Hume, diploma thesis, CrossF2L example

[Stefan]

I recently finished my diploma thesis and put it online:
http://stefan-pochmann.info/hume/

Here's an example CrossF2L solve I found hilarious. Cross was obvious,
first pair was unusual but trivial once you see it, last three pairs
were just weird.

Scramble:
F' B D R' D B L2 F2 R2 U F' D2 L F R2 D2 R'

Solve:
R2 F1 B2 D' B'
B1 D1 L' D' B'
B' U2 R2 B1 R2
U' B' L' B' L1 B1
U1 B2 U1 L1 U' L' B2

Ooooh I love how he named his program after my favouritest philosopher ever!!!

It's the only nice acronym I found. Then I read about the philosopher (I had known his name, but not much more) and liked him.

EDIT: After quickly skimming over the thesis, I see it is in English. So, to keep it simple, why? Why not German? Surely it could have a lot more meaning (or is English sufficient and used for a wider audience?)

Mostly for the same reason my homepage is in English: To potentially reach more people. Using German would be an utter waste. And I found a paper about the cube recently in Polish or so and it was very annoying that the author had decided to make it practically unreadable for most of the world. Finally, I'm so used to talking/writing/thinking about cubing in English that it might've been harder to do in German. Um, what do you mean with "could have a lot more meaning"?

 

[Dene]

First of all: awesome solve! Great f2L, with a brilliant OLL, and PLL-skip!!
Hume is awesome, I am yet to find something that he has said that I disagree with.
By more meaning I mean the fact that the German language has far more complexities than English has. It is often the case that English doesn't have the right words or phrases to describe certain things that many other languages (and likely a developed language like German) do have. A quick example would be the one you mentioned earlier.

 

[Stefan]

Actually it's only an F2L solve and I artificially added the quick OLL so if you try it you can focus on the last F2L pair rather than seeing the whole cube miraculously getting solved.

I don't think German is richer than English. The "Ladenschlussgesetz" example is just a word combining three words (Laden=shop, Schluss=end, Gesetz=law). (Oh and that's why you visited the Easter thread... I was already wondering (yes, I've been stalking you via your profile page)). One of my favourite English words, evidence, doesn't even have a German translation that feels equivalent to me. That's so sad.

 

[Dene]

Actually it's only an F2L solve and I artificially added the quick OLL so if you try it you can focus on the last F2L pair rather than seeing the whole cube miraculously getting solved.

Aww well, it would still be a great speedsolve!

I don't think German is richer than English. The "Ladenschlussgesetz" example is just a word combining three words (Laden=shop, Schluss=end, Gesetz=law). (Oh and that's why you visited the Easter thread... I was already wondering (yes, I've been stalking you via your profile page)). One of my favourite English words, evidence, doesn't even have a German translation that feels equivalent to me. That's so sad.

LMAO at the stalking >.< I feel like a celebrity (perhaps suitable, as I intend to go to UCLA next year). Do you honestly think that English is as "rich" as German? I mean, there might be equivalent words for the majority of the language, but I thought German (as well as other well developed languages) would just have more. English makes up for it by using the same words in different places for different meanings, which is in my opinion a bad thing, a very bad thing particularly in Philosophy (of language).

 

[FTF]

Do you honestly think that English is as "rich" as German? I mean, there might be equivalent words for the majority of the language, but I thought German (as well as other well developed languages) would just have more. English makes up for it by using the same words in different places for different meanings, which is in my opinion a bad thing, a very bad thing particularly in Philosophy (of language).

What do you mean by a 'developed' language (as contrasted to English)? There really isn't such a thing, and you can express just as much in English as you can in German, or other languages. Some things may be harder to express, some may be easier, but overall it'll balance out.

Also, Hume (the cube one ) seems very interesting; I'll be reading through it as I find time.

 

[qqwref]

English is very much a developed language. Dozens of cultures have appropriated English for their own use and there are huge amounts of jargon in English, so much that I've heard English has by far the most number of words of any language (if you know all of it, which nobody does). Unlike a lot of languages which are concerned with maintaining some kind of purity, English also doesn't mind appropriating words from anywhere else: we have dozens of words from Yiddish, many from various African and Native American languages, and thousands of stolen French, Latin, and Spanish phrases. If you need a new word all you have to do is make one up or take one from somewhere else. Because of all the concepts and terms that have been brought into the modern version of English I would actually call it the most developed language in the world.

By the way, all of the German compound words can be easily described in English with a little circumlocution or hyphens, which gets the job done even if it doesn't always sound entirely natural. You can always translate (say) Ladenschlussgesetz as Shop-Closing Law.


Oh, and Stefan - are you going to release Hume to us when you're done tweaking it? It seems really awesome I'd also be interested in version that handles megaminx, 4x4 and 5x5, perhaps some other puzzles as well... have fun working on it

 

[dChan]

That was an interesting solve, actually. The first pair was pretty good but I liked how it solved the rest of the F2L the most.

I can't seem to view the PDF though. Is it only my problem?

 

[fanwuq]

English makes up for it by using the same words in different places for different meanings, which is in my opinion a bad thing, a very bad thing particularly in Philosophy (of language).

Are you serious?
English has so many useless technical terms.
In Chinese, you really do use the same words in different places for different meanings. Chinese never invent new words, just new combinations.
How is this bad? How many words do you want? What do you mean by developed language?

