Ask Chris McKinstry About Giant Telescopes, Etc.

Have you ever heard of Chris McKinstry? If not (I hadn't until a few weeks ago), it's probably because he's been moving too quickly in the background for you to apprehend with human vision. In addition to operating the world's largest optical telescope -- the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paramal Observatory (Atacama, Chile) -- he writes and reviews books, hacks consciousness, creates art, and enjoys his family. Chris has agreed to field questions about the VLT, as well as about the upcoming OWL (OverWhelmingly Large) telescope project -- a 100-meter filled-aperture device which would put all current terrestrial telescopes to shame. Please read through the linked sites, then post your questions (one per comment, please) for Chris below; we'll pass along the best ones for his reply.

Comments

Hey...

[AntiPasto]

you know what they say about the size of a man's telescope... nudge-nudge, wink-wink...

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might as well ask it now..

[Blue Lang]

i noticed in your 'fave books' section that you have the blind watchmaker, et al.

so, with an eye towards dawkins' views on evolution, what's your personal take on the probability (not the possibility) of humans locating extraterrestrial life without going outside the solar system?

Terrestrial Optical Telescopes

[pb]

What are the benefits of having an Earth-bound, optical telescope?

Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?

If there are no advantages here, is it more cost-effective, or what?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Re:Terrestrial Optical Telescopes

[chgreer]

Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?

Think about trying to blast an 8.4m mirror into space -- imagine how much fuel you'd have to expend and how much it would cost. I once read that one space shuttle mission costs up around a billion dollars per launch, the cost of the payload not withstanding.

The dual Gemini telescopes that NOAO and a group of others are putting together are nearly 4 times the size of HST. NGST, or the next generation space telescope is years away from being launched (2010, maybe?) and will only be 6.4m.

(For those who don't know, a bigger mirror means more light gathering power (ie, fainter objects.) and higher spatial resolution (things are less fuzzy), so it is in effect, possible to build ground telescopes that are big enough to out resolve HST, even after dealing with atmosphereic corrections.

(Also, fwiw, spain will be building a 15m on the canary isles soon.) There is also the Large Binocular Telescope in AZ that will be going on line in 5 years or so that will have 2 8m mirrors that have the resolution of 1 18m mirror, and will allow astronomers even higher resolution.

So, the say it in a line: space is not the end all and be all of optical astronomy, no matter what STScI wants you to believe.

Re:Terrestrial Optical Telescopes

[eVarmint]

Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?

The OWL article answers this question nicely. The short of it is this:

1) Ground is way cheaper. At $1 Billion, the OWL will still be much cheaper than Hubble.

2) Adaptive optics can get you close to diffraction-limited resolution, which makes putting a telescope in space less compelling.

3) Bigger telescopes mean you can see much fainter objects and do lots more science in the same amount of time, saving even more money.

So basically, for the same amount of money as a space telescope you can get a telescope on the ground that sees farther and more clearly.

The real advantage of space telescopes is being able to see light that is absorbed by the atmosphere, and the ability to have huge baselines for interferometers. Both of these advantages should be considered complimentary to ground based telescopes, and not competative.

BHT (Big Honkin' Telescopes)

[Golias]

With so many "purdy pictures" coming in from the Hubble, and more orbital telescopes planned, it seems that we might approaching the point of diminishing returns for bigger ground-based telescopes.

Other than cost savings and easy access for changes, are there many advantages to staying on the ground?

funding

[jmayes]

What's the biggest hurdle to hop over in getting funding for projects like OWL?
And how did you pull it off?

Telescope naming conventions

[komet]

How do telescope designers come up with all those names? "Very Large Telescope", "OverWhelmingly Large ..", .. when will it all end? Will the 1000th telescope system be called "Obscenly Fucking Gigantic Big-Mama Mega Telescope"? It's not like Intel calls its latest processor "Very Very Very Fast 86". The only other group I know with such silly names are particle collider folks..

So, when will a new naming scheme come up?

