The novel "Pompeii", FWIW, contains a scene describing exactly that -- a former slave who became rich treats the local nobility to some disgusting "delicacies" from rare and expensive animals, just to show off his new status.
You make it sound like we know what hallucinations are and why or even how they occur. Maybe he did perceive symptoms that resemble what you call hallucinations, maybe they would have even been measurable in an MRI (if it can detect hallucinations) or some future brain meter, and maybe there was a correlation between those and the movement of tectonic plates or whatever. Earthquakes don't happen out of the blue, there was a buildup of enormous energy of some sort leading up the earthquake and maybe that affected whatever processes influence the brain-mind. But we don't even understand earthquakes, let alone the brain (a living, active one) or the mind, so to write it off as "hallucinations" is unscientific (but is very scientism-ic).
They were aware of Turing Completeness, as was I since I had it in school, but it doesn't say anywhere that they actually applied the concept. I never once actually applied it in any design either. Did you?
The Turing Test doesn't take into account time -- in up to 10 seconds a chatbot can fool you, in up to 2 minutes Eliza can fool you and so on. It talks about the kind of AI that has so far proven to be generally useless, i.e. conversational AI. So the test, nice as it may sound, doesn't seem to have been of any practical value so far either.
I'm sorry but that doesn't answer the question: did the designers of C look at Turing Completeness when they designed the language? From what I've read, it doesn't look like it. Were they using procedures and tools developed by people before them based on Turing Completeness? I can't say, not having studied theory (enough). But if K&R didn't use TC, if their formal tools and procedures were not based on TC, and surely most coders never look at TC when designing software, then what good is TC?
As for the Turing AI test, this is so far only hypothetical, we do not know that the test is valid because nothing ever passed it, and in fact you may have some examples of AI that may pass the Turing Test in a short conversation (like a handful of lines with Eliza) but not in other contexts, eg. AI characters in a game that make a very stupid action like going back and forth between two points that no intelligent creature would do.
Again I'm not attacking Alan Turing, he gave his best, I'd rather use someone else as an example (maybe Norbert Wiener and his "cybernetics" that I learned in school he invented but that turned out to be BS), I'm going after the belief that theory comes first and I'm not seeing good examples in the defense of that belief.
Again, I have all the respect for Alan Turing and sympathy for him having suffered unjustly, but I have reasons to believe that theories don't come first, rather that it's the opposite: in almost all fields, practical discoveries come first, some of them later formulated into theories, some useful, some not, some actually harmful.
In the case of Turing Completeness, I can't see from the explanation above what the practical value of it is, for C designers and/or for programmers in C. I've written a lot of code and I never once needed to check if it's Turing Complete, I don't know anyone who did, and I never needed to compare it with Haskell or anything else -- whenever I chose C, that was because I liked it or because of the hardware requirements or the libraries available. I guess most people are in the same boat, so unless Turing Completeness was a big factor in the design of C, I can't see how that concept has helped software and system designers (who are coding in C) for decades now.
As for the poisoned apple, whether it's accident or suicide we'll never know, but after being forced to undergo castration over what he saw then and we see now as an inhuman and unjust law, it's not hard to imagine that he may have subconsciously wanted to end such life.
Thanks for the reply. I looked up whether C is Turing complete. The answer on one page is "sometimes yes, sometimes no." So I don't understand what the value of Turing completeness is (and everyone understand the value of C). Specifically, did creators of C take into account Turing completeness and do something differently when designing the language? Or, was the practice of language design they used at the time based on Turing's work?
I tried looking up other basic theories but what I found seemed pretty obscure, so still not sure what exactly the contribution was.
Btw as for my motivation -- there is always one -- I have all the respect for the man himself, but have heard an argument recently that the value of academic theory behind most practical disciplines and discoveries is overblown. I'm trying to see if this case supports that argument or not.
I must ask, what exactly are Turing's contributions to computers as a practical discipline? I have been trying to find out but couldn't find specific things. I would not consider the "Turing Test" a practical contribution, and I do not understand how the "Turing Machine" helps practical issues either -- actual computing starting in the 50s and 60s until today. In other words, what specific good in the field came out of his theories? Is it cryptography? I am not saying there aren't any, just that they aren't obvious (to me).
I understand his contribution to winning WWII, but I don't consider that to fall in the above category.
