Facebook reportedly was using Bittorrent to distribute their own application across their servers. I remember outreach presentations where they mentioned this over 10 years ago, and this article seems to have some corroborating details: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/04/exclu...
Congrats! We tried something similar a few years ago (also at the TC Disrupt Hackathon [1]), but had to take a lot of shortcuts to get to something working. I'm impressed you had the time to train a proper model (we went with old school CV hacks).
Looking forward to seeing what BoardBoss could become. These days I've been wanting a CV app to track backgammon games. Those dice can be pretty tiny though :)
That's correct. If you're curious about the architecture: the vision part detects a chessboard, then corrects the perspective and restricts the image to just the square of the board, then looks at each square and has some simple thresholds to decide if it's occupied by a piece, and of what color. From there, the camera is treated as a black box sensor that continuously streams two 64-bit masks, for where it thinks it sees white and black pieces. There is a second program (controller) that turns that stream into a stream of chess positions (and a Unix pipe in between). The sensor is faulty of course and the controller has logic for ignoring bits from the mask where there cannot possibly be pieces etc.
It takes a lot of shortcuts, works with just the right lightning, etc., but worked great as a proof-of-concept :)
We got away with not identifying the pieces by just detecting the color, assuming the game started from the initial position, and assuming only legal moves (the whole game is unambiguous using these assumptions).
It's all old-school computer vision with hand-written features, and I'm pretty confident there is tons of low-hanging fruit, but who has the time.
A friend+former colleague of mine is the lead author of ReactiveML, a synchronous extension to OCaml: http://rml.lri.fr/
We worked on a hackathon together where we built a physical chessboard interface (https://github.com/chesseye/chesseye). He built the controller, which handles among other things the output from the video recognizer and messages the chess engine, in ReactiveML. I didn't know much about the language beyond first principles then, but was impressed by how easy it made it to compose parallel processes.
It is my understanding that QB64 [1] compiles through C++, although I haven't tried it myself. They in theory support a superset of QBasic, and you could compile the C++ generated files using emscripten (again, in theory).
On a "warm" invocation, almost all the time goes into DOSBox + QBasic.
Not precise measurements but: on my MacBook Pro, running the QBasic interpreter from within DOSBox consistently takes about 1.5 seconds & running DOSBox + QBasic from the shell in "headless" mode takes about 2.4 seconds.
OpenWhisk also gives me the logs of the invocations, which include debug lines produced by DOSBox, and from the timestamps in those I can tell that invocations do typically spend >2s running DOSBox.
> Do you foresee an enlargement in the total number of speakers? Why?
In total number of speakers, it's possible, and I think it's been the case historically (just by general population growth). In relative numbers (fraction of the population), it's been shrinking and I don't see this changing. Main reasons are that:
a) as mentioned in the BBC article, people move, and it's very difficult to keep the language after one or two generations if you don't live in that region,
b) even if you were to move to a Romansh-speaking area (as a Swiss national or as an immigrant), the incentive to learn is low because almost everyone also speaks (Swiss-)German.
(just my non-expert opinion)
> national language
It has a slightly different status than the other 3 languages, Wikipedia explains it well [1]. I don't know if you could get citizenship that way but you'd definitely be on the news.
MX3 is a platform curated by the national radio stations in all four languages. The playlist by Radio Rumantsch would be a good start: https://mx3.ch/p/2ev (not all the songs are in romansch in there, though).
I'm not sure it was ever the goal that everyone would _speak_ Rumantsch Grischun, as it is called, but the hope was that at least it would be used in writing (e.g. in school books) [1]. The resistance there is arguably more surprising.
[1] This is not too different from the situation with High German being used in education even though everyone speaks in dialects.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1957760/Islands__Trains/