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Hmm, with all the advances recently in biotech/nanotech, we should really cut back on the worlds military budgets (a world-wide tax so as to level the playing field perhaps?)....AND we take a small amount of this money and put it into funding projects like the SENS project and the Mprize and open cures projects.....these projects are working to control and reverse aging through research into the mechanisms of aging and cell repair and the development of therapies to boos the exsting stem cell repair envieroments of our bodies and also things like growing replacement, printing replacement organs, the developement of exsting nanotechnologies to control and eliminate cancers, the development of advanced programmable methods of reprogramming our cellular dna programs in our cells, the development of advanced programmable nanobots to diagnose and repair our cells from the inside out. Good sites to stay informed....http://www.kurzweilai.net/ http://www.fightaging.org/ http://www.sens.org/ http://www.mprize.org/

Like the Methuselah Foundation?

You'll catch a lot of flack for wanting to live a very very long time. Ignore it. There are others out there too.

You might be interested in the immortality institute and the Methuselah project. Links gratuitously provided...
http://www.imminst.org/
http://www.mprize.org/

Finally, if the current pace of scientific development isn't quite fast enough:
http://www.cryonics.org/

In my humble opinion, dying is severely overrated and should be put off for a rainy day in the far far future.

The Hutter Prize's incremental prize awards for progress, itself modeled on the M-Prize, is a superior way of awarding prize money. There is continual reward for teams that contribute substantially and no one team takes everything based on a technicality.

Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.

Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.

Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.

This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers (many newly laid off!) and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers. For example, the original idea for the Hutter Prize was:

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Something similar can be done with the size of the binary that passes the entire suite of tests for Microsoft's software suite.

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions, memoizations, tablings and/or materialized views similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded hence time-optimized code base.

Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.

Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.

This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:

S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

It may turn out that due the incomputability of Kolmogorov complexity, the growth of reward may need ultimatelyto go exponential but the principle remains true.

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

Be that the case, He'd have better luck putting his money where his mouth is, as Peter Thiel did.

Frankly, I can see where he is going. I'll take the less popular approach to this, and fuck the karma.

The tech industry has an undercurrent of applied improvement, here, now, making a better world etc etc. A sort of distant extension of the seventies hippie culture. Make a difference, make a change.

Intel may not be mother-googla-teresa, but the specialized applied science they funded over the years led to orders upon orders upon orders of magnitude of increase in the computational power available to mankind, and served as an enabling technology to a lot of good things that happened to a lot of people. More importantly, the profits from this venture were used to push this wheelbarrow further and further and further down.
Intel is not the only one. Forget startups. Forget flag bearers a-la google. Any and every fat-cat in the tech industry is doing it. IBM. HP. Sun. Sandisk. It's hardwired into the way business in the industry is done.

What he is complaining about, if my understanding serves me right, is not how they do the nuts and bolts of their job. He's not claiming he can do a better one, at that.
It is the choice of just running with a working product ad-infinum (say, selling a 486 for 20 years rather improve and improve and end up with a "core 2"), putting dividends over a supposed responsibility a business may (or may not) have towards choosing to pursue products that improve the world alongside fill its coffers. Legally, no such responsibility exists. Morally - some people recon otherwise. More such people lead and steer technology giants than big-pharma giants. And that's what he's upset about.

To a lesser extent, he is also ramming the prioritization of theoretical science (the NIH grant-receiving scientists) over applied science. Controversial as that may be, especially to scientist purists, in the medical field and once applied to vast populations that imminently have people who suffer from anything and everything, he has a point there too. Theoretical science is important, but he recons, and I agree, public money should follow and applied-science-first priority list.

Be technological advance in medical science coin, speculative investment (theoretical science) should be a background investment, whereas applied science should be critical primary income. Anyone who says otherwise is merely a hypocrite who has yet to get a loved one succumb to a nasty condition medical progress could have prevented. Every dog has his day, and at the end of the day we're all human, as are our loved ones.

Here's what I wrote back when there was still hope for Microsoft:

If I were in Ray Ozzie's shoes I would apply something like the The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge to the entirety of MS's software services suite. This, of course, requires making a rigorous spec for testing purposes.

Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.

Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.

Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.

This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:

S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring

At the danger of being modded O/T, I'm going to post some of the research I did regarding medical patents in general.