:)

Re:Telescope naming conventions

[Mignon]

I think the BFT-9000 is next...

Why single-mirror?

[jd]

I could have been mis-reading the article, but it seemed to me as though the idea was to build a single-mirror system. On the other hand, in radio astronomy, and in the insect world, arrays are considered the norm.

Is there some advantage that a single mirror gives that cannot be duplicated using multiple smaller mirrors? (Simpler optics is an obvious one, paradoxically. :) Or is this (at least in part) NerdTrek III: The Search for Sponsors, where a record-setting single telescope is going to get more interest than a comparable array?

(A supplementary question, to go along with this. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that optical arrays are practical. Do you see any possibility of optical astronomers adopting the same line as radio astronomers, in trying to build an effective 1Km+ optical telescope, using an array?)

Re:Why single-mirror?

[phil reed]

Just for the record, when the Paramal Observatory is finished as planned, it will have 4 large telescopes running in an optical array.


...phil

Re:Why single-mirror?

[pq]

This is deep, so I won't do a good job of explaining this, but let me take a stab at it anyways... The fundamental difference is that quanta of light (photons) have more energy than quanta of radio waves (also photons, but ever hear them called that?): E = hf, as Planck tells us. So for a given signal strength, there are far more radio photons than there are optical photons - this implies that optical telescopes are in a quantum regime (shot noise limited), while radio telescopes work in a classical regime (thermal noise limited). So what? So: radio signals can be received and amplified and replicated "perfectly" - each telescope output can be split into N identical copies to be correlated against the other N telescopes in the array. But optical photons cannot be received and amplified without destroying coherence - so the light form one mirror has to be split N ways to be combind with the other N telescopes. That's why optical interferometry is only possible with huge mirrors like the VLT, where for 4 mirrors, 1/3 the light from each telescope is still enough photons to work with. For radio telescopes: add more scopes? Sure, just boost the amplifier some more. Optically, to add another scope, you need to increase collecting area by (N+1)/N. This is a fundamental limit, sadly - so it keeps us radio astronomers in business and makes optical interferometry very very hard... - pq: I can't login today, for some reason.

Re:Why single-mirror?

[gotan]

I think that is addressed under the keyword scalability: "Perhaps the most far-reaching innovations have been brought by the Keck, with virtually unlimited scalability of the telescope primary optics". The Keck telescope consists of 36 smaller mirrors (supplied by Kodak). Since for such big telescopes active optical control (meaning that the mirror(s) can be deformed slightly by special elements under them) is necessary anyway to counteract athmospheric effects and structural relaxation in different positions the problem of microadjusting all those smaller mirrors could be addressed by the active optics (though this is apparently still an issue).

This might also mean that the OWL could already start working before the main mirror is completely assembled, probably starting with the outer ring to make most of the diameter.

Re:Why single-mirror?

[jd]

The slashdot db seems to be manglified. Slashdot's been reporting all sorts of strange errors, from syntax errors to invalid form ids, this afternoon.

I think it's the Greys from Redmond, Alpha Centauri, upset at the telescope plans, which'll show their top-secret random number generator - oops, software design centre.

Why can't you guys think of some decent names?

[Psiren]

VLT = Very Large Telescope.
OLT = Overwhelmingley Large Telescope.

Kinda boring no? Haven't you astronomers got *any* imagination? ;-)

Now weary traveller, rest your head. For just like me, you're utterly dead.

A little prediction...

[Explo]

I'm sure that sooner or later in this post the usual argument raises its head: "What real use this has? Astronomy is not an useful science, and the funds should be instead transferred to something sensible and useful!"

I've usually just defended astronomy, but for once I want to be faster than the bashers ;)

How parellelizable?

[Omnifarious]

How parallelizable is the problem of micro-adjusting small portions of a large deformable mirror to correct for atmospheric distortion?

I remember a Scientific American article stating that you'd have to devote a top-of-the-line Cray to continuously recalculate the deformations needed given data from the guide star, or laser simulated guide star. If this problem is highly parallelizable, you may be able to get away with _much_ cheaper hardware.

