Since there isn't a mathematical definition of random generation, I would assume at this point it would be more reasonable to ask for proof that randomness is even a property of the universe at all. You can find mathematical theories that rely on randomness or random distributions. What you will never find is a real-world physical explanation for randomness because physics keeps saying it doesn't exist. What physics maintains is that there is a set of information in the universe, only part of which we understand. The rest is called entropy and when we bump into it, it looks random but it was really just stuff we didn't know that was already there doing deterministic stuff.
The air in the room you are breathing is a great example. It's "random" except that we can explain every molecule over air using the standard model of physics. So it's really not random. It's just very damned complicated.
Physics claims that the laws of the universe are either fixed or can only change in a fixed way. That is determinism. It doesn't mean that the entire future is already completely predictable. It means that the phenomena that we observe can only be explained by principles which assume a very specific level of consistency. A mathematical type of consistency that implies a type of structure that you cannot escape. Things which look random to us are simply large-scale phenomena that are beyond our ability to completely systematically understand in a single unit of time or space. These are complex systems with dynamic outcomes. However, they are all driven by ruthless, deterministic, mathematical calculations.
Which "quantum theory"? Quantum mechanics which uses statistical analysis? Quantum Field Theory which uses renormalization and statistical analysis? String theory which uses multi-dimensional tensor analysis? All of these are converging on higher dimensional linear algebra and are using techniques and strategies from computer science, complexity theory, information theory, and other deterministic disciplines.
In a system where you have individual components that contribute to an overall distribution, the way you analyze it is through statistics. The reason why NIST rejects long strings of 0's and 1's is because in any system where these two values actually do flip on a regular basis, the statistics of getting long strands of a single digit rapidly drop to 0%. A "real" random number generator has to have cycles in it even if you can't predict them because the way in which we analyze and use them presume the cycles are there (Fourier analysis). Even if the cycle isn't there, we make on up and test against it.
Random just means that you have inputs for which you can't measure their history. If we truly believe in a deterministic universe (as physics does), then there is no random. There is only entropy and your local evaluation of it.
The reason why "pensions" don't exist anymore is for exactly the reason you mentioned. Why do you deserve a lifetime of payments that you didn't really earn? I mean it's kinda sort based on your earnings, but the overall amount is disconnected from your own contributions. Pension plans died because financial planning is actually a thing.
Social security was gutted since inception. If anything the 401k was a response to the failure of government to provide any sort of incentive for people to actually save money.
It's not meant to bolster Social Security. It's meant as a full retirement package in place of or next to social security. I'm currently living on my 401k so I'm pretty sure I know a little about this.
The biggest difference between a 401k and SS is this: a 401k is YOUR money. You might not be able to legally access without penalty before retirement age, but at no time is the government ever allowed to take it from you or spend it or use it any way unless you are already under prosecution for tax crimes.
With social security, none of it is ever your money. The money you pay to social security is either immediately paid to beneficiaries each month, or is converted to special T-bonds that were designed specifically for social security. The money you say was stolen from social security was never there. Every cent went into the general fund and now what we pay is interest on the T-bonds that are stored in the social security IOU coffers. This will have to be paid back by the taxes of future younger people. When you look at the national debt, about half of it is these unfunded future obligations.
I hope you like to work because I didn't pay taxes for the past two years. I've been partially retired on my 401k at 41.
Huh? Tons of companies give pensions. They are called 401ks usually but any sort of tax-deferred annuity account handled by your employer is a "pension". Maybe you are talking about part-time personnel that may not qualify for retirement benefits, but most professional jobs I've seen offer a 401k or suitable alternative.
This is how I think of things. Basically just regions where energy is denser and lighter and flows in between them. The EM and Weak fields are just particular configurations or patterns of this and the entire thing is perfectly deterministic. We are living in a wrinkled energy background that constantly vibrates.
When do the other movie studios pull their licensing and NetFlix only has original content? And is the Disney service going to be as good or better than the NetFlix experience?
I don't see enough EVs on the market or on the roads to push a convincing argument that they are going to dominate any time soon. That being said what is on the radar of every IC-based manufacturer are the ever-increasing environmental standards that they must comply to. This might go a long way in being able to meet those goals along with maybe increasing safety or adding features that are stripped in preference to emissions controls.
Hydrogen is far less volatile than gasoline. People have a fear of Hydrogen but it has a low energy density and dissipates very rapidly by floating away. Gasoline vapor is explosive with a very high energy content and the liquid itself adheres to surfaces easily and will burn on the surface of water. The biggest issue with using hydrogen as a fuel is simply that it takes too much energy to make a decent quantity of it. It sticks to everything and you have to input energy to unstick it.