I'm against patents for medical technology, because the incentives to the drug companies barely match the desires of the patients. As I recently showed in my blog, only 14% of drug revenue goes towards R & D, half of this 14% is wasted by looking for new drugs which don't treat diseases better than old ones (but are patentable, hence profitable), and the remaining 7% funds research skewed towards untested, patentable treatments even if well-known drugs might do as good or better a job. We've set up incentives for drug companies to find patentable tech they can then market to us. I think we need an entirely new incentive system, and I think we can do it and still have a free-market-friendly environment for research companies.

In this blog post, I outline a way for drug companies to get rewarded based on how much good their research does for humanity, using an Mprise-like system. Companies would get rewards proportional to how much better their treatment was shown to be over the current best treatment.

I have some ideas on how to implement this system so that everybody wins (yes - everybody - don't forget the parable of the broken window), but I would love some input from /.ers to help refine the details. You're always good at spotting holes in arguments, and I'd love to find them to see if they can be plugged.

Thanks!

Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.

Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.

Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.

This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the Hutter Prize:

S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:

S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

If I had the kind of money these guys carry around, that's EXACTLY where I'd be plugging it.

Even for my smaller money, that is the one and only place I'd think of donating putting it.

There's nothing even remotely on the scale of the amount of good to humanity in general, to EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US, that comes close dealing aging a blow. The amount of subsequent evils this would postpone, reduce or even, at some point, completely obliterate, from cancer to heart disease to any other form of our bodies growing frail, falling apart, and eventually killing 100,000 of us *each day*, is by many orders of magnitude bigger than feeding any number of kids in Africa. In the long term, even to the kids in Africa themselves.

Every dollar in places such as the multi-million M-Prize competition encourages 10-20$ in research, if past competitions such as the X-Prize are to serve as an indicator.

Every dollar spent on targeted research (as opposed to research for the sake of research, only stumbling on useful anti-aging applications by chance) towards fixing things we *know* deteriorate in our bodies and that ideas (that require research) on how to fixing them are on the table, is nothing short of helping humanity as a whole. In the most literal sense of the word. Every dollar there increases our (read: your and my) chances of benefiting from them and living *significantly* longer (read: more than the 5-8 years on average that the linear graph anticipates for us at this stage. 15 Would be great. 25 Would be wonderful. And if those 25 get us to the point when better treatments are available that can keep us vigorous another 15 years, you won't see me objecting to that either).

Your sarcasm as put forth by the quotes is misplaced.

Real Anti-Aging research (as opposed to the cosmetic/snake-oil industry that shares the same name) that targets aging on the cellular level, is the by-far single most important charity one can donate to.

All of the important decisions about the rail have already been made, and the "research" mainly consists of trying to convince people that it's worth the astronomical costs to invest more money in such a system. We get so much federal funding from gas taxes specially allocated to mass transit, and Michigan has very little besides cars, so it's use it or loose it, but the proposal is just not going to happen in a region with a local recession, reasonably limited traffic congestion, and stable to declining population.

Sadly, this "research" gets in the way examinig of potentially useful and applicable solutions, which might actually be installed, and might actually have a net positive impact, especially in Detroit where poverty is so aweful and people have a genuine lack of transportation. Cheaper and faster solutions such as Mini Pods, more buses, or even rentable GPS tracked electric motor bikes might be considered instead.

Heck, just toss aside a measly 3% and double the M-Prize and you'll do the people of Metro Detroit more good.

Microsoft has at least 2 really big problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone needs their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.

The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinantly rich and their technology inordinantly influential.

The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.

Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yor look Spartan.

So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.

So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly poisition turning its many programmers and mountains of cash into succinct code?

Monetary Incentives for the Programmers, ala the C-Prize:

S = size of uncompressed code-base
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed code-base
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X

Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring the code. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.

They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.

The Methuselah Mouse Prize (MPrize), is the premiere effort of the Methuselah Foundation and is being offered to the scientific research team who develops the longest living Mus musculus, the breed of mouse most commonly used in scientific research. Developing interventions which work in mice are a critical precursor to the development of human anti-aging techniques, for once it is demonstrated that aging in mice can be effectively delayed or reversed, popular attitudes towards aging as 'inevitable' will no longer be possible. When aging in mice is shown to be 'treatable' the funding necessary for a full-line assault on the aging process will be made available. This is the true power of the Methuselah Mouse Prize, to demonstrate a proof of principle, and give hope to the world that decline in function and age-related disease are no longer guarantees, for us, or for future generations, if we work together now.

They could fund a prize competition such as the following:

Let anyone submit an open source program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:

Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize

Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where "simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you currently know about the universe.

He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones. Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of these can have probability higher than p.

-- Matt Mahoney

It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).