I'm sure the idea has occured to you, but I want to know what your thoughts are on it.

Why on the ground

[ocelotbob]

With all of the problems our ground-based telescopes being blinded by lights of urban sprawl, why are you continuing to build terrestrial-based telescopes? It seems more and more obvious, at least to me, that we should be working towards putting the next generation of megatelescopes in space, so that we could use them basically 24 hours per day, and not have to worry about that metropolis growing every day.

Re:Why on the ground

[lennon]

It is cheaper to control light pollution than build something in space. http://www.darksky.org is just one of the places where a little money go a long way to fight light pollution.

Re:Why on the ground

[Omnifarious]

I can tell you the answer to this one.

The bigger your telescope, the more light you can gather and the finer the detail you can resolve. The problem that caused space spaced telescopes to be planned is atmospheric distortion. The density of the atmosphere, and hence its refractive index, changes in a complicated, almost random pattern. It's why stars twinkle.

OWL will be a deformable mirror telescope. It will technically not be a single mirror telescope, but a whole gigantic array of hexegontal deformable mirrors all abutting eachother. The fact that the mirrors are deformable means that you can use light from a bright object or laser beam to on-the-fly recalibrate the mirror for atmospheric distortion effects, resulting in a clear picture.

Building a large mirror like this in space would be very costly. Much more costly than building it on the ground. And previous problems that have made large mirrors not very useful on the ground now have solutions.

Re:Why on the ground

[drudd]

Actually the Hubble cannot be used anywhere near 24 hours a day. You have the problem of avoiding the very bright sun and moon, both which would easily damage the sensitive instruments.

You also have the problem that at any given time half of the sky is blocked by the earth.

Doug

Can you track something fast?

[lennon]

Could this scope be trained on the moon, or even on something even closer by, like a spacecraft in orbit? Would the slewing system be nimble enough to track something moving very fast (like the spacecraft or the moon), or to get to a place where gamma ray burst was detected fast enough?

Atmospheric Turbulence Correction?

[exploder]

I've read a little bit about mechanisms to correct for atmospheric distortion using adaptive optics. To what degree can these systems reduce the distortion that an earth-based telescope suffers? Will advances in this area make it less attractive to put an optical telescope in space, given that the cost of lifting it into orbit can instead be used for corrective systems, and to build a larger instrument?

Yeah, they're big...

[viper21]

But what do you do with them?

What kind of work do the telescopes at your facility generally do? Do local astronomers get to come in and do research or are the scopes reserved for some large project?

Thanks,

-S

Scott Ruttencutter

a good telescope question

[gtx]

what is your take on having telescopes with mirrors and lenses polished by nanomachines? it sounds like a good idea. just think about it... molecular sized defects taken out by little machines! it may be a bit far off, but i wanted to know if you thought it sounded like it was at all possible, or if it's even a good idea.

CCD or what?

[paRcat]

What kind of imaging does a telescope of this scale use? Is it an OWLCCD or something else? What kind of resolution? And how far away would an object need to be before the resolution becomes a shortcoming?

Moon closeup

[russiste]

I've always wondered: "now" that we have incredibly powerful telescopes, wouldn't be possible to take closeup pictures of the moon, for example where people have landed (and/or left some stuff)? (it has been already asked if it would be possible to track the moon considering its relative fast speed).

It sure would put an end to all of those conspiracy theories... or maybe confirm them. ;-)

Greg

Division between Science and Spirituality

[ParticleGirl]

I am continuously frustrated that people's general perception seems to be that science and art, spirituality, and so forth are divided by an uncrossable schism. People feel the need to pit science against spirituality; logic against intuition. It is a rare thing that people accept the idea that these are different ways of approaching the same reality. As a dreamer and artist as well as a respected scientist, what do you say to people who doubt that scientists can be spiritual and artistic people?

