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Post by Admin on Oct 17, 2020 11:03:31 GMT
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2020 20:45:56 GMT
The Glass Bead Gameen.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_GameDescription The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries into the future. Hesse suggested that he imagined the book's narrator writing around the start of the 25th century.[4] The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools, and to cultivate and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history[citation needed]. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. The novel is an example of a Bildungsroman, following the life of a distinguished member of the Castalian Order, Joseph Knecht, whose surname means "servant" (and is cognate with the English word knight). The plot chronicles Knecht's education as a youth, his decision to join the order, his mastery of the Game, and his advancement in the order's hierarchy to eventually become Magister Ludi, the executive officer of the Castalian Order's game administrators.[5] glassbeadgames.com/www.glassbeadgame.com/aim4truth.org/glass-bead-game/
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Post by Admin on Nov 12, 2020 20:39:55 GMT
Want to Make Better Decisions? Start Playing More ChessNetflix's hit series The Queen's Gambit confirms it: A game as old as time can help you strategize for basically anything. www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a34537329/queens-gambit-netflix-chess-strategy/The Queen's Gambit (miniseries)en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Queen%27s_Gambit_(miniseries)Queen's Gambiten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_GambitThe Queen's Gambit is one of the oldest known chess openings. It was mentioned in the Göttingen manuscript of 1490 and was later analysed by masters such as Gioachino Greco in the 17th century. In the 18th century, it was recommended by Phillip Stamma and is sometimes known as the Aleppo Gambit in his honour.[1] During the early period of modern chess, queen pawn openings were not in fashion, and the Queen's Gambit did not become common until the 1873 tournament in Vienna. As Wilhelm Steinitz and Siegbert Tarrasch developed chess theory and increased the appreciation of positional play, the Queen's Gambit grew more popular, reaching its zenith in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was played in all but 2 of 34 games in the 1927 World Championship match between José Raúl Capablanca and Alexander Alekhine. After the resumption of international chess activity following World War II, it was less frequently seen, as many Black players moved away from symmetrical openings, tending to use Indian Defences to combat queen pawn openings. The Queen's Gambit is still frequently played, however, and it remains an important part of many grandmasters' opening repertoires.[2]
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Post by Admin on Nov 17, 2020 18:31:02 GMT
The Powers That Be Boardgame Do you have what it takes to rule the world from the shadows? Enter the eye in the triangle in this multi-level, hybrid board game.
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Post by Admin on Nov 25, 2020 12:41:42 GMT
Invented by Conway in 1970, the game of life is a quite fascinating application of cellular automata with deep implications in computer science and mathematics Extended Game of LifeHow to simply extend it to multiple states in multiple dimensions with numpy medium.com/cantors-paradise/extended-game-of-life-ff1f9b48760
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Post by Admin on Jan 23, 2021 11:33:59 GMT
Three-dimensional chessen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chessThree-dimensional chess (or 3D chess) is any chess variant that uses multiple boards representing different levels, allowing the chess pieces to move in three physical dimensions. In practical play, this is usually achieved by boards representing different layers being laid out next to each other. Three-dimensional variants have existed since at least the late 19th century, one of the oldest being Raumschach (German for '"Space chess"'), invented in 1907 by Ferdinand Maack and considered the classic 3D game.[1] Maack founded a Raumschach club in Hamburg in 1919, which remained active until World War II. Chapter 25 of David Pritchard's The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants discusses some 50 such variations extending chess to three dimensions as well as a handful of higher-dimensional variants. Chapter 11 covers variants using multiple boards normally set side by side which can also be considered to add an extra dimension to chess.[2] "Three-dimensional chess" is used colloquially to describe complex, dynamic systems with many competing entities and interests, including politics, diplomacy and warfare. To describe an individual as "playing three-dimensional chess" implies a higher-order understanding and mastery of the system beyond the comprehension of their peers or ordinary observers.[3]
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Post by Admin on Jan 24, 2021 18:59:44 GMT
“Aren’t all religions equally true? No, all religions are equally false. The relationship of religion to truth is like that of a menu to a meal. The menu describes the meal as best it can. It points to something beyond itself. As long as we use the menu as a guide we do it honor. When we mistake the menu for the meal, we do it and ourselves a grave injustice.”
Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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Post by Admin on Feb 19, 2021 17:22:54 GMT
Divine Games: Game Theory and the Undecidability of a Superior Being (The MIT Press) by Steven J. Brams (Author)
In Divine Games, Steven Brams analyzes games that a human being might play with an omnipotent and omniscient godlike being. Drawing on game theory and his own theory of moves, Brams combines the analysis of thorny theological questions, suggested by Pascal's wager (which considers the rewards and penalties associated with belief or nonbelief in God) and Newcomb's problem (in which a godlike being has near omniscience) with the analysis of several stories from the Hebrew Bible. Almost all of these stories involve conflict between God or a surrogate and a human player; their representation as games raises fundamental questions about God's superiority.
In some games God appears vulnerable (after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit in defiance of His command), in other games his actions seem morally dubious (when He subjects Abraham and Job to extreme tests of their faith), and in still other games He has a propensity to hold grudges (in preventing Moses from entering the Promised Land and in undermining the kingship of Saul). If the behavior of a superior being is indistinguishable from that of an ordinary human being, his existence would appear undecidable, or inherently unknowable. Consequently, Brams argues that keeping an open mind about the existence of a superior being is an appropriate theological stance.
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2021 20:48:39 GMT
Quantum Mechanics, Free Will and the Game of LifeSome thoughts triggered by the death of the mathematician John Conway By John Horgan on February 14, 2021 www.scientificamerican.com/article/quantum-mechanics-free-will-and-the-game-of-life/Before I get to the serious stuff, a quick story about John Conway, a.k.a. the “mathematical magician.” I met him in 1993 in Princeton while working on “The Death of Proof.” When I poked my head into his office, Conway was sitting with his back to me staring at a computer. Hair tumbled down his back, his sagging pants exposed his ass-cleft. His office overflowed with books, journals, food wrappers and paper polyhedrons, many dangling from the ceiling. When I tentatively announced myself, he yelled without turning, What’s your birthday! Uh, June 23, I said. Year! Conway shouted. Year! 1953, I replied. After a split second he blurted out, Tuesday! He tapped his keyboard, stared at the screen and exulted, Yes! Finally facing me, Conway explained that he belongs to a group of people who calculate the day of the week of any date, past or present, as quickly as possible. He, Conway informed me with a manic grin, is one of the world’s fastest day-of-the-week calculators. This encounter came back to me recently as I read a wonderful New York Times tribute to Conway, felled by COVID-19 last year at the age of 82. The Times focuses on the enduring influence of the Game of Life, a cellular automaton invented by Conway more than a half century ago. Scientific American’s legendary math columnist Martin Gardner introduced the Game of Life, sometimes just called Life, to the world in 1970 after receiving a letter about it from Conway. The Times riff on Life got me thinking anew about old riddles. Like, Does free will exist? Some background. A cellular automaton is a grid of cells whose states depend on the states of neighboring cells, as determined by preset rules. The Game of Life is a two-dimensional cellular automaton with square cells that can be in one of two states, alive or dead (often represented by black or white). *A given cell’s state depends on the state of its eight immediate neighbors. A dead cell comes to life if three of its neighbors are alive, and a live cell stays alive if two or three of its neighbors are alive. Otherwise, the cell dies or remains dead. So simple!* And yet Life, when the rules are applied over and over, ideally by a computer, yields endlessly varied patterns, including quasianimated clusters of cells known as “longboats,” “gliders,” “spaceships” and my favorite, “Speed Demonoids.” Like the Mandelbrot set, the famous fractal icon, the Game of Life inspired the fields of chaos and complexity, which are so similar that I lump them together under a single term: chaoplexity. Chaoplexologists assume that just as Life’s odd digital fauna and flora stem from straightforward rules, so do many real-world things. With the help of computer simulations, chaoplexologists hoped to discover the rules, or algorithms, underpinning stuff that has long resisted conventional scientific analysis, from immune systems and brains to stock markets and whole civilizations. (The “big data” movement has recycled the hope, and hype, of chaoplexology.) Of course, the Game of Life can be interpreted in different ways. It resembles a digital, animated Rorschach test upon which scholars project their biases. For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett, commenting on Conway’s invention in the Times, points out that Life’s “higher-order patterns” emerge from processes that are “completely unmysterious and explicable.... No psionic fields, no morphic resonances, no élan vital, no dualism.” Dennett’s comment annoyed me at first; Life just gives him an excuse to reiterate his defense of hard-core materialism. But Life, Dennett goes on to say, shows that deterministic rules can generate “complex adaptively appropriate structures” capable of “action” and “control.” Yes! I