Let anyone submit an open source program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment [tinyurl.com] on it:

Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize

Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where "simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you currently know about the universe.

He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones. Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of these can have probability higher than p.

-- Matt Mahoney

It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).

Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?

The profound danger of a biased AI here is quite avoidable. The theoretic problem of unbiased AI has been formally solved by Marcus Hutter with AIXI:

Computational AI. There are strong arguments that AIXI is the most intelligent unbiased agent possible in the sense that AIXI behaves optimally in any computable environment.

This is the reason I set up the following definition of the C-Prize:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment on it:

Matt Mahoney
Jun 17, 7:18 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.compression
From: "Matt Mahoney"
Date: 17 Jun 2005 20:18:59 -0700
Local: Fri, Jun 17 2005 7:18 pm
Subject: Re: The C-Prize

Hutter's AIXI, http://www.idsia.ch/~marcus/ai/paixi.htm makes another argument for the connection between compression and AI that is more general than the Turing test. He proves that the optimal behavior of an agent (an interactive system that receives a reward signal from an unknown environment) is to guess that the environement is most likely computed by the shortest possible program that is consistent with the behavior observed so far. In other words, the most likely outcome for any experiment is the one with the simplest explanation, where "simplest" means the smallest program that could model what you currently know about the universe.

He gives a formal proof, but it basically says that the only possible distribution of the infinite set of programs (or strings) with nonzero probability is one which favors shorter programs over longer ones. Given any string of length n with probability p > 0, there are an infinite set of strings longer than n, but only a finite number of these can have probability higher than p.

-- Matt Mahoney

Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states:

It is shown that optimal text compression is a harder problem thanartificial intelligence as defined by Turing's (1950) imitation game; thus compression ratio on a standard benchmark corpuscould be used as an objective and quantitative alternative test for AI (Mahoney, 1999).

(Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge.)

Now a big question here is whether it might be possible to create a verifiably unbiased AI without making the compression program open source. In any case I don't think it is wise to trust any AI that hasn't at least gone through a compression competition with other purportedly unbiased AI's compressing an open source corpus.

Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?

Well, here's a suggestion:

Since:

1. Larry Page is on the board of directors of the X-Prize Foundation.
2. The mission of the X-Prize Foundation:

One of the advantages children have may also be the weakness in this study is that they show extreme plasticity. That is, their neurons are already growing and filling in gaps. Cases such as the "Boy with half a brain" demonstrate such extreme plasticity.

So, I'm somewhat hesitant that this procedure may be of great value to the population they picked. Instead, it may be issues like scarring that cause the most problems. Perhaps doing things like adding nerve growth factor (NGF), reducing inflammation, and keeping trauma victims cold would help more.

Well the foreseen consequences of not doing anything about aging are well known... getting frail, sick and dying.

The Sirtuin genes are well established as a regulator of genes expressed near the ends of telomeres and there are many researchers studying its effects in mammals in fact there are pharmaceutical companies (Sirtris for instance) betting the pharm that, resveratrol, a component of red wine and activator of mammalian sir2 pathway, can be tweaked into a more powerful drug and help everyone live healthier longer.

Whichever way you look at it... aging is going to be "oh so yesterday..." within the next few years. Baby boomers will soon get the message that we know enough to start really looking at the dysfunction that increases as we get older as "treatable" by attacking it at the root cellular processes which give rise to it. Now if only those people in the "pro-aging trance" could wake-up we'd there would really be an all out War on Aging and many of our parents and loved ones would be around longer not to mention the 250 billion dollars that would be saved not having to buy diapers for them. Seems the best solution to the rising costs of Medicare from an increasingly frail population that everyone is whining about is to maker sure they don't get frail in the first place.

In fact..

There's a research prize of THREE MILLION DOLLARS being offered to the scientist that beat the world record for the lifespan of a mouse using any technologies available.

Mprize

That metric is compression.

If there were funding for the C-Prize these guys might have walked away with a large chunk of it but then they might not have been able to acquire the monopoly rights they're pursuing via the patent application. The C-Prize description follows:

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

ExplanationA very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.

That metric is compression.

If there were funding for the C-Prize these guys might have walked away with a large chunk of it but then they might not have been able to acquire the monopoly rights they're pursuing via the patent application. The C-Prize description follows:

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

ExplanationA very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.

Marcus Hutter's AIXI paper provides a proof that if an agent is a good model for human behavior, and the universe is computable, that the most intelligent program is the smallest program that losslessly compresses the set of observations of the universe.

