unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.
Electron microscopes have been around for decades. So long, in fact, that you do NOT have to explain how an electron microscope works every single time you show a picture taken with an electron microscope. Instead, you publish an article and you say "figure three was taken with an electron microscope" and anybody unclear on the subject can go and read up on how that works.
In the exact same way genetic algorithms have been around for decades. And in the exact same way, you do not have to spell out the precise details of what you're doing every single time you're using one. It is entirely sufficient to say "we used a genetic algorithm to evolve a certain behaviour (like food-seeking or poison avoidance) and found the following interesting social strategies...".
while i appreciate your attempt, it is unfortunately ill-adapted. The problem is that there's a fundamental dis-analogy between the two cases.
In the first case, "electron microscope" is a phrase that has only one usage and meaning. It does not have multiple possible understandings.
In the second case, this is apparently not so. "evolve", "food", and "genome" have a standard meaning which refer to a process in biology, sustenance for animals and plants, and the bearer of genetic material in the form of DNA/RNA and methylation.
the usage you are making of these terms is not this. If I want to use the term "Iron Condor" to refer to a mountain range near where I live, I should not go about publishing popular press articles as if I am referring to the same thing that others refer to.
as a second example, if I write a visual basic program and call it SQL, then publish an article about how I improved SQL 500%. I should really explain that I am not talking about the database language.
that's exactly what I am asking of the article.
If you aren't going to do that, then it means you're lazy, not that the article is "misleading".
I feel you're not putting your critical thinking cap on here. Your analogy was utterly disanalogous.
Yes, food is exactly the right word. Because it is a necessary precondition for survival and the passing on of sections of ones genome.
afraid not. that's not what food means. food provides sustenance for animals. these ain't animals and don't need the "food." we'll start with an easy link: here. I'll leave reading it as an exercise.
if you want to use food in another meaning, please mark it as such.
Only in the same sense that you are a figment of your own imagination, and any discussion of there being a "you" or "me" is also a misconstrual.
how so?
the one is clearly a construction that we can fully comprehend because we generated it.
the other has yet to be shown to be merely a construction (whether or not it can ever be shown as such).
maybe to make it more clearly, robots do not survive on the basis of said "food" so it's not the same as our "food" even if both deserve the quotes.
the further difficulty with your claim is that you state "Only in the same sense that you are a figment of your own imagination". But then it seems that we need to endow the robot with imagination before it can really have the same sense.
You seem to be confused... The very thing that is unclear is the aptness of the analogy, and the very fault of the article is to perpetuate it without justifying.
The terms are a (very good) metaphor, and the article is not at all misleading. I would have thought this would be obvious.
unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.
I would have that this would be obvious
The entire point of this sort of research is that the "genome" in the bots is analogous to, but far simpler than, a biological genome, and the means of selecting which "genomes" to generate the next "generation" from is analogous to how genomes are selected in biology (either "natural selection" like you find in nature or "artificial selection" like you get with farmed crops or dog breeding).
the entire failing is that it's not clear that the simplified model in any way duplicates the more complicated model.
oddly, when you simplify something, you often bludgeon the very thing that makes it what it is. What has made genetics so interesting is that the pathways of inheritance and gene expression are more complicated than each model we devise.
So without knowledge of the senses in which this is reflective of a "genome" to call it so is misleading.
In what way is it not transparent?
see above. The opacity is the validity of the comparison not the use of the comparison.
Believe it or not, the article makes no mention of this and does not indicate how the randomization was effected.
oddly that failing is precisely what i questioned to begin with... believe it or not.
...
in summary, while you have marshaled an interesting array of wikipedia articles, the original article in question remains a piece of hype-mongering.
it has in no way connected itself to any of what you have stated.
instead, it has merely used (or possibly abused) the terms of biology to describe what might otherwise be a rather boring high school science fair experiment.
it sounds like you are now accepting that the article is misleading.
You're agreeing that the terms are not what a normal reader would construe them to mean.
if the experiment wants to show anything, the methodology has to be more transparent so that we can know whether to consider its "genome" as really a genome or are something more banal.
if the semi-random is really just someone going through and changing parameters in a config file (or using a script to do it), then it's not really random at all.
here's a url that helps make sense of the difference: same site [wikipedia.org]
oh, so you're saying we just make up new meanings for old terms and act like their the same!
oh now i get it!
see that's the problem. the robots do not deceive; they do not see food. the article is a misconstrual of what is happening.
I did. Did you understand the meaning behind the paragraphs you cite?
I am confused as to how it was possible to understand the claims it made. Robots don't have genomes and don't eat food. Their "genomes" cannot be recombined.
Robots have code and programmers. What does a random change mean in this context?
