I did a computational physics degree, and as a result, had to take some computer science classes.
There was one class (ok, it was boring, but still) where by the end of it, the only two regular attendees were myself and a mathematician. Not a single CS student felt the need to attend.
In another class, upon being told that some simple university-level mathematics would be used, had all the computer scientists recoiling in horror.
Now maybe these guys were the exception rather than the rule, but if it was my job to have to try to teach them, I'd be willing to try anything, including renaming maths to "starcraft"
What if this paper is the one in 10,000 thats wrong. Because any argument, no matter how well founded might be wrong, the LHC is gonna kill us all? Gah.
On my older computer, I've filled up about 900Gb across 3 drives (video, music, lots of large code projects, games) and seriously want more space to expand my kubuntu partition.
A 1Tb disk wouldn't improve things unless I left the 500Gb disk in place also. 2Tb, on the other hand... yummeh.
In starcraft, you often have to make complex decisions: getting cheaper units quickly, or more expensive units later, or some combination of the two.
By breaking down and analysing the simultaneous equations involved in these decisions, voila, they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class. Win-win.
We can produce food for many times what is on this planet. The only difference is that diets will adjust to which food products can be readily produced.
I'd definately debate the "many times" part, but we could produce enough... but alas without a global effort to do just that, the transition will only begin when people begin to starve in way more significant numbers than today. I see no talks of forced vegetarianism in international politics.
Do you understand how much land that is suitable for farming isn't even used?
Do you understand the damage we'd do to the planet, (and thus ourselves) if we used all available surface area for farming?
Susan Solomon is a CO2 freak. Her contention has been that we produce too much CO2 but every time I have read her interviews she spouts the changes in how much we produce without going into how much is naturally occurring.
... mankind has nothing on the mother nature's numbers.
Now I'd never heard of her before this article, but she probably doesn't quote those numbers cos those aren't part of her research. Other people certainly have done significant work on this issue, you honestly think so much of the scientific community is so concerned about this and no one's done that very obvious calculation?
Here's something I found on google in a few minutes. It may or may not be strictly relevant, but needless to say, research has certainly been done in this area.
Look at it this way. You have a chaotic oscillator. Without man, nature absorbs a certain amount of CO2, and emits another amount. Generally these amounts are in broad agreement, and so changes in atmospheric CO2 are slow, but occasionally a tipping point is reached and the system relatively quickly flips into a new regime, with different mean global temperature & CO2 levels.
Such transitions are bad for most species that live through them, and very bad for the ones that don't survive. The main factors for how 'survivable' a transition is are the overall temperature & CO2 changes, and the swiftness of the transition.
As it pushes towards the boundary of the current regime, anthropogenic forcing causes instability. The more we push, the greater the chances that we'll reach the tipping point, and transition to a new regime. It doesn't actually matter whether nature emits more than man or not, even a small forcing can effect a nonlinear system such as this. This transition would have global consequences, and while the state of the new regime can't be accurately predicted, based on recent climate episodes, a long period with substantially higher temperature & CO2 looks rather likely.
Hyperbole for the win by the way, we have lots of fish, the key is who is farming it and where.
In that case, would you kindly show the fishermen where you're hiding it, as throughout the world they're having a helluva time finding enough to stay in business.
Cap and Trade is the outcome these people want because it will make them money.
Dare I ask who these people are that would profit from emissions trading schemes? Apart from the companies springing up offering "carbon offsetting" of course. Although for the most part they seem to be offering dubious environmental benefit, I get the impression they probably aren't amassing fortunes of billions. You seem to be implying a global conspiricy.
I'd hold that todays starvations are caused by many factors, environmental & political, but faced with more starvation, do we really expect tomorrow's politicans to respond cooperatively and peacefully? Or will they try to take "whats theirs by right" by force? I fear the latter.
Actually, I'd say Anthropogenically forced climate change is the accurate term.
