Are you suggesting that Germany is not "free" to choose to have economic relationships with e.g. Russia because of United States military reasons? Do you think the US military is the primary reason Germany (the people, the government) is reluctant to trade with Russia?
Just think about it. A German Russian partnership would become a major rival to American Hegemony. German know-how and Russian resources. Can you imagine what a force they would become? From Americas point of view it must not happen. It has nothing to do with Putin in particular, its Russia period. It has everything to do with threats from potential rivals to American power. Nixon and Kissinger thought a China Russia alliance was a threat so did their best to keep them apart. Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, and Brett McGurk are the unholy triumvirate you want to look into for US Foreign Policy decisions in recent years. They obviously thought pushing Russia and China closer together was a good idea for maintaining America's world hegemony. Pax Americana.
As long as American bases remain on German soil, you bet your boots on the ground Germany is beholden to Americas hegemonic wishes.
>Are you suggesting that Germany is not "free" to choose to have economic relationships with e.g. Russia because of United States military reasons?
Yes. America deeply disapproves of Germany having economic relations with Russia and it puts political pressure on Germany to sever those relationships.
It also puts heavy pressure on Germany to maintain good relations with Israel in spite of the racially-motivated genocide (which is a bit awkward morally speaking given Germany's history...).
It's plausible that blowing up the pipeline was supposed to reduce the risk of that relationship being rekindled - it was probably seen by America as a risk that all that was required to stop the Germany economy from screaming was to turn on one switch.
>Do you think the US military is the primary reason Germany (the people, the government) is reluctant to trade with Russia?
I think the reason that Germans are, on average, reluctant to trade with Russia but less reluctant to trade with Israel is mostly about the propaganda they consume which is, yes, indirectly driven by US hegemony.
Non-mainstream parties (i.e. those that America doesn't have its claws into) have a lot of wacky ideas about tossing out immigrants and turning on the gas taps to Russia again. There is a significant risk of them winning.
It really depends if you can find a (cryptocurrency) exchange that lets you withdraw to a bank account in Costa Rica. If you can find one, you don't even need stablecoins. The way it will work is
US Bank -> Deposit USD to US cryptocurrency exchange -> Trade USD for Bitcoin (or some other crypto that has cheap transfers, it doesn't really matter) -> Send Bitcoin from US cryptocurrency exchange to Costa Rica cryptocurrency exchange -> Trade Bitcoin for USD (or local currency) on Costa Rica cryptocurrency exchange -> Withdraw to Costa Rica local bank
Theoretically, all of these steps can be done with less than ~$1 in fees. My banks and exchanges let me deposit for free and withdraw any arbitrary amount for 50 cents. Sending any arbitrary amount of cryptocurrency should be cheaper than that. The big question is if an exchange exists that lets you withdraw to Costa Rica banks, and what they charge for that.
There is no hidden information and turns are sequentially. This means both players have full access to all information, and that implies there must be a single "best" move. If the board is at a certain state and one player is to play next, the strategy of the opponent is irrelevant for determining the optimal move.
Proof:
Suppose that it is possible that different strategies exist that outperform each other. Lets consider the case that there are three "optimal" strategies that counter each other, call them Rock Paper and Scissors. Since these are the three "optimal" strategies, both players know the exact move produced by these strategies. The first important part to note is that there is no cost to changing strategy during the game. If an opponent has one fixed strategy, say Rock, the "optimal" strategy is to change your strategy to Paper. Since you have full information on the state of the board, you do not have to guess the strategy of the opponent, because there is no hidden information. Now you could consider the opponent strategy to be hidden information, but this doesn't hold for the following reason: If knowing the opponent strategy would alter your choice of move (by for example changing to Rock that specifically counters his hidden Scissors), the opponent can freely change to Paper after you made your move, because he can see that you changed to Rock before making his next move. If it was impossible for the opponent to tell that you changed your strategy, that implies that each strategy produces the same board state, and that implies the strategies are identical.
There is no fundamental difference between Chess and Tic-Tac-Toe other than the computational complexity. It is not feasible to compute all of the game states in Chess, and so we cannot determine (at this time) a single optimal strategy the same way we can for Tic-Tac-Toe. But that does not imply that it doesn't exist. From a pure game theoretical perspective, they are the same category of game.
If there are more than 3 strategies, the same argument stands. IF there are multiple "optimal" strategies, AND these strategies create different "optimal" moves on the same board state, the opponent can just play the optimal counter-strategy after you make your move, because your move is enough information to give away your strategy. If your opponent cannot determine your strategy after you make your move, that implies the different strategies have the same "optimal" move.
At least one of the players has a strategy that cannot be countered though. That is, either white can force a win, black can force a win, or both players can force a draw. There is no situation where every strategy can be countered.
Big kudos for building things from scratch. Even though it's not directly applicable in most jobs, the knowledge you have from understanding the entire "stack" helps a lot when using tools and frameworks, because you understand their value and cost.
A tree is a subtype of a graph, but it is not the same as a DAG. A diamond-shaped directed graph (edges A->B, A->C, B->D, C->D) is a DAG, but not a tree.
Very interesting. From playing a single game you immediately notice that traditional chess theory doesn't apply to this game at all. After some testing I found a few things in particular that change the way the game plays out drastically:
When having two pawns adjacent one of them can still defend the other by having it only slightly behind. They can also alternate defending each other with a single move. Pawns can also attack/defend things directly in front of them by pushing up against them. These things combined mean that it's almost impossible to have any pawn weaknesses, other than having a singled out pawn with no neighbors. In general pawns are the most improved piece with this ruleset.
The ability to move directly forward makes knights significantly stronger. Knights ability to move through other pieces is also particularly strong versus pawns which can now block most pieces from moving around quite easily.
Since pawns generally mainly move along one axis, it is easier to control the distance between pieces in the forward-backward axis than in the left-right axis. This makes it harder to utilise Rooks to capture two adjacent pieces. Bishops on the other hand have an easier time capturing two adjacent pieces, if positioned correctly. I'm not sure this compensates for the fact that bishops now have a much harder time penetrating positions, they are the most easily blocked of all the pieces.
Overall it is very interesting as a chess variant, it plays so very different from chess. It's hard to even figure out reasonable openers.
If you would want to run a tournament for this you'll probably need a better client, potentially with built-in online play. I could be tempted to work on something web based, but it would take a while to finish.
If you like this kind of thing you should take a look at the suckerpinch channel on YouTube. The technical complexity and amount of effort spent on some of his projects is quite unbelievable, with no practical use other than displaying the crazy things you can do with computing.
Particularly Reverse Emulating the NES and Harder Drives are good examples of this.
May favourite suckerpinch is the Uppestcase and Lowestcase letter video.
I like that he takes something familiar - and goes sideways with it such that you could have thought of that, but probably wouldn't have "explored that space" mentally.
Look at the pictures of sample hands in the link you posted. From the position of the hand and fingers it's unlikely they are software generated, but they have the same "neat" aesthetic as the other pictures.
I think what you're seeing is just pictures taken by someone with attention to detail.
With Ethereum no longer in the game the total USD issuance for GPU mining probably dropped over 80%. Is your strategy to just wait out for miners to capitulate until mining is profitable again? Are you not worried that this will crater the value of your hardware?
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