One problem is that we can't even agree on what it means to reach "human level intelligence", it's such a moving target! Decades ago, one big goal of AI was to beat the chess world champion, and well, mission accomplished! But then people argued that the use of brute force does not AI make.
Now people are working on soccer-playing robots, and already you can witness how in the RoboCup simulated league the agents are playing extremely well, and I have no doubt that with further advancements in robotics we'll see robots capable of beating the human world champions by 2050, which I believe is the goal of the RoboCup competition. But then I'm sure critics will say that such robots are merely being programmed for that one particular task, that the algorithms in question do not "exhibit" any intelligence, bla bla bla.
Despite all the objections I've been reading in this thread, AI has been extremely successful! It's everywhere - in your email spam filter, in your search engine, in your book recommendation site, in your sudoku-solver, in your classroom-scheduling software, in your face-detecting, smile-triggered digital camera etc.
We need researchers to agree on a formal roadmap of milestones to strong AI, with well-thought benchmarks and easily measurable success criteria (like "beat the chess champion", "predict the weather n days ahead of time", but unlike "pass the turing test"). This way we will be able to focus our efforts, measure our progress and have the ammo to respond to the nay-sayers.
You are correct indeed: you used the word "maybe", which contains an "e".
Re:Not just Ron paul included, Mike Gravel too
on
Science Debate 2008
·
· Score: 1
Could it also have to do with having a clear and coherent program, with no crowd- or corporation-pleasing concessions? Gravel might be an "underdog" or an "anomaly" here, but in Europe his political program would be considered very middle-of-the-road. It's all about perspective.
I guess I'll have to fall into Godwin's law, but basically if the moderates let extremists take over and do the talking AND the walking you can quickly end up with a world war or a genocide of some sorts, as we've seen in the past...
Oh and of course we should "police" Pat Robertson and co! Every time he speaks some nonsense there needs to be a loud expression of outrage! Think of the demonstrations for peace in Spain (including the basque territory) after ETA attacks. Jean-Marie Le Pen (a right wing extremist in France) has always been free to say whatever he wants, but he has also always been denounced by fellow Frenchmen for what he's saying (countless demonstrations, shows of solidarity with minorities). Maybe that's how they've managed to keep his brand of extremism in check for the most part.
So yes, we should be hearing about moderate muslims, *very loudly and in no ambiguous terms*, their outrage at those who give them a bad reputation. I want to hear from moderate religious leaders. I want them to call for demonstrations in the streets of New York, Kabul, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, London (basically everywhere where they can do so with no fear of brutal retaliation), and say "we're not with them, we're not like them, we don't want them, that's not what Islam is, we want peace". As long as they won't do that, people will assimilate them with the extremists, and things will keep getting worse.
Where are you guys? It's the silence of this majority of muslims, the moderate ones, that is allowing the loud-mouthed ones to hurt you. Some self-policing is in order, big time!!!
PS My favourite Lego add-on in the 70s was a large, motorised block that had a wired remote for forward and backward movement. You could put on wheels or caterpillar tracks and then stick on your favourite Lego parts. When we had two, my brother and I would use them for Robot Wars type battles (long before Robot Wars existed).
I used to play that same game with my cousin! He was 4 years older, a true hacker, and he'd come up with some truly impressive designs (like rock-solid trucks), whereas mine were all about strengthening one weakness by creating two more... He always kicked my butt.
The funny thing though is that nothing ever came out of his creative genius (last time I heard of him he was a tourist guide), whereas I ended up getting an engineering degree... There must be something wrong with our educational system.
Both C and Java have their purposes. I'd use C to teach pointers, memory management, recursion and maybe even complex data structures and algorithms. I'd use Java to teach OO. I would also go back to C when teaching operating systems, and to Java when teaching design patterns and software development methodologies. But I believe that neither should be used as an intro to programming.
