Hrvoje's blog

  Tražeći bezuspješno po Istri adekvatnu nekretninu već duže vremena kako bih je kupio za odmor i eventualno iznajmljivanje, angažirao sam pritom poveći broj posredničkih agencija. Kako god bi neku nekretninu koja me zainteresirala nudila neka nova agencija s kojom dotad nisam poslovao, ja bih s njenim agentom zaduženim za dotični predmet sklopio posrednički ugovor. Pri tome sam se susreo s izvjesnim brojem ponuda koje su meni kao laiku djelovale nezakonito, te s činjenicom da velika većina agencija, negdje između 98 i 99 posto ukupnog broja, barem onih u Istri i Zagrebu, posreduje u predmetima kao agent obje strane. Budući da sam u tome vidio sukob interesa, koji je umjesto iznimke postao pravilo koje korumpira jednu cijelu privrednu djelatnost, uzrokujući direktno spomenute nezakonitosti, to me ponukalo da malo proučim sljedeće tekstove, sljedećim redom: Zakon o posredovanju u prometu nekretnina   Zakon o sprječavanju sukoba interesa   SUKOB INTERESA U PRIVATNOM SEKTORU...

  Did you ever notice how an artistic explanation can sometimes be superior to any scientific or philosophical one, and therefore more enjoyable and fun? This week ABBA published a new album named Voyage, after a forty years long sabbatical, during which me and the rest of the world who admires them could only pray to God for this to happen.  Although all songs are brilliant, to me Bumblebee stands out for the ecological theme of its lyrics, expressing anxiety about the possibility that humans can cause the extinction of this insect species. I will spare my words by not trying to describe the magic of their music, suffice it to say they are the reason why I love music, and that I will never forget the moment I first heard Super Trouper, forty years ago, played on a brand new stereo device my parents bought so that their children could learn to love music and better socialize through that. The transformation which that beautiful song sung by beautiful ladies produced in me was ...

  Let us first postulate the problem of abiogenesis, what is it exactly? If one reads popular science articles such as this one  https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/spontaneous-generation/ one might get confused by a sentence such as this one: >>“Spontaneous generation” was the idea that living organisms can spring into existence from non-living matter.<< Being written by superficial evangelists of science of today, it is no wonder that it poses a question, at least to a reader who is not a native English speaker, how come was abiogenesis possible then, if that idea is wrong, and what does that sentence mean at all? To convey anything meaningful, it obviously relies heavily on the distinct meaning of the phrase "spring into existence", vs "come into existence", or "arise". The difference is that it means "arise suddenly", but the precise meaning of the word "suddenly", in that context was not given. Wikipedia article htt...

As soon as I wrote my previous essay, I realized there are several points that require correction or further explication.  First, I checked if Stockfish would use against me the same strategy that I described for KRK and KQK, and saw that it does not, which proves I was wrong when I supposed that there are no correct strategies which are substantially different from those I described. It turns out there are, and they are faster in delivering checkmate, especially when starting position is with BK in the center and WK in the corner. The basic difference is that I assumed BK must be squeezed from the center to some edge by pushing it away from WK, by taking immediately under control the line that separates kings, using the major piece, while the engine is not afraid to push BK towards WK, and save that way a few moves needed for WK to approach BK. Second, precise and concise language in which rigorous proofs are written is known to be math. Describing KRK endgame concept mathematical...

Let me explain my point further by giving an example of what knowledge exactly are we talking about here, that engines and endgame tablebases possess, but in much more concrete form, which raises the question of software possibility to extract it from them in an abstract form, like I will present here, without using software. Pawnless endgames with major pieces, are a good start because some of them are most elementary checkmates, simplest patterns to describe, such as K+Q vs K and K+R vs K. In both cases, the lone king must be forced to the edge (or to the corner) of the board in order to get checkmated, due to a lack of other pieces (its own or its opponent’s) that could constrain its mobility additionally in sufficient way, if they were present. This can always be achieved by squeezing it from the center, by placing our king in opposition (an even simpler concept which also requires explanation/description), and checking it from the side, with the major piece. Actually, this is need...

I was watching this  video on youtube  in which Gary Kasparov says that machines revealed so many secrets, and magic or mysteries of the game of chess are gone because you could see it through the lenses of computer and even an amateur can actually understand immediately what is happening at the chessboard thanks to the machine’s advice. There is another video that I cannot find anymore in which he is more specific and says that engines can explain what’s going on. And he is right of course, in the context of chess, every explanation is expressible first and foremost in the language of moves, which engines do speak, however, besides that, human mind tends to reason abstractly about it, create concepts expressible in natural language, mastering of which is something that people primarily refer to when they speak about “understanding chess”, otherwise everyone can understand if he or she is losing consistently, that is kind of obvious directly from the moves, but why exactly thi...

I have been reading an admirable and thought provoking essay published back in 2012 in Aeon magazine  How close are we to creating artificial intelligence ,  written by David Deutsch, and some responses to it, like for example  The real reasons we don’t have AGI yet ,  written by Ben Goertzel, or youtube series about  Artificial Creativity  by Dennis C Hackethal, or Demis Hasabis's take on  Creativity and AI , so here is my view. Let's begin with a pedestrian observation that if you already have an algorithm which is not computationally expensive, you should  probably not transform that functionality to a lookup in a table of cached results precomputed by using the original algorithm, unless the list of its legitimate inputs is really short, for obvious reasons: if that list is really long, you might require huge storage  for that cache, and long time to prepare it in the first place, and if that list is infinite, or unanticipatable (such ...