I don't put much stock in these much-touted computer chess programs beating Kasparov and the like, because the computers are allowed to effectively cheat by having massive databases of chess moves on file, and using them they can simply copy the strategy and tactics thought up by other humans. And that is how they win.
So are humans cheating by using the ideas thought up by other humans. Chess programs are programmed, so it doesn't make sense to assume experts aren't allowed to help and that databases can't be used.
The complaint Kasparov had was that the program wasn't fixed. In other words, programmers would change the program in between matches. This is clearly unfair in the sense that he is really taking on a computer/human hybrid if the program is allowed to be modified during the tournament.
No one is suggesting that there would no regulation of drugs. In fact, regulation is what is needed as opposed to a black market controled by criminals.
So if someone becomes a burden on society because of a behavior that you deam inappropriate then we should outlaw that behavior. Where do you draw the line: fastfood, motorcycles, rock climbing. Not to mention the fact that outlawing a behaviour doesn't necessarily stop the behavior, and a system of prohabition can do more harm then good. Consider alcohol prohabition or today's drug war...
I'm sad to say Leonid
Khachiyan also died recently. He proved that linear programming
can be solved in polynomial time with the ellipsoid method. I took a class on algorithms from him many years ago at Rutgers. He was an excellent teacher, and he will be missed.
That's because diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. It also produces more carbon-dioxide per gallon.
While diesel does have a slighly higher engery density it's not enough to explain the 30% higher efficency of diesel engines. Diesel engines are just more efficent than gasoline engines.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Fortunately, your own experience, while not measurable by instruments,
is at least directly observable.
So you say your experiences will never be measurable by
instruments. How do you know this is true?
You're confusing a neural correlate of consciousness with
consciousness itself. Classic mistake.
Perhaps you could help by defining consciousness. What is the agreed
upon definition? Vague fuzzy definitions are ripe for equivocation.
See, for all that brain activity, it could operate just the same if
there were nobody watching, as if there is somebody watching.
Light would flow, enter eyes, trigger neurons, neurons would bump
signals against other neurons, the whole machinery would
operate. Blobs of chemicals move. The cheecks flush, the mouths move,
marionettes sway back and forth, all with nobody to see it.
Actually it seems quite reasonable to think that all this machinery
could create what people vaguely call consciousness. I mean, we can do
experiments on people (even ourselves) and mess with the machinery,
and it seems to effect this vague notion of what people call
consciousness. Perhaps there is always someone watching; the machine
is watching itself because it is an evolved adaptation for survival.
In general, it is impossible to prove that such a 'formal logic
validator' is correct since it is not possible to prove that an axiom
system is correct inside that axiom system (one of Goedel's
theorems). So if you would find a proof that your validator is
correct, you'd have used reasoning techniques outside the logic of
your validator, and do you believe those?
Dealing with the consistency of the axioms is not the job of the
validator. That is something for the mathematicians. They have to
deal with it whether or not they use computers. So it's a red herring.
The validators job is to confirm that the steps are legal in the
formal system.
(and fyi, not all truths in mathematics are provable!)
This is wrong. It is based on a misunderstanding of Godel's proof
that has been popularized by various authors.
All truths in mathematics are provable. However, assuming our
system of mathematical axioms is consistent, there are some statements
that are neither true or false. These statements have not been
determined by the axioms. Furthermore, for any computable set of
mathematical axioms we choose, there are always some statements which
are undecided. Godel proved this by coming up with a technique that
always generated one of these undecided statements.
Is digital currently the way to go? I know Roger Ebert is not a
big fan of digital. He prefers a system called MaxiVision I know
this is an old artical, but has digital film solved these problems,
especially when compared to MaxiVision.
Of course, I don't think the movie industry is really interested in
quality. They want the conveniences of digital. Again referring to
Ebert, he thinks the films of 40 years ago had better standards than
today. How often do they shoot 70mm films today?
Instead of improving security at the choke points - which will always
be under heavy attack - why not make identity theft harder by
multiplying the potential number of choke points? If someone has to
have, say, my Driver's License, Passport, Social Security Number,
Credit Card Number, "Personal ID Password" and, say, a
"Counter-Identity-Theft Number" suddenly ID theft becomes a heck of a
lot harder.
As pointed out, the thieves would just steal all the information,
however, I think this could be worked into a partial solution. When
all this information, and more, is recorded by the company to check
your identity and processes your request, they should do a consistency
check. They should have access to several databases and make sure all
this information is consistent with itself including your current
address, phone number, job, etc. If it's not consistent then a more
formal procedure can be put in place to investigate possible identity
theft and/or make you records consistent.