It doesn't work that way. You need a specific, obvious symbol of what you're protesting against to make the protest meaningful -- to yourself and to observers. Open streets in the deep south were the theater of inequality. A CEO's lawn is just a lawn of what looks like any other rich person's house, in a quiet wealthy neighborhood, where the CEO does not make his (or her) decisions anyway if he even spends much time in that house. Those buses are a perfect symbol of what those protestors are against.
No, it does not have negligible dimensions, and they are not just smaller than Planck length, they are exactly zero, according to this theory. I.e. each elementary particle (incl. electrons and quarks of which all matter is made) is a tiny force field originating from an invisible (so to speak, or maybe better said immaterial) point in space. Mass is a property of that field given by the Higgs Boson.
It kind of makes sense, b/c if it were solid i.e. had some volume and was made of "stuff" then it wouldn't be elementary.
I used to think so too but realized there is a nuance (as always) -- drugs may help some people to experience for the first time in many years what it means to be not obese, and that feeling may help them work on their own later on to get there. But I agree, drugs should be used in one-off and extreme cases.
That's a great explanation re arbitrary choice, thanks. I'm thinking BT could by the same token become "real" if government(s) decided to make it real like Germany did with Euro in your example, except I don't easily see a scenario in which it is in their interest to do so.
This is true. PS technology is depth sensing. A webcam-based device can sense motion and still have no clue about anything but changes in illumination, where Kinect (1) knows distances of solid surfaces from itself.
Also it's interesting that yours is one of the few posts here related to the technology and not grammar. I think it shows the tech still needs a killer app to occupy the mindspace of the public.
Back in 2000 there was a homemade electronic circuit attached to the receiver that would generate a conversation with the spammer. Here's one hilarious example:
This is an excellent service! I never listen to Pandora because I am not interested in an algorithm mining for my tastes, I concluded that after giving it a try a few times. But this is way different: people who play songs I like are likely to play other songs I like, whether those songs have similar "DNA" or not.
I just put the theory to the test by typing "iron maiden", pick a station that played one of their songs, the next song was U2 in the name of love -- very different songs but I liked both. Then saw a more rare maiden song played on another station -- great idea to keep the updates for the search going! -- and the rest was a mixture going from Metallica through Journey, songs not similar and some I wouldn't pick on my own but liked them being served. And now it's playing songs I haven't even heard before and they are gooood.
One suggestion: would be nice to keep the list of the last few songs that played, just the names, e.g. just now there a song I liked ended and another is playing but I can't see the prev. song name. So maybe 5-6 of the most recent songs that played (and you can add direct links to Amazon or iTunes).
All in all, really really good site! In relation to Pandora it's like playing a game against a bot vs a live person. Thanks a bunch.
Complete BS, this. Microsoft made skeleton tracking that is incredibly advanced and yet it didn't quite work. PrimeSense made some of their own skeleton tracking, unremarkable in performance in reliability, and decent object segregation. The brilliance of the PrimeSense tech is exactly what's on the chip, it gives you a quite accurate depth map with only 30ms lag compared to a regular webcam and quite solid as well as long the cam is not looking at open sky. And that depth map is all you need for a number of applications.
I work extensively with Kinect and spent a few weeks testing Leap Motion. Leap Motion is actually so bad and unreliable in object detection that it makes the PS structured light look all that more ingenious.
Most investments sort of need a gut feeling argument, and evidence needs to be given to justify it, not to not justify it, but let me try nevertheless,
- the pain from the current "market alternative" -- beer, wine, liquors -- is insignificant compared to the attachment to it (social, psychological, taste-wise, some might even enjoy alcohol in part because of its dark side) - the current alcoholic beverage technology and market is extremely well established, probably the most established of all times, which makes it nearly impossible to displace -- the habits of buying and consuming, the places, the industry, all of it is incredibly engrained in the society. Eg. lots of people are attached to their tablets/phones but the habit is new and something else can replace it; with alcohol, most of us has have had it and often enjoyed it pretty much all of our adult lives at the least.
Now if he invented a *pill* that can be taken before drinking that would eliminate the bad side effects, that would be a different story.
So in another universe where beer, wine, and liquors do not exist and billions of people have not been exposed to and conditioned by their (pleasant and unpleasant) effects, from physiological and psychological ("spirits" are call that for a reason) to social, this alcohol-free, temporarily-intoxicating-but-currently-without-evidence-of-other-harm product stands a chance?
