All the Wired article states about the Caltech and Ohio State teams is that "The squads from Caltech and Ohio State University were also allowed in, even though their drones did not complete the obstacle course. "
From the Caltech team site: "Bob completed the test route flawlessly until the last few feet. He was stopped by DARPA officials seven feet away from the final obstacle -- although had he been allowed to continue, he may have stopped himself in time..."
In addition to his work with computers, von Neumann helped develop the atomic bomb for the United States during World War II, exposing himself to a great deal of radiation in the progress.
Although the sample looks impressive, I have a feeling that it is non-representative of the actual poetry put out by the program.
If the program writes enough lines and there is a human on the other end deciding which poems to submit as samples, the quality of the example poem is a statement only to the artistic judgment of the human and not to the quality of the program writing the poem.
Although this doesn't account for the entirety of the poem's quality (it would take a long time for a program just stringing words together to be coherent at all), there probably is a great deal of magnification going on here due to selection.
Reading Hilbert's lecture and a couple other sources, here is what I THINK Hilbert is asking in his 16th problem. Take this with a grain of salt.
The first part of Hilbert's 16th problem asks about the relative number and position of the components of a curve of order n. In other words, if we look at the graph of an equation of nth degree in the plane, what might the graph look like? We can describe it fairly easily for small n.
If n=1, the first order equations are precisely the linear ones, so the curve always consists of a single unbounded component (the straight line).
If n=2, the general equation of the 2nd order is Ax^2+Bxy+Cy^2+Dx+Ey+F=0, also known as the equation of a conic section. Depending on the coefficients, the graph will be a point, a line, a parabola, two intersecting lines, an ellipse, or a hyperbola. Geometrically, all of the cases but the last are only a single component. Therefore an equation of the second order has at most two branches. When there are two branches, they both are unbounded.
The case n=3 is much more complicated, and involves the study of what are known as elliptic curves. Beyond that, it just gets worse.
What Hilbert wished to have investigated was the geometry of the branches in the case of the curves with the most branches. As it turns out, you can't just have any orientation. If n=6, for example, the greatest number of branches is 11, but if the curve has 11 branches then one of the branches will always lie completely inside another branch. The 16th problem asks what similar restrictions are required for other n, and what happens if we look in higher dimensions than the plane.
A related problem that Hilbert referred to in his problem was that of curves defined by differential equations instead of polynomials. Here the objects of interest are boundary cycles of first order (featuring no derivatives higher than the first) differential equations. I have not encountered this term before, but if I had to guess I would say a boundary cycle was a closed, limiting path of a function satisfying the differential equation (so, for example, a boundary cycle of the second-order differential equation given by gravitation would be a planet's orbit after it is sucked in the system). The same sort of question is asked: how could these cycles be placed relative to one another in the plane? It is this question that may have been answered by the student in the article.
Not necessarily through the damage it does, but through the sheer number of times I have to get rid of it. Even though I use adaware and block cookies, it still manages to get itself in through a back door (I think it runs as a java applet, which then installs a cookie).
It doesn't do anything particularly nasty (other then send tracking data out), but I find it hard to block and its used by quite a few sites that I visit often (BBC, for example).
I fail to see the difference between the old way ("We've filed a lawsuit against you. Either settle with us or we'll take you to court") and the new one ("Either settle with us or we'll file a lawsuit and take you to court")
Is there some sort of long-term difference legally between a settlement reached before or after the lawsuit is filed?
Moxy Fruvous did an amusing take on the topic a few years ago at MIT on their U.S. tour. The discussion made it on their "Live Noise" album as "Kasparov vs. Deep Blue", and a transcript is available at http://www.fruvous.com/ln-lyr.html about 2/3 of the way down the page. (Warning, there are a few instances of adult language in the discussion)
That's a pretty strong statement to be making. Why do they think its a magnetic monopole and not one of a myriad other unknown or poorly understood effects?
"Just don't forget, bandwidth is no different than crude oil - it's very supply/demand driven, and right now, those who've survived to be here today in telecom just won't sell cheap anymore."
