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Slashback: Bots, Time Travel, Turing
That eerie, eerie theme music will get in your head all day. sideshow-voxx writes: "The BBC has announced that there will be more installments of the Audio Adventure Dr Who - Death Comes to Time available on the web in the New Year."
This is cool news (the accompanying art is a nice touch with this Dr. Who presentation), but it would be nice if they would put the episodes into more audio formats as well.
Things always seem to get more complicated. Eric Molitor, ("Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May") wrote about the BattleBots vs. Battlebots story of the other day, saying:
"As a BattleBot competitor I was horrified when I noticed your article but here are some corrections... BattleBots INC != BattleBots the show.BattleBots INC is suing and not the TV show. (Comedy Central tapes the tournaments and airs portions of the finals on a TV show. But thats just like showing NFL games mostly. The TV company just pays a licensing fee to broadcast the event.)
Do a little research and the guy registered his domain at least a year after the first BattleBots competition in Long Beach. (Early 1998) In fact the battlebots.org domain was registered after BattleBots.com, and after BattleBots applied for their TM.
So this kid (running a script kiddie hosting service no less) registers a domain after somebody applies for the TM and then asks for $5K to give it up. Sounds like cyber-squatting to me. Also take a look at the dates on the website for the replies, etc. Things don't look right ....
Still BattleBots is dumb not to have registered the .org domain.
For a little history on BattleBots and the law suits, etc. that RobotWars got into that nearly destroyed this sport take a look at http://www.robotcombat.com/history.html.
Greg and Tray gave up a lot and everybody got together to dodge RobotWars/Profile records lawsuits to prevent the sport from happening. I'd hate to see them unfairly get a bad name."
Thanks, Eric.
Something to see in England. slathering wrote with news that the Alan Turing memorial written about in this Slashdot story has finally materialized. He writes: "I read about this in this months IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (who doesn't have a website). But I found the website for the memorial itself. Apparently funding was found for the Alan Turing Memorial since it was unveiled June 23, 2001 in Manchester, England. It was funded without any donations from the computing industry."
I had no idea he was so young.
Makes you wonder what would have come had he lived twice as long and had the more powerful technology to play with.
You should. Alan Turing is considered by some to be the father of modern Artificial Intelligence. A troubled soul whose contributions to the world included The Turing Test (to measure whether a program is artificially intelligent or not) and cracking the German Enigma cypher code during the war.http://www.math.sfu.ca/histmath/Europe/20thCen turyAD/Turing.html for more
info.
Well, this surely sheds a little more light on the Battlebots situation. The NFL analogy is a good one. CBS and Fox have no rights to the NFL name. They only pay $100's of millions for the right to broadcast the games. So it's not Comedy Central that is not suing the kid, but the owner of the Battlebots properties. Who registered his trademark long before the battlebots.org name was registered. I think the kid would be better off taking his $70 for the domain transfer and cutting his losses now...
Doctor Who was a popular television show that ran in Belgium between 1972-1974. In it's day it was one of the most popular shows in Belgium and it starred Larry Lamb and John Craven (who went on to star in Hollywood movies such as Terminator and Total Recall).
No episodes exist of this classic TV show, but we can relive the episodes thanks to Steve Roberts who has reconstructed them from Crayon drawings and dialogue from episodes of Eldorado. The show was axed in 1974 after allegations that it was just a big hoax designed to extract money from the Belgium TV service. These allegations were denied by the production company, Grabitandrun.
There is another Doctor Who series as well, but by all accounts it was some obscure rubbish that is long since dead.
Well it certainly seems that Doctor Who is still popular. Not only is it being published on the web but the BBC releases an old episode on DVD every 3 months, has fequent VHS releases, comes up with two new novels every month and has licensed Big Finish to produce audio plays on CD in to the second half of this decade.
It's a wonder that with all this interest nobody is filming new episodes for TV.
there are many artificial systems designed to interact with humans even now that fool humans.
One has to set different standards for different kinds of cognition, communication and interaction. An IRC user can sound like a computer if he or she is from another country and has a limited grasp of the language in which you and s/he are conversing, for instance.
