Nice of you to hijack the thread for a bit of religious dogma.
You underestimate the elegance of evolution and hence misunderstand it (which probably contributes to your need to attribute our existence to the divine). Yes individual changes produce very little obvious benefit, but the offspring is almost always still viable. This is very important because it means that evolution can (and does) make LOTS of changes within in each generation through sexual reproduction. In so doing it blazes through parameter space. Our developmental engine for turning DNA into a human is incredibly robust.
Computer code, on the other hand, is extremely brittle. Most changes will break something causing a crash or compilation error, so progress would be horribly slow.
The success of evolution in creating us has nothing to do with time.
The reason evolution works for us and not for computer programs is that the language of our DNA is specifically geared to be useful for evolution. From the protein to the cell to the body, the coding system is designed so that new variations usually produce viable offspring. The fact that someone with an entire extra chromosome (Downs syndrome) can exist is a testament to the robustness of this code.
This isn't surprising. Naturally evolution would prefer to stick with a coding system that facilitates faster evolution. Anything else would get selected out.
The biggest problem is that Microsoft has gotten people to believe that computers are inherently unreliable, unstable, and buggy
It's not just Microsoft though. Mac's prior to OS X (not to bash Mac's I have an Ibook and love it) were horrible. I'm forced to use one right now at work and it's far worse that Windows ever was. I've had control panel applications crash. Everything seems to be threaded together and losing access to the interface while an application (often the Finder) takes complete control of the system is a regular occurence.
It's hard to believe that the miracle of OS X came out of the same company frankly. sheesh.
It's hard to see why genetic algorithms are an inherently good way to design computer virii. The fitness landscape is not well suited to GA'S, it's too rugged. GA's need a particular structure of problem to function well, one in which every change produces an incremental benefit or impairment.
Changing which registry key a worm modifies, or what files a virus affects will cause wildly varrying effects, 99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable effect, or blue screen the system. This is not a good setup for the GA to figure out what works best.
So despite the similarity in name and function with biological viruses, computer virii (and worms, trojans etc) are not really evolvable, but need to be engineered.
However, there are other factors that make getting off an MMOG addiction harder then just finding something "more fun". The brain uses dopamine to indicate fun yes, but it also learns which things are fun making it all the more likely to do those things, and all the harder to stop. It takes time to learn a new fun activity because you have to beat not just the dopamine released by warcraft, but all the learning as well.
And there's another factor: quitting WOW also means coming to realization that you just flushed away the last 2 years of your youth is a soul crushing and therefun distinctly unfun experience. The new fun activity has to be more fun than WOW plus the unfun of coming to this epiphany.
Some players have this epiphany while still playing WOW, and at that point the game becomes not just fun, but an escape mechanism as well.
So nothing you've said is wrong, but there are a few additional wrinkles. Evolution has tacked a great deal of learning on top of our "fun detector" and WOW pushes all the right buttons.
Similarly, if cell phones could muck up the instrumentation on an airplane, every plane within 100 miles of a lightning bolt would barrel roll into the ground in seconds.
Both are equally superstitous nonsense. Unfortunately the airplane voodoo is widely believed by anyone who doesn't understand electric fields. Of course the airlines tell us this storyon every flight. If the EM sensititivity were as widely repeated, most people would probably believe that too.
Your proposed test won't a very good one if the friend believes the symptoms are legitimate.
By knowing whether it's turned on or not, it's likely they'll subconsciously send this information to the subject. This might take the form of repeated questions about how he's feeling when it's turned on, and disinterest when it's off. It wouldn't be hard to pick up on these cues, even without trying.
Resonance requires a very specific coupling between frequencies. If this was actually about resonance, you would only be sensitive to one particular frequency band (and it's higher order harmonics). Yet somehow these people claim to get sick from 50 hz, 60 hz, 2.4 Ghz...
What a fantastic coincidence that all of the frequencies we use in commercial applications happen to be the ones that "resonate" in some way.
Or maybe it's all in their heads.