I've formalized a prize competition based on this criterion as the C-Prize, modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize. The big difference is that instead of lifespan the metric is intelligence. Here is the currently published C-Prize criteria:

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.

Marcus Hutter's AIXI paper provides a proof that if an agent is a good model for human behavior, and the universe is computable, that the most intelligent program is the smallest program that losslessly compresses the set of observations of the universe.

I've formalized a prize competition based on this criterion as the C-Prize, modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize. The big difference is that instead of lifespan the metric is intelligence. Here is the currently published C-Prize criteria:

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.

Marcus Hutter's AIXI paper provides a proof that if an agent is a good model for human behavior, and the universe is computable, that the most intelligent program is the smallest program that losslessly compresses the set of observations of the universe.

I've formalized a prize competition based on this criterion as the C-Prize, modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize. The big difference is that instead of lifespan the metric is intelligence. Here is the currently published C-Prize criteria:

Since all technology prize awards are geared toward solving crucial problems, the most crucial technology prize award of them all would be one that solves the rest of them:

The C-Prize -- A prize that solves the artificial intelligence problem.

The C-Prize award criterion is as follows:

Let anyone submit a program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.

S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).

Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:

Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))

Compression program and decompression program are made open source.

Explanation A very severe meta-problem with artificial intelligence is the question of how one can define the quality of an artificial intelligence.

Fortunately there is an objective technique for ranking the quality of artificial intelligence:

Kolmogorov Complexity

Kolmogorov Complexity is a mathematically precise formulation of Ockham's Razor, which basically just says "Don't over-simplify or over-complicate things." More formally, the Kolmogorov Complexity of a given bit string is the minimum size of a Turing machine program required to output, with no inputs, the given bit string.

Any set of programs which purport to be the standards of artificial intelligence can be compared by simply comparing their Artificial Intelligence Quality. Their AIQs can be precisely measured as follows:

Take an arbitrarily large corpus of writings sampled from the world wide web. This corpus will establish the equivalent of an IQ test. Give the AIs the task of compressing this corpus into the smallest representation. This representation must be a program that, taking no outside inputs, produces the exact sample it compressed. The AIQ of an AI is simply the ratio of the size of the uncompressed writings to the size of the program that, when executed, produces the uncompressed writings.

In other words, the AIQ is the compression ratio achieved by the AI on the AIQ test.

The reason this works as an AI quality test is that compression requires predictive modeling. If you can predict what someone is going to say, you have modeled their mental processes and by inference have a superset of their mental faculties.

Mechanics The C-Prize is to be modeled after the Methusela Mouse Prize or M-Prize where people make pledges of money to the prize fund. If you would like to help with the set up and/or administration of this prize award similar to the M-Prize let me know by email.

We will need some pretty advanced nanotech for both building and maintaning space settlements and terraforming planets too...but we also will need advanced medical nanotech so that we can repair the damage from exposure to radiation in space and on the surface of asteriods etc. because it's pretty harsh enviroment out there.

We'd had better start a lot less wars here on earth so that we can finance the nanotech research needed, after all, just in the last 5 years or so, the US and China and India, combined military spending has been OVER the 1-trillion (1000 billion or 1-million milionairs (if you had them all in a single room!!).

Imagine if we had invested that money into nano research instead, we would have had a working nanotech by right now, so that we could build any item you wanted from raw materials, you could cutom design that computer system you allways wanted (no gov't and hollywood/microsoft DRM crap!!), aso, you could use the nanotech to rebuild your body (if you are like a lot of us, over 25!!), so you could rejuvnate your body and mind back like you were 20-25 again and no getting old again, and if you have any medical problems like missing an arm or paralysed, etc, that could be solved too!!

It's funny, studies indicate that peaple would kill for the ability to cheaply reverse aging, (we spend toons of money on cosmeticals that don't work), but continue to finance the same old war behaviour every single decade, etc, and not invest in R&D to develop nano faster.

If you are a rich high-tech oriented person today, or you know one, you should insist that they help push the development of advanced nano/biotech, after all, it took only 4 years to develop the atom bomb, the same effort today could develop nano in 5 to 10 years, so why not do it, i'm surprised Bill Gates or Paul allen haven't developed advanced nano, if they did, the could be 10000 times richer and very much more famous too..
You could aso support the m-prize (they want to award a prize to the fist people who can stop/revese aging in a mouse model (http://www.mprize.org/).

One point which hasn't been made here yet is how the M Prizes are actually being awarded. These aren't one-time awards -- rather, a new cash award is given out each time the previous longevity record is broken, with the amount depending on how much the old record was beaten by.

