It's only the readout from the quantum computer which is (or appears) random. The actual calculation is completely deterministic and doesn't exhibit randomness.
Now one could, of course, imagine that this apparent randomness on readout is governed by another resource which is of yet unknown to us, and which could be utilized for calculating better. But that would go beyond quantum mechanics, and the computer doing this would not be a quantum computer, but a new type of computer which can utilize this hypothetical resource. It would be this "sub-quantum" resource which would then potentially allow solving additional problems, not quantum mechanics. Therefore I maintain that quantum effects wouldn't help. "Sub-quantum" effects however might, if they exist.
They seldom show interstellar space in the series. They most often show the interior of the space ship (and all the social interaction there could generally as well happen if they were orbiting a star), and the only interesting things outside the ship are usually when they encounter another planet (-> not interstellar space), or when they encounter another space ship or several of them (while that may happen in interstellar space, it's would not be any less interesting close to a star).
The Enterprise is actually proof that interstellar space is boring: Do you think they had made the huge effort to build a holodeck into the ship to entertain the people on it, if that would not have been needed to bear those long, boring interstellar travels? Of course they don't show the boring parts of the travel in the series. They also don't show that people shit. I don't think future people will be able to avoid shitting.
Quantum entanglement-based teleportation will enable us to create robots, teleport them to far away lands, and then said robot will teleport back the video, sensor data, etc instantly as if it were a computer sitting on the floor next to you.
Whatever hypothetical future technology would enable us to instantly teleport information would certainly not be based on quantum entanglement. The only thing which quantum entanglement would provide is that if we already had instantaneous classical communication through other means (and classical communication is actually all you need to send video and sensor data), then we could use that technology to also make quantum communication instantly, even if that instant-communication technology by itself doesn't preserve quantum information.
You know, strong enough gravitational waves will also make your eardrum (and the membrane of a microphone) vibrate, and therefore cause the perception of sound. And unlike sound waves, gravitational waves can travel through vacuum. I'm sure that warp technology produces an awful lot of those gravitational waves.
Actually I'd love bicycles to have a required minimum noise level (not speakers, but at least some noise). To often I've been surprised by a practically silent bike coming from behind me and, from my perception, suddenly appearing close to my side. Yes, bicyclists are supposed to use the bell, and they are also supposed to keep a reasonable minimum safety distance. However, reality is all too often different.
This would be the coolest thing ever, if instead of "vroom vroom" noises, it played the lyrics to Madness' Driving in My Car read out by a bad Japanese speech synthesizer.
I've been driving in my car, it's not quite a Jaguar I bought it in Primrose Hill from a bloke from Brazil It was made in '59 in a factory by the Tyne...
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm not sure I'd want to drive a car built by people who build colliders. I prefer to not collide with my car.:-)
If this goes into regular use, I won't be able to fly without having to worry about cellular level damage. I've already received the maximum life-time dosage of x-rays for medical treatment.
Flying exposes you to radiation anyway, so if that's a problem for you, then you better not fly. However they mention the use of this at other places, like sport stadiums. So with this, you also better don't visit any sports event either.
Well, it's a very specific bad time (60 seconds after the minute), and it only can occur at very specific times (IIRC there are exactly two times a year where a leap second could be inserted). Therefore a malfunction causing this very specific time at the very specific date is much less likely than a malfunction creating a generally valid-looking time. Therefore basically the following rule should work well: If seconds>60 or seconds0, it's bogus. If seconds == 60, check if it's one of the two times a year it may occur, otherwise it's bogus. If it's at one of the two valid times, assume it's a legit leap second. Basically it increases the number of valid time codes in a year from 31536000 different values (31622400 for leap years) to 31536002 different values (31622402 for leap years).
If I send an AM signal and modulate it in a way that can carry data, it's going to be very clear that I am doing so to anyone who receives it and understands the concept of modulation.
I marked an essential part. To detect amplitude modulation, you have to know amplitude modulation. And if all you know is amplitude modulation and seek for AM signals, you'll not notice the FM signal quite in front of your nose. Or the spread spectrum signal. And how do you know what the aliens use to encode the message in? Maybe it's in the polarization of the waves. Or maybe it's in some correlation between frequency and amplitude, or frequency and polarization.
But even if you know that the potential message uses amplitude modulation: How do you distinguish a randomly modulated EM wave (i.e. noise) from a EM wave modulated with an apparently random signal?
And I just noticed that you obviously think you'll always have a binary encoding of the signal. But there's no reason to assume that. To start with, until recently all TV transmissions were analog. And even digital data doesn't have to be transmitted in a binary code. (And if you are going to say that a ternary code should be as easy to detect: There's also no need to use a ternary code. What if the aliens use a 200-symbol code?)
