Quelques millimètres de carapace

Zenity is just a great program for doing quickly a Graphical User Interface on Linux.

I am sure you can understand the following program, which asks if you want to increase or decrease,

and runs "./increase" or "./decrease" accordingly:

===========================================

#!/bin/bash

while [ true ]

do

#uses zenity to ask first.

zenity --question --title "Difficult level" --text "Increase ?" --ok-label="Increase" --cancel-label="Decrease"

if [ "$?" -eq "0" ]

then

./increase

else

./decrease

fi

done

I am French and spend one year in Tainan, a city in the south of Taiwan. I had been told, prior to coming, that Tainan

was particularly friendly, even compared to Taiwan which is a particularly friendly country.

I have spent 7 months here, and there are things that I find just great here - in particular, I've collected a short list of the 4 most surprising recommendations in a list of politeness rules displayed on a wall in my children school. The rules were translated in English, so no mistake in translation (except in case of mistake in reporting...).

1. "Surprise others by performing random acts of kindness". The main thing is that this is really taught to children, implicitly and explicitly - and that really works. Beyond the very strict honesty of people here (a seller can find you 300 meters away and 5 minutes after you bought something a few cents too expensive due to a mistake he/she has made, so that he can give you back the few additional cents...), people can take a lot of time and energy for helping people they have never met before.

2. "Be positive and enjoy life". 

3. "If you are asked a question in conversation, ask a question in return." This is less widely appreciated by westerners, in particular in countries like France in which we have a very strong focus on privacy - as a matter of facts, people who don't know you can ask questions that only close friends might ask in France. Keep in mind that it is intended to show interest.

4. "On a bus, always face forward." This is quite a mistery to me, I can understand that some people find that more comfortable to face forward, but I don't understand why it's a matter of politeness. If someone has an explanation please tell me :-)  in trains for example, all seats face forwards.

All is not perfect; for example, when it's about gifts, the notion of conflict of interest is not considered.

Also there is a very strong sense of hierarchy; even politeness is very related to hierarchy - for this I prefer the French culture of equality - French people know that when you have a high position it probably means that you have stolen it. But many people here are masters in this special kind of politeness which both makes the world nicer and opens all doors; some kind of courtesy which is both a pleasure and a strength. 

If you spend time here, you will also notice that children, or students, are extremely quiet here, and it is considered as a main politeness requirement - you can have a meal in a restaurant with a group of students sitting next to you, the noise will be very low. A teacher in Taiwan told me that there is a very strong pressure on parents here, and that children are supposed to be perfect and quiet for everything, and that this is why people have almost no children here (I don't know how Taiwan will look like in 2050 with so few babies...). The result is impressive to me; nonetheless, maybe there are bad consequences as well, the social pressure being, I guess, much stronger than in Europe.

There's much more to say, in particular the fact that politeness includes gestures more than in western countries - but I guess the rules above are less widely known. I don't speak Chinese, and people with both Taiwanese and Western culture are more than welcome for commenting - I might miss plenty of important points and deeply misunderstand some elements. Anyway, if you have the opportunity of spending one year in Taiwan, just do it - it's a real change!

Un bref survol de wikipedia sur ces bestioles, à l'occasion d'un séjour à Taiwan, où chaque nourriture qui traine donne lieu à une invasion de mini-fourmis.

1) Colonies & Nids

Les fourmis ont des nids de 20m environ, constitués de nombreuses galeries souterraines et dans les recoins. Une colonie de fourmis est un tas de nids de fourmis qui sont copines entre elles (qui ne se font pas de guerres, et sont capables de se mettre à travailler ensemble si on les met ensemble; une colonie est faite de fourmis génétiquement proches, quoiqu'une alimentation commune semble être aussi un facteur de pacification des relations). Ca peut faire 300 millions d'individus genre sur une ville en Asie. Ca peut être très grand parfois, comme en Europe (il y en a une qui va d'Espagne à Italie en passant par la France).

2) Vie et combat.

Une fourmi c'est oeuf, larve, nymphe, adulte (pour la plupart des variétés de fourmis du moins). Chez certaines espèces, la fourmi de base attend 3cm. Les fourmis mordent, et certaines piquent, et certaines projettent de l'acide. Les fourmis peuvent elever des pucerons, les protégeant des prédateurs; il s'agit de la seule espèce à part l'homme à domestiquer des animaux. Dans certains cas elles élèvent des chenilles. Elles ne sentent pas la chaleur, et peuvent mourir bêtement de cuisson. Certaines espèces sont nécrophages.

3) Volumétrie.

Il y en a 10 millions de milliards environ sur terre. Le poids total est d'environ 4 fois le poids total de tous les vertébrés, humains inclus.

