No. That's like saying you only need one digit in base 5 to store 43232, which has five digits...
1.24 trillion digits is really amazingly large. But you could make do with 1 digit in base 10^1.24 trillion - how to store this digit while distinguishing it from all the other possible digits is left as an exercise for the reader:-).
Some other poster also mentioned this, but I want to make a few different points. First think about the sort of thing you want to teach, what is the point of your class - then think about the specifics.
Your list of items seem to hint you want to teach them "Linux rulez!!". That ruffles my feathers a little - classes aren't meant for propaganda. On the other hand, enthusiasm is the best learning aid there is, so probably this isn't so bad...
Things that you'd want kids to know about:
Windows isn't all there is!
There is a thing called Free (or Open Source) software. That means that you can usually download it all for free, which is good. It also means you can do what you want with it. This may be a weird notion to kids who can't program and who are used to pirating everything they want to have anyway.
This stuff is actually useful. Many web computers they interact with (the servers) run stuff like Linux.
Everything is customizable. Show them how to change the background, how their windows work, how many start bars they have, et cetera. Go all out on this. Kids have fun trying to make their own desktop look more wildly different from the others:-).
Give a demo of a wild range of software - these systems are just as useful as Windows.
Simple to program. No need to install anything extra, and you can already make tiny GUI programs with, say, Python and Tkinter.
Also mention other options than Linux.
Involve (networked) games. Something like Liquid Wars is very simple to learn, addictive, fun (if it's fast enough) and open source.
As a start. You could teach them how to make a dual boot system for themselves at the end, I suppose, but it's not the main point of the class. As a distro, who cares, they're all basically the same, go with Debian since that's what you know.
So you have to write a minimal header, then print a string.
For some perspective: the normal ELF header is 52 bytes long, and the string including line feed is 55 bytes. The winner did it in 102, less than the sum of those. Wow.
The next thought: why in heck didn't they print source (as if he didn't build that binary by hand), the binaries, or any info at all about how they did this!! It's stupid to look at the results only, so many questions, so few answers...
Why does everyone continue to believe that the government can do a better job at space exploration than the private sector?
Uhm, compare results of the two? If private organizations can do better without government funding, why aren't they doing it? (of course they are, they're even going to the moon, but they haven't outperformed government) And if government would be paying for it, I don't see the difference with NASA.
Probably because like most of Europe it is far cheaper to put up cell towers than to have wires run everywhere.
Note that Europe is much more densely populated than the US, there are actually land lines absolutely everywhere, and the wired telephone was a state monopoly. Your argument just vanished.
I don't know about 'cell towers' so much. I think most of them are on churches, that sort of thing. Perhaps tall buildings are denser in Europe as well (purely rural areas? they hardly exist anymore in the Netherlands, and where they are, there are churches).
The cell phone thing is driven by kids. They want their own phones, and use SMS like they're insane. When your phone is half a year old you're uncool. Adults just thought they were pretty cheap and very useful. Especially when abroad, it's easier to have a cell phone that just switches to some local network than to have a public phone card of whatever country you're presently in.
Plus aggressive marketing from many different competitors, who really compete directly, and who had to give huge discounts on the phones to get subscribers. It's not often that a media/communication market is open like this (choice between five or six equal competitors).
I've heard that in America, it's not so easy to switch to a new phone. In Europe, you just remove the simcard from the old phone to the new one and you're done, everything is ported over.
Sci-fi's are often uncannily accurate at predicting the future.
Uhm. Jules Verne, yes, he did predict things that did happen - well, submarines, and we did go to the moon. We didn't go to the center of the earth. I don't care about Googling for his other books right now.
Then we get to HG Wells... Wars with aliens, time machines, anti gravity,...
Since then... None of the 20th century SF seems to have gotten the world around the year 2000 right. Cell phones are everywhere, personal computing is cheap and used for games, there's the Internet, and maybe we'll even finish the current space station in ten years. There is some cloning and biotech and we use it for medicine. There have been a few terrorist attacks, and now the whole world is obsessed with them.
Now what did SF tell us... Rockets! Space colonies! World War Three! One World Government! Aliens! FTL travel! And of course, flying cars.
My first guess is that SF has been performing less (at predicting the future) than you would expect of pure chance. But there have been great books:-)
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
·
· Score: 2
On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence.