The point is, the universe is full of natural sources of noise. So the task is to distinguish a natural source from an artificial source. Without knowing where the sender of the artificial source is sitting (or if he exists at all).
Or to take your Ethernet example: There's not only the one cable where I send the perfectly compressed message, but there are a hundred other cables through which truly random content is sent. The receiver of course knows which cable I use, and can therefore get my message without problems. But you'd be hard pressed to detect my perfectly compressed message in between all those truly random data streams.
Well, one could also argue that our brain was "tweaked" during evolution to better understand the world around us. That doesn't hinder us to accept the result as intelligence.
However, I think the idea behind Hutter's claim is that the more you understand about something, the better you can predict it, and therefore the better you can compress it. In other words, starting from a certain point, to better compress you basically have to develop an AI. To me that doesn't mean that researching compression methods is an easier way to AI, but rather that to get really good compression, you have to do AI research.
One thought I once had was what would happen if you used the decompressor of a perfect compression algorithm, and fed it actual white noise? IMHO the result should be something which is mostly meaningful, because it's improbably that meaningless stuff would be thrown at the compression algorithm, therefore the perfect compression algorithm would generate long and therefore unlikely bit sequences from them, while short bit sequences would correspond to meaningful stuff. Therefore random noise should most likely decompress to meaningful stuff. Of course that meaningful stuff would most likely be complete nonsense, but meaningful nonsense, nonsense where every part makes some sense, only everything together doesn't.
I am not a biologist, nor an evolutionist, but as I understand it 'evolution' (talking macro-evolution here, not micro) is believed to be random mutations that turn out to be beneficial to a creature and so enable it to survive and pass along its genetic code to the next generation - so it is indeed random, and if you elevate it to anything higher you are anthropomorphizing the idea of evolution itself.
While I'm also not a biologist (I'm a physicist), I believe I know enough about the basic ideas of evolution to make that statement. I'm certainly far from anthropomorphising evolution.
While random mutations are indeed essential to evolutions, they are not by themselves evolution. Your implied assumption ios that because it's all random mutations, it produces only random results. But that argument is like warning to enter a hot-air balloon because it works based on the random movement of molecules. Which is somewhat true, but the point is that by by the law of big numbers, you get something very reliable. The random movement of the molecules gives a very predictable rise of the hot-air balloon. And the random mutations together with the other important part of evolution, selection, also give a quite deterministic system (although not completely deterministic, but I think that's because it's actually a nonlinear process; small random deviations, be it mutations or random variations in the environment, can be amplified to macroscopic scale in finite time). Basically mutation and selection together form a "selective force": The mutation is responsible for the population to "move", and selection is responsible for giving the direction in which it moves.
You make some good points. I could easily hate living the way my grandmother did for the last year of her life. But your objections could work just as well for sentient machines. They can fill up the world and they can go insane as well. Yes, we could stop those things from happening, but we can also do that for organic life. We already have memory erasure drugs (or at least I think we had hvae them...) and some very effective birth control.
There's no reason why intelligent machines should also be self-reproducing. If we don't make them self-reproducing (and why should we?) then they will certainly not fill up the world.
But that's besides the point. The question is not whether we are better of with an AI or without, the question is if an AI will eventually be created. And I'd say if it is possible, and we continue to have the resources to do so, then most probably we will. And the most probable reason will be: To show that we can.
I can not consider your response to be a conclusive rebuttal to my main points:
Organics do it better than silicates. That is why we evolved while they had to wait for us to invent.
That's nonsense. What organics do better is to build up themselves (namely, they can do it, silicon can't; a robot might be able to produce a copy of itself, but it cannot grow itself from something simple). But that doesn't tell you anything about what is better for intelligence. The fact that the only natural intelligence we know is organic is from the pure fact that it was the only substrate available, because organic is the only form that can self-build (the whole process of going from a single cell to a full human is autonomous; all the mother does is to give nutrition, oxygen and a stable, protected environment). But that doesn't say the least bit whether it's the best substrate for intelligence.
My main point remains, the people talking about sentient machines are bragging, not making valid points. They have made NO resonable explanation about why they think that silicate based life forms are easier to engineer to immortality than organic based ones.
I strongly doubt they would be immortal (anyone who thinks that obviously has never seen a computer failing). However, they are clearly better suited for space exploration: They don't need air, they don't need water, they can withstand higher accelerations, they don't suffer under weightlessness, they don't get bored (OK, the latter might be different for a true AI, but then, you could simply put it to sleep in situation where non-AI systems work well, and only wake it up for situations where it is needed). To send humans in space, you need complex life-support systems. To send machines into space you just need an energy source.