Noone likes to be told that they've got a screw loose. But that doesn't mean it ain't so.
What you say is true, but there limits. Somethings just can't be learned because the underlying hardware and control structures do not exist. Your ability to learn new facial movements may be impressive, but it may be that you have a particular genetic predisposition to do that.
Simply put, if the nerves from the brain to allow a muscle to do a specific movement do not exist, no amount of practice is going to help let you make that movement.
Rolling tongues, as a concrete example, is something that some people can do and others cannot, and it's controlled by genes.
The very idea of a rule against hurting humans implies that a robot knows:
1. What hurting means is it pain? death? financial impact? what about indirect effects? If I help human 1 build a better mousetrap, I am indirectly harming some other human's way of life.
2. What people are
3. Where they are
These are highly non trivial problems. In fact, they're unsolvable to any degree of certainty. They only make sense in a *science fiction* book in which a highly talented author is telling you a story. In the real world, they are meaningless because of their computational intractibility.
In the real world, we use codes of ethics and/or morality. Such codes recognize the fact that there are no absolutes and sometimes making a decision that will ultimately cause harm to someone is inevitable.
So can we please stop with these damned laws already?
I use nanotechnology with every breath I draw. Nanoparticles of oxygen enter my lungs, merge with my bloodstream in nanoreactions, and are nano-ported to the rest of the nanomachines that make up my body.
I really detest what journalism does to otherwise upstanding and level headed scientists
The parent poster has apparently zero expertise with robotics.
But he can build a robot
You make this point with Lego's? I understand you're trying to make a conceptual point here, but this is the same as pretending that we should be worried about a kid making a rocket launcher because he can make a slingshot.
Why are "killer robots" so scary to you? There are a million ways you can die, and killer robots are, probalistically, waaaaay down on the list of things you should be worrying about. There are many unsolved problems in creating a truly dangerous robot, from materials, to power sources, to AI that can navigate its way out of a corner.
Hell we can't even make a car that can drive itself through the desert.
So this is the same guy who designed a device that runs on a single platform, is fairly simple, and yet manages to crash periodically in a way that requires you to *drain the battery* to reset it.
Pardon me if I don't stand up and applaud.
The Ipod is an amazing piece of hardware and haptic engineering, but the software is pretty flakey.
Not that I didn't before. You'd be amazed what a can of mountain dew will do to a laptop keyboard. I spent hours cleaning underneath every single key anddddd myyyyyy typpping stttttiiiiill lookeddd llike thhhhhhhhhhis.
Lions, as individuals don't need to eat people to learn that we're tasty. It's in our smell and the way we move.
There are much simpler reasons that people are buried deep underground across cultures, including feelings of kinship with the deceased, and the desire to not smell or look at rotting corpses. It's a mistake to make a jump to assuming that it's some kind of clever trick to confuse lions.
The idea that game developers crank out 10 different versions of Madden's football because they enjoy it is so naive it makes me twitch.
Everyone wants to do what these kids did, and there's plenty of talent. Turns out that it's easier to have good ideas than it is to have a million dollars to burn on a new concept with an untested devteam.
It's not proof of concept if they can't expose the biological sensors to real stimuli. Why not? I'm guessing that light gradients in the real world aren't sufficient to drive the slime strongly enough to react quickly enough to be interesting.
You have a good case with olfactory receptors being better in bio form than silicon, but it is almost certainly true that photoresistors are more sensitive to light than the slime. So why bother with it? (hint, the answer is grant money)
All this proves is that they can detect the slime's movement, which is interesting, but has nothing to do with bio sensors.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice of you to hijack the thread for a bit of religious dogma.
You underestimate the elegance of evolution and hence misunderstand it (which probably contributes to your need to attribute our existence to the divine). Yes individual changes produce very little obvious benefit, but the offspring is almost always still viable. This is very important because it means that evolution can (and does) make LOTS of changes within in each generation through sexual reproduction. In so doing it blazes through parameter space. Our developmental engine for turning DNA into a human is incredibly robust.