A human can compete with a chess playing computer and his or her experience with computers may have been limited, so without further input that chess playing human may mistake this computer for another live person.
I think that artificial intelligence wpould be best measured with an understanding of emotion and ethics, so psychological and ethical examinations, such as those administered in Blade Runner.
Goat sex free since 2001
More acurately he is the father of Computing Science and he developed the "turing machine" -- basically the simplest model of a machine necessary to compute anything that is computable. He also determined what is computable by a machine and what is not computable, e.g.the halting problem
In the main, you can not change it. The smart ones survive it, the dumb ones commit suicide. That's the reality. A little love and understanding, and a little openness makes life more bearable.
Alan Turning was a brilliant mathematician, he was also a homosexual. Having a gender issue does not prevent you from making a serious contribution to society. On the other hand, the very same thing, like any other defect, gives one ample scope to master other skills to a much more worthy level.
And it's sad, that we take away from these great people the fruits of their work, and at the same time, make their life more miserable for what they are. Even if this makes them what they are.
Learn to love and cherish variety. It's what make the world go around.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Linux hacker and Builder of Violator - Linux powered BattleBot that competed in May
Somebody needs to build an NT powered battlebot, then we can have a serious NT vs Linux battle. (Of course the bastard will probably bluescreen as soon as the competition heats up...)
You're using her as bait, Master!
Bletcheley Park, where Alan Turing and others defeated the German Enigma (as well as other codes) during WW2 is also in some financial trouble. If you find yourself in England, it's worth a trip. Until then, they could use your support (or you can buy stuff from them).
Having visited Bletcheley Park for the first time last year, I highly recommend the trip. If you have any interest in WW2, code breaking, or the history of computing, it is a great place to visit. You can really feel the history as you walk past the huts where Turing and others worked. If you've read Cryptonomicon or The Code Book, it's even cooler.
Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
The irony of Turing holding the apple is quite a powerful message, as stated at the end of the article. Symbol of Newton, and yet he deliberately took his life with one (news to me).
Imagine helping save Europe from the Nazi's and then being prodded and forced by politicians and doctors to take libido-surpressing drugs: people who's very asses you helped save, all because they're fucking prudes.
Fuckers.
Makes me recite the anticlericalist mantra: intolerance of the intolerant. In the words of Consolidated (from Play More Music), "Yes, we're hypocrites, but for the left."
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I have read some of Turing's papers. The man was *far* ahead of his time. He was a major factor in breaking Enigma. His work was the basis for computing as we know it today.
If it was not for Turning, many of us would be speaking German. (And I have a bad enough time spelling as it is...)
And as payback he was hounded to the point where he commited suicide because the narrow-minded twits who were/are in charge of Britian thought that being a homosexual was a "security risk". (The only people who were overly concerned about it were the ones in the Government. You can't be blackmailed if no one cares.)
As Frank Zappa said "Drool Britiania".
And even more shameful is that NO ONE in the computer industry is willing to honor the man in a way where their name will be seen. Are they that concerned about the blue-noses and busy bodies? Must be. Not like they don't owe him for Computer Science as we know it today...
But they are not alone in the blame game. The ACM and IEEE should have been involved as well.
Too damn much attention is given to preasure groups now-a-days.
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The real proof that computers have reached human levels of "intelligence" would be a machine that will blame a mistake onto another, hierarchically lower machine.
+++ath0
(Text padding to get past the filter.)
On a related note, Tom Stoppard wrote a movie called "Enigma" about Bletcheley park. It was produced by the odd pairing of Mick Jagger and Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels.
I saw the movie at Sundance last year (both Lorne & Mick as well as the director Michael Apted were there and answered questions afterwards) and while it wasn't a GREAT film by any means, I think it would definately be interesting to the slashdot crowd-- Kate Winslet was pretty awesome (she's good in everything though) and it had a cool "cloak and dagger" feel to it.
I'm not sure if the movie's out yet. I also can't remember Alan Turing being mentioned specifically, though there are lots of scenes of guys brainstorming trying to crack the code, plenty of BBC-esque twists and turns, and the film does a great job of explaining how the enigma machine actually operates. Just getting to see it how it was actually used in close-up is pretty cool.