You've just described a test for intelligence that 99.9% of humans would fail. And yet a computer, who could pass the test but by some different method, isn't as intelligent as a human? Doesn't sound like a good test.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't have a purpose to put it to, you may as well be a jellyfish.
So why did Deep Blue play the game then, instead of just closing itself down? Why do computer programs do anything at all? Because they want to? No, of course not, because we tell them to. And it will be the same for any intelligent program.
Re:Would Poker be a good AI test?
on
Behind Deep Blue
·
· Score: 2
Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?
I like someone's suggestion of Dungeons and Dragons. The problem is defining success. There's no optimal way to play, and you could make something almost Eliza-style to make it play in a very boring, stupid, non-cooperative way. It'd be back to a judgement call.
Perhaps a better approach is to just have a system that can learn games. User invents a game, sits down, tells the computer how to do it, computer plays it legally and does its best. Bonus points if it recognizes when it can use brute force, or another strategy it can do well, but playing strength isn't the point - after all, almost all humans totally suck at any game they've just been taught as well - and many don't even improve with practice.
I think requiring knowledge of natural language is too much, human language is very weird and connected to the specific architecture of our brain. If we ever figure it out we can teach computers, but before that, it must be possible to be intelligent and not know human languages. However, the artificial language used must be complex enough to explain the rules of basically any game. Perhaps something like Lojban?
Take this to extremes, and you have Nomic - where the rules are trivial to begin with, and players vote for new rules, changes to existing rules, etc. Anything goes. If you can play Nomic, you're intelligent:-).
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine,
Thinking yes, feeling no; that would be AE, and I don't see much point in that.
Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.
Just that you know, and are able to understand how it does it, does not mean it's not intelligent.
But of course, stupendously narrowly intelligent:-). It couldn't recognize a chess piece if it had a.png of one. General AI is, of course, a very different beast. But suppose we solve that problem and you'll still be able to understand how it works - wouldn't it still be general AI?
And feeling... nah, in us that's a result of our evolution, but general intelligence doesn't need it.
Are we talking about the brain as we use it, or the brain, at it's full potential?
They're the same thing. The brain used the way we use it is the brain.
The idea of a brain that could do a lot more than we ever used it for, by very simple means, is an evolutionary impossibility - it could never have evolved. The idea is absurd.
I'm sorry for saying this. It's not constructive and rather anti-US, I suppose.
But from all the things that look stupid about US politics from this side of the ocean, this phenomenon of tacking on loads of totally unrelated stuff to some bill must be the worst.
Has any politician who did this ever defended this process in public? Is there one politician left who takes this whole democracy thing seriously?
I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.
Standard library solution: position the monitors just so that the librarian behind the desk can see them.
Can the Hubble Space Telescope take a picture that shows the Apollo lunar modules on the moon? With its 2.4 diameter mirror, the smallest object that the Hubble can resolve at the Moon's distance of about 400,000 kilometers is about 80 meters across.
Besides, why would anyone who believed in that naive hoax suddenly believe a so-called Hubble picture?
This year's Leonid shower will be the last one for a long time to come! Earth won't pass through this comet trail for quite a while. The next probable year for a Leonid shower/storm is 2098, or maybe even 2131!
See this article for explanation. The dates are on page 4.
But for this year, a great show is still expected. So if you have half an option to go outside for a while (say, Nov 19), do so!
One, they know that it's not like you've got a choice in how you obtain music in the future, because every store will be carrying crippled disks,
They also know very well that I can download the mp3s on the CD just as easily (and much cheaper) than buying it from them. The stores know very well that consumers have another option. They're full with people who listen to CDs in their store but not buying them. The last thing they need is CDs that people will just refuse to buy.
I haven't bought many CDs in recent years, but I was just about to start again. I probably will buy one or two in the next weeks.
When I'm buying my CD, I will explain to them about this, and I want to know for sure that my computer can read it (it's the only CD player I have). I want a money back guarantee from them, or at least the right to swap my CD for another if it doesn't work. And if they refuse, I'll take my business elsewhere. It's not much, but there aren't many stores that don't care about selling stuff.
I want the stores to know that they're missing revenue and exactly why that's happening. They might ask their distributor for non-crippled CDs. That way at least my 'boycott' just might make some people aware of the quality of this idea.
