"
For the second, do you know how much publicity would come of trying to prosecute a reporter for reporting the truth?"
I think you're quite wrong. Reporters aren't allowed to break the law in the interests of reporting a story. "Uh, your honor, I shot and killed that liquor store owner in the process of demonstrating how easily it is to buy a gun and use it to hold up a liquor store." No journalism school will ever teach a student that they can try to break into buildings--much less secure government buildings--without being liable for prosecution.
Watch. He will be prosecuted, and any journalists that try to make a fuss about it will be shown the secure facilities and then be reminded that trying to break into a government facility is a bad idea, regardless. The reporter will be shown to be the fool that he is.
"
Would you care to point some of them out for us, please?"
Okay. The author doesn't substantiate his claim that the one building he approached (but didn't enter) is actually that sensitive of an area. It's on the list he was given. Big deal. What I'm wondering about is the materials that was supposedly stolen from there: electronic equipment and camping gear? I dunno, that doesn't sound like the kind of place that's doing super-sensitive research.
Secondly, he completely misrepresents what the Lab facilities are like. LANL is not one big, monolithic facility sitting on a single plot of land. It's got a main area, right in town (the "front gate" he refers to), and then lots of little facilities scattered all over the area. They are individually secured.
Getting in the "front gate" is no big deal because, you know, visitors are allowed in. (Unlike Sandia in Albuquerque, which is much harder to get into. But it's a single contiguous site situated within an Air Force base.)
The one facility that easily the most sensitive is the plutonium refinement facility--yes, LANL still has a reactor and refines and stores some plutonium. That area is surrounded by several staggered perimeter fences, with mines between them, dogs, guards, and "helicopter landing denial cables" strung all over the area, for good measure.
Then, if you've ever been in any of the facilities, you'll find that there are armed guards stationed at entraces to sensitive areas within buildings. When I was in high school, and went on a tour of LANL as part of its "High School Senior Science Day", a friend of mine innocently walked down a corridor to a vending machine and was immediately physically hoisted in the air and carried back to the rest of the group by two armed guards.
Furthermore, constantly patrolling the area of the Lab, including parts of town and neighboring areas that border the labs, are MPs in Jeeps with M-16s prominently displayed.
LANL is a sprawling facility built upon finger-like mesas and in deep canyons spread over a huge area. LANL-owned land is fenced off, but for these remote facilities--like those along NM 4--are individually secured. And not all facilities are equal. Some are not that sensitive. There are a lot of relatively insecure facilities at LANL, because they do a lot more research than just weapons research. I had numerous friends who did coop work there while they were in college, and only one of them actually needed a security clearance to do her work.
LANL is, more than Livermore, and certainly more than Sandia and Oak Ridge, a very "civilian-esque" lab. They do weapons design work there, and those areas, along with the plutonium facility, you can be sure are heavily secured.
Finally, this author was an idiot. He was lucky that he tried to approach a facility that apparently isn't that sensitive. He's lucky he didn't get shot. They will shoot you. And you can bet that there will be criminal charges filed against him for this. Imbecile.
It took me a long time to finally give in and go with Outlook. First, for years I just telnetted into my shell acount and used Pine. Then, I switched to Eudora. Finally, I guess in '99 or so, I finally switched to Outlook.
Not that this is very meaningful. But I'm quite happy with Outlook now. As long as I have everything locked down properly and don't have to worry about viruses. Norton's email scanning gives me some more peace of mind about that.
"It's all very well of you trying to tell people what is moral and what isn't.. but I'll figure out my own morals, thanks. And if that includes getting revenge on people that piss me off, so be it."
Well, and if my own moral code includes punching you in the face because I don't like your moral code, I assume that you won't complain?
Whether or not there is an "absolute moral code" or not is beside the point. What is not beside the point is whether various relevant moral codes can be evaluated against some meaningful standard (not necessarily an absolute standard, just a standard that the various people involved can agree is "meaningful"). If you believe there's a rational justification to objecting to my "punch you because I feel like it" morality, then you implicitly agree that it's possible that there's a rational justification for the other poster's criticism of your lex talionis morality.
When you write "you spout that off as if there is an absolute moral code than should be followed...", you're being intellectually lazy in two distinct ways. The first is you're inferring the writer is an absolutist and then knocking down that inferred straw man. The second is that you probably don't even realize that you were knocking down a straw man because it appears that you think that advocating a moral position necessarily implies absolutism. It doesn't.
"There are also distinct invisible genetic differences among races, and it would be foolish to ignore these in the name of political correctness- the higher incidence of Caucasians having cystic fibrosis genes, or Africans having sickle-cell or Ashkenazaic Jews having Tay-Sachs genes."
Western Africans. Not all Africans, and certainly not all dark-skinned people. Similarly, Ashkenazaic Jews have a high incidence of the Tay Sachs gene, but not other Jewish populations, and there are non-Jewish populations that have it.
I think it's important to recognize that when you say "There are also distinct invisible genetic differences among races..." and then follow it with the rest of what you said, it's clear that you've reduced the word "race" to merely mean "closely related population". And that is certainly not what almost anyone means when they use the word "race". The whole problem is that people use the word "race" as a synonym for "closely related population" and think that this indicates all black-skinned people, all asiatics, all white Europeans, etc. But they're not necessarily "closely related populations". The fundamental idea of the modern conception of "race" is false: there is not a correlation between how people identify two people's "race" and their genetic relatedeness. Yeah, there is in sufficiently restricted populations--that is, where the superficial trait that they use to identify "race" corresponds to a restricted population that shares that trait and happens to be related. Yeah, seeing many blonde persons in Sweden leads one to think that they are closely genetically related--and they are--but it's only an accident that their blondness is also shared. There's lots of blonde people worldwide that are not even remotely close related. And people know this, and that's why they don't call all blonde people a "race". But they call all dark-skinned people a "race".