They completely blew the PC empire. They completely blew the O/S empire. At least twice. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are currently actually doing what IBM dreamed about doing (a-la-carte pay-per-cycle compute) and are winning. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all way ahead of IBM in AI, machine learning, neural nets, natural speech recognition, vision learning, and are currently already in medical as well as chemical and biological spaces. IBM just exposed all of Sweden's data by failing to encrypt internet-accessible private information on their competitor's cloud storage service.
I hate to be too negative but that's one hell of a history. I hear they make good backup tapes, though. I'm sure Amazon buys a lot of them (for now).
You mean every z-series mainframe produced? All of them ship fully loaded with every CPU and RAM bay filled but you have to pay IBM to turn them on. Per year.
The data workloads start at multiple TBs and sometimes can't even be hosted on a single machine. This is about distributing workloads to multiple machines that may then have dedicated hardware accelerators attached.
Anything labeled "tensor" just means that it does matrix multiplications according to the principles of linear algebra. The reason why 3D game GPUs are popular for this is because gaming has used this technique since at least the Quake engine was invented. Basically everything that happens in a game rendering engine is just setting up a matrix and then multiplying a bunch of them together in a particular order.
What you see with things like the TPU is more dedicated hardware that is optimized for matrix and linear operations. These would be more optimized for AI workloads and have busses and memory pipelines designed for these problem sets rather than things like textures or shaders in a GPU. Mathematically speaking they are all doing the same thing, though.
So, essentially any piece of software that relies on these techniques can benefit from dedicated hardware acceleration and many products offer several backends that will support various hardware accelerator platforms. The recent article on a USB-based one comes to mind. Google's TensorFlow can run on a native CPU, a GPU, or dedicated CUDA-based hardware cards, also. Part of the advantage of using TensorFlow is having an abstraction over this hardware, actually. IBM's effort here mirrors other's in an attempt to distribute huge data workloads across many machines efficiently. There is a big problem in AI right now with idle cores waiting for data to load and sync.
Because of optimization. You don't render all points in a space. You only render points in a viewport. That means part of the job of the game loop is constantly keeping track of which points in space you need to worry about for rendering purposes versus physics purposes. There are tons of algorithms to do this and it is one of the areas that people optimize pretty aggressively.
Once you have a point list, you can build a scene and render it based on a ton of other factors (z-order, shaders, shadows, light blending, etc.). All of this is completely dynamic and can't be pre-computed. The assets that are pre-computed are basically just hints that tell you how to do all of these real-time calculations faster. Also, a lot of optimization goes into the 3D models themselves to eliminate unnecessary triangles. The more triangles in a viewport, the more calculations you have to do, and the slower the engine will be.
Again, a lot of this can't be done in parallel because it doesn't depend on the number of players. It is a problem with the fact that you are multiplexing an entire universe into a single viewport and trying to optimize it so that it actually runs. Some things can (and are) run in threads. Like I said, they've been working on this for a long while now.
I know a lot of you don't think small power consumption issues are a big deal but I thought I'd highlight a few points:
x) We now operate in a space where the physics of chips well into the future is already known, planned, and targetted for production. 7nm and below is atoms-wide production that we have been theorizing about for over a decade and what you are seeing is the culmination of a lot of that work today. This requires high skill and high tech to just be able to prototype, let alone mass produce. There are only a few companies in the world left that have the money to do this and Intel, AMD, and ARM are all on the short list.
x) As we get smaller, heat exponentially gets to be a larger problem. Making things faster in smaller spaces trades off heat as a waste by-product and this has been ramping up significantly since the Pentium chips. I remember reading about the first ones being water and/or ice cooled (right here on/., iirc).
x) The current drive for chip production is probably going to data centers (think AWS). Data centers do not care what chip in the box. They need chips that run cool and use the least electricity possible because they have a lot of them working a lot of the time. I have seen several analysts say that Intel is so far ahead here you will never see AMD in data centers at this point. It is simply not affordable based on today's market rates for computation.
I hope AMD stays around for a long while. I have an FX-8350 right next to me. That being said, the chip industry is run completely on physics at this point and things are going to start getting weird.
For rendering it comes down to how the scene is set up which is based on the viewport of the player as well as the action in the game. There is no way to predict how many points or triangles there will be on-screen at any given time and you can't run these calculations in parallel because there is only one player. It's not an architecture problem. It's a nature-of-the-problem problem that has been well known in gaming since at least Quake 3.
This is after another press release a few days ago where they stated that Tesla lost 60k pre-orders. That stock could be a hyperloop if manufacturing slips at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Since there isn't a mathematical definition of random generation, I would assume at this point it would be more reasonable to ask for proof that randomness is even a property of the universe at all. You can find mathematical theories that rely on randomness or random distributions. What you will never find is a real-world physical explanation for randomness because physics keeps saying it doesn't exist. What physics maintains is that there is a set of information in the universe, only part of which we understand. The rest is called entropy and when we bump into it, it looks random but it was really just stuff we didn't know that was already there doing deterministic stuff.
