TLDR: Players are more likely to pick the move that just won.
To exploit that, the best strategy would probably be to always pick the move that wasn't played. Should give you an edge until your opponent notices your pattern :)
My wife and I play RPS to determine who does things like change a diaper when we're out and about and stuff. We tie a lot. Far, far more than chance would dictate. We can tie for 10 in a row, quite easily, and before you jump up about how this can happen by chance, we tie in sequences a lot, not just 1/3^10 times. We're trying to second guess each other.
Since humans are bad at random, "just play randomly" doesn't really work; humans don't have access to "random" to play that way. So you often do get into the sorts of strategies you mention, to compensate for this.
I played for years with a close friend in high school to decide who was driving or whatever, or just pass time. The better we knew each other (ie the longer we were playing) the more ties.
I believe there's a natural intuition for reading the expected movements of the other player, and have seen this reproduced (if anecdotally by only testing between myself and her, and not recording results) hundreds of times. Like you, 10-12 streaks of ties were not uncommon, certainly less common than statistics would seem to dictate.
But now everyone starts picking the move that wasn't played. I am not saying I am very good at this game (well who can claim that...), but I mostly win well by observing opponent's reaction and their habit. I try to exploit them by giving them some false sense of my next move. Too abstract? Random pattern. And honestly, the best strategy is don't get frustrated and enjoy the game :)
Apple never showed the path prominently in the first place. Since System 7 you can Cmd-Click the title bar to show a menu with the path, and you can use Cmd-I to show the path in the Info panel.
Not including a path bar by default doesn't mean they "try to hide the information", it's just a different UI design.
Joking aside, I think you are misunderstanding me.
I don't suggest anybody should be fired for asking someone for a date. I'm saying that company policy can give you an easy way to say "no" to a date: "Sorry, I don't want to jeopardize my career, you know company policy.". Ideally, the person asking you out will accept your rejection, and there's no need to fire anyone.
That excuse becomes unusable quickly as the number of office couples grows. A policy on the books won't let you off the hook when everyone knows it's not an actual policy.
Not just "ideally"; I would go so far as to say that the situation where the rejected person does not gracefully accept it is the point at which anyone in that situation has first done something "bad". (We have a term for further retribution against the rejector in a professional context: "sexual harassment". In an ordinary personal context, we would simply say it makes the person an asshole.)
If the woman is attracted to you then she expects you to make a romantic gesture. If you don't she's hurt. If she's not attracted then such a gesture could hurt her. Policies like no dating is a lot to do with protecting women in the workplace from having to go out of their way expressing themselves. A much better policy could be everyone has to make their intentions clear.
> A much better policy could be everyone has to make their intentions clear.
Easily said, but impossible to put into practice. Have you ever tried to get a woman to make her intentions clear? Apart from being seen as insulting, it's an impossible condition to place on social interactions between men and women, where a woman's inalienable right to be vague and ambiguous is an essential component of the dating game.
I thought you were going to go a different direction with that. All joking aside I really feel like the policies outlined in the op wreak of "apparently nobody in this company is mature enough to engage in what all adults engage in and we selfishly don't want to have to let people go due to their emotional unpreparedness."
Which is possible given that a lot of the most promising developers are young, I still don't agree with it. People need to be able to make mistakes and corporate culture is strangling them.
The biggest issue here is that users are allowed to pick their own passwords in the first place. Sure, you can require them to use passwords with a capital letter and with a number and with a punctuation character, but that will just make them pick "Password1."
Better: Use one time passwords sent via SMS. Or send a one-time-login URL via email.
If you do have to use a password, just generate a 10 digit numeric code. Sure, some of your customers might complain, but at least you aren't responsible for disclosing people's ebay password when your site gets hacked.
That's not "some of your customers might complain" territory, it's "your business failed because nobody signed up" territory.
2FA basically ensures security via a second channel, and it's perfectly possible to store passwords in a secure format. I'm not convinced your ideas there are worth the cost.