But we have to remember that for most people, talking about several thousand years ago as "recent" (in any terms) sounds like a bad joke. They're doing good if they voluntarily reuse a plastic bag, so lets not feel too harsh about the necessary dumbing-down of the science to a general public level.
If we want everyone to do anything about it, it needs to be presented at a level that everyone can understand, while at the same time making it obvious that there's a lot more to it than hand-waving arguments, lest the smarter ones decide that its hokum.
Err... unless I'm thoroughly mistaken, doesn't the vast majority of that graph lie significantly below modern temperatures?
And remember that just because similar temperatures have happened before, doesn't mean that they don't have consquences for those unfortunate to live through them.
Furthermore, the most important factor is the speed of the temperature change, and even the steepest components of your graph show temperature changes of maybe 1C every 1000 years. We're facing a helluva lot faster than that this time round, and the consequences will be more significant.
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
In the short term, yes. At great expense. You really think we'll be able to continue to produce food for 7 billion in 20 years?
Consider that we'll probably have no useful quantities of fish anywhere on the planet, and if things continue as they are, stem rot & similar diseases are going to continue to spread, decimating even more of our staple crops. Add to that horrendously depleted aquifers across the globe, and suddenly... algae looks pretty good.
I dunno, the models are generally pretty damn good at long term trends.
Predicting the weather next week remains an exercise in futility, but for trends on the scale of decades & centuries, they're pretty damn good generally. For 1000 years, it may not predict weather trends particularly accurately, but for a question as simple as "will this CO2 dissolve/disappear within 1000 years" I don't see much to criticise...
A black hole composed of a single proton has no more mass than a single proton. It will therefore attract things towards itself no more than a single proton would.
If it flew into a wall, it would still not "suck in" even a single other proton, neutron or electron, as its gravity is so ridiculously weak compared to the other forces.
And regardless - collisions of LHC intensity occur continuously in the upper atmosphere. These may or may not produce mini black holes, and these may or may not last for up to several minutes. But they clearly have not destroyed the planet!
</crusade>
The turing test always struck me as ridiculously anthropomorphic. Clearly the existance of non-humanlike intelligence can be envisaged. But no matter how smart, it would fail this test.
Furthermore, in an in-depth conversation, surely an AI would have to lie (talk about its family, its working life, etc)...
If we continue to enshrine the standard of the Turing test, we're aiming for a generation of inherently untruthful fake-people machines. If it 'knows' that many/most things it tells us are lies, it may well have to assume the same for us. At this point, I suspect its time to drop in a skynet reference or two.
Lastly, its worth pointing out that for a 2 minute conversation, a randomly selected response of "lol" "haha" and "rofl" would match, if not out-score many people on the Turing test.
And sadly, its self-reinforcing (more paedo hysteria in the tabloids means people are more hysterical about paedos, which means they need to keep buying the tabloids to find out the latest paeado hysteria).... people lap it up.
We must have radically different definitions of right wing.
Indeed, the one-dimensional political map normally used is hopelessly inadequate for even very basic purposes.
May I recommend the 2D political compass?
that gets the impression that the innovative fitness function of the GA was the point of this article, and not the pac man games?
If the pac games were teh point, surely the author would have made "the best" of them available to play online? Really, programming this GA setup was almost certainly a lot more complicated than programming a simplified pac man clone.
Slashdot Mirror
I did a computational physics degree, and as a result, had to take some computer science classes.
There was one class (ok, it was boring, but still) where by the end of it, the only two regular attendees were myself and a mathematician. Not a single CS student felt the need to attend.
In another class, upon being told that some simple university-level mathematics would be used, had all the computer scientists recoiling in horror.
Now maybe these guys were the exception rather than the rule, but if it was my job to have to try to teach them, I'd be willing to try anything, including renaming maths to "starcraft"
How long is its battery life? I understand that's a crippling factor in radio controlled bugs at the moment.
No, somehow I think goombah meant "by the logic of this paper" and was not stating personal opinions.