No, they only win if we buy their CDs. Laws by themselves don't make them money.
Last time a CD came out in the Netherlands that didn't work well on a PC (in fact it crashed Windows - insert joke here), there was a huge uproar from consumer organizations, and the CD was pulled in a few days. People will notice that these CDs suck. That means Bertelsmann will have to leave this plan rather quickly.
That says as much about the sad state of the way the stock market works as it does about MS.
After the result of the lawsuit came out, MS stock went up, of course. And then, so did the stock of a lot of other tech companies. After all, as my newspaper explains, when the biggest company of them all goes up so much, that means the whole sector must be on a rise!
So, in short, stock market logic:
1. Microsoft abuses their competitors, abusing a monopolistic stranglehold on many other businesses
2. But they avoid bad punishment in the resulting lawsuit, and can basically continue their practices
3. That's good for Microsoft!
4. That must be good for the competition!!
("5. Profit!" occurs only in their dreams).
Yeah, but that's a service agreement. Somehow I think this stuff is much more absurd as a contract you have to accept before they allow you to use their #^#$@#%^ webpage. And then if you refuse, they allow you to use their webpage.
The end result is a heap of wheeling and dealing between candidates for these "directed preferences." It even becomes a stick in between elections that the minor parties can use to beat a major party with;
That sounds like a Good Thing. The winner of the election gets the seat and thus direct power, but smaller parties still get some power even though they're not elected.
In a simple system where the highest number of votes wins automatically, it doesn't matter much what minorities want, once you have enough votes to win. Even in cases where the race is close so they do matter, this instant runoff system formalizes it (there is a clear minority party which makes it explicit who their voters should vote for next), making it a more direct process; candidates have a good view of the issues that matter to the minorities.
So sure, it's a lot of wheeling and dealing, politics etc, but it sure seems to me it should work better at representing everybody's interests, at first sight.
Slashdot Mirror
You only need 1 digit in base 1.24_trillion!!!
No. That's like saying you only need one digit in base 5 to store 43232, which has five digits...
1.24 trillion digits is really amazingly large. But you could make do with 1 digit in base 10^1.24 trillion - how to store this digit while distinguishing it from all the other possible digits is left as an exercise for the reader :-).
Some other poster also mentioned this, but I want to make a few different points. First think about the sort of thing you want to teach, what is the point of your class - then think about the specifics.
Your list of items seem to hint you want to teach them "Linux rulez!!". That ruffles my feathers a little - classes aren't meant for propaganda. On the other hand, enthusiasm is the best learning aid there is, so probably this isn't so bad...
Things that you'd want kids to know about:
As a start. You could teach them how to make a dual boot system for themselves at the end, I suppose, but it's not the main point of the class. As a distro, who cares, they're all basically the same, go with Debian since that's what you know.
Pipe http://server/message | stdout
That's not an ELF binary. Can you make a binary that does that in 102 bytes?
So you have to write a minimal header, then print a string.
For some perspective: the normal ELF header is 52 bytes long, and the string including line feed is 55 bytes. The winner did it in 102, less than the sum of those. Wow.
The next thought: why in heck didn't they print source (as if he didn't build that binary by hand), the binaries, or any info at all about how they did this!! It's stupid to look at the results only, so many questions, so few answers...
Why does everyone continue to believe that the government can do a better job at space exploration than the private sector?
Uhm, compare results of the two? If private organizations can do better without government funding, why aren't they doing it? (of course they are, they're even going to the moon, but they haven't outperformed government) And if government would be paying for it, I don't see the difference with NASA.
Probably because like most of Europe it is far cheaper to put up cell towers than to have wires run everywhere.
Note that Europe is much more densely populated than the US, there are actually land lines absolutely everywhere, and the wired telephone was a state monopoly. Your argument just vanished.
I don't know about 'cell towers' so much. I think most of them are on churches, that sort of thing. Perhaps tall buildings are denser in Europe as well (purely rural areas? they hardly exist anymore in the Netherlands, and where they are, there are churches).
The cell phone thing is driven by kids. They want their own phones, and use SMS like they're insane. When your phone is half a year old you're uncool. Adults just thought they were pretty cheap and very useful. Especially when abroad, it's easier to have a cell phone that just switches to some local network than to have a public phone card of whatever country you're presently in.
