Maths is, by its pure essence, a symbolic system. That is, you have a concept for one and another for two, and you consciously relate the concepts to the real things.
But what if an alien race had a sort of biollogical, evolutionary evolved embedded calculators in their brains? They would watch reallity and make perfect estimations usable for advanced engineering and planning, and to them those processes would be perfectly intuitive, not reasoned. I would not dare to say that their culture has 'maths'. Althoug the basic operations being executed were the same, the fact that they don't perform a conscious symbolic process would make it a different thing than what we call mathematics.
People like you seem to take for granted that the universe just exists.
Of course we do. It is a religion, and religions are irrational. Thanks The System that we now guide our society with freedom of religion, and people like us aren't pursued by people with the same ideas that you have.
"The whole is more than the sum of its parts" is a concept called "holism", the opposit is called "reductionism". As long as you understand both concepts and respect people for whatever they think, you don't have to believe the same as them or convince them of your ideas. Neither it is choosen, it comes to you through revelation.;-)
The fact is, you don't need a perfect model for creating advanced tools and survive in complex societies. Egyptians built pyramids and channels for river Nilus with flawed models for product and trigonometry.
That is, you can achieve great practical results with methods that more "intuitive" than "mathematical" in our mothern sense. For an alien mind, our logic system might simply not make any sense, but they could still be called intelligent.
Thanks to the structure of scientific papers, you don't have to actually RTFA in order to know what is all about:
5 Conclusions
In this paper, we presented a measurement study performed over the population of peers that choose to participate in the Gnutella and Napster peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Our measurements captured the bottleneck bandwidth, latency, availability, and file sharing patterns of these peers. Several lessons emerged from the results of our measure- ments. First, there is a significant amount of heterogeneity in both Gnutella and Napster; bandwidth, latency, availability, and the degree of sharing vary between three and five orders of magnitude across the peers in the system. This implies that any similar peer-to-peer system must be very deliberate and careful about delegating responsibilities across peers. Second, even though these systems were designed with a symmetry of responsibilities in mind, there is clear evidence of client-like or server-like behavior in a significant fraction of systems' populations. Third, peers tend to deliberately misreport in- formation if there is an incentive to do so. Because effective delegation of responsibility depends on accurate information, this implies that future systems must either have built-in in- centives for peers to tell the truth or systems must be able to directly measure and verify reported information.
Want me to believe that you are going to read a book from a Great English Genius, translated to Spanish?:-P
I learned English in order to read the original;-)
Read "Sin noticias de Gurb" (Eduardo Mendoza) instead:
" Un extraterrestre desaparece en Barcelona. Otro alienigena, narrador de la historia, le busca por la jungla barcelonesa. Se trata de una parodia en la que se hace una mordaz critica de la sociedad actual. Divertidisima."...
You won't regret it!
Or "Cinco horas con Mario" or "Los santos inocentes" (or anything else from Miguel Delibes) for a more adult reading.
Subject: help
Body: "help. it doesn't work"
And thats pretty much all thats in the email. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ME TO HELP YOU IF YOU DON'T TELL ME WHATS GOING WRONG?:-)
Really is that big difference between "disabled people" and "people with disabilities?" If it said "handicapped", "disqualified" or "restricted" people i would understand, but what is so negative about the word "disability"?
And did you never thought that all this ranting about the "correct" way to use language is MORE offendig to people with disabilities, as if they should be protected and they were unable to face these colloquial, conversational terms?
Computers are a fairly new thing, and we really don't know to what extent there is a cause-effect going here.
I mean, society isn't accustomed to having interactive games which last for so long time. The process of educating people to use them properly should have taken place somehow, but it haven't.
Just think, if you create a 24 hour alternate reality, why don't try to make the manipulation of your game more adict-safe? Of course the responsability is that of the people malusing the system, but a bit of safety checks in your design wouldn't hurt. At least, TV has frequent 20 second commercials that remind you of a reality different of the inmersive experience.
