No it wouldn't count. There are plenty of problems that would quickly overwhelm a universe full of molecules working in parallel, much less those in a tiny machine.
Well, on the other hand, knowledge of programming sheds a lot of light on other areas. Chaos theory, gradient descent w.r.t. evolution, neural network theory and memory, why you should use more than one antibiotic at a time if you want to prevent resistant bacteria, all give much deeper understanding of a lot of intractable problems than a hand analysis on paper would (physicists might still be looking for the holy grail of weather prediction, not realizing one molecule being one billionth of a nanometer out of place yields completely different day-to-day weather six months down the road.)
Now, if your point is that without a physicist to say, "hey, let's try to solve this problem, or simulate that problem" then I would agree with you. However, computer science does study things like genetic algorithms independent of evolutionary biologists, and it does indeed shed light on that (for example, "punctuated equilibrium" is only an observational description of bursting out of one local minima and dropping down to the next. Even worse, the "fittest" function is constantly changing as preditor and prey, from bacteria through lion and even human, constantly adapt to each other in the context of the environment.)
> I know it's a worst case scenerio, but imagine a
> future where normal, unmodified humans are
> considered to be an inferior waste product
When? It's inevitable.
Cyberpunk novels make guesses about the technologies that will be out there, but even that's short-term, near-future (a few hunderd years or a few thousand at most.)
Expect to see "people", that is, "minds", existing completely independent of a physical body, and heavily modified with various database storage and auxiliary thinking modules, whatever.
No one will exist in a human-style body in a thousand years or less; it may end up being a nothing more than a quaint way to take a vacation from time to time. Even then, probably not, as things like sex could be much more erotic with all your relevent brain locations fired up to 100%. Heck, if they can lick the study of the subjective perceptual experience, imagine living in a virtual world where they multiply the feelings by 10, 100, 1000 times what is theoretically possible in a "real" body.
Would YOU want to go back to the real world?
We just have to make sure purely artificial thinking devices with no subjective perceptual experience are ever let loose to manage things with human goals in their minds.
Dang, that's two levels above The Incredible Hulk's geometrically increasing strength when angry.
Re:I'm very leery of this wrt Second Amendment rig
on
Hacking Biology
·
· Score: 1
> But, if DARPA genetically engineers soldiers who are resistant to bullets
Ehh, that Soldier movie with Kurt Russel isn't looking like such a terrible movie anymore, is it? Huh? Huh?
Re:Uggh, do American's want this?
on
Hacking Biology
·
· Score: 1
At least this explains why we don't receive signals from other worlds. Everyone is biocomputerized and lives forever in a virtual world much more interesting than the real world, AND they don't want to contact any primitives until the primitives get to a virtual stage and won't try to do any silly adventuring.
Go to Canada (since 99.999% of Canadians live within 50 miles of the US, the reverse must be true), buy a Hulkster 3000 Turdswallower, DECLARE it at the border (no need to hide it; besides, it was more likely than not manufactured in America and will be happy to be going home) and take it home and install it.
I HATE these little girly-man toilets! My GF's 'rents have one, and I have, PRIOR to the insertion of any toilet paper, had to actually remove the choking poop, place it on a hastily-created toilet paper workstation prepared on the floor, and physically disassemble it into smaller pieces for reinsertion into the toilet for swallowing over multiple flushes. Then I was able to wipe myself clean, over several more flushings.
Some idiot engineers thought that by narrowing the opening, they could make it use less water. Either that, or the opening just was never man enough to accept all that without 5 gallons of water weight pushing it through.
Anyway, none of the states near the CA border have any water shortage problems whatsoever, so we hate the concrete canyon dwellers of NY and CA2 for forcing this idiot legislation down our throats. Well, them and the idiot environmentalists who get the states to individually pass such lame, needless (even in California) laws.
This is too much! We need government regulation to decide the best course of action, and to tax it too.
Actually, with balloons, you could easily have several up at once, and they could be unmanned, too (not to mention ground-controlled via fiber optic thru the cable. Problem with one? Reel 'er in!)
What I really want to know is what happened to the impossibility of broadband-for-everyone-via-wireless? That there was physically not enough radio spectrum, even if it was all devoted, to give high speed to everyone in a given area, and the larger the area covered by the same transponder, the worse it was. Certainly covering a 70-mile radius over a large city would involve several million x the bandwidth of a cable modem.
> The ability to filter noise and tune in on
> information that you want is exactly what
> democracy is all about.
