Seriously brain-dead way to round off numbers in Python

import decimal
def Round(value, precision = 3):
decimal.getcontext().prec = precision
return float(str(decimal.Decimal(str(value))
/decimal.Decimal('1')))

Computer Go Advances

A professional 8-dan player has been defeated by MoGo, a computer Go program that uses Monte Carlo tree search algorithms, in a 9-stone handicap game on a 19x19 board. [usgo.org] [slashdot.org]

This represents a major milestone in computer Go, and is also, evidence that the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm is a viable search technique that works in high branching factor domains. In my honest opinion, the budding graduate student in computer games research can easily find applications of this technique in emerging problems which are unsolvable by traditional techniques.

Think RTS, think war games, think huge risk mitigation situations like epidemic simulations. sigh I had a research proposal rejected a year ago based on this concept, and, as a result, made me switch from academic research to industry.

Lots of papers, few implementations

Why aren't there more open source text summarization projects?

There seems to be a ton of papers on text summarization. I would like to get my hands on something decent to experiment with. And don't tell me Mac OS X Summarize service or Microsoft Word. :)

Predict and Prevent

While the hot new thing from Google is knol, defined as a unit of knowledge, I believe there is something else pretty darn hot was just announced too which can, hopefully, identify hot spots (you knew that pun was coming) - Predict and Prevent at google.org.

Rapid ecological and social changes are increasing the risk of emerging threats, from infectious diseases to drought and other environmental disasters. This initiative will use information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.

This is part of Larry Brillant's vision for the future - see my earlier blog post on this.

Just in case you missed it...

Google has open sourced protocol buffers.

Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

Protocol buffers are a great technology. It is one of those things that you typically don't stop to think about - what kind of technology goes into a car, a computer or a plane when you are using it?

And that's not the only cool technology that Google has released - check out our Google C++ Testing Framework and Google commandline flags module for C++.

What I did on 4th of July

Went shopping. To make this.



Sayor Lodeh - vegetable curry.

So it's not the most fantastic food I have cooked, but it took me two hours to pound the ingredients to make the curry base! My dad calls it "suicidal" to attempt to cook this without trying out first and fine-tuning the recipe. But that's me, throwing caution into the wind.

My friends are still alive AFAIK; hopefully they are still my friends. :)