I believe Mick Jagger actually had one of the few surviving enigmas which they used for the film. I also think Jagger has a cameo as an english general or something for about a 10th of a second, but it was so fast I coulda been wrong.
During the Q&A the actors said they got to meet many of the surviving members of the Bletcheley Park team, and some scientists tried to explain to them what they were saying in the film. They didn't understand it apparently, but had a lot of respect for those guys..
The best laugh was when during a somewhat technical discussion about the enigma machine and the various sea battle sequences, someone asked how historically accurate the film was and Lorne Michaels replied, "Well, the film was mostly accurate-- although in the actual war, the Germans lost."
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Since I don't live in a country that's covered by the Official Secrets Act, I can say what should be pretty obvious: some brain-damaged James Bond type decided that having an openly gay scientist with a head full of Ultra-grade secrets just wouldn't do.
I have to throw in my favorite Turing story. During WW II, he was sent to the U.S. on a secret mission. He was told, "Don't take any documents with you." Of course, that meant technical documents, but he took it quite literally, and showed up in New York with no passport or personal ID of any kind. Must have been interesting.
I don't think the Turing rates sole credit for the Ultra Secret, or that the Ultra Secret was crucial to winning the war. But Turing certainly helped save thousands of lives.
Another Slashdot post calls him the "Father of Computer Science". That's going a bit far, but CompSci does owe him a lot. And he probably rates as the first computer geek.
If you have a Debian system, here's all you need to do:
root@localhost:~# apt-get install vsound
If you're on another system, you'll need to download the a href="http://www.zip.com.au/~erikd/vsound/vsound-0 .5.tar.gz">source and also make sure that you have sox installed. (vsound uses sox to convert the raw .au into wav format, which you can then compress however you'd like.)
--
Runnin' around, robbin' banks all whacked on the Scooby Snacks...
yeah, i hate formula one too.
In truth Germany was beaten after it failed to capture Moscow in fall 1941. The Germans were completely unprepared for a winter campaign, not even having adequate clothing for their soldiers let alone other supplies. After the failure to take Moscow, Hitler dismissed many of his top generals including the father of German armor Heinz Guderian. Perhaps his decision to order the army to stand fast in the face of a strong Soviet counterattack that winter saved the front from total collapse, but otherwise, Hitler in command was an endless series of catastrophes such as Stalingrad and Kursk.
The argument I suppose is that had Great Britain been strangled by the German U-boats than the Soviet Union would not have been supplied by Lend Lease. Lend Lease provided all sorts of supplies including I believe basically the entire truck force that gave the Red Army mobility in the counterattack. However, the facts are that by December 1941 the Germans were already in retreat, they were going to lose stupendous numbers of men in the winter because of unpreparedness, the Soviets had a tank the T-34 coming into mass production better than any tank the Germans could ever produce in mass quantities, and Hitler was in personal command. Even with no Great Britain, Germany after 1941 needed to learn how to fight a defensive war to force a stalemate, precisely the type of strategy Hitler would never have authorized. And in addition, the Germans would not have been able to complete an atomic bomb for many years. Sure they would have had V2s but the Soviets had the more battlefield effective Katyusha. (Okay mass deployment was helped by those Lense Lease trucks.) Soviet technology was sufficient to counter Germany's, with the possible exception of rocket-powered fighters, a technology that Hitler delayed until it was too late due to his obsession with rocket bombers.
It is possible that a hundred years from now the real intelligence agency story of World War II will be how Joseph Stalin in his paranoid purges destroyed the finest network of spies ever assembled. Think of this, a time when Communism still had sway as an effective religion to produce loyal agents in any country. The United States for the past few decades has been continuously learning that one can't buy that type of loyal fanatic agent abroad, which is why the US is so dependent on high tech and American citizen agents, a combination totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas. Even though Stalin tried to order all his foreign agents back to the Soviet Union to be executed, there was still enough of a remnant such as the Red Orchestra to give Stalin a precise warning of when the Germans would attack. But Stalin had screwed things up so badly that the Soviets were caught totally unprepared. The initial catastrophe of the first few months when Soviet forces were repeatedly surrounded and annihilated was the only reason the Germans got as far as they did. Had Stalin followed through using the human intelligence network he had at his disposal, Germany would have been beaten years sooner, and perhaps all of continental Europe is occupied by the Red Army.
