> usually the neural network is just a very simple, possibly linear, adaptive filter which means that really contains no more than a few matrix multiplications...
No one in their right mind would use a linear ANN, since ANNs get their computational power from the nonlinearities introduced by their squashing functions. Without the nonlinearities, you'd just be doing linear algebra, e.g. multiplying vectors by matrices to get new vectors.
As for the computational power of ANNs,
A simple feed-forward network with a single hidden layer can approximate any continuous function on the range [0,1] with arbitrary accuracy. (Or is it s/continuous/differentiable/ ? - can't remember.)
Certain architectures of recurrent ANNs are equivalent to Turing machines, if the weights are specified with rational numbers.
An ANN with real-valued weights (real, not fp) would be a trans-Turing device.
Goggle a paper by Cybenko for the first result, Siegelmann and Sontag for the second, and Siegelmann (sans Sontag?) for the third third.
> yes it has some success in approximating things locally, but terms like "learning" are really misused
"Neural network" and "learning" are orthogonal concepts. A neural network is a model for computation, and learning is an algorithm.
In practice we almost always use learning to train neural networks, since programming them for non-trivial tasks would be far to difficult.
No, I don't blame family values; I just want to call attention to how much time politicians spend talking about family values, and how little about other kinds of values.
> But Schliemann at least had this going for him, he was looking for Troy right around where Homer suggested it was.
The Greeks and Romans knew darn well where it was, because their city "Illium" was there well into the "AD" era.
I wonder whether scholars were actually as surprised about the archaelogy as everyone says they were.
Also, remember that this was at the very beginning of modern archaeology: very few "lost cities" had been dug up at that time. (Schliemann was still more of a treasure hunter than an archaelogist.) Now "lost cities" are a dime a dozen in archaeology, and no one is particularly surprised when another one is found.
> uncomfortable. The key is to find an acceptable level of mediocrity. If people weren't getting dumber and less literate, there would be no motivation to reduce the reading level of news magazines.
Would you mind explaining that again, without using so many big words?
Originally it meant a show doing something outrageous and irrelevant in order to boost sagging ratings, e.g. Fonzie jumping over sharks on waterskis.
Now the term seems to be generalized to a couple of broader meanings by a lot of people, such as (a) making changes that take it away from its original conception, or even (b) simply going down the tubes.
> And Andromeda...starts out with this gimmick of a holographic hot chick representing the ship (sort of a video version of Star Trek's talking female ship voice). Then they drop all pretense and somehow she becomes a walking talking hologram.
In a low-cut miniskirt.
That's where the series lost me. (In more than one sense of the word.)
> On another note, I was under the impression that the "four corners of the Earth" referred to compass points. True, compasses haven't been around that long, but the concept of North, South, East, and West have been around for millenia. Meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah speaks of "One dwelling above the circle of the Earth." The Hebrew word translated as "circle" can also mean "ball" or "sphere".
Let's see if I've got this right. The bible is to be interpreted figuratively when it talks about corners, but literally when it talks about a circle? Except on ly figuratively literally, since it really means sphere instead of circle?
I don't think I'm smart enough to be a theologian. Or at least not flexible enough to jump through the necessary hoops.
> Note that a sphere is the only shape that looks like a circle from any angle.
I thought you already said the word meant "ball" or "sphere". Do you really need to CYA both ways?
> and Isaiah didn't need to go there to find that out. Isaiah's writings date back to approximately 800 to 850 B.C.E., by the way.
Why did God tease us with cryptic info about the shape of the earth, and not bother telling us about germs and stuff?
> Yeah, I don't care what you say. All I know is that right now, there is a man all alone up there in the sky driving his chariot around [...] What would Apollo do?
At least the "What Would Appolo Drive" variant makes sense...
How many does a refutation of "Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation" require?
> > We could spend days listing reasons why the ark as described in the story could never have existed.
> consistent with archaeological evidence. Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation.
Except stuff like the Great Flood, etc.
> Supposing that Noah's ark actually exists (which I believe is the case)
We could spend days listing reasons why the ark as described in the story could never have existed.
> Why is it, therefore, here at/. there is such open hatred for Judeo-Christian beliefs when just about anything else goes? If this were an Egyptian dig, no one here would denigrate it. If this were Mayan or Aztec, or Hindu or ancient Sumerian, it would be taken at face value.
Funny enough, we almost never get kooks from those cultures claiming that their mythology is true. (FWIW, I don't believe the Sumerian flood story either.)
> Why the hatred, then, for what has been shown time and time again to be the most accurate
Not.
