[dba-Tech] Questions about 2 Unusual Databases

Rocky Smolin - Beach Access Software bchacc at san.rr.com
Wed Oct 27 22:07:33 CDT 2004


Oops.  Meant 64, not 32

Rocky

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rocky Smolin - Beach Access Software" <bchacc at san.rr.com>
To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" 
<dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 6:52 PM
Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Questions about 2 Unusual Databases


> Arthur:
>
> I might use an array of 32 bytes where each byte represents a square on 
> the board and the contents of that byte describes the piece , if any, 
> occupying that square.
>
> If you want to get into bit twiddling, it could probably be done in less 
> than 32 bytes.  There are 6 different pieces, yes, pawn, rook, knight, 
> bishop, queen, king.  and two colors. So it seems that the numbers 1 
> through 12 could represent all the pieces of both colors.
>
> Rocky
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Arthur Fuller" <artful at rogers.com>
> To: "Discussion of Hardware and Software issues" 
> <dba-tech at databaseadvisors.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 5:46 PM
> Subject: Re: [dba-Tech] Questions about 2 Unusual Databases
>
>
>> Thanks for responding! Doubly interesting.... On the first case, part of 
>> the reason I keep coming back to this is that I have a gut feeling that 
>> brute force is all wrong for this application. What I have in mind is a 
>> sort of double-perspective on any given chess situation -- one that 
>> records the sequence and the other that records the absolute position, so 
>> that any two positions could be compared very rapidly without having to 
>> go through the move-sequences to build it. Not to suggest that the 
>> following is anywhere near an optimal model for recording the latter 
>> piece, but let's just say it might look something like this....
>> There are 64 squares and at most two pairs of 16 pieces. (Convenient 
>> numbers from a computing viewpoint.) So we could have a 1-D array of 64 
>> elements or a 2-D array of 8*8 elements to reprsent the squares. 
>> Regarding the pieces, we need to distinguish white from black, but we do 
>> not need to distinguish Queen's knight from King's. The front row (at 
>> setup) is an array of 8 pawns; the back row is a ragged array of 3 pairs 
>> (rook, knight, bishop) and perhaps another pair or two single-element 
>> items, Q and K.
>> To record any given position, we need to note the square of interest, the 
>> piece that's sitting on it and the colour of said piece. If we could map 
>> this compactly and effectively, we could also search it rapidly, I think. 
>> Let's say for the sake of argument that positions P1 and P2 differ by 
>> only one piece's position. Let's further say that we have employed a 
>> legion of low-wage workers to plug in the Book of Endings. Then (and here 
>> comes a large leap of faith) any position P3 could be compared to any 
>> known and similar position P4 that is guaranteed to result in victory (or 
>> defeat). I.e., P3 can be compared with P4 (victory) and the relatively 
>> small problem of how to get from here to there can be concentrated upon. 
>> If I can paint you into said corner, then I'm guaranteed to win and the 
>> rest is rote.
>>
>> ----------------
>> On problem two, I guess that we have both invested some time in this 
>> investigation, and that's (for me at least) a good thing. I tackled it in 
>> various ways, from studying and playing music to taking various academic 
>> courses and reading the literature on various investigations from 
>> researchers (not to say I'm in any way expert, but I have read some). 
>> From I gather, the most accurate vector of prediction is what you have 
>> previously listened to. As it happens, I am either "eclectic" or 
>> musically promiscuous -- you choose. I have almost everything Beethoven 
>> wrote, and Bach, and also Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Talking Heads, the 
>> Clash and Zakir Hussain, to name only a few. This opens me to radical new 
>> musics in a way that is simply unavailable to people acquainted with only 
>> one or two genres and only four or five decases of same. I'm not trying 
>> to toot my horn here, and if the previous sentence reads that way then I 
>> apologize. Here's another perspective on the point I'm attempting to 
>> make: when I started studying classical guitar about -- god! -- 35 years 
>> ago, it took me on average about 20 minutes to tune the guitar. Once two 
>> notes got very close to each other, I had a very difficult time 
>> determining which one was higher than the other. A gifted friend of mine 
>> cleared up the mud with a simple instruction: listen to the wa-wa-wa as 
>> you compare the notes. The faster the wa-wa-wa, the further the notes are 
>> apart. Adjust the pegs and make the wa-wa-wa slower. Once it gets to a 
>> "wa" per second, you're close enough for folk music. After he told me 