Computer code, on the other hand, is extremely brittle. Most changes will break something causing a crash or compilation error, so progress would be horribly slow.
The success of evolution in creating us has nothing to do with time.
The reason evolution works for us and not for computer programs is that the language of our DNA is specifically geared to be useful for evolution. From the protein to the cell to the body, the coding system is designed so that new variations usually produce viable offspring. The fact that someone with an entire extra chromosome (Downs syndrome) can exist is a testament to the robustness of this code.
This isn't surprising. Naturally evolution would prefer to stick with a coding system that facilitates faster evolution. Anything else would get selected out.
The biggest problem is that Microsoft has gotten people to believe that computers are inherently unreliable, unstable, and buggy
It's not just Microsoft though. Mac's prior to OS X (not to bash Mac's I have an Ibook and love it) were horrible. I'm forced to use one right now at work and it's far worse that Windows ever was. I've had control panel applications crash. Everything seems to be threaded together and losing access to the interface while an application (often the Finder) takes complete control of the system is a regular occurence.
It's hard to believe that the miracle of OS X came out of the same company frankly. sheesh.
It's not a mystery at all. GA's are not well suited to this problem. See my reply to the GP.
It's hard to see why genetic algorithms are an inherently good way to design computer virii. The fitness landscape is not well suited to GA'S, it's too rugged. GA's need a particular structure of problem to function well, one in which every change produces an incremental benefit or impairment.
Changing which registry key a worm modifies, or what files a virus affects will cause wildly varrying effects, 99.9999% of which will cause either no discernable effect, or blue screen the system. This is not a good setup for the GA to figure out what works best.
So despite the similarity in name and function with biological viruses, computer virii (and worms, trojans etc) are not really evolvable, but need to be engineered.
Excellent post.
However, there are other factors that make getting off an MMOG addiction harder then just finding something "more fun". The brain uses dopamine to indicate fun yes, but it also learns which things are fun making it all the more likely to do those things, and all the harder to stop. It takes time to learn a new fun activity because you have to beat not just the dopamine released by warcraft, but all the learning as well.
And there's another factor: quitting WOW also means coming to realization that you just flushed away the last 2 years of your youth is a soul crushing and therefun distinctly unfun experience. The new fun activity has to be more fun than WOW plus the unfun of coming to this epiphany.
Some players have this epiphany while still playing WOW, and at that point the game becomes not just fun, but an escape mechanism as well.
So nothing you've said is wrong, but there are a few additional wrinkles. Evolution has tacked a great deal of learning on top of our "fun detector" and WOW pushes all the right buttons.
Similarly, if cell phones could muck up the instrumentation on an airplane, every plane within 100 miles of a lightning bolt would barrel roll into the ground in seconds.
Both are equally superstitous nonsense. Unfortunately the airplane voodoo is widely believed by anyone who doesn't understand electric fields. Of course the airlines tell us this storyon every flight. If the EM sensititivity were as widely repeated, most people would probably believe that too.
Your proposed test won't a very good one if the friend believes the symptoms are legitimate.
By knowing whether it's turned on or not, it's likely they'll subconsciously send this information to the subject. This might take the form of repeated questions about how he's feeling when it's turned on, and disinterest when it's off. It wouldn't be hard to pick up on these cues, even without trying.
Resonance requires a very specific coupling between frequencies. If this was actually about resonance, you would only be sensitive to one particular frequency band (and it's higher order harmonics). Yet somehow these people claim to get sick from 50 hz, 60 hz, 2.4 Ghz...
What a fantastic coincidence that all of the frequencies we use in commercial applications happen to be the ones that "resonate" in some way.
Or maybe it's all in their heads.
Noone likes to be told that they've got a screw loose. But that doesn't mean it ain't so.
What you say is true, but there limits. Somethings just can't be learned because the underlying hardware and control structures do not exist. Your ability to learn new facial movements may be impressive, but it may be that you have a particular genetic predisposition to do that.
