> it seems mostly like conjecture, trying to shoehorn increasingly complex theories to fit some phenomena that is probably explainable in a simpler manner which we just yet haven't found
What if the universe is so complex that there's no explanation that's both simple and correct?
Which suggests working on a back-end solution as well. Half the problem is that people can get your identity info too easily; the other half is that it's too easy for them to exploit it.
I saw a news story about some people who had their houses sold out from under them by identity crooks. It's preposterous that that could happen, no matter how much info about you someone has.
> A few weeks ago, someone hacked into the UT Austin business school computers and snatched information from current and former faculty, staff, and students. A professor I am currently taking an intellectual property course with was talking about it and how he has all his info on fraud alert right now. The school negotiated with an identity protection service to offer him a major (66%) discount, but he's still paying something like $20 or $70 a year for this (I forget what amount he said exactly).
So how come UT isn't picking up the tab?
Re: Games as an AI research platform.
on
10th Annual RoboCup
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or anything remotely advanced. [...] The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all.
Kind of like the "beat Kasparov" approach to chess-playing AI. When competition is involved, people resort to hardware and hacks. That says a lot about the state of AI after ~50 years of research!
Games as an AI research platform.
on
10th Annual RoboCup
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas.
FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research. In addition to the now vast literature on RoboCup there are several new conferences dedicated to AI and games, usually covering non-RoboCup topics. Grep the net for Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), and the Special Session on Games at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). I've seen some of the proceedings on line, and you can find some pretty interesting papers about applications, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
> The idea is that if the ads are cool you will tell your friends about them, and then they will see them and spread them to their friends, hence viral.
So if they beat your ass when you don't buy their product, and you warn all your friends, is that also viral marketing?
I think there's a conflation of concepts going on here.
> Too much of research these days is too tightly locked down; specific results must be achievable and there's no wiggle room. While this might make sense from an economists point of view but makes for less innovation.
In the USA there has become a great focus on short-term results, with a resulting unwillingness to invest in longer-term results. Businesses want to optimize the next quarterly report; too much research erodes reportable profits. The Federal govenment wants to reduce spending that doesn't offer someone a direct payoff (practical or political), so publically funded deep research gets cut. (Applied research is still pretty well funded, especially if it's a military application.)
Take the Supercollider. As the number of states being considered for its site decreased, so did the amount of support it got in Congress. The ratio of cost to "political profit" was too high.
> A quote from Asimov on the subject: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
> The experiment was therefore a success. It was interpreted correctly, and an appropriate conclusion was drawn from it. Einstein had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
However, if I'm not mistaken, the result of the experiment set up a problem which Einstein solved by the introduction of general relativity.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you tried pretending to be a gurl and posting a question to Slashdot?
> no one since einstein has made an astonishing leap in physics with detailed mathematics to back it up.
That's 'cause no one has figured out what Einstein used to smoke.
> ... not when one side, his own, acts of the panties are in a wad.
Hmmm... panties are a sort of two-dimensional string, wadded up in a higher-dimensional space.
Maybe we can explain the universe with panty-wad theory.
> it seems mostly like conjecture, trying to shoehorn increasingly complex theories to fit some phenomena that is probably explainable in a simpler manner which we just yet haven't found
What if the universe is so complex that there's no explanation that's both simple and correct?
> Just because backers tend to be religious does not by itself make it wrong.
Yeah, it's the utterly bogus arguments offered in support of their religious beliefs that makes it wrong.
> There exists a universe in which major advances in Phyics would have been made if so many smart scientists were not distracted by String Theory.
Of course, there also exists a universe in which string theory is correct.
I tried a kneeler, and found it hard on my knees and knee joints. Even tried it with a pillow on the lower part... Now it's a rolling junk holder.
Might work better for skinny people; I wouldn't know.
> that perhaps global warming is at least partly due to Earth's natural cycle of events?
/sarcasm
No, they're scientists, they never consider stuff like that.
