You still can't beat the speed of light barrier. Entanglement is disrupted as soon as soon as you observe it. This means that just by reading your 1 bit inter-galactic text message, the link between the two breaks. All you know for sure is that the bit you got is the opposite of the bit the other end got. As you can't manipulate the outcome of either entangled particle without disrupting the entanglement, you can't pass any non-random information.
This is a rough example of how it would work. Before you leave on your inter-galactic flight, you take a quarter with you. This is no ordinary quarter... it's actually an exact match and entangled (coupled) with a quarter that you are leaving at home with a friend. When you finally decide to communicate with your magic quarter, all you have to do is flip it. If you get heads, then you know for sure that your friend back at home got tails and visa-versa. The problem is, once you flip the quarter, the entanglement is lost and now it's back to a regular quarter. Another problem is that you have no way of knowing when or if your buddy back at home flipped his quarter, you just know that when he did/does, he will get the opposite result as you.
The best you could do with this is to coordinate random number generation across light years. Just remember, for every bit of data you want to 'coordinate' with someone remotely, that's one entangled particle that you have to observe, breaking the entanglement and thereby spending it.
The concept of entanglement is cool, but it's not THAT cool. Sorry. Also, Einstein never really accepted that any form of communication happens between entangled particles. He just figured that during the process of entanglement, the two had to be completely isolated from the surrounding universe and kept that way until it was time to observe them. He figured it was more like writing a yes and a no on two different pieces of paper, randomizing them, separating them, then reading them. He didn't believe the pieces of paper would actually coordinate with each other to display the opposite of it's counterpart, just that they were in a mutually exclusive state to begin with and kept isolated enough that their mutually exclusive state would persist.
How many slashdotters think that they could easily establish a vpn connection to get behind the Great Firewall of China, then using that VPN, create a second VPN route from the inside back out? Okay, let's make it interesting... you have 1 hour. Bonus points if you can do it for free.
Anyone else having random urges to go hop the great firewall of China over and back?
Einstein never really accepted quantum mechanics. I sometimes wonder if the issues regarding quantum computing are a little more fundamental than technological. Maybe that old genius was smarter than we give him credit for!
I'm not after programs that are 'useful to a government'... I want the actual bills that congress writes to be in a state where a compiler won't crap its binary pants.
ooooh.... a git repository for each law would be fun. In retrospect, being able to see the different proposed branches/commits/forks would be really interesting in the next elections "i told ya so" debate.
Thread-locking: When two threads try to write to the same memory at the same time... crap happens... progress stops. So in this sense, I guess Republicans and Democrats bickering would be more like infinite indirect recursion? Oh well, thread-locking sounded cooler.
Of course, then it could lead to all sorts of "hacking" the system. Imagine winning a court case because of an off-by-one error in a law, or a buffer overrun vulnerability in a contract that allowed for arbitrary code execution.
I guess we'd just have to open-source it and when disputes arise run the code line by line, debug style.
I too would love to see this... that's what inspired the comment. Every time I try to wade through legal code, it just looks like a bunch of variable initializations and messy if/then logic. Putting it through a compiler would at least force certain standards.
Hey, if a set of 3 programmers can get all of the U.S. legal code to compile, even if they do eff it up, I'd be extremely impressed... but first someone should write a programming language that can actually run legal code.
...now figure out how to get all that legal code to compile without error... and while you are at it, fix the thread locking issues that keeps coming up between Republicans and Democrats.
This article describes a logical/ethical thought experiment, but seems to come to the wrong conclusion. The halting problem states that in a general case, it is not possible to design an algorithm that will perfectly decide if another algorithm will ever stop 100% of the time. However, it doesn't take into account that very often, it is possible to determine if an algorithm will halt or not using standard algorithm-analysis techniques. These are referred to as specific case algorithms. What the 'ethicists' did was come up with a 'specific case' that proves that a general algorithm for determining that the 'lesser of two evils' choice between taking a life and not is NOT ALWAYS possible. However, a simple solution presents itself.