Of course, some people would not like such a scheme because it may
decrease our amount of privacy. (Or at least make it more obvious how
much privacy we have already lost.) Also, there is the difficulty of
keeping peoples records consistent between several different databases
and which databases to use. It may require some government
infrastructure which could further reduce privacy. However, it would
make identity theft much more difficult.
I doubt it would be the end of the world. Reducing green house gas
over the course of 50 years would involve many technological
innovations. You can't just look at technology today and say we can't
do it. Currently we don't have enough incentives to do the research
and clean up the problem. By creating an economic incentive for
people to reduce green house gas, the technology will be developed.
Just as Malthus was wrong about over population, technology can help
us lower green house gases. (Think nuclear power, algae based
oils...) Otherwise we can continue destroying the commons until we
create a real economic disaster that will be much harder to reverse.
Personally from what I've read and heard (which is limited) I think
the expected damage from ignoring green house gas emissions is much
greater than putting together a solid program of incentives to reduce
emissions. Of course, this would shake up the world economy and some
vested interests would lose money, but so be it. This only gives me
further reason to doubt the do nothing policy. Various rich people
don't want to lose their empires and will spin things by spending
money to keep things the same.
Their models may strongly suggest that the cause is greenhouse gases, but its not proof.
You need to consider the expected damage of greenhouse gases. If there is a 5% chance these greenhouse gases will greatly change the world with damage D1 and cleaning up the greenhouse gases will do damage D2. You need to compare 0.05*D1 with 0.95*D2. Just saying that we're not 100% certain that we're causing global warming does not justify doing nothing. We're never 100% certain of anything in science.
The point that is missing, is that the net cost of crime, terrorism, and spam typically is greater than the economics of the industries spawned to combat them.
I think the missing point is that all these people creating spam and fighting spam aren't contributing much to society except at best canceling each other out. These people could be doing something good for society if their time wasn't being wasted with spam. (Not to say spam fighters aren't doing something good, but they could do other good things if they didn't have to fight spam.)
Just like telemarketers. They might be getting paid but they're actually a negative on society.
Why don't we all try to donate 1.5% of our assets instead of whining about the poster's flamebait.
The utility of money is not linear. He has more money then he can spend in a lifetime. He has to do something with that money. Many foundations are formed because the rich would rather control how there money is spent than give it to the government in estate tax (There's Bush screwing us again.) I on the other hand have to worry about retirement...
It might be conjecture, but it's not new conjecture. People have been saying this as soon as the X-box was announced. This is what Microsoft does. They do everything to protect their monopoly.
The continuum hypothesis is a bit different though, and it is
equally valid for it to be true or false. Maybe it is equally valid
for P = NP to be true or false, mathematically, but that would leave
us in a difficult position for the applied side of it, since we'd have
to start thinking about which applied to "our world". I've just
decided that I 'believe' that cannot be the case, on the grounds it is
far too messy!
There are many undecided statements dealing with computation. In
the real world, these statements either fall apart because of problems
with how the math models the universe (infinite universe,...) or
experiments can, in principal, be performed to determine the truth.
(If experiments are not possible, it is not a very useful statement.)
In either case, our mathematical model of reality has some problems.
An interesting and related problem is the Church-Turing thesis
[wikipedia.org] since it is too vague (as the Wikipedia article says)
for it to be proved true using mathematics, but it could be proved
false using a good enough counter example. I'm sure most computer
scientists here strongly believe it to be true, though.
The Church-Turing thesis is an empirical statement. It depends on
the laws of physics. Look at this paper
by Warren Smith on the issue. He proves Church-Turing is false in a
certain Newtonian system and true in a simplified relativistic system.
The "blog" sounds more like a case of what can happen when a
hypochondriac has access to too much Internet information without
enough medical training.
Sounds like he did exactly what he needed to do to get better. What
was he supposed to do when he is ill and the doctors he see give him
no explanation as to what is causing the problem. He did some
research to try to come up with a diagnoses. He knows his own
symptoms better than any doctor he talks to for 15 minutes and who
forgets him an hour after he leaves. Who else is going to do the
research?
Yes his medical training is not great, but what does that have to do
with anything. He can come up with ideas that a doctor can consider
and perhaps confirm or contradict. What's the harm at someone who
really cares about the issue working on the problem 24/7. The only
harm seems to be to the doctor's ego if the patient turns out to be
right.
P> The entire list was put forth as reasons why the human race is "in
serious shape", according to him. The content of his section on
homosexuality didn't support that though. Which means at least one of
two things: It didn't belong in the list, or he was looking for a
reason to put it on there.