So I strongly agree and disagree with you, depending upon which statement I'm looking at. Your "...epidemiological basis for classifying humans into genetic groups that correspond to race" and especially "there are also distinct invisible genetic differences among races" are at best misleading (the first) and at worst (the second) completely false. (The second is only true if you use the word "race" completely differently than it is used in ordinary usage.)
I agree with the part that it is absurd to ignore that subpopulations have genetic divergences, and some of them are significant in a variety of ways.
"The thing that worries me most about tagging personality to genes is that it gives some scientific justification for being racially prejudiced."
Only if the idea of "race" has a scientific basis in the first place, which it doesn't.
We already know that there are genetic variations in populations. What we don't know is whether or not any of these genetic differences amount to significant behavioral differences of the sort that a regular person could recognize and understand. Some populations could be smarter, more empathic, stronger, more easily angered, whatever. We don't know, we don't understand our genome and our brains well enough to answer those questions. But there's no reason that we know of currently that says it necessarily isn't so, and there are a variety of things that indicate that it may be.
One thing that we do know is that most human populations are pretty homogenous relative to the populations of many other species. The fact is that there aren't any subpopulations that have really been that isolated from each other, in relative terms, for that long.
But what does this have to do with race?
Nothing, actually, since race is not genetic. It's cultural. There's no genetic basis for the concept of "race". All modern ideas of "race" are built around distinctions on the basis of a few, pretty arbitrary and loosely defined gross morphological traits. And those traits do not reflect genetic similarity. People think that they do, and so they think that continuing evidence for genetic components of behavior and population divergences all validate the idea of race and their (mostly subconscious) bigoted ideas of how they think about people of other races.
So, yeah, as long as people are ignorant of the fact that the modern idea of "race" does not reflect genetic reality, then this sort of work can be used as fodder for racism.
However, correcting that ignorance doesn't solve the related problem implied in my first paragraph. A lot of the modern liberal democratic society is built around egalitarianism. What happens when you've knocked down irrational barriers that unfairly discriminate against many groups as we've done (by proving that that those barriers had been justified on the basis of an ignorant falsehood) only to find that people are different in some important ways--just not in the ways that we supposed? What then? But I think we'll find a solution.
"
Instead, Savage reasoned, the needs and attitudes of the customers should determine what software Microsoft should produce, and the technology should come later."
Wow! This person discovered the most fundamental and obvious prerequisite for being successful in business! Jeepers!
[pause]
Well, I have to admit that this was apparently not very obvious to most of the dot-com crowd.
"
Humans routinely solve problems with computational trees larger than the number of atoms in the universe. It's *easy* for humans. It's impossible for computers."
Why? Maybe computers could manage to do so the same way that humans do. Or are you postulating some metaphysical means by which humans accomplish this feat?
And, anyway, the post you're replying to already pointed out that modern chess algorithms don't rely on exhaustive searches. They apply judgment filters to cull the search tree. Is it cheating that the human programmers are then inserting human knowledge into the algorithm? No, because human chess players also learn from other humans how to recognize worthless lines of inquiry. They also learn on their own, something that chess algorithms are only beginning to do and quite rudimentarily at that--but there's no rigorous argument that this isn't possible for them, as well. Again, the only argument against this is that such learning is somehow magical and essentially metaphysical--and that's a stupid argument (at least from a scientific standpoint).
You seem very caught up in the extremely suspicious notion that humans discarding (or not considering) worthless lines of inquiry, or recognizing (implied in your other example) the truth of the Godel Statement, are examples of some impossible-to-mechanistically-duplicate holistic comprehension. But that's a prejudice with no real evidence to support it.
"
No one who knows what they're talking about has *ever* claimed that a computer being able to solve an algorithm is a sign of intelligence."
"Knows what they're talking about" in your biased opinion, maybe. I think the point that others are trying to make is that your definition of "intelligence" seems to be "sufficiently impressive and mysterious", a definition that many others share and have shared, and a definition that has suspiciously changed over time.
As a practical matter, I'm inclined to agree with you about the current state of AI, computation vis a vis human intelligence. Nothing we've accomplished in AI seems to me to be "sufficiently impressive" to warrant being called "intelligence". Nevertheless, I'm perfectly aware that my (and other people's) intutive sense of what "intelligence" is is incredibly unrigorous and subjective and that, putting all irrational and chauvinistic sentimental essentialist preconceptions aside, qualitatively "intelligence" probably has little or no meaning. In some sense, maybe all computations are "intelligent" and what computers can already do is at least minimally intelligent.
Personally, I think that intelligence is apparently intentional behavior that defies as a practical matter a fully reductionist description (it's an emergent property of a complex system). But "apparently intentional" and "defies as a practical matter" are variables that are currently very anthropocentric. While it is true that I think that practically nothing in the universe is perfectly reductively describable and that human behavior, compared to most physical phenomena is quite complex--I also think that a sufficiently greater alien intelligence would see human behavior as being quite a bit more reductive and deterministic (and simple and explicable) than we ourselves do.
