1. e4 c5 2. Ne2 seems to just be superior to 2. Nf3 if you plan on playing the open sicilian, because assuming 2... d6 (or Nc6) 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 it leads to an identical position, but has the additional meta advantage of getting tagged by some tools with the ECO code 'B20: Sicilian Defense, Keres Variation' which is some weird ass opening that stops at move 2 and nobody plays

as well as possibly confusing your opponent, although i have yet to see them hesitate for more than a second or two

the thoughts that are best to share here tend to be object level

stockfish claims that the starting position without the g1 knight is -4.5 for white

chess engine evaluation points seem to have come to mean something more than the value of pieces. i guess it makes sense that a powerful engine can usually see ways for the player with a material advantage to leverage that into more advantage, but it really makes me question the commonly cited relative piece values. if being a knight up often gives you an extra 50% immaterial advantage, does that not apply to a pawn? why is a knight said to be only worth 3? in either case it seems something is wrong

there may not be any better baseline available, but i find it misleading to refer to points as 'pawns'

similar to mind and body, a piece cannot be isolated from the surrounding position

interestingly, missing the e-pawn gives -1.0 and missing the f-pawn gives -1.7

it might be fun to look at the rating given to every starting position missing a single piece. i wonder if stockfish has an api to do that

this place is hardly decentralised but it's still great because it's small enough to not incentivise anti-user policies

i think i am going to shill for decentralisation now

freetards were 100% right

the anagram solver is released in a usable state

next steps if i continue working on this at some point

- improve performance (probably many ways to do this, highest priority i think after actually using it a bit)

- use a bigger dictionary

- more and better heuristics

- fix some issues with the dom updating too frequently so you can't add words while it's running sometimes

- allow results to be copied

- batch size parameter for each set of iterations of the search. too few and ui is unresponsive, too many and it's wasteful. the desired value varies greatly depending on how challenging your input is, maybe this can be estimated?

i should probably redesign this site to be more readable

but i think i'll at least keep it monochromatic and allow the colour change script to be used, i still like that

maybe the text shouldn't be coloured

it works, and it's faster than i expected but obviously still can't traverse the entire search space for large inputs

the hard part looks to be coming up with not just a heuristic for the purpose of searching more efficiently, but also for rating the output anagrams, which are extremely numerous

i was thinking perhaps i'd have an interface similar to this where users can fix certain words in place to narrow the search. but the great difficulty i had using that to find a good anagram makes me question how useful it will be here

perhaps it could be augmented by showing the number of solutions found so far if you were to fix a certain word. it would be cool and probably quite possible to have it be 'live' also and update as more solutions are found

this exercise taught me that you can't just magically optimise for something unless you can clearly define what it is. it's unclear what exactly makes an anagram 'good', not easy to tell if a sentence is comprehensible and hard to guess

i tried using both word length and word frequency to make a search heuristic, but i can't tell whether or not it helped because there are so many solutions. i saw no reason to bother with letter distribution because i had no shortage of valid anagrams

maybe next i'll try specifically avoiding short words, rather than just scoring better for longer words but not really penalising 6+1+1+1 vs 6+3

one trick i used was ensuring each prospective sentence was always lexicographically sorted to cut down on permutations of existing sentences e.g. 5! different orderings for every sentence with 5 words

however, overall i think it's likely the performance is far from optimal because javascript and i did a fair amount of string manipulation and generally didn't consider performance details that much while writing code, but i think it performs well enough

i got it working with a web worker which stops the browser from hanging, originally i thought there was a memory issue inherent to the problem but it was just a dumb bug that created a lot of unnecessary objects

since i wanted to allow the solver to be paused and send live updates to the page reporting partial results, i had to hardcode a number of iterations that the worker algorithm does before waiting for the next 'frame' which calls setInterval with no delay

i also wanted to use a binary tree and couldn't be bothered writing my own implementation so i decided to install one from npm and make it into a node project (i know, hear me out)