Let a robot be given a choice to take any action that could result in knowingly ending a human life. If the robot does not encounter the halting problem, it will make a very educated and justified decision. If it DOES encounter the halting problem, perform no action. As the robot will probably be stuck in some while-loop or recursion function anyway, this isn't really a problem. Also, it is useful to note that the lack of an action that results in a human's death is not a morally wrong thing... it's simply a mechanical error. When insufficient data is available to make an ethically sound decision, it is arguable that the best course of action is not to interfere. You won't ever be guilty of making things worse, even if you COULD have made things better.
Granted, my solution falls apart when you take into account the very real possibility that the robot is in a position where the default behavior should be to take an action. For example, a robot in charge of activating the brakes on a train should NOT be stuck in a halting problem loop when it comes time to perform normal behavior. I'd argue that this can be solved by simple multi-threading strategies... just remember to keep your robot's ethical thread separate from its normal function thread:D
So, stupid celebrities use poor judgment on their password habits. Some idiot manages to gain access to their accounts on Apple's servers... and now GOOGLE GETS THE BLAME?!!! Imagine this. You are a programmer or system administrator working at Google... you are tasked with removing all instances of leaked nude photos of these X celebrities from ALL Google hosted servers. Well, that's not too hard right? Let's just view every last youtube video one by one and make sure that none of them contain offending images... Not exactly easy. Okay, what about just the movies uploaded after the leak... still not easy or feasible. Okay, let's tell the computers how to do it with a fancy nude detecting face matching algorithm... that isn't exactly a weekend project. Now consider all of the photos that Google hosts. You have to filter them too. Oh, while you are at it, figure out how to program Google's web crawler bots to detect images of these certain naked celebrities on all of the sites on the internet and blacklist each site it finds... REALLY?!! This is an insane amount of responsibility to throw at someone who HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE INITIAL LEAK!!! Go blame Apple for not cross checking for same email address and password across multiple sites as it was APPLE who was hosting the offending material. Also, at the end of the day, this is the celebrities' fault for not being smart about their passwords.
Just because hardware has advanced to a point where we could justify increasing the minimum specs for Windows, doesn't mean we should. I mean sports cars are constantly being re-engineered to maximize power (acceleration/speed) and minimize weight (even more acceleration and speed). Why would consumers want a computer that REQUIRES multiple cores just to power the OS? That's called software bloating and it isn't necessary or appreciated by consumers when their computer is rendered unusable a year into its lifetime. No, minimize the OS. This gives you maximum headroom for the applications that you REALLY care about that actually NEED the cpu/gpu/ram cycles. In addition to it running better across the board, it also allows it to run on the light end devices such as the phone in your pocket. When it comes to software, lighter is better... especially when you are dealing with the dang Operating System.
This was a thought I had when reading the summary. We have a lot of evidence that they exist. We see gravitational effects on nearby matter and the subtle but present gravitational lensing.
On the other hand, what I gather from this summary is that the status of a black hole becomes somewhat of a mathematical limit. Basically, matter still accumulates. Time still slows. Space still bends to the same extent that it would if the matter was in a singularity. However, from a distance, the concentration of mass within a volume of a few AU across could be indistinguishable from the same matter contained in a point that takes up exactly 0 m^3. Basically, for any volume, there is a distance that you can view it from that makes it look like a 0 dimensional point. Isn't this the idea behind relativity? From our frame of reference many thousands, millions or billions of light-years away, it looks exactly like our current model of a black hole... from a frame of reference within a light-year or so of the anomaly, it may look completely different, though it would have the exact same wide scale gravitational footprint.
Another thing to consider is as matter drifts towards a black hole, time slows down for it, until you hit the event horizon where time effectively (I suspect literally) stops. If time approaches the limit of 'static', then it is impossible for matter to actually become sucked into a black hole. It will simply get sucked ever closer to a limit it simply can't cross. This prevents the event horizon from ever forming.
I admit, this is all the speculation of a curious soul and has no mathematical foundation, but this is how I picture a black hole... I am partial towards this new theory because I never understood how anything ever enters a black hole if time approaches a stopping point as the object gets closer. Eventually, the time gets so slow that any forward movement becomes negligible as it approaches this limit. Therefore a black hole can't grow... and according to this theory, it can't even form.
