It makes we wonder why we don't use leadship simulators. I'm thinking of something like SimCity meets CivIII. Lots of variables to tweak that can have various effects on the nation and its economy. Then we could have cool elections based on the candidates playing the games to see who can score highest.
Of course, we'd never agree on how to score the results or which models to base the simulation on. After all, depending on how you slant the models you could have the ultimate propaganda tool...
The problem with this is that you're still searching for a particular problem domain; the AI bait 'n switchers will say it's not thinking once you've solved it (because to them it's not thinking if a machine can do it).
This is the point that I'm trying to make to you. If you solve the actual problem then you have not created an AI, you've merely produced a specialised tool for a given domain. An actual AI would be a generic solution that could take information about any domain that it had been exposed to before and conjecture how to apply that experience to its current domain. Chess computers don't do this, and most research into improving chess play is not AI research. It is just a search problem.
You mentioned that this could be generalised to make all problem solving just examples of search problems but that isn't true. What if you have a domain that cannot be easily expressed. Consider a program designed to produce art. What is its domain? Can it be searched? Or perhaps a counterpart that is designed to evaluate art and come up with aesthetic criteria to describe it - is it just searching a space?
I still hold that its not really a bait 'n switch. If you could create a program that could learn from experience then it would be an example of an AI. This has not yet been done although we have systems that we say learn (like neural nets) when all that they really do is find minimum solutions to sets of equations.
The actual question of can a machine ever be made to learn is an open one. True, such a machine if created would be an excellent chess player (after practice of course) but that doesn't mean that an excellent chess player is necessarily an example of an AI.
I was about to mod you down but it seems that it would be better to point out where you're wrong (for a change on slashdot;^). Whilst all early chess programs were mainly brute force with tree reduction the current generation use quite advanced heuristics to evalutate board position - precisely because this effectively increases their search depth by a few ply without such a high cost in computation. The source code for one of the earlier IBM machines is out on the web somewhere (I think it was deep blue, whichever one came first) and is loaded with these heuristics. This is the 'tuning' referred to between games in the match by the fritz programmers, reweighting these heuristics against each other.
I don't think that what you refer to is a bait 'n switch in the arguing sense. There are lots of problems that have seemed to indicate thinking which have been explored and found to be pure logic or mechanics. There are quite good working definitions for AI, it's just that nobody has come close to ever fulfilling them. Chess is certainly not an example of AI, it's just a search problem.
A true AI would be something that was capable of learning. Not simply training, like a neural net or having its heuristics reweighted, but something that could generalise experience from one domain into another domain to form plans of actions. Minsky at MIT springs to mind as somebody who is trying to nail down this big picture approach to AI but AFAIK nobody has come up with any problem domain that are both complex enough to demonstrate this behaviour but simple enough to understand. A real breakthrough in this area is going to have to wait until the genetics lottery gives us an Einstein or a Laplace in AI.
Err, ok then. You have trouble communicating with people don't you mr AC? I wasn't being condesending, I was pointing out to him that crypto is harder than it looks because most of the points are quite subtle. It's hardly pompous, I'm not even a crypto person myself although I know a few who are. I do know enough about electronic voting to know that it is hard to do properly.
The candidates that you vote for are part of the hash already. That was the point. I suggest you reread...
Designing a secure, anoymous, verifiable voting protocol is a hard problem. You just don't appreciate how hard it is because you don't have a background in crypto. Your system sounds nice and simple and secure but unfortunately isn't. What you have sacrificed is anonymity.
Basically, the voter number is public info, the results are public info. The only hidden info is the PIN number, and these would tend to be small so that people can remember them. So, if I want to know who you voted for, I take your voter number, I compute SHA-1 hashs of all possible pins in combination with your number (1000 or 10000 possibilities depending on PIN length). Then I search for which one of the possibilities is in the voter record. As the method of combining PIN and voternumber is fixed, I'm guarenteed not to accidently generate another valid combination, and then the SHA-1 algorithm gives me a very low collision probability so that we won't hit.
Then I just read back who you voted for. I can repeat this for the entire roll to remove the anonymity.
We have anonymous elections for a very good reason. Because its very hard to design an electronic system that works, most countries (like us here in the UK) use a paper system that works well enough. Its a shame that you guys are giving up your democratic rights.
You make a nice point but doesn't it fall apart when you think of cloning rather than moving. So what happens if the deep copy is restored whilst the original is still active? Which is the real person?
That's much cooler. There was an Amiga strategy / space-exploration games called Dueteros that did something similar. To get between the second and third stage of the game you had to fight off the hoards until you developed a star-drive. Of course if you had a cracked copy... you never did.
You make some good points, but I think the main problem with Michael's article is the shear amount of crack that he is smoking. Yah! Lets give $25K to everyone in the country, so everyone can be really happy and have nice middle-class lifes. In the opium laced utopia that he is currently inhabiting that makes sense, but here on planet earth we have a thing called inflation.
