From Search Engine To Intelligence Provider

Americans are never running short on creativity. A front-page story on today’s Seattle Times is definitely a good example. The story says that the State Department turned to Google to find the names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their roles in Iran’s nuclear weapon program. They went to CIA first, but were refused because CIA believed that this information was too sensitive to be made public. This is understandable — maybe CIA has already drafted a plan to assassinate those major contributors. I sound like a conspiracy theorist, don’t I? However, the State Department has already initiated a plan to sanction those Iranians and is going to submit a draft resolution to the UN. There’s no way out. They have to find some names to fill in the blanks, even if they don’t have any secret agent themselves. Now what’s the solution? It’s easy — just google them. Those with most hits under the search item "Iran and nuclear" became the targets. Wow, I’m wondering whether the guy who came up with this idea has a computer science background or not.

Like it or not, Google is no longer purely a search engine. It has become an intelligence provider. American policymakers use it. Will this boost Google’s stock price? Let’s wait and see.

Top 10 Web Sites Snapshot

These two pictures are taken from an article on eMarketer.com. Here’s the hyperlink to the original article. It’s interesting to notice that

1. Wikipedia is on male’s list but not on female’s list.
2. Flickr is on female’s list but not on male’s list.
3. Amazon is on male’s list but not on female’s list.
4. eBay is on female’s list but not on male’s list.

郎朗的《流浪者幻想曲》（一）

舒伯特的《流浪者幻想曲》是部伟大的作品，也是他钢琴作品中对技巧要求最高的作品之一。我一共听过四个版本，分别是Vladimir Ashkenazy、Bruce Hungerford、贾然和郎朗。想想舒伯特的一生，不免要感慨，这样一个旋律大师，生活竟然如此穷困潦倒。上帝给了他作曲的天才，结果却在他生活的幸福上吝啬了一把。我若和他同一时代，宁可自己节衣缩食也要养他。当然，可能会对他加些限制，譬如他可以拿我的钱去买面包、买牛奶，但不能拿我的钱去嫖妓。不知道这个会不会影响他的创作？

四个版本中只有贾然是现场，其他都是录音。其实贾然的演奏有些记不清了，半年前在上音的贺渌汀音乐厅听的。贾然很年轻，才十八岁，现在还在Curtis音乐学院念书，是Gary Graffman的学生，这样说来算是郎朗的师妹了（郎朗出国后也是师从Gary Graffman）。据说贾然是弹莫扎特的天才，傅聪和郎朗都说过她弹的莫扎特令人难忘。那次独奏会前一晚，她在上海音乐厅和上海爱乐乐团合作弹莫扎特的钢琴协奏曲，据说大获成功，可惜没去听。不过那天的《流浪者幻想曲》还是让人感到有些稚嫩，特别是一些高潮的地方没有亮出来，听得便觉得不过瘾。倒是那天弹的舒曼的Kreisleriana很有味道。贾然毕竟年轻，等她艺术上真正成熟了，应该也是大师级的人物。

顺便说一句，我喜欢舒曼的Kreisleriana甚于他的Kinderszenen，虽然后者更出名一些（可能是因为《梦幻曲》的缘故吧）。手头有一张Martha Argerich（她是唯一让我觉得具有男子气概的女钢琴家）的CD，无可挑剔的演奏。

Lessons Learned from Kalah

One of my course projects this quarter is to write a program that can play the game Kalah intelligently. I started with minimax search with alpha-beta pruning. This algorithm has been there for around thirty years, but it’s still powerful — even Deep Blue used it. Of course, I had to add some enhancements to make my program faster. The first thing came up to my mind was transpositon table (it’s basically a hash table). I tried to keep all the search results in this table so that they could be reused. However, this turned out to be a disaster: it didn’t make my program faster at all; it made my program ten times slower. So lesson 1: Learn to give up. Sometimes you just can’t keep them all. To be complete is not always the best. After I decided to keep only less than 1% of the search results, which I regarded as the most valuable, transposition table worked — now it made my program ten times faster. Analogously, when you find yourself overscheduled and underslept, which happens to be my current situation, don’t try to cut your sleep time further. It might be a solution, but definitely not good in the long run. To reprioritize, I think, is better and smarter.

Timeout is something I must consider for a real game. There’ll be some results from incomplete searches due to timeout. Shall I use them? I answered “yes” at first. And I applied some seemingly sophisticated rules to use them. Alas, my program became dull. So lesson 2: Don’t make important decisions with incomplete information. I tried some other rules. No matter how sophisticated they were, they couldn’t save my program. After I decided not to use the results from incomplete searches at all, my program became smart again. Sometimes, incomplete information can misguide you rather than help you. Then how to make decisions with incomplete information when you have to? Sorry, I don’t have the answer yet.

Prologue

I’m going to use my blog as a notebook or a piece of scratch paper to collect my random thoughts.  I probably won’t use this place to experiment with vulgarities; however, I’m not sure that I will agree with everything I said or wrote here, because random sometimes means immature, and immature sometimes means wrong.