"
As for white wins in chess, if it was known how to force a win for white, nobody would play against computers."
Yes, but there is a qualitative distinction between knowing how to win, and knowing that such a strategy exists. All he ever said was that white to win was proven, not described. I don't understand why people are not grasping the distinction.
At any rate, after a web and USENET search, I'm skeptical that such a thing has actually been rigorously proven. (Again, though, not that I have any problem with the possibility that it could be proven. Seems to me to be possible, even likely.) One interesting discussion about this (and related matters) is found here in rec.games.chess.
"
To the extent that a game follows mathmatical law Godel's Theorem applies and one could construct a game with true, but unprovable, theorms of solution."
No. This is a wildly speculative application of Godel Incompleteness.
Firstly, all Godel Incompleteness asserts is that there is exactly one "true" but unprovable statement--the Godel statement--for any given formal system. That is arguably an extremely limited and relatively trivial case. It asserts something astonishingly mathematically counter-intuitive as does, for example, Cantor's Diagonal Method. What is significant is how it shows our intuitive understanding was incorrect: we thought that for a given formal system, all true statements were deducible--but Godel showed that one is not. One. It's tempting to want to use GI as part of an argument for the general limitations of deductive mathematics, but that's a misuse.
Secondly, for GI to apply to a game, the game has to have sufficient expressive power to construct an equivalent to the Godel Statement--a significant requirement.
As is the case with your post that mentions chaos theory, you're misapplying popular but poorly understood ideas to support your arguments.
I don't know about DJ, but I think that some chess algorithms search the problem space in a random fashion. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I have a strong impression that I read somewhere of an algorithm that culls search trees (and perhaps how deeply it searches the trees) using some random factor as a variable.
I would think that adding some randomness to the algorithm would have two benefits. The first is my intuitive sense that a degree of randomness is more efficient. (Is a random walk more efficient than a deterministic walk in the general case? I apologize for my ignorance of a fundamental question of which I should be well familiar.)
The second is in the context of the game being a contest. Will a human opponent play the same game every time? I suspect not. Not merely because their own decisions are apparently non-deterministic, but because they may intentionally chose to play a game differently to avoid the competitive disadvantage of being totally predictable. It would be in the interests of a chess algorithm to do the same thing.
Chaos theory has absolutely nothing to do with the toss of a coin. I can only try to guess at what you think you are trying to say. You seem to be arguing that a) the universe is not deterministic; b) human comprehension of the universe must be non-deterministic; c) all machine computation is necessarily deterministic; and therefore, d) computers cannot do what humans can do.
All of those except the first are incorrect.
Chaos theory, by the way, is deterministic. It just shows that determinisitc systems can exhibit "chaotic" behavior that is difficult to predict without duplicating the system.
You seem to be synthesizing the bottom-up problem of the anti-determinism of quantum physics with the top-down problem of the apparently anti-reductionism of chaos theory. That is to say, the universe is non-deterministic because of QM, therefore human cognition is in some sense non-deterministic. Then, from the top-down view, human cognition is "impossible" to reduce to a deterministic system since it is obviously chaotic.
That second proposition is a falsehood built on the misunderstanding of the truth of chaos theory. Chaos theory says that is is very difficult or impossible as a practical matter to identify all the properties of the deterministic system that give rise to chaotic behavior. Put another, a chaotic system is difficult to "reverse engineer". But that doesn't mean that it's not deterministic. You can easily produce chaotic output from a computer algorithm. Does that make your computer non-deterministic and human-like? Of course it doesn't.
While the essential non-deterimism of the quantum world is without question, whether this results in an all-pervasive non-determinism in the macro world is an open question. I think most physicists would agree that, for the most part, the macro world behaves deterministically. It certainly seems to. Most of the varieties of applied physics assumes that it does, and they sure do seem to work.:) While people like Penrose and others have tried to link human cognition directly with quantum physics and thus place it in a "special" realm; this is, in my opinion, incredibly premature and irresponsible. And, anyway, such a view doesn't preclude the possibility of a artifical implementation of such a system.
Your conclusion:
"
Your point of view ( and that of many AI researchers) relies on the concept that universe is a predictable machine if one simply knows all the parameters, whereas it is now known that even if all the parameters are known results may be fundamentally unpredictable.
I don't know of any AI researchers that are relying on a deterministic universe in the sense that you imply; and, related to this, your second statement is true but misleading. QM may say that every physical process must not be absolutely predictable, but it also allows (and indeed relies upon) various degrees of unpredictability. The more macrocosmic a process is, the more predictable it is, to the point of being effectively determinstic. There is no currently persuasive reason to believe that human cognition is any less deterministic than any other macrocosmic process. Chaotic, yes; non-deterministic, no. You should be clear on that distinction.
"
However, my point is that people are often too quick to turn to the halting problem as proof that human intelligence is somehow fundamentally superior to algorithmic intelligence, when in fact we don't know for certain that they're not equivalent."
Right. In this example and in the other anti-AI example of Godel Incompleteness, it is simply assumed that a human can do what a computer cannot, and then that assumption is used to demonstrate that a human can do what a computer cannot. Hmm.
People don't think that they're being tautological, which is ironic because (if they are being tautological) their mistake is in misunderstanding what it means to "think" something. A human might do a pretty good job at "solving" as a practical matter specific examples of the halting problem, and clearly we seem to recognize the "truth" of the Godel statement. But in both cases it's important to ask: are we truly doing what it is that we assume we're doing? This is the question that the anti-AI advocates never really ask, they just assume that we are doing what it "feels like" we're doing...an assumption that is quite convenient for their argument.
