The researchers have it backwards. What we should fear is that powerful intelligent machines will remain under human control. Man is his own worst enemy.
What are you, a wise guy? Bell's inequality is about entangled particles and nonlocality. That has nothing to do with superposition of states. The Copenhagen interpretation has to do with the Schrodinger wave function, which is about superposition. You don't even understand the very theory you're arguing about.
The only reason that quantum mechanics is counterintuitive and hard is that physicists are clueless as to what is really going on. This should be a clue that current interpretations are wrong and should be either revised or abandoned.
This is BS and you know it. Superposition is certainly part of the Copenhagen interpretation. The hard irrefutable truth is that nobody has ever observed superposed states. The only thing that is tested is the probabilistic nature of quantum interactions. The entire concept of a wave function collapse is just silly guess work. One could just as easily say that the property has a given state but the state can instantly change when the particle interacts with another (during observation) in order to obey conservation principles.
The problem with quantum physicists is that they don't have a clue as to why nature is probabilistic and they don't even care to know why. And yet, in spite of this glaring lack of understanding, they feel free to come up with all sorts of cockamamie fairy tales to explain phenomena that they obviously don't understand. Worse, they believe in their own fairy tales. But not everybody is fooled. See you around.
The link you provided questions quantum physics in general.
Not it doesn't. It only questions the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, especially the concept of superposition of quantum states. An interpretation is not a theory. It is just a guess. In this case, it is a very lame guess and silly on the face of it.
It seems that a week does not go by unless somebody, somewhere, claims yet another major advance in quantum computing. But has anybody noticed that this has been going on for at least a decade and we still don't have a quantum computer that we can put our hands on? It's obvious that some people need a constant flow of money to keep themselves employed. I just wish it weren't the public's money.
Well, that's just it. I does not work. All the claims that some organizations have built quantum computers with a number of qbits are 100% BS. You can take that to the bank.
I have very few problems with quantum mechanics. I accept entanglement and nonlocality. So please don't create a strawman so that you can have a point to argue about. I do have a problem with speculative and highly illogical interpretations that are accepted as facts without evidence. State superposition is one such speculation.
Superposition is an interpretation, not an observation. You don't build a science on an interpretation. Voodoo, yes, but science, I don't think so. Besides, if physicists understood the real physical reason that quantum interactions are probabilistic, they would realize that superposition is as stupid an interpretation as they come. Too bad that they don't.
That being said, don't let me or anybody else make up your mind for you. Just remember that it's always easier to go along with the flow.
Just when Obama is about to spend tens of billions of the people's money on pseudoscientific environmental BS, this story shows up on Slashdot? And here I was complaining that Slashdot was a bastion of polical correctness and a mouthpiece for environmental wackos. Is the tide is reversing on the climate change alarmists/con artists or am I just dreaming?
Watch out, Obama. The public will tear you a new asshole if it so much as suspects that it's being ripped off by the enviro-mafia.
The US government pioneered the internet and, IMO, this has been the greatest enabler of research and innovation since the the invention of the movable type. What we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't think historians will ever be able to comprehend the full impact of the internet on science and technology. The cross-pollination of ideas and the easy availability of information is so mind boggling, it's scary. You are living in truly interesting times.
I am not sure why you make your assumptions since the solution that I am proposing emphasizes intructions and timing more than anything else. Data is just the environment where the program effects changes and reacts to changes. If my solution is dataflow then so is a pulsed neural network that consists of connected sensors and effectors. I have never heard neural network programmers refer to their programs as dataflow programs. Yet, this is what I am proposing: a program should be more like a signal-driven neural network.
AFAIK, dataflow systems do not concern themsleves with a program counter. One of the most important aspects of the solution that I am advancing is that determinism is essential to reliable software. There should never be any ambiguity as to whether any two events/operations in a program are sequential or parallel. This requires a program counter to mark time. Another important aspect is that a program should be 100% reactive, i.e., everything should happen in reaction to a change/event.
Sorry but, IMO, the cell is a perfect example of how not to design a multicore processor. Heterogenous processors introduce nothing new to the table of solutions that was not already there. We had systems with CPUs and GPUs before the Cell (or Intel's Larrabee and AMD's Fusion) showed up. Everybody knows that they're a pain in the ass to program. Neither CUDA nor OpenCL nor Microsoft's much ballyhooed TBB (threaded building blocks) will change that fact.