So what happens when you pump $25K x 300M = 7.5 trillion dollars into the economy? Do you think that the relative value of money does not decrease?
Now, don't get me wrong, he has one or two nice ideas in his list - particularly taxing extended copyrights. That one is a gem. But none of them are even with a few orders of magnitude of $7.5T.
An issue that he doesn't touch upon is what happens when the lower end of the gene-pool is freed from drudgery. Work is not just an economic activity, it also has a social function. Consider the collapse in living quality in communities where large numbers of men have been laid off of work, think of the fall of the coal industry in British northern industrial towns in the 80's.
What do you think the effect of releasing 80M people who don't have a high quality of education, have no great skills or abilities (his argument, not mine) and no ambitions from the workforce. Not just that, but giving them lots of cash and saying, here, go and enjoy your new life of freedom.
Does he really believe that a new Renaissance will result? Has he never seen Ibitha uncovered?
Whilst I don't agree with this idea, it does remind me of a game (sadly the name escapes my memory so no ref) which did something like this. There was multi-layer protection which kicked in over a period of time, so if you cracked it, it worked for a few weeks. Then the second layer cut in and locked you out. So you crack that.... The point is that you can't make something crack-proof but you can drag it out for long enough that the crackers lose interest. If your software uncracks itself over time then most of the kids who write cracks are only interested in the latest software, so hte odds of it getting cracked again and again drop dramatically. Annoy them enough and they'll go away.
It's a shame that there are so many uninformed moderators in the system. The point that this guy makes is perfectly true - it will be impossible to secure software from hackers until DRM is in a system. Now, there may be many other bad things about DRM that most slashdot readers don't agree with, but mod'ing this guy as flamebait because of your view just means that you're abusing the system. Meta-moderators take note.
Its a very good point and leads to the question, 'Is this the beginning of pro-gaming?'. After all, these are players competing at something for money, and you can assume that over time all of the best players will gravitate towards pay services. How long before games-player becomes a possible career move?
I find that memorysticks are very reliable as long as you don't write to them from the PC. They're fine as long as you only write to them from the camera (so obviously not any good for what this guy wants). If you do write from the PC (and I've tried this under linux and windows) then they totally blank the card pretty frequently. We scanned them and the problem is an incompatability between the way the hardware devices (like sony cameras) and the software drivers write to them. If you really want the data you can recover it by touching dummy filenames as its only the FAT entries that disappear, not the data.
It's good to see that they actually asked someone with a clue to quote for a change. All too often people will jump on the popularity bandwagon and say that its terrible that (videogames/television/insert arbitrary passtime here) is evil and should be banned. I'm glad they hit a psychologist who actually points out that there is no recognised addiction to videogaming. Addiction is a much over-used word, whilst there are real addictions in the world (heroin, ciggerettes, alchohol...) something that you do because you enjoy it, is *not* an addiction. If it leads you to neglect things in your life that are more important then that can be a tragedy but people need to learn self-control instead of blaming their problems on others.
There is still a huge price differential between storage on CD-R and harddisk. Harddisk densities are about 1Gb per 1 at the moment. A CD costs 0.18, thats nearly 5:1.
Amazingly, DVD-R is now that cheap, you can now get a 4.3Gb (well, they call them 4.7) DVD-R for 1.20. Now, that's the way to go for backup storage.
Congraulations. That is the highest mod I've seen for a troll in a long time. +5 insightful means that there are 5 other people in the world smoking the that same funky mellow blend of crack that you are.
Not only that, but the sanctions that were imposed were exploited by Saddam in an inconceivable way,
Err, do you even know what inconceivable means? And as I remember, most of the commentators at the time said that sanctions were a mistake because that was what would happen.
That would certainly be most people's first impression, but I find that the CSM is probably the *most* objective reporting I've ever seen to date. There doesn't seem to be any particular bias that I can see. I'm glad I found the CSM, and I really enjoy reading it, even though I'm agnostic. I highly recommend everyone take a look with an open mind.
Well done, you've completed reading your first ever magazine. Now try your second...
Re:Rusty Glucose - Good Question...
on
Powered by Blood
·
· Score: 1
So then it wouldn't be an RFID tag. We call that a radio beacon you dumbass. As an RFID is a passive beacon...
Re:Rusty Glucose - Good Question...
on
Powered by Blood
·
· Score: 1
Err, I take it that you know that RF tags don't require any power and that they only work over a few feet. I think you are thinking of something else...
Slashdot Mirror
GEEKS LIKE NET Truly an insightful study...
Errrr, right.
- int land[1000];
+ int land[100000];
weeeeeeeeeee
would be to tell him to take a look at http://www.pokerroom.com which does exactly what he wants and is mozilla friendly.
