I don't agree 100% that the brain makes digital decisions. The article says that we make an either/or decision regarding whether something is there or not. It is a car or it isn't a car. That's rather black and white. If a picture is blurry or if the object is partially hidden, then we could say, "It is almost a car," or, "It might be a car," implying that there is a degree to which something might be a car.
This is another reason why the brain is so difficult to emulate... When a human makes a decision like that, he or she uses a combination of bottom up and top down processing. The bottom up processing sees shapes and lines (such as simple things like vertical or horizontal lines, or maybe even a more complicated shape such as a triangle) and builds the image from that. However, at some point the top down processing steps in and says "Hey, that kind of looks like a car. So it must be a car." The entire process is not built up from scratch every time you look at an object.
In conclusion, you are correct... Not only is it both digital and analog to some degree but there seems to be a lookup table of some sort created. Even more mysteries to unravel.
Actually, this is altogether incorrect. Each neuron has only one axon (output) but my have multiple dendrites (input, decision making). All neurons can only fire at one magnitude, and they all depolarize at about the same electrical level. The difference comes in the chemicals that are released at the end of the axon. The decision making process is all done in the dendrites, and as to sensitivity, it has been shown that the further a signal is from the neuron the weaker it is. The neuron isn't quite all that complicated... That's part of the mystery as to why our brains work.
It isn't that simple. I am unfortunately not a neurologist, but I did study brain mechanics for two semesters of Psychology, so please bear with me.
If I remember correctly, the way it works is the neuron gets signals from many other sources along its dendrites, which either have an inhibitory or excitatory response, which also decays along the way (the "analog decision"). The decision to fire or not at any given time is digital to some degree, but there are factors that affect that as well such as the refractory period (an axon may only depolarize and fire once every so often).
However, once the electrical impulse reaches the end of the axon, it does not leap across to the next dendrite. It releases chemical agents which float across to the dendrite and interact with it, which are then recovered by the axon. Those chemical agents vary from axon to axon.
In addition, the recovery (reuptake) of those chemicals is crucial. What if a drug affecting the brain prevents the reuptake of those chemicals? Then they start floating around and reacting with any dendrite they happen to run into, and they get the same effect as if an axon had been fired. In fact, this is part of what happens when you become inebriated... Dopamine reuptake is blocked, causing it to float about in your brain and get overused, making you get a buzz.
Unfortunately, there is a limit to what I can remember. There are seven ways that a drug can interact with a neuron to create an inhibitory or excitatory response, however. So while it may seem digital, there is a lot more to the human brain than "fire/not fire".
I don't think this has anything to do with a bunch of scientists. The mice have obviously seen fit to humor this attempt at genetic modification, probably in an odd experiment on human behavior. It's only a matter of time anyway that they show their true form and start taking over the world (the program should be finished by now)... And they're not going to be happy that us humans have been polluting a world that they paid for. I think we should be pouring money into space colonization just in case we decode a message from the dolphins saying "So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
I can just see the headlines a year or so from now...
Cupertino, CA -- Apple has just announced their decision not to include support for microdisks of any kind, claiming that they are legacy technology and will probably fall into complete disuse in six months. Steve Jobs comments on Apple's decision.
"We are on the edge of a new era in computing. At the Apple labratories we are developing a new way of transferring data between computers. With the proper training and the right hardware, we have discovered a way to form a mind-meld with your computer and transfer data directly to or from your brain. We have reached speeds in excess of excess of 2 TB/s and we have no idea what is the limit of the human brain in storing data."
When asked about the effects on the human brain, Jobs refused to comment apart from saying that they are reviewing the effects. The interview was then interrupted by a man sloppily dressed and drooling babble "Macintosh -- Mind-meld" before he was escorted out by a pair of men in black suits and sunglasses. Jobs remarked "Oh no! The test subject!" before hastily excusing himself and asking us to leave the building.
"the ability to withstand a 1500-G shock. That is equivalent to a drop from a normal office desk onto a medium-thickness carpet"
The shock is when it lands with a delta vee equal to its falling velocity (or more, if it bounces) in a very small space.
