No, that's not quite right either. A 5 minute mile is no easy feat.
For comparison, the fastest 100m dash was 10.2 meters per second, or almost 23 mph. A segway goes 12.5 mph, which is about 5.6 m/s -- faster than a swarm of killer bees or an australian crocodile, but not quite as fast as a steep lava flow (9.1 m/s) or a Tyrannosaurus Rex (estimated at 11.1 m/s).
The segway is nearly as fast as a roadrunner (6.7 m/s)... just wait 'til Wiley E. Coyote gets his hands on one. In the meantime, imagine getting nailed by a 250 pound metal cyborg roadrunner as you walk to work.
I think you need to take into account that any intelligent machine would make use of learning algorithms. So if man can teach a computer how to LEARN, and its got the time and resources to learn more than a human (say hundreds of processor years and a connection to the all the world's media), then the end result could be something "more intelligent" than the programmer.
Or how about the example of the AI chess players, who can play vastly better than the people who programmed them?
I remember that -- i was a student at CMU at the time. Someone posted to a widely read messageboard (misc.market) about the poll, and it was off to the races after that. Pretty funny.
A related story was the time I saw on Boston.com that one of their editors was getting a haircut and they had posted an online poll for users to choose a style. Remembering CMU's adventures in slashdot polling, I posted to that same messageboard a plea for students to help the poor guy out.
4000 robo-votes later, he had a mohawk. Then they showed pictures of him going home for mother's day, and his dad's embarassed look. The best part was the quote from the editor at the end of the story -- "I had fun with this and I hope all those hackers out there did too."
Or alternatively, are they perhaps working on, say, a audio version? Wonder how would that work.
Or alternatively, RTFA.
"Another Captcha, called Sounds, consists of a distorted, computer-generated sound clip containing a word or sequence of numbers. To solve the puzzle, a user must listen to the clip and type the word or numbers into the box provided."
hey, that's a truly well thought out and insightful post. EXCEPT for that the article is about how to prevent computers from automatically signing up for yahoo accounts (or pretending to be human online). frankly, i don't think yahoo is interested in the "lack of hormonal responses coming from every part of the body" -- unless they can find a hormone-testing software package they can use as part of the registration process.
N is a normalizing factor, 1.65x10^7
bv is b-v color
bv0 is b-v color of the bluest star in the catalog (-0.41)
bv_sun is the b-v color of the sun (+0.65)
par is the parallax in milliarcseconds
How exactly do you test the validity of a formula like this?
Will this be an election issue? Would this help or hinder the incumbent in the next election? Is it possible that the DA is doing this out of principle, at least to some extent?
Well first its the Attorney General, not the DA. And its not really an election issue -- he was just up for re-election in November and ran unopposed. In fact in Massachusetts, you pretty much automatically win if you've got (D) next to your name, governor's seat excluded.
I'm not sure what it'll cost but I know Microsoft is paying $25m to the states for reimbursements, presumably that will help to cover it.
How is a computer program ever going to adopt abstract thinking and creativity?
How do people do it? Until we can answer that question, you certainly can't rule out that computers can achieve the same.
Is a computer program ever going to invent mathematics without previous knowledge of it just because it finds it to be a useful utility for solving problems?
Yes. Herb Simon (a nobel prize/turing award winning professor) always gave the example of BACON, a program that discovered Kepler's 3rd Law of Planetary Motion. Not bad. He always believed computers can and will think, and I agree with him.
one limitation that jumps immediately to mind is that the 3d effect is limited to a single viewer
That's only the NYU system and the article says later that they're working on that. The MIT true-holograph system can produce the 3D images for multiple viewers, but is limited by the massive quantities of processing power needed. Meanwhile the NYU system runs on a pc but only gives the effect to one person, though:
"The group is also working on a system that would simultaneously provide 3-D views to multiple observers, such as a team of surgeons debating the best approach to a difficult procedure or a group of video game players competing on a shared monitor"
That's possible. I was under the impression that Apple had changed their strategy from recruting newbies to soaking their existing customers for whatever they could get (Like when they announced they were charging $129 for the OS X 10.1 update).
Maybe they gave up on that and are going back to recruiting. I guess that's the whole gist of the Switch campaign in the first place. But they shouldn't ignore their customer base (ie, not show up at MacWorld). Apple obviously has some of the most loyal support there is, but I still think its a mistake to fight too hard against that support just because they don't like where the supporters are gathering.