It makes we wonder why we don't use leadship simulators. I'm thinking of something like SimCity meets CivIII. Lots of variables to tweak that can have various effects on the nation and its economy. Then we could have cool elections based on the candidates playing the games to see who can score highest.
Of course, we'd never agree on how to score the results or which models to base the simulation on. After all, depending on how you slant the models you could have the ultimate propaganda tool...
The problem with this is that you're still searching for a particular problem domain; the AI bait 'n switchers will say it's not thinking once you've solved it (because to them it's not thinking if a machine can do it).
This is the point that I'm trying to make to you. If you solve the actual problem then you have not created an AI, you've merely produced a specialised tool for a given domain. An actual AI would be a generic solution that could take information about any domain that it had been exposed to before and conjecture how to apply that experience to its current domain. Chess computers don't do this, and most research into improving chess play is not AI research. It is just a search problem.
You mentioned that this could be generalised to make all problem solving just examples of search problems but that isn't true. What if you have a domain that cannot be easily expressed. Consider a program designed to produce art. What is its domain? Can it be searched? Or perhaps a counterpart that is designed to evaluate art and come up with aesthetic criteria to describe it - is it just searching a space?
I still hold that its not really a bait 'n switch. If you could create a program that could learn from experience then it would be an example of an AI. This has not yet been done although we have systems that we say learn (like neural nets) when all that they really do is find minimum solutions to sets of equations.
The actual question of can a machine ever be made to learn is an open one. True, such a machine if created would be an excellent chess player (after practice of course) but that doesn't mean that an excellent chess player is necessarily an example of an AI.
I was about to mod you down but it seems that it would be better to point out where you're wrong (for a change on slashdot ;^). Whilst all early chess programs were mainly brute force with tree reduction the current generation use quite advanced heuristics to evalutate board position - precisely because this effectively increases their search depth by a few ply without such a high cost in computation. The source code for one of the earlier IBM machines is out on the web somewhere (I think it was deep blue, whichever one came first) and is loaded with these heuristics. This is the 'tuning' referred to between games in the match by the fritz programmers, reweighting these heuristics against each other.
I don't think that what you refer to is a bait 'n switch in the arguing sense. There are lots of problems that have seemed to indicate thinking which have been explored and found to be pure logic or mechanics. There are quite good working definitions for AI, it's just that nobody has come close to ever fulfilling them. Chess is certainly not an example of AI, it's just a search problem.
A true AI would be something that was capable of learning. Not simply training, like a neural net or having its heuristics reweighted, but something that could generalise experience from one domain into another domain to form plans of actions. Minsky at MIT springs to mind as somebody who is trying to nail down this big picture approach to AI but AFAIK nobody has come up with any problem domain that are both complex enough to demonstrate this behaviour but simple enough to understand. A real breakthrough in this area is going to have to wait until the genetics lottery gives us an Einstein or a Laplace in AI.
Err, ok then. You have trouble communicating with people don't you mr AC? I wasn't being condesending, I was pointing out to him that crypto is harder than it looks because most of the points are quite subtle. It's hardly pompous, I'm not even a crypto person myself although I know a few who are. I do know enough about electronic voting to know that it is hard to do properly.
The candidates that you vote for are part of the hash already. That was the point. I suggest you reread...
How is Nortel doing these days? Their middle managers are all that way...
Designing a secure, anoymous, verifiable voting protocol is a hard problem. You just don't appreciate how hard it is because you don't have a background in crypto. Your system sounds nice and simple and secure but unfortunately isn't. What you have sacrificed is anonymity.
Basically, the voter number is public info, the results are public info. The only hidden info is the PIN number, and these would tend to be small so that people can remember them. So, if I want to know who you voted for, I take your voter number, I compute SHA-1 hashs of all possible pins in combination with your number (1000 or 10000 possibilities depending on PIN length). Then I search for which one of the possibilities is in the voter record. As the method of combining PIN and voternumber is fixed, I'm guarenteed not to accidently generate another valid combination, and then the SHA-1 algorithm gives me a very low collision probability so that we won't hit.
Then I just read back who you voted for. I can repeat this for the entire roll to remove the anonymity.
We have anonymous elections for a very good reason. Because its very hard to design an electronic system that works, most countries (like us here in the UK) use a paper system that works well enough. Its a shame that you guys are giving up your democratic rights.
Building a self-aware machine is going to be a bit more difficult than just hooking together a masssive beowolf cluster and hitting it with lightning
How unlucky are you? Surely if we do it enough times...
You make a nice point but doesn't it fall apart when you think of cloning rather than moving. So what happens if the deep copy is restored whilst the original is still active? Which is the real person?