I saw the play 14 years ago, but the Turing character was so vivid that it seems like last week. His pre-suicide monologue compared his own fatal apple to Snow White's. The computer section of the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology may still have a video clip of the "Can machines think?" monologue. Since the same actor led the fundraising for the statue, I wonder which came first: playing the role, or caring about Turing.
This is not a Fugazi
I took the Turing test and failed it. Does that mean I'm not intelligent, or just that I'm not artificially so?
Under what rational system of morality could one's preference of partners for consensual sex be "morally wrong"?
Is it morally wrong for a man to be attracted to overweight women? To pregnant women? To female amputees? To midgets? You can find specialized pr0n for each of these fetishes.
I find some of these preferences a bit disturbing - but certainly not wrong. Just somewhat creepy. But people have creepy tastes in all sorts of matters - doesn't make them wrong, just means that I won't be joining them for an all day festival of pr0n featuring all 300+ pound people, or all guy-on-guy action. Neither is to my taste.
A human being can't control who they are attracted too, any more than then they could control their taste in food.
Can you imagine: "Gee, I like the taste of vanilla." "Sinner! Preferring vanilla over chocolate is morally wrong!"
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It seems to me that one major precondition for squatting to have occurred, is for the "legitimate" owner of the word to somehow be denied use of that word. But in this case, the Battlebots trademark owner seems to already have battlebots.com, no? So how could this possibly be squatting? The trademark owner already has the appropriate domain.
If they mysteriously and inscrutibly want to buy up other domains that happen to mention Battlebots without actually infringing on their trademark, then maybe they should be prepared to pay whatever the current holders' whimsical price happens to be. When a commercial entity already has their name withih .com, getting the same name within other TLDs is a luxury, not
a necessity or a serious attempt to defend trademark.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The IEEE Annals of the History of Computing site is at http://www.computer.org/annals .
"PROFANITY is the inevitable literary crutch of the inarticulate MOTHER FUCKER." -- some PC user
Overemphasis on new technology actually lengthened the war against Japan by 18 months. Read this for one of many accounts of how the United States' dogged insistence on the efficacy of the magnetic detonation torpedo rendered the US submarine fleet impotent for 18 months, whereas after downgrading to earlier technology of contact detonation (and other fixes) the submarine fleet succeeded in sinking more than half of Japanese shipping, in effect imposing a total naval blockage. Note how scientific theory was perverted to reject empirical evidence from the submarine crews.
US intelligence had plenty of chances to have successfully warned the country of imminent Japanese attack. What saved the US was that the Japanese were so far below the US level of industrial capability and resources that even a perfect plan might not have been sufficient. The only Japanese hope was to have destroyed the oil storage tanks at Pearl Harbor in a follow-up attack. Ironically the Japanese own rigidity in their military thinking possibly influenced the commander of the fleet from pressing home the advantage, a pattern repeated when they failed at Leyte Gulf to seize the opening to attack the landing fleet.
All the futuristic technology and information isn't going to help if the leadership at the top is incapable or unwilling to determine what is of the most importance. Fortunately for the winning side in World War II the opposition had far less industrial capability and resources. And what won the war was more from the bottom-up as entire populations united and bottlenecks were solved in practical ways. As the war progressed it became easier for men of merit to get their jobs done. In such improved environments a million small improvements could work their way into the war effort, so yes there was some technical progress. But remember the Germans had V2 rockets and jet fighters and they still lost.
It seems to me the modern American large corporation is not facing a lack of technology problem, it's facing organization problems. The people at the top who are supposed to be setting direction for the company cannot or will not accurately access the reams of information at their disposal. In story after story I read about World War II, the solution to a problem turns out to be putting the competent man in charge and letting him use his expertise. Preconceptions, ideology, and prejudice driving policy are the enemy.
Alan Turing also wrote a paper called "The chemical basis of morphogenesis" which is one of the key papers in explaining how morphogenesis can produce differnt types of cells and hence organisms with differntiated parts (arms, legs, tentacles), or patterned coats (zebra stripes, cow splodges, cheetah spots) etc, on the basis of sets of chemical reactions.