i figured out how to use webpack so it generates static javascript files instead of using node as a backend or whatever it usually does. it's kind of nice how you can import random data files and it bundles it with the script

it did make me feel gross afterwards, but i tell myself it isn't so bad so long as the output is static javascript. i can still make my own html template so it's not some gross poorly performant dom-munging thing, which is honestly the main gripe i have with modern web development

i think i looked down on using npm before understood how webpack worked, because i assumed i'd have to serve it with node and i saw a lot of packages had bought into this. i guess it does allow me easy access to a lot of javascript libraries without having to directly link or copy over the scripts, which is undeniably valuable

i didn't even end up using binary trees yet and might not bother, but i'm glad i learned some things

i'll post it here after i've polished it further, at some date that is not right now

yeah this is having issues in the browser with memory and stuff. but i think i'll keep trying for a bit longer

when choosing a word to include, the anagram search heuristic will need to consider:

- word frequency (avoid uncommon words)

- word length (avoid selecting short words when a lot of letters are available, even though short words are more common)

- letter distribution (favour using up infrequent letters early, avoid leaving no vowels or no consonants at the end)

even if you accept that most religious mythology and ideology are not literally true, there are lots of ways it can still be interesting

such as how the ideas could metaphorically reflect some deep truths about human nature, in what ways they are adaptive, and what it would have been like to live in the world those beliefs came from

ah, this is known as a trie/prefix tree apparently

or a special case of one where the keys' letters are also sorted before insertion

i made a simple anagram animation tool with css/js

i would also like to make a good anagram generator. the tools i saw online generally sucked

most had a hard limit on the number of letters, and in general i can see there are challenges finding all the anagrams with a lot of letters

i think i can do better by not traversing the entire search space and optimising for common words as well as a good range of vowels/consontants in the remaining letter pool

i think i could also get better performance with the anagram dictionary data structure i used a few years ago for the bookworm adventures tool

if possible i will make it a webpage that does computation client side, but i don't want it to hang the browser if i can't get it running fast enough. so maybe it will be a desktop application or script instead

if not every hue is equally privileged by the eye there must be some way to measure that

i think maybe thinking negative thoughts is bad

humans are evil and need to be tamed

there is no hope for aligning incentives on a global scale

austerity if not collapse awaits us

a stable equilibrium that most today would consider pleasant probably isn't even achievable

modern ideology is not attempting to encourage cooperation and instead words emerge from chaos serving individuals by sanitising sin and making the inconsciable understandable

i have a family to feed, but you can starve

there was never any true good in this world, only efficiently arranged evil

all i ask of humanity is that it stops gaslighting me

i don't care what happens to these people

many types of confusion and psychosis arise from the illusion of self, the perceived separation between the individual and the world

for instance the problem of free will

i would prefer to, but cannot

that was not a great analogy because the hunger goes away after a while of not eating

if willpower was the primary factor driving personal improvement, fasting would be a more effective method of weight loss than exercise

exercise is fun and fasting isn't. no matter how much someone wants to lose weight, they find it effectively impossible to stop themselves from eating long enough to lose weight even though their body could survive adequately off their fat reserves

yet the concept of just trying harder is so seductive, propping up countless self-help grifts

i guess the reason people want to persevere at painful things is because they might turn out to be less painful eventually. but the misconception that a painful thing can be endured indefinitely seems widespread

people don't change

was trying to make an actual thing but ended up playing with webgl instead

selective kindness in an open space is a prisoner's dilemma betrayal. i have no opportunity to change this, they'll all stand up for each other and there is very strong unchallenged ideology in this area. where i can, i offer a cold shoulder to the clique and a secret smile to the voluntary hermit, and i hope that makes the great punch in the gut a little less nauseating

but i would never approach a fellow outcast, and no matter how unconsciously they understand their feelings i doubt they would ever approach me

flickering