GAC's future and Hacking Consciousness

[Animol]

From a look around the MindPixels site, I must say I'm fairly impressed with the idea of training an AI-consciousness through not just interaction, but through large-scale, longer-term communication with Real Live Human Beings. The question this leads me to, though, is two-part:
1. When GAC is online, working, and trained to a certain extent, what purpose will he/she/it serve aside from a learning experience in the AI consciousness field?
2. Do you think there's a large place for non-human "presences" on the internet at large?

Technology

[rw2]

I know that SDSS (www.sdss.org) uses Linux in it's effort to map the sky. Can you tell us about the hardware, OS and software used for your kind of control and DAQ work and what considerations were particularly relevant in the selection process?

Distributed Computing Problems

[Aravaipa]

Recently, SETI@HOME has received much attention for their distributed project, which allows non-astronomers to participate in the search for ET. Can you think of any other astronomy projects that could benefit from this approach utilizing the data from these new telescopes?

How can we help?

[Mignon]

You probably know about SETI At Home, which lets people volunteer spare CPU time to processing radio-telescope data, in a (so far vain) attempt to find extra-terrestrial intelligence. Is there a similar way that we can help process some of the data that you gather?

As a simple example, one could compute the differences between a sequence of pictures of the same portion of the sky, looking for anomalies like giant asterioids on their way to wiping us all out.

Bang for Buck

[A nonymous Coward]

A. A whole lot cheaper, factor of ten or so I believe.

B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.

C. Much easier to upgrade ground based equipment.

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Re:Bang for Buck

[Hooptie]

B. Huge telescopes aren't yet even possible in space; no way to get them up there.

That is making the assumption that the telescope is constructed on the ground, put inside a rocket, then sent into orbit. Why could a telescope not be constructed in orbit much like the International Space Station? If it is a problem with constructing a giant lens in situ, why not use a ssytem of smaller mirrors rather than one giant lens, as has been done with some terrestrial telescopes such as the MMT?

Hooptie

Re:Bang for Buck

[Coz]

There are other issues in space... accurate pointing, attitude control, vibration damping, power management, orbit maintenance and management of thruster fuel, thermal loads (absolute and differential)... whereas on Earth, you have a stable base (outside the occasional earthquake), accurate pointing is a well-developed technology, you can plug into the power grid, you orbit geosynchronously at a (hopefully ;-) stable altitude, you can control the temperature of the mirror (although you're stuck with the quality and temp of the air outside your dome).

Huge telescopes COULD be assembled in space - even better, multiple large telescopes could be used cooperatively, or in very long baseline interferometry. The technology's chancier, the price tag is an order of magnitude higher, and then you have to have gen-u-ine Rocket Scientists get the thing(s) into orbit, and assembled - then there's the continuing Ground Control cost, and piles of money for the occasional servicing mission (if you want a long, reliable life).

Thirty years from now, yeah, we can do this stuff in orbit. For now, let's prove the adaptive optics, control technologies, and other basic principles here on the planet, where we can get to it to fix it when it breaks.

Re:Bang for Buck

[A nonymous Coward]

Because no matter how you divide it up, the same principle still applies. For the same price of linking 10 2.4 meter telescopes in orbit, you could link 10 ten meter telescopes on the ground.

Someday space construction won't be so expensive, but it is now.

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OWL not OLT

[A nonymous Coward]

Yes I know you're just being funny, but you should realize that that OverWhelmingly Large Telescope is otherwise known as OWL. Get it? :-)

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How do you guys do it?

[pc486]

With exptreemly high magnification, how in heck do you keep the telescope still enough to take photos?

The slightest movement ought to mean millions of miles so thoes pesky little earthquakes should be a problem. Not to mention how you guys move the telescope accuratly.

Atmospheric interference

[john_many_jars]

I was wondering...