> and most studied ancient historical text in the world?
What hs "most studied" got to do with anything? Plato has probably been the most studied philosopher in history, but he's still a dweeb.
> I've done a lot of research for school into the search for Noah's ark, and I think this mission is doomed to fail. Every documented mission to find the ark has failed. Three major factors have kept searchers from looking on Mt. Ararat-- #1. The frigid weather, #2. The Turkish Government (security concerns, blah blah blah) #3.Kurdish people who have the nasty habit of killing people who want to go up the mountain.
Worse, there's not the slightest reason to believe that modern Ararat is the same is the biblical Ararat. (IIRC, the former didn't hold that name until the Middle Ages.)
> This will provide material for a substantial test of Bill Dembski's theories about the limitations of evolutionary algorithms.
The "theory", which Dembski gratuitously mis-applies, is Wolpert & McReady's No Free Lunch Theorem.
Dembski is nothing but a creationist apologist, relying on pseudo-science and obfuscation to give creationism a glamor of scientific respectability among the ill-informed.
> Everytime some new advance in bio-tech get's posted the gadget geeks and code pushers get ramped up into a ludite rage against this new evil threat to civilization itself.
I, for one, look forward to the new movie plots. Destroying the aliens with a computer virus is getting kind of jaded. Now the hero can mix some test-tubes instead of typing something on a keyboard.
> So far he has won and avoided jail. But, if he continues to push his luck, like this, some corporation is going to bury him.
I think it's called "getting even". US corporations got him treated like a criminal for doing something that wasn't illegal where he lives, now he's getting some back.
Slashdot Mirror
> usually the neural network is just a very simple, possibly linear, adaptive filter which means that really contains no more than a few matrix multiplications
No one in their right mind would use a linear ANN, since ANNs get their computational power from the nonlinearities introduced by their squashing functions. Without the nonlinearities, you'd just be doing linear algebra, e.g. multiplying vectors by matrices to get new vectors.
As for the computational power of ANNs,
- A simple feed-forward network with a single hidden layer can approximate any continuous function on the range [0,1] with arbitrary accuracy. (Or is it s/continuous/differentiable/ ? - can't remember.)
- Certain architectures of recurrent ANNs are equivalent to Turing machines, if the weights are specified with rational numbers.
- An ANN with real-valued weights (real, not fp) would be a trans-Turing device.
Goggle a paper by Cybenko for the first result, Siegelmann and Sontag for the second, and Siegelmann (sans Sontag?) for the third third.> yes it has some success in approximating things locally, but terms like "learning" are really misused
"Neural network" and "learning" are orthogonal concepts. A neural network is a model for computation, and learning is an algorithm.
In practice we almost always use learning to train neural networks, since programming them for non-trivial tasks would be far to difficult.
No, I don't blame family values; I just want to call attention to how much time politicians spend talking about family values, and how little about other kinds of values.
> while 4 others dressed as Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde try to catch him.
What happened to Tinkie-Winkie?
> Which is why there's a case to be made for producing malware that's really mal. Perhaps even grand mal.
Nah, grandmal would never do that.
> But Schliemann at least had this going for him, he was looking for Troy right around where Homer suggested it was.
The Greeks and Romans knew darn well where it was, because their city "Illium" was there well into the "AD" era.
I wonder whether scholars were actually as surprised about the archaelogy as everyone says they were.
Also, remember that this was at the very beginning of modern archaeology: very few "lost cities" had been dug up at that time. (Schliemann was still more of a treasure hunter than an archaelogist.) Now "lost cities" are a dime a dozen in archaeology, and no one is particularly surprised when another one is found.
> This is interesting... I have heard other explanations for Atlantis...
Here's the best one, from last time Atlantis was found.
> I don't believe it: Atlantis was predicted to be found in 2012!
Guess he found their time machine.
> What makes this guy so sure he's found Atlantis and not Ry'leh?
He's still alive.
So get in as many gaming hours as you can right away, before someone else uses up the universe's quota of computation.
> uncomfortable. The key is to find an acceptable level of mediocrity. If people weren't getting dumber and less literate, there would be no motivation to reduce the reading level of news magazines.
Would you mind explaining that again, without using so many big words?
> WTF is "jumping the shark"?
Originally it meant a show doing something outrageous and irrelevant in order to boost sagging ratings, e.g. Fonzie jumping over sharks on waterskis.
Now the term seems to be generalized to a couple of broader meanings by a lot of people, such as (a) making changes that take it away from its original conception, or even (b) simply going down the tubes.