That's much cooler. There was an Amiga strategy / space-exploration games called Dueteros that did something similar. To get between the second and third stage of the game you had to fight off the hoards until you developed a star-drive. Of course if you had a cracked copy ... you never did.
Very sweet answer to the problem.
You make some good points, but I think the main problem with Michael's article is the shear amount of crack that he is smoking. Yah! Lets give $25K to everyone in the country, so everyone can be really happy and have nice middle-class lifes. In the opium laced utopia that he is currently inhabiting that makes sense, but here on planet earth we have a thing called inflation.
So what happens when you pump $25K x 300M = 7.5 trillion dollars into the economy? Do you think that the relative value of money does not decrease?
Now, don't get me wrong, he has one or two nice ideas in his list - particularly taxing extended copyrights. That one is a gem. But none of them are even with a few orders of magnitude of $7.5T.
An issue that he doesn't touch upon is what happens when the lower end of the gene-pool is freed from drudgery. Work is not just an economic activity, it also has a social function. Consider the collapse in living quality in communities where large numbers of men have been laid off of work, think of the fall of the coal industry in British northern industrial towns in the 80's.
What do you think the effect of releasing 80M people who don't have a high quality of education, have no great skills or abilities (his argument, not mine) and no ambitions from the workforce. Not just that, but giving them lots of cash and saying, here, go and enjoy your new life of freedom.
Does he really believe that a new Renaissance will result? Has he never seen Ibitha uncovered?
Dammit! The gambler in me wants to take those odds ... but the slashdot reader is saying I Pity The Fool!
Whilst I don't agree with this idea, it does remind me of a game (sadly the name escapes my memory so no ref) which did something like this. There was multi-layer protection which kicked in over a period of time, so if you cracked it, it worked for a few weeks. Then the second layer cut in and locked you out. So you crack that .... The point is that you can't make something crack-proof but you can drag it out for long enough that the crackers lose interest. If your software uncracks itself over time then most of the kids who write cracks are only interested in the latest software, so hte odds of it getting cracked again and again drop dramatically. Annoy them enough and they'll go away.
It's a shame that there are so many uninformed moderators in the system. The point that this guy makes is perfectly true - it will be impossible to secure software from hackers until DRM is in a system. Now, there may be many other bad things about DRM that most slashdot readers don't agree with, but mod'ing this guy as flamebait because of your view just means that you're abusing the system. Meta-moderators take note.
Its a very good point and leads to the question, 'Is this the beginning of pro-gaming?'. After all, these are players competing at something for money, and you can assume that over time all of the best players will gravitate towards pay services. How long before games-player becomes a possible career move?
I find that memorysticks are very reliable as long as you don't write to them from the PC. They're fine as long as you only write to them from the camera (so obviously not any good for what this guy wants). If you do write from the PC (and I've tried this under linux and windows) then they totally blank the card pretty frequently. We scanned them and the problem is an incompatability between the way the hardware devices (like sony cameras) and the software drivers write to them. If you really want the data you can recover it by touching dummy filenames as its only the FAT entries that disappear, not the data.
It's good to see that they actually asked someone with a clue to quote for a change. All too often people will jump on the popularity bandwagon and say that its terrible that (videogames/television/insert arbitrary passtime here) is evil and should be banned. I'm glad they hit a psychologist who actually points out that there is no recognised addiction to videogaming. Addiction is a much over-used word, whilst there are real addictions in the world (heroin, ciggerettes, alchohol ...) something that you do because you enjoy it, is *not* an addiction. If it leads you to neglect things in your life that are more important then that can be a tragedy but people need to learn self-control instead of blaming their problems on others.
There is still a huge price differential between storage on CD-R and harddisk. Harddisk densities are about 1Gb per 1 at the moment. A CD costs 0.18, thats nearly 5:1. Amazingly, DVD-R is now that cheap, you can now get a 4.3Gb (well, they call them 4.7) DVD-R for 1.20. Now, that's the way to go for backup storage.
Congraulations. That is the highest mod I've seen for a troll in a long time. +5 insightful means that there are 5 other people in the world smoking the that same funky mellow blend of crack that you are.
Not only that, but the sanctions that were imposed were exploited by Saddam in an inconceivable way,
Err, do you even know what inconceivable means? And as I remember, most of the commentators at the time said that sanctions were a mistake because that was what would happen.
That would certainly be most people's first impression, but I find that the CSM is probably the *most* objective reporting I've ever seen to date. There doesn't seem to be any particular bias that I can see. I'm glad I found the CSM, and I really enjoy reading it, even though I'm agnostic. I highly recommend everyone take a look with an open mind.
Well done, you've completed reading your first ever magazine. Now try your second...
So then it wouldn't be an RFID tag. We call that a radio beacon you dumbass. As an RFID is a passive beacon...
Err, I take it that you know that RF tags don't require any power and that they only work over a few feet. I think you are thinking of something else...