Journal

VPNs

A friend of mine recommended http://www.vpnbook.com/freevpn as an easy way to get out of uncensored internet.  I also found SoftEther which is a VPN project that provides a few VPN protocols.  That way if one is being blocked you can try another.  Another interesting project I found was tinc.  This seemed a bit old.  However, due to the obscurity of the implementation it is probably not blocked.  A hacker vpn called ChaosVPN also seems a bit extreme.

http://samy.pl/ has some interesting networking tools to get around firewalls and other network and hacking type tools.

All of this is due to the fact that I want to be able to remote desktop to a friends computer on a computer that sits behind a firewall.  Which made me think that oh I might be going to China and I would like to be able to get on gmail while there.  So, I looked into vpns!

Korean BBQ eh “doge”

Oh my!  I went to Kogiya Korean BBQ in Annandale, VA.  It was pretty good.  I wouldn’t go there often (or probably by choice).  It is a bit pricy for what you get.  I tried to eat with the chopsticks, but I need practice (since I’m going to China).  I ate some sort of pork ribs that had a spicy sauce on them that was really good (but a bit fatty).  There was some beef brisket thing that I really didn’t care for (that was really fatty and the fat wasn’t tasty and the meat had no marinade or sauce on it so wasn’t flavorful).  There were various sauces and such that I we could try.  Although I found I didn’t really care for any.  I also had some rice which was a nice respite to have something a bit normal between bites of the meat.

I went with Bryan and his friend from work JZ.  His friend from work uses the word doge from dogecoin(**) (crypto currency) as a verb, noun, adjective and without any consistent connotation.  So, basically it allows your mouth to move and emit sound, leaving your listener to interpret the meaning given the context.  It sort of reminds you of why little babies make noises/cry.  But I might be a bit harsh.  He is really into asian stuff.  I think he wants to move to Japan and become an english teacher.  He also wouldn’t mind going to the Netherlands to become an astrophysicist (since according to him they have the best grad program in that area).  He talks constantly.  He reminded me of Nathaniel.

The adventure tonight was the fact that Bryan told me that we were going to eat at a different Korean BBQ and then when I got there I checked my phone (since the restaurant had wifi) and found out that he texted me the adjusted location.  Thankfully I had wifi, otherwise I wouldn’t have found out until I got back home!

(**) http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge I’ve been notified that doge is not from the cryptocurrency, but from a meme.  My friend Stephen told me about this.

AI conspiracy

I know this sounds all conspiracy theory like, but it seems possible that people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, who have recently made comments about the potential threat of an artificial intelligence take over, were only doing it so that there would be more articles written about AI and how its highly unlikely given current state of the art.  I mean there has been so much press about this issue lately that I don’t think that as many people would have even known about the true current state of AI.  So, the conspiracy is that Bill and Elon really know how unlikely it is to happen any time soon and they know how hard getting all of the news outlets to talk about AI and the current research.  So, they made the outrageous claims to get attention to an area that needs it.  Which other than making them look bad I think it was useful.

Botball 2015

I’m going to be a mentor again for Botball.  This time I’m partnering with David, Kevin and Stephen and we are mentors for the middle school that David helped at last year.  So, hopefully that means we will have more success than I had last year with Kramer middle school.  This weekend is the intro/get everyone up to speed days and hopefully we can make use of the fact that the middle school participated last year to our advantage.

Comparison Continued

I took a look at the R source code for the tukey test (HSD test) from the agricolae library http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/agricolae/index.html.  The interesting thing is that they purposefully call round:

round(1-ptukey(abs(dif[k])*sqrt(2)/sdtdif,ntr,DFerror),6)

Also, they assume lm or aov.  So, we know that they don’t like big numbers. However, the nice thing is that the R file shows how to use the ptukey function!  Which is where I was a bit iffy.  So, I think I could get away with writing it in R and just instead of requiring lm or aov I just want the data then I can perform the requisite calculations.

I think I’ve convinced myself that I’ll trust mathematica and I’ll deal with how long it takes to get the data.  I don’t like how ineffiecient it is, but I can sacrifice time if it means that I get accurate results.  I don’t think that I’m qualified or have the time to create such a library.  It is interesting though that we don’t have many papers on knowing how many significicant digits are necessary for accurate tests.  Or that the R libraries don’t report the errors in their calculations.  This must be why people use Mathematica or Matlab because we trust them to do it right to enough sig figs that it doesn’t matter the error because it is insignificant.