4) Fourmis et hommes

Les fourmis ont des morsures qui font mal mais disparaissent vite en général; les espèces pouvant déclencher un choc anaphylactique sont en fait très rares et il faut une attaque hyper-massive pour arriver à ça. Certains mangent des fourmis, et les fourmis peuvent être utilisés pour rendre une terre meuble. Des fourmis déplacées de leur habitat peuvent faire de gros dégâts en remplissant vite une niche écologique en l'absence de prédateurs; ainsi la fourmi d'argentine qui a colonisé l'Europe. Deux colonies distinctes en Europe, dont l'une très agressive, pourraient finir par la mort de l'une des deux.

Preliminaries:

Octave is a just great free software, very good alternative to the expensive Matlab.

It does not handle multiprecision (to keep it simple, let's say that multiprecision is computation

with very high precision).

Aribas is a GNU free tool for multiprecision.

This page presents a simple tool for using Aribas within Octave.

Keywords:

- Fractals

- Multiprecision, high precision computing

- Opensource software (Octave, Aribas)

- Buggy source code

Why multiprecision matters ?

Sometimes, computation errors cumulate until reaching a very significant level.

It is widely claimed that the satelite-lifting rocket Ariane 5 exploded due to computation errors

(see www.intel.com/standards/floatingpoint.pdf  for more on this example and other examples).

Download:

you just have to put the following lines in a file "aribas_eval.m",

in the exec path of octave:

============ aribas_eval.m ===================

function r=aribas_eval(s)
  n=round(rand*10000);m=round(rand*10000);
  chaine=(sprintf('echo "%s.\nexit" | sed ''s/\\^/**/g'' > /tmp/test%d%d.ari ',s,n,m));
 system(chaine);
  system(sprintf("aribas -b /tmp/test%d%d.ari | tail -1 |sed 's/_//g' > /tmp/testb%d%d.ari",n,m,n,m));
  r=load(sprintf('/tmp/testb%d%d.ari',n,m));
 system(sprintf('rm /tmp/test%d%d.ari /tmp/testb%d%d.ari',n,m,n,m));
end

==============================================

How to use:

- Write your code with the Octave "eval" function for the computations that you want to see in multiprecision.

- Check that it works

- Replace "eval" by "aribas_eval"

     ==> this is supposed to be a multiprecision version

     ==> however, there are plenty of bugs

Example:

mod(eval("(2**250)-1"),256)

    returns 0 (which is wrong --- precision error)

mod(aribas_eval("(2**250)-1"),256)

    returns 255 (which is ok)

Important remarks:

- no guarantee

- known bugs: handles only a very small subset of Octave's function

- this will be maintained and improved only as long as there is no better such functionality in Octave

- if you know a better way for doing this in octave just tell me and this page will disappear

Contacts:

   olivier . teytaud

      at  gmail . com

I am the only responsible of any mistake in the code. The code is not guaranteed, it is even not guaranteed to do

anything which is useful for anyone - if you use it, you have to check yourself that it is ok for you.

The code is completely free (free code, free of charge).

What is rengo ?

Rengo consists in having two players playing Go as a team, without communicating - each player plays in turn.

What is this page about ?

You have two programs which play Go in GTP and you want to use them as a Rengo pair - this page is for you.

Where can I download this script ?

http://www.lri.fr/~teytaud/rengo1.1.tgz

How to use it ?

- uncompress the archive: "tar -zxvf rengo1.1.tgz"

- Modify gtpmogo1 and gtpmogo2 - these are the two scripts which are called by the rengo program.
   They are supposed to speak GTP, or sufficiently of GTP for your use.
   For example, "gtpmogo1" might be simply "/usr/games/gnugo --mode gtp" and
   "gtpmogo2" might be simply "/usr/games/mogo --9 --nbTotalSimulations 5000". Then, gnugo and mogo
   will play the rengo together.
- Then the script "rengo" is a GTP program which uses the two programs above in turn. The first
   player is randomly chosen.
- The script "compa" launches games between "rengo" and another script, "gtpmogo".
- The script "check" gives results of the "compa" script.

So what ?

- you can use it in gogui

- you can use it in gogui-twogtp

   so you can do experiments like "what if program A plays againt programs B and C"

   or "what if programs A and D play againt programs B and C".

Bugs:
- There are more bugs than I can list here. Only the main ones below :-)
- Sometimes some codes are not properly killed. Kill manually :-)

- Some time is lost in some "sleep" commands (yes, it's dirty programming). So the CPU is not fully used.

    But with non-negligible time setting this should be negligible (maybe :-) )

Help:

- send an email if you have troubles - I'm happy when my codes can be useful to anyone :-)