Assuming that my logic in this essay is somewhat valid, instead of seeing black holes such as we currently think exist, we would see extremely dense spheres that are literally kept from collapsing by the extremely slow passage of time. Again, this would look like a black hole from a distance, but it's a completely different, and Einstein approved monster.
Autonomous cars are still new so obviously they are in the minority. What happens when they become mainstream and the benefits become irrefutably clear? Then they will become the majority and won't have to deal with us crappy drivers. As fewer error prone human drivers hit the road, this will slowly become a problem of history. I can't wait for the day when stoplights become nonexistent because all cars are intercommunicating and they all time their transit through an intersection perfectly... granted, you could be forgiven if you wet yourself once or twice as your self-driving car approaches an intersection full of cross-traffic at normal speed, but it should be possible with computers behind the wheel.
Look up the afterlife dysfunction on youtube for an idea that should challenge your perspective on reality... basically the universe is simply X amount of data that is in every possible superposition of quantum states. If the universe could be represented in 1's and 0's (quantum physics suggests it can be... or at least each of its possible configurations can) then the big bang is simply when all matter existed at the same point at (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,... nth) where n is the number of dimensions. As this is a possible universe configuration, then it does exist in some sense. It's a lot easier when you stop thinking about the big bang as the beginning, but as the Null value of the universe.
At the time of the big bang, matter and anti-matter should have been made in roughly (if not exactly) equivalent amounts... but the distribution of that matter might not be perfectly even. It could be that in our half of the universe, matter slightly (percentage-wise) out-massed the anti-matter and annihilated it while in the other half of the universe, the opposite happened. We have to remember that much of the universe could lie beyond the limit of the visible universe.
Another thought is that matter and anti-matter could have the same relationship as positive and negative numbers. If you add them together in equal amounts, you get 0, but if you square them first, then their sums are positive. So what does it take to "square matter?" Is it possible that anti-matter has it's own form of nuclear fusion? If you fuse anti-matter with anti-matter, do you get matter?
I know this is all hypothetical and way within the realm of speculation, but it could be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
You still can't beat the speed of light barrier. Entanglement is disrupted as soon as soon as you observe it. This means that just by reading your 1 bit inter-galactic text message, the link between the two breaks. All you know for sure is that the bit you got is the opposite of the bit the other end got. As you can't manipulate the outcome of either entangled particle without disrupting the entanglement, you can't pass any non-random information.
This is a rough example of how it would work. Before you leave on your inter-galactic flight, you take a quarter with you. This is no ordinary quarter... it's actually an exact match and entangled (coupled) with a quarter that you are leaving at home with a friend. When you finally decide to communicate with your magic quarter, all you have to do is flip it. If you get heads, then you know for sure that your friend back at home got tails and visa-versa. The problem is, once you flip the quarter, the entanglement is lost and now it's back to a regular quarter. Another problem is that you have no way of knowing when or if your buddy back at home flipped his quarter, you just know that when he did/does, he will get the opposite result as you.
The best you could do with this is to coordinate random number generation across light years. Just remember, for every bit of data you want to 'coordinate' with someone remotely, that's one entangled particle that you have to observe, breaking the entanglement and thereby spending it.
The concept of entanglement is cool, but it's not THAT cool. Sorry. Also, Einstein never really accepted that any form of communication happens between entangled particles. He just figured that during the process of entanglement, the two had to be completely isolated from the surrounding universe and kept that way until it was time to observe them. He figured it was more like writing a yes and a no on two different pieces of paper, randomizing them, separating them, then reading them. He didn't believe the pieces of paper would actually coordinate with each other to display the opposite of it's counterpart, just that they were in a mutually exclusive state to begin with and kept isolated enough that their mutually exclusive state would persist.
Round 2: Establish redundancy.
How many slashdotters think that they could easily establish a vpn connection to get behind the Great Firewall of China, then using that VPN, create a second VPN route from the inside back out? Okay, let's make it interesting... you have 1 hour. Bonus points if you can do it for free. Anyone else having random urges to go hop the great firewall of China over and back?
Einstein never really accepted quantum mechanics. I sometimes wonder if the issues regarding quantum computing are a little more fundamental than technological. Maybe that old genius was smarter than we give him credit for!