Actually, this is incorrect, and the space it falls in has nothing to do with the space it falls through (except for wind resistance). The large shock is created by the velocity coming to a stop or even reversing itself in a near-negligible time.
Assume for a moment that a disk fell one meter onto the ground and bounced a small distance back into the air. A one meter fall at 9.8 m/s/s would result in a final velocity of 4.427 m/s. Let's also assume that it bounces up into the air at a velocity of 1 m/s, resulting in a net change in velocity of 5.527 m/s. The final assumption is the amount of time the disk contacts the ground, so let's assume a conservative value of.001 seconds.
Acceleration is equal to velocity divided by time, so we take our 5.527 m/s net change in velocity and divide it by.001, our time. This results in a net change in acceleration of 5527 m/s/s due to the disk bouncing off of the ground. Dividing this by earth's acceleration, 9.8, results in the G-Force of the collision, which is 564 Gs.
As shown by this conservative estimate, great shock can result from small forces when exerted over a negligible time. A bounce of a hard object may take even less than a thousanth of a second to recoil upwards, which I would guess is where IBM Labs is getting thier figures.
Don't mock the Trash-80? Gather 'round children, and listen to a story of horror and delight! What I am about to relate is entirely true... It happened to me, in fact. What's more, it gives me the complete and undeniable right to mock the Trash-80 as much as I please.
When I was in seventh grade (not so long ago... about six years) I had an English teacher who was not the brightest when it came to computers. She went down to the Learning Center one day to see a whole row of horribly obsolete Trash-80s sitting there on a table (they had been there as long as I can remember. 'Well,' she thought, 'look at all these wonderful computers here! I could use these to create a writing lab!
So, this fateful English teacher brought back the eight Trash-80s and got the Tech teacher or someone to set up a mini-network in our classroom. There were seven workstations and one server computer, which always ran the server software. We used some word processor, the name was unknown to me, and so were expected to type up documents which could then be printed out on the network printer. We could save our documents on 5.25 inch disks and then finish them later, and that English teacher even created a bunch of templates that we could use for our documents.
Now let me explain why this was so bad... First of all, the Trash-80 has an eight character limit on filenames. However, we were only allowed to use the first six. The last two characters had to be "~1" or it would overwrite the template, which then had to be retyped from scratch (this happened about once a week). The computer had a big orange button recessed in the keyboard which would reset the computer... It got pressed right before someone finished a document about once a week.
The word processor was also horrendous. First of all, Trash-80s don't have a backspace key, and don't need one for a command line. However, with a word processor, you need freedom of movement in all four directions, so the left arrow couldn't be used as backspace. Instead, you needed to use combinations with the '@' key... '@-d' deleted one character, '@-y' deleted a line, '@-p' deleted a paragraph, etc. Also, the cursor was always set to overwrite and couldn't be changed, so '@-i' inserted one character, '@-b' inserted a block of text, etc. It took longer to type a document on those things than to write out a document and then retype it on the Apple IIgs that was in the room!
Now I hope everyone agrees that this experience (which lasted through the entire second semester -- about eighteen weeks) gives me the right to mock the Trash-80!
While I am interested to know if the mission will be a success, I'm also interested to see what the space administration will do with the money. I'm all for cheaper propulsion techniques... If we can find a way to get up to space with a fraction of the cost, I'm sure we can see more of these trips, as well as a better chance of colonizing the moon sooner, which is something I'll celebrate.
Oh, but it's not just the transportation cost! As many a high class restaurant will tell you, you're not paying for the food. You're paying for the atmosphere, or in this case, the lack therof.
You'd think they'd check the licences before they decided to include the code... I suppose that is too much to ask for. If all three licences conflict, I think there are only a few options. The project could be torn apart and completely scrapped, or a court battle could emerge over the terms of the licenses. Who knows, this could turn into the court case that challenges the GPL.
This may go without saying, but I think that this kind of technique will find much greater life on the communications venue. Now that the ability to create a photorealistic Avatar of yourself has been created, the logical next step is to move forward to create chat rooms or other places where people communicate with each other in an OOC context where people may actually care about what you look like in real life. Photorealistic Quake III skins are cool, but nothing beyond that... I wouldn't be surprised if one of the Avatar chats that already exists tries to get their hands on this.