Do they use faulty dram or mess with the voltage?
The timing coincided with an expiration of a no-compete. He also tapped some of the same people he liked working with at EDS who also had their no competes expire.
well, i too think slashdot is getting worse, but i don't think the problem is in the comments section.
there's really been no work done on this project AFAIK. it's just hope, a dream, and a website so far. A couple napkin calculations and suggested solutions to the basic problems. Unfortunately, he didn't know that napkinning is a multi-person sport.
a basic problem is that it often snows at night, good sir. how do propose to power a solar cell at night in order for it to have the energy it needs to melt ice across its entire surface?
I was just trying to imagine there was something other than marketing + hope in the website or blog post
the more i think about it the more i realize this project will only work if a new form of relativistic physics arrives that has hope as the magic term.
that's also what i think of the new health care cost plan, but that's for another thread.
in particular, this sentence: "This means that if each individual panel can be made for no more than $6912.00, then the Solar Roadwayâ can be built for the same cost as current asphalt roads." It seems to assume that an outlay of 3x the money for a road that lasts 3x as long is the same cost as 1x & 1x respectively. While this is true for someone with infinite readily available money, the reality is that most places don't have enough money for that.
also "The Solar Roadwayâ will, therefore, eliminate half of the greenhouse gases currently being produced. " seems to be a dramatic overstatement.
that's a good set of points you make skull. have you considered following your own advice? (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1229581&cid=27915343)
i.e. you should also read the convo.
i'll spell it out for since i don't expect you to do any reading. linux power management doesn't work that well because most systems are not fully ACPI compliant and cheat using their windows-only drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
I read them for humor not content.
the quote marks are insulted to be so close to a word combination meaning refuse pump
It gets worse than that
much, much worse.
they made TWO sequels to explain away anything you thought was cool in the first one.
Outside of lame Slashdot jokes, Soviet Russia hasn't existed since 1991. Elcomsoft is in the Russian Federation.
tell that to Georgia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, and Poland.
I'm sorry to hear you consider yourself retarded.
unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.
Electron microscopes have been around for decades. So long, in fact, that you do NOT have to explain how an electron microscope works every single time you show a picture taken with an electron microscope. Instead, you publish an article and you say "figure three was taken with an electron microscope" and anybody unclear on the subject can go and read up on how that works.
In the exact same way genetic algorithms have been around for decades. And in the exact same way, you do not have to spell out the precise details of what you're doing every single time you're using one. It is entirely sufficient to say "we used a genetic algorithm to evolve a certain behaviour (like food-seeking or poison avoidance) and found the following interesting social strategies...".
while i appreciate your attempt, it is unfortunately ill-adapted. The problem is that there's a fundamental dis-analogy between the two cases.
In the first case, "electron microscope" is a phrase that has only one usage and meaning. It does not have multiple possible understandings.
In the second case, this is apparently not so. "evolve", "food", and "genome" have a standard meaning which refer to a process in biology, sustenance for animals and plants, and the bearer of genetic material in the form of DNA/RNA and methylation.
the usage you are making of these terms is not this. If I want to use the term "Iron Condor" to refer to a mountain range near where I live, I should not go about publishing popular press articles as if I am referring to the same thing that others refer to.
as a second example, if I write a visual basic program and call it SQL, then publish an article about how I improved SQL 500%. I should really explain that I am not talking about the database language.
that's exactly what I am asking of the article.
If you aren't going to do that, then it means you're lazy, not that the article is "misleading".
I feel you're not putting your critical thinking cap on here. Your analogy was utterly disanalogous.
Yes, food is exactly the right word. Because it is a necessary precondition for survival and the passing on of sections of ones genome.
afraid not. that's not what food means. food provides sustenance for animals. these ain't animals and don't need the "food." we'll start with an easy link: here. I'll leave reading it as an exercise. if you want to use food in another meaning, please mark it as such.
That was actually helpful.
I see your point about the usefulness and prevalence of these analogies.
I just still question how well they fit the biological model.
but i do appreciate your efforts to help me see.
Only in the same sense that you are a figment of your own imagination, and any discussion of there being a "you" or "me" is also a misconstrual.
how so?
the one is clearly a construction that we can fully comprehend because we generated it.
the other has yet to be shown to be merely a construction (whether or not it can ever be shown as such).
maybe to make it more clearly, robots do not survive on the basis of said "food" so it's not the same as our "food" even if both deserve the quotes.
the further difficulty with your claim is that you state "Only in the same sense that you are a figment of your own imagination". But then it seems that we need to endow the robot with imagination before it can really have the same sense.
The terms are a (very good) metaphor, and the article is not at all misleading. I would have thought this would be obvious.
unless you're the author of the underlying study, I am unclear as to how you have knowledge of the methods and science behind what they are doing.