The list was put forth as reasons why the human race may be
overpopulated. His claim is that homosexuality may be a built in way
to control population growth. As the population increases, maybe
environmental pressures cause a higher percentage of homosexuals to
help control the population. He implies that we might currently have
a higher percentage of homosexuals, because our population is
triggering this evolutionary control method. It seems like a fairly
innocuous theory. It's wrong, but it's not homophobic.
You on the other hand are OK with homosexuals on earth. You just
think they are all going to hell if they don't rectify their ways.
So kevlar is an offensive weapon because it helps protect our soldiers
from being shot? A concrete bunker is an offensive weapon then, since
it helps protect our soldiers while they fire their guns. The U-2,
which never carried a weapon so far as I know, was an offensive weapon
because it was used to gather intelligence to make it easier to win a
war?
In the context of missile defense, a weapon is offensive if it is used
to help attack another country and defense if it is used to fight off
an attack from another country.
Kevlar is not really offensive or defensive, since it helps with both
aims. A concrete bunker is primarily defensive, but I suppose you
could use one to hold foreign territory. The U-2 was probably
more offensive, since it helped plan for an attack, but was a little
defensive since it could help you predict and defend against an
attack.
The missile "defense" currently seems primarily offensive, since their
doesn't seem to be a credible threat of someone attacking us with a
missile. A country would have to be pretty stupid to launch a missile
at the US. Of course, it's a great offensive weapon because, if it
worked, it would allow us to attack countries without fear of nuclear
reprisal.
It is slightly defensive since it would defend us in the unlikely event
that some "terrorists" were able to break into the missile control of a
country and secretly launch missiles. They must only be able to aim
and launch the missiles, but not steal the bombs. (If they could steal
a bomb, they wouldn't need a missile to get it to its target.)
Read my post again. I specifically said that I thought locking people
up was not a good solution. It's not even an efficient solution.
Sorry, your right. Your post implied we are justified to lock
people up for being inefficient, not that locking them up is an
efficient solution. The people who are locking up non-violent
offenders could be locked up for being less efficient than the
non-violent offenders.
Or maybe, we aren't justified at pointing guns at people and
locking them up for being inefficient?
This New Scientist article discusses the evidence for a link between
regular pot use and schizophrenia. There is also a possibly a link
between pot and depression, but it's hard to tell because regular dope
smokers often fail at education and end up unemployed - not exactly a
great outcome either.
To be fair, regular alcohol use has been shown to be much
worse, but I'm glad alcohol is legal because it makes it easier for
people with a problem to get help.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what they said 50 years ago.
I don't put much stock in these much-touted computer chess programs beating Kasparov and the like, because the computers are allowed to effectively cheat by having massive databases of chess moves on file, and using them they can simply copy the strategy and tactics thought up by other humans. And that is how they win.
So are humans cheating by using the ideas thought up by other humans. Chess programs are programmed, so it doesn't make sense to assume experts aren't allowed to help and that databases can't be used.
The complaint Kasparov had was that the program wasn't fixed. In other words, programmers would change the program in between matches. This is clearly unfair in the sense that he is really taking on a computer/human hybrid if the program is allowed to be modified during the tournament.
It may help with some of your debts to declare bankruptcy.
No one is suggesting that there would no regulation of drugs. In fact, regulation is what is needed as opposed to a black market controled by criminals.
So if someone becomes a burden on society because of a behavior that you deam inappropriate then we should outlaw that behavior. Where do you draw the line: fastfood, motorcycles, rock climbing. Not to mention the fact that outlawing a behaviour doesn't necessarily stop the behavior, and a system of prohabition can do more harm then good. Consider alcohol prohabition or today's drug war...
I'm sad to say Leonid Khachiyan also died recently. He proved that linear programming can be solved in polynomial time with the ellipsoid method. I took a class on algorithms from him many years ago at Rutgers. He was an excellent teacher, and he will be missed.
That's because diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. It also produces more carbon-dioxide per gallon.
While diesel does have a slighly higher engery density it's not enough to explain the 30% higher efficency of diesel engines. Diesel engines are just more efficent than gasoline engines.
Fortunately, your own experience, while not measurable by instruments, is at least directly observable.
So you say your experiences will never be measurable by instruments. How do you know this is true?
You're confusing a neural correlate of consciousness with consciousness itself. Classic mistake.
Perhaps you could help by defining consciousness. What is the agreed upon definition? Vague fuzzy definitions are ripe for equivocation.
See, for all that brain activity, it could operate just the same if there were nobody watching, as if there is somebody watching.
Light would flow, enter eyes, trigger neurons, neurons would bump signals against other neurons, the whole machinery would operate. Blobs of chemicals move. The cheecks flush, the mouths move, marionettes sway back and forth, all with nobody to see it.