>> that, my time to tune shrank dramatically, and now I can sit in the back 
>> row of a nightclub and tell you in seconds who's out of tune.
>> That doesn't mean that my taste in music is "better" than anyone else's. 
>> (We've all met stupid lawyers.) But it does say on the one hand that I 
>> can probably tell you whether a given melody was lifted from Bach, even 
>> if it was transposed and inverted and the instrumentation was changed.
>> When I was in university I took a course called "History of Music." 
>> Doctor Ursula Rempel told us in the first class that the exam would be to 
>> listen to 20 fragments of music (each 10 seconds long), and we'd have to 
>> identify the type of work, the movement if possible, the composer if 
>> possible, and the year in which it was written (within 20 years). When 
>> the good doctor said that, I thought there's no way in the world I could 
>> possibly do that. This incidentally was a summer course; I attended class 
>> every day for 6 weeks. By exam time I thought that 10 seconds was an 
>> absurdly long time for each question. Ms. Rempel had taught me how to 
>> recognize Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Classical, Romantic, Late 
>> Romantic, Early Modern, 12-tone etc. almost instantly... and it was 
>> almost as easy to say this is German as opposed to Italian. A few trick 
>> questions could undermine you... for example, Schubert is pretty close to 
>> Beethoven, and Carl Czerny is even closer, and certain composers make a 
>> point of trying to confuse you with era. But the fact is that most of the 
>> time I can tell you (within the classical European, jazz and East-Indian 
>> classical music traditions) who is playing and what composition type is 
>> being played within seconds. If it's tricky, it might take me a minute, 
>> and if it takes me longer than that then I'm just guessing.
>> All the foregoing was about music from the dare I say it, educated 
>> listener's point of view. This axis has virtually nothing to do with what 
>> will sell. I like to think that I have an ear for quality (don't we all), 
>> and I have a certain amount of evidence to cite. Not a lot of said 
>> evidence concerns record sales, but rather longevity. There are things 
>> you can do in the world of European classical music that are impossible 
>> in other genres. For example, I have approximately 20 recordings of Igor 
>> Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and I can tell you without hesitation which 
>> one I consider the best, and even play fragments from the various 
>> versions to justify my position. You can't do that with rock, or movies, 
>> or most other musical genres. To a lesser extend you can do it with jazz.
>> So where am I going with this? I don't want to go into the corner thats 
>> says great music is only for those who know. Neither do I want to go into 
>> the corner that says that someone who has listened only to punk or rap or 
>> disco or classical Indian music can pronounce upon what is great music. I 
>> think that a LOT more perspective is required, and a much larger 
>> time-frame.
>> You proposed a much simpler proposition that is much easier to test. 
>> Let's just hope you don't come up with the musical equivalent of "Famous 
>> Dogs of the Civil War." Even if it does sell a jillion copies this year.
>>
>> LOL. I do tend to ramble on.
>> A.
>> There's a rule in S-F writing circles: introduce exactly 1 radical new 
>> concept and base your book upon that. There are numerous exceptions to 
>> this rule: to cite just three, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Philip 
>> Kerr. But in general, I think that the rule holds. It doesn't guarantee 
>> success, by any means, but it does describe many and perhaps the majority 
>> of successful S-F novels.
>> I vaguely recall a joke about this sort of analysis, too. Some book 
>> publisher decided to search for the three most successful themes in 
>> novels, thereby to derive the formula for the next blockbuster, and after 
>> all the data was sifted and the numbers crunched, the software proposed 
>> "Famous Dogs of The Civil War."
>> So in fact, your perspective (I think -- don't let me put words in your 
>> mouth), you nest two other questions and possibly three. IOW, you 
>> identify one axis as the measure of the database's success: future sales 
>> of the proposed artwork. That's fine, as far as it goes, but I think it 
>> does not go very far... except, assuming success, all the way to the 
>> bank. What I must applaud about this approach is its scientific 
>> perspective (i.e. prediction and control) -- you propose a case that can 
>> be tested objectively in a relatively small time-frame, whereas lofty 
>> frames of reference such as "greatness", "beauty", "influence over 
>> subsequent composers" etc. require much more subjectivity and much larger 
>> time-frames.
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