I would have that this would be obvious
The entire point of this sort of research is that the "genome" in the bots is analogous to, but far simpler than, a biological genome, and the means of selecting which "genomes" to generate the next "generation" from is analogous to how genomes are selected in biology (either "natural selection" like you find in nature or "artificial selection" like you get with farmed crops or dog breeding).
the entire failing is that it's not clear that the simplified model in any way duplicates the more complicated model.
oddly, when you simplify something, you often bludgeon the very thing that makes it what it is. What has made genetics so interesting is that the pathways of inheritance and gene expression are more complicated than each model we devise.
So without knowledge of the senses in which this is reflective of a "genome" to call it so is misleading.
In what way is it not transparent?
see above. The opacity is the validity of the comparison not the use of the comparison.
Believe it or not, computers actually can generate effectively random numbers.
Believe it or not, the article makes no mention of this and does not indicate how the randomization was effected.
oddly that failing is precisely what i questioned to begin with ... believe it or not.
in summary, while you have marshaled an interesting array of wikipedia articles, the original article in question remains a piece of hype-mongering.
it has in no way connected itself to any of what you have stated.
instead, it has merely used (or possibly abused) the terms of biology to describe what might otherwise be a rather boring high school science fair experiment.
it sounds like you are now accepting that the article is misleading.
You're agreeing that the terms are not what a normal reader would construe them to mean.
if the experiment wants to show anything, the methodology has to be more transparent so that we can know whether to consider its "genome" as really a genome or are something more banal.
if the semi-random is really just someone going through and changing parameters in a config file (or using a script to do it), then it's not really random at all.
here's a url that helps make sense of the difference: same site [wikipedia.org]
oh, so you're saying we just make up new meanings for old terms and act like their the same! oh now i get it! see that's the problem. the robots do not deceive; they do not see food. the article is a misconstrual of what is happening.
I did. Did you understand the meaning behind the paragraphs you cite?
I am confused as to how it was possible to understand the claims it made. Robots don't have genomes and don't eat food. Their "genomes" cannot be recombined.
Robots have code and programmers. What does a random change mean in this context? Do they use faulty dram or mess with the voltage?
conspicuously absent is any explanation of what is meant by "learned" in this context or how the algorithms "evolved"
The timing coincided with an expiration of a no-compete. He also tapped some of the same people he liked working with at EDS who also had their no competes expire.
that was my question as well. the motor seems to consist of many atoms. one might fairly say "the piston" is only 2 atoms.
is grounding no longer a problem? I haven't built a computer in a while, but I'm not sure if cardboard makes a good ground.
i'm not sure where you're getting your data: http://www.municipalbonds.com/ seems to be somewhere between 4-5%
try googling the municipal bond rate.
well, i too think slashdot is getting worse, but i don't think the problem is in the comments section.
there's really been no work done on this project AFAIK. it's just hope, a dream, and a website so far. A couple napkin calculations and suggested solutions to the basic problems. Unfortunately, he didn't know that napkinning is a multi-person sport.
a basic problem is that it often snows at night, good sir. how do propose to power a solar cell at night in order for it to have the energy it needs to melt ice across its entire surface?
...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_of_fusion
we're looking 333.55 J/cm^3 of water. So at 16m^2 per panel, it's 1.6 x 10^6 * 3.3 x 10^2 = J/cm of water = ~ 5 x 10^5 kJ/cm of water
that's a pretty decent amount of energy not including the amount needed to heat it up to 0C in the first place.
if you read the website, you would realize the only thing they tested is the HTML.
fair point.
I was just trying to imagine there was something other than marketing + hope in the website or blog post
the more i think about it the more i realize this project will only work if a new form of relativistic physics arrives that has hope as the magic term.
that's also what i think of the new health care cost plan, but that's for another thread.
at least one of the claims here seems a little off: http://www.solarroadways.com/The%20Numbers.htm
in particular, this sentence: "This means that if each individual panel can be made for no more than $6912.00, then the Solar Roadwayâ can be built for the same cost as current asphalt roads." It seems to assume that an outlay of 3x the money for a road that lasts 3x as long is the same cost as 1x & 1x respectively. While this is true for someone with infinite readily available money, the reality is that most places don't have enough money for that.
also "The Solar Roadwayâ will, therefore, eliminate half of the greenhouse gases currently being produced. " seems to be a dramatic overstatement.
that's a good set of points you make skull. have you considered following your own advice? (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1229581&cid=27915343)
i.e. you should also read the convo.
i'll spell it out for since i don't expect you to do any reading. linux power management doesn't work that well because most systems are not fully ACPI compliant and cheat using their windows-only drivers.