Hacker News: hakuseki

New comment by hakuseki in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

hakuseki — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:33:00 +0000

At double-digit kyu level, you should just play every day until you feel you are stuck.

After you get stuck, you should pick one thing at a time to focus on improving. But the one thing should probably be related to tesuji or life and death.

New comment by hakuseki in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

hakuseki — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:23:28 +0000

Traditionally, handicaps are usually given in the form of extra stones played on the board. This is a coarser resolution than points, with one extra stone in the opening having a strategic value of about 13 points. So he probably couldn't have won if his handicap were a full stone smaller, but he may have won if it were a few points smaller.

New comment by hakuseki in "Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop"

hakuseki — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 23:55:15 +0000

Leaving aside the question of whether the universe is discrete or continuous, a simulation would still have lower "resolution" than the real world, and some information can be lost with each time step. To compensate for this, it can be helpful to have simulation step t+1 depend on both the step t and step t-1 states, even if this dependency seems "unphysical."

New comment by hakuseki in "A Made-Up Name Is Better Than No Name"

hakuseki — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 00:19:11 +0000

The article is about (position, move) pairs. Why not call these objects "steps"?

New comment by hakuseki in "Children should be allowed to get bored (2013)"

hakuseki — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 09:47:10 +0000

In what sense is looking at a screen a failure to prepare for the world that adults navigate? Adults also look at screens.

New comment by hakuseki in "How do computers calculate sine?"

hakuseki — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 07:42:35 +0000

> However, even using extra hardware wasn't enough in this case. So they pre-calculated lookup tables for sine, cosine, tangent etc. for every angle at the necessary precision.

Is this really the order of events? I imagine the pre-calculated route is what you'd try first, and only go for extra hardware if that failed somehow.

New comment by hakuseki in "Relativistic Spaceship"

hakuseki — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:03:31 +0000

Are you planning to decelerate by crashing into the planet at relativistic speed?

New comment by hakuseki in "When would you ever want bubblesort?"

hakuseki — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 01:57:33 +0000

I guess you mean k log k, not n log n.

New comment by hakuseki in "10,000TB storage cartridges could become mainstream by 2030"

hakuseki — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:35:53 +0000

What's so difficult about optical links from deep space compared to low earth orbit, where 200 gigabit throughput has been achieved? Is it just the attenuation?

I would have imagined that we could upgrade the communication equipment on a space probe much more easily than we could add fuel for a return trip.

New comment by hakuseki in "GraphCast: AI model for weather forecasting"

hakuseki — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 02:54:37 +0000

That is not strictly true. The weather at time t0 may affect non-weather phenomena at time t1 (e.g. traffic), which in turn may affect weather at time t2.

Furthermore, a predictive model is not working with a complete picture of the weather, but rather some limited-resolution measurements. So, even ignoring non-weather, there may be local weather phenomena detected at time t0, escaping detection at time t1, but still affecting weather at time t2.

New comment by hakuseki in "BB(3, 3) is Hard"

hakuseki — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 05:30:29 +0000

> there is nothing in principle stopping us from running this machine for BB(748) steps

How would we compute the value of BB(748)?

New comment by hakuseki in "Why isn't chess popular in Japan?"

hakuseki — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 13:29:52 +0000

So to summarize, the game tree complexity is estimated by estimating the branching factor and the game length, and raising the former to the power of the latter.

I find it slightly odd that the game length is calibrated to "reasonable" games but the branching factor is not.

If the goal is to estimate the number of possible games of go, then the calculation would be dominated by the number of long games rather than the number of short games, and very long games are possible.

If the goal is to estimate the number of "reasonable" games of go, then the branching factor should also be much smaller, as most possible moves are not reasonable. Perhaps the logarithm of the branching factor could be estimated as the entropy of some policy model such at that of KataGo.

P.S. I am happy to have received a reply from the mighty Tromp!

New comment by hakuseki in "Why isn't chess popular in Japan?"

hakuseki — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 06:26:43 +0000

How were these numbers arrived at?

New comment by hakuseki in "Cloth Simulation"

hakuseki — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 06:52:35 +0000

Seems like no collision is detected if you move the ball through the cloth fast enough.

New comment by hakuseki in "Launch HN: Roundtable (YC S23) – Using AI to Simulate Surveys"

hakuseki — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 07:42:32 +0000

ISTM that's just an a priori feeling. The value or lack thereof of the product totally depends on how accurately it predicts human survey responses, which you can't know without looking at the data.

New comment by hakuseki in "The only acceptable rating to leave an Uber driver is 5 stars"

hakuseki — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:23:57 +0000

I think a median rating of 5 stars makes sense for a taxi service. You want the rating system to be able to express varying levels of bad. There are many levels of bad outcomes for a car ride. There are not many ways to improve on the median experience.

New comment by hakuseki in "Wow, is Apple’s Vision Pro loaded with pixels"

hakuseki — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:21:48 +0000

I am not a vision expert, but simply matching the resolution of your display to the resolution of your sensor wouldn't necessarily produce a clear image, unless the pixels are aligned to the sensing elements.

By analogy, if you resize a 1025x1025 image to 1024x1024, it's usually going to look bad.

New comment by hakuseki in "Writing Python like it's Rust"

hakuseki — Sun, 21 May 2023 09:45:45 +0000

The `find_item` example uses List for an argument. To my thinking, this indicates that the function is intended to mutate the argument. I don't think that was the author's intention, though, so I would prefer to use Sequence in this situation (or possibly Iterable, if we only need to traverse the sequence once in order).

New comment by hakuseki in "Avoiding hallucinations in LLM-powered applications"

hakuseki — Wed, 03 May 2023 04:54:48 +0000

> It seems to me all we need here is a measure of confidence for the result averaged over the entire answer. Low confidence is a guess/hallucination.

Even if the model knows the exact answer to the question, there may be many distinct ways of phrasing the answer. This would also lead to low confidence in any particular phrasing.

New comment by hakuseki in "Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics"

hakuseki — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 09:19:25 +0000

> Like any good mystery, the fun was in the build up and as we move towards a resolution there's a bitter sweet aspect to the slightly mundane reality of it 'merely' being an emergent property of large networks.

I would disagree with this description. An "emergent property of large networks" would be something that just appears when you wire together a large network.

To get intelligent behavior, it's not sufficient to wire together a large neural network. You also need to use an optimizer to train it on a large data set.