It's what freedom is all about, actually. People make this mistake all the time, but it's not democracy that made this country great, it was freedom.
Politicians usually play up the value of democracy, rarely mentioning freedom, because they gain their power by using democracy to limit freedom 99 times out of 100 (a conservative estimate, actually.)
> mandatory links connecting Web sites to
> others promoting different views--to manage "the
> scarce commodity" of the public's attention.
This is a conceit, ironically, usually found on the left, wherein if, by golly, you just saw what we were saying, then you would come around to our way of thinking.
It happens when moral righteousness of a position develops, and then further develops until any arguments against the position are treated with moral skepticism, if not outright questioning, of the opposition's motive above and prior to examining their positions.
> The sex scandal was bullshit, the fundraising
> hanky-panky was D.C. business-as-usual. None of
> it even approached the shadow of real high
> crimes like Iran-Contra and Watergate.
Actually, Watergate was D.C. business-as-usual, too. Both parties used to (and still do, no doubt) physically spy on each other all the time. Nixon just had the unfortunate luck to have his cronies caught.
Bob held his diary in check not so much of what it contained to implicate himself, but because of the dirt it held on many other members of congress. He waived it around the same way Heidi F-lice waived her little black book filled with names of the Hollywood elite and CA politicians. "Come on, bring it on peeps!"
> No, wait, I bet you're referring to his
> successful attempt to derail the manual recount
> in Florida that would have certainly given Gore
> the presidency.
If I recall correctly, the results from newspaper examinations were that it would not have, unless you counted double-punches of which one was for Gore, and interpreted those entirely as being for Gore, which you could not do of course.
If the web browser had been patented, it still would have taken off, although it probably wouldn't be where it was today. In fact, Microsoft would probably have heaved upwards of a billion dollars to buy it out, cheap by their standards.
Since we're wondering what-if, what if MS had been stopped several years ago, prior to killing (death-by-FUD) Netscape's NAPI (Netscape API) for the integration of web functionality into applications? Or the FUD killing of Java and the pure virtual machine, complete with interface? Might MS be on the down and out in some parallel reality, as native OS's became replaced by a vitrual machine independent of hardware and OS?
Well, now that scanner technology allows for high quality blowups of any desired body region,.jpegs are more desireable for close viewing than the originals in many cases.
Actually, little webpad type things with wireless lan connection to a central Internet hub in your home are well along in design. It's diskless computers, light. It just remains to be seen who comes up with a useful design that also plays games and has a keyboard option, or really good voice recognition.
> On a related note, can quantum computers solve
> NP complete problems in P time? I haven't kept
> up w/ quantum computers
I haven't either, but it would seem so. All of this stuff is related to the Church-Turing Thesis, that the Turing Machine, et al. are what is meant by the "most powerful computational model that performs at most a finite number of steps in a finite amount of time." Quantum computing seems to cheat that by not falling under that general description of a computing machine.
Of course, that in turn has an enormous implication: that the universal machinery underlying quantum mechanics itself is also above such a computational definition. In other words, there wouldn't be some God-machine with a 10^^googleplex length random-number generator telling every quantum event where it should appear when it is measured.
> "Well, it turns out these 0's and 1's have no
> mathematical structure. They cannot be compressed."
Does the lack of compressability derive from its unknowability? It must, because if it could be figured out, then we already have a simple formula for it (thus compression under his definition.) The formula is the concept, the exact details are left to the reader. But if it's unknowable, the details cannot be figured out, hence the uncompressability.
> This is getting chaos out of chaos, not chaos
> out of order.
Just like you can't compress the average string of bits because the average string is more or less random. Yet, for example,.jpeg manages to compress just about everything (pictorialy) the human mind considers interesting. So, too, formula may be found (tiny, compressed representation of huge data domains) for essentially everything that humans may be interested in.
This, I think, is his point. Mathematicians were looking at the tiny sea shore of interesting things, then were shocked, shocked! that there be sea dragons out there.
I think it's jumping the gun, though, to suggest as some here have, that the universe may not in principle be understandable to the last digit. To pull something out of nothing, such as the universe, you're probably pretty close to the shore, rather than finding the definition of the universe to be way out with the sea dragons.
Slashdot Mirror
No it wouldn't count. There are plenty of problems that would quickly overwhelm a universe full of molecules working in parallel, much less those in a tiny machine.