Why? Almost all websites require email confirmation; sending someone a login-URL via email actually has less friction because the password-choosing step is removed!
> it's perfectly possible to store passwords in a secure format
But it's very hard to do so. Even if you use scrypt, it is very hard to make sure your whole system is actually secure against password leakage.
The simple truth is that letting your users choose their own passwords is a liability; and I've decided to avoid this liability.
Re: "Password1". There was an interesting paper, I think by someone from Microsoft, that argued that when users pick silly passwords they are actually being rational. They (the users) informally decide that the pain of overcomplex password schemes just isn't worth it. In other words, remembering passwords or using security-related programs and practices is a high price they have to pay everyday (while we computer literate people often disregard this cost, it is there), while the relatively uncommon security breach is something they often never see.
Maybe I'm misrepresenting what the paper states, but my takeaway from it was "don't assume users are dumb when they pick silly passwords. They simply are not willing to use an overcomplex system that for them turns out to be not worth the effort."
I just tried to find this paper online but I can't even remember the title :(
We are told to not re-use passwords. This is not helped by every single shopping web site out there requiring an account (and therefore a password) in order to buy something. Fair enough for big sites like Amazon - I'm actually likely to come back at some time in the future, although I dislike the way it tries to store my card number each time.
On most sites, requiring me to create an account discourages me from shopping there. I'm not likely to come back unless I suddenly have a burning need for another obscure once-in-a-lifetime widget, so why do I need an account? If I do come back, you still only need my card number and a delivery address.
As it stands, the sheer number of accounts that I have means that I invariably set an impossible to remember password and immediately forget it, relying on the password reset mechanism. This is not ideal.
Honestly, I just wish I could elect one-factor non-password login on such rarely used sites. Just put a button next to the username box "login by email" and use my email address as my username. So I type in pxtl@myemailhost.ca and then click that button, get a link in my email to auth the session cookie, and I'm in. Hard implementation detail would be polling the server from the browser window to find out when I've authed the session from email, since I might want to auth from my phone.
Password reset without the password. If my email account is compromised then everything is screwed, but with password-reset emails that was already true.
Of course, this is potentially vulnerable to abuse... but again, password-reset emails have the same problem.
Have you seen what modern password hacking tools do? We don't see old school brute force anymore: Things users do are checked first. 3 words one after the other, one or two letters replaced, or sitting, right next to passwords. walking on a keyboard... those things are tested relatively early in the process.
So HorseBatteryStaple sucks as a password, along with anything else you can easily remember. If you want security, you probably want 2 factor authentication and a different password for every site, probably stored in something like a KeePass DB.
Testing several words after each other is an old-school brute force method. How hard a password is to crack is basically a measure of the amount of entropy encoded, and there is more than you think in a collection of several words. The comic uses four words for a reason, not three. Sure, replace a few characters if you wish - it does increase the entropy slightly.
Also, know your target. If your target is to secure your account against a web-based brute force, as depicted in the comic, the attacker is likely to be rate-limited by the server, and a reasonable password is likely to be sufficient. If the attacker gets access to the hashed password database, then that's a different matter, but if you have sufficient entropy in your password it can still be secure.
But my main point is this - why do I need an account and password for uncle bob's glass cutting tool emporium, when I am only likely to make a single order in my lifetime? If I don't have an account, and therefore have no password, then there is nothing to hack.
> relies on the assumption that there is something special about the mechanisms behind the human brain's function
Imagine someone spilled the contents of a large trash in a pile on the floor. Now it is your task to create an exact replica of this pile.
There was absolutely nothing special going on when that pile of trash was generated, and yet it is impossible to replicate.
Sure, you can create similar piles of trash by spilling other trash cans on the floor, or you can carefully arrange banana peels an half-filled soda cans to create a pile that looks similar from the surface. But generate an exact copy? No way.