Searle's Chinese room argument, for example, assumes without explanation that a person who knows Chinese "knows" in some "deep" sense while the Chinese room construction does not. But while his thought experiment seems to be rigorously contructed, it inexplicably is very non-rigorous when it fails to carefully try to pin down what it means to "know Chinese". Instead, he appeals to the reader's intuitive assumptions of what "know" means, and then uses that to prove that a computer can't "know" something in a similar fashion. But the real AI argument is that perhaps we don't "know" things in this almost-mystical (or truly mystical!) sense that Searle (and others) assume. Their arguments all really boil down to variations of "Yes, we do". That's not an argument. It's an appeal to sentiment.
"...could always play at his best like Deep Junior can..."
I'm curious why you assume that Deep Junior always plays "at its best". True, Deep Junior has infinitely fewer ways to be potentially distracted than Kasparov does, since Deep Junior can't be distracted.:) But one can also play poorly because one has missed noticing an important opportunity simply because one didn't notice it--not because one was distracted and would have otherwise noticed it. Just...didn't think of it. Deep Junior can do that, too.
I don't see the conflict between what I wrote and the account in your link. I compressed in my memory and thus my post the two meetings: the first Wigner and Szilard, the second Teller and Szilard; and I emphasized the important detail that Einstein didn't completely write even the first version of the letter that Szilard then translated and edited into two versions: long and short.
If you read the page you linked to carefully, you'll see that this is the sequence:
On July 12, 1939, Szilard and Wigner meet with Einstein in Peconic, Einstein dictates to Wigner (in German) a letter to the Belgian ambassador.
Shortly thereafter, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, an unofficial adviser to the President. He agreed to carry a letter from Einstein to FDR, if Szilard could get one.
Szilard wrote a four-page draft version of this letter, and mailed it to Einstein.
Einstein asked to meet again with Szilard in person to discuss the letter, and so on July 30, 1939--this time with Edward Teller as chauffeur--Szilard travels out to Peconic a second time.
Einstein felt that Szilard's version was too long and technical for the President, and dictated (again, in German) a shorter version to Szilard.
Szilard spent a few days translating Einstein's letter into English, and even produced an even more shortened version. He took both to Einstein; Einstein signed both but preffered the longer of the two.
Szilard gave the longer letter to Sachs to take to FDR.
Sachs was not able to meet with FDR until October 11, 1939.
Here is one
summary account of that meeting (an account which corresponds with my memory of its description in Rhodes's book--probably the source for this one):
"
When Sachs met with the president, he spent the better part of an hour going through the physics involved in splitting the atom, then handed Roosevelt the Einstein letter with a cover note from Szilard. Unfortunately, after an hour Roosevelt was losing interest and questioned whether further costly research was appropriate for government funding. The audience was clearly at an end, but FDR invited Sachs to return the next morning for breakfast.
Imagine the night Sachs spent at the Carlton Hotel on Oct. 11! He had that afternoon failed to engage Roosevelt's interest in a project that he and Szilard and Einstein felt was essential if Hitler was not to win the war and conquer the world. He knew he had one more shot to convince FDR that the government should fund the research, or all of Szilard's work and the effect of the Einstein letter would go down the drain. Hitler would have an atomic bomb, and there would be no one with the wherewithal to contest the Nazis. And now it all came down to his breakfast meeting with Roosevelt.
The next morning, Sachs took a different tack, as Roosevelt asked him, "What bright idea do you have this morning?"
Sachs reminded Roosevelt of Napoleon's foolish refusal to underwrite Robert Fulton's experimental submarine, an invention that might have won the battle of Trafalgar for the French if Napoleon had had more faith in it. He also quoted the scientist Francis Aston's concern that a device powered by subatomic energy might allow one nation's leader to blow up his neighbor. "Alex," Roosevelt responded, "what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."
"Precisely," Sachs responded.
That turned out to be enough. By 1945 the government was to spend $2 billion building the bomb. After 1945 most of the scientists involved (especially Leo Szilard) were to spend the rest of their lives trying to get the genie back into the bottle.
So, none of this was Einstein's initiative. Szilard wrote the first version of the letter that Einstein was to send to FDR. Einstein rewrote it by dictating a new version of Szilard; then Szilard himself translated that into two versions which he took back to Einstein to sign. Sachs met with the President, but didn't present Einstein's letter until the end of the meeting, by then FDR was bored and not paying attention. Sachs met with FDR again the next day, this time convincing FDR to support an atomic program. There's not much evidence that Einstein's letter was particularly influential in this discussion. All evidence indicates that it was Sachs himself was who was persuasive. And, even then, the initial support was still very tepid.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have posted a simple "Why?" in response to the story, since doing so was a little bit coy and sort of an entrapment. But I partly did it because I was trying to be cautious about assuming why people so strongly associate Einstein with the bomb. Some people, for example, argue that he's in some sense the "father" of the bomb because of "e=mc^2".
But I've always thought that his importance to the development of the bomb was greatly overestimated in popular imagination. I imagine that a lot of people, uninformed about physics, just assume that the greatest physicist they're familiar with must be responsible in some way for the bomb. Others that are more knowledgable probably believe that he was intimately familiar with the work on atomic theory and the possibility of the bomb and took it upon himself to write FDR that letter and thus made the whole thing happen with his enormous influence. But that's not the way that it happened.
