored beams. You can download it here. This version is very close to demoware: there’s just one set of sample documents to be viewed.

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A major milestone: a machine has consistently defeated very strong humans at at the game of “go” (report here Christmas in Connecticut divx

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). The caveat is that this is on a 7×7 board, which is dozens of orders of magnitude less complex than the full 19×19 game.

Crazy Stone, the program in question, used the so-called Monte Carlo technique. Basically, it plays hundreds of thousands of random games and finds which move leads to the highest winning percentage. An interesting Wired article on this approach is here The Pledge video . A server allows bots to play thousands of games of each other, providing real-time information on the degree of promise of various approaches.

The King of Comedy divx The real question is whether this is a one-trick pony useful only for tiny boards, or whether it can be usefully extended to 19×19. Until 20 years gives us immensely more powerful computers, we need some kind of abstraction to serve as the topic of Monte Carlo simulations. Or, perhaps Monte Carlo can be another trick in the go programmer’s bag of tricks, somehow combined with the opening books and connectivity analysis and pattern matching and heuristics that serve as the basis of today’s strongest 19×19 programs.

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The brain is not a computer, of course. But wait. Computers are devices that process information…and that’s certainly what the brain does, right?

As an alert reader pointed out in my post on Roger Penrose, the English mathematician and philosopher, the problem here lies in the definition of “computer” or “computer-like”.

In one sense, saying that the brain is a computer is saying exactly nothing. That’s since the word “computer” refers to any device that “computes”—processes information. That includes everything from adding machines to quantum computers

. Penrose may think the brain operates on quantum principles—so fine, it may be a quantum computer, but that’s still a computer. The only possibility for negating the assertion that the brain is a computer in this extremely general sense is to hold that the brain does not even “process information”. Perhaps it is doing something with information other than processing it, or perhaps it is processing something other than information as we know it. A more likely possibility is that it might be processing information but, at the same time, doing additional, important things that cannot be interpreted as processing information—such as being conscious. In that case, we would have to say the brain is only partially “like a computer.”

We also have to be aware of hidden agendas in defining these words. For some people, saying “the brain is not (like) a computer” is a kind of code for a belief in the human “spirit”, the absolute uniqueness of our “minds”, or the ineffability of existence. These people are simply making an exclamation of a particular variety of faith.

Personally, I believe that even consciousness is a form of information processing, and thus that the brain is a computer in the tautological sense. (Not that I think it’s a quantum computer.)

In that case, in what sense of the word “computer” does the brain fail

to qualify? The narrowest sense is that of von Neumann, a stored program computer, one that computes a problem sequentially and deterministically from beginning to end. Even if we include parallel processing within the von Neumann paradigm, our “neural computer” does not fit within that framework. Most basically, it seems clear our brains involve no equivalent of a “program” or “stored data” in the von Neumann sense.

A broader sense is that of the Turing machine. This is the model that Eric Baum

believes the brain works under, although in his details he often seems to have a von Neumannian focus. A Turing machine executes algorithms, and serves as a model for all modern computer hardware and software architectures.

If we limit ourselves to considering the synaptic architecture of the brain, we can say that it has Turing-like aspects, and its processing can be described as being algorithmic in nature, but it’s very unlike any Turing machine you’ve ever seen, with tens of thousands of dendrites converging on individual neurons, and neuronal plasticity involved in a type of learning at the level of the architecture of the “machine” itself.

But in other important regards the brain is almost certainly not a Turing machine. First, neural functioning involves chemical and hormonal levels which are fundamentally analog in nature; such analog behavior could be simulated by a digital computer, but never reproduced exactly. Second, the brain appears to be strongly specialized to deal with intrinsic temporal flow and temporal patterns.

In summary, we can say that the brain is a semi-analog, parallel, self-modifying, temporally-specalized device for processing information. Whether or not that’s a “computer”, we’ll leave up to the reader.

Numenta is an intriguing new startup that plans to commercialize technology based a model of human memory developed by Jeff Hawkins, he of Palm Pilot and Graffiti fame, in his book On Intelligence (see also the book’s website).

According to the website:

Numenta co-founder Dileep George has created a mathematical formalism that follows and extends Hawkins’ biological theory. This formalism is a variation of Belief Propagation, a mathematical technique invented by Judea Pearl. Belief propagation explains how a tree of conditional probability functions can reach a set of mutually consistent beliefs about the world. By adding time and sequence memory to each node of the tree, belief propagation can be morphed to match Hawkins’ biological theory.

We may be seeing the very beginning of a second “AI” boom, one rooted this time in actual neurobiological research, or at least in models inspired by, or plausibly informed by, schemes of brain functioning.