She's only 38. :-( World’s greatest female chess player Judit Polgar retires http://www.livemint.com/Consumer/XqUmBlhIVnhbLkaahYtovN/Worlds-greatest-female-chess-player-Judit-Polgar-retires.html http://www.livemint.com/Consumer/XqUmBlhIVnhbLkaahYtovN/Worlds-greatest-female-chess-player-Judit-Polgar-retires.html World’s greatest female chess player Judit Polgar retire... http://www.livemint.com/Consumer/XqUmBlhIVnhbLkaahYtovN/Worlds-greatest-female-chess-player-Judit-Polgar-retires.html Polgar says she is retiring from competition to dedicate more time to her family and chess foundation View on www.livemint... http://www.livemint.com/Consumer/XqUmBlhIVnhbLkaahYtovN/Worlds-greatest-female-chess-player-Judit-Polgar-retires.html Preview by Yahoo
Definitely needs to learn TM if she doesn't practice it, and the TM-Sidhis if she does. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : So soon? WHY? She's in her 40's, right? L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <sharelong60@...> wrote : Lawson, when you wrote that part about the Polgar sisters, did you know that Judit announced her retirement today? On Wednesday, August 13, 2014 5:17 PM, "LEnglish5@... [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: A perfect example of me not reading carefully. You are talking about a computerized NSA facial recognition search, NOT about how the brain recognizes faces. Face palm, runs out of room crying piteously. L ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> wrote : The brain has specialized hardware that is hardwired to make recognition of faces easier. As far as I know, facial recognition is considered very much a pure connectionist thing where inputs get processed in a completely mechanistic way in the classical neural network sense that that features are evaluated in terms of how strongly individual neruons are activated and then pass along that activation to adjacent ( directly connected) neurons in the network. There ARE probably specialized feature-recognition circuits in the mix but they function the same way. There's no "logic circuits" that test things and say "close or not close?" and then do some kind of if-then-else decision making. Our really high-level logic seems to work that way, but that is based on symbolic and verbal reasoning. Facial recognition is a much more low-level thing. Of course, like any set of neurons in the brain, the facial recognition centers can do more than one thing. Tests done on one of the Polgar Sisters (a trio of gorgeous Hungarian women who are also world-class chess players -one is the first non-male international grandmaster) showed that her ability to glance at a chess board and decide what was the best move to do next, involved activation of the same neurons that the rest of us mostly use just to recognize faces. L---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote : I suspect the matching process works more like this: your face is categorized by certain general features. Thus the search doesn't bother with faces on file that don't match that category and just searches on ones that do and possibly filter out sub categories that don't match too. Thus leaving a few possibilities which didn't match. Much more efficient.On 08/13/2014 12:09 PM, TurquoiseBee turquoiseb@... mailto:turquoiseb@... [FairfieldLife] wrote: I had an odd experience today. I know that there is a lot of talk and paranoia on the Internet these days about how much guvmints know about us, and whether they should know that much, but it's never really concerned me because I've always assumed that I was too boring for any guvmint to become interested in enough to want to track me. Well, it turns out I was right. I can officially tell you that I am on no "watchlists" maintained by any major guvmint, for any reason whatsoever. I know this because today I had to go to the Immigration Dept. to get my Dutch resident ID card renewed. In the past it's been mainly a formality -- take a new photo, get a new card, outa there. But this time, they told me I'd have to report first to "Biometrics." So I did, waited for a bit, and then a *remarkably* nice guvmint official verified that my renewal papers had arrived in the mail and then walked me into the Biometrics Room. I know that's what it was called because there was a sign over the door that said this. :-) He sat me down at one of two science fiction-inspired machines, on which I had to first look into the screen while it took my photo, and then allow it to take my fingerprints and sign my signature. Electronically, of course -- no muss, no fuss. I was finished in a little over a minute and then he walked me back to his desk and looked at the results on his own computer monitor. He said, "That looks OK...no red flags," and then said my new ID would be ready in about a week. But he really *was* a remarkably nice guvmint official, so I told him I worked with computers and was curious about this "Biometrics" thang and asked him to explain it to me. He did, even showing me his computer screen occasionally so I could see what he did. It was spooky. The moment that scifi machine took my photo, the biometrics of my face were instantly recorded and compared against all known databases of "bad faces," those presumably belonging to terrorists or known criminals. My fingerprints and signature got the same electronic scrutiny. All in the time it took for me to walk back to this guy's cubicle. Fortunately, I got no "red flags," and so my new ID card is in the mail. But I can't help but wonder what would have happened if my pleasing but aging face had had similar biometrics to the face of a known terrorist. I suspect that if that had happened, I would be in a cell somewhere, and wouldn't be writing this. :-) Anyway, this was a very science fiction movie day for me. I got to find out first-hand that a lot of that "science fiction stuff" we see on TV and in movies isn't fiction. In less than two minutes, the Dutch guvmint scanned all my "biometrics" and decided that I was cool to renew as a resident. I can't help but be impressed by the tech behind that, even if as a computer scientist I know how terribly badly it could have gone if one of the Dutch programmers who built this system was a fuckup.