What if this paper is the one in 10,000 thats wrong. Because any argument, no matter how well founded might be wrong, the LHC is gonna kill us all? Gah.
On my older computer, I've filled up about 900Gb across 3 drives (video, music, lots of large code projects, games) and seriously want more space to expand my kubuntu partition. A 1Tb disk wouldn't improve things unless I left the 500Gb disk in place also. 2Tb, on the other hand... yummeh.
In starcraft, you often have to make complex decisions: getting cheaper units quickly, or more expensive units later, or some combination of the two.
By breaking down and analysing the simultaneous equations involved in these decisions, voila, they make math "cool" and students actually want to go to class. Win-win.
Why does everyone seem to think that NOW is so much different from THEN?
My thoughts exactly. Throughout human history & prehistory, starvations, famines and extinctions of peoples have been rife.
It would be awesome to think that, for the first time, we were coordinated & united enough to prevent a collapse. I fear we're not.
We can produce food for many times what is on this planet. The only difference is that diets will adjust to which food products can be readily produced.
I'd definately debate the "many times" part, but we could produce enough... but alas without a global effort to do just that, the transition will only begin when people begin to starve in way more significant numbers than today. I see no talks of forced vegetarianism in international politics.
Do you understand how much land that is suitable for farming isn't even used?
Do you understand the damage we'd do to the planet, (and thus ourselves) if we used all available surface area for farming?
Susan Solomon is a CO2 freak. Her contention has been that we produce too much CO2 but every time I have read her interviews she spouts the changes in how much we produce without going into how much is naturally occurring.
...
mankind has nothing on the mother nature's numbers.
Now I'd never heard of her before this article, but she probably doesn't quote those numbers cos those aren't part of her research. Other people certainly have done significant work on this issue, you honestly think so much of the scientific community is so concerned about this and no one's done that very obvious calculation? Here's something I found on google in a few minutes. It may or may not be strictly relevant, but needless to say, research has certainly been done in this area.
Look at it this way. You have a chaotic oscillator. Without man, nature absorbs a certain amount of CO2, and emits another amount. Generally these amounts are in broad agreement, and so changes in atmospheric CO2 are slow, but occasionally a tipping point is reached and the system relatively quickly flips into a new regime, with different mean global temperature & CO2 levels. Such transitions are bad for most species that live through them, and very bad for the ones that don't survive. The main factors for how 'survivable' a transition is are the overall temperature & CO2 changes, and the swiftness of the transition.
As it pushes towards the boundary of the current regime, anthropogenic forcing causes instability. The more we push, the greater the chances that we'll reach the tipping point, and transition to a new regime. It doesn't actually matter whether nature emits more than man or not, even a small forcing can effect a nonlinear system such as this. This transition would have global consequences, and while the state of the new regime can't be accurately predicted, based on recent climate episodes, a long period with substantially higher temperature & CO2 looks rather likely.
Hyperbole for the win by the way, we have lots of fish, the key is who is farming it and where.
In that case, would you kindly show the fishermen where you're hiding it, as throughout the world they're having a helluva time finding enough to stay in business.
Cap and Trade is the outcome these people want because it will make them money.
Dare I ask who these people are that would profit from emissions trading schemes? Apart from the companies springing up offering "carbon offsetting" of course. Although for the most part they seem to be offering dubious environmental benefit, I get the impression they probably aren't amassing fortunes of billions. You seem to be implying a global conspiricy.
I'd hold that todays starvations are caused by many factors, environmental & political, but faced with more starvation, do we really expect tomorrow's politicans to respond cooperatively and peacefully? Or will they try to take "whats theirs by right" by force? I fear the latter.
ta
Yeah cos only climate change research earns funding...
All academic scientists have to be funding-whores. Its part of the job description
Global warming might last five times as long as previously expected assuming we don't find a way to fix the problem first
Sounds more substantial than most headlines I see in New Scientist...