Now even if this universe, if a glass of that product were sold for $1, in a crappy bar, there would be buyers. Or if it were sold for $30, in an up-scale bar, there might be buyers. But long term, IMO there is very low chance that it would be anything more than a quick fad, and hence it cannot justify the investment.
As a thought experiment, imagine a bar where a glass of wine is being sold for $7 and a glass of this non-alcoholic-but-intoxicating-wine-substitute that has a slightly unpleasant taste but the same effect for $6. By your theory, most people would buy the latter, whereas I think it's easy to imagine that very few actually would do that.
I'm a very light user but when I noticed "sponsored tweets" in my feed I actually read/consumed almost all of the info in them before I realized they were sponsored. And I wasn't annoyed that I did, more lightly amused that they got me to read the ad and that it didn't feel bad. I think it's b/c of the short format of everything. It's after that experience that I decided to place ads myself.
So, again, FWIW, I decided to give Twitter some money, just to see what happens, which I'd *never* do with Facebook. Can't imagine I'm the only one.
Exactly. And very few people were affected by the moon landing program physically and economically, which is why the healthcare mess is a mess in the first place, so all those competing, self-serving, moralistic, concerned, ideological, and other societal forces were out of the way.
Care to elaborate what is wrong with Jung's archetypes? From what I have read it seems like a model that successfully maps to patterns in human behavior. For example the strong access to the "magician" archetype energy combined with a weak access to the "warrior" archetype energy (these are just labels) will cause the person to think too much and act too little in various areas in their lives, so by taking say martial arts they gain more access to the "warrior" archetype energy and develop propensity for action, even if they aren't physically fighting anyone.
It is just a model, the archetypes aren't "real" anymore than any other model can claim its elements are "real," and admittedly the model is strange but so are humans. What's important is whether it works.
Slashdot Mirror
The novel "Pompeii", FWIW, contains a scene describing exactly that -- a former slave who became rich treats the local nobility to some disgusting "delicacies" from rare and expensive animals, just to show off his new status.
You make it sound like we know what hallucinations are and why or even how they occur. Maybe he did perceive symptoms that resemble what you call hallucinations, maybe they would have even been measurable in an MRI (if it can detect hallucinations) or some future brain meter, and maybe there was a correlation between those and the movement of tectonic plates or whatever. Earthquakes don't happen out of the blue, there was a buildup of enormous energy of some sort leading up the earthquake and maybe that affected whatever processes influence the brain-mind. But we don't even understand earthquakes, let alone the brain (a living, active one) or the mind, so to write it off as "hallucinations" is unscientific (but is very scientism-ic).
They were aware of Turing Completeness, as was I since I had it in school, but it doesn't say anywhere that they actually applied the concept. I never once actually applied it in any design either. Did you?
The Turing Test doesn't take into account time -- in up to 10 seconds a chatbot can fool you, in up to 2 minutes Eliza can fool you and so on. It talks about the kind of AI that has so far proven to be generally useless, i.e. conversational AI. So the test, nice as it may sound, doesn't seem to have been of any practical value so far either.
I'm sorry but that doesn't answer the question: did the designers of C look at Turing Completeness when they designed the language? From what I've read, it doesn't look like it. Were they using procedures and tools developed by people before them based on Turing Completeness? I can't say, not having studied theory (enough). But if K&R didn't use TC, if their formal tools and procedures were not based on TC, and surely most coders never look at TC when designing software, then what good is TC?
As for the Turing AI test, this is so far only hypothetical, we do not know that the test is valid because nothing ever passed it, and in fact you may have some examples of AI that may pass the Turing Test in a short conversation (like a handful of lines with Eliza) but not in other contexts, eg. AI characters in a game that make a very stupid action like going back and forth between two points that no intelligent creature would do.
Again I'm not attacking Alan Turing, he gave his best, I'd rather use someone else as an example (maybe Norbert Wiener and his "cybernetics" that I learned in school he invented but that turned out to be BS), I'm going after the belief that theory comes first and I'm not seeing good examples in the defense of that belief.
Again, I have all the respect for Alan Turing and sympathy for him having suffered unjustly, but I have reasons to believe that theories don't come first, rather that it's the opposite: in almost all fields, practical discoveries come first, some of them later formulated into theories, some useful, some not, some actually harmful.