> And Andromeda...starts out with this gimmick of a holographic hot chick representing the ship (sort of a video version of Star Trek's talking female ship voice). Then they drop all pretense and somehow she becomes a walking talking hologram.
In a low-cut miniskirt.
That's where the series lost me. (In more than one sense of the word.)
> Nothing like the herd mentality, though.
Yeah, how could people possibly be skeptical about the possibility of getting something for nothing?
> On another note, I was under the impression that the "four corners of the Earth" referred to compass points. True, compasses haven't been around that long, but the concept of North, South, East, and West have been around for millenia. Meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah speaks of "One dwelling above the circle of the Earth." The Hebrew word translated as "circle" can also mean "ball" or "sphere".
Let's see if I've got this right. The bible is to be interpreted figuratively when it talks about corners, but literally when it talks about a circle? Except on ly figuratively literally, since it really means sphere instead of circle?
I don't think I'm smart enough to be a theologian. Or at least not flexible enough to jump through the necessary hoops.
> Note that a sphere is the only shape that looks like a circle from any angle.
I thought you already said the word meant "ball" or "sphere". Do you really need to CYA both ways?
> and Isaiah didn't need to go there to find that out. Isaiah's writings date back to approximately 800 to 850 B.C.E., by the way.
Why did God tease us with cryptic info about the shape of the earth, and not bother telling us about germs and stuff?
> Yeah, I don't care what you say. All I know is that right now, there is a man all alone up there in the sky driving his chariot around [...] What would Apollo do?
At least the "What Would Appolo Drive" variant makes sense...
> > Except stuff like the Great Flood, etc.
> That's 1, let's hear some more...
How many does a refutation of "Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation" require?
> > We could spend days listing reasons why the ark as described in the story could never have existed.
> Yet you provide not one single reason.
How many did you need?
> Ironically, people thought that Troy were just figments of the imagination 150 years ago, and now they have pretty good proof of where it is.
What you overlook is that nobody believes any of the impossible stuff related in the story about it.
> consistent with archaeological evidence. Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation.
Except stuff like the Great Flood, etc.
> Supposing that Noah's ark actually exists (which I believe is the case)
We could spend days listing reasons why the ark as described in the story could never have existed.
> Why is it, therefore, here at
Funny enough, we almost never get kooks from those cultures claiming that their mythology is true. (FWIW, I don't believe the Sumerian flood story either.)
> Why the hatred, then, for what has been shown time and time again to be the most accurate
Not.
> and most studied ancient historical text in the world?
What hs "most studied" got to do with anything? Plato has probably been the most studied philosopher in history, but he's still a dweeb.
> I've done a lot of research for school into the search for Noah's ark, and I think this mission is doomed to fail. Every documented mission to find the ark has failed. Three major factors have kept searchers from looking on Mt. Ararat-- #1. The frigid weather, #2. The Turkish Government (security concerns, blah blah blah) #3.Kurdish people who have the nasty habit of killing people who want to go up the mountain.
Worse, there's not the slightest reason to believe that modern Ararat is the same is the biblical Ararat. (IIRC, the former didn't hold that name until the Middle Ages.)
> This will provide material for a substantial test of Bill Dembski's theories about the limitations of evolutionary algorithms.
The "theory", which Dembski gratuitously mis-applies, is Wolpert & McReady's No Free Lunch Theorem.
Dembski is nothing but a creationist apologist, relying on pseudo-science and obfuscation to give creationism a glamor of scientific respectability among the ill-informed.
> Everytime some new advance in bio-tech get's posted the gadget geeks and code pushers get ramped up into a ludite rage against this new evil threat to civilization itself.
I, for one, look forward to the new movie plots. Destroying the aliens with a computer virus is getting kind of jaded. Now the hero can mix some test-tubes instead of typing something on a keyboard.
> interesting ! do you have any info on that ? I missed out on that completely.
Here ya go.
> "Is life merely a convenient arrangement of cells or is it necessary to have a "spark of life" or the "soul" to bring bring the cells to "life"?"
We've been figuring out what makes life tick for several hundred years now, and never once found any indication that it's anything but chemisty.
Maybe there's a soul lurking in there somewhere, but it would sure have to be a little one.
> So far he has won and avoided jail. But, if he continues to push his luck, like this, some corporation is going to bury him.
I think it's called "getting even". US corporations got him treated like a criminal for doing something that wasn't illegal where he lives, now he's getting some back.
> DeSCO
You know the old song: "Desco, desco sc0x".