Plus aggressive marketing from many different competitors, who really compete directly, and who had to give huge discounts on the phones to get subscribers. It's not often that a media/communication market is open like this (choice between five or six equal competitors).
I've heard that in America, it's not so easy to switch to a new phone. In Europe, you just remove the simcard from the old phone to the new one and you're done, everything is ported over.
one of the first (if not the first) to use animation in a video
Yesterday, I saw the video of 'Leader of the pack', by the Shangri-La's, from 1972. Animated.
It's just possible that this was something made by the BBC, not an official video clip, but I'd be very surprised. It looked vintage 1970s (ie, bad).
Sci-fi's are often uncannily accurate at predicting the future.
Uhm. Jules Verne, yes, he did predict things that did happen - well, submarines, and we did go to the moon. We didn't go to the center of the earth. I don't care about Googling for his other books right now.
Then we get to HG Wells... Wars with aliens, time machines, anti gravity, ...
Since then... None of the 20th century SF seems to have gotten the world around the year 2000 right. Cell phones are everywhere, personal computing is cheap and used for games, there's the Internet, and maybe we'll even finish the current space station in ten years. There is some cloning and biotech and we use it for medicine. There have been a few terrorist attacks, and now the whole world is obsessed with them.
Now what did SF tell us... Rockets! Space colonies! World War Three! One World Government! Aliens! FTL travel! And of course, flying cars.
My first guess is that SF has been performing less (at predicting the future) than you would expect of pure chance. But there have been great books :-)
On the other hand, if a person (or a computer program) independently realized that it is a consequence of 3 not being the sum of two squares mod 4, I would regard this is at least a narrow intelligence.
You've just described a test for intelligence that 99.9% of humans would fail. And yet a computer, who could pass the test but by some different method, isn't as intelligent as a human? Doesn't sound like a good test.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are; if you don't have a purpose to put it to, you may as well be a jellyfish.
So why did Deep Blue play the game then, instead of just closing itself down? Why do computer programs do anything at all? Because they want to? No, of course not, because we tell them to. And it will be the same for any intelligent program.
Since chess moves are limited to a certain domain, what *would* be a good game for creating and/or testing an AI computer system?
I like someone's suggestion of Dungeons and Dragons. The problem is defining success. There's no optimal way to play, and you could make something almost Eliza-style to make it play in a very boring, stupid, non-cooperative way. It'd be back to a judgement call.
Perhaps a better approach is to just have a system that can learn games. User invents a game, sits down, tells the computer how to do it, computer plays it legally and does its best. Bonus points if it recognizes when it can use brute force, or another strategy it can do well, but playing strength isn't the point - after all, almost all humans totally suck at any game they've just been taught as well - and many don't even improve with practice.
I think requiring knowledge of natural language is too much, human language is very weird and connected to the specific architecture of our brain. If we ever figure it out we can teach computers, but before that, it must be possible to be intelligent and not know human languages. However, the artificial language used must be complex enough to explain the rules of basically any game. Perhaps something like Lojban?
Take this to extremes, and you have Nomic - where the rules are trivial to begin with, and players vote for new rules, changes to existing rules, etc. Anything goes. If you can play Nomic, you're intelligent :-).
True AI would be a real thinking, feeling machine,
Thinking yes, feeling no; that would be AE, and I don't see much point in that.
Anyway, I do believe Deep Blue had intelligence, just in a very narrow way. Why? Because humans playing chess is seen as a sign of intelligence in humans, because before we built a chess playing computer we thought it would be an intelligent thing for a computer to do.
Just that you know, and are able to understand how it does it, does not mean it's not intelligent.
But of course, stupendously narrowly intelligent :-). It couldn't recognize a chess piece if it had a .png of one. General AI is, of course, a very different beast. But suppose we solve that problem and you'll still be able to understand how it works - wouldn't it still be general AI?
And feeling... nah, in us that's a result of our evolution, but general intelligence doesn't need it.
Hey Slashdot, you could have become famous if you'd included the controversial html embedded in the post ;-)
Are we talking about the brain as we use it, or the brain, at it's full potential?
They're the same thing. The brain used the way we use it is the brain.