Well, on the other hand, knowledge of programming sheds a lot of light on other areas. Chaos theory, gradient descent w.r.t. evolution, neural network theory and memory, why you should use more than one antibiotic at a time if you want to prevent resistant bacteria, all give much deeper understanding of a lot of intractable problems than a hand analysis on paper would (physicists might still be looking for the holy grail of weather prediction, not realizing one molecule being one billionth of a nanometer out of place yields completely different day-to-day weather six months down the road.)
Now, if your point is that without a physicist to say, "hey, let's try to solve this problem, or simulate that problem" then I would agree with you. However, computer science does study things like genetic algorithms independent of evolutionary biologists, and it does indeed shed light on that (for example, "punctuated equilibrium" is only an observational description of bursting out of one local minima and dropping down to the next. Even worse, the "fittest" function is constantly changing as preditor and prey, from bacteria through lion and even human, constantly adapt to each other in the context of the environment.)
> I know it's a worst case scenerio, but imagine a
> future where normal, unmodified humans are
> considered to be an inferior waste product
When? It's inevitable.
Cyberpunk novels make guesses about the technologies that will be out there, but even that's short-term, near-future (a few hunderd years or a few thousand at most.)
Expect to see "people", that is, "minds", existing completely independent of a physical body, and heavily modified with various database storage and auxiliary thinking modules, whatever.
No one will exist in a human-style body in a thousand years or less; it may end up being a nothing more than a quaint way to take a vacation from time to time. Even then, probably not, as things like sex could be much more erotic with all your relevent brain locations fired up to 100%. Heck, if they can lick the study of the subjective perceptual experience, imagine living in a virtual world where they multiply the feelings by 10, 100, 1000 times what is theoretically possible in a "real" body.
Would YOU want to go back to the real world?
We just have to make sure purely artificial thinking devices with no subjective perceptual experience are ever let loose to manage things with human goals in their minds.
"Hyperexponential"?
Dang, that's two levels above The Incredible Hulk's geometrically increasing strength when angry.
> But, if DARPA genetically engineers soldiers who are resistant to bullets
Ehh, that Soldier movie with Kurt Russel isn't looking like such a terrible movie anymore, is it? Huh? Huh?
At least this explains why we don't receive signals from other worlds. Everyone is biocomputerized and lives forever in a virtual world much more interesting than the real world, AND they don't want to contact any primitives until the primitives get to a virtual stage and won't try to do any silly adventuring.
Go to Canada (since 99.999% of Canadians live within 50 miles of the US, the reverse must be true), buy a Hulkster 3000 Turdswallower, DECLARE it at the border (no need to hide it; besides, it was more likely than not manufactured in America and will be happy to be going home) and take it home and install it.
I HATE these little girly-man toilets! My GF's 'rents have one, and I have, PRIOR to the insertion of any toilet paper, had to actually remove the choking poop, place it on a hastily-created toilet paper workstation prepared on the floor, and physically disassemble it into smaller pieces for reinsertion into the toilet for swallowing over multiple flushes. Then I was able to wipe myself clean, over several more flushings.
Some idiot engineers thought that by narrowing the opening, they could make it use less water. Either that, or the opening just was never man enough to accept all that without 5 gallons of water weight pushing it through.
Anyway, none of the states near the CA border have any water shortage problems whatsoever, so we hate the concrete canyon dwellers of NY and CA2 for forcing this idiot legislation down our throats. Well, them and the idiot environmentalists who get the states to individually pass such lame, needless (even in California) laws.
Spare me, it's driving internet badwidth expansion just like it drove the initial acceptance of VCR's.
This is too much! We need government regulation to decide the best course of action, and to tax it too.
Actually, with balloons, you could easily have several up at once, and they could be unmanned, too (not to mention ground-controlled via fiber optic thru the cable. Problem with one? Reel 'er in!)
What I really want to know is what happened to the impossibility of broadband-for-everyone-via-wireless? That there was physically not enough radio spectrum, even if it was all devoted, to give high speed to everyone in a given area, and the larger the area covered by the same transponder, the worse it was. Certainly covering a 70-mile radius over a large city would involve several million x the bandwidth of a cable modem.
> The ability to filter noise and tune in on
> information that you want is exactly what
> democracy is all about.
It's what freedom is all about, actually. People make this mistake all the time, but it's not democracy that made this country great, it was freedom.
Politicians usually play up the value of democracy, rarely mentioning freedom, because they gain their power by using democracy to limit freedom 99 times out of 100 (a conservative estimate, actually.)
> mandatory links connecting Web sites to
> others promoting different views--to manage "the
> scarce commodity" of the public's attention.
