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https://hal.elte.hu/flocking/w...

Here is an older paper with a similar conclusion (and the same lead author).

Are we supposed to ignore the scientists because an editorial columnist is shocked that ice that melted in the summer, refroze in the winter? The rest of the column is similar willful ignorance - "it's cold in the winter, so global warming is a scam!"

Local weather events do not disprove, nor prove, a global trend.

CO2s heat-absorbing effects, i.e. its spectrum absorption, have been known, and repeatedly experimentally validated, for over 100 years. It isn't some flaky correlation, like increased ice cream sales "causing" shark attacks.

Svante Arrhenius, 1896b, "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground", London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (fifth series), April 1896. vol 41, pages 237-275.

http://tinyurl.com/3afl5b (google book search)
http://hps.elte.hu/zagoni/Arrh1.htm

The article in The Telegraph.
The research group
Funding from CORDIS of 1.16 million euros, total cost 1.29 million euros. [rja]

Dude... no one's job is an *end*.

If your view was the predominant one, people would work until they died, no?

Some people do. A classic example is Paul Erdös, who died of a heart attack at a conference at age 83, "while he was working on another equation." Although Erdös may be an extreme example, he's not the only one by a long shot. Many other academics similarly work for as long as they're allowed to - sometimes age catches up with them and they're forced to stop. It's not a coincidence that you find this in academia, where people are more often paid to work on something that interests them. Another example is John Conway, who at age 70 is professor of math at Princeton. I'm pretty sure he's not still working just because he needs the money. There are quite a few other well-known examples in the math and computer science fields, which I'm most familiar with, but they exist elsewhere, too, and amongst much less famous people.

I personally know people in business in their 70s, who could afford to retire many times over. They don't do it because they enjoy their work. They might take longer vacations, because they can afford to, but they don't stop working, because their job is something that they do because they like to do it.

Some people are very good at finding these primes. The now disposed record twin prime's finder was prof. Járai, whose lectures I attended.

I find it interesting that the guy who works with insanely cool things like primes gave mind-numblingly boring lectures. He basically read his book out aloud. Some people are just very good at research and very bad at teaching.

Sure, the US could push for a multilateral approach to space exploration. Now, stop and think about the current state of affairs in the 'states and you'll see why this isn't likely to happen.

We do cooperate on some things, like the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.

Which amongst others includes contributions from :

• America
• Australia
• China
• Canada
• Europe
• France
• Germany
• Hungary
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• Russia
• Spain
• United Kingdom

I haven't had it happen, but maybe this is what you're looking for?

Are you certain you're not looking for this? Oh, wait, that's not what you're looking for. That's NOT what you're looking for!

Oh, not again... Obi-wan's gonna kill me!

Yeah sure. It is not a troll just a different opinion. You should obviously read about how to make a difference between something you DO NOT agree with and something that has been created for the purpose to stir controversy. I have to conclude that it was rather the former.

First, GP is correct imo. There are signs, which would be too numerous to detail here, indicating that the USA is behaving as an empire, not as a nation. In a democratic way the USA wouldn't ignore international laws and customs just because noone is in the place to punish them for doing so. If you would examine your economics textbooks a bit more in-depth, you would realise that Japan beat the US economy on a lot of points, pushed the usa out of a lot of markets in the 80ies. It needs a bit longer explanation. After WW2 USA administration assumed that the soviets are 20 years behind technologically at the time. They were proven wrong by the A-bomb two years after, the hydrogen-bomb and sputnik and Gagarin. The administration had a panic reaction and realised that they need to improve the education in the states drastically, which happened in the 60ies (i'm thinking about bleeding edge science here, so universities and laboratories mainly). They pushed a TON of money into the education system and into so called "base or basic research". They came up with a lot of progress and inventions, and the electronical industry LIVES from those inventiones UP UNTIL TODAY. The USA, however stopped these researches because of the economic changes, think of oil crisis, etc. This gave place for Japan in the 80ies to grab markets, because although japan didnt run any base research, they improved the technology they bought from the USA, so that's why it had a big impact on US economy. I have to note that most of these info is from a course i'm attending now and the reasoning i presented is from my teacher specialized in this subject

I'm not saying that something similar is going on with the EU atm, just that there are consequences if someone ruins the education system and that the USA seems to make bad decisions when messing with the economy.