Actually it seems quite reasonable to think that all this machinery could create what people vaguely call consciousness. I mean, we can do experiments on people (even ourselves) and mess with the machinery, and it seems to effect this vague notion of what people call consciousness. Perhaps there is always someone watching; the machine is watching itself because it is an evolved adaptation for survival.
In general, it is impossible to prove that such a 'formal logic validator' is correct since it is not possible to prove that an axiom system is correct inside that axiom system (one of Goedel's theorems). So if you would find a proof that your validator is correct, you'd have used reasoning techniques outside the logic of your validator, and do you believe those?
Dealing with the consistency of the axioms is not the job of the validator. That is something for the mathematicians. They have to deal with it whether or not they use computers. So it's a red herring. The validators job is to confirm that the steps are legal in the formal system.
(and fyi, not all truths in mathematics are provable!)
This is wrong. It is based on a misunderstanding of Godel's proof that has been popularized by various authors.
All truths in mathematics are provable. However, assuming our system of mathematical axioms is consistent, there are some statements that are neither true or false. These statements have not been determined by the axioms. Furthermore, for any computable set of mathematical axioms we choose, there are always some statements which are undecided. Godel proved this by coming up with a technique that always generated one of these undecided statements.
Is digital currently the way to go? I know Roger Ebert is not a big fan of digital. He prefers a system called MaxiVision I know this is an old artical, but has digital film solved these problems, especially when compared to MaxiVision.
Of course, I don't think the movie industry is really interested in quality. They want the conveniences of digital. Again referring to Ebert, he thinks the films of 40 years ago had better standards than today. How often do they shoot 70mm films today?
Instead of improving security at the choke points - which will always be under heavy attack - why not make identity theft harder by multiplying the potential number of choke points? If someone has to have, say, my Driver's License, Passport, Social Security Number, Credit Card Number, "Personal ID Password" and, say, a "Counter-Identity-Theft Number" suddenly ID theft becomes a heck of a lot harder.
As pointed out, the thieves would just steal all the information, however, I think this could be worked into a partial solution. When all this information, and more, is recorded by the company to check your identity and processes your request, they should do a consistency check. They should have access to several databases and make sure all this information is consistent with itself including your current address, phone number, job, etc. If it's not consistent then a more formal procedure can be put in place to investigate possible identity theft and/or make you records consistent.
Of course, some people would not like such a scheme because it may decrease our amount of privacy. (Or at least make it more obvious how much privacy we have already lost.) Also, there is the difficulty of keeping peoples records consistent between several different databases and which databases to use. It may require some government infrastructure which could further reduce privacy. However, it would make identity theft much more difficult.
I doubt it would be the end of the world. Reducing green house gas over the course of 50 years would involve many technological innovations. You can't just look at technology today and say we can't do it. Currently we don't have enough incentives to do the research and clean up the problem. By creating an economic incentive for people to reduce green house gas, the technology will be developed. Just as Malthus was wrong about over population, technology can help us lower green house gases. (Think nuclear power, algae based oils...) Otherwise we can continue destroying the commons until we create a real economic disaster that will be much harder to reverse.
Personally from what I've read and heard (which is limited) I think the expected damage from ignoring green house gas emissions is much greater than putting together a solid program of incentives to reduce emissions. Of course, this would shake up the world economy and some vested interests would lose money, but so be it. This only gives me further reason to doubt the do nothing policy. Various rich people don't want to lose their empires and will spin things by spending money to keep things the same.
Their models may strongly suggest that the cause is greenhouse gases, but its not proof.
You need to consider the expected damage of greenhouse gases. If there is a 5% chance these greenhouse gases will greatly change the world with damage D1 and cleaning up the greenhouse gases will do damage D2. You need to compare 0.05*D1 with 0.95*D2. Just saying that we're not 100% certain that we're causing global warming does not justify doing nothing. We're never 100% certain of anything in science.
The point that is missing, is that the net cost of crime, terrorism, and spam typically is greater than the economics of the industries spawned to combat them.
I think the missing point is that all these people creating spam and fighting spam aren't contributing much to society except at best canceling each other out. These people could be doing something good for society if their time wasn't being wasted with spam. (Not to say spam fighters aren't doing something good, but they could do other good things if they didn't have to fight spam.) Just like telemarketers. They might be getting paid but they're actually a negative on society.
Why don't we all try to donate 1.5% of our assets instead of whining about the poster's flamebait.
The utility of money is not linear. He has more money then he can spend in a lifetime. He has to do something with that money. Many foundations are formed because the rich would rather control how there money is spent than give it to the government in estate tax (There's Bush screwing us again.) I on the other hand have to worry about retirement...