thought, my own bias coming into play. Dennett clearly means that deterministic processes can spawn phenomena that transcend determinism, like minds with free will. Then another thought occurred to me, inspired by my ongoing effort to understand quantum mechanics. Conventional cellular automata, including Life, are strictly local, in the sense that what happens in one cell depends on what happens in its neighboring cells. But quantum mechanics suggests that nature seethes with nonlocal “spooky actions.” Remote, apparently disconnected things can be “entangled,” influencing each other in mysterious ways, as if via the filaments of ghostly, hyperdimensional cobwebs. I wondered: Can cellular automata incorporate nonlocal entanglements? And if so, might these cellular automata provide even more support for free will than the Game of Life? Google gave me tentative answers. Yes, researchers have created many cellular automata that incorporate quantum effects, including nonlocality. There are even quantum versions of the Game of Life. But, predictably, experts disagree on whether nonlocal cellular automata bolster the case for free will. One prominent explorer of quantum cellular automata, Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft, flatly rules out the possibility of free will. In his 2015 monograph The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, ‘t Hooft argues that some annoying features of quantum mechanics—notably its inability to specify precisely where an electron will be when we observe it—can be eliminated by reconfiguring the theory as a cellular automaton. ‘t Hooft’s model assumes the existence of “hidden variables” underlying apparently random quantum behavior. His model leads him to a position called “superdeterminism,” which eliminates (as far as I can tell; ‘t Hooft’s arguments aren’t easy for me to follow) any hope for free will. Our fates are fixed from the big bang on. Another authority on cellular automata, Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and other popular mathematical programs, proposes that free will is possible. In his 2002 opus A New Kind of Science, Wolfram argues that cellular automata can solve many scientific and philosophical puzzles, including free will. He notes that many cellular automata, including the Game of Life, display the property of “computational irreducibility.” That is, you cannot predict in advance what the cellular automata are going to do, you can only watch and see what happens. This unpredictability is compatible with free will, or so Wolfram suggests. John Conway, Life’s creator, also defended free will. In a 2009 paper, “The Strong Free Will Theorem,” Conway and Simon Kochen argue that quantum mechanics, plus relativity, provide grounds for belief in free will. At the heart of their argument is a thought experiment in which physicists measure the spin of particles. According to Conway and Kochen, the physicists are free to measure the particles in dozens of ways, which are not dictated by the preceding state of the universe. Similarly, the particles’ spin, as measured by the physicists, is not predetermined. Their analysis leads Conway and Kochen to conclude that the physicists possess free will—and so do the particles they are measuring. “Our provocative ascription of free will to elementary particles is deliberate,” Conway and Kochen write, “since our theorem asserts that if experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom.” That last part, which ascribes free will to particles, threw me at first; it sounded too woo. Then I recalled that prominent scientists are advocating panpsychism, the idea that consciousness pervades all matter, not just brains. If we grant electrons consciousness, why not give them free will, too? To be honest, I have a problem with all these treatments of free will, pro and con. They examine free will within the narrow, reductionistic framework of physics and mathematics, and they equate free will with randomness and unpredictability. My choices, at least important ones, are not random, and they are all too predictable, at least for those who know me. For example, here I am arguing for free will once again. I do so not because physical processes in my brain compel me to do so. I defend free will because the idea of free will matters to me, and I want it to matter to others. I am committed to free will for philosophical, ethical and even political reasons. I believe, for example, that deterministic views of human nature make us more likely to accept sexism, racism and militarism. No physics model—not even the most complex, nonlocal cellular automaton--can capture my rational and, yes, emotional motives for believing in free will, but that doesn’t mean these motives lack causal power. Just as it cannot prove or disprove God’s existence, science will never decisively confirm or deny free will. In fact, ‘t Hooft might be right. I might be just a mortal, 3-D, analog version of the Speed Demonoid, plodding from square to square, my thoughts and actions dictated by hidden, superdeterministic rules far beyond my ken. But I can’t accept that grim worldview. Without free will, life lacks meaning, and hope. Especially in dark times, my faith in free will consoles me, and makes me feel less bullied by the deadly Game of Life. Further Reading: I obsess over free will and related riddles in my two most recent books: Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science, and Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are. *Editor's note: The passage between the asterisks was revised because the description in the original version was incorrect.
