Re: Nath-project
Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2019 7:47 am
It doesn't. Just skip it.unhandyandy wrote: ↑Fri Feb 01, 2019 5:52 pmI'm having trouble parsing this sentence - does that "not" belong there?the people that tend to be the best with abstractions, tend to use their minds for creating abstractions that give rise to some theoretical unification, but not those who care about solutions supply awful messy ones, yet it's hard to argue with a concept, if it works.
I strongly disagree. Since we can't have a definition of cleanness this can't be a result of a definition. I've seen abstractions, I'd call awfully messy. Did you ever do discrete mathematics? You don't even need to apply it...unhandyandy wrote: ↑Fri Feb 01, 2019 5:52 pmYou seem to be observing that abstractions are clean (almost by definition) and concrete solutions to concrete problems are messy. I think anyone familiar with the real world will recognize that.
Another informal thing I tend to observe is that we can make things at the cost of complexity less dirty. There are quite often unifying concepts that are just more complex. And if I don't see them, it might just be the case due to my limited ability to handle more complexity. Note that complexity isn't any pure category here, since what's complex highly depends on the stuff we take for granted.
We always have to balance different properties of a given solution or abstraction. There is no best solution for a given problem. In fact I there are simple problems I solve in a lot of different ways in my daily live depending on the context. The simple problems are usually some that are known solved and only occur as subproblems. There are a lot of things I factor in. The length of stuff to write, the stuff other people have to read, their backgrounds, the complexity of the solutions, the complexity of the stuff they are not yet familiar with, the ability to isolate technical parts and calculations into specific pages without littering the big picture with them.
This not depended on whether I do math, programming or do virtually anything else. Understanding the audience is usually the hard part.
While we always have to decide which route we go, the observation I wanted to make above, is that people tend to push the dirty or the complexity and not to find a middle ground. The thing that surprises me even more that there so few methods explored to switch viewpoints between different layers of abstraction.
I learned java way back then. But I still think that wasn't great. How is that connected to the discussion?
I claim to have perfect play of tic-tac-toe. We have perfect play of checkers and morris as well.unhandyandy wrote: ↑Fri Feb 01, 2019 5:52 pmI don't think "perfect" is the right word to use here. Nobody claims that any engine, short of an exhaustive database, plays perfectly. But even 20 years ago Chess engines were playing well enough to beat 99% of the players. The tafl community could a learn a lot just by having an engine as good as those available in chess a generation ago.
Well, to give an extreme example: Walking 50 miles is easier than building a car. I'm not going to fix this metaphor. Not because I couldn't, but because I don't want us to argue about the right one describing the reality. Yet my point stays the same.unhandyandy wrote: ↑Fri Feb 01, 2019 5:52 pmRe: Brandubh v. Copenhagen, I'm sure the differences you mention are real and salient, but surely Brandubh is the place to start with a tafl engine. Shouldn't you always start with the simpler cases before progressing to the harder ones? So much would be learned by actually building a brandubh engine. Even if you don't enjoy playing brandubh, as a programmer isn't that the right place to start?
That being said: If you enjoy it, it's the right thing to do. There is no reason you have to adapt my passion for Copenhagen. You should never just take the stuff you care for for granted. It's a gift and if you care by all means don't let me sow doubts.
Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't see what retrograde analysis have to do with this. That sounds way more complex.unhandyandy wrote: ↑Fri Feb 01, 2019 5:52 pmMaybe, maybe not so straightforward. Have you ever built a retrograde analysis engine, e.g. for chess or checkers? I have not, and I'm intimidated by the prospect. Surely you would learn an awful lot by actually carrying through such a project for brandubh. It would certainly be a service to the tafl community, as we could all then stop playing it.
Regards
nath