Interrestingly enough, Isaac Asimov already told us just that.

Isaac Asimov already figured it out...

The Last Question

For anyone interested in what Multivac is, here's a link to one of Asimov's short stories about it.

Actually, I've never seen an official cellphone connector for the GBA. Perhaps it's available in Japan, as you say, but I think I'd have heard of it - sort of like the E-card reader which is finally making its way here. Yay for 4k NES games on little paper cards :)
Anyway, while I haven't seen any OFFICIAL connectors, a hungarian kid calling himself ph0x has hacked together one of his own. It looks really awesome, he has posted some photos and video of it in action in action. I'm sure developers would jump at the chance to play with GBA+phone. At least the homebrew scene is pretty excited :)

I initially bought this for three reasons:

1) It's the only portable OGG player right now :-)

2) It's a reasonably full functional, and powerful PDA

3) It runs linux, thus has endless potential -- far more than any proprietary PDA

Already there is a completely opensource replacement OS for the Zaurus.

But... there is no "killer app" yet. A few possibilities though:

1) Real, usable, opensource GPS software using one of the many CF GPS cards out there.

2) Wireless portable OpenH323 terminal

For now, zaurus xmms and zmame are enough to keep me busy for a long time :-)

http://people.inf.elte.hu/isten/xmms/

Another neat MW trick is building a sustained plasma ball

it is done w/ a pencil led and a microwave-safe glass ball... very cool, must try.

see here also.

These are all the same problem, if you consider them in their full glory; a really good print spooler that respects job priorities, printer statuses, patterns of use, etc. etc. might wind up printing three-lower priority jobs over one high priority job, or split a high priority job between printers (and proceed each piece with a cover sheet giving directions on how to re-assemble the job). Or it could detect a paper out condition and move the rest of the job to another printer. Or, in fact, make use of any sort of fancy planning / scheduling trick you care to think of. It's all the same problem.

And yes, it is a hard (NP complete, runs into the frame problem, etc.) problem. But that doesn't mean that any attack on it is AI! This is a classic (and too often revisited) logic error. You have a goal (AI). If you could obtain that goal, it would have some consequence (you could presumably write good scheduling software). You obtain the consequent, and announce that you have reached the goal!

To see that this is fallacious, consider: You have a goal (go to Scottland); it would have a consequence (you could try haggis). So then someone in your home town feeds you haggis, and you mistakenly announce that you have been to Scotland!

These problems are AI in the sense that (a) no known tractable engineering solution exists and (b) they are tasks that lie squarely in the province of (talented and capable) human beings.

This statement argues for my side, since they evidently have (a) found a tractable engineering solution and (b) it doesn't involve sending talented and capable human beings with each mission. Therefore it must not be AI.

--MarkusQ

P.S. (I invite you to try writing serious planning/scheduling software if you doubt me.)

I'm afraid I didn't wait for your invitation. Been there, done that. Many times.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

I unfortunately don't have a copy of Canadian Artifical Intelligence lying around. But I do know that a key point of the Turing test is that it is not objective. Consciousness, whatever else it may be, is inherently subjective. Someday we will understand consciousness sufficiently to be able to make an objective test, or to know why such a test is impossible. Until that day, the only meaningful way to test for consciousness is to use subjective tests.

That's not a key point, that's a key flaw. MIST was specifically designedt o replace the subjective judgement of individual judges with the statistical judgement of a very large number of people (1 million or more). I managed to find a pre-publication copy of my paper here.

That's a pretty big leap. A conscious human run as a simple computer program would probably go nuts due to lack of sensory input. Is your program going to emulate that?

The consciousness, is actually frozen. It exists only when stimulated and just waits for input when not stimulated. You can go crazy if no computation takes place.

What about issues which people don't agree on, like abortion, the death penalty, or whether computers can ever be conscious? How are you going to implement those as MindPixels? (I'm not trying to trip you up here--you must have thought about these issues, and I am curious what your answer is.)

Who cares about those. They vary from person to person and life to life. The goal here is to model an average person. Not a specific person. MIST only considers consensus knowledge, that which is the same across all people. The rest is fluff.

Appearantly the stanard mesa drivers don't correctly pass the VRAM size to Quake, there is a modified version of Mesa that does work at http://valerie.inf.elte.hu/~boga/MesaDownloads.htm l.