There is one critical difference in the supply curves between the two commodities. Oil's marginal cost increases as the most easily accessible oil is found and used. Bandwidth, on the other hand, I would think to have a decreasing marginal cost. Once they've laid down the cables to your house, it's not much more difficult to lay them down to the house next door (which is why it is much cheaper to wire 2000 people in a college dorm than in rural Montana).
This same property means that there is a tendency for telecom markets to tend towards monopoly -- firms attempting to enter the market are at a competitive disadvantage due to the cheaper marginal costs for the preexisting line. Perhaps this is why cable costs have increased so much since deregulation (as a previous poster complained).
Actually, the fault probably lies more in my trying to stretch the experiment to fit the discussion at hand. Thinking about it again, you're right in that the experiment was more about how much "fairness" was a part of each cultures values and how individuals utility consisted of more than just monetary gain in those cultures.
"it's obvious that people act to further their own interests".
Though this may happen most of the time, a lot of fascinating research (beyond this book) explores times when it doesn't. For example, Jean Ensminger at Caltech has been doing a series of games with various cultures around the world (involving sizable chunks of cash so participants should rationally try to do well).
One game is the "Ultimatum" game. Person 1 gets to decide how to split up $X between himself and person 2 (whose identity is unknown to him). Person 2 decides either to accept person 1's distribution or reject it (in which case both players get nothing). If people behave purely rationally, player 1 will offer player 2 a penny and player 2 will accept because it's better than nothing. She even did a simpler game where player 2 didn't have the option of accepting or rejecting, but just got what player 1 gave him.
The results: (Un)surprisingly, people behaved irrationally and would often split 50/50 even when there would be no consequences for an unfair offer. Furthermore, the more integrated the economy is (i.e. industrial nations), the more likely people were to split 50/50 instead of maximizing their own profit. Playing fast and loose with cause and effect, one could almost say that non-rationality is a prerequisite for the formation of sophisticated markets!
For a non-technical article on Ensminger's research in.pdf format, see http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/E nsminger%20Feature.pdf
How much more serious of an issue would this have been if a shelf of the same size broke off in Antarctica (where the ice is anchored to land) than in the Arctic (where it was floating before and thus won't raise sea levels)?
When there's a drought, what is the first thing my home city does? It requires that people who water their lawns every day "cut their bandwidth" by not watering as often.
Overloaded power grids? Rolling blackouts do the trick there.
Taking a brief look at the site you linked to, it doesn't seem as if that weblog is run by Clark at all. It's linked to under "grassroots support" on his site, but it seems to be just a place for Clark's supporters to discuss his campaign, and not Clark himself (correct me if I am mistaken)
that show that "faster, better, cheaper" shouldn't mean cutting as many corners as possible while earthside. Galileo was probably one of the top few probes ever on a measure of information learned per dollar spent NOT because we saved money while building it, but because it was built so well that it just kept on transmitting when by all rights it should have gone quiet a long time ago.
According to the chart on the NY times page, Kazaa has dropped from about 6.5 million homeusers in May to a little over 4 million now, a drop of a full third in a span of just a few months. That doesn't seem a "very little" drop to me (unless some other service happened to gain 2+ million users in those same few months)
You could always talk to Ahmed Zewail (1999 Nobel laureate in Chemistry). His work was on using laser flashes to gather images over a time scale of femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). I'm not sure how detailed these pictures would be, however, or if the method would be viable in liquid.
Start your own "spam" company as part of the slashdot program to end spam. Solicit e-mail addresses from willing slashdotters who provide the desired false leads. You get both the benefit of bogus leads and the windfall from all the extra false leads
It'll be harder and harder to get that to work though. I remember a story in the LA Times that said (don't necessarily trust me on the numbers) that one of the large spammers was still doing well at 10 responses per million. When we get down to numbers that small, it'll become harder and harder to convince each remaining person to stop responding, as we've reached the committed core who think spam really IS good for them.