The point is that life forms, including humans, evolved to live in an ecosystem. If you want to leave that ecosystem, you basically have to carry an imitation around with you. While this is certainly possible, it's wasteful. Machines OTOH don't need an ecosystem. Give them power, give them a protection against cosmic rays (you'd need that part for humans, too), and they'll work great.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only the readout from the quantum computer which is (or appears) random. The actual calculation is completely deterministic and doesn't exhibit randomness.
Now one could, of course, imagine that this apparent randomness on readout is governed by another resource which is of yet unknown to us, and which could be utilized for calculating better. But that would go beyond quantum mechanics, and the computer doing this would not be a quantum computer, but a new type of computer which can utilize this hypothetical resource. It would be this "sub-quantum" resource which would then potentially allow solving additional problems, not quantum mechanics. Therefore I maintain that quantum effects wouldn't help. "Sub-quantum" effects however might, if they exist.
They seldom show interstellar space in the series. They most often show the interior of the space ship (and all the social interaction there could generally as well happen if they were orbiting a star), and the only interesting things outside the ship are usually when they encounter another planet (-> not interstellar space), or when they encounter another space ship or several of them (while that may happen in interstellar space, it's would not be any less interesting close to a star).
The Enterprise is actually proof that interstellar space is boring: Do you think they had made the huge effort to build a holodeck into the ship to entertain the people on it, if that would not have been needed to bear those long, boring interstellar travels? Of course they don't show the boring parts of the travel in the series. They also don't show that people shit. I don't think future people will be able to avoid shitting.
Actually I think a teleportation device for interstellar distances would be more useful. No need to hang around in the boring interstellar space.
They don't have our sun, but they have their sun.
Yes, I've heard the aliens are much more logical: There every sort of violence against others can earn you a medal.
Whatever hypothetical future technology would enable us to instantly teleport information would certainly not be based on quantum entanglement. The only thing which quantum entanglement would provide is that if we already had instantaneous classical communication through other means (and classical communication is actually all you need to send video and sensor data), then we could use that technology to also make quantum communication instantly, even if that instant-communication technology by itself doesn't preserve quantum information.
You know, strong enough gravitational waves will also make your eardrum (and the membrane of a microphone) vibrate, and therefore cause the perception of sound. And unlike sound waves, gravitational waves can travel through vacuum. I'm sure that warp technology produces an awful lot of those gravitational waves.
Actually I'd love bicycles to have a required minimum noise level (not speakers, but at least some noise). To often I've been surprised by a practically silent bike coming from behind me and, from my perception, suddenly appearing close to my side. Yes, bicyclists are supposed to use the bell, and they are also supposed to keep a reasonable minimum safety distance. However, reality is all too often different.
You hear that loud "Whooooosh" sound? No, that wasn't a Prius.
You mean, a man's voice reading Lisp programs aloud?
All I get is: "Dieses Video ist nicht verfügbar." (This video is not available) - So I conclude the sound will not be available?
This would be the coolest thing ever, if instead of "vroom vroom" noises, it played the lyrics to Madness' Driving in My Car read out by a bad Japanese speech synthesizer.
I've been driving in my car, it's not quite a Jaguar
I bought it in Primrose Hill from a bloke from Brazil
It was made in '59 in a factory by the Tyne...
I'm not sure I'd want to drive a car built by people who build colliders. I prefer to not collide with my car. :-)
"I'm not dead yet"?
I choose the voice making "Vroom! Vroom!"
Flying exposes you to radiation anyway, so if that's a problem for you, then you better not fly.
However they mention the use of this at other places, like sport stadiums. So with this, you also better don't visit any sports event either.
This is Slashdot. We need car analogies!
So I get Intel will counter AMD's Bulldozer with their new Vogon architecture?
Well, it's a very specific bad time (60 seconds after the minute), and it only can occur at very specific times (IIRC there are exactly two times a year where a leap second could be inserted). Therefore a malfunction causing this very specific time at the very specific date is much less likely than a malfunction creating a generally valid-looking time. Therefore basically the following rule should work well: If seconds>60 or seconds0, it's bogus. If seconds == 60, check if it's one of the two times a year it may occur, otherwise it's bogus. If it's at one of the two valid times, assume it's a legit leap second. Basically it increases the number of valid time codes in a year from 31536000 different values (31622400 for leap years) to 31536002 different values (31622402 for leap years).
So why change UTC, instead of simply changing critical applications to use TIA instead?
I marked an essential part. To detect amplitude modulation, you have to know amplitude modulation. And if all you know is amplitude modulation and seek for AM signals, you'll not notice the FM signal quite in front of your nose. Or the spread spectrum signal. And how do you know what the aliens use to encode the message in? Maybe it's in the polarization of the waves. Or maybe it's in some correlation between frequency and amplitude, or frequency and polarization.
But even if you know that the potential message uses amplitude modulation: How do you distinguish a randomly modulated EM wave (i.e. noise) from a EM wave modulated with an apparently random signal?