What is the advantage of having such a massive earth-bound telescope (OWT)? I understand that the potential resolution is extremely sharp. However, WRT collecting photons that have journeyed through the atmosphere, the best of telescopes (even with adaptive optics) can only approach the diffraction limit of the telescope. Further work in using phase diversity images can get fairly close to the diffraction limit, but the problem is collecting enough photons to have an out-of-focus image (as well as a computer fast enough to generate restorations from the phase diversity images). In short, as a cost-benefit analysis, will the OWL telescope produce a big enough marginal return on resolution such that it is worth the effort and $$ to create and how will it handle the problems of atmospheric interference?

Observatory software/hardware.

[Remote]

In fact, two related questions here:

• 1 - What kind of software runs the show? I assume you have at least software for positioning, a stellar body database and image processing/enhancing software. Which are those? Any other interesting bit about this?

  2 - What computer/OS platform do you use? Is it basically off-the-box or did it need major tweaking to meet your needs? If so, how were those needs special?

Things outside our plane of existence...

[Curious__George]

I would like to present a brief analogy to ask a larger question: Imagine a theoretical TWO dimensional universe. A planet in this two dimensional universe would be like a flat sheet of paper with no thickness. Two dimensional creatures living "on" that planet would have no knowledge or concept of "up" or "down" (the third dimension). If there were two of these creatures, standing side by side, and one of us (being three dimensional creatures) reached down and picked one of them up, he would have appeared to simply disappear from his friends perspective. If we put him back down, he would seem to magically reappear. These creatures would have no concept of how this was accomplished and the creature lifted would have no words to adequately express what he had experienced. Moving this thought experiment up a dimension, it would be equally simple for a "higher being" to transfer a mouse inside a tennis ball (and back), though this would be "impossible" from our viewpoint. Based on the above thought experiment, my question for Chris is this: Does he believe that there are things that exist outside our plane of existence that BY THEIR VERY NATURE cannot be proved or explained by observation and scientific methodology? (This does not mean that science does not provide an extremely valuable service, just that it may be the height of arrogance to believe that the only things that exist or are possible are those postulated by science). Curious George

Re:Things outside our plane of existence...

[Mignon]

This sounds like Abbott's "Flatland" meets Goedel's incompleteness theorem. Goedel's theorem states, roughly, that within an axiomatic system (satisfying some criteria that I've forgotten), there are statements that can be constructed which are true or false, but which cannot be proved to be so by those axioms.

It would be hard to apply this theorem to our observed universe, however, since we don't really know the set of axioms that determines the universe...

Can anyone whose math/logic is less rusty than mine elaborate?

The big at the expense of the small

[Anonymous Coward]

What doesn't seem to appreciated by the people that control the Science grant lines is that you can't do everything with these monster telescopes. Nearby objects are simply too bright to observe with 4m+ telescopes. Yet many of the smaller telescopes are being shut down to fund the new ones. Given that many properties of remote objects are inferred from observations of nearby stars (see the results of the Hipparcos parallax measurements for an example of some alarming discrepancies in the distances of nearby stars) the continued future of small telescopes is vital.

Does Chris McKinstry have any comments on this??

Duncan

Adaptive Optics and Inferometers

[wazzzup]

Has adaptive optics foregone the need to deploy space-based telescopes? For those who don't know about adaptive optics, the primary mirror continuously makes small variations in its figure to compensate for atmospheric distortions, thus giving very crisp resolution like we see from the Hubble (which operates free from atmospheric distortions). To launch or construct a 100m scope in space would seem to be exceedingly expensive both in initial construction costs and the inevitable component replacements and upgrades. Given the cost of launching and constructing objects in space, recent advances in the field of adaptive optics and placing several smaller telescopes in an array to simulate larger apertures (what, if I recall correctly, is called an inferometer), do space-based scopes still offer any advantages to earthbound scopes?

Re:Error:syntax error at (eva

[rjamestaylor]

All the Slashboxen are out of date. LWN Daily is reporting a breaking news flash: Linuxcare CIO is out! Wow! ;) RXC's I, Cringley is dated 4/14/00.

Hmmm...has Slashdot reverted some content serving to a pre-Exodus backup?