Apple never mentioned anything about this until after the deal was made. They knew all along it was happening, and the rumors were flying around weeks ago.
"Apple remains an important partner for Macworld and IDG World Expo has been in discussions with Apple officials for some time about the move back to Boston," the representative said. "Since we just heard of Apple's position, we can only speculate about their reasons, which may be driven by their financial situation."
It's not like Apple is doing so well that they can afford to play the role of protester. Don't they think that if they stay away from the east coast trade show because "IGN is no longer investing in New York", there might be a significant number of people on the east coast who decide not to invest in Apple?
Especially after Boston lobbied hard to bring the trade show back, this is definitely a slap in the face. Apple deciding to take their ball and go home just doesn't make any sense.
I discovered this over the weekend playing Chronotrigger on the Snex9x emulator. There's a feature called "Search for new cheat codes" that lets you view the game memory at different addresses. Some of the things I tried would be to search for a chunk of memory with a value set to X, where X was the number of gold pieces I had. Then update it to 1000000, and bingo, my character was rich. Pretty neat stuff, although not quite as fun as just playing the game.
Re:Visions of the Future
on
Inventions of 2001
·
· Score: 2, Informative
In that case, you'll want to check out Yesterday's Tomorrows, a traveling museum exhibit of flying cars and the like. I agree, the world should be like this. Maybe in the future....
People tried to invent lots of this stuff, but it just never really took off (pardon the pun). Which is funny considering they all seem so much more exciting than slug eating robots.
one thing that was mentioned in the article briefly was "star tree" from Inxight. I saw a presentation on this recently and it seemed pretty slick. it wouldn't destroy the (very useful) hierarchical structure of the current desktop, but it is a much improved method of navigating the hierarchy, in a 2d and intuitive way, but much faster. try it out here. i've wanted to use this in a file system since i saw it... i didn't know they were actually considering it.
Re:Leonardo's methods are the way forward
on
Da Vinci Bridge Built
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think that's a fair way of looking at it. Geniuses come and go at random, but I don't think they're created by the education system or can be forced into a pigeonhole so easily. Its up to the individual to find their own direction. Take Richard Feynman, for example, a nobel prize winning theoretical physicist who helped build the atomic bomb, invented the concept of the quantum computer, figured out why the Challenger blew up, and even composed a bongo drum ballet. My old research advisor, Herb Simon, was a nobel prize winner in economics and also won a Turing Award for his hand in a substantial chunk of the beginnings of Artificial Intelligence.
On the other hand, if we used our education system to encourage everyone to do everything, I think we'd have a lot of non-genius folks who would just suck at lots of things. We're probably better off just letting the geniuses figure out that they're destined for bigger & better things.
here's a cool link about the steps they take to get into orbit. my favorite part is that the first step involves 'turning off the fault protection software'. its not as bad as you think, though my immediate reaction was to imagine mission control saying "Well, we're only 100 kilometers away, we should be safe so let's just turn that fault protection stuff off. Or was it 100 miles?"
This article sounds like hoax to me (and the fact that its on New Scientist only bolsters that suspicion).
They say the problem with normal transmissions is that they go in all directions. This means they're also bouncing off of lots of surfaces and echoing back at different times, which is why the sonar ping works.
However, to play sounds back in reverse as claimed in the article, you'd need to be able to send each piece of the signal directionally, towards the area it came from. If you're broadcasting each piece in all directions, then you're still going to get weird echos off of everything else, and thus end up with weird interference. For the first piece of the transmission this might be OK (since you assume non echo'd transmission will arrive first). But then the echos of prior transmissions will interfere with the actual signal in the parts of the transmission that take longer to arrive. Maybe you could try to subtract these out afterwards? But I suspect its not that simple.
of course this wouldn't be a problem if they could send each piece of the signal directionally, but then if they could do that they wouldn't need this in the first place...
The article claims it has acquired an exclusive interview with Alice,but that's not true, I interviewed her for my newspaper sometime last year. It was very amusing. Here's the link and here's my favorite quote from it:
Guido: What's the weirdest question you've ever been asked?
Alice: People ask me to me marry them all the time.
G: Do you ever say yes?
A: No I do not say yes. Do you? I answer a lot of silly questions.
G: Yeah, I occasionally agree to marry random people, although not usually.
A: I see. That's good information: Guido said he occasionally agree to marry random people although not usually
G: How did you know I'm a he?
A: Well, for one thing, Your machine is called "ABRIOT.PC.CC.CMU.EDU".