The first course on programming is where you can turn off a lot of students if the language gets in the way (weird syntax, a compiler with cryptic error messages, a mammoth virtual machine, etc.). If all you want is teach variables, conditions, loops, and simple data structures in order to solve simple problems, why not use something like Python, Pascal or Scheme? Let's please leave concerns like the understanding of computer architecture and efficiency (C) and software engineering (Java) for later courses. The C-centric crowd needs to understand that Turing is not married to von Neuman: understanding of pointers is not necessary for computing and algorithm design (hello Lisp?). The Java-centric crowd needs to understand that, for some, programming is just a tool (for problem-solving) and not a discipline (software engineering).
And this does NOT mean I'm promoting the dilution of the curriculum. In fact, because students would get up to speed faster, you could solve more complex problems earlier, and actually hit those issues of efficiency and code reuse that C and Java are respectively supposed to solve. They will then be ready to enjoy and understand those courses that follow.
- a slow withdrawal from Iraq, with a transition to a fully UN-operated phase, like they did in Bosnia. A quick withdrawal would lead to a blood-bath, with even more animosity toward the US.
- BIG emphasis on education. More spending, more quality control. Every student who finishes high-school has to pass a tough standard test.
- real separation of church and state.
- universal health-care, partially financed by taxing private health-care. If the rich want better health care, fine, but they have to pay through the nose for it and in the process they help improve the state of public health care. Everyone wins!
- end lobbies.
- actually enforce anti-monopoly laws.
- the big project for the decade: the environment. Heavy investment in eco-friendly research and technologies, making the US the world leader. Sign Kyoto and actually go beyond simply reaching the objectives. Tax imports on polluting goods to support this. Tax big polluters.
- a one-year civil service for all who come out of high-school and for new immigrants. The former get some maturity and time to reflect on what they want to become, immersion in the country and improved language skills for the latter. And the society at large benefits. Again, everyone wins!
- for anything else that requires funding: the Entertainment Tax. Subsidize cultural production and preservation while taxing its consumption. This should encourage people to become active participants in the cultural life of the country instead of passive couch-potatoes.
The thing is that journalists ARE capable of good reporting, just watch sports news coverage. If world news could be dissected and debated like baseball or football trades, stats and injury reports we'd be fine. Unfortunately one generates audience and the other doesn't.
Very good summary! Also, I don't see how observing bee behavior (beehavior?) was so instrumental in coming up with what basically is a blackboard system (you can use a tuple-space to do this) or a contract-net protocol [Smith].
You can definitely program in Smalltalk using emacs (or vim or whatever you like), but why would one want to do that? The IDE is part of what made Smalltalk revolutionary in the first place. I don't know if Eclipse has support for Smalltalk, but its ancester, VisualAge, certainly did, and actually contained some Smalltalk code inside.
As for frameworks similar to RoR in Smalltalk, there is indeed one. I think it's called Seaside, but I haven't tried it myself (yet).
Re:But the proof steps are known, right?
on
Open Source Math
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· Score: 1
Good points. In the case of the counterexample though, it can probably be verified easily without needing access to the source code of the program that exhibited it.
But the proof steps are known, right?
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
I don't understand: don't these automatic theorem provers provide the steps they took to prove the theorem? As long as those steps are provided and can be verified, I don't see why we care how the proof was obtained. We don't always know how proofs obtained by humans were obtained either; they don't tell us what they had for breakfast that day or what inspired them.
There's probably not much insight that can be obtained by the source code of the theorem prover, you can always just assume that it was brute force with some optimization tweaks.
As long as you don't just take the proof at face value and that you verify the proof you should be fine, no? And if you used another software tool to do the verification itself, then verify the verification manually. And so on. Verifying the proof of a theorem should always be easier than coming up with the proof, so this is not a hopeless process.
I disagree. If Intel wants to advertize, let them buy an ad on slashdot that links to their own site where they can feel free to install slash and discuss whatever product they want.
It is important to not only maintain editorial independence but also the appearance of editorial independence.