Inquiring minds want to know...

I really shouldn't use my +1 bonus ...

GAC

[Dungeon Dweller]

I have an active interest in artificial intelligence. I study it as part of my major, and hope to do research in it in the future. As a young man coming up in the world, I am hoping to enter into research eventually, am entering into research at my university (WVU).

Your project reminds me of several projects/theories that have been discussed before. In the psychological debate, your system depends entirely upon nurture, it would seem. I like that kind of system and research. I do have a few questions.

1) What separates this from other projects in the field?
2) Where did you draw your inspiration for this project?
3) What kind of support staff do you recommend to an individual who has never led research before, but would like to? (I ask this of many of my professors who conduct research)
4) Where are you getting the bulk of your input for this project?
5) What do you hope to learn from this project?
6) At what time will you consider this project a success?

I know that I posed a lot of questions, but several could be answered in combination, I just didn't want to ask 2 questions at the same time.

Pentium...

[Dungeon Dweller]

Pentium, Pentium II, Pentium III.

They've gone up to 886, and stuck with the pentium name, which just implies 5... It's hard to come up with names that simply mean "It's bigger" when that was what the last one meant. I mean, they'll name one "The telescope to end all telescopes" which will be followed by "The telescope to end all TEAT (Telescope to End All Telescope) class telescopes" or "TEATEATCT."

cost, and the future of large observatories

[mattorb]

Given the enormous startup cost of a 100-m class scope ($1 billion-ish), and the truly stunning operating costs (many thousands of dollars per night), do you think such scopes will continue to be developed by, eg, university consortiums? Or do you think we will have to develop a new funding/use model? My point is that very, very few schools can contemplate even being a part of a project like OWL, nor (in the current political landscape) does it seem likely that governments will be eager to dish out funds for very many such scopes. Given these conditions, do you doubt that there will ever be more than one or two instruments of this size, do you suspect that universities will band into larger and large consortiums, or do you imagine industry (for some reason which escapes me at the moment) taking interest in such a project and providing funds?

How exactly do you enjoy your family?

[Municipa]

And why where there a link for [timothy] to use like his did your other interests? Fishing trips, playing with the family cat, that kind of thing. Post them man!

Open GAC

[Jelloman]

I have three similar questions:

Will the MindPixel Digital Mind Modeling Project be open source? Will GAC be an open consciousness? Will your database of MIST stimuli be freely available for the use of other artificial consciousness researchers?

I've discerned some of your intent from the arcondev archives and from Jeff Elman's Finding Structure in Time. You seem to believe that the amount of effort required to carry out your experiment mandates some kind of economic incentive structure to get people to participate; as I understand it, you intend to issue participants stock in MindPixel Corp proportional to their contribution, and then share the profits from any commercial exploitation of the result.

I have two problems/arguments with this:
1) Economic reward as the sole means to incent participation ("production") is an unprovable axiom underlying most economic theory. It totally disregards the human needs to create, communicate, and form communities. The success of the open source software movement has proven this assumption wrong. People can and will participate for other reasons; in fact, the commercial character of your project may disincent some people, especially the audience here. Have you considered other incentives? (I'm not taking issue with the incentive, but rather that it seems to be based in part on keeping the results private.)
2) You yourself have emphasized Elman's point about the "importance of starting small." I think this statement and his initial failures also indicate the importance of starting multiple times. If your project is closed, it will prevent (to borrow a software development term) "forking" the consciousness. A single GAC will tell you less than many GACs.

Re:Size limitations of optics...

[nstrug]

At a guess...

The subject is always at infinity so all you need to worry about is if the focal plane is at the right distance from the secondary/tertiary mirror. The focal plane assembly is fairly small so can be wound back and forth on actuators of some description I suppose.

From your question it sounds as if you are a wee bit confused. There are no lenses in these telescopes, just two (or three depending on the configuration) mirrors. The mirrors are made of glass but are backwards compared to the mirror in your bathroom - the light bounces off the coated side without passing through the glass. The glass is there purely to support the layer of silver or whatever the hell they use. Glass is used as it can be polished to very low tolerances and is thermally stable but it plays no optical role in the telescope - it's merely a support for the reflecting surface.