Simply put, if the nerves from the brain to allow a muscle to do a specific movement do not exist, no amount of practice is going to help let you make that movement.
Rolling tongues, as a concrete example, is something that some people can do and others cannot, and it's controlled by genes.
I think he is the author.
that or a business partner of some kind
My thoughts?
I smell an astroturfer.
I could swear it said "Farting" for both the first and second reads....
You're mostly right, but there are exceptions. I dare you to put MOO2 down after 10 minutes.
I just lost a week to it recently after I was stupid enough to reinstall it.
I'm sure Civ would be the same.
Modern turn-based games have gotten too complicated and have lost the fun aspect. In this case, the old ones really are better.
Mod parent down
Modern rendering in the 360 can produce shots like that on the fly. The era of pre-rendered movies has been over for a few years.
Then you need more learnin because there are lots of them.
No, in a world in which everything affects everything else, they are intractable, period.
The very idea of a rule against hurting humans implies that a robot knows:
1. What hurting means
is it pain? death? financial impact? what about indirect effects? If I help human 1 build a better mousetrap, I am indirectly harming some other human's way of life.
2. What people are
3. Where they are
These are highly non trivial problems. In fact, they're unsolvable to any degree of certainty. They only make sense in a *science fiction* book in which a highly talented author is telling you a story. In the real world, they are meaningless because of their computational intractibility.
In the real world, we use codes of ethics and/or morality. Such codes recognize the fact that there are no absolutes and sometimes making a decision that will ultimately cause harm to someone is inevitable.
So can we please stop with these damned laws already?
Jingoism at its worst.
I use nanotechnology with every breath I draw. Nanoparticles of oxygen enter my lungs, merge with my bloodstream in nanoreactions, and are nano-ported to the rest of the nanomachines that make up my body.
I really detest what journalism does to otherwise upstanding and level headed scientists
The parent poster has apparently zero expertise with robotics.
But he can build a robot
You make this point with Lego's? I understand you're trying to make a conceptual point here, but this is the same as pretending that we should be worried about a kid making a rocket launcher because he can make a slingshot.
Why are "killer robots" so scary to you? There are a million ways you can die, and killer robots are, probalistically, waaaaay down on the list of things you should be worrying about. There are many unsolved problems in creating a truly dangerous robot, from materials, to power sources, to AI that can navigate its way out of a corner.
Hell we can't even make a car that can drive itself through the desert.
So this is the same guy who designed a device that runs on a single platform, is fairly simple, and yet manages to crash periodically in a way that requires you to *drain the battery* to reset it.
Pardon me if I don't stand up and applaud.
The Ipod is an amazing piece of hardware and haptic engineering, but the software is pretty flakey.
Not that I didn't before. You'd be amazed what a can of mountain dew will do to a laptop keyboard. I spent hours cleaning underneath every single key anddddd myyyyyy typpping stttttiiiiill lookeddd llike thhhhhhhhhhis.
Lions, as individuals don't need to eat people to learn that we're tasty. It's in our smell and the way we move.
There are much simpler reasons that people are buried deep underground across cultures, including feelings of kinship with the deceased, and the desire to not smell or look at rotting corpses. It's a mistake to make a jump to assuming that it's some kind of clever trick to confuse lions.
Mod Parent Up
The idea that game developers crank out 10 different versions of Madden's football because they enjoy it is so naive it makes me twitch.
Everyone wants to do what these kids did, and there's plenty of talent. Turns out that it's easier to have good ideas than it is to have a million dollars to burn on a new concept with an untested devteam.
It's not proof of concept if they can't expose the biological sensors to real stimuli. Why not? I'm guessing that light gradients in the real world aren't sufficient to drive the slime strongly enough to react quickly enough to be interesting.
You have a good case with olfactory receptors being better in bio form than silicon, but it is almost certainly true that photoresistors are more sensitive to light than the slime. So why bother with it? (hint, the answer is grant money)
All this proves is that they can detect the slime's movement, which is interesting, but has nothing to do with bio sensors.