In the case of Turing Completeness, I can't see from the explanation above what the practical value of it is, for C designers and/or for programmers in C. I've written a lot of code and I never once needed to check if it's Turing Complete, I don't know anyone who did, and I never needed to compare it with Haskell or anything else -- whenever I chose C, that was because I liked it or because of the hardware requirements or the libraries available. I guess most people are in the same boat, so unless Turing Completeness was a big factor in the design of C, I can't see how that concept has helped software and system designers (who are coding in C) for decades now.
As for the poisoned apple, whether it's accident or suicide we'll never know, but after being forced to undergo castration over what he saw then and we see now as an inhuman and unjust law, it's not hard to imagine that he may have subconsciously wanted to end such life.
Thanks for the reply. I looked up whether C is Turing complete. The answer on one page is "sometimes yes, sometimes no." So I don't understand what the value of Turing completeness is (and everyone understand the value of C). Specifically, did creators of C take into account Turing completeness and do something differently when designing the language? Or, was the practice of language design they used at the time based on Turing's work?
I tried looking up other basic theories but what I found seemed pretty obscure, so still not sure what exactly the contribution was.
Btw as for my motivation -- there is always one -- I have all the respect for the man himself, but have heard an argument recently that the value of academic theory behind most practical disciplines and discoveries is overblown. I'm trying to see if this case supports that argument or not.
I must ask, what exactly are Turing's contributions to computers as a practical discipline? I have been trying to find out but couldn't find specific things. I would not consider the "Turing Test" a practical contribution, and I do not understand how the "Turing Machine" helps practical issues either -- actual computing starting in the 50s and 60s until today. In other words, what specific good in the field came out of his theories? Is it cryptography? I am not saying there aren't any, just that they aren't obvious (to me).
I understand his contribution to winning WWII, but I don't consider that to fall in the above category.
It doesn't work that way. You need a specific, obvious symbol of what you're protesting against to make the protest meaningful -- to yourself and to observers. Open streets in the deep south were the theater of inequality. A CEO's lawn is just a lawn of what looks like any other rich person's house, in a quiet wealthy neighborhood, where the CEO does not make his (or her) decisions anyway if he even spends much time in that house. Those buses are a perfect symbol of what those protestors are against.
No, it does not have negligible dimensions, and they are not just smaller than Planck length, they are exactly zero, according to this theory. I.e. each elementary particle (incl. electrons and quarks of which all matter is made) is a tiny force field originating from an invisible (so to speak, or maybe better said immaterial) point in space. Mass is a property of that field given by the Higgs Boson.
It kind of makes sense, b/c if it were solid i.e. had some volume and was made of "stuff" then it wouldn't be elementary.
I used to think so too but realized there is a nuance (as always) -- drugs may help some people to experience for the first time in many years what it means to be not obese, and that feeling may help them work on their own later on to get there. But I agree, drugs should be used in one-off and extreme cases.
That's a great explanation re arbitrary choice, thanks. I'm thinking BT could by the same token become "real" if government(s) decided to make it real like Germany did with Euro in your example, except I don't easily see a scenario in which it is in their interest to do so.
This is true. PS technology is depth sensing. A webcam-based device can sense motion and still have no clue about anything but changes in illumination, where Kinect (1) knows distances of solid surfaces from itself.
Also it's interesting that yours is one of the few posts here related to the technology and not grammar. I think it shows the tech still needs a killer app to occupy the mindspace of the public.
This one is even better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsAsTy3VOiw
It waits for a pause on the other side, and then randomly plays a prerecorded audio sample asking a question or rambling about something.
Back in 2000 there was a homemade electronic circuit attached to the receiver that would generate a conversation with the spammer. Here's one hilarious example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgEGCoxb8hE
This is an excellent service! I never listen to Pandora because I am not interested in an algorithm mining for my tastes, I concluded that after giving it a try a few times. But this is way different: people who play songs I like are likely to play other songs I like, whether those songs have similar "DNA" or not.
I just put the theory to the test by typing "iron maiden", pick a station that played one of their songs, the next song was U2 in the name of love -- very different songs but I liked both. Then saw a more rare maiden song played on another station -- great idea to keep the updates for the search going! -- and the rest was a mixture going from Metallica through Journey, songs not similar and some I wouldn't pick on my own but liked them being served. And now it's playing songs I haven't even heard before and they are gooood.