"Maybe we should even combine the two at one institution, but we should clearly distinguish between the two in order to be honest."
The two are already combined in most of North America, and that's precisely the source of confusion. Having a faculty of engineering next to a faculty of science or arts makes people think that they all serve the same purpose, which is not true.
In France, engineering schools are a separate entity. University is considered as a purely academic place (although that is unfortunately changing now), where you can study arts or science or whatever you want as long as you have your high-school degee. Of course to move up you still need to get good grades and everything.
Profs in France are all paid the same way, according to a salary scheme that is public. There is no distinction between the salary of a prof in computer science or in arts.
As I said though, unfortunately things are changing in France as well. Students are frustrated about having gone through university and not finding a job - as if the purpose of university was to prepare them for a job! As you said, vocational schools are extremely important and unfortunately carry a bad reputation.
I think that students and their parents need to get better information about jobs and careers. They need to understand that you can make a very good living coming out of a vocational school, and you can be very miserable getting a fancy (and certainly intellectually fullfilling) degree in latin or ancient greek and looking for an inexistant job. There's only so much room for hiring profs to perpetuate the knowledge.
Yeah, I was really hoping for DCCs to take off at the time. They were a more convenient format to use for a walkman, and the players were backward compatible with regular tapes! IIRC, they had some sort of indexing as well, so you could fast forward to a song almost as quickly as with a CD.
I'm sure they lost out to CDs for the same reason that DATs lost: the fact that the medium was read-write.
But how about the people you care about and who care about you? They probably would like you to live a long life, even though it may contradict your "live fast, die young" credo.
I've switched from My Yahoo to Google's Personalized Homepage simply because the Yahoo module for their calendar is useless. It is either "unavailable" or requires you to login on a daily basis to get the info. Google Calendar's gadget is much nicer and is always logged in.
Little details I know, but that's how Yahoo is slowly losing its long-time users.
You might want to check out Lenya, which is based on the Apache Cocoon project. I don't know mature and full-featured it is though. More generally speaking, Apache has a lot of Java-based projects that can be used toward building a CMS, so if you did want to write your own, you could do worse than start on top of some Apache framework.
Slashdot Mirror
One problem is that we can't even agree on what it means to reach "human level intelligence", it's such a moving target! Decades ago, one big goal of AI was to beat the chess world champion, and well, mission accomplished! But then people argued that the use of brute force does not AI make.
Now people are working on soccer-playing robots, and already you can witness how in the RoboCup simulated league the agents are playing extremely well, and I have no doubt that with further advancements in robotics we'll see robots capable of beating the human world champions by 2050, which I believe is the goal of the RoboCup competition. But then I'm sure critics will say that such robots are merely being programmed for that one particular task, that the algorithms in question do not "exhibit" any intelligence, bla bla bla.
Despite all the objections I've been reading in this thread, AI has been extremely successful! It's everywhere - in your email spam filter, in your search engine, in your book recommendation site, in your sudoku-solver, in your classroom-scheduling software, in your face-detecting, smile-triggered digital camera etc.
We need researchers to agree on a formal roadmap of milestones to strong AI, with well-thought benchmarks and easily measurable success criteria (like "beat the chess champion", "predict the weather n days ahead of time", but unlike "pass the turing test"). This way we will be able to focus our efforts, measure our progress and have the ammo to respond to the nay-sayers.
You are correct indeed: you used the word "maybe", which contains an "e".
Could it also have to do with having a clear and coherent program, with no crowd- or corporation-pleasing concessions? Gravel might be an "underdog" or an "anomaly" here, but in Europe his political program would be considered very middle-of-the-road. It's all about perspective.
I guess I'll have to fall into Godwin's law, but basically if the moderates let extremists take over and do the talking AND the walking you can quickly end up with a world war or a genocide of some sorts, as we've seen in the past...