Regardless of whether I can print fancy jewel case covers/inserts out, I wouldn't really see your music as "just getting a bunch of files" any more than I would see a CD as "just getting a bunch of 0's and 1's". Ideally, I would like to focus on just two things, the quality of the music you play and the quality of the transfer of the music into the file. I would be willing to pay much more for those things than I would for the extras you mention.
This reminds me of some of the practices espoused by Ayn Rand's future USA in Atlas Shrugged. It's horribly unfair that you're making more of a profit than I am when I compete with you, so we must 'level the playing field' at all costs. Of course, the net effect is that successful firms are eventually driven out of business, and the ones with political power rise to the top (regardless of how noble the original intentions).
I am disturbed that people are letting their hatred of Microsoft get in the way of their common sense.
In fact, let's extend it some more! I've always wanted to open a fast food restaurant, Mcdonald's has such an unfair advantage due to their existing market share. Let's require Mcdonald's to pay 10% of their profits to people like me who haven't been as successful so far.
From the article: "Forty-three million Americans â" half of those who connected to the Internet â" used file-sharing software last month that allows people to copy music without paying for it."
It is possible to allow P2P software for legal purposes only (though not very many people do so), and it is possible to use it only for movie trading, etc. The actual number may thus be somewhat higher.
Another way of viewing the 3D Rubik's cube (for the mathematicians out there) is as a group on 6 generators, meaning that any reachable configuration could be gotten by merely repeating the same 6 operations in some order (I believe the 6 generators being rotating the two outer 3x3x1 squares 90 degrees clockwise along any of the 3 axes).
Using this group, you could do various things like find the odds that a random arrangement of stickers is actually solvable (take the size of the group divided by the number of possible arrangements). Are there computations involving this for the 4D cube on the web anywhere?
I am a senior at Caltech. In my Freshman biology class (admittedly for non-majors), we had no labs, 7 problem sets. Of those sets, over consisted of either: 1. Writing Maple programs to solve differential equations. 2. Looking up phrases in biological databases and telling how many results were obtained 3. Learning how to use the swiss.pdb molecule viewer.
Slashdot Mirror
...as the article makes them out to be.
All the Wired article states about the Caltech and Ohio State teams is that "The squads from Caltech and Ohio State University were also allowed in, even though their drones did not complete the obstacle course. "
From the Caltech team site: "Bob completed the test route flawlessly until the last few feet. He was stopped by DARPA officials seven feet away from the final obstacle -- although had he been allowed to continue, he may have stopped himself in time..."
Seems close enough to me.
In addition to his work with computers, von Neumann helped develop the atomic bomb for the United States during World War II, exposing himself to a great deal of radiation in the progress.
Within 15 years he was dead from cancer.
Although the sample looks impressive, I have a feeling that it is non-representative of the actual poetry put out by the program. If the program writes enough lines and there is a human on the other end deciding which poems to submit as samples, the quality of the example poem is a statement only to the artistic judgment of the human and not to the quality of the program writing the poem. Although this doesn't account for the entirety of the poem's quality (it would take a long time for a program just stringing words together to be coherent at all), there probably is a great deal of magnification going on here due to selection.
Reading Hilbert's lecture and a couple other sources, here is what I THINK Hilbert is asking in his 16th problem. Take this with a grain of salt.
The first part of Hilbert's 16th problem asks about the relative number and position of the components of a curve of order n. In other words, if we look at the graph of an equation of nth degree in the plane, what might the graph look like? We can describe it fairly easily for small n.
If n=1, the first order equations are precisely the linear ones, so the curve always consists of a single unbounded component (the straight line).
If n=2, the general equation of the 2nd order is Ax^2+Bxy+Cy^2+Dx+Ey+F=0, also known as the equation of a conic section. Depending on the coefficients, the graph will be a point, a line, a parabola, two intersecting lines, an ellipse, or a hyperbola. Geometrically, all of the cases but the last are only a single component. Therefore an equation of the second order has at most two branches. When there are two branches, they both are unbounded.
The case n=3 is much more complicated, and involves the study of what are known as elliptic curves. Beyond that, it just gets worse.
