I understand that occupying the corners is desirable, as a counter placed there can never be flipped. Also, placing a counter on a square next to a corner seems to be bad as it usually hands the corner to your opponent.  What other tactics are useful to know?
I have played the game Othello (Reversi) numerous times but I never approach it with a specific logic or algorithm to apply on each move in my mind. I won many times and lost as much. How would one approach this game? How would one work in his mind to prune the possible moves and choose the &quot;right&quot; one in each step? I see that most Othello CPUs more or less &quot;think&quot; the same at each move, how should I think on each move?
I applied for a 90-day visa and got a long-term visit, single-entry tourist visa. The date given is 09-March-2015, and it's valid until 07-May-2015.  My agent says the 7th is the latest date I can travel to Dubai; once I enter I need to count 90 days. I entered on the 10th of March.    Is it true, or where can I get it checked?    Can I stay for another month, or do I need to leave before the 7th of May? After reading an article about Ubuntu's netflix support I decided to try running netflix through chromium but I got this error code: M7063-1913 I assumed that it was a problem with html5 but in the playback preferences it doesn't give me the option to use it. Custom function won't refresh as inputs are changed Big tilde in math mode How to know that your machine learning problem is hopeless? Imagine a standard machine-learning scenario:     You are confronted with a large multivariate dataset and you have a   pretty blurry understanding of it. What you need to do is to make   predictions about some variable based on what you have. As usual, you   clean the data, look at descriptive statistics, run some models,   cross-validate them etc., but after several attempts, going back and   forth and trying multiple models nothing seems to work and your   results are miserable. You can spend hours, days, or weeks on such a   problem...   The question is: when to stop? How do you know that your data actually is hopeless and all the fancy models wouldn't do you any more good than predicting the average outcome for all cases or some other trivial solution?  Of course, this is a forecastability issue, but as far as I know, it is hard to assess forecastability for multivariate data before trying something on it. Or am I wrong?   Disclaimer: this question was inspired by this one  that did not attract much attention. It would be nice to have detailed answer to such question for reference. Why didn't Star Trek TOS have better medical equipment for Vulcans? In  when Ambassador Sarek became critically ill, why didn't they send him home or send for a Vulcan medical expert? Since they were hosting many prominent political figures from many races, it seems strange that they did not have much medical support for a race so common as Vulcans (who are part of the Federation). How to configure preferred network for internet? I am connected to a LAN network and wireless network. Both provide access to internet.  Sometimes when the internet on LAN is not working, the browser simply throws an exception instead of switching to Wireless. (Wireless is on and local peer computers on wireless are connectible).  Apparently it is giving more priority to LAN. How do I increase the priority of Wireless or set it as an automatic fall back? Script to Notify me when something happens on a shared directory The situation is:  I have a shared directories from many other machines where other users work on.  I need to be notified whenever a user create, modify or delete a directory or file from his local directory which I share using smb...  It looks like the folder actions in the MAC systems..  Is there a software that do that?!  If there is no such application, any help in writing a script for that is appreciated..  Thanks in advanced... I have two passports/nationalities. How do I use them when I travel? Hibernate @Enumerated mapping Change this behavior to allow for spelling corrections and the like: "Edits must be at least 6 characters" I have Ubuntu on my laptop. Now I want install Windows 7 in a dual-boot. How can I do this? I can't lose my Ubuntu files, and I'm afraid that I might break . Go  for UEFI only! How to find the inverse modulo $m$? For example: $$7x \equiv 1 \pmod{31} $$ In this example, the modular inverse of $7$ with respect to $31$ is $9$. How can we find out that $9$? What are the steps that I need to do? Update If I have a general modulo equation: $$5x + 1 \equiv 2 \pmod{6}$$ What is the fastest way to solve it? My initial thought was: $$5x + 1 \equiv 2 \pmod{6}$$ $$\Leftrightarrow 5x + 1 - 1\equiv 2 - 1 \pmod{6}$$ $$\Leftrightarrow 5x \equiv 1 \pmod{6}$$ Then solve for the inverse of $5$ modulo 6. Is it a right approach? Thanks. Why should users never use normal sudo to start graphical applications? Help + Noun + Gerund or Infinitive How do you clone a Git repository into a specific folder? Executing the command git clone git@github.com:whatever creates a directory in my current folder named whatever, and drops the contents of the Git repository into that folder:  /httpdocs/whatever/public   My problem is that I need the contents of the Git repository cloned into my current directory so that they appear in the proper location for the web server:  /httpdocs/public   I know how to move the files after I've cloned the repository, but this seems to break Git, and I'd like to be able to update just by calling git pull. How can I do this? How to show the inequality for $\int_{0}^{\pi/4}\tan^n(x) dx$ I can't seem to figure out the inequality option, I substituted n=2 for the answer bit is there any elegant way of getting it? How could they return the Infinity Stones in their "raw" form? There is this one little thing that I don't quite get at the end of Avengers: Endgame.  After Thanos was defeated, Captain took the stones back to where they were originally taken to "correct" the timeline. However we see that Cap has the 6 stones in their "Raw" form, but that is not how all of them were taken.   For example in 1970 Tony didn't take the Space Stone but the Tesseract, so I assume they extracted the Space Stone in the present (by breaking the Tesseract like Thanos in the Infinity War movie?).   So how could Cap return the stone to the rightful place when he actually needed to return the Tesseract? Or am I missing something here...   The same goes for the Mind Stone, which was inside the Gem on the Staff Loki had in the first Avengers movie. Regular cast vs. static_cast vs. dynamic_cast Simulation software to solve high school level mechanics problems I'm a physics teacher and I would like to find a simulation software that could be used to give exact numerical answers to high school level problems in Newtonian mechanics.  I want the students to first calcultate a numerical answer to a physics problem and then use the simulator to visualize the problem in order to understand it better and verify that the simlator gives the same answer that they got when doing the calculation themselves.  Here are some examples of what kind of problems I want the students to be able to solve with the simulator:   A slope with a specific angle of inclination and a ball starts rolling at a certain point. Determine the speed, angular momentum and total mechanical energy of the ball after a specific time t. A ladder of known mass and length is leaning against the wall at a specific angle. The contact between the ladder and the wall is frictionless. Calcultate the x and y components of the force between the floor and the ladder.   I would like the software to have the following features:  - Simulation in 2D. No 3D simulations are necessary and the software should at least have the option of doing simulations only in 2D.  - Position all objects exactly by writing numbers (just positioning the objects using the mouse is not precise enough).  - Show animations of the time evolution of the system.  - Show forces, velocities and accelerations as arrows.  - Give exact numerical results so that the students can use the software to verify their calculation.  Ideally the software would have a graphical user interface, but if no suitable software with graphical interface exixts, I could also consider a software with text-based inputs. I would consider both free and commercial software.  My question is: Is there any software that would meet these requirements and if there is, where could I get it?