Oh and of course we should "police" Pat Robertson and co! Every time he speaks some nonsense there needs to be a loud expression of outrage! Think of the demonstrations for peace in Spain (including the basque territory) after ETA attacks. Jean-Marie Le Pen (a right wing extremist in France) has always been free to say whatever he wants, but he has also always been denounced by fellow Frenchmen for what he's saying (countless demonstrations, shows of solidarity with minorities). Maybe that's how they've managed to keep his brand of extremism in check for the most part.
So yes, we should be hearing about moderate muslims, *very loudly and in no ambiguous terms*, their outrage at those who give them a bad reputation. I want to hear from moderate religious leaders. I want them to call for demonstrations in the streets of New York, Kabul, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, London (basically everywhere where they can do so with no fear of brutal retaliation), and say "we're not with them, we're not like them, we don't want them, that's not what Islam is, we want peace". As long as they won't do that, people will assimilate them with the extremists, and things will keep getting worse.
Where are you guys? It's the silence of this majority of muslims, the moderate ones, that is allowing the loud-mouthed ones to hurt you. Some self-policing is in order, big time!!!
The funny thing though is that nothing ever came out of his creative genius (last time I heard of him he was a tourist guide), whereas I ended up getting an engineering degree... There must be something wrong with our educational system.
Both C and Java have their purposes. I'd use C to teach pointers, memory management, recursion and maybe even complex data structures and algorithms. I'd use Java to teach OO. I would also go back to C when teaching operating systems, and to Java when teaching design patterns and software development methodologies. But I believe that neither should be used as an intro to programming.
The first course on programming is where you can turn off a lot of students if the language gets in the way (weird syntax, a compiler with cryptic error messages, a mammoth virtual machine, etc.). If all you want is teach variables, conditions, loops, and simple data structures in order to solve simple problems, why not use something like Python, Pascal or Scheme? Let's please leave concerns like the understanding of computer architecture and efficiency (C) and software engineering (Java) for later courses. The C-centric crowd needs to understand that Turing is not married to von Neuman: understanding of pointers is not necessary for computing and algorithm design (hello Lisp?). The Java-centric crowd needs to understand that, for some, programming is just a tool (for problem-solving) and not a discipline (software engineering).
And this does NOT mean I'm promoting the dilution of the curriculum. In fact, because students would get up to speed faster, you could solve more complex problems earlier, and actually hit those issues of efficiency and code reuse that C and Java are respectively supposed to solve. They will then be ready to enjoy and understand those courses that follow.
I'd vote for you. I particularly agree with 1.2, I've been advocating it in my own presidential program somewhere in this thread! :)
- a slow withdrawal from Iraq, with a transition to a fully UN-operated phase, like they did in Bosnia. A quick withdrawal would lead to a blood-bath, with even more animosity toward the US.
- BIG emphasis on education. More spending, more quality control. Every student who finishes high-school has to pass a tough standard test.
- real separation of church and state.
- universal health-care, partially financed by taxing private health-care. If the rich want better health care, fine, but they have to pay through the nose for it and in the process they help improve the state of public health care. Everyone wins!
- end lobbies.
- actually enforce anti-monopoly laws.
- the big project for the decade: the environment. Heavy investment in eco-friendly research and technologies, making the US the world leader. Sign Kyoto and actually go beyond simply reaching the objectives. Tax imports on polluting goods to support this. Tax big polluters.
- a one-year civil service for all who come out of high-school and for new immigrants. The former get some maturity and time to reflect on what they want to become, immersion in the country and improved language skills for the latter. And the society at large benefits. Again, everyone wins!
- for anything else that requires funding: the Entertainment Tax. Subsidize cultural production and preservation while taxing its consumption. This should encourage people to become active participants in the cultural life of the country instead of passive couch-potatoes.
Vote DrEasy!
The thing is that journalists ARE capable of good reporting, just watch sports news coverage. If world news could be dissected and debated like baseball or football trades, stats and injury reports we'd be fine. Unfortunately one generates audience and the other doesn't.