Not trying to troll, just wondering beyond the usual "yes but game is not in fault"...
Come on guy, my point is not about originality. You have a thousand clones of the same game. What I mean is, how could you know whether there is some GPLd code in a product like that, if you haven't got access to the code? A reverse engeneering could determine it?
Since glTron is GPLd, and Sonic Speedsters doesn't seem to provide anything similar to source code, do you think this might be a case of Copyleft violation?
I'm afraid you have to learn more about science, because you don't even understand what rjh is trying to tell you. Sure, "The Scientific Method" (which you seem to have glorified) is usually explained that way. And *that* is what rjh was trying you to do:
A)succinct explanations for observed behaviors means that you find a behavior which *can't* be explained with the competing gravitational theory, and can be with yours.
B)Mathematical model, and why does your model depend on the mass of the observed bodies instead of a property of the repelling energy?
C)What evidence could come up with doesn't mean that you find the evidence, but that you imagine which evidence would prove your theory wrong (ever heard of Karl Popper?). You know, as in C) Test hypothesis. What is your test?
Btw, the fourh step in the algorithm of scientific method should be return to *A*, not *C*. Always go back to the facts, if you want science.
It is easily read. Just invest the time getting over the initial hurdle of the parentheses and it's a very easy-to-read language.
Let me desagree. I like that my if's have then's attached (to separate the condition, 'then' and 'else' expressions). Call me maniacal. 8-)
The two main attributes of LISP are (a) everything's a list and (b) functional programming
I'm not at all convinced that (a) is mandatory to get the benefits of introspection and code generation, which can be done in other ways. And as (b), fortunately many of the principal benefits of Lisp are finally becoming available in other mainstream languages. So yes, Lisp was better in the 70's, and in the 80's, and in the 90's, but I believe that on the XXI century other languages will catch up and offer the same benefits with many other additional advantages.
John McCarthy first started working on LISP in the 50s. It's older than 40 years.
Yep. Mine was a wild guess, i didn't know the precise date.
Spoken like someone who's never learned LISP. LISP's learning curve is surprisingly gentle, which is why it and its derivatives are used in so many undergraduate CS curricula.
I *have* learned Lisp (or is it LISP?), but not well. Maybe my problems are from a bad experience and a bad teacher, since nobody has tried to explain me the inner working of the interpreter (I haven't yet managed to know how many kinds of variables, namespaces, forms and expressions are there, for god's sake!), and the books i have peeked don't do a good job explainin it clearly either.
I think that's the crucial problem with Lisp syntax. It's not mean to be easily read, but easily accessed from the language itself. My point is that Lisp is a 40 years old programming language, and that has its burdens. Everything discovered later about user friendliness is lacking. Lisp syntax is too simple for most everyday tasks as, for example, reading other people's code.
If you have to remove the main attribute of the language in order to understand and think in it, is clear that THAT attribute should be removed. And that's what Python, Haskell, etc. have been doing, even if it complicates a bit the essential meta-code construction. There's no doubt that the powers of Lisp are needed (and that is the reasong for the other languages playing the "add something which Lisp has had for decades" game), but Lisp high learning curve is something that most programmers can't simply afford.
People frequently bash it because it's too big. And that's my own opinion. 8-) I find it difficult to learn because there are thousands of things to learn, and no syntax to discriminate between them - so no mnemonics to carry from one learning session to the next. I suppose i could manage it if i tried hard.
But now I'm learning Oz with the people at Pragmatic Programmers "language of the year" mailing list. I find its syntax easier to grab, and I think it will be a worthwile experience. So one thing at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither makes it a reality. Both possibilities are likely.
But what if an alien race had a sort of biollogical, evolutionary evolved embedded calculators in their brains? They would watch reallity and make perfect estimations usable for advanced engineering and planning, and to them those processes would be perfectly intuitive, not reasoned. I would not dare to say that their culture has 'maths'. Althoug the basic operations being executed were the same, the fact that they don't perform a conscious symbolic process would make it a different thing than what we call mathematics.