And I just noticed that you obviously think you'll always have a binary encoding of the signal. But there's no reason to assume that. To start with, until recently all TV transmissions were analog. And even digital data doesn't have to be transmitted in a binary code. (And if you are going to say that a ternary code should be as easy to detect: There's also no need to use a ternary code. What if the aliens use a 200-symbol code?)
Maybe you could make an adapter which makes the keyboard look like a Braille device to the iP*?
The point is, the universe is full of natural sources of noise. So the task is to distinguish a natural source from an artificial source. Without knowing where the sender of the artificial source is sitting (or if he exists at all).
Or to take your Ethernet example: There's not only the one cable where I send the perfectly compressed message, but there are a hundred other cables through which truly random content is sent. The receiver of course knows which cable I use, and can therefore get my message without problems. But you'd be hard pressed to detect my perfectly compressed message in between all those truly random data streams.
Well, one could also argue that our brain was "tweaked" during evolution to better understand the world around us. That doesn't hinder us to accept the result as intelligence.
However, I think the idea behind Hutter's claim is that the more you understand about something, the better you can predict it, and therefore the better you can compress it. In other words, starting from a certain point, to better compress you basically have to develop an AI. To me that doesn't mean that researching compression methods is an easier way to AI, but rather that to get really good compression, you have to do AI research.
One thought I once had was what would happen if you used the decompressor of a perfect compression algorithm, and fed it actual white noise? IMHO the result should be something which is mostly meaningful, because it's improbably that meaningless stuff would be thrown at the compression algorithm, therefore the perfect compression algorithm would generate long and therefore unlikely bit sequences from them, while short bit sequences would correspond to meaningful stuff. Therefore random noise should most likely decompress to meaningful stuff. Of course that meaningful stuff would most likely be complete nonsense, but meaningful nonsense, nonsense where every part makes some sense, only everything together doesn't.
Not simply random mutations. Evolution.
I am not a biologist, nor an evolutionist, but as I understand it 'evolution' (talking macro-evolution here, not micro) is believed to be random mutations that turn out to be beneficial to a creature and so enable it to survive and pass along its genetic code to the next generation - so it is indeed random, and if you elevate it to anything higher you are anthropomorphizing the idea of evolution itself.
While I'm also not a biologist (I'm a physicist), I believe I know enough about the basic ideas of evolution to make that statement. I'm certainly far from anthropomorphising evolution.
While random mutations are indeed essential to evolutions, they are not by themselves evolution. Your implied assumption ios that because it's all random mutations, it produces only random results. But that argument is like warning to enter a hot-air balloon because it works based on the random movement of molecules. Which is somewhat true, but the point is that by by the law of big numbers, you get something very reliable. The random movement of the molecules gives a very predictable rise of the hot-air balloon. And the random mutations together with the other important part of evolution, selection, also give a quite deterministic system (although not completely deterministic, but I think that's because it's actually a nonlinear process; small random deviations, be it mutations or random variations in the environment, can be amplified to macroscopic scale in finite time). Basically mutation and selection together form a "selective force": The mutation is responsible for the population to "move", and selection is responsible for giving the direction in which it moves.
There's no reason why intelligent machines should also be self-reproducing. If we don't make them self-reproducing (and why should we?) then they will certainly not fill up the world.
But that's besides the point. The question is not whether we are better of with an AI or without, the question is if an AI will eventually be created. And I'd say if it is possible, and we continue to have the resources to do so, then most probably we will. And the most probable reason will be: To show that we can.
That's nonsense. What organics do better is to build up themselves (namely, they can do it, silicon can't; a robot might be able to produce a copy of itself, but it cannot grow itself from something simple). But that doesn't tell you anything about what is better for intelligence. The fact that the only natural intelligence we know is organic is from the pure fact that it was the only substrate available, because organic is the only form that can self-build (the whole process of going from a single cell to a full human is autonomous; all the mother does is to give nutrition, oxygen and a stable, protected environment). But that doesn't say the least bit whether it's the best substrate for intelligence.
I strongly doubt they would be immortal (anyone who thinks that obviously has never seen a computer failing). However, they are clearly better suited for space exploration: They don't need air, they don't need water, they can withstand higher accelerations, they don't suffer under weightlessness, they don't get bored (OK, the latter might be different for a true AI, but then, you could simply put it to sleep in situation where non-AI systems work well, and only wake it up for situations where it is needed). To send humans in space, you need complex life-support systems. To send machines into space you just need an energy source.
The point is that life forms, including humans, evolved to live in an ecosystem. If you want to leave that ecosystem, you basically have to carry an imitation around with you. While this is certainly possible, it's wasteful. Machines OTOH don't need an ecosystem. Give them power, give them a protection against cosmic rays (you'd need that part for humans, too), and they'll work great.