Wednesday, February 10, 2010

cyclopoleon

8 comments:

  1. "In May 1968 the US nuclear submarine Scorpion (SSN-589) failed to arrive as expected at its home port of Norfolk, Virginia. The US Navy was convinced that the vessel had been lost off the Eastern seaboard but an extensive search failed to discover the wreck. The US Navy's deep water expert, John Craven USN, believed that it was elsewhere and he organised a search south west of the Azores based on a controversial approximate triangulation by hydrophones. He was allocated only a single ship, the Mizar, and he took advice from a firm of consultant mathematicians in order to maximise his resources. A Bayesian search methodology was adopted. Experienced submarine commanders were interviewed to construct hypotheses about what could have caused the loss of the Scorpion.

    The sea area was divided up into grid squares and a probability assigned to each square, under each of the hypotheses, to give a number of probability grids, one for each hypothesis. These were then added together to produce an overall probability grid. The probability attached to each square was then the probability that the wreck was in that square. A second grid was constructed with probabilities that represented the probability of successfully finding the wreck if that square were to be searched and the wreck were to be actually there. This was a known function of water depth. The result of combining this grid with the previous grid is a grid which gives the probability of finding the wreck in each grid square of the sea if it were to be searched.

    This sea grid was systematically searched in a manner which started with the high probability regions first and worked down to the low probability regions last. Each time a grid square was searched and found to be empty its probability was reassessed using Bayes' theorem. This then forced the probabilities of all the other grid squares to be reassessed (upwards), also by Bayes' theorem. The use of this approach was a major computational challenge for the time but it was eventually successful and the Scorpion was found about 740 kilometers southwest of the Azores in October of that year."

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  2. cyclopoleon was poleoning the bathysphere!

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousexpeditions/3238870461/

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. whoever you are, put your comment back! even insults are music within
    the symphony of death..

    :)

    have at it.
    you can't insult me worse
    than i can!

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  5. sorry, that was just me accidentally hitting the publish button twice! ouch!

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  6. Oh man! You really need to see the youtube clips on this page:

    http://io9.com/5469278/screwtopia-the-5-types-of-erotic-dystopia-in-science-fiction

    ZARDOZ!!!!

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