Check out Beam Robotics sometime.. The concept is to emulate biology as much as possible. Some suprisingly simple circuits generate extremely complex behaviors.
"But such people are often cognitively lost in details... they can't deal with concepts easily, and can't abstract over information they have taken in, since they are so overwhelmed by the distinctiveness and richness of the details. As are computers, which know nothing except detail. So the "lossiness" of the human memory actually serves a useful purpose, and is a large part of what makes us "intelligent" relative to a piece of silicon"
I had this intuition for a little while now that "intelligence" was a by-product of lossy compression. Computers reproduce data, but as humans, we reconstruct data. When we reconstuct data we have to fill in the gaps that are left by the compression. We as humans have evolved to take advantage of that, so we can take bits of unrelated data, and fill in the gaps between them to form a memory.
Or... We don't store the bits of information themselves, but rather the relationships between those bits. Maybe we those relationships are the key to "intelligence".
Just a thought..:)
No one thing exists by itself. Everything relies on something else to give it "meaning"
As a Linux user and lover I'm beginning to see the cracks in the Linux community, but I'm not all that convinced that they are bad.
Why do I say that? It's a psychology thing really. People have taken Linux, and elevated it from what it was really good at (a server), and promoted it into a Microsoft Killer. When they did that, they assumed that Linux has to have a single user interface. Linux still has a long ways to go to beat Microsoft at it's game in that respect.
But, here is the clincher. Linux doesn't have to beat Microsoft at it's game. As I write this, the rules are changing. The world isn't just about PC's anymore. A PC is nothing if it can't connect with something. (we all know that, right?) Microsoft Operating systems have always been developed from a standalone PC view, and when they network, they're not particularly good at it.
However, in the new world order, the network will reign supreme. The strength of your OS is judged by what you can connect with and how stable you are. This is where Linux reigns supreme. It connects to just about everything under the Sun out of the box. Linux has already won that round.
Yet, why should we play by MS's rules with one interface for everyone? Does everyone want to drive the same car? Who says we can't win on the desktop with more then one interface? If you get in a Ferrari F50, it's not going to be the same experience/same interface as a Dodge Neon, but... you know what? I'm pretty damn sure that almost everybody could figure out how to drive that Ferrari.
I applaud Red Hat on it's efforts to bring Linux to the business world, yet.... I want the choice to run *my* Linux, the way I want to run it. It's about the users. The users reign supreme in Linux, and I think that's the vision that Red Hat gave up when it started courting the business world.
Anarchy - Used to describe the tension between moral autonomy and political authority
What? Science is not a quest for the "truth". Science is a methodology of finding and encoding new ideas about the relationship between things. This is not the "truth", it *is* a map of our world, but it is *not* the truth.
Relgion isn't that truth either, it's just a map to guide our behaviour. .
I also suggest you read a little more before making sweeping generalizations of all religions and philsophies. It makes you sound a little less ignorant in the long run. (if you can't figure out what that means, go read the Tao Te Ching)
Believe nothing, no matter where you have read it or who has said, even if I said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. -Buddha
Another book along those same lines as those mentioned would be Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind".
And to really bend your brain a little bit, think about this quote by M.C. Escher. "Isn't it fascinating to realize that no image, no form, not even a shade or color, "exists" on its own; that among everything that's visuably observable we can refer only to relationships and to contrasts?"
When you extend that quote, and take it deeper, you begin realize that you can only refer to relationships and contrasts between all things. A formula in physics, for example is just a mathematical embodiment of that relationship and/or contrast. I first came upon this concept when I started thinking about AI, and how to create/code one. I realized that there was no one fundemental concept that I could code into a computer to have it learn everything in relationship to that.
Overall a excellent article, with one minor exception.
The author seems to equate Beowulfs with high availability clusters. Beowulf clusters are for high computational processing, not for high availability processes.
The most fascinating thing I find about both Star Wars and The Matrix is the constant references to the battle between our spiritual and our logical sides.
As we become more "civilized", we desire greater and greater mastery of our environment. The feeling that programming brings us is complete mastery over this one part of our environment. (Linux anyone?) Programming is a art derived from the depths of Aristotlian logic. Everything is completely deterministic and non-random in programming.