It depends on how 'exact' exact is. For a brain, there are a finite number of neurons with a finite number of dendrites and axons. A quick search suggests 2.5 pentabytes (2.5 million GB) of storage http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memory.... So about 2.5 thousand hard drives, so not an unreasonable amount of complexity to deal with today.
Your argument seems to suggest there is some finite level of complexity which is the limit of engineering. What is this limit and how is it justified?
If our ability to scale to complex systems scales linearly, this could take a very long time. If it follows a power law (like Moore's Law), it could be feasibly much faster.
The trash argument is weak because the pile serves an identical function regardless of how exact or inexact it is.
Probably the challenge is not in making an artificial brain, it is in reading a current one (especially one that is living without damaging it).
The argument with the trash I was trying to make was that we don't need magic to make things that are beyond our understanding. I do believe that our conscious derives from the physical structure of our brain, but that doesn't mean it is possible to "upload" it.
Yes, part of the impossibility stems from the impossibility of reading a brain. Non-destructive measurements aren't possible because the amount of energy required to scan the tiny structures in the brain would destroy it. Destructive measurements would destroy the brain while we read it, and we can only read a subset of the information before the whole brain is destroyed.
But even if it was possible to scan a brain, I think you are underestimating the task of creating an artificial brain. Storage is the least of our troubles. To actually simulate the neural net, each of these two thousand hard drives must be connected to every other one, requiring millions of interconnects, and then you need millions of processors, and every simulation step touches every byte of every hard drive. This is so many orders of magnitude beyond what we can do now that I doubt it is ever possible.
I think the only feasible way of uploading a brain will be to create a program that can convince everyone that the uploaded person is actually living inside the computer, similar to the Turing test. You'd configure the program by telling it anecdotes from your life and taking psychological tests, rather than "scan your brain". However, I consider even this variant unlikely, because it would basically require something similar to an AI.
Do you have any clue about the current state of neuroscientific research? Scientists are struggling to understand a single neuron, there are no models that reliably predict networks of more than two neurons, and the current state of the art is recording partial signals from a few dozen neurons.
"Brain upload" is just the modern day version of the philosophers' stone. As more knowledge about the human brain will be taught in schools, and the current state of the art will become public knowledge, people will look back at the idea of "brain uploads" just like we look back on the idea of "turn lead into gold".
We have a poor understanding of the brain from a bottom-up perspective. But from a top-down perspective we are far from ignorant. We can be fairly confident that consciousness arises completely within the brain through material processes. If this is the case then consciousness is a function of information rather than matter. And of course, information is independent of the medium so uploading consciousness is in fact a small leap from the assumption of materialism.
But information can not be transferred as we please. I believe that our consciousness arises from the information stored in the material structure of our brain. But there is no reason to believe we have any way of extracting or transferring this information to another place.
If you assume this step is a "small leap" you are entering the realm of science fiction. And that's okay, I greatly enjoy reading science fiction. But if you tell people that this might actually become reality in the future, they will rightfully be skeptical.
Transferring information within the brain is no harder than transferring a file across the internet. The hard part is decoding how information is represented within the brain.
We don't even need to do that though. The hard part isn't transferring information, but transferring consciousness sustained by that information. If you believe that neurons are the sole physical entity that makes up the brain, and that any one neuron has no significant effect on consciousness, then transitioning each neuron one by one is simply a logical deduction from the premises. I no more have to "believe" this than I believe in a given mathematical proof. If the premises are accepted then the conclusion of transferring consciousness is required.
If it's just about target audience, then I wonder why all these companies seem to target detergents / toothpaste / toilet paper exclusively to 25 year olds...
In addition to the habit-forming age (if cigarette users are aged 16-60, rational advertising would target 16, not 60), a point is that you don't show your target audience as they are, but you show your target audience as they wish to be.
If you target average 65 year old women, then you show gray-haired above-average-health 55-year women.