So, I just need a nice desktop.

New computer, is it worth it?

OR I could just ask for a computer with more ram then I could just use slow mathematica or R or whatever and not care.  Of course it might not be that slow for R since its not that slow it just takes lots of ram.  Which makes sense since it is very memory inefficient.  That would be so much easier.  But it would cost probably 2k for a computer like that.  Crazy that if only they had coded the tests better I could get results instantly!

Then I can also have the nice pretty graphs that Mathematica has too.  Then I don’t have the headache of ensuring that the tests are correct etc.  That would be terrifying if I coded the tests wrong and I reported incorrect results.  So, probably best to just get a new computer…  I think he said he has money to buy machines.

Handcoded Tukey

So, it seems that if I want a fast tukey test I need a fast ANOVA.  Which seems to be where the bottle neck is. If I had time I would code ANOVA and borrow a Tukey implementation in C.  I think that all of these programming languages are doing it wrong for what I need to do.  In all of the languages I have to load all of the numbers and then perform an ANOVA.  Then do the post hoc tukey test.  The thing that takes a lot of ram is that I think these algorithms are keeping all of the numbers in ram rather than loading and summing and then releasing the memory and keeping the sum.  What should be done is that the values could be calculated while the file that the numbers are stored in is being read.  Then you would really have at most n numbers (where n is the number of groups) in ram.  Which is tiny.  So, the ANOVA really should be super fast.  Which means that maybe its the tukey test itself that takes a while…  I don’t think so though.  The code for it looks pretty fast.  So, it must just be poor memory management and large numbers that are tripping mathematica and R etc. up because it seems like it could be a super fast calculation.

http://www.graphpad.com/support/faqid/1517/ has a link to the C code that R uses for the tukey test.  It uses double values so I don’t think I would be able to just plug and play with it since the values I have are greater than a double.

large numbers

Well I’ve been looking into using R to calculate the tukey test.  I’m doing this because I have a 10 files of 200,000 integers (all around 5000 and above).  That is about 200MB per file.  So, right now the ANOVA with a post hoc tukey test takes about 1hr to run in Mathematica.  THIS IS SO SLOWWWW.

To do a tukey test you first get the numbers from an ANOVA (http://web.mst.edu/~psyworld/anovaexample.htm).  Then run it through the tukey formula (http://web.mst.edu/~psyworld/tukeysexample.htm) for each pair.  It really doesn’t seem that hard.  And it doesn’t seem like it should take an hour to run.  In mathematica it takes forever to even load the files.

So, I’ve been looking into using R.  Loading the numbers into a list is super fast, takes no time at all.  However, to run the ANOVA it uses so much ram I can’t do it on my computer.  I’m starting to think it might be that the numbers are so big after squaring them that it causes it to use so much memory.  I don’t know….

But, the fun thing was in the process I tried out Rmpfr a library that is suposed to provide arbitrary precision calculations.  However, when I try doing 1246863692^2 using Rmpfr I get 1554669066427870976.  Which is wrong!  It should be 1554669066427870864.  Which I hand, wolfram, and scientific calculator triple checked!  So, I’m not going to use that package.

Also, I tried http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Brobdingnag/vignettes/brobpaper.pdf.  Which also doesn’t do what I want!

So, I found gmp which works!!!

Man vs Machine

Some people (not me) believe that we are the result of random chemical interactions.  I wonder what the probability is that they assign to us existing.  Because it has to be less than the probability of machine men existing.  The existence of such machines would fit more into the notion of evolving randomly by fitness since they would be more durable and require less variety of resources.  The number of micro organisms and organs and what not that must work together in order for humans to work compared to what a machine man would need, most likely would astound us.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/cells/scale/ really neat slider app that puts the size of a cell into perspective.

On a side note I found this neat PopSci article, http://www.popsci.com/have-we-found-alien-life, haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.

Just a note, I’ve been sick for that past few days, most likely the flu.  Thats probably why I’ve been writing such odd posts…  Oh well.

Bounty Hunting AAMAS

Bounty Hunting and Multiagent Task Allocation, a paper I co-authered with David and my Professor was accepted into AAMAS as a full paper!  This is the first paper I have published where I’m the first author and at a respected AI conference.  I’ll post a link to the full paper once everything is finalized.  Its very exciting.  I will get to go to Istanbul in May to present the paper.  I’ll get to meet and talk to all kinds of people who are interested in the same things I am and hopefully get some good ideas and advice.