My point is that one does not design a parallel processor and then come up with a programming model to exploit it. It should be the other way around. The programming model should come first. One should design a model that makes parallel programming easy and the resulting apps rock-solid. Only then, after you have perfected your model, should you even consider designing a processor to support the model.
IOW, everybody's doing it wrong, and by everybody, I mean the all big players in the multicore hardware/software industry: Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Sun-Oracle, AMD, ARM, Apple, FreeScale, etc. The major computer science centers who are getting a lot of research money form the industry are not helping either since they have to kowtow to the likes of Intel and AMD whose main interest is to safeguard their installed base and preserve continuity.
It makes no difference. When the pain becomes unbearable (it's all about money), it will suddenly dawn on everybody that what is needed is to break away from the past.
Exactly, some problems are inherently serial. These programs would run slower if you made them run in parallel.
If they are inherently sequential, then obviously they cannot be made to run in parallel. The truth is that the vast majority of computing applications, both existing and future, are inherently parallel. As soon as some maverick startup (forget the big players like Intel, Microsoft, or AMD because they are too married to the old ways) figures out the solution to the parallel programming crisis (see link below), get ready for a flood of super complex parallel applications to hit the market, especially in the AI, gaming and simulation fields. Cars will drive themselves and robots will maintain your home, that kind of stuff. The possibilities are mind boggling.
Now the reason that the old timers cannot solve the problem is that they are all addicted to the Turing Machine model of computing and last century's multithreaded approach to concurrency. The Turing Machine model is evidently no help in solving the crisis and threads are inherently non-deterministic. There is an urgent need to move away from antiquated and flawed paradigms that do not contribute to the solution. Indeed, they got us into this mess to begin with.
I think that Carla Bruni, Sarkozy's wife and model/singer, is the real author of the bill. In fact, the two first met at a official function where Bruni had come to promote copyright enforcement and authors' rights. IMO, Sarkozy is just acting out of love for his wife. The man is dangerous.
It looks impressive (and, from the programmer's perspective, it is very impressive) but, if it's a big deal for a robot, then it's really no big deal. Unless robots can learn to negotiate stairs (and everything else) as easily as humans, I'm afraid that the robot revolution is still a dream. My point is that we really need general AI so as to free robots to learn to perform all sorts of tasks, not just a few domain-specific ones.
The future is parallelism. Unless Apple can come out with a hardware and software solution to the parallel programming crisis within the next few years, this is an investment that will come back to bite them in the ass. Hard.
Anybody who thinks that the conmputer industry should retain last century's multithreading CPU technology should lay off the dope, in my opinion. Heterogeneous processors, too, will lead to failure. What is needed is a new parallel processor, a homogeneous one designed to support a universal, deterministic and easy to program parallel computing model.
Can Apple deliver? Does it have the correct vision? Does it have the courage? I am not so sure. All those hardware experts come from the old conservative school of computer science. That's too bad because what is needed is a radical paradigm shift. Apple needs a true maverick, a rebel with humongous huevos. I wish them the best.
People can be wearing sunglasses or be holding up a picture of another person to get into a computer with face recognition security.
I agree and this is the reason that the industry must come up with a better face recognition technology. We need a video-based system that can direct the user/subject to perform various facial movements (e.g., smile, frown, move face or eyes left, right up, down, etc...) in real time. If the system can distinguish between a live face and a still picture, it would do wonders for security at ATMs and high security facilities where surveillance cameras are used. However, Internet applications of this technology will always be shaky because it is always possible to generate a list of convincing video frames from a computer. This is not possible with a security system like an ATM that requires that the user be physically present at a given location.
CAPTCHAs are among the best motivators for progress in AI research since DARPA began throwing gobs of money around. The question is, what will happen to online forums and social/financial networks when machines become indistinguishable from humans?
Nope. I don't think evolution has a damn thing to do with it. An appetitive or aversive mechanism is still a mechanism regardless of its complexity. Complexity has nothing to do with consciousness no matter how hard some people (you know who you are) want to believe in their favorite pseudoscientific nonsense. Something other than mechanism is required.
I can write a computer program based on well known operant and classical conditioning principles that can "feel" and remember pain too. Big Deal! Does that mean that my program is conscious? Nope. Sure, it would act like if "feels" pain too, whatever "feel" means, but conscious pain? I don't think so.
Does my thermostat feel pleasure when the temperature decreases after it turns the AC on? Does it feel pain when the temperature goes up past 75 at which point it turns the AC on? I don