KludgeHack

Advanced searches with Google Hacks
11 July 2007 in Random tidbits | Comments (0)

Lifehacker has a article about a new free and open-source application: Google Hacks. It supports Windows, Mac and Linux, and helps you find free media on the web using Google search engine.

Google Hacks gives you a friendly GUI for searching books, videos, music and others.

Coding Pratices
6 July 2007 in Fun & Random tidbits | Comments (0)

Courtesy Smalltalk Tidbits:

Why Computers Can’t Play Go
6 July 2007 in Random tidbits | Comments (0)

Computers have now forever been able to play nearly every hame we’ve invented. Most, they can even master better than us.

One game has always been different in that matter, as it keeps unbeaten: The ancient Chinese game of Go.

The Times of London has an interesting article on why the computer still can’t beat an average human Go player.

The computer can play chess because it can calculate the results of all possible moves and then pick the best one.  In chess, there are usually 25-35 possible moves at any point.  In Go, there are 250.  This makes the brute force strategy a lot harder.  Almost impossibly hard.  The thinking goes that playing Go well is all about recognizing patterns – something computers are notoriously bad at.  If so, being able to play Go well would be a breakthrough affecting lots of other areas of computing from vision to AI.

Go is seen as a key to unlocking the secret of artificial intelligence (AI). If computers can “learn” the game, some scientists believe, mankind would be a huge step closer to replicating human thought processes, with great scientific benefits. Conversely, so long as we can still beat computers at this most human game, then the spectre of a machine that can comprehend rather than merely compute will remain the stuff of fiction.

Another WPF animation sample
5 July 2007 in Programming & Random tidbits | Comments (0)

Just came across this XBAP from Denis Dolfus. Its got some kewl animation and evasion techniques. Check it out here.

Working with Dev-Cpp on Windows Vista
5 July 2007 in Personal Experience & Random tidbits | Comments (0)

Recently I needed Dev-Cpp (free C++ IDE for Windows and Linux) to compile some old code, unfortunately, current versions (4/5 beta) don’t support Windows Vista.

Doing some online searches I found out at a SourceForge post mentioning a workaround:

• Open the menu “Tools > Compiler Options“, select the “Directories” tab and add “C:\Dev-Cpp\libexec\gcc\mingw32\3.4.2″ to the list.
• On the same window, choose the ”Programs” tab, and add ”C:\Dev-Cpp\bin\” before every executable name. (You can also edit Windows Environment variables, but this is definitely a safer way)

Naturally, put no quotation marks and eventually replace C:\Dev-Cpp\ with your Dev-Cpp installation folder.

After this, everything should work fine.