Not much fun if you just walk over to the goal and win is it?
(I know I'm generalizing and that NO company that made such good games as MYST and RIVEN would do something stupid like that.)
Actually, you could just walk over and win in Myst. The game was horrendously easy if you knew how to play the endgame, it took five minutes. You only have to solve three puzzles to beat the game.
At the time, however, the game was billed as having advanced CD-quality graphics, if I'm not mistaken. Making the game real-time wouldn't take away that sense of awe and exploration as you stepped through the world of Myst and goggled as you went wondering from puzzle to puzzle. If you think about it, most of the puzzles would still work in real-time. In most of those worlds you could simply go wherever you wanted anyways, another part of the fun was discovering the puzzles and story, none of which was given to you at the beginning of the game. A game like Myst was about exploration, and making that real-time can only improve it.
I agree that it won't be popular beyond a novelty, but not because of interface problems... The target audience here seems to be old gaming enthusiasts (read: Computer geeks), the same audience which has already dug up a Z-Machine emulator and beaten them all!
This is still offtopic, but it seems to be a small portion of general interest, so I thought I'd post this. A new movie is coming out about the "war" for the legalization of marijuana directed by Woody Harrelson called Grass. Here's an information snippet from Moviefone.com:
Woody Harrelson, who is known for his vocal support for the legalization of hemp, narrates this documentary which looks at the last 100 years of marijuana use, culture, and legislation, compiled from 400 hours of archival footage.
Here in Korea, you can't publish any advertisement which compares products of one company with products of another company directly, whether it's true or not. I don't think it's allowed in the U.S. also.
You can in the United States (it's very common), but it is not allowed in many parts of Europe.
A correction: It is legal to compare products directly in the U.S., but only if the comparison is true. Otherwise the offending company can be charged with False Advertising, a serious enough offense that it is avoided. However, the ad execs know how to get their point across and what results is more creative ways of saying "Our product is better than theirs" or strange attempts at confusing the consumer enough to buy their product.
Slashdot Mirror
MIT, bringing you the Butlerian Jihad one discovery at a time.
I don't agree 100% that the brain makes digital decisions. The article says that we make an either/or decision regarding whether something is there or not. It is a car or it isn't a car. That's rather black and white. If a picture is blurry or if the object is partially hidden, then we could say, "It is almost a car," or, "It might be a car," implying that there is a degree to which something might be a car.
This is another reason why the brain is so difficult to emulate... When a human makes a decision like that, he or she uses a combination of bottom up and top down processing. The bottom up processing sees shapes and lines (such as simple things like vertical or horizontal lines, or maybe even a more complicated shape such as a triangle) and builds the image from that. However, at some point the top down processing steps in and says "Hey, that kind of looks like a car. So it must be a car." The entire process is not built up from scratch every time you look at an object.
In conclusion, you are correct... Not only is it both digital and analog to some degree but there seems to be a lookup table of some sort created. Even more mysteries to unravel.
Actually, this is altogether incorrect. Each neuron has only one axon (output) but my have multiple dendrites (input, decision making). All neurons can only fire at one magnitude, and they all depolarize at about the same electrical level. The difference comes in the chemicals that are released at the end of the axon. The decision making process is all done in the dendrites, and as to sensitivity, it has been shown that the further a signal is from the neuron the weaker it is. The neuron isn't quite all that complicated... That's part of the mystery as to why our brains work.
It isn't that simple. I am unfortunately not a neurologist, but I did study brain mechanics for two semesters of Psychology, so please bear with me.
If I remember correctly, the way it works is the neuron gets signals from many other sources along its dendrites, which either have an inhibitory or excitatory response, which also decays along the way (the "analog decision"). The decision to fire or not at any given time is digital to some degree, but there are factors that affect that as well such as the refractory period (an axon may only depolarize and fire once every so often).
However, once the electrical impulse reaches the end of the axon, it does not leap across to the next dendrite. It releases chemical agents which float across to the dendrite and interact with it, which are then recovered by the axon. Those chemical agents vary from axon to axon.
