Larry Walters’ boyhood dream was not an unusual one: He wanted to fly. What was unusual, though, was the way he fulfilled it. After finishing school, Larry joined the U.S. aion account Air Force, but was rejected from pilot-training school because of poor eyesight. However, his dream remained.
Larry, aged 33, was not a pilot, but a truck driver in Los Angeles. One day, while sitting outside in his lawn chair, Larry had his eureka moment. As he watched jets fly overhead, an idea came to him to use weather aion money balloons to fly.
A few weeks later, Larry bought 42 one-meter diameter weather balloons. He tied them to a lawn chair and filled them with helium. Then he sat down in the chair with some beer, sandwiches, and a BB gun. Larry’s plan was to float about 10 aion power leveling meters above his backyard, enjoy a few hours in the air, and then pop some balloons with his gun to get back down. But things did not go according to Larry’s plan.
When his friends cut the anchor lines, Larry, lifted by the 42 balloons, shot skyward at an astonishing speed. He finally settled at an altitude of 4,000 meters. Afraid to pop any of the balloons, in case he should upset the balance of his “craft,” Larry sat, cold and frightened, in the sky with his beer and sandwiches for 14 hours.
Airline pilots heading toward Los Angeles’ busy international airport radioed in reports of the strange sight. Larry’s presence in the skies caused numerous planes to be rerouted. Eventually, Larry worked up the nerve to shoot a few runescape account balloons and slowly descended, landing in power lines. Uninjured, he climbed down to safety and was arrested by waiting police.
When asked by a reporter why he had done it, Larry responded, "a man just can't sit around." Larry fulfilled his dream, and set a record for a gas-filled balloon flight. But it cost him: He was later fined US$1,500 for violating air safety regulations.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Asia-Pacific most affected by climate change
The Asia-Pacific region has become the largest victim of climate change as roughly 70 percent of the natural disasters, believed to be caused by global warming, struck this aion gold region, a regional forum report said Sunday.
Climate change is believed to contribute to the increasing number of natural disasters, with developing nations experiencing the most adverse effects, the Secretariat of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) said in a report released here at the opening of the forum's annual Leaders' Meetings. But it did not give the timeframe in which it conducted the research.
The report said increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters has created challenges for disaster response in the region and can be a severe economic pressure. Last month, four back-to-back aion kina storms hit the Philippine archipelago, killing around 1,000 people and causing economic loss amounting to 38.8 billion pesos (US$817 million), according to the latest government statistics.
The APEC, formed in 1989, groups 21 economies including China, the United States, Japan, Canada and most of the Southeast Asia.
APEC leaders are widely expected to call for further cuts in energy consumption amongst themselves at this year's summit. In 2007, APEC leaders proposed a aion kinah regional goal to reduce energy intensity by at least 25 percent by 2030.
The Secretariat said APEC economies account for approximately 60 percent of the world energy consumption, which is aion power leveling expected to continue to rise as the region becomes increasingly industrialized and more people move from the countryside to cities.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Artificial intelligence in the game of go
Early in the film "A Beautiful Mind," the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually was awarded a Nobel Prize.
In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even aion kinachess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player.
The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with aion kinah stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition.
Danny Hillis, a computer designer and chairman of the technology company Applied Minds, said the depth of Go made it ripe for the kind of scientific progress that came from studying one example in great detail.
In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London. But the obstacles go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly; they have trouble evaluating them corectly. Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go incereases as the difficulties it poses encourages programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence.
For that reason, Fotland said, "writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program."
In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even aion kinachess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player.
The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with aion kinah stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition.
Danny Hillis, a computer designer and chairman of the technology company Applied Minds, said the depth of Go made it ripe for the kind of scientific progress that came from studying one example in great detail.
In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London. But the obstacles go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly; they have trouble evaluating them corectly. Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go incereases as the difficulties it poses encourages programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence.
For that reason, Fotland said, "writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program."
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