#search algorithm

[agatedragongames]

Random Mouse Algorithm

The 'Random Mouse Algorithm' is the best maze solving algorithm in the universe. It uses less memory than other wasteful pathfinding algorithms like 'Breadth First Search' and 'A-star'. Since it picks a random node at every junction.

So there is no need for complicated containers like queues and stacks. The only downside, it's very slow… But it's guaranteed to find the goal (or cheese) eventually! It also won't find you the shortest path, but there is nothing wrong with taking the scenic route 🐭🧀

[numa-smells]

taking a break from computer science by doing some more computer science

[thisismyideaofhumor]

You know how people add “Reddit” to the end of Google searches to get actually good results? Google apparently knows people are doing this bc I just searched an too specific search term that did not return any relevant results, but under the “People also searched for” the first link was “[too specific search term] reddit”

[gudamor]

it's like they always say "Every improvement is a change, but improvements make up such a vanishingly minuscule volume in changespace that you need a better search algorithm than a random walk"

[sofiaruelle]

❄️☃️The SDV Girlies in their winter garb!☃️❄️

One side how i interpreted their lil avatars and then the other side is just me playing dress up lmao.

“Bois when?” Dunno. 🤷🏽‍♀️ I will if anyone donates screenshots.

[seohabibi]

Massive Changes Made In Google Search Essentials

[sleepymccoy]

what was done to make the legalization of gay marriage damaging there?

They ran a plebiscite, which is like a non mandatory opinion poll for the country

The thing was, the public demand from queer groups for gay marriage to be legal was so so high in 2017. 2017! Not ten years ago, of course it was common to be okay w gay marriage.

The Labor party were in opposition and had fairly calmly promised to legalise next time they were in power. The Coalition, who were in power, reaaallly didn't want to tho. Cos they're homophobes. But demand was so high that had to do something, so they did a plebiscite

Firstly, gay rights is not such a complex matter that the government can't figure it out themselves. We vote for them to represent us, this was the coalition going mmmm I don't wanna represent that, gross. Can the population do it for me?

Secondly, queer people are a minority. We're meant to be protected by the government. The government, the coalition, did not protect their citizens

What it meant was a public debate, with tv required to air equal weight to each side. And the coalition, the Australian government, ran vote no ads

So we had a big old public debate. With the coalition getting to hate on gay kids and tag it with 'sponsored by the Australian government, Canberra' tag at the end. It's very hard to find examples of this now, but different ads ran all night long. The love the community tried to pour out was not worth the hate that was supported to speak

This is an ad that ran before the plebiscite was announced, explaining the danger it could have

Here's the foreign minister being shown an ad that tells people to vote no, and her saying it's fine for that to play on prime time tv. It's wild, watch it

No gay organisation wanted the plebiscite. Once it happened they pulled their socks up and campaigned, of course, but it was devastating and devisive. I started wearing a rainbow flag as a wee 22ish year old and people threw slurs. The cruelty was on the street like it never had been before, and didn't need to be

The plebiscite passed with a yes vote

I can remember a lot of reporting around how 61.6% (yes votes) of 79.5% (total votes) is less than half. Less than half of the country gave enough of a shit to vote yes put the letter back in the mail box. Cunts.

The government then didn't pass it into law! No, they had a conscience vote, which means the ministers are not required to vote down party lines but can vote freely with no repercussions. Labor, in opposition, voted mostly yes. The coalition split the vote, but it did get over and gay marriage was dragged into law

Obviously it's good that we have gay marriage

Idve prefered we didn't subject our community to government sponsored vitriol for it. And I won't forgive the coalition ever. They are cowards. I would have absolutely preferred to wait three years and make an election of it

And I hate that they get to say they moved the country forward with this liberal equal rights agenda. Cos they didn't. They looked at their job, which is to make law, and found a novel way to step on the queers a little before doing that

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

TONIGHT (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:

https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/

Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you'll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense.

AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results.

Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn't Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that's possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google's back-end and then filtering the results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you're a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people's minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Nevermind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?

A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It's a supremely confident liar that can get you killed:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

This is true of all of AI's most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

But let's take Google at its word. Let's stipulate that:

a) It can't fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and

b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and

c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized.

AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there's a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us.

Remember: enshittification isn't the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system's back-end to make sure the house always wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.

Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent.

Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is why Google doesn't have to worry about privacy laws. They've successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

In Europe, Google's vast profits lets it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland's tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, and it also doesn't fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn't have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google's lucrative, low-quality results:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, it doesn't fear rival technology and it doesn't fear its workers. Google's workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company's direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.

Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself.

Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries.

This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees.

AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn't tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI 'hallucination.'"

The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

That's why, even if you're willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won't.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[woman-becomer]

me when I shed my carapace and I'm reborn again, wiser and stronger. me when I rise from the flames like the glorious Phoenix

[agatedragongames]

Learn how to explore a grid and find a goal point with breadth first search in this pathfinding tutorial. You will use Processing and Java to code the breadth first search pathfinding algorithm and create a graphical demo so you can see it in action.

In the last tutorial, we programmed depth first search and watched it explore a node graph. In this tutorial we will program breadth first search and watch it explore a grid.

The breadth first search algorithm will add every unexplored adjacent node to a queue, and explore all of the added nodes in sequence. For each node explored, it will continue to add the adjacent unexplored nodes to the queue. It will continue to do this until the goal is found or all connected nodes have been explored.

[satans-knitwear]

I bring u more screenshots from Facebook suggestions that have seen into my soul

[thechekhov]

[fedoraspooky]

Man I haven't been on instagram in a while but HOLY SHIT the search is even more useless than it was the last time I was there

Like the bar is so low it has started tunneling into the earth at this point, folks! I didn't even think it'd be possible for it to be this bad

Forced AI explanation at top describing thing you are searching for (I ALREADY KNOW WHO FELIX THE CAT IS META SHUT UUUP)

Not only is there no way to search by newest, there isn't even a top posts section now, either. There is no way to sort or filter your search at all aside from the tabs at the top.

There is only Reels. There is no normal image post tab AT ALL save for whatever pops up in For You (and For You is also sprinkled with reels)

For You just shows me the same collection of results over and over so if i wanna find new art of something, I'm SOL.

Hashtags are entirely useless. There is a Tags tab in the search, and clicking on any of the relevant ones just leads you right back to the For You tab on the search!

So riddle me this, Batman- How the heck do you find anything new there for specific things you're interested in?? The only option is "For You"! And no, it does not in fact Have It For Me!!

So what are you supposed to do on there if you actively wanna see something? Just sit around and wait, twiddlin your thumbs and hoping that some kinda rng will hand-deliver a crumb of your favorite thing to you every now and then?

Fuck off with that lol

[severevoiddragon]

I wonder how the Haiku Bot happens to find posts with Haikus in?

[blaithnne]

Though it’s not hugely prominent, I think Lauren’s style still has that little bit of 80s grunge influence from her teen years.