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So after reading the article (I know, rare for a slashdotter) I started wondering who they named the probe after. Turns out they named it after a 17th century astronomer who was the first to observe Saturn's four moons.

Some more info on the man behind the name of the probe can be found here.

The Maths equivalent of the Nobel prize is the Fields medal.

My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician ... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting :-)

Every branch of science will therefore run into ever deeper trouble; when it climbs too high it is almost completely shrouded in even greater isolation, where the remembered results of that science take on an independent existence. The "foundations" of this branch of science are investigated, and that soon becomes a new branch of science. One then begins to search for the foundations of science in general and knocks up some "theory of knowledge." As they climb higher and higher confusion grows until they are all completely deranged. Some in the end quietly give up; having thought for a long time about the elusive link betwen the intuiting consciousness (which develops from the perceptional world) and the perceptional world itself (which in turn only exists through and in the forms of the intuiting consciousness) - a confusion which arose from their own sin of constructing a perceptional world - they then plug the hole with the concept of the ego, which was self-created with and at the same time as their perceptional world; and they say, "Yes, of course, something must remain incomprehensible, and that something is the ego that comprehends."

But there are others who do not know when to stop, who keep on and on until they go mad: they grow bald, shortsighted, and fat; their stomachs stop working properly; and moaning with asthma and indigestion they fancy that equilibrium is within reach - and almost reached. So much for science, the last flower and ossification of culture.

17th post. 17 is a Gaussian prime. read more here

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About ten years ago, Rodney Brooks (also of MIT) flipped AI on its head with his "insect bots," which took a bottom-up (instead of Minskyesque top-down) approach. Brooks put a cheap microprocessor and servo motor on each of six "legs" of a lowly bot, and programmed each leg unit to do extremely simple things like check whether the leg was bumping against something, and if so, to lift it. Repertoires of behavior learned from the environment were then stored and re-used when similar stimuli presented themselves again. What happened after a short time was that far more complex behaviors than were programmed "emerged" from the collection of puny processors and actuators. With just a few lines of code, the damned things could navigate complex environments (like a back yard) that completely foiled Minsky-style bots run by minicomputers and millions of lines of instructions. (Brooks coined the phrase "fast, cheap, and out of control" to describe not only his bots, but the behaviors they "invented" by walking around.)

George Dyson (Freeman's son) wrote a book a couple of years ago called Darwin among the Machines that is as good an explanation of machine-evolved intelligence as I've seen. It's packed with illustrative stories from both within and without the discipline. Look here for Dyson's own commentary and some good links. Hans Moravec, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Field Robotics Lab, also writes very convincingly, if speculatively, about the evolution of machine intelligence, in his recent book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind . It's a fascinating read.

After what's been learned in the past decade about how machines can become intelligent, Minsky seems to me a bit like Lord Kelvin. Kelvin made tremendous contributions to science, especially in the fields of heat theory and thermodynamics, but in his later years, became mired in defending some pet theories that were way past their prime. He railed bitterly against Darwin, claimed the Earth was only a few million years old, and refused to accept radioactivity. One of his biographers observed that for the first half of his career, he could no wrong, and for the second half, he seemingly could do no right. Minsky, alas, has in some ways shared this fate.

Perhaps differ may be too stong a word... His reputation is a bit daunting.

I think Microsoft have done a lot of good things for the software industry, although it messed up many other companies in the process... (Like what happened to Stac Technologies' Intellectual Property Rights for instance? Hmm...)

I have a foot in both coffins, I guess. I actively use Linux to develop one product, and adhere to the GPL etc..., and with the other hand(foot?) I write COM+ for a commercial Bank.

To add to Linus' examples of famous people, I'd like to add 'van Gogh' and 'Ramanujan' who (in my opinion) was a greater mathematician than the ill-tempered Newton. These people also did Science/Art in the name of Art, and was rewarded by dying poor and sickly (mentally and physically).

For any 'normal' person out there who does not want to die in this way, they may have to resort to some way of preotecting investments.

It's not always easy if you are not Stallman/Linus/Newton to protect your interests, and make profit out of it in some other value added service way....

Forgive my impurtenance (and spelling?) for this article... I hope someone may find it informative at the very least.

:)

I think Microsoft have done a lot of good things for the software industry, although it messed up many other companies in the process... (Like what happened to Stac Technologies' Intellectual Property Rights for instance? Hmm...) I have a foot in both coffins, I guess. I actively use Linux to develop one product, and adhere to the GPL etc..., and with the other hand(foot?) I write COM+ for a commercial Bank. To add to Linus' examples of famous people, I'd like to add 'van Gogh' and 'Ramanujan' who (in my opinion) was a greater mathematician than the ill-tempered Newton. These people also did Science/Art in the name of Art, and was rewarded by dying poor and sickly (mentally and physically). For any 'normal' person out there who does not want to die in this way, they may have to resort to some way of preotecting investments. It's not always easy if you are not Stallman/Linus/Newton to protect your interests, and make profit out of it in some other value added service way.... Forgive my impurtenance (and spelling?) for this article... I hope someone may find it informative at the very least. :)

both essentially came up with calculus at the same time

2000 years after Archimedes did.

Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.

If QChem is your bag, you might want to look at GAP (Groups, Algorithms, and Programming) here. The license isn't quite GPL, but it's not too hostile either.

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Thanks to him, our concept of formal logical systems will never be the same:

Let us consider any formal theory T that contains a full-fledged concept of natural numbers... Let us build for T Gödel's formula G sub T asserting "I am not provable in T". Gödel proved that, indeed, G sub T cannot be proved in T, i.e Gödel proved that G sub T is a true formula... Therefore, if we choose an arbitrary formal theory T, then Kurt Gödel - by using his "informal, creative thinking" - proves immediately some assertion G sub T about properties of natural numbers, which cannot be proved in T. Hence, none of [the] formal theories can express 100% of the "informal, human" concept of natural numbers. If you fix some particular formal theory, my "creative mind" will unmistakably find out a true assertion G sub T overcoming all what can be proved in T.

The analysis of Gödel's proof ... forces us to revise this picture. One can prove that G sub T is a true formula (i.e. that G sub T cannot be proved in T) only by postulating consistency of T. Indeed, if G sub T is proved to be true, then also consistency of T is proved (G sub T asserts its own unprovability, and the unprovability of at least one formula means consistency of T). Hence, if we do not know, whether T is consistent or not, we can say nothing about the truth or falsity of G sub T. What could think the enthusiasts of the above picture about the consistency problem?

"Mathematics is the part of science you could continue to do if you woke up tomorrow and discovered the universe was gone."

Z. the M. [Cursing the fact that /. doesn't support markup for superscripts and subscripts... ;-)]

Zontar The Mindless,

I got the trailer from the UK at almost 100 Kbps (kissing my ADSL modem right now ;-)....