Contrast that to the world outside of the computer, which operates in a continous relm, which we cannot fully grasp or comprehend. It may be deterministic, but unless we know the complete state of the universe, we will never know what exactly will happen next. We have intuitions, ideas, and worries about the real world, but are they always 100% correct? Our emotions and our feelings are still there, whether we acknowledge them or not.
This is why these movies touch us so. Not because of the heros and the villians, but because of the mastery of the human soul over the unknowable. It is a parable that is thousands of years old. It is the same story, told in many different ways. But it always touches us.
Beowulf clustering would make sense for a large Quake world, would it not? It should be relativly easy to divide up the world on different nodes and use MPI to only pass the objects that affect the current node. The only bad thing would be the network bottleneck of the "master" machine.
Would be interesting to see something like this, kind of like Ultima Online, only as a FPS.
I sit here reading the posts, remembering the pain I went through in High School. I still go through it to this day. Am I going to bore you with yet another account of it? No. I'm going to make you think about this whole situation.
This is wrong. The amount of media attention given to this is astounding. Every day there are gang wars in cities across the country. Kids in the ghetto are being shot everyday, and they maybe get 30 secs on the news. Nobody seems to care. Just because they are poor, or black, or asian, or mexican, or gay, they don't get the same attention as upper white class kids in Colorado did.
Think about it for a second.
15 teenagers lost their lives to stupidity, yes, this is horribly tragic. But how many kids lose their lives each day to alcohol, gangs, drugs? Why don't we hear about them for days on end?
Stop and think about Bosnia and Serbia. This is going on every day there. Somebody's kid, father, mother, brother is dying. Do we hear about it?
America has it so good, and many here don't even realize it. If you hadn't been born in America, there is a very real chance that you wouldn't be able to post to Slashdot, because you wouldn't have a computer, or the right to post what you thought. In some countries, you can be persecuted (I don't mean just discrimated against either, I'm talking being forced to leave your home, or shot even) for the color of your skin or what religion you follow. Why isn't this on the news for hours upon hours at a time?
I'm tired of day after day of Littleton stories and half-assed reporting. I'm sick of memorial services. Where is the rest of the world? What about them? This is the real tragedy.
MP3 is dead, except in the hands of the people that use it, which is just about every "real" computer user I know of. I have half my CD collection dumped into MP3's and sitting on my server, where only I can get to it. 60 hours of music is readily available with just a click of my mouse. I can't tell you how much that's worth to me.
So they distribute music in a new digital audio format. We take it, decode it, encode it again in MP3. Is it illegal? Yes. Should it be? I don't know.
What about the people that make the music? How will they make their money? How will they live? Remember those days a long time ago when bands had to "tour" to support themselves? Remember the days when bands actually had to have talent? (unlike the Spice Girls and other bands that I can think of)
Cringely makes a comment that MP3 is like the neutron bomb, leaving the artist's works and killing the artist. I don't believe that's true. The artists will find some way to make money. Who MP3 will kill is the record executives, and if you look that's who's complaining the loudest!
I would rather pay 2 or 3 dollars directly to my favorite artist then have to pay 14 dollars to the record company for the same thing.
Hey man.. I think the Wright brothers are the right idea. No one believed in them until they flew. No one believes the Russians are going to keep MIR going unless someone pitches and helps. That's what the Linux community is all about, isn't it?. Helping other people out. Someone can't get the code done or is having problems. Someone else pitches in and helps out. That's what someone has done for the MIR. (I'm not sure I want to know who it was in this case, but I'm sure it was for a good cause) I'm sure the Wright brothers had their doubters, but some one backed them up and, guess what... they flew!
Of course.. If you want to be paranoid, just think what kind of damage a satellite would do to a city. Especially considering if it was loaded with anthrax. Hmmmm... Iraq? Anyone? Keep it in air for just a little bit longer to control where it lands, and bye bye major American city. (Just in time for the year 2K crisis when America doesn't have any capital to spend on it.)
"Mr. President -please don't forget about that."
(The sounds of major re-arming can be heard in the background)
I'm serious Mr President! If you fuck this one up *we* all go down with you, and I'm not sure you really want that, do you?