In addition, the recovery (reuptake) of those chemicals is crucial. What if a drug affecting the brain prevents the reuptake of those chemicals? Then they start floating around and reacting with any dendrite they happen to run into, and they get the same effect as if an axon had been fired. In fact, this is part of what happens when you become inebriated... Dopamine reuptake is blocked, causing it to float about in your brain and get overused, making you get a buzz.
Unfortunately, there is a limit to what I can remember. There are seven ways that a drug can interact with a neuron to create an inhibitory or excitatory response, however. So while it may seem digital, there is a lot more to the human brain than "fire/not fire".
I don't think this has anything to do with a bunch of scientists. The mice have obviously seen fit to humor this attempt at genetic modification, probably in an odd experiment on human behavior. It's only a matter of time anyway that they show their true form and start taking over the world (the program should be finished by now)... And they're not going to be happy that us humans have been polluting a world that they paid for. I think we should be pouring money into space colonization just in case we decode a message from the dolphins saying "So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
I can just see the headlines a year or so from now...
Cupertino, CA -- Apple has just announced their decision not to include support for microdisks of any kind, claiming that they are legacy technology and will probably fall into complete disuse in six months. Steve Jobs comments on Apple's decision.
"We are on the edge of a new era in computing. At the Apple labratories we are developing a new way of transferring data between computers. With the proper training and the right hardware, we have discovered a way to form a mind-meld with your computer and transfer data directly to or from your brain. We have reached speeds in excess of excess of 2 TB/s and we have no idea what is the limit of the human brain in storing data."
When asked about the effects on the human brain, Jobs refused to comment apart from saying that they are reviewing the effects. The interview was then interrupted by a man sloppily dressed and drooling babble "Macintosh -- Mind-meld" before he was escorted out by a pair of men in black suits and sunglasses. Jobs remarked "Oh no! The test subject!" before hastily excusing himself and asking us to leave the building.
"the ability to withstand a 1500-G shock. That is equivalent to a drop from a normal office desk onto a medium-thickness carpet"
The shock is when it lands with a delta vee equal to its falling velocity (or more, if it bounces) in a very small space.
Actually, this is incorrect, and the space it falls in has nothing to do with the space it falls through (except for wind resistance). The large shock is created by the velocity coming to a stop or even reversing itself in a near-negligible time.
Assume for a moment that a disk fell one meter onto the ground and bounced a small distance back into the air. A one meter fall at 9.8 m/s/s would result in a final velocity of 4.427 m/s. Let's also assume that it bounces up into the air at a velocity of 1 m/s, resulting in a net change in velocity of 5.527 m/s. The final assumption is the amount of time the disk contacts the ground, so let's assume a conservative value of .001 seconds.
Acceleration is equal to velocity divided by time, so we take our 5.527 m/s net change in velocity and divide it by .001, our time. This results in a net change in acceleration of 5527 m/s/s due to the disk bouncing off of the ground. Dividing this by earth's acceleration, 9.8, results in the G-Force of the collision, which is 564 Gs.
As shown by this conservative estimate, great shock can result from small forces when exerted over a negligible time. A bounce of a hard object may take even less than a thousanth of a second to recoil upwards, which I would guess is where IBM Labs is getting thier figures.
Don't mock the Trash-80? Gather 'round children, and listen to a story of horror and delight! What I am about to relate is entirely true... It happened to me, in fact. What's more, it gives me the complete and undeniable right to mock the Trash-80 as much as I please.
When I was in seventh grade (not so long ago... about six years) I had an English teacher who was not the brightest when it came to computers. She went down to the Learning Center one day to see a whole row of horribly obsolete Trash-80s sitting there on a table (they had been there as long as I can remember. 'Well,' she thought, 'look at all these wonderful computers here! I could use these to create a writing lab!
So, this fateful English teacher brought back the eight Trash-80s and got the Tech teacher or someone to set up a mini-network in our classroom. There were seven workstations and one server computer, which always ran the server software. We used some word processor, the name was unknown to me, and so were expected to type up documents which could then be printed out on the network printer. We could save our documents on 5.25 inch disks and then finish them later, and that English teacher even created a bunch of templates that we could use for our documents.
