Phillipharryt

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I am under the impression they're only non-deterministic in the practical sense (i.e, it produces this output on my machine, I can't know what minute differences there are on your machine), but that's not non-deterministic in the truest sense. If you have completely identical inputs you will get the exact same output, ergo, deterministic.

You said ' “Funding raised” is completely uncorrelated with how successful the company is. ' I showed you this statement is wrong, by providing you a statistic that proves they are correlated. We were not talking about any specific case, I don't know why you've opened with that. The coin flip statement is true but also completely unrelated to our discussion.

From the paper Deep Blue by Murray Campbell et al (people who worked on Deep Blue) "The initialization of the feature values is done by the “evaluation function generator”, a sub-program which was run on the master node of SP system." Which would suggest it generated the heuristic itself. The features may have been hardcoded, but assigning values to them wasn't. In addition to this, feature values could be static or dynamic, meaning it would update dynamic ones depending on the board state. It not only generated the heuristic values (feature values) it could modify them to reflect their relative change in impact throughout the game.

That is a form of machine learning. It uses an algorithm with an enormous ability to look ahead, and selects the moves according to a heuristic that have been shown previously to be most likely to create the desired end state.

Chess is not a solved game from the starting state, so it has to make assumptions based on the data it has. This is machine learning. Please don't make such definite statements. You even say it in your own comment "selects the best possible true of outcomes", how do you think it selects this? It uses heuristics to assign values to different board states, and in the case of Deep Blue these values were created through previous game analysis. If a knight to c2 on turn 8 is rarely seen in the same game as a winning board state, then this is valued lower. Looking through the tree wasn't the ML part, but knowing how to pick the best node on the tree was. Deep Blue is ML.

Doesn't the inclusion of the digital accuracy checkers then decrease the efficiency, and mean you might as well use a completely digital computer? Just supposing here, but interfacing digital with analogue probably is a poor middle ground between the versatility and ubiquity of purely digital computers (countless existing systems exist to do whatever you want, with optimised algorithms and chips to work with) and purely analogue (presumably gain efficiency advantage by not having to cater to versatile use-cases).

Very interested to watch the second part to this video, off the top of my head I can't come up with a situation in which analogue computation or signals are better than digital ones. Digital's versatility means we are making 2 signals represent an infinite number of other possible values, so there is certainly an inefficiency there, but the analogue signal's propensity to degradation and uncertainty is another hurdle I would find hard to overcome and produce a better computer with.

There are many options backed ETFs, these are essentially tracking the right to buy x product at y price. Sure if you trace it down long enough there is an asset there, but realistically you're buying an ETF tracking a number of contracts. The ETFs tracking oil futures aren't going to cash in on these options and collect the oil, so the assets are never going to change hands. They'll sell them at a determined date. Making them essentially contract ETFS. Is a contract for a good you're never going to buy in any other way more 'imaginary' than an electronic currency when compared to hard assets? I guess that's up to the consumer to decide.

Saying Australian culture demonise alcohol is a laughable claim. Australian summers are about BBQs and beers on the beach.

Australia allows drinking in parks unless it's a designated no-drinking area (usually any area outside an alcohol store). That being said different states in Aus handle alcohol differently and some are very strict. The major states of NSW and Vic are pretty chill though.

Sadly phone companies cannot exist in a vacuum. In the book "Losing the Signal" there's great evidence that Blackberry faced far more pressure than merely losing market-share. Their push-based email service (the back end) previously existed as the only of its kind for phones, then Microsoft updated their version in 2006 so all other phones could have it. Blackberry lost a key differentiator.

Then there was Verizon pushing them to release phones that would work well on their new 4G networks, while Blackberrys were being optimised for 2.5G as one of their CEOs was determined to preserve the selling point of great battery life.

The companies they relied on were not letting them fall into a niche product-producer role. They would have been pushed out of the market, not even by their competitors, by their partners.

In economic theory there is no benefit to diversification (which is what a company does when it absorbs another company) unless there are organisational improvements shared between the companies. If the acquired company is truly completely unrelated there would be no benefit at all as Apple isn't able to improve the running of an unrelated company. Being bought out by Apple might be a nice outcome for any company's shareholders (as they might get a premium on the their share prices), but technically there would be no improvement to the business in terms of expected revenue.

The issue is then speed, you can't engrave at anywhere near the same speed as you can print.

Though funnily enough named after the same Muddy Waters track