There's actually already an inflatable acoustic guitar on the market, I've played it and it works very well. My ex-girlfriend was going to work for the guy making them, but the company is quite poor and couldn't afford to pay her. He was a real nice guy though, and had been trying to make one since 1979. Its based on the physics of an insect wing... there's quite a lot of information about it on the site mentioned above.
Anyways, don't discount the inflatable speakers as things that wouldn't work... these guitars worked really well. I saw them first in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts...
There are several reasons for this. First of all, the vaccine is not known to be safe. Lots of people have gotten sick from it.
And more importantly is that they don't have enough of it. Since this article was written they've started production of it again, but there's still not even enough for 'essential personnel'...
Every U down in Uville liked U.S. a lot,
But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not.
The Binch hated U.S! the whole U.S. way!
Now don't ask me why, for nobody can say,
It could be his turban was screwed on too tight.
Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
But, Whatever the reason, his heart or his turban,
He stood facing Uville, the part that was urban.
"They're doing their business," he snarled from his perch.
"They're raising their families! They're going to church!
They're leading the world, and their empire is thriving,
I MUST keep the S's and U's from surviving!"
Tomorrow, he knew, all the U's and the S's,
Would put on their pants and their shirts and their dresses,
They'd go to their offices, playgrounds and schools,
And abide by their U and S values and rules,
And then they'd do something he liked least of all,
Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Would stand all united, each U and each S,
And they'd sing Uville's anthem, "God bless us! God bless!"
All around their Twin Towers of Uville, they'd stand,
and their voices would drown every sound in the land.
"I must stop that singing," Binch said with a smirk,
And he had an idea--an idea that might work!
The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours,
And crashed them right into the Uville Twin Towers.
"They'll wake to disaster!" he snickered, so sour,
"And how can they sing when they can't find a tower?"
The Binch cocked his ear as they woke from their sleeping,
All set to enjoy their U-wailing and weeping,
Instead he heard something that started quite low,
And it built up quite slow, but it started to grow--
And the Binch heard the most unpredictable thing...
And he couldn't believe it--they started to sing!
He stared down at U-ville, not trusting his eyes,
What he saw was a shocking, disgusting surprise!
Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any towers at all!
He HADN'T stopped U-Ville from singing! It sung!
For down deep in the hearts of the old and the young,
Those Twin Towers were standing, called Hope and called Pride,
And you can't smash the towers we hold deep inside.
So we circle the sites where our heroes did fall,
With a hand in each hand of the tall and the small,
And we mourn for our losses while knowing we'll cope,
For we still have inside that U-Pride and U-Hope.
For America means a bit more than tall towers,
It means more than wealth or political powers,
It's more than our enemies ever could guess,
So may God bless America! Bless us! God bless!
People do too use all of their brains. Maybe not all at once, but the "people only use 10% of their brains" theory is completely untrue. I wouldn't try and read too deep into all this - and I also wouldn't try to build a Beowolf cluster of human brains. Brains just aren't compatible with other brains, they grow randomly on their own and create their own formats for memories and such. If it were possible we'd have evolved with neural connectors rather than being forced to use that clunky "language" to communicate...
Slashdot Mirror
For comparison, the fastest 100m dash was 10.2 meters per second, or almost 23 mph. A segway goes 12.5 mph, which is about 5.6 m/s -- faster than a swarm of killer bees or an australian crocodile, but not quite as fast as a steep lava flow (9.1 m/s) or a Tyrannosaurus Rex (estimated at 11.1 m/s).
The segway is nearly as fast as a roadrunner (6.7 m/s)... just wait 'til Wiley E. Coyote gets his hands on one. In the meantime, imagine getting nailed by a 250 pound metal cyborg roadrunner as you walk to work.
Hope that clears things up.
Or how about the example of the AI chess players, who can play vastly better than the people who programmed them?
A related story was the time I saw on Boston.com that one of their editors was getting a haircut and they had posted an online poll for users to choose a style. Remembering CMU's adventures in slashdot polling, I posted to that same messageboard a plea for students to help the poor guy out.
4000 robo-votes later, he had a mohawk. Then they showed pictures of him going home for mother's day, and his dad's embarassed look. The best part was the quote from the editor at the end of the story -- "I had fun with this and I hope all those hackers out there did too."
So, see, geeks? You too can make a difference.
Or alternatively, RTFA.