This is a conceit, ironically, usually found on the left, wherein if, by golly, you just saw what we were saying, then you would come around to our way of thinking.
It happens when moral righteousness of a position develops, and then further develops until any arguments against the position are treated with moral skepticism, if not outright questioning, of the opposition's motive above and prior to examining their positions.
> The sex scandal was bullshit, the fundraising
> hanky-panky was D.C. business-as-usual. None of
> it even approached the shadow of real high
> crimes like Iran-Contra and Watergate.
Actually, Watergate was D.C. business-as-usual, too. Both parties used to (and still do, no doubt) physically spy on each other all the time. Nixon just had the unfortunate luck to have his cronies caught.
Bob held his diary in check not so much of what it contained to implicate himself, but because of the dirt it held on many other members of congress. He waived it around the same way Heidi F-lice waived her little black book filled with names of the Hollywood elite and CA politicians. "Come on, bring it on peeps!"
Hillary was even brighter, talking directly to the ghost of Elanor Roosevelt, no phone lines involved.
> No, wait, I bet you're referring to his
> successful attempt to derail the manual recount
> in Florida that would have certainly given Gore
> the presidency.
If I recall correctly, the results from newspaper examinations were that it would not have, unless you counted double-punches of which one was for Gore, and interpreted those entirely as being for Gore, which you could not do of course.
Unfortunately, that sex pictogram is itself a 16+ year old rating, thus must be taped over on boxes on shelves open to the general public.
If the web browser had been patented, it still would have taken off, although it probably wouldn't be where it was today. In fact, Microsoft would probably have heaved upwards of a billion dollars to buy it out, cheap by their standards.
Since we're wondering what-if, what if MS had been stopped several years ago, prior to killing (death-by-FUD) Netscape's NAPI (Netscape API) for the integration of web functionality into applications? Or the FUD killing of Java and the pure virtual machine, complete with interface? Might MS be on the down and out in some parallel reality, as native OS's became replaced by a vitrual machine independent of hardware and OS?
Young man, if you study history, you will see that the most powerful empires were the ones that opened the trade route, then kept them protected.
Empires that did not do this, allowing highway robbers and pirates, did not last long or were not that powerful.
People have to have the effort they make protected, whether it be music or a cart of apples.
Well, now that scanner technology allows for high quality blowups of any desired body region, .jpegs are more desireable for close viewing than the originals in many cases.
It also was self-contained, I believe.
Actually, little webpad type things with wireless lan connection to a central Internet hub in your home are well along in design. It's diskless computers, light. It just remains to be seen who comes up with a useful design that also plays games and has a keyboard option, or really good voice recognition.
How can zero be self-evident? You can't have zero things!
Note: This seems like a troll, but is a reference to mathematical history.
> On a related note, can quantum computers solve
> NP complete problems in P time? I haven't kept
> up w/ quantum computers
I haven't either, but it would seem so. All of this stuff is related to the Church-Turing Thesis, that the Turing Machine, et al. are what is meant by the "most powerful computational model that performs at most a finite number of steps in a finite amount of time." Quantum computing seems to cheat that by not falling under that general description of a computing machine.
Of course, that in turn has an enormous implication: that the universal machinery underlying quantum mechanics itself is also above such a computational definition. In other words, there wouldn't be some God-machine with a 10^^googleplex length random-number generator telling every quantum event where it should appear when it is measured.
Actually, the complete set of real numbers can be mapped between any two rational numbers, or any two real numbers for that matter.
> "Well, it turns out these 0's and 1's have no
> mathematical structure. They cannot be compressed."
Does the lack of compressability derive from its unknowability? It must, because if it could be figured out, then we already have a simple formula for it (thus compression under his definition.) The formula is the concept, the exact details are left to the reader. But if it's unknowable, the details cannot be figured out, hence the uncompressability.
> This is getting chaos out of chaos, not chaos
.jpeg manages to compress just about everything (pictorialy) the human mind considers interesting. So, too, formula may be found (tiny, compressed representation of huge data domains) for essentially everything that humans may be interested in.
> out of order.
Just like you can't compress the average string of bits because the average string is more or less random. Yet, for example,
This, I think, is his point. Mathematicians were looking at the tiny sea shore of interesting things, then were shocked, shocked! that there be sea dragons out there.
I think it's jumping the gun, though, to suggest as some here have, that the universe may not in principle be understandable to the last digit. To pull something out of nothing, such as the universe, you're probably pretty close to the shore, rather than finding the definition of the universe to be way out with the sea dragons.