There are a few people that really were crucial to getting the ball rolling. The first and foremost is Szilard, who, if anyone, is the appropriate person to have his photo associated with this story. The two civilians are probably Vannevar Bush and James Conant (and possibly Sachs for his one crucial meeting with FDR). The former three worked tirelessly for years trying to get the US involved in atomic research, and then were instrumental after it began.
Well, he wrote a short letter that was essentially dictated to him by Szilard and Wigner the day that they visited him and asked him to write one. After being presented with the state of the current research, Einstein was convinced that an atomic weapon was possible and that a German program would be a grave threat. He asked them what they would like his letter to say. Wigner and Szilard took the letter with them, and it eventually found its way to FDR. Even then, FDR only released about $6,000 for initial research.
Prior to this time, Einstein was on record as being very skeptical that any sort of nuclear power or weapon was possible. He did not write this letter on his own initiative, and he did not actually present it to FDR.
When the Manhatten Project got underway, he made it known that he was willing to work on it in some capacity, but he was blackballed by many people in the security establishment because of his outspoken pacifist views. I think, in fact, that FDR didn't trust him completely for this reason.
Einstein's letter was influential, but it was not even close to being as important as popular imagination has it as being. Einstein's work did show the equivalence between matter and energy, but that is the extent of his professional influence on this matter.
The person that is absolutely critical in the history of the nuclear program is Leo Szilard.
The one thing I didn't like about this book and his followup on the fusion bomb, was that he doesn't tell the story completely linearly. He'll jump around in time, as much as a year or two at time. He does this in order to be as coherent as possible with regards to a specific area of narrative focus, and I suspect the book is the better for it. However, there are so many dates included that there was no way that I could actually keep them in my head and so sort them out as I tried to follow the story's progression. What I really wold have liked was a timeline included as an appendix.
"The cheapness of human life in WWII wasn't really related to nuclear weapons. The Allied Air Forces were firebombing "enemy" cities with conventional weapons long before Hiroshima."
Yes, and the reviewer unfortunately didn't make clear that this context is exactly what Rhodes provides in his book.
I think that's a very insightful and balanced summary of the problem.
My own opinion is that Berman's conception of the "Star Trek formula" is what killed it. He was right that the general (non-Trekkie) audience liked his formula. What he didn't understand is that they'd eventually get tired of it.
To me, Berman and crew sucked all the life out of the Star Trek franchise. I've always sort of felt that their successes occured in spite of their efforts, not because of them.
When I realized there was a new ST movie out, my initial reaction was "Cool! I want to see it." But that was immediately followed with, "Eh, except that these TNG movies all are incredibly mediocre and they're getting worse. Well, maybe I'll go see it one of these weekends." And I never got around to seeing it.
"There are ways to get energy directly from fission of U-238, but they require very fast neutrons such as are created in a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction [iadfw.net]."
75% of the yield from the first fusion bomb came from the fissioning of the U-238 tamper.
Although, I haven't yet found any good information on how much Pu is left at Aklo. But it's also the case that there's trace amounts of Pu to be found--some is generated from spontaneous fissioning of U-238 with subsequent reabsorption of a neutron.
...but building a reasonably efficient version for power generation probably is.
At any rate, Fermi's reactor in Chicago (the first) used natural uranium (almost all U-238) as fuel. There wasn't any other choice. Enrichening U-238 to higher quantities of U-235 is a really big deal. Natural uranium contains only about one half of one percent U-235. Fermi's design used highly purified graphite in a honeycomb pattern as the moderator. The Russians, before they got the plans for our reactor, looked at a U-238 design that used heavy water as the moderator (the Germans were going that way, too). Anyway, as this guy has shown, it's all about finding the correct moderator in the right configuration.
Slashdot Mirror
Watch. He will be prosecuted, and any journalists that try to make a fuss about it will be shown the secure facilities and then be reminded that trying to break into a government facility is a bad idea, regardless. The reporter will be shown to be the fool that he is.
Secondly, he completely misrepresents what the Lab facilities are like. LANL is not one big, monolithic facility sitting on a single plot of land. It's got a main area, right in town (the "front gate" he refers to), and then lots of little facilities scattered all over the area. They are individually secured.
Getting in the "front gate" is no big deal because, you know, visitors are allowed in. (Unlike Sandia in Albuquerque, which is much harder to get into. But it's a single contiguous site situated within an Air Force base.)
The one facility that easily the most sensitive is the plutonium refinement facility--yes, LANL still has a reactor and refines and stores some plutonium. That area is surrounded by several staggered perimeter fences, with mines between them, dogs, guards, and "helicopter landing denial cables" strung all over the area, for good measure.
Then, if you've ever been in any of the facilities, you'll find that there are armed guards stationed at entraces to sensitive areas within buildings. When I was in high school, and went on a tour of LANL as part of its "High School Senior Science Day", a friend of mine innocently walked down a corridor to a vending machine and was immediately physically hoisted in the air and carried back to the rest of the group by two armed guards.
Furthermore, constantly patrolling the area of the Lab, including parts of town and neighboring areas that border the labs, are MPs in Jeeps with M-16s prominently displayed.
LANL is a sprawling facility built upon finger-like mesas and in deep canyons spread over a huge area. LANL-owned land is fenced off, but for these remote facilities--like those along NM 4--are individually secured. And not all facilities are equal. Some are not that sensitive. There are a lot of relatively insecure facilities at LANL, because they do a lot more research than just weapons research. I had numerous friends who did coop work there while they were in college, and only one of them actually needed a security clearance to do her work.