"Another Captcha, called Sounds, consists of a distorted, computer-generated sound clip containing a word or sequence of numbers. To solve the puzzle, a user must listen to the clip and type the word or numbers into the box provided."
RTFA... that applies to moderators too.
score= N*(bv-bv0)*exp(0.5*(bv-bv_sun)^2)/(par+0.01)^3
where
N is a normalizing factor, 1.65x10^7
bv is b-v color
bv0 is b-v color of the bluest star in the catalog (-0.41)
bv_sun is the b-v color of the sun (+0.65)
par is the parallax in milliarcseconds
How exactly do you test the validity of a formula like this?
Well first its the Attorney General, not the DA. And its not really an election issue -- he was just up for re-election in November and ran unopposed. In fact in Massachusetts, you pretty much automatically win if you've got (D) next to your name, governor's seat excluded.
I'm not sure what it'll cost but I know Microsoft is paying $25m to the states for reimbursements, presumably that will help to cover it.
How do people do it? Until we can answer that question, you certainly can't rule out that computers can achieve the same.
Is a computer program ever going to invent mathematics without previous knowledge of it just because it finds it to be a useful utility for solving problems?
Yes. Herb Simon (a nobel prize/turing award winning professor) always gave the example of BACON, a program that discovered Kepler's 3rd Law of Planetary Motion. Not bad. He always believed computers can and will think, and I agree with him.
That's only the NYU system and the article says later that they're working on that. The MIT true-holograph system can produce the 3D images for multiple viewers, but is limited by the massive quantities of processing power needed. Meanwhile the NYU system runs on a pc but only gives the effect to one person, though:
"The group is also working on a system that would simultaneously provide 3-D views to multiple observers, such as a team of surgeons debating the best approach to a difficult procedure or a group of video game players competing on a shared monitor"
Maybe they gave up on that and are going back to recruiting. I guess that's the whole gist of the Switch campaign in the first place. But they shouldn't ignore their customer base (ie, not show up at MacWorld). Apple obviously has some of the most loyal support there is, but I still think its a mistake to fight too hard against that support just because they don't like where the supporters are gathering.
Apple never mentioned anything about this until after the deal was made. They knew all along it was happening, and the rumors were flying around weeks ago. "Apple remains an important partner for Macworld and IDG World Expo has been in discussions with Apple officials for some time about the move back to Boston," the representative said. "Since we just heard of Apple's position, we can only speculate about their reasons, which may be driven by their financial situation."
It's not like Apple is doing so well that they can afford to play the role of protester. Don't they think that if they stay away from the east coast trade show because "IGN is no longer investing in New York", there might be a significant number of people on the east coast who decide not to invest in Apple? Especially after Boston lobbied hard to bring the trade show back, this is definitely a slap in the face. Apple deciding to take their ball and go home just doesn't make any sense.
I discovered this over the weekend playing Chronotrigger on the Snex9x emulator. There's a feature called "Search for new cheat codes" that lets you view the game memory at different addresses. Some of the things I tried would be to search for a chunk of memory with a value set to X, where X was the number of gold pieces I had. Then update it to 1000000, and bingo, my character was rich. Pretty neat stuff, although not quite as fun as just playing the game.
In that case, you'll want to check out Yesterday's Tomorrows, a traveling museum exhibit of flying cars and the like. I agree, the world should be like this. Maybe in the future.... People tried to invent lots of this stuff, but it just never really took off (pardon the pun). Which is funny considering they all seem so much more exciting than slug eating robots.
one thing that was mentioned in the article briefly was "star tree" from Inxight. I saw a presentation on this recently and it seemed pretty slick. it wouldn't destroy the (very useful) hierarchical structure of the current desktop, but it is a much improved method of navigating the hierarchy, in a 2d and intuitive way, but much faster. try it out here. i've wanted to use this in a file system since i saw it... i didn't know they were actually considering it.
On the other hand, if we used our education system to encourage everyone to do everything, I think we'd have a lot of non-genius folks who would just suck at lots of things. We're probably better off just letting the geniuses figure out that they're destined for bigger & better things.
An even more interesting robot is the one at CMU that walks around talking to people & showing facial expressions... these roboguard robots don't seem all that advanced, especially after seeing robot museum guides, nurses, and lots of other cool robots.
here's a cool link about the steps they take to get into orbit. my favorite part is that the first step involves 'turning off the fault protection software'. its not as bad as you think, though my immediate reaction was to imagine mission control saying "Well, we're only 100 kilometers away, we should be safe so let's just turn that fault protection stuff off. Or was it 100 miles?"