A genius spanning several fields....
Regards
Treefrog.
I thought that the memorial was the bronze casting of Turing sitting on a park bench holding an apple. It sound as though you're describing the sign behind it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I think it means that you are intelligent enough to convince someone that you are not intelligent. Or something.
The Mark VII torpedo scandal is a well known one. Less known is that the Germans suffered almost the exact same issue for over a year with signifigant impact to their U-boat operations.
There is a good reason why navies were pushing magnetic detonation: contact detonation sucks. Modern (as in post 1905) warships and some merchant vessels are sectioned off into watertight bulkheads to improve survivability in the event of a hull breach. Most ships can suffer a breach of 30-50% of its watertight compartments before sinking!
A contact-detonated torpedo often only blows a hole in one or two compartments. Thus, you need to fire four or more torpedoes which are in very limited supply (about 18 per boat, with a 20minute reload time)
Magnetic detonators explode directly beneath the hull of a ship, breaking the keel of the target and causing massive flooding. When magnetic detonators were perfected, most any non-capital ship could be sunk with a single torpedo hit.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Ok, then start thinking. Give us some of your moral philosophy. Give us your justification for condemning certain types of love.
And, if find you can't give one, have the intellectual honesty to re-examine your moral indignation and see if it rests on nothing more than a feeling of "ooh! gross!".
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
For one:
I think that artificial intelligence wpould be best measured with an understanding of emotion and ethics, so psychological and ethical examinations, such as those administered in Blade Runner.
What do you think a Turing test is? In Blade Runner, they were not looking to see if someone had a proper sense of ethics... they were seeing if someone had *any* sense of ethics. Also, the idea of a human playing against a computer in chess and thinking it is another human is utterly silly (at this point) when you are talking outside the chess-game. Sure, the person might think they know the playing style of the computer, and therefore assign a human identity to it, but the instant a conversation comes up about stuff like "What'd you do yesterday" and "Why don't you live with your parents anymore" the cat would be out of the bag faster than you can blink.
For two (or something like that):
The whole point of the Turing test is that if a computer can fool a trained human in a double blind test reliably... it doesn't matter if they are naturally or artificially intelligent. Think about that. If you can't tell if it is human or not... does it matter whether it is actually human? Shouldn't you treat it as if it were human? This is a pragmatic approach (formal pragmatics, not pragmatics which is that same as "practicality"), but no less valid for that. If it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck...
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
And when I called him the first computer geek, I was claiming him as founder of a club to which I belong. I say this not just because of his many personal quirks, but because he was one of the first to recognize the importance of software. He had some interesting disagreements with von Neumann (another FoCS pretender) on this subject. Von Neumann thought that when you'd figured out the hardware, you had your system. Turing had the insight to see that this was just the beginning.
My argument is that people and organization are more important for intelligence work than technology.
Similarly consider Operation Bagration, the destruction of the German Army Group Center in Summer 1944. Bagration I suppose is the Russian counterpart of the Allied deception campaign that mislead the Germans about the Normandy invasion. The "technology" that led to the success of Operation Bagration was the massive fleet of trucks the West had given Russia through Lend Lease, so perhaps some argument can be made that indirectly Enigma contributed to the victory. But what made Operation Bagration work was organization, attention to detail.
In my opinion, overemphasis on technology such as Enigma is dangerous in today's era because it reinforces current United States prejudices on how to conduct intelligence without "getting one's hands dirty". It would be a shame to repeat all the mistakes of the Germans and learn nothing from what worked for say the Russians.
What is the obsession with having all the domain names? Its getting realy annoying, so some kid has got the .org? as long as he doesn't rty to convince people he's part of the battlebots that ComedyCentral airs, let it go.
anybody who is looking for battlebots can find it.
Perhap I should get a class action suit against battlebots. I have yet to see a bot(automated device). I see lots of RC cars with saws and hammers smashing into each other, but no bots.
In fact they wouldn't allow me to enter an actual bot into there contest. Sad really.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
~ Leilah