There is no credible documentation of EURISKO's achievements. No one has every actually seen EURISKO's source code except for Lenat.

Despite huge advances in technology, in computational power, and in the amount of engineers and grad students thrown at these problems, the magical reasoning feats have never been reproduced by anyone else - not even by Lenat's much more expensive project Cyc.

What's more, Lenat did not give a consistent account of the Traveler tournament. One time he claimed "ninety-six ships in Eurisko’s fleet, most of which were slow and clumsy because of their heavy armor", other times he would claim the winning strategy was "astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility".

The most probable explanation is that there's more myth than truth in the stories about EURISKO.

(on a less serious note, the jargon file entry for "bogosity" references Lenat; see http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003515.h...)

IIRC there were two different Traveler entries in different years, and they changed the rules in between to fix the problems the first win had revealed. After the second win they said they'd cancel the tournament if he entered again.

Scientists say that there's a considerable but not overwhelming chance that the volcano on my island might erupt in the next few days.

If I knew that the volcano is going to erupt, then I would drive to the airport (with all my belongings, and leave).

If I knew that the volcano on my island is not going to erupt this month, then I would drive to the airport (to go on a package holiday that I had planned).

However, if the outcome is undetermined, I might prefer to cancel my holiday (I would not enjoy it while worrying about all my stuff potentially being destroyed in a fiery inferno) and wait to see what happens. So I should hesitate from driving to the airport.

In this example the two "drive to airport" actions are different.

    If (volcano_status == GONNA_BLOW)
        pack_everything_and_run();
    else if (volcano_status == NO_WORRIES)
        pack_suitcase_and_leave_for_holiday();
    else if (volcano_status == UNKNOWN)
        cancel_holiday();

It depends on what you treat as a complete action. One could equally well decompose it as two actions and two conditionals:

if (volcano_status == GONNA_BLOW) refuel_car(); else if (volcano_status == NO_WORRIES) refuel_car(); else if (volcano_status == UNKNONW) nop();

then later

if (volcano_status == GONNA_BLOW) pack_everything_and_run(); else if (volcano_status == NO_WORRIES) pack_suitcase_and_leave_for_holiday(); else if (volcano_status == UNKNONW) call_to_cancel_holiday();

Then refueling the car is definitely the same action, even if it's followed by different actions later on.

> What happens when the only housing available is for drug addicts and you just happen to be poor?

The same thing that happens when the only parking available is reserved for the disabled and you're not disabled?

Difference being that it can seem enticing to ease yourself into a life of heroin or crack, but not so much to break your own legs.

So what? You could equally well observe that most great scientists were men, but that doesn't mean that STEM education for women can be improved by sex reassignment surgery.

My point is that a well rounded education probably makes for a smarter person. If all you do is code or solve calculus your world view might end up being rather narrow.

Diffie–Hellman key exchange?

Oh gosh, this feels just like my crypto finals :(

Alas, spending time on writing production-ready software is career suicide in academia. Conferences and journals value novelty, and are not interested in incremental improvements.

If you're really lucky (EvoSuite [1] / Google), BigCompany will take interest in your project and give you some money. The expectation is that you'll hire students to improve your software, and then these students will go on to work for BigCompany.

[1] http://www.evosuite.org/evosuite/

This article about the bracelet is from 2015. No updates since then, and it does not link to anything peer-reviewed. All in all I would take this with a huge grain of salt.

A simple google search shows further updates...

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/n0711-worlds...

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23559

Except the Siberian Times article also doesn't link to anything peer-reviewed, and the Nature paper is about bone identification, not bracelets or other artifacts.

The only academic paper about the bracelet I could find is from 2008 and was submitted to the journal "Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia", whose editor-in-chief, Anatoly Derevyanko, is also the paper's primary author.

True but to be fair they're still fresh findings. And oldest as well, so comparison to other findings is pretty low.

> True but to be fair they're still fresh findings.

Your "fresh finding" was found nine years ago - this is even explicitly stated in the 2015 Siberian Times article.

All of the citations for the paper describing the "bracelet" [1] are for uncontroversial findings (that Denisovans existed, that they interbred with Neanderthals, etc.) - none of them make any reference to the supposed "bracelet".

[1]: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1563011008...

I figured someone who has no idea what they were talking about would say that. They're fresh but I'm not going to teach as to all the reasons why, as it's clear you don't do much with science, research or archaeology. Good luck.

There's an article in Pleistocene Coalition News from 2015.[0] But I note: "The Pleistocene Coalition is now into its sixth year of challenging mainstream scientific dogma. If you would like to join the coalition please write to the editors." So ...

I find no peer-reviewed followup about the Denisovan bracelet. However, I do find an article in Current Biology about Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans.[1] The date estimate is about right: "[W]e estimate 44,000–54,000 years ago for Denisovan admixture."

0) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.695...

1) http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816...

Indeed, it's poorly written (no morphological similarities to modern humans?? They were alive before they were extinct? Daily mail as source), and this scans more like the mystical bullshit you read in Russian media all the time (Jesus was Russian, all peoples are descended from the pure Slavic archetype, dinosaur spotted in Yekaterinburg, putin wrestles ten bears saving orphanage).

and quotes the daily mail. as far as i'm concerned that puts it immediately in "bigfoot discovered in noah's ark" territory until definitively shown otherwise.

"Mr. LastName was my father's name! Please, call me Dr. LastName."

> I'm a trained mathematician as well.

Mayhap.

>A constructivist would state the result in a variety of ways. But none of them would involve a potentially self-referential construction based on the absolute truth of an infinite number of statements. Which really does rule out Cantor's argument.

But in any case you misunderstand Cantor's argument and constructive mathematics.

mbid is correct; Cantor's diagonalization argument constructively proves the uncountability of the real numbers, see e.g. Bishop-Bridges' CONSTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS, Theorem 2.19, page 29.

> Buy a hard-sided bag for checking your laptop?

Think before you write?

A hard case makes zero difference (or in some cases actively makes things worse) if the TSA fails to secure your laptop after inspecting it.