Now let me explain why this was so bad... First of all, the Trash-80 has an eight character limit on filenames. However, we were only allowed to use the first six. The last two characters had to be "~1" or it would overwrite the template, which then had to be retyped from scratch (this happened about once a week). The computer had a big orange button recessed in the keyboard which would reset the computer... It got pressed right before someone finished a document about once a week.
The word processor was also horrendous. First of all, Trash-80s don't have a backspace key, and don't need one for a command line. However, with a word processor, you need freedom of movement in all four directions, so the left arrow couldn't be used as backspace. Instead, you needed to use combinations with the '@' key... '@-d' deleted one character, '@-y' deleted a line, '@-p' deleted a paragraph, etc. Also, the cursor was always set to overwrite and couldn't be changed, so '@-i' inserted one character, '@-b' inserted a block of text, etc. It took longer to type a document on those things than to write out a document and then retype it on the Apple IIgs that was in the room!
Now I hope everyone agrees that this experience (which lasted through the entire second semester -- about eighteen weeks) gives me the right to mock the Trash-80!
While I am interested to know if the mission will be a success, I'm also interested to see what the space administration will do with the money. I'm all for cheaper propulsion techniques... If we can find a way to get up to space with a fraction of the cost, I'm sure we can see more of these trips, as well as a better chance of colonizing the moon sooner, which is something I'll celebrate.
Oh, but it's not just the transportation cost! As many a high class restaurant will tell you, you're not paying for the food. You're paying for the atmosphere, or in this case, the lack therof.
You'd think they'd check the licences before they decided to include the code... I suppose that is too much to ask for. If all three licences conflict, I think there are only a few options. The project could be torn apart and completely scrapped, or a court battle could emerge over the terms of the licenses. Who knows, this could turn into the court case that challenges the GPL.
This may go without saying, but I think that this kind of technique will find much greater life on the communications venue. Now that the ability to create a photorealistic Avatar of yourself has been created, the logical next step is to move forward to create chat rooms or other places where people communicate with each other in an OOC context where people may actually care about what you look like in real life. Photorealistic Quake III skins are cool, but nothing beyond that... I wouldn't be surprised if one of the Avatar chats that already exists tries to get their hands on this.
Actually, you could just walk over and win in Myst. The game was horrendously easy if you knew how to play the endgame, it took five minutes. You only have to solve three puzzles to beat the game.
At the time, however, the game was billed as having advanced CD-quality graphics, if I'm not mistaken. Making the game real-time wouldn't take away that sense of awe and exploration as you stepped through the world of Myst and goggled as you went wondering from puzzle to puzzle. If you think about it, most of the puzzles would still work in real-time. In most of those worlds you could simply go wherever you wanted anyways, another part of the fun was discovering the puzzles and story, none of which was given to you at the beginning of the game. A game like Myst was about exploration, and making that real-time can only improve it.
int haiku(char x)
{ x = x + 16;
if(1) return x; }
Not very useful, but... Oh, you mean they wanted a compter program that generates haiku! Darn.
I agree that it won't be popular beyond a novelty, but not because of interface problems... The target audience here seems to be old gaming enthusiasts (read: Computer geeks), the same audience which has already dug up a Z-Machine emulator and beaten them all!
This is still offtopic, but it seems to be a small portion of general interest, so I thought I'd post this. A new movie is coming out about the "war" for the legalization of marijuana directed by Woody Harrelson called Grass. Here's an information snippet from Moviefone.com:
Here in Korea, you can't publish any advertisement which compares products of one company with products of another company directly, whether it's true or not. I don't think it's allowed in the U.S. also.
You can in the United States (it's very common), but it is not allowed in many parts of Europe.
A correction: It is legal to compare products directly in the U.S., but only if the comparison is true. Otherwise the offending company can be charged with False Advertising, a serious enough offense that it is avoided. However, the ad execs know how to get their point across and what results is more creative ways of saying "Our product is better than theirs" or strange attempts at confusing the consumer enough to buy their product.