It might be conjecture, but it's not new conjecture. People have been saying this as soon as the X-box was announced. This is what Microsoft does. They do everything to protect their monopoly.
The continuum hypothesis is a bit different though, and it is equally valid for it to be true or false. Maybe it is equally valid for P = NP to be true or false, mathematically, but that would leave us in a difficult position for the applied side of it, since we'd have to start thinking about which applied to "our world". I've just decided that I 'believe' that cannot be the case, on the grounds it is far too messy!
There are many undecided statements dealing with computation. In the real world, these statements either fall apart because of problems with how the math models the universe (infinite universe, ...) or
experiments can, in principal, be performed to determine the truth.
(If experiments are not possible, it is not a very useful statement.)
In either case, our mathematical model of reality has some problems.
An interesting and related problem is the Church-Turing thesis [wikipedia.org] since it is too vague (as the Wikipedia article says) for it to be proved true using mathematics, but it could be proved false using a good enough counter example. I'm sure most computer scientists here strongly believe it to be true, though.
The Church-Turing thesis is an empirical statement. It depends on the laws of physics. Look at this paper by Warren Smith on the issue. He proves Church-Turing is false in a certain Newtonian system and true in a simplified relativistic system.
What's shaddy about it. The address is in a complex of modern townhouses. It's right across from a new Shopright. Very residental.
The "blog" sounds more like a case of what can happen when a hypochondriac has access to too much Internet information without enough medical training.
Sounds like he did exactly what he needed to do to get better. What was he supposed to do when he is ill and the doctors he see give him no explanation as to what is causing the problem. He did some research to try to come up with a diagnoses. He knows his own symptoms better than any doctor he talks to for 15 minutes and who forgets him an hour after he leaves. Who else is going to do the research?
Yes his medical training is not great, but what does that have to do with anything. He can come up with ideas that a doctor can consider and perhaps confirm or contradict. What's the harm at someone who really cares about the issue working on the problem 24/7. The only harm seems to be to the doctor's ego if the patient turns out to be right.
The list was put forth as reasons why the human race may be overpopulated. His claim is that homosexuality may be a built in way to control population growth. As the population increases, maybe environmental pressures cause a higher percentage of homosexuals to help control the population. He implies that we might currently have a higher percentage of homosexuals, because our population is triggering this evolutionary control method. It seems like a fairly innocuous theory. It's wrong, but it's not homophobic.
You on the other hand are OK with homosexuals on earth. You just think they are all going to hell if they don't rectify their ways.
So kevlar is an offensive weapon because it helps protect our soldiers from being shot? A concrete bunker is an offensive weapon then, since it helps protect our soldiers while they fire their guns. The U-2, which never carried a weapon so far as I know, was an offensive weapon because it was used to gather intelligence to make it easier to win a war?
In the context of missile defense, a weapon is offensive if it is used to help attack another country and defense if it is used to fight off an attack from another country.
Kevlar is not really offensive or defensive, since it helps with both aims. A concrete bunker is primarily defensive, but I suppose you could use one to hold foreign territory. The U-2 was probably more offensive, since it helped plan for an attack, but was a little defensive since it could help you predict and defend against an attack.
The missile "defense" currently seems primarily offensive, since their doesn't seem to be a credible threat of someone attacking us with a missile. A country would have to be pretty stupid to launch a missile at the US. Of course, it's a great offensive weapon because, if it worked, it would allow us to attack countries without fear of nuclear reprisal.
It is slightly defensive since it would defend us in the unlikely event that some "terrorists" were able to break into the missile control of a country and secretly launch missiles. They must only be able to aim and launch the missiles, but not steal the bombs. (If they could steal a bomb, they wouldn't need a missile to get it to its target.)
This can solve the problem of nuclear waste from fission plants. Just dilute the nuclear waste in ash and let the wind take care of it.
Read my post again. I specifically said that I thought locking people up was not a good solution. It's not even an efficient solution.
Sorry, your right. Your post implied we are justified to lock people up for being inefficient, not that locking them up is an efficient solution. The people who are locking up non-violent offenders could be locked up for being less efficient than the non-violent offenders.
Or maybe, we aren't justified at pointing guns at people and locking them up for being inefficient?
This New Scientist article discusses the evidence for a link between regular pot use and schizophrenia. There is also a possibly a link between pot and depression, but it's hard to tell because regular dope smokers often fail at education and end up unemployed - not exactly a great outcome either.
To be fair, regular alcohol use has been shown to be much worse, but I'm glad alcohol is legal because it makes it easier for people with a problem to get help.