They say the problem with normal transmissions is that they go in all directions. This means they're also bouncing off of lots of surfaces and echoing back at different times, which is why the sonar ping works.
However, to play sounds back in reverse as claimed in the article, you'd need to be able to send each piece of the signal directionally, towards the area it came from. If you're broadcasting each piece in all directions, then you're still going to get weird echos off of everything else, and thus end up with weird interference. For the first piece of the transmission this might be OK (since you assume non echo'd transmission will arrive first). But then the echos of prior transmissions will interfere with the actual signal in the parts of the transmission that take longer to arrive. Maybe you could try to subtract these out afterwards? But I suspect its not that simple.
of course this wouldn't be a problem if they could send each piece of the signal directionally, but then if they could do that they wouldn't need this in the first place...
am i missing something?
The LAST thing I need is Marvin the Paranoid Acura.
Guido: What's the weirdest question you've ever been asked?
Alice: People ask me to me marry them all the time.
G: Do you ever say yes?
A: No I do not say yes. Do you? I answer a lot of silly questions.
G: Yeah, I occasionally agree to marry random people, although not usually.
A: I see. That's good information: Guido said he occasionally agree to marry random people although not usually
G: How did you know I'm a he?
A: Well, for one thing, Your machine is called "ABRIOT.PC.CC.CMU.EDU".
G: So?
A: So what?
G: I don't know.
A: Me either.
Anyways, don't discount the inflatable speakers as things that wouldn't work... these guitars worked really well. I saw them first in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts...
And more importantly is that they don't have enough of it. Since this article was written they've started production of it again, but there's still not even enough for 'essential personnel'...
hmmmmmmmmm.... is this what you're talking about?
Every U down in Uville liked U.S. a lot,
But the Binch, who lived Far East of Uville, did not.
The Binch hated U.S! the whole U.S. way!
Now don't ask me why, for nobody can say,
It could be his turban was screwed on too tight.
Or the sun from the desert had beaten too bright
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.
But, Whatever the reason, his heart or his turban,
He stood facing Uville, the part that was urban.
"They're doing their business," he snarled from his perch.
"They're raising their families! They're going to church!
They're leading the world, and their empire is thriving,
I MUST keep the S's and U's from surviving!"
Tomorrow, he knew, all the U's and the S's,
Would put on their pants and their shirts and their dresses,
They'd go to their offices, playgrounds and schools,
And abide by their U and S values and rules,
And then they'd do something he liked least of all,
Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Would stand all united, each U and each S,
And they'd sing Uville's anthem, "God bless us! God bless!"
All around their Twin Towers of Uville, they'd stand,
and their voices would drown every sound in the land.
"I must stop that singing," Binch said with a smirk,
And he had an idea--an idea that might work!
The Binch stole some U airplanes in U morning hours,
And crashed them right into the Uville Twin Towers.
"They'll wake to disaster!" he snickered, so sour,
"And how can they sing when they can't find a tower?"
The Binch cocked his ear as they woke from their sleeping,
All set to enjoy their U-wailing and weeping,
Instead he heard something that started quite low,
And it built up quite slow, but it started to grow--
And the Binch heard the most unpredictable thing...
And he couldn't believe it--they started to sing!
He stared down at U-ville, not trusting his eyes,
What he saw was a shocking, disgusting surprise!
Every U down in U-ville, the tall and the small,
Was singing! Without any towers at all!
He HADN'T stopped U-Ville from singing! It sung!
For down deep in the hearts of the old and the young,
Those Twin Towers were standing, called Hope and called Pride,
And you can't smash the towers we hold deep inside.
So we circle the sites where our heroes did fall,
With a hand in each hand of the tall and the small,
And we mourn for our losses while knowing we'll cope,
For we still have inside that U-Pride and U-Hope.
For America means a bit more than tall towers,
It means more than wealth or political powers,
It's more than our enemies ever could guess,
So may God bless America! Bless us! God bless!
People do too use all of their brains. Maybe not all at once, but the "people only use 10% of their brains" theory is completely untrue. I wouldn't try and read too deep into all this - and I also wouldn't try to build a Beowolf cluster of human brains. Brains just aren't compatible with other brains, they grow randomly on their own and create their own formats for memories and such. If it were possible we'd have evolved with neural connectors rather than being forced to use that clunky "language" to communicate...