Very good summary! Also, I don't see how observing bee behavior (beehavior?) was so instrumental in coming up with what basically is a blackboard system (you can use a tuple-space to do this) or a contract-net protocol [Smith].
You can definitely program in Smalltalk using emacs (or vim or whatever you like), but why would one want to do that? The IDE is part of what made Smalltalk revolutionary in the first place. I don't know if Eclipse has support for Smalltalk, but its ancester, VisualAge, certainly did, and actually contained some Smalltalk code inside. As for frameworks similar to RoR in Smalltalk, there is indeed one. I think it's called Seaside, but I haven't tried it myself (yet).
Good points. In the case of the counterexample though, it can probably be verified easily without needing access to the source code of the program that exhibited it.
I don't understand: don't these automatic theorem provers provide the steps they took to prove the theorem? As long as those steps are provided and can be verified, I don't see why we care how the proof was obtained. We don't always know how proofs obtained by humans were obtained either; they don't tell us what they had for breakfast that day or what inspired them.
There's probably not much insight that can be obtained by the source code of the theorem prover, you can always just assume that it was brute force with some optimization tweaks.
As long as you don't just take the proof at face value and that you verify the proof you should be fine, no? And if you used another software tool to do the verification itself, then verify the verification manually. And so on. Verifying the proof of a theorem should always be easier than coming up with the proof, so this is not a hopeless process.
I disagree. If Intel wants to advertize, let them buy an ad on slashdot that links to their own site where they can feel free to install slash and discuss whatever product they want. It is important to not only maintain editorial independence but also the appearance of editorial independence.
"Maybe we should even combine the two at one institution, but we should clearly distinguish between the two in order to be honest."
The two are already combined in most of North America, and that's precisely the source of confusion. Having a faculty of engineering next to a faculty of science or arts makes people think that they all serve the same purpose, which is not true.
In France, engineering schools are a separate entity. University is considered as a purely academic place (although that is unfortunately changing now), where you can study arts or science or whatever you want as long as you have your high-school degee. Of course to move up you still need to get good grades and everything.
Profs in France are all paid the same way, according to a salary scheme that is public. There is no distinction between the salary of a prof in computer science or in arts.
As I said though, unfortunately things are changing in France as well. Students are frustrated about having gone through university and not finding a job - as if the purpose of university was to prepare them for a job! As you said, vocational schools are extremely important and unfortunately carry a bad reputation.
I think that students and their parents need to get better information about jobs and careers. They need to understand that you can make a very good living coming out of a vocational school, and you can be very miserable getting a fancy (and certainly intellectually fullfilling) degree in latin or ancient greek and looking for an inexistant job. There's only so much room for hiring profs to perpetuate the knowledge.
The Society of the Spectacle indeed...
Yeah, I was really hoping for DCCs to take off at the time. They were a more convenient format to use for a walkman, and the players were backward compatible with regular tapes! IIRC, they had some sort of indexing as well, so you could fast forward to a song almost as quickly as with a CD.
I'm sure they lost out to CDs for the same reason that DATs lost: the fact that the medium was read-write.
But how about the people you care about and who care about you? They probably would like you to live a long life, even though it may contradict your "live fast, die young" credo.
.sig has never felt more a propos)
(BTW my
I've switched from My Yahoo to Google's Personalized Homepage simply because the Yahoo module for their calendar is useless. It is either "unavailable" or requires you to login on a daily basis to get the info. Google Calendar's gadget is much nicer and is always logged in.
Little details I know, but that's how Yahoo is slowly losing its long-time users.
Don't know about the money part, but why not the IETF?
You might want to check out Lenya, which is based on the Apache Cocoon project. I don't know mature and full-featured it is though. More generally speaking, Apache has a lot of Java-based projects that can be used toward building a CMS, so if you did want to write your own, you could do worse than start on top of some Apache framework.
Thank you very much! Nothing beats an example.