The details from this page:

Longevity Prize (LP): details

The Longevity Prize is won whenever the world record lifespan for a mouse of the species most commonly used in scientific work, Mus musculus, is exceeded.

The amount won by a winner of PP is in proportion to the size of the fund at that time, but also in proportion to the margin by which the previous record is broken. The precise formula is:

Previous record: X days
New record: X+Y days
LP fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of death of record-breaker
Winner receives: $Z x (Y/(X+Y))

Thus, hypothetically, if the new record is twice the previous one, the winner receives half the fund. If the new record is 10% more than the old one, the winner receives 1/11 of the fund. The fund can thus never be exhausted, and the incentive to break the new record remains intact indefinitely. (This is in contrast to a structure that specifies a particular mouse age whose first achiever gets the whole fund.) We believe that this is important, because the public attention will be best maintained if there is a steady stream of record-breaks, showing that scientists are taking progressively better control of the aging process.

The record-breaker will receive prize money every week from the point where they beat the previous record. The amount paid each week will be as if their mouse had just died; the total amount won so far by a living record-breaker will be prominently displayed on the web site.

Rejuvenation Prize (RP): details

The Rejuvenation Prize rewards successful late-onset interventions. There are many ways to structure a prize to achieve this goal. The Rejuvenation Prize has been instituted (in replacement of the Reversal Prize -- see above) so as to satisfy two additional shortcomings of the Longevity Prize: first, that it is of limited scientific value to focus on a single mouse (a statistical outlier), and second, that the most important goal is to promote the development of interventions to restore youthful physiology, not merely to extend life. Thus, the Rejuvenation Prize rules are as follows:

1) The Rejuvenation Prize is awarded not for an individual mouse but for a published study. The study must satisfy the following criteria:

- The treated and control groups must have been at least 20 mice each.
- The intervention must have been begun at an age at least half of the eventual mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the CONTROL group.
- The treated mice must have been assessed for at least five different markers that change significantly with age in the controls, and there must be a statistically significant reversal in the trajectory of those five markers in the treated mice at some (unrestricted) time after treatment began versus some (also unrestricted) time before it began. (It is OK if other markers do not show this.)

2) The record that a new prizewinner has to beat should be the mean age at death of the longest-lived 10% of the treated group.

Conveniently, the Rejuvenation Prize does not require the same rigorous validation procedures as the Longevity Prize, because the age involved is defined to be that reported in the publication of the study.

A growing number of organizations and scientists know that the control of aging is foreseeable and desirable. It is no longer a question of if but when true medical interventions for aging will be developed. These people are pioneers in more ways than one: more than a few hardy visionaries have decided to become members of the Foundation as donors and by joining The Three Hundred. We share a common vision for the future - a world in which aging has been defeated and the years ahead become open ended.

"...it's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span."
Cynthia Kenyon Ph.D. ref

Much like The Three Hundred Greek warriors of Sparta, who bought the armies of Greece precious time at Thermopylae, this is a special group committed to defending the human race from a more ancient enemy... the suffering and misery of the aging process.

The Methuselah Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) registered organization. We are a group of dedicated professional and non-professional VOLUNTEERS who believe that the control of aging is forseeable preserving health and wisdom in a world that sorely needs it. There are NO salaries paid and no money given in compensation for the many hours invested in spreading this message. It is a labor of love. Below find a list of just a few of the individuals who have worked tirelessly in building the bedrock from which the Foundation arises to become the first organization of its kind in the world.

A growing number of organizations and scientists know that the control of aging is foreseeable and desirable. It is no longer a question of if but when true medical interventions for aging will be developed. These people are pioneers in more ways than one: more than a few hardy visionaries have decided to become members of the Foundation as donors and by joining The Three Hundred. We share a common vision for the future - a world in which aging has been defeated and the years ahead become open ended.

"...it's possible that we could change a human gene and double our life span."
Cynthia Kenyon Ph.D. ref

Much like The Three Hundred Greek warriors of Sparta, who bought the armies of Greece precious time at Thermopylae, this is a special group committed to defending the human race from a more ancient enemy... the suffering and misery of the aging process.

The Methuselah Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) registered organization. We are a group of dedicated professional and non-professional VOLUNTEERS who believe that the control of aging is forseeable preserving health and wisdom in a world that sorely needs it. There are NO salaries paid and no money given in compensation for the many hours invested in spreading this message. It is a labor of love. Below find a list of just a few of the individuals who have worked tirelessly in building the bedrock from which the Foundation arises to become the first organization of its kind in the world.