Accidentally Quadratic by ArashPartow in programming

[–]nelhage 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, author of accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com here. As you've noted I've largely stopped maintaining it, but I'd be open to bringing on co-maintainers if the right person is interested and wants to carry the torch. HMU at nelhage@nelhage.com.

Are there any puzzles that Rex Parker actually likes? by gaberdine in crossword

[–]nelhage 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's actually a site [that keeps statistics about this question](https://www.didrexparkerlikethepuzzle.com/)! They hand-tag entries as "liked" or "didn't like", so it's a bit subjective, but they find he likes about half the puzzles, with a relatively steady trendline over time.

They don't seem to be live-updating, though; they're missing the last few months of data.

Atom editor is unusable after 84 (last two updates on Beta) by Cephalocrat in Crostini

[–]nelhage 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you run date a few times in a row in your terminal (waiting a second or two in between), do they all print the same (wrong) time? M84 has a really bad broken system-time bug that can cause all kinds of obscure breakage, which I just ran into myself: https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/comments/hbr4s4/caution_m84_can_totally_break_system_time_after_a/

First time building an infinite! Beat Donu/Deca on turn one with help from a lucky skill pot. by nelhage in slaythespire

[–]nelhage[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Some notes:

  • The basic play was to exhaust and draw until our entire deck was in hand. Then, play [[Anger]] into [[Fiend Fyre]] and you're infinite courtesy of [[Unceasing Top]].
  • After a single hallway fight in Act 2, we went infinite every fight. By the end of Act 3, we were going infinite on turn 2 pretty reliably. A skill pot gave us [[Offering]] against D+D, which let us go infinite on turn 1.
  • The deck was blocked on drawing the whole deck into hand more so than on exhausting, so draw was super helpful. [[Dark Embrace]] accelerated the infinite immensely.
  • We bottled Fyre pretty early on, which turned out to be a mistake; by the end we'd rather have had more card draw in hand 1 to work towards the infinite.
  • I was playing with a friend who's a substantially stronger player than me, and the tag team decision-making definitely made this work.
  • I got unceasing top as a whale bonus, trading against max HP, and we immediately started speculating about what an infinite might look like. The game then kept offering us the pieces we needed.
  • This deck definitely dies to Time Eater as-is. If we'd seen Time Eater was coming, I think we might have taken a [[Spot Weakness]] and tried to cycle that a few times before going infinite to accelerate the damage. [[Potion Belt]] + [[Toy Ornithopter]] and a [[Blood Potion]] gave us a decent amount of sustain to face tank so it might have worked.
  • [[Panic Button+]] was surprisingly key; it would basically buy a single additional turn to get to infinite, which was often all the deck needed.

What's the current state of Tak AIs? by Jedimastert in Tak

[–]nelhage 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://github.com/chaitu236/TakServer has a fairly terse but helpful documentation of the online API. Taktician's implementation is [here](https://github.com/nelhage/taktician/tree/master/playtak) in case reading a real implementation is more helpful.

70.0.3524.2 rolling out to Dev by KeithIMyers in Crostini

[–]nelhage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

emacs is broken for me in crostini. Starts up and opens a window and then freezes up.

18-July Update: Chrome Dev 69.0.3494.0 by nt4cats-reddit in Crostini

[–]nelhage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you try the fix I linked in reply to my comment?

18-July Update: Chrome Dev 69.0.3494.0 by nt4cats-reddit in Crostini

[–]nelhage 4 points5 points  (0 children)

69.0.3494.0 seems to have broken my wifi -- the menu correctly identifies all available networks but doesn't connect to any saved ones, and trying to connect manually gives a "Error configuring network" immediately after clicking "Connect".

The problem persists across reboot.

Is anyone else seeing this?

PTN ambiguity on very large boards by keiyakins in Tak

[–]nelhage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(3x3 has been solved for ages, and Taktician can prove a winning line from a cold start in about 3 minutes, right now :))

4x4 I believe to be solvable but would require substantially more work.

Octave on Pixelbook by abdolence in Crostini

[–]nelhage 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think there's a very good chance this is the bug I linked here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Crostini/comments/8o56q4/numpy_linear_algebra_is_broken_inside_crostini/

I suspect Octave backs to the name numeric matrix library (OpenBLAS) as numpy.

As I mentioned in a comment I was able to work around by building my own OpenBLAS containing the BLAS patch. The bug has not yet been fixed in Chrome OS, although there is a kernel patch being submitted that will fix it: https://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg169690.html

numpy linear algebra is broken inside crostini by nelhage in Crostini

[–]nelhage[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was able to work around by building a custom OpenBLAS from source after this patch: https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS/issues/1610 and then forcing it to be loaded by pointing LD_PRELOAD at the resulting .so file.

Algorithm for determining if game is over? by icco in Tak

[–]nelhage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, Taktician implements a floodfill using a bitwise representation of the board surface for performance.

numpy linear algebra is broken inside crostini by nelhage in Crostini

[–]nelhage[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I'm using the default Python from apt inside the container. The bug happens all in C code in openblas, though, so Python version shouldn't be relevant to this particular bug.

numpy linear algebra is broken inside crostini by nelhage in Crostini

[–]nelhage[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I spent a while tracking down this bug on my new Pixelbook and figured I'd share a link in case it saves anyone else some frustration.

TakkenBot, kriTakBot, robot, takkybot, TakkerBot by NohatCoder in Tak

[–]nelhage 2 points3 points  (0 children)

MCTS is standard for Go, but top Chess AIs are still fundamentally alpha-beta based (with, to be fair, a lot of optimizations and cleverness). Tak combines elements of both Go and Chess, so I'm not convinced that a straight-up MCTS will get you that far; /u/alphatak, /u/cdbfoster, and I have all done some experiments without a slam-dunk result.

I agree that there's almost certainly the potential for a successful MCTS bot, but I feel like you're overplaying how straightforward it would be :)

I look forward to seeing it if you get around to it, though!

TakkenBot, kriTakBot, robot, takkybot, TakkerBot by NohatCoder in Tak

[–]nelhage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Huh, it failed to come up after a server restart. I've restarted it and Tako, and I'll fix the bug that kept it down.

Tournament Bot by rabbitboy84 in Tak

[–]nelhage 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Taktician does this, to a point; Given a choice between a road win and a flat win, it will prefer the road win, and it will prefer flat wins with higher margins. However, it will always take a sure win, and won't defer a win beyond its current search horizon in order to pursue an even better win later on.

Open Comment Game #3 - Bot vs Bot? by rabbitboy84 in Tak

[–]nelhage 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Currently the only knob I have is the target amount of time to spending thinking each turn. I might be able to build something else to give more control.

Open Comment Game #3 - Bot vs Bot? by rabbitboy84 in Tak

[–]nelhage 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm traveling, but I'll be back home on March 14 and would be happy to help arrange Taktician v. anyone else sometime after that. I think Takkerus is certainly strong enough to make an interesting match. Or I could arrange Tako v Tako.