One suggestion: would be nice to keep the list of the last few songs that played, just the names, e.g. just now there a song I liked ended and another is playing but I can't see the prev. song name. So maybe 5-6 of the most recent songs that played (and you can add direct links to Amazon or iTunes).
All in all, really really good site! In relation to Pandora it's like playing a game against a bot vs a live person. Thanks a bunch.
Complete BS, this. Microsoft made skeleton tracking that is incredibly advanced and yet it didn't quite work. PrimeSense made some of their own skeleton tracking, unremarkable in performance in reliability, and decent object segregation. The brilliance of the PrimeSense tech is exactly what's on the chip, it gives you a quite accurate depth map with only 30ms lag compared to a regular webcam and quite solid as well as long the cam is not looking at open sky. And that depth map is all you need for a number of applications.
I work extensively with Kinect and spent a few weeks testing Leap Motion. Leap Motion is actually so bad and unreliable in object detection that it makes the PS structured light look all that more ingenious.
Most investments sort of need a gut feeling argument, and evidence needs to be given to justify it, not to not justify it, but let me try nevertheless,
- the pain from the current "market alternative" -- beer, wine, liquors -- is insignificant compared to the attachment to it (social, psychological, taste-wise, some might even enjoy alcohol in part because of its dark side)
- the current alcoholic beverage technology and market is extremely well established, probably the most established of all times, which makes it nearly impossible to displace -- the habits of buying and consuming, the places, the industry, all of it is incredibly engrained in the society. Eg. lots of people are attached to their tablets/phones but the habit is new and something else can replace it; with alcohol, most of us has have had it and often enjoyed it pretty much all of our adult lives at the least.
Now if he invented a *pill* that can be taken before drinking that would eliminate the bad side effects, that would be a different story.
So in another universe where beer, wine, and liquors do not exist and billions of people have not been exposed to and conditioned by their (pleasant and unpleasant) effects, from physiological and psychological ("spirits" are call that for a reason) to social, this alcohol-free, temporarily-intoxicating-but-currently-without-evidence-of-other-harm product stands a chance?
Now even if this universe, if a glass of that product were sold for $1, in a crappy bar, there would be buyers. Or if it were sold for $30, in an up-scale bar, there might be buyers. But long term, IMO there is very low chance that it would be anything more than a quick fad, and hence it cannot justify the investment.
As a thought experiment, imagine a bar where a glass of wine is being sold for $7 and a glass of this non-alcoholic-but-intoxicating-wine-substitute that has a slightly unpleasant taste but the same effect for $6. By your theory, most people would buy the latter, whereas I think it's easy to imagine that very few actually would do that.
FWIW I'm just looking into advertising on Twitter for my product, some people reports that twitter is comparable to adwords for some situations and way better than Facebook: http://www.techhive.com/article/2030740/do-social-media-ads-really-work-we-put-them-to-the-test-.html
I'm a very light user but when I noticed "sponsored tweets" in my feed I actually read/consumed almost all of the info in them before I realized they were sponsored. And I wasn't annoyed that I did, more lightly amused that they got me to read the ad and that it didn't feel bad. I think it's b/c of the short format of everything. It's after that experience that I decided to place ads myself.
So, again, FWIW, I decided to give Twitter some money, just to see what happens, which I'd *never* do with Facebook. Can't imagine I'm the only one.
Inferior in terms of desirability in social circles, teenage social circles anyway.
That's absolutely true. I blame the influence of Apple.
Exactly. And very few people were affected by the moon landing program physically and economically, which is why the healthcare mess is a mess in the first place, so all those competing, self-serving, moralistic, concerned, ideological, and other societal forces were out of the way.
Care to elaborate what is wrong with Jung's archetypes? From what I have read it seems like a model that successfully maps to patterns in human behavior. For example the strong access to the "magician" archetype energy combined with a weak access to the "warrior" archetype energy (these are just labels) will cause the person to think too much and act too little in various areas in their lives, so by taking say martial arts they gain more access to the "warrior" archetype energy and develop propensity for action, even if they aren't physically fighting anyone.
It is just a model, the archetypes aren't "real" anymore than any other model can claim its elements are "real," and admittedly the model is strange but so are humans. What's important is whether it works.