Of course we do. It is a religion, and religions are irrational. Thanks The System that we now guide our society with freedom of religion, and people like us aren't pursued by people with the same ideas that you have.
"The whole is more than the sum of its parts" is a concept called "holism", the opposit is called "reductionism". As long as you understand both concepts and respect people for whatever they think, you don't have to believe the same as them or convince them of your ideas. Neither it is choosen, it comes to you through revelation. ;-)
The fact is, you don't need a perfect model for creating advanced tools and survive in complex societies. Egyptians built pyramids and channels for river Nilus with flawed models for product and trigonometry.
That is, you can achieve great practical results with methods that more "intuitive" than "mathematical" in our mothern sense. For an alien mind, our logic system might simply not make any sense, but they could still be called intelligent.
Maybe this idea could be developed
Maybe not Half Life, but "Severance: Blade of Darkness"'s logic is written in python.
A better example than cheese may be the classic nine puzzle. It is solid but has clearly movable holes.
that Linus isn't the one who invented Open Source. Linus just invented the "release early&often" technique that made that idea popular.
It's perfect, and all of them are called "grandma".
Thanks to the structure of scientific papers, you don't have to actually RTFA in order to know what is all about:
5 Conclusions
In this paper, we presented a measurement study performed
over the population of peers that choose to participate in the
Gnutella and Napster peer-to-peer file sharing systems. Our
measurements captured the bottleneck bandwidth, latency,
availability, and file sharing patterns of these peers.
Several lessons emerged from the results of our measure-
ments. First, there is a significant amount of heterogeneity in
both Gnutella and Napster; bandwidth, latency, availability,
and the degree of sharing vary between three and five orders
of magnitude across the peers in the system. This implies that
any similar peer-to-peer system must be very deliberate and
careful about delegating responsibilities across peers. Second,
even though these systems were designed with a symmetry of
responsibilities in mind, there is clear evidence of client-like
or server-like behavior in a significant fraction of systems'
populations. Third, peers tend to deliberately misreport in-
formation if there is an incentive to do so. Because effective
delegation of responsibility depends on accurate information,
this implies that future systems must either have built-in in-
centives for peers to tell the truth or systems must be able to
directly measure and verify reported information.
Has anybody thought of other animated episodes of a trilogy *cof*animatrix*cof* before?
Want me to believe that you are going to read a book from a Great English Genius, translated to Spanish? :-P
;-)
I learned English in order to read the original
Read "Sin noticias de Gurb" (Eduardo Mendoza) instead:
" Un extraterrestre desaparece en Barcelona. Otro alienigena, narrador de la historia, le busca por la jungla barcelonesa. Se trata de una parodia en la que se hace una mordaz critica de la sociedad actual. Divertidisima."...
You won't regret it!
Or "Cinco horas con Mario" or "Los santos inocentes" (or anything else from Miguel Delibes) for a more adult reading.
I'm not a grammar nazi, but I'm Spanish and I live near Aranjuez ;-)
and Aranjuez sounds like 'Aran - hoo - eth', while
Aranguez sounds like 'Aran - guess'
Body: "help. it doesn't work"
And thats pretty much all thats in the email. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU WANT ME TO HELP YOU IF YOU DON'T TELL ME WHATS GOING WRONG?
Easy. You should reply this way:
Subject: Re: help
Body: "Fix it."
Really is that big difference between "disabled people" and "people with disabilities?" If it said "handicapped", "disqualified" or "restricted" people i would understand, but what is so negative about the word "disability"?
And did you never thought that all this ranting about the "correct" way to use language is MORE offendig to people with disabilities, as if they should be protected and they were unable to face these colloquial, conversational terms?