I'm not after programs that are 'useful to a government'... I want the actual bills that congress writes to be in a state where a compiler won't crap its binary pants.
ooooh.... a git repository for each law would be fun. In retrospect, being able to see the different proposed branches/commits/forks would be really interesting in the next elections "i told ya so" debate.
Thread-locking: When two threads try to write to the same memory at the same time... crap happens... progress stops. So in this sense, I guess Republicans and Democrats bickering would be more like infinite indirect recursion? Oh well, thread-locking sounded cooler.
Of course, then it could lead to all sorts of "hacking" the system. Imagine winning a court case because of an off-by-one error in a law, or a buffer overrun vulnerability in a contract that allowed for arbitrary code execution.
I guess we'd just have to open-source it and when disputes arise run the code line by line, debug style.
I too would love to see this... that's what inspired the comment. Every time I try to wade through legal code, it just looks like a bunch of variable initializations and messy if/then logic. Putting it through a compiler would at least force certain standards.
Hey, if a set of 3 programmers can get all of the U.S. legal code to compile, even if they do eff it up, I'd be extremely impressed... but first someone should write a programming language that can actually run legal code.
...now figure out how to get all that legal code to compile without error... and while you are at it, fix the thread locking issues that keeps coming up between Republicans and Democrats.
This article describes a logical/ethical thought experiment, but seems to come to the wrong conclusion. The halting problem states that in a general case, it is not possible to design an algorithm that will perfectly decide if another algorithm will ever stop 100% of the time. However, it doesn't take into account that very often, it is possible to determine if an algorithm will halt or not using standard algorithm-analysis techniques. These are referred to as specific case algorithms. What the 'ethicists' did was come up with a 'specific case' that proves that a general algorithm for determining that the 'lesser of two evils' choice between taking a life and not is NOT ALWAYS possible. However, a simple solution presents itself.
Let a robot be given a choice to take any action that could result in knowingly ending a human life. If the robot does not encounter the halting problem, it will make a very educated and justified decision. If it DOES encounter the halting problem, perform no action. As the robot will probably be stuck in some while-loop or recursion function anyway, this isn't really a problem. Also, it is useful to note that the lack of an action that results in a human's death is not a morally wrong thing... it's simply a mechanical error. When insufficient data is available to make an ethically sound decision, it is arguable that the best course of action is not to interfere. You won't ever be guilty of making things worse, even if you COULD have made things better.
Granted, my solution falls apart when you take into account the very real possibility that the robot is in a position where the default behavior should be to take an action. For example, a robot in charge of activating the brakes on a train should NOT be stuck in a halting problem loop when it comes time to perform normal behavior. I'd argue that this can be solved by simple multi-threading strategies... just remember to keep your robot's ethical thread separate from its normal function thread :D
So, stupid celebrities use poor judgment on their password habits. Some idiot manages to gain access to their accounts on Apple's servers... and now GOOGLE GETS THE BLAME?!!! Imagine this. You are a programmer or system administrator working at Google... you are tasked with removing all instances of leaked nude photos of these X celebrities from ALL Google hosted servers. Well, that's not too hard right? Let's just view every last youtube video one by one and make sure that none of them contain offending images... Not exactly easy. Okay, what about just the movies uploaded after the leak... still not easy or feasible. Okay, let's tell the computers how to do it with a fancy nude detecting face matching algorithm... that isn't exactly a weekend project. Now consider all of the photos that Google hosts. You have to filter them too. Oh, while you are at it, figure out how to program Google's web crawler bots to detect images of these certain naked celebrities on all of the sites on the internet and blacklist each site it finds... REALLY?!! This is an insane amount of responsibility to throw at someone who HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE INITIAL LEAK!!! Go blame Apple for not cross checking for same email address and password across multiple sites as it was APPLE who was hosting the offending material. Also, at the end of the day, this is the celebrities' fault for not being smart about their passwords.