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Post by Admin on Mar 16, 2021 21:07:53 GMT
IS RELIGION A GAME? religiondispatches.org/is-religion-a-game/Live in your world. Play in Ours. So went Sony’s tagline for Playstation 2 a few years ago, though it is a line that could have been spoken by Muhammad, the Buddha, Shiva, Confucius, or Jesus Christ. I don’t say this to be disrespectful to any of the traditions that these great people helped to found, but rather to raise the stakes of what is frequently involved in the pursuit of understanding religions. Religions cause people to juxtapose worlds, living in some, playing in others, and setting stark contrasts between them. Sometimes arrogantly, sometimes humbly, religions suggest that, in the words of the late great Christian folk rocker Larry Norman, “This world is not my home, I’m just passing through…” Or, if you like, in a more secular apocalyptic vein, to croon with Willie Nelson, “I’ve just destroyed the world I’m living in.” Flanking Norman, Nelson, and Sony, religions collectively operate through a deep understanding that games are more than detached technological environments, but actually can create a world, even if temporarily, for its players. The buzz last week was a new board game (yes, board game, as in folded cardboard tables and dice and cards) called Playing Gods: The Board Game of Divine Domination. Following essentially the same strategy as Risk minus the armies, Playing Gods has each player assume the role of a different god or prophet in their attempt to take over the world. As the game’s Web site suggests: “This is done by spreading your believers, converting the followers of other gods, or killing them off with Acts of God.” /images/managed/Story+Image_275px-kali_devi_1228264591.jpgThe satiric figurines include a laughing Buddha with an automatic weapon, Moses about to bash someone with stone tablets held high, Muhammad armed with a saber and hand grenade, Jesus wielding a bladed cross, and Kali with a sword, shield, and severed head (oh, wait, that’s Kali’s typical depiction, see left). Carl Raschke, a professor of religious studies at Denver University, claims in USA Today that the new game is “too stupid to go far,” and that may be so. Yet, I think there is much worth investigating in the relation between religious worlds and games, both in their board and video versions. For those still baffled as to why religion works so well in a modern/postmodern world, games might offer some insight. Take some of the recent board games that deal with religious themes: Missionary Conquest, BuddhaWheel, The Mahabharata Game, Catholic-opoly and Mormon-opoly (the goal of the latter two is not to raise houses and hotels to charge rent but, you guessed it, to raise churches and cathedrals in order get more people into the respective congregations). Each game includes some element of conflict along the way: Games wouldn’t be games without some conflict. While I’ve never played it, I love Missionary Conquest’s write-up. This is produced by the “Bible Games Company” and suggests it is a game of “laughter and strategy,” in which one must learn to finance their missionary trips through wise investment. Competition, strategy, some fortuitous roles of the dice, and we are replaying in microcosm the worlds we are living out in macrocosm. Video games take the basic concepts of board games and create more comprehensive worlds in three dimensions. Many games created over the last two decades such as Black & White, Power Monger, Sim Earth and Populous, to name just a few, operate through players taking on the role of a god/dess as they try to gain power in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The interest in and influence of these has culminated in the generic tag, “God Games.” Wired magazine’s “Senior Maverick,” Kevin Kelly, was writing about this stuff years ago. In a chapter on God Games in his 1994 book Out of Control, Kelly muses: I can’t imagine anything more addictive then being a god. A hundred years from now nothing will keep us away from artificial cosmos cartridges we can purchase and pop it into a world machine to watch creatures come alive and interact on their own accord. Godhood is irresistible. It’s an intriguing statement for a jacked-in society that regularly re-creates the world on screen in myriad ways, simultaneously feeling the power of doing so. Life itself thrives on creation, on re-creation, through the ongoing human desire to make something new (even when using old materials), and the equally important need for humans to develop mythologies of master creators: gods and goddesses, as well as monsters and devils. Like games, religions play in differing worlds, with their own sets of rules, beliefs, and behaviors. In his book Religious Worlds, religious scholar William Paden suggests how: Religions do not all inhabit the same world, but actually posit, structure, and dwell within a universe that is their own. They can be understood not just as so many attempts to explain some common, objectively available order of things that is ‘out there,’ but as traditions that create and occupy their own universe. The fact of the matter is that we religious humans live in multiple worlds with multiple, overlapping, intersecting, and even contradicting conceptions of space and time. Not everyone understands the here and now to be the year 2008. For many Muslims it is now 1429 and for many Jews it’s 5769. And this apocalyptic Mayan thing about December 21, 2012 only illuminates the creative poverty of Eurocentrism by misunderstanding that “2012” even exists on a Mayan calendar. The Mayan calendar represents a different world from that of the modern West; we may play in it, but we can’t really live in it. The point of all this is that there are multiple, interwoven, concentric worlds that simultaneously exist on the planet earth. Our neighbors are keeping different calendars, and orient their lives to different gods, goddesses, books, and places. Worlds—religious worlds especially—are relative. “God games” are basically expressions and representations of what many religious traditions have been doing for a long time. Through creative or coercive means, convincing others to follow your way/world and not another has been fundamental to Christianity since the time of Constantine, fundamental to Islam since the time of Muhammad, and fundamental to Buddhism since the Bodhi-Dharma left for the East. There is a certain primal desire to suggest to others that “my world” is the right one. Games, and religions, are about creating ever-new worlds, accompanied by the enticing suggestion to come to my world to play. If we want to understand religions, we have to understand their game-like qualities, and that religion might, at the heart of it all, be a game. Which does not make it trivial. Games can have high stakes. Games can entrance people to the point of risking much, if not all: cars and condos, wives and lives, fortunes and families. Games excite, annoy, produce joy and anguish, and take their players to great extremes of emotion and rationality, even as the player may still say “its only a game.” So, here’s a call to learn about religion by playing games. And vice versa. Choice and chance, destruction and creation, role-playing and playing one’s heart, are all at the center of the worlds that we call religions. We may live in our world, but play in another.