 

[Dene]

The Chinese written language works completely differently to English though, it's impossible to compare.
And you say useless technical terms, but while they may be of no use to you, they are everyday language to people in appropriate professions.

I refer particularly to philosophy. This is because any ambiguity in any written argument or theory then becomes impossible to decipher. This is a huge problem in every aspect of philosophy, where the writings of (for example) Locke can be interpreted in many different ways, and rendering different answers every time. Because the only available information is the published text, trying to decipher what exactly what was meant by any ambiguities is effectively impossible. For sure, of the many interpretations, one of them is bound to be correct, but it is impossible to know which one.

I don't know how may words "I want", but certainly the current dictionary is insufficient.

By developed language I mean one that has been around for more than a few centuries. Well not really, what I mean is one that has been around for a very long time and has been fully scrutinised with very specific grammar and such for any given situation. Of course no language could ever be fully developed, as there are always new things to factor in, which makes English very useful in this case, because of the malleability of it. But this has the negative effects as mentioned above.

I'm not going to say any more on this in this thread, it isn't the right place.

 

[badmephisto]

Indeed, you guys are hijacking a great thread. So Stefan, how long before we can get our paws on Hume?

 

[FTF]

By developed language I mean one that has been around for more than a few centuries. Well not really, what I mean is one that has been around for a very long time and has been fully scrutinised with very specific grammar and such for any given situation. Of course no language could ever be fully developed, as there are always new things to factor in, which makes English very useful in this case, because of the malleability of it. But this has the negative effects as mentioned above.

I'm not going to say any more on this in this thread, it isn't the right place.

I couldn't say much about philosophy, because it's not my area. I think the only reason German might be more 'suited' to philosophy, though, is that so much philosophy has been written in German, so so much terminology (etc.) has been created in German to serve philosophy specifically.

All languages have been around as long as all other languages. In fact, German and English were the same language about two thousand years ago. Also, all languages that are actively spoken are changing. Our English is different than Shakespeare's, but so is modern German different than that of the past. This is why I'm confused about calling a language 'developed' (or 'malleable', for that matter).

Also, English grammar functions just as fully as German grammar, and as any other grammar in the world. It can handle essentially all of the same situations, just in different (but no less precise, necessarily) ways.

You're right though, this isn't the right thread. I'll stop as well.

 

[mizzle]

Since I haven't weighed in yet, I feel like one last hijacking point is in order:

English's vocabulary is, at current count, one million words. Compare that to something like 200,000 for Spanish. Chinese, in all its dialects, has something like 50,000. English is an ugly language, cobbled together from the remnants of German, French, and the Latin family, as well as bits and pieces from nearly everywhere else. Its great strength is the fact that you can find a word to mean literally anything you want, and precisely shade the tone and sound of the word to evoke the exact image you're aiming for. Contrast that with German, which has only as many as Chinese.

Its status as an analytical language means that it conveys most of its meaning without the need for inflection, but rather via word order and usage of different morphemes. You get meaning by using specific new words, instead of by modifying other ones.

This business about English not being developed compared to German is kind of silly.

Great paper, Stefan. I can't wait to play with the tool once you release it.

 

[Stefan]

I'll have to give a talk about it Thursday next week, that'll keep me busy in my spare time (which is less now because this month my job became full time). Expect the program in maybe two weeks. Might seem long for you, sorry about that. For me it's short, I "started" it in July 2006 and finished the paper a month ago. Didn't work very hard on it for much of the time, always spend too much time cubing. I'm just glad it's over (except for the talk).

 

[genwin]

well i guess you'll have to edit the world record in average and single ... I'm not a computer scientist, but i surely enjoyed reading the non-technical aspects of your thesis...

 

[LarsN]

Really good job

I hope you find some time to implement orient first subgoals. I would be very interested to see what results hume would get from my orient first method.

 

[fanwuq]

The paper is quite interesting. I read part of it.

 

[Stefan]

I forgot to mention: People here might want to jump right to chapter four, which describes/compares some statistics for solving F2L cross-style and block-style. The first two chapters introduce cubing and previous programs, so you might know that stuff already. The remaining chapters describe the program, which might be more interesting once you can actually try it yourself.

 

[MiloD]

I skimmed through the whole thing and read all of chapter 4. It made me very happy as a Petrus solver Thank you Stefan for writing this, I can't wait to use your program. Perhaps one day you could add an orienting edges in Petrus step, although I know this would skew the comparison since it is more than just f2l.

 

[Sin-H]

One of my favourite English words, evidence, doesn't even have a German translation that feels equivalent to me. That's so sad.

That's true. "Beweis" feels so unreal.

Congratulations on that thesis! Having read the first few pages, I'm gonna "fight myself" through the English version and I hope that it's as good as it seems.

By the way, I also think that it's useless to say this and that language (this is a germanism which I now use deliberately) is more or less developed. Every language has its specialities; I personally like the English gerund, for example, for which there is no equivalent structure in German. But I also like the so-called "Infinitivgruppen" in German, "um zu", which means: I do something with the purpose of something else.

And all "systems" of word use (I mean, some languages have a lot of words with a lot of different meanings and other languages have words with exactly one meaning) has its pros and cons...