Just because hardware has advanced to a point where we could justify increasing the minimum specs for Windows, doesn't mean we should. I mean sports cars are constantly being re-engineered to maximize power (acceleration/speed) and minimize weight (even more acceleration and speed). Why would consumers want a computer that REQUIRES multiple cores just to power the OS? That's called software bloating and it isn't necessary or appreciated by consumers when their computer is rendered unusable a year into its lifetime. No, minimize the OS. This gives you maximum headroom for the applications that you REALLY care about that actually NEED the cpu/gpu/ram cycles. In addition to it running better across the board, it also allows it to run on the light end devices such as the phone in your pocket. When it comes to software, lighter is better... especially when you are dealing with the dang Operating System.
I honestly think that this is sound and very likely the explanation behind black holes. Kudos
This was a thought I had when reading the summary. We have a lot of evidence that they exist. We see gravitational effects on nearby matter and the subtle but present gravitational lensing.
On the other hand, what I gather from this summary is that the status of a black hole becomes somewhat of a mathematical limit. Basically, matter still accumulates. Time still slows. Space still bends to the same extent that it would if the matter was in a singularity. However, from a distance, the concentration of mass within a volume of a few AU across could be indistinguishable from the same matter contained in a point that takes up exactly 0 m^3. Basically, for any volume, there is a distance that you can view it from that makes it look like a 0 dimensional point. Isn't this the idea behind relativity? From our frame of reference many thousands, millions or billions of light-years away, it looks exactly like our current model of a black hole... from a frame of reference within a light-year or so of the anomaly, it may look completely different, though it would have the exact same wide scale gravitational footprint.
Another thing to consider is as matter drifts towards a black hole, time slows down for it, until you hit the event horizon where time effectively (I suspect literally) stops. If time approaches the limit of 'static', then it is impossible for matter to actually become sucked into a black hole. It will simply get sucked ever closer to a limit it simply can't cross. This prevents the event horizon from ever forming.
I admit, this is all the speculation of a curious soul and has no mathematical foundation, but this is how I picture a black hole... I am partial towards this new theory because I never understood how anything ever enters a black hole if time approaches a stopping point as the object gets closer. Eventually, the time gets so slow that any forward movement becomes negligible as it approaches this limit. Therefore a black hole can't grow... and according to this theory, it can't even form.
Assuming that my logic in this essay is somewhat valid, instead of seeing black holes such as we currently think exist, we would see extremely dense spheres that are literally kept from collapsing by the extremely slow passage of time. Again, this would look like a black hole from a distance, but it's a completely different, and Einstein approved monster.
Autonomous cars are still new so obviously they are in the minority. What happens when they become mainstream and the benefits become irrefutably clear? Then they will become the majority and won't have to deal with us crappy drivers. As fewer error prone human drivers hit the road, this will slowly become a problem of history. I can't wait for the day when stoplights become nonexistent because all cars are intercommunicating and they all time their transit through an intersection perfectly... granted, you could be forgiven if you wet yourself once or twice as your self-driving car approaches an intersection full of cross-traffic at normal speed, but it should be possible with computers behind the wheel.
Look up the afterlife dysfunction on youtube for an idea that should challenge your perspective on reality... basically the universe is simply X amount of data that is in every possible superposition of quantum states. If the universe could be represented in 1's and 0's (quantum physics suggests it can be... or at least each of its possible configurations can) then the big bang is simply when all matter existed at the same point at (0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... nth) where n is the number of dimensions. As this is a possible universe configuration, then it does exist in some sense. It's a lot easier when you stop thinking about the big bang as the beginning, but as the Null value of the universe.
At the time of the big bang, matter and anti-matter should have been made in roughly (if not exactly) equivalent amounts... but the distribution of that matter might not be perfectly even. It could be that in our half of the universe, matter slightly (percentage-wise) out-massed the anti-matter and annihilated it while in the other half of the universe, the opposite happened. We have to remember that much of the universe could lie beyond the limit of the visible universe. Another thought is that matter and anti-matter could have the same relationship as positive and negative numbers. If you add them together in equal amounts, you get 0, but if you square them first, then their sums are positive. So what does it take to "square matter?" Is it possible that anti-matter has it's own form of nuclear fusion? If you fuse anti-matter with anti-matter, do you get matter? I know this is all hypothetical and way within the realm of speculation, but it could be possible.