LANL is, more than Livermore, and certainly more than Sandia and Oak Ridge, a very "civilian-esque" lab. They do weapons design work there, and those areas, along with the plutonium facility, you can be sure are heavily secured.
Finally, this author was an idiot. He was lucky that he tried to approach a facility that apparently isn't that sensitive. He's lucky he didn't get shot. They will shoot you. And you can bet that there will be criminal charges filed against him for this. Imbecile.
Not that this is very meaningful. But I'm quite happy with Outlook now. As long as I have everything locked down properly and don't have to worry about viruses. Norton's email scanning gives me some more peace of mind about that.
Whether or not there is an "absolute moral code" or not is beside the point. What is not beside the point is whether various relevant moral codes can be evaluated against some meaningful standard (not necessarily an absolute standard, just a standard that the various people involved can agree is "meaningful"). If you believe there's a rational justification to objecting to my "punch you because I feel like it" morality, then you implicitly agree that it's possible that there's a rational justification for the other poster's criticism of your lex talionis morality.
When you write "you spout that off as if there is an absolute moral code than should be followed...", you're being intellectually lazy in two distinct ways. The first is you're inferring the writer is an absolutist and then knocking down that inferred straw man. The second is that you probably don't even realize that you were knocking down a straw man because it appears that you think that advocating a moral position necessarily implies absolutism. It doesn't.
I think it's important to recognize that when you say "There are also distinct invisible genetic differences among races..." and then follow it with the rest of what you said, it's clear that you've reduced the word "race" to merely mean "closely related population". And that is certainly not what almost anyone means when they use the word "race". The whole problem is that people use the word "race" as a synonym for "closely related population" and think that this indicates all black-skinned people, all asiatics, all white Europeans, etc. But they're not necessarily "closely related populations". The fundamental idea of the modern conception of "race" is false: there is not a correlation between how people identify two people's "race" and their genetic relatedeness. Yeah, there is in sufficiently restricted populations--that is, where the superficial trait that they use to identify "race" corresponds to a restricted population that shares that trait and happens to be related. Yeah, seeing many blonde persons in Sweden leads one to think that they are closely genetically related--and they are--but it's only an accident that their blondness is also shared. There's lots of blonde people worldwide that are not even remotely close related. And people know this, and that's why they don't call all blonde people a "race". But they call all dark-skinned people a "race".
So I strongly agree and disagree with you, depending upon which statement I'm looking at. Your "...epidemiological basis for classifying humans into genetic groups that correspond to race" and especially "there are also distinct invisible genetic differences among races" are at best misleading (the first) and at worst (the second) completely false. (The second is only true if you use the word "race" completely differently than it is used in ordinary usage.)
I agree with the part that it is absurd to ignore that subpopulations have genetic divergences, and some of them are significant in a variety of ways.
We already know that there are genetic variations in populations. What we don't know is whether or not any of these genetic differences amount to significant behavioral differences of the sort that a regular person could recognize and understand. Some populations could be smarter, more empathic, stronger, more easily angered, whatever. We don't know, we don't understand our genome and our brains well enough to answer those questions. But there's no reason that we know of currently that says it necessarily isn't so, and there are a variety of things that indicate that it may be.
One thing that we do know is that most human populations are pretty homogenous relative to the populations of many other species. The fact is that there aren't any subpopulations that have really been that isolated from each other, in relative terms, for that long.
But what does this have to do with race?
Nothing, actually, since race is not genetic. It's cultural. There's no genetic basis for the concept of "race". All modern ideas of "race" are built around distinctions on the basis of a few, pretty arbitrary and loosely defined gross morphological traits. And those traits do not reflect genetic similarity. People think that they do, and so they think that continuing evidence for genetic components of behavior and population divergences all validate the idea of race and their (mostly subconscious) bigoted ideas of how they think about people of other races.
So, yeah, as long as people are ignorant of the fact that the modern idea of "race" does not reflect genetic reality, then this sort of work can be used as fodder for racism.
However, correcting that ignorance doesn't solve the related problem implied in my first paragraph. A lot of the modern liberal democratic society is built around egalitarianism. What happens when you've knocked down irrational barriers that unfairly discriminate against many groups as we've done (by proving that that those barriers had been justified on the basis of an ignorant falsehood) only to find that people are different in some important ways--just not in the ways that we supposed? What then? But I think we'll find a solution.
[pause]
Well, I have to admit that this was apparently not very obvious to most of the dot-com crowd.
And, anyway, the post you're replying to already pointed out that modern chess algorithms don't rely on exhaustive searches. They apply judgment filters to cull the search tree. Is it cheating that the human programmers are then inserting human knowledge into the algorithm? No, because human chess players also learn from other humans how to recognize worthless lines of inquiry. They also learn on their own, something that chess algorithms are only beginning to do and quite rudimentarily at that--but there's no rigorous argument that this isn't possible for them, as well. Again, the only argument against this is that such learning is somehow magical and essentially metaphysical--and that's a stupid argument (at least from a scientific standpoint).
You seem very caught up in the extremely suspicious notion that humans discarding (or not considering) worthless lines of inquiry, or recognizing (implied in your other example) the truth of the Godel Statement, are examples of some impossible-to-mechanistically-duplicate holistic comprehension. But that's a prejudice with no real evidence to support it.