Nick

Still room for amateurs?

[mav[LAG]]

Amateurs with smallish telescopes still contribute a lot to worldwide observation efforts. Any chance of this happening with at least some aspects of radio astronomy?

Question:

[Byteme]

Do you get sick of hearing Uranus jokes?

Mindpixels and the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test

[Dan Crash]

Moderators: I came in late, but I think I have something substantial to say, here.
Can you help me out?

Message begins:

Hey Chris --

I remember you posting about the Mindpixel project several years back on the comp.ai.* hierarchy, before it was called the Mindpixel project, back when you were first attempting to build the Corpus.

(For those of you just jumping in here, I'll quote from Chris' website:

MindPixel, MindPixel, I guess I should define a MindPixel...

A MindPixel is a kernel sentence of consensus fact, such as:

- The sky is usually blue:TRUE
- It is difficult to swim with ski pants on:TRUE
- Water is a dry powder:FALSE
- Mars is the first word is this sentence:TRUE

MindPixels are always binary and are answered by most people in the same way when instructed 'Respond as you think most human beings would respond'.

I call these MindPixels because it is my strong opinion that with a very large number of MindPixels, we can create a high dimensional image of consciousness. Where each kernel sentence is one pixel in that image.

The brilliant part (IMHO) of what Chris has described is his method of determining whether or not a system is, in fact, conscious, called the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, or MIST. Where the Turing Test is completely subjective, the MIST is objective. It uses a series of binary (yes/no) questions to establish a threshhold for human-level cognition. With it, any system can be tested and rated based on its deviation from chance (50%).

So, as I remember you were flamed pretty hard at the time by the comp.ai.* yokels. Not that THAT means anything; they hate EVERYONE. But there were a few trenchant critiques there that I don't remember you answering adequately.

The big one that sticks out in my mind is the following: For your corpus, there seems to be some small problem regarding certain types of binary questions. For instance, those questions which depend having more data about the situation to provide the correct answer (i.e. "Is P-e4 a good move?") or can meaningfully be answered either way ("Are human beings often blue?"). Your response was that ambiguous questions like these will be eliminated from the Corpus, but some might say that you are solving the problem of intelligence by eliminating the intelligent questions. Can your Corpus function as successful training data and create a system approximating our own level of cognition when it encapsulates such a narrow slice of human intelligence?

(My own idea was that the MIST needed to be expanded from a binary to a quaternary model so that it could reflect the knowledge that some questions can be answered both ways, and some questions simply don't make sense. Call it the "yes/no/both/huh" variant.)

Also, I seem to recall some criticism based on information theory grounds; the idea that even with billions of these buggers, you still won't have enough to do anything meaningful with.

Care to update us? I found your work fascinating the last time, and am glad to see you continuing it.

Living in Chile

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

How does having a big international science facility in Chile influence the Chileans?

How do you adapt to living in a place (the Atacama desert) with virtually no rain?
__

Hubris

[gad_zuki!]

How much scientific hubris do you need to believe that consciousness is simply an effect of electrical activity in the brain and that your complex object of choice (computers, internet, etc) will suddenly come 'alive?' Answer: Lots

Makes about as much sense as the space shuttle coming alive because its so complex.

Re:There are incompatibilities.

[gad_zuki!]

Considering there's a difference between spirituality and religion I'd say the problem isn't as real as you make it out to be. Not to mention that the fundamentalist type belief you describe isn't as popular as it used to be.

Seems to me that people are taking a great dose of scientific cosmology as faith, as much as the followers as organized religion, and not understanding that our current knowledge is far from perfect and existance is almost as much a mystery as its ever been. I don't see a conflict between religion and science as much as a migration for the credulous from one orthodoxy to another without question and ignorance of the underlying philosphy.