The air in the room you are breathing is a great example. It's "random" except that we can explain every molecule over air using the standard model of physics. So it's really not random. It's just very damned complicated.
Physics claims that the laws of the universe are either fixed or can only change in a fixed way. That is determinism. It doesn't mean that the entire future is already completely predictable. It means that the phenomena that we observe can only be explained by principles which assume a very specific level of consistency. A mathematical type of consistency that implies a type of structure that you cannot escape. Things which look random to us are simply large-scale phenomena that are beyond our ability to completely systematically understand in a single unit of time or space. These are complex systems with dynamic outcomes. However, they are all driven by ruthless, deterministic, mathematical calculations.
Which "quantum theory"? Quantum mechanics which uses statistical analysis? Quantum Field Theory which uses renormalization and statistical analysis? String theory which uses multi-dimensional tensor analysis? All of these are converging on higher dimensional linear algebra and are using techniques and strategies from computer science, complexity theory, information theory, and other deterministic disciplines.
What reading have you done?
In a system where you have individual components that contribute to an overall distribution, the way you analyze it is through statistics. The reason why NIST rejects long strings of 0's and 1's is because in any system where these two values actually do flip on a regular basis, the statistics of getting long strands of a single digit rapidly drop to 0%. A "real" random number generator has to have cycles in it even if you can't predict them because the way in which we analyze and use them presume the cycles are there (Fourier analysis). Even if the cycle isn't there, we make on up and test against it.
Some of us are trying to smarten /. up but you aren't listening. There is no random. There is only entropy.
Random just means that you have inputs for which you can't measure their history. If we truly believe in a deterministic universe (as physics does), then there is no random. There is only entropy and your local evaluation of it.
The reason why "pensions" don't exist anymore is for exactly the reason you mentioned. Why do you deserve a lifetime of payments that you didn't really earn? I mean it's kinda sort based on your earnings, but the overall amount is disconnected from your own contributions. Pension plans died because financial planning is actually a thing.
Social security was gutted since inception. If anything the 401k was a response to the failure of government to provide any sort of incentive for people to actually save money.
It's not meant to bolster Social Security. It's meant as a full retirement package in place of or next to social security. I'm currently living on my 401k so I'm pretty sure I know a little about this.
The biggest difference between a 401k and SS is this: a 401k is YOUR money. You might not be able to legally access without penalty before retirement age, but at no time is the government ever allowed to take it from you or spend it or use it any way unless you are already under prosecution for tax crimes.
With social security, none of it is ever your money. The money you pay to social security is either immediately paid to beneficiaries each month, or is converted to special T-bonds that were designed specifically for social security. The money you say was stolen from social security was never there. Every cent went into the general fund and now what we pay is interest on the T-bonds that are stored in the social security IOU coffers. This will have to be paid back by the taxes of future younger people. When you look at the national debt, about half of it is these unfunded future obligations.
I hope you like to work because I didn't pay taxes for the past two years. I've been partially retired on my 401k at 41.
Huh? Tons of companies give pensions. They are called 401ks usually but any sort of tax-deferred annuity account handled by your employer is a "pension". Maybe you are talking about part-time personnel that may not qualify for retirement benefits, but most professional jobs I've seen offer a 401k or suitable alternative.
"... we might as well just give up as a species and elect a reality TV host as president."
"We" elected a cartoon from the 80s. And in the 80s we had a movie actor from the 30's. My kingdom for a fiddle...
This is how I think of things. Basically just regions where energy is denser and lighter and flows in between them. The EM and Weak fields are just particular configurations or patterns of this and the entire thing is perfectly deterministic. We are living in a wrinkled energy background that constantly vibrates.
When do the other movie studios pull their licensing and NetFlix only has original content? And is the Disney service going to be as good or better than the NetFlix experience?
Full Disclaimer: I'm glad Bambi's mom died.
I don't see enough EVs on the market or on the roads to push a convincing argument that they are going to dominate any time soon. That being said what is on the radar of every IC-based manufacturer are the ever-increasing environmental standards that they must comply to. This might go a long way in being able to meet those goals along with maybe increasing safety or adding features that are stripped in preference to emissions controls.
Hydrogen is far less volatile than gasoline. People have a fear of Hydrogen but it has a low energy density and dissipates very rapidly by floating away. Gasoline vapor is explosive with a very high energy content and the liquid itself adheres to surfaces easily and will burn on the surface of water. The biggest issue with using hydrogen as a fuel is simply that it takes too much energy to make a decent quantity of it. It sticks to everything and you have to input energy to unstick it.