As a practical matter, I'm inclined to agree with you about the current state of AI, computation vis a vis human intelligence. Nothing we've accomplished in AI seems to me to be "sufficiently impressive" to warrant being called "intelligence". Nevertheless, I'm perfectly aware that my (and other people's) intutive sense of what "intelligence" is is incredibly unrigorous and subjective and that, putting all irrational and chauvinistic sentimental essentialist preconceptions aside, qualitatively "intelligence" probably has little or no meaning. In some sense, maybe all computations are "intelligent" and what computers can already do is at least minimally intelligent.
Personally, I think that intelligence is apparently intentional behavior that defies as a practical matter a fully reductionist description (it's an emergent property of a complex system). But "apparently intentional" and "defies as a practical matter" are variables that are currently very anthropocentric. While it is true that I think that practically nothing in the universe is perfectly reductively describable and that human behavior, compared to most physical phenomena is quite complex--I also think that a sufficiently greater alien intelligence would see human behavior as being quite a bit more reductive and deterministic (and simple and explicable) than we ourselves do.
At any rate, after a web and USENET search, I'm skeptical that such a thing has actually been rigorously proven. (Again, though, not that I have any problem with the possibility that it could be proven. Seems to me to be possible, even likely.) One interesting discussion about this (and related matters) is found here in rec.games.chess.
Firstly, all Godel Incompleteness asserts is that there is exactly one "true" but unprovable statement--the Godel statement--for any given formal system. That is arguably an extremely limited and relatively trivial case. It asserts something astonishingly mathematically counter-intuitive as does, for example, Cantor's Diagonal Method. What is significant is how it shows our intuitive understanding was incorrect: we thought that for a given formal system, all true statements were deducible--but Godel showed that one is not. One. It's tempting to want to use GI as part of an argument for the general limitations of deductive mathematics, but that's a misuse.
Secondly, for GI to apply to a game, the game has to have sufficient expressive power to construct an equivalent to the Godel Statement--a significant requirement.
As is the case with your post that mentions chaos theory, you're misapplying popular but poorly understood ideas to support your arguments.
I would think that adding some randomness to the algorithm would have two benefits. The first is my intuitive sense that a degree of randomness is more efficient. (Is a random walk more efficient than a deterministic walk in the general case? I apologize for my ignorance of a fundamental question of which I should be well familiar.)
The second is in the context of the game being a contest. Will a human opponent play the same game every time? I suspect not. Not merely because their own decisions are apparently non-deterministic, but because they may intentionally chose to play a game differently to avoid the competitive disadvantage of being totally predictable. It would be in the interests of a chess algorithm to do the same thing.
All of those except the first are incorrect.
Chaos theory, by the way, is deterministic. It just shows that determinisitc systems can exhibit "chaotic" behavior that is difficult to predict without duplicating the system.
You seem to be synthesizing the bottom-up problem of the anti-determinism of quantum physics with the top-down problem of the apparently anti-reductionism of chaos theory. That is to say, the universe is non-deterministic because of QM, therefore human cognition is in some sense non-deterministic. Then, from the top-down view, human cognition is "impossible" to reduce to a deterministic system since it is obviously chaotic.
That second proposition is a falsehood built on the misunderstanding of the truth of chaos theory. Chaos theory says that is is very difficult or impossible as a practical matter to identify all the properties of the deterministic system that give rise to chaotic behavior. Put another, a chaotic system is difficult to "reverse engineer". But that doesn't mean that it's not deterministic. You can easily produce chaotic output from a computer algorithm. Does that make your computer non-deterministic and human-like? Of course it doesn't.
While the essential non-deterimism of the quantum world is without question, whether this results in an all-pervasive non-determinism in the macro world is an open question. I think most physicists would agree that, for the most part, the macro world behaves deterministically. It certainly seems to. Most of the varieties of applied physics assumes that it does, and they sure do seem to work. :) While people like Penrose and others have tried to link human cognition directly with quantum physics and thus place it in a "special" realm; this is, in my opinion, incredibly premature and irresponsible. And, anyway, such a view doesn't preclude the possibility of a artifical implementation of such a system.
Your conclusion:
I don't know of any AI researchers that are relying on a deterministic universe in the sense that you imply; and, related to this, your second statement is true but misleading. QM may say that every physical process must not be absolutely predictable, but it also allows (and indeed relies upon) various degrees of unpredictability. The more macrocosmic a process is, the more predictable it is, to the point of being effectively determinstic. There is no currently persuasive reason to believe that human cognition is any less deterministic than any other macrocosmic process. Chaotic, yes; non-deterministic, no. You should be clear on that distinction.People don't think that they're being tautological, which is ironic because (if they are being tautological) their mistake is in misunderstanding what it means to "think" something. A human might do a pretty good job at "solving" as a practical matter specific examples of the halting problem, and clearly we seem to recognize the "truth" of the Godel statement. But in both cases it's important to ask: are we truly doing what it is that we assume we're doing? This is the question that the anti-AI advocates never really ask, they just assume that we are doing what it "feels like" we're doing...an assumption that is quite convenient for their argument.
Searle's Chinese room argument, for example, assumes without explanation that a person who knows Chinese "knows" in some "deep" sense while the Chinese room construction does not. But while his thought experiment seems to be rigorously contructed, it inexplicably is very non-rigorous when it fails to carefully try to pin down what it means to "know Chinese". Instead, he appeals to the reader's intuitive assumptions of what "know" means, and then uses that to prove that a computer can't "know" something in a similar fashion. But the real AI argument is that perhaps we don't "know" things in this almost-mystical (or truly mystical!) sense that Searle (and others) assume. Their arguments all really boil down to variations of "Yes, we do". That's not an argument. It's an appeal to sentiment.