If you target average 45 year old men, then you show slim (but not too slim) fit (but not too fit) 38 year old men - that might plausibly be average 45 year old men, but are very much skewed towards the idealized goal.
If you target very overweight people, then you show people that are visibly overweight, but particularly good looking for that weight.
That's what works best, that's how homo sapiens are most receptive to be influenced.
I'm 36 and I've already decided on my brand of toothpaste, toilet paper detergents years ago. I will not buy another brand as long as these brand exists with the same price and quality level. I would be a very bad target for advertising.
Just going from my understanding, which could be wrong... Many people find a household goods brand they like and stick with it. For example, once you decide that Crest toothpaste is good enough for you, you'll likely continue buying it for many years without ever thinking twice about it.
So it makes sense for these household goods brands to target young adults, to become their "go-to" choice for decades to come.
Aren't there materials that become semi-fluid when a shock is applied to them? (The opposite of your non-Newtonian cornstarch fluid.) How about steel handled mauls covered with something like that?
I find it odd that the only moral issue people seem to find with procedures like this is whether it is okay to kill an egg cell, or an early stage embryo.
These egg cells don't grow on trees. They must be harvested from human beings. Egg cell harvesting is a complex process, requiring the donors (young women) to take experimental drugs with possibly harmful long term sideeffects.
If we are using human egg cells for experiments, or at some point in the future, for curing old people, aren't we exploiting the young woman we take those egg cells from?
AFAIK, they use the embryos left after a successful IVF (if the parents agree).
The sucess rate of an IVF is relatively low, and the procedure to extract the ova is complex, inconvenient and not risk-free.
Ovaries are overstimulated to produce more than one egg. They are all collected and fertilized, but, usually, only two or three are implanted at a time, to balance the low success rate and the non-null chance of multiple pregnancy (that's how octuplets are made :\).
If a successfull pregnancy occurs before running out of embryos, the mother/couple may donate the remaining embryos for research (that's how it works in Belgium, at least).
Current practice from the doctors I've talked to in North America is to encourage people to implant one egg per attempt, with two eggs being allowed if the couple insists.
Well, all of the egg donors are adults with (presumably) the ability to make rational decisions. They should of course give proper informed consent and potentially be given due compensation, but in that case I don't think it's fair to call it exploitation.
e: I hate to complain about downvotes, but did totally miss your point here or something? I think this is a good conversation to have, and I was replying in good faith.
There is a significant proportion of feminists who are against prostitution and pornography because it exploits women's bodies, and your statement can be used as a potential argument to dislodge their beliefs.
On the other hand, it is more unacceptable to suggest at times a person might not be always fully rational, and even more unacceptable to generalize this to a group of people. So your statement has brought up a contradiction in the beliefs of a subset of people, which you're not supposed to do.
They are being paid to become mothers to children who they will never know, who will likely die in miscarriages (implantation of IVF embryos is not very successful), and (per the WSJ article linked) may very likely be intentionally murdered by "scientists" to collect "tissue" (and citations, and grant money). These are young women, typically college students with poor earning prospects and lots of debt, being enticed with large amounts of money they may not feel free to turn down.
I'm sure that your comment is in good faith, and I'm not one of the ones who downvoted you. I only want to show you that, from this point of view, "informed consent" is not a good enough excuse for how these women are being used. (And I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.)
To me, informed consent has a specific meaning. From Wikipedia:
> An informed consent can be said to have been given based upon a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, implications, and future consequences of an action.
Of course, as you say:
> I would also question whether these girls are truly "informed" about what's really going to be done to their children.
This is completely fair, and I agree coercion or enticement may preclude informed consent. I know that this can be a sensitive issue, but I believe in working towards this goal rather than avoiding the issue. For instance: many people donate organs and tissues, but it is (generally speaking, and in the USA) illegal to sell these services. Thanks for the rsponse.
To exploit that, the best strategy would probably be to always pick the move that wasn't played. Should give you an edge until your opponent notices your pattern :)