(sorry) off-topic post. preacherism. shoot me. I'll come back.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Beam Robotics sometime.. The concept is to emulate biology as much as possible. Some suprisingly simple circuits generate extremely complex behaviors.
I had this intuition for a little while now that "intelligence" was a by-product of lossy compression. Computers reproduce data, but as humans, we reconstruct data. When we reconstuct data we have to fill in the gaps that are left by the compression. We as humans have evolved to take advantage of that, so we can take bits of unrelated data, and fill in the gaps between them to form a memory.
Or... We don't store the bits of information themselves, but rather the relationships between those bits. Maybe we those relationships are the key to "intelligence".
Just a thought..
No one thing exists by itself. Everything relies on something else to give it "meaning"
As a Linux user and lover I'm beginning to see the cracks in the Linux community, but I'm not all that convinced that they are bad.
Why do I say that? It's a psychology thing really. People have taken Linux, and elevated it from what it was really good at (a server), and promoted it into a Microsoft Killer. When they did that, they assumed that Linux has to have a single user interface. Linux still has a long ways to go to beat Microsoft at it's game in that respect.
But, here is the clincher. Linux doesn't have to beat Microsoft at it's game. As I write this, the rules are changing. The world isn't just about PC's anymore. A PC is nothing if it can't connect with something. (we all know that, right?) Microsoft Operating systems have always been developed from a standalone PC view, and when they network, they're not particularly good at it.
However, in the new world order, the network will reign supreme. The strength of your OS is judged by what you can connect with and how stable you are. This is where Linux reigns supreme. It connects to just about everything under the Sun out of the box. Linux has already won that round.
Yet, why should we play by MS's rules with one interface for everyone? Does everyone want to drive the same car? Who says we can't win on the desktop with more then one interface? If you get in a Ferrari F50, it's not going to be the same experience/same interface as a Dodge Neon, but... you know what? I'm pretty damn sure that almost everybody could figure out how to drive that Ferrari.
I applaud Red Hat on it's efforts to bring Linux to the business world, yet.... I want the choice to run *my* Linux, the way I want to run it. It's about the users. The users reign supreme in Linux, and I think that's the vision that Red Hat gave up when it started courting the business world.
Anarchy - Used to describe the tension between moral autonomy and political authority
What?
Science is not a quest for the "truth". Science is a methodology of finding and encoding new ideas about the relationship between things. This is not the "truth", it *is* a map of our world, but it is *not* the truth.
Relgion isn't that truth either, it's just a map to guide our behaviour. .
I also suggest you read a little more before making sweeping generalizations of all religions and philsophies. It makes you sound a little less ignorant in the long run. (if you can't figure out what that means, go read the Tao Te Ching)
Believe nothing, no matter where you have read it or who has said, even if I said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. -Buddha
Another book along those same lines as those mentioned would be Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind".
And to really bend your brain a little bit, think about this quote by M.C. Escher.
"Isn't it fascinating to realize that no image, no form, not even a shade or color, "exists" on its own; that among everything that's visuably observable we can refer only to relationships and to contrasts?"
When you extend that quote, and take it deeper, you begin realize that you can only refer to relationships and contrasts between all things. A formula in physics, for example is just a mathematical embodiment of that relationship and/or contrast. I first came upon this concept when I started thinking about AI, and how to create/code one. I realized that there was no one fundemental concept that I could code into a computer to have it learn everything in relationship to that.
Overall a excellent article, with one minor exception.
The author seems to equate Beowulfs with high availability clusters. Beowulf clusters are for high computational processing, not for high availability processes.
The most fascinating thing I find about both Star Wars and The Matrix is the constant references to the battle between our spiritual and our logical sides.
As we become more "civilized", we desire greater and greater mastery of our environment. The feeling that programming brings us is complete mastery over this one part of our environment. (Linux anyone?) Programming is a art derived from the depths of Aristotlian logic. Everything is completely deterministic and non-random in programming.
