CatPower wrote:diep wrote:
If you throw 100 million at a project in a science where everything is about testing, of course you always win.
Why would anyone or any government spend 100mln on a chess program?
There is a few valid excuses to give *some* funding, yet we must distinguish roles.
As you know from the wikileaks, USA has roughly 1200 intelligence agencies and 3 million people all together work there (the official numbers given there are different from 2.6 to 2.7 million to 3.0 million, by different congressional members so i hope you allow me to round it off at 3 million).
They doubled in size short after september 11, of course losing a lot of their personnel members there. Funding also more than doubled i assume.
Even the communistic party in Netherlands (called: SP = socialistic party, a direct marxistic party), they had in their 2007 election program an increase of 0.5 billion for the security forces, which is an incredible amount if you realize they are *against* having an army at all.
What do you do with all that cash?
First of all there is a number of valid 'see ya' guys who show up in tournaments. They have a good excuse to be there. Too much has happened there. Yet all they require is a few tickets and some hotel costs.
That's not the $100 million i refer to.
Vasik is excused there.
To give just 1 of the many examples excusing Vasik yet not the dudes who carried out the job of programming and wasting money to hardware:
It's not so long ago that Ahmad Altani left from USA back to Qatar, short before september 11. He was right under the nose of the USA, working at a military airbase. Really i didn't know that. It's the secrecy of the job that allows most dirt to happen. Had i known in 90s he worked at a military airbase, rather than the lame excuse he gave what sort of work he was doing, i would've immediately picked him out as someone who would've been a potential risk, as it was obvious to me he was a hardliner in religion.
Instead of that, he could use great hardware from others, Crafty and Diep and other software back in 90s ran on those Alpha's, cpu's not yet released, at the ICC server.
The evil part therefore is not the see ya guys who walk around; it is using that funding to build kick butt software, just because they can.
Instead of finding a method to do matrix calculations more accurately using a new algorithm that's lossless, i understand from conversations that currently a lot of problems in quantum mechanic get caused by round-off errors because of the floating point used, which let's the scientists use the slowish O ( n ^ 3 ) matrix calculations to solve the problem in that more accurate manner, they like to get more credits of course than that. So instead of helping their nation forwards, instead they join forces to fund an insane project like this.
Some guys like Fabien show a way to progress forwards and if someone else shows the fact it is possible, to just throw big hardware at it that eats on its own already dozens of millions in hardware, is of course something the non-brilliant working for the government can do as well.
The total amount of non-see ya guys that got funded is simply too big for this, as they did not do fundamental research. They only joined a contest, and were obviously paid to do so, as secret information and secret software was used to get things done.
What you then typically get is dozens of consultants from the health-IT and bioinformatics, so guys who really have no clue on computerchess, let alone game tree search, who join in, just to catch their rate of 75 euro an hour up to 168 euro an hour. Most are around 100 euro an hour.
Oh yeah, they need also a program to show up at a tournament. Ring ring, can i get a clone for myself? Of course they ring up everyone within government, but not the chessprogrammers. Some of them do ring up a few chessprogrammers. I also had a few on the line, but they definitely didn't want to give more than a 500 euro for a 'kick butt' clone. No business with me was done. Other chessprogrammers reported (i heard this from 3 different chessprogrammers) for very low fees. Around $30 to 30 euro an hour or so for a limited time usually.
So these crap people with their clones, who also pollute computerchess, show up *because* of the smoke already created by N*SA.
It has also very bad side effects.
As government even has to manipulate the tournament directors to not catch those guys as full blown clones, whereas even a kid on the street recognizes them as an actor and clueless.
If you obviously and willingly manipulate the entire field in such a manner that you are in 100% control over the field, all this with government funding, then that's what i call a very evil way to get things done.
For your information i have been in a tiny energy commission with respect to high voltage powerlines. Based upon knowledge i have from that i can assure you that when in 6 years from now USA must import the full 19 million barrels of oil daily into USA, which will have a cost by then of maybe even more than a trillion dollar a year, that in short term things will go very bad in USA. The military will be used for basically everything.
That's what happened in Greece also. Past 50 years, the national spendings to military were roughly 50% of the national income. A situation you cannot maintain. Total bankrupsy.
Yet despite that this energy problem is the biggest problem threatening USA in short term, if you would project the manipulation there onto a small world like computerchess, manipulation in computerchess by government has been a lot bigger.
Just because they could afford to do it.
100 million is peanuts for governments, if you realize how much money they waste anyway.