What Hilbert wished to have investigated was the geometry of the branches in the case of the curves with the most branches. As it turns out, you can't just have any orientation. If n=6, for example, the greatest number of branches is 11, but if the curve has 11 branches then one of the branches will always lie completely inside another branch. The 16th problem asks what similar restrictions are required for other n, and what happens if we look in higher dimensions than the plane.
A related problem that Hilbert referred to in his problem was that of curves defined by differential equations instead of polynomials. Here the objects of interest are boundary cycles of first order (featuring no derivatives higher than the first) differential equations. I have not encountered this term before, but if I had to guess I would say a boundary cycle was a closed, limiting path of a function satisfying the differential equation (so, for example, a boundary cycle of the second-order differential equation given by gravitation would be a planet's orbit after it is sucked in the system). The same sort of question is asked: how could these cycles be placed relative to one another in the plane? It is this question that may have been answered by the student in the article.
Not necessarily through the damage it does, but through the sheer number of times I have to get rid of it. Even though I use adaware and block cookies, it still manages to get itself in through a back door (I think it runs as a java applet, which then installs a cookie).
It doesn't do anything particularly nasty (other then send tracking data out), but I find it hard to block and its used by quite a few sites that I visit often (BBC, for example).
I fail to see the difference between the old way ("We've filed a lawsuit against you. Either settle with us or we'll take you to court") and the new one ("Either settle with us or we'll file a lawsuit and take you to court")
Is there some sort of long-term difference legally between a settlement reached before or after the lawsuit is filed?
Moxy Fruvous did an amusing take on the topic a few years ago at MIT on their U.S. tour. The discussion made it on their "Live Noise" album as "Kasparov vs. Deep Blue", and a transcript is available at http://www.fruvous.com/ln-lyr.html about 2/3 of the way down the page. (Warning, there are a few instances of adult language in the discussion)
That's a pretty strong statement to be making. Why do they think its a magnetic monopole and not one of a myriad other unknown or poorly understood effects?
"Just don't forget, bandwidth is no different than crude oil - it's very supply/demand driven, and right now, those who've survived to be here today in telecom just won't sell cheap anymore."
There is one critical difference in the supply curves between the two commodities. Oil's marginal cost increases as the most easily accessible oil is found and used. Bandwidth, on the other hand, I would think to have a decreasing marginal cost. Once they've laid down the cables to your house, it's not much more difficult to lay them down to the house next door (which is why it is much cheaper to wire 2000 people in a college dorm than in rural Montana).
This same property means that there is a tendency for telecom markets to tend towards monopoly -- firms attempting to enter the market are at a competitive disadvantage due to the cheaper marginal costs for the preexisting line. Perhaps this is why cable costs have increased so much since deregulation (as a previous poster complained).
Actually, the fault probably lies more in my trying to stretch the experiment to fit the discussion at hand. Thinking about it again, you're right in that the experiment was more about how much "fairness" was a part of each cultures values and how individuals utility consisted of more than just monetary gain in those cultures.
"it's obvious that people act to further their own interests".
.pdf format, see http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/E nsminger%20Feature.pdf
Though this may happen most of the time, a lot of fascinating research (beyond this book) explores times when it doesn't. For example, Jean Ensminger at Caltech has been doing a series of games with various cultures around the world (involving sizable chunks of cash so participants should rationally try to do well).
One game is the "Ultimatum" game. Person 1 gets to decide how to split up $X between himself and person 2 (whose identity is unknown to him). Person 2 decides either to accept person 1's distribution or reject it (in which case both players get nothing). If people behave purely rationally, player 1 will offer player 2 a penny and player 2 will accept because it's better than nothing. She even did a simpler game where player 2 didn't have the option of accepting or rejecting, but just got what player 1 gave him.
The results: (Un)surprisingly, people behaved irrationally and would often split 50/50 even when there would be no consequences for an unfair offer. Furthermore, the more integrated the economy is (i.e. industrial nations), the more likely people were to split 50/50 instead of maximizing their own profit. Playing fast and loose with cause and effect, one could almost say that non-rationality is a prerequisite for the formation of sophisticated markets!
