tjwhitaker (u/tjwhitaker)

tjwhitaker commented on Dear Chess World twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen... · Posted by u/shreyas-satish

roflyear · 3 years ago

The issue I have with this is Hans is obviously either some god-level cheater (who can also cheat at rapid formats?? in casual settings - like in parks, on the beach, etc??) or he's actually 2500-2600 (or, let's even say 2400).

If he's 2400, he can still analyze. This leads me to believe that the dude is just trolling. IDK. I haven't watched all his interviews, but he seems like a troll.

tjwhitaker · 3 years ago

I don’t think he necessarily has to be god level. This has been talked about ad nauseum but it’s not that hard to cheat just a little to gain significant advantage. Security has been lax at these events and there are numerous examples of cheating at the top level of many sports and throughout chess history. It’s definitely not that outrageous to see the possibility. Rapid and classical are different games that require different skill sets. He is definitely strong regardless which I think most people agree on. So you may have a point that he should still be able to have better analysis than what he showed. Especially if it’s a classical game where you have been thinking and calculating deeply for 2 hours. Perhaps the analysis was whack exactly because he wasn’t thinking and calculating deeply in these critical positions as magnus suggests in his statement.

None of us know for sure and it’s all speculation at this point. He could be trolling. He could be cheating. At some level he lied in his apology interview. He has not acknowledged the statement chess.com made in which they accused him of lying and cheating more often and more recently than he admitted. There’s just a lot of suspicion and sometimes where there’s smoke there is fire. My guess is he is a strong grandmaster that desperately wanted to be a super gm and took some shortcuts to get there.

tjwhitaker commented on Dear Chess World twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen... · Posted by u/shreyas-satish

me_me_me · 3 years ago

I am into chess, was studying it, have read few books on chess.

People who know near zero about chess seem to come out of woodwork to defend underdog who is attacked by the top level clique. Its understandable, but to me its akin to the flat earth arguments. All based on emotions, never have much to say about chess.

Anyone who knows a bit about chess (lets say advanced level), would point to the post game interview of game vs Firouzja as amazingly suspicious. It feels like a guy in group project who did noting and is trying to explain the project to their professor.

50/50 split is either illusion or its due to inflation of randoms giving their opinions.

No sound human would bee asking random ppl to determine if a patient has a cancer as a diagnostic tool. Cheating in chess is at top level extremely subtle, how is a random 1000 player any authority on the topic?

tjwhitaker · 3 years ago

Agreed. Not only the firouzja interview but also the post game interview after the magnus match. It struck me as someone cheating on a test and being unable to show their work after the fact. Alejandro was pushing back against his analysis even before the cheating allegations came out. And his apology interview was full of inconsistencies where he couldn’t keep his story straight. This video does a body language analysis of the apology. While I don’t think you can put too much stock into the defensive postures, his behavior and his story is suspect at best https://youtu.be/OK9ZkoSQNFs

tjwhitaker commented on Julia 1.5 Highlights julialang.org/blog/2020/0... · Posted by u/tosh

fermienrico · 5 years ago

Personally, every time I try to delve into Julia, I am reminded by the massive ecosystem that exists around Python. Speed takes a backseat, instead enormous ecosystem makes Python indispensable and Julia a fringe language despite of its growing popularity.

Say you have a database, and need pull data, do some heavy math computation, then present this data in a pdf report with a QR code, pulling images and processing them in the report.

In Python, it is without bells and whistles: psycopg2, numpy/pandas, reportlab and may be use PIL. Wanna stick this on S3? boto3.

In Julia, it's all very fragmented. LibPQ is immature, DataFrames.jl is nice, ??? (what pdf conversion tool?), images.jl (300 stars), qr code generator?

The problem is not the speed with most tasks. The problem is availability of tools. I am sure that will come with it, but why not just use Python at that point? I am not a fan of Julia and that's nothing to do with its features. It has immature ecosystem, with terrible IDE support (Atom/Juno raises my blood pressure), debugging is painful if non existent, error messages are all over the place, everything falls apart as the immature dependencies change and error messages don't help at all.

Julia is fun in your jupyter notebook. If you try to build apps in production environment in my team, expect push back if not straight up refusal to initiate such a project in the first place.

Syntax was amazing around 0.4v and it went downhill from there.

I am sure someone is going to nitpick my comment and provide a way to do it in Julia, but that's missing the point. The point is Python is miles ahead of what it does. In production systems, robustness + maturity matters.

Also, don't forget ancillary aspects of a programming language. When we put a python repo together, I am rewarded by an endless supply of developers that I can hire and immediately work on it. With Julia, the supply of engineers is limited and it is such a pain to train people to use it, learn its quirks, spend nights and weekends fighting with it and the business doesn't give a fuck about it.

tjwhitaker · 5 years ago

I mean yea you're not wrong. Python is a much more general language and has a large ecosystem. But also, not everyone is an enterprise programmer and values the same things you do. This kind of complaint comes up every time there's a new julia release and it's kind of akin to posting in a C++ thread and asking why anyone uses it because the python ecosystem is so much better for your use case.

tjwhitaker commented on Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how? dissociativediaries.com/n... · Posted by u/Anon84

g_airborne · 5 years ago

The connectedness of neurons in neural nets is usually fixed from the start (i.e. between layers, or somewhat more complicated in the case CNNs etc). If we could eliminate this and let neurons "grow" towards each other (like this article shows), would that enable smaller networks with similar accuracy? There's some ongoing research to prune weights by finding "subnets" [1] but I haven't found any method yet where the network grows connections itself. The only counterpoint I can come up with is that is probably wouldn't generate a significant performance speed up because it defeats the use of SIMD/matrix operations on GPUs. Maybe we would need chips that are designed differently to speed up these self-growing networks?

I'm not an expert on this subject, does anybody have any insights on this?

1. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/05/10/135426/a-new-way...

tjwhitaker · 5 years ago

I think this is a really interesting area of machine learning. Some efforts have been made in ideas that are tangential to this one. Lots of papers in neuroevolution deal with evolving topologies. NEAT is probably the prime example http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/downloads/papers/stanley.ec02.pdf and another paper I read recently called pathnet that is different but very interesting https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08734.