Computers are a fairly new thing, and we really don't know to what extent there is a cause-effect going here.
I mean, society isn't accustomed to having interactive games which last for so long time. The process of educating people to use them properly should have taken place somehow, but it haven't.
Just think, if you create a 24 hour alternate reality, why don't try to make the manipulation of your game more adict-safe? Of course the responsability is that of the people malusing the system, but a bit of safety checks in your design wouldn't hurt. At least, TV has frequent 20 second commercials that remind you of a reality different of the inmersive experience.
Not trying to troll, just wondering beyond the usual "yes but game is not in fault"...
Think of the infamous Vigor. It was not an April Fool's joke thought but a cartoon from Userfriendly.org
Glad to see I'm not the only one believing that! Indeed I would extend that feeling to natural numbers too, and in fact to all mathematical objects.
But then, I've been using computers since I was 10... Would you say that is the reason? 8-)
So this is LotR meets Nethack?
Come on guy, my point is not about originality. You have a thousand clones of the same game. What I mean is, how could you know whether there is some GPLd code in a product like that, if you haven't got access to the code? A reverse engeneering could determine it?
Since glTron is GPLd, and Sonic Speedsters doesn't seem to provide anything similar to source code, do you think this might be a case of Copyleft violation?
A)succinct explanations for observed behaviors means that you find a behavior which *can't* be explained with the competing gravitational theory, and can be with yours.
B)Mathematical model, and why does your model depend on the mass of the observed bodies instead of a property of the repelling energy?
C)What evidence could come up with doesn't mean that you find the evidence, but that you imagine which evidence would prove your theory wrong (ever heard of Karl Popper?). You know, as in C) Test hypothesis. What is your test?
Btw, the fourh step in the algorithm of scientific method should be return to *A*, not *C*. Always go back to the facts, if you want science.
Forgive me if I was rude.
Let me desagree. I like that my if's have then's attached (to separate the condition, 'then' and 'else' expressions). Call me maniacal. 8-)
The two main attributes of LISP are (a) everything's a list and (b) functional programming
I'm not at all convinced that (a) is mandatory to get the benefits of introspection and code generation, which can be done in other ways. And as (b), fortunately many of the principal benefits of Lisp are finally becoming available in other mainstream languages. So yes, Lisp was better in the 70's, and in the 80's, and in the 90's, but I believe that on the XXI century other languages will catch up and offer the same benefits with many other additional advantages.
John McCarthy first started working on LISP in the 50s. It's older than 40 years.
Yep. Mine was a wild guess, i didn't know the precise date.
Spoken like someone who's never learned LISP. LISP's learning curve is surprisingly gentle, which is why it and its derivatives are used in so many undergraduate CS curricula.
I *have* learned Lisp (or is it LISP?), but not well. Maybe my problems are from a bad experience and a bad teacher, since nobody has tried to explain me the inner working of the interpreter (I haven't yet managed to know how many kinds of variables, namespaces, forms and expressions are there, for god's sake!), and the books i have peeked don't do a good job explainin it clearly either.
So you admit it!!! ;-)
I think that's the crucial problem with Lisp syntax. It's not mean to be easily read, but easily accessed from the language itself. My point is that Lisp is a 40 years old programming language, and that has its burdens. Everything discovered later about user friendliness is lacking. Lisp syntax is too simple for most everyday tasks as, for example, reading other people's code.
If you have to remove the main attribute of the language in order to understand and think in it, is clear that THAT attribute should be removed. And that's what Python, Haskell, etc. have been doing, even if it complicates a bit the essential meta-code construction. There's no doubt that the powers of Lisp are needed (and that is the reasong for the other languages playing the "add something which Lisp has had for decades" game), but Lisp high learning curve is something that most programmers can't simply afford.
But now I'm learning Oz with the people at Pragmatic Programmers "language of the year" mailing list. I find its syntax easier to grab, and I think it will be a worthwile experience. So one thing at a time.