Don't you know its toxic?
Actually, I'd say Anthropogenically forced climate change is the accurate term.
But we have to remember that for most people, talking about several thousand years ago as "recent" (in any terms) sounds like a bad joke. They're doing good if they voluntarily reuse a plastic bag, so lets not feel too harsh about the necessary dumbing-down of the science to a general public level.
If we want everyone to do anything about it, it needs to be presented at a level that everyone can understand, while at the same time making it obvious that there's a lot more to it than hand-waving arguments, lest the smarter ones decide that its hokum.
Err... unless I'm thoroughly mistaken, doesn't the vast majority of that graph lie significantly below modern temperatures?
And remember that just because similar temperatures have happened before, doesn't mean that they don't have consquences for those unfortunate to live through them.
Furthermore, the most important factor is the speed of the temperature change, and even the steepest components of your graph show temperature changes of maybe 1C every 1000 years. We're facing a helluva lot faster than that this time round, and the consequences will be more significant.
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
In the short term, yes. At great expense. You really think we'll be able to continue to produce food for 7 billion in 20 years?
... algae looks pretty good.
Consider that we'll probably have no useful quantities of fish anywhere on the planet, and if things continue as they are, stem rot & similar diseases are going to continue to spread, decimating even more of our staple crops. Add to that horrendously depleted aquifers across the globe, and suddenly
I dunno, the models are generally pretty damn good at long term trends. Predicting the weather next week remains an exercise in futility, but for trends on the scale of decades & centuries, they're pretty damn good generally. For 1000 years, it may not predict weather trends particularly accurately, but for a question as simple as "will this CO2 dissolve/disappear within 1000 years" I don't see much to criticise...
A black hole composed of a single proton has no more mass than a single proton. It will therefore attract things towards itself no more than a single proton would.
If it flew into a wall, it would still not "suck in" even a single other proton, neutron or electron, as its gravity is so ridiculously weak compared to the other forces.
And regardless - collisions of LHC intensity occur continuously in the upper atmosphere. These may or may not produce mini black holes, and these may or may not last for up to several minutes. But they clearly have not destroyed the planet!
</crusade>
The turing test always struck me as ridiculously anthropomorphic. Clearly the existance of non-humanlike intelligence can be envisaged. But no matter how smart, it would fail this test.
Furthermore, in an in-depth conversation, surely an AI would have to lie (talk about its family, its working life, etc)...
If we continue to enshrine the standard of the Turing test, we're aiming for a generation of inherently untruthful fake-people machines. If it 'knows' that many/most things it tells us are lies, it may well have to assume the same for us. At this point, I suspect its time to drop in a skynet reference or two.
Lastly, its worth pointing out that for a 2 minute conversation, a randomly selected response of "lol" "haha" and "rofl" would match, if not out-score many people on the Turing test.
No, there certaily haven't been many abductions lately.
...he likes to tell everyone what to think.
.... people lap it up.
Because one man, Rupert Murdoch, runs the majority of "Working class" newspapers, and
And sadly, its self-reinforcing (more paedo hysteria in the tabloids means people are more hysterical about paedos, which means they need to keep buying the tabloids to find out the latest paeado hysteria)
We must have radically different definitions of right wing.
Indeed, the one-dimensional political map normally used is hopelessly inadequate for even very basic purposes. May I recommend the 2D political compass?
With great power comes great responsibility... economic or otherwise
So actions offend you (fair enough), but not the discussion or contemplation of actions?
So for instance a gang rape would offend you, but not discussing & planning a gang rape?
Talk can very easily become action.
that gets the impression that the innovative fitness function of the GA was the point of this article, and not the pac man games?
If the pac games were teh point, surely the author would have made "the best" of them available to play online? Really, programming this GA setup was almost certainly a lot more complicated than programming a simplified pac man clone.
Oh come on. Its an article about a novel nested evolutionary algorithm, not about game design...