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Post by Admin on Apr 9, 2021 12:52:18 GMT
Infinite possibilities, infinite worlds The surprising benefits of a strange theory iai.tv/articles/infinite-possibilities-infinite-worlds-david-k-lewis-auid-1788The idea of an infinite number of worlds - each containing all the possibilities presented in our own world - might initially seem bizarre. Certainly David K. Lewis had a hard time convincing his fellow philosophers of his theory. But its application to theories of possibility - and its undeniable similarity to how we already think about time - means that we must make sense of its extraordinary claims, writes Daniel Nolan.
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Post by Admin on Apr 28, 2021 9:43:55 GMT
Surakarta (game) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surakarta_(game)Surakarta is a little-known Indonesian strategy board game for two players, named after the ancient city of Surakarta in central Java. The game features an unusual method of capture which is "possibly unique" and "not known to exist in any other recorded board game".[1][2] The real name of the game is permainan ("the game" in Bahasa Indonesia).[3][4] In Java, the game is also called dam-daman. It was first published in France in 1970 as "Surakarta".[4] The game is called "Roundabouts" in Sid Sackson's The Book of Classic Board Games.[5]
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Post by Admin on May 29, 2021 3:09:17 GMT
The Special Properties of 28 The Chessboard is not just the Game of Life, is also considered to be a symbol for the Earth in many cultures, and defines its relationship with the Moon. This is made apparent when we add up the 28 squares of the Perimeter, which are astronomically the 28 nightly stations or mansions of the Moons path as it orbits the Earth. How does this relate to the 7 days of the Week? In 2 ways. 1- The Sum of the first 7 numbers = 28 2- Also 28 is called a Perfect Number because the sum of it’s factors 1, 2, 4, 7, 14 also equals 28 which is a very rare occurrence in Number Theory. The Number 28 also is steeped in ancient Egyptian culture, with the 28 fingers that composed their “cubit” measure, based on the 7 palms of 4 fingers, and attributed to a large statue of Osiris, also known as the Lord of Cycles and of the Moon. Millennia later, the Geometry of the Chessboard continues - Even in Britain circa 1900, in our modern world, the square mile of the County of central London was partitioned or sub-divided into 28 metropolitan Boroughs
Jain 108
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2021 12:45:17 GMT
Deep Reinforcement Learning Applications www.rebellionresearch.com/deep-reinforcement-learning-applicationsA new reinforcement learning system out of China, EfficientZero, can achieve super-human level performance playing Atari games. Furthermore, with only two hours (100k steps) of real-time game experience! Deep Reinforcement Learning Applications Reinforcement learners have mastered games such as Go in recent years. Now, developers are creating systems that can play multiple games in one system (e.g. Chess, Draughts, Backgammon, Go), and even learn to play video games too. As so many of our social, economical, biological, psychological, and physical mechanisms can be modelled as ‘games’. As a result, mastering such games may be a path towards generalizable forms of intelligence. The Acknowledgments and Disclosure of Funding section is worth noting: “This work is supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, the 2030 Innovation Megaprojects “Program on New Generation Artificial Intelligence” (Grant No. 2021AAA0150000).” We are certainly off to races in terms of Artficial Intelligence. In addition, state and non-state actors have little to gain and everything to lose if they do not dump resources into machine intelligence development. Furthermore, there appear to be few diminishing returns, but potential existential threats to nations and companies who are complacent in the face of such rapid advances. In conclusion, unexpected and unparalleled AI ‘Sputnik Moments’ will be a hallmark of the 2020s. Moreover, in a time when we are ill-prepared for AI safety. In addition, alignment challenges which become massively more challenging with scale and complexity.
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Post by Admin on Jan 24, 2022 8:28:26 GMT
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