If you read the page you linked to carefully, you'll see that this is the sequence:
On July 12, 1939, Szilard and Wigner meet with Einstein in Peconic, Einstein dictates to Wigner (in German) a letter to the Belgian ambassador.
Shortly thereafter, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, an unofficial adviser to the President. He agreed to carry a letter from Einstein to FDR, if Szilard could get one.
Szilard wrote a four-page draft version of this letter, and mailed it to Einstein.
Einstein asked to meet again with Szilard in person to discuss the letter, and so on July 30, 1939--this time with Edward Teller as chauffeur--Szilard travels out to Peconic a second time.
Einstein felt that Szilard's version was too long and technical for the President, and dictated (again, in German) a shorter version to Szilard.
Szilard spent a few days translating Einstein's letter into English, and even produced an even more shortened version. He took both to Einstein; Einstein signed both but preffered the longer of the two.
Szilard gave the longer letter to Sachs to take to FDR.
Sachs was not able to meet with FDR until October 11, 1939.
Here is one summary account of that meeting (an account which corresponds with my memory of its description in Rhodes's book--probably the source for this one):
So, none of this was Einstein's initiative. Szilard wrote the first version of the letter that Einstein was to send to FDR. Einstein rewrote it by dictating a new version of Szilard; then Szilard himself translated that into two versions which he took back to Einstein to sign. Sachs met with the President, but didn't present Einstein's letter until the end of the meeting, by then FDR was bored and not paying attention. Sachs met with FDR again the next day, this time convincing FDR to support an atomic program. There's not much evidence that Einstein's letter was particularly influential in this discussion. All evidence indicates that it was Sachs himself was who was persuasive. And, even then, the initial support was still very tepid.
In retrospect, I shouldn't have posted a simple "Why?" in response to the story, since doing so was a little bit coy and sort of an entrapment. But I partly did it because I was trying to be cautious about assuming why people so strongly associate Einstein with the bomb. Some people, for example, argue that he's in some sense the "father" of the bomb because of "e=mc^2".
But I've always thought that his importance to the development of the bomb was greatly overestimated in popular imagination. I imagine that a lot of people, uninformed about physics, just assume that the greatest physicist they're familiar with must be responsible in some way for the bomb. Others that are more knowledgable probably believe that he was intimately familiar with the work on atomic theory and the possibility of the bomb and took it upon himself to write FDR that letter and thus made the whole thing happen with his enormous influence. But that's not the way that it happened.
There are a few people that really were crucial to getting the ball rolling. The first and foremost is Szilard, who, if anyone, is the appropriate person to have his photo associated with this story. The two civilians are probably Vannevar Bush and James Conant (and possibly Sachs for his one crucial meeting with FDR). The former three worked tirelessly for years trying to get the US involved in atomic research, and then were instrumental after it began.
Prior to this time, Einstein was on record as being very skeptical that any sort of nuclear power or weapon was possible. He did not write this letter on his own initiative, and he did not actually present it to FDR.
When the Manhatten Project got underway, he made it known that he was willing to work on it in some capacity, but he was blackballed by many people in the security establishment because of his outspoken pacifist views. I think, in fact, that FDR didn't trust him completely for this reason.
Einstein's letter was influential, but it was not even close to being as important as popular imagination has it as being. Einstein's work did show the equivalence between matter and energy, but that is the extent of his professional influence on this matter.
The person that is absolutely critical in the history of the nuclear program is Leo Szilard.
The one thing I didn't like about this book and his followup on the fusion bomb, was that he doesn't tell the story completely linearly. He'll jump around in time, as much as a year or two at time. He does this in order to be as coherent as possible with regards to a specific area of narrative focus, and I suspect the book is the better for it. However, there are so many dates included that there was no way that I could actually keep them in my head and so sort them out as I tried to follow the story's progression. What I really wold have liked was a timeline included as an appendix.
My own opinion is that Berman's conception of the "Star Trek formula" is what killed it. He was right that the general (non-Trekkie) audience liked his formula. What he didn't understand is that they'd eventually get tired of it.
To me, Berman and crew sucked all the life out of the Star Trek franchise. I've always sort of felt that their successes occured in spite of their efforts, not because of them.
When I realized there was a new ST movie out, my initial reaction was "Cool! I want to see it." But that was immediately followed with, "Eh, except that these TNG movies all are incredibly mediocre and they're getting worse. Well, maybe I'll go see it one of these weekends." And I never got around to seeing it.
Although, I haven't yet found any good information on how much Pu is left at Aklo. But it's also the case that there's trace amounts of Pu to be found--some is generated from spontaneous fissioning of U-238 with subsequent reabsorption of a neutron.
At any rate, Fermi's reactor in Chicago (the first) used natural uranium (almost all U-238) as fuel. There wasn't any other choice. Enrichening U-238 to higher quantities of U-235 is a really big deal. Natural uranium contains only about one half of one percent U-235. Fermi's design used highly purified graphite in a honeycomb pattern as the moderator. The Russians, before they got the plans for our reactor, looked at a U-238 design that used heavy water as the moderator (the Germans were going that way, too). Anyway, as this guy has shown, it's all about finding the correct moderator in the right configuration.