They completely blew the PC empire. They completely blew the O/S empire. At least twice. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are currently actually doing what IBM dreamed about doing (a-la-carte pay-per-cycle compute) and are winning. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all way ahead of IBM in AI, machine learning, neural nets, natural speech recognition, vision learning, and are currently already in medical as well as chemical and biological spaces. IBM just exposed all of Sweden's data by failing to encrypt internet-accessible private information on their competitor's cloud storage service.
I hate to be too negative but that's one hell of a history. I hear they make good backup tapes, though. I'm sure Amazon buys a lot of them (for now).
You mean every z-series mainframe produced? All of them ship fully loaded with every CPU and RAM bay filled but you have to pay IBM to turn them on. Per year.
The data workloads start at multiple TBs and sometimes can't even be hosted on a single machine. This is about distributing workloads to multiple machines that may then have dedicated hardware accelerators attached.
Anything labeled "tensor" just means that it does matrix multiplications according to the principles of linear algebra. The reason why 3D game GPUs are popular for this is because gaming has used this technique since at least the Quake engine was invented. Basically everything that happens in a game rendering engine is just setting up a matrix and then multiplying a bunch of them together in a particular order.
What you see with things like the TPU is more dedicated hardware that is optimized for matrix and linear operations. These would be more optimized for AI workloads and have busses and memory pipelines designed for these problem sets rather than things like textures or shaders in a GPU. Mathematically speaking they are all doing the same thing, though.
So, essentially any piece of software that relies on these techniques can benefit from dedicated hardware acceleration and many products offer several backends that will support various hardware accelerator platforms. The recent article on a USB-based one comes to mind. Google's TensorFlow can run on a native CPU, a GPU, or dedicated CUDA-based hardware cards, also. Part of the advantage of using TensorFlow is having an abstraction over this hardware, actually. IBM's effort here mirrors other's in an attempt to distribute huge data workloads across many machines efficiently. There is a big problem in AI right now with idle cores waiting for data to load and sync.
Because of optimization. You don't render all points in a space. You only render points in a viewport. That means part of the job of the game loop is constantly keeping track of which points in space you need to worry about for rendering purposes versus physics purposes. There are tons of algorithms to do this and it is one of the areas that people optimize pretty aggressively.
Once you have a point list, you can build a scene and render it based on a ton of other factors (z-order, shaders, shadows, light blending, etc.). All of this is completely dynamic and can't be pre-computed. The assets that are pre-computed are basically just hints that tell you how to do all of these real-time calculations faster. Also, a lot of optimization goes into the 3D models themselves to eliminate unnecessary triangles. The more triangles in a viewport, the more calculations you have to do, and the slower the engine will be.
Again, a lot of this can't be done in parallel because it doesn't depend on the number of players. It is a problem with the fact that you are multiplexing an entire universe into a single viewport and trying to optimize it so that it actually runs. Some things can (and are) run in threads. Like I said, they've been working on this for a long while now.
I know a lot of you don't think small power consumption issues are a big deal but I thought I'd highlight a few points:
x) We now operate in a space where the physics of chips well into the future is already known, planned, and targetted for production. 7nm and below is atoms-wide production that we have been theorizing about for over a decade and what you are seeing is the culmination of a lot of that work today. This requires high skill and high tech to just be able to prototype, let alone mass produce. There are only a few companies in the world left that have the money to do this and Intel, AMD, and ARM are all on the short list.
x) As we get smaller, heat exponentially gets to be a larger problem. Making things faster in smaller spaces trades off heat as a waste by-product and this has been ramping up significantly since the Pentium chips. I remember reading about the first ones being water and/or ice cooled (right here on /., iirc).
x) The current drive for chip production is probably going to data centers (think AWS). Data centers do not care what chip in the box. They need chips that run cool and use the least electricity possible because they have a lot of them working a lot of the time. I have seen several analysts say that Intel is so far ahead here you will never see AMD in data centers at this point. It is simply not affordable based on today's market rates for computation.
I hope AMD stays around for a long while. I have an FX-8350 right next to me. That being said, the chip industry is run completely on physics at this point and things are going to start getting weird.
For rendering it comes down to how the scene is set up which is based on the viewport of the player as well as the action in the game. There is no way to predict how many points or triangles there will be on-screen at any given time and you can't run these calculations in parallel because there is only one player. It's not an architecture problem. It's a nature-of-the-problem problem that has been well known in gaming since at least Quake 3.
This is after another press release a few days ago where they stated that Tesla lost 60k pre-orders. That stock could be a hyperloop if manufacturing slips at all.
But if people drive more EVs, the air will be cleaner for the homeless to sleep in. Think of that positive note.
You do pay less because most road taxes are excise taxes on fuel. It's the damn bicyclists that are tearing up our roads for free.