The idea of a brain that could do a lot more than we ever used it for, by very simple means, is an evolutionary impossibility - it could never have evolved. The idea is absurd.
I'm sorry for saying this. It's not constructive and rather anti-US, I suppose.
But from all the things that look stupid about US politics from this side of the ocean, this phenomenon of tacking on loads of totally unrelated stuff to some bill must be the worst.
Has any politician who did this ever defended this process in public? Is there one politician left who takes this whole democracy thing seriously?
I see absolutely no harm in having tools that slow down teenagers from leaving goatse.cx sitting on library computers as a "joke" that my 5 year old daughter has to walk through.
Standard library solution: position the monitors just so that the librarian behind the desk can see them.
Let's score a Informative...
Why don't they just use the freekin' Hubble to take pictures of the landing sites and shut these idiots up?
As explained on this Astronomy Picture of the Day:
Besides, why would anyone who believed in that naive hoax suddenly believe a so-called Hubble picture?
This year's Leonid shower will be the last one for a long time to come! Earth won't pass through this comet trail for quite a while. The next probable year for a Leonid shower/storm is 2098, or maybe even 2131!
See this article for explanation. The dates are on page 4.
But for this year, a great show is still expected. So if you have half an option to go outside for a while (say, Nov 19), do so!
One, they know that it's not like you've got a choice in how you obtain music in the future, because every store will be carrying crippled disks,
They also know very well that I can download the mp3s on the CD just as easily (and much cheaper) than buying it from them. The stores know very well that consumers have another option. They're full with people who listen to CDs in their store but not buying them. The last thing they need is CDs that people will just refuse to buy.
I haven't bought many CDs in recent years, but I was just about to start again. I probably will buy one or two in the next weeks.
When I'm buying my CD, I will explain to them about this, and I want to know for sure that my computer can read it (it's the only CD player I have). I want a money back guarantee from them, or at least the right to swap my CD for another if it doesn't work. And if they refuse, I'll take my business elsewhere. It's not much, but there aren't many stores that don't care about selling stuff.
I want the stores to know that they're missing revenue and exactly why that's happening. They might ask their distributor for non-crippled CDs. That way at least my 'boycott' just might make some people aware of the quality of this idea.
They win either way.
No, they only win if we buy their CDs. Laws by themselves don't make them money.
Last time a CD came out in the Netherlands that didn't work well on a PC (in fact it crashed Windows - insert joke here), there was a huge uproar from consumer organizations, and the CD was pulled in a few days. People will notice that these CDs suck. That means Bertelsmann will have to leave this plan rather quickly.
That says as much about the sad state of the way the stock market works as it does about MS.
After the result of the lawsuit came out, MS stock went up, of course. And then, so did the stock of a lot of other tech companies. After all, as my newspaper explains, when the biggest company of them all goes up so much, that means the whole sector must be on a rise!
So, in short, stock market logic:
1. Microsoft abuses their competitors, abusing a monopolistic stranglehold on many other businesses
2. But they avoid bad punishment in the resulting lawsuit, and can basically continue their practices
3. That's good for Microsoft!
4. That must be good for the competition!!
("5. Profit!" occurs only in their dreams).
for about $1300-$1400, which you're not going to convince me is that much more than a well-built equivalently priced PC.
In other news, it was announced that object X is not that much heavier than any other object of equivalent weight.
Verisign has them beat by a long shot.
Yeah, but that's a service agreement. Somehow I think this stuff is much more absurd as a contract you have to accept before they allow you to use their #^#$@#%^ webpage . And then if you refuse, they allow you to use their webpage.
The end result is a heap of wheeling and dealing between candidates for these "directed preferences." It even becomes a stick in between elections that the minor parties can use to beat a major party with;
That sounds like a Good Thing. The winner of the election gets the seat and thus direct power, but smaller parties still get some power even though they're not elected.
In a simple system where the highest number of votes wins automatically, it doesn't matter much what minorities want, once you have enough votes to win. Even in cases where the race is close so they do matter, this instant runoff system formalizes it (there is a clear minority party which makes it explicit who their voters should vote for next), making it a more direct process; candidates have a good view of the issues that matter to the minorities.
So sure, it's a lot of wheeling and dealing, politics etc, but it sure seems to me it should work better at representing everybody's interests, at first sight.