The report was championed by a Republican.
...unless you've got something to hide.
> > Turns out the guy was a registered sex-offender as well.
> I hope they took this into account - and gave him double the usual sentence, punched him in the gut and took away his testicles.
He'll probably get more jail time for this than he did for his sex offenses.
> focusing specifically on the OMG's technology adoption process itself.
Calling themselves "OMG" probably didn't do much to encourage adoption.
> Who can keep my records safe? No one.
Which suggests working on a back-end solution as well. Half the problem is that people can get your identity info too easily; the other half is that it's too easy for them to exploit it.
I saw a news story about some people who had their houses sold out from under them by identity crooks. It's preposterous that that could happen, no matter how much info about you someone has.
> A few weeks ago, someone hacked into the UT Austin business school computers and snatched information from current and former faculty, staff, and students. A professor I am currently taking an intellectual property course with was talking about it and how he has all his info on fraud alert right now. The school negotiated with an identity protection service to offer him a major (66%) discount, but he's still paying something like $20 or $70 a year for this (I forget what amount he said exactly).
So how come UT isn't picking up the tab?
> I talked with several teams and I was quite surprised when I saw how primitive the their programs were. They basically had thousand nested "if" statements. No neural nets or anything remotely advanced. [...] The Robocup competition I saw there didn't require any special AI or engineering skills from team members at all.
Kind of like the "beat Kasparov" approach to chess-playing AI. When competition is involved, people resort to hardware and hacks. That says a lot about the state of AI after ~50 years of research!
> Beyond the novelty value, the cup enables 2,500 experts in artificial intelligence and robot engineering to meet and test their latest ideas.
FYI, though RoboCup has been around for a long time, the past few years have seen a sudden surge of interest in the use of games as a platform for AI research. In addition to the now vast literature on RoboCup there are several new conferences dedicated to AI and games, usually covering non-RoboCup topics. Grep the net for Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE), Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), and the Special Session on Games at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). I've seen some of the proceedings on line, and you can find some pretty interesting papers about applications, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
> Can a working human mind ultimately be reduced to a complicated algorithm?
That's a commonly held idea, though it isn't well established, and has its critics.
> The idea is that if the ads are cool you will tell your friends about them, and then they will see them and spread them to their friends, hence viral.
So if they beat your ass when you don't buy their product, and you warn all your friends, is that also viral marketing?
I think there's a conflation of concepts going on here.
I don't see the connection between "interesting enough to make people want to watch" and "viral".
> Too much of research these days is too tightly locked down; specific results must be achievable and there's no wiggle room. While this might make sense from an economists point of view but makes for less innovation.
In the USA there has become a great focus on short-term results, with a resulting unwillingness to invest in longer-term results. Businesses want to optimize the next quarterly report; too much research erodes reportable profits. The Federal govenment wants to reduce spending that doesn't offer someone a direct payoff (practical or political), so publically funded deep research gets cut. (Applied research is still pretty well funded, especially if it's a military application.)
Take the Supercollider. As the number of states being considered for its site decreased, so did the amount of support it got in Congress. The ratio of cost to "political profit" was too high.
> A quote from Asimov on the subject: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but 'That's funny...'"
That's funny...
> We should add the discovery of Intelligent Design as the biggest accident in the history of science.
It's hardly a discovery when you make up a bunch of bullshit to rationalize an a priori belief.
Nice troll though, if a bit dated.
> The experiment was therefore a success. It was interpreted correctly, and an appropriate conclusion was drawn from it. Einstein had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
However, if I'm not mistaken, the result of the experiment set up a problem which Einstein solved by the introduction of general relativity.
> The girls just don't seem to realise that it can be fun to sit down and scratch an itch once in a while.
A Google image search for amateur + vibrator suggests otherwise.
> You would get some mod points if I had them, alas, they expired yesterday. Very insightful post.
We need a plan to help people who don't have mod points!