For a non-technical article on Ensminger's research in
How much more serious of an issue would this have been if a shelf of the same size broke off in Antarctica (where the ice is anchored to land) than in the Arctic (where it was floating before and thus won't raise sea levels)?
When there's a drought, what is the first thing my home city does? It requires that people who water their lawns every day "cut their bandwidth" by not watering as often.
Overloaded power grids? Rolling blackouts do the trick there.
Taking a brief look at the site you linked to, it doesn't seem as if that weblog is run by Clark at all. It's linked to under "grassroots support" on his site, but it seems to be just a place for Clark's supporters to discuss his campaign, and not Clark himself (correct me if I am mistaken)
that show that "faster, better, cheaper" shouldn't mean cutting as many corners as possible while earthside. Galileo was probably one of the top few probes ever on a measure of information learned per dollar spent NOT because we saved money while building it, but because it was built so well that it just kept on transmitting when by all rights it should have gone quiet a long time ago.
According to the chart on the NY times page, Kazaa has dropped from about 6.5 million homeusers in May to a little over 4 million now, a drop of a full third in a span of just a few months. That doesn't seem a "very little" drop to me (unless some other service happened to gain 2+ million users in those same few months)
You could always talk to Ahmed Zewail (1999 Nobel laureate in Chemistry). His work was on using laser flashes to gather images over a time scale of femtoseconds (10^-15 seconds). I'm not sure how detailed these pictures would be, however, or if the method would be viable in liquid.
Start your own "spam" company as part of the slashdot program to end spam. Solicit e-mail addresses from willing slashdotters who provide the desired false leads. You get both the benefit of bogus leads and the windfall from all the extra false leads
It'll be harder and harder to get that to work though. I remember a story in the LA Times that said (don't necessarily trust me on the numbers) that one of the large spammers was still doing well at 10 responses per million. When we get down to numbers that small, it'll become harder and harder to convince each remaining person to stop responding, as we've reached the committed core who think spam really IS good for them.
Regardless of whether I can print fancy jewel case covers/inserts out, I wouldn't really see your music as "just getting a bunch of files" any more than I would see a CD as "just getting a bunch of 0's and 1's". Ideally, I would like to focus on just two things, the quality of the music you play and the quality of the transfer of the music into the file. I would be willing to pay much more for those things than I would for the extras you mention.
This reminds me of some of the practices espoused by Ayn Rand's future USA in Atlas Shrugged. It's horribly unfair that you're making more of a profit than I am when I compete with you, so we must 'level the playing field' at all costs. Of course, the net effect is that successful firms are eventually driven out of business, and the ones with political power rise to the top (regardless of how noble the original intentions). I am disturbed that people are letting their hatred of Microsoft get in the way of their common sense.
In fact, let's extend it some more! I've always wanted to open a fast food restaurant, Mcdonald's has such an unfair advantage due to their existing market share. Let's require Mcdonald's to pay 10% of their profits to people like me who haven't been as successful so far.
From the article: "Forty-three million Americans â" half of those who connected to the Internet â" used file-sharing software last month that allows people to copy music without paying for it." It is possible to allow P2P software for legal purposes only (though not very many people do so), and it is possible to use it only for movie trading, etc. The actual number may thus be somewhat higher.
Another way of viewing the 3D Rubik's cube (for the mathematicians out there) is as a group on 6 generators, meaning that any reachable configuration could be gotten by merely repeating the same 6 operations in some order (I believe the 6 generators being rotating the two outer 3x3x1 squares 90 degrees clockwise along any of the 3 axes).
Using this group, you could do various things like find the odds that a random arrangement of stickers is actually solvable (take the size of the group divided by the number of possible arrangements). Are there computations involving this for the 4D cube on the web anywhere?
I am a senior at Caltech. In my Freshman biology class (admittedly for non-majors), we had no labs, 7 problem sets. Of those sets, over consisted of either: .pdb molecule viewer.
1. Writing Maple programs to solve differential equations.
2. Looking up phrases in biological databases and telling how many results were obtained
3. Learning how to use the swiss