Contrast that to the world outside of the computer, which operates in a continous relm, which we cannot fully grasp or comprehend. It may be deterministic, but unless we know the complete state of the universe, we will never know what exactly will happen next. We have intuitions, ideas, and worries about the real world, but are they always 100% correct? Our emotions and our feelings are still there, whether we acknowledge them or not.
This is why these movies touch us so. Not because of the heros and the villians, but because of the mastery of the human soul over the unknowable. It is a parable that is thousands of years old. It is the same story, told in many different ways. But it always touches us.
Beowulf clustering would make sense for a large Quake world, would it not? It should be relativly easy to divide up the world on different nodes and use MPI to only pass the objects that affect the current node. The only bad thing would be the network bottleneck of the "master" machine.
Would be interesting to see something like this, kind of like Ultima Online, only as a FPS.
Just a thought..
I sit here reading the posts, remembering the pain I went through in High School. I still go through it to this day. Am I going to bore you with yet another account of it? No. I'm going to make you think about this whole situation.
This is wrong. The amount of media attention given to this is astounding. Every day there are gang wars in cities across the country. Kids in the ghetto are being shot everyday, and they maybe get 30 secs on the news. Nobody seems to care. Just because they are poor, or black, or asian, or mexican, or gay, they don't get the same attention as upper white class kids in Colorado did.
Think about it for a second.
15 teenagers lost their lives to stupidity, yes, this is horribly tragic. But how many kids lose their lives each day to alcohol, gangs, drugs? Why don't we hear about them for days on end?
Stop and think about Bosnia and Serbia. This is going on every day there. Somebody's kid, father, mother, brother is dying. Do we hear about it?
America has it so good, and many here don't even realize it. If you hadn't been born in America, there is a very real chance that you wouldn't be able to post to Slashdot, because you wouldn't have a computer, or the right to post what you thought. In some countries, you can be persecuted (I don't mean just discrimated against either, I'm talking being forced to leave your home, or shot even) for the color of your skin or what religion you follow. Why isn't this on the news for hours upon hours at a time?
I'm tired of day after day of Littleton stories and half-assed reporting. I'm sick of memorial services. Where is the rest of the world? What about them? This is the real tragedy.
MP3 is dead, except in the hands of the people that use it, which is just about every "real" computer user I know of. I have half my CD collection dumped into MP3's and sitting on my server, where only I can get to it. 60 hours of music is readily available with just a click of my mouse. I can't tell you how much that's worth to me.
So they distribute music in a new digital audio format. We take it, decode it, encode it again in MP3. Is it illegal? Yes. Should it be? I don't know.
What about the people that make the music? How will they make their money? How will they live? Remember those days a long time ago when bands had to "tour" to support themselves? Remember the days when bands actually had to have talent? (unlike the Spice Girls and other bands that I can think of)
Cringely makes a comment that MP3 is like the neutron bomb, leaving the artist's works and killing the artist. I don't believe that's true. The artists will find some way to make money. Who MP3 will kill is the record executives, and if you look that's who's complaining the loudest!
I would rather pay 2 or 3 dollars directly to my favorite artist then have to pay 14 dollars to the record company for the same thing.
Who would you rather your money went to?
Hey man.. I think the Wright brothers are the right idea. No one believed in them until they flew. No one believes the Russians are going to keep MIR going unless someone pitches and helps. That's what the Linux community is all about, isn't it?. Helping other people out. Someone can't get the code done or is having problems. Someone else pitches in and helps out. That's what someone has done for the MIR. (I'm not sure I want to know who it was in this case, but I'm sure it was for a good cause) I'm sure the Wright brothers had their doubters, but some one backed them up and, guess what... they flew!
Of course.. If you want to be paranoid, just think what kind of damage a satellite would do to a city. Especially considering if it was loaded with anthrax. Hmmmm... Iraq? Anyone? Keep it in air for just a little bit longer to control where it lands, and bye bye major American city. (Just in time for the year 2K crisis when America doesn't have any capital to spend on it.)
"Mr. President -please don't forget about that."
(The sounds of major re-arming can be heard in the background)
I'm serious Mr President! If you fuck this one up *we* all go down with you, and I'm not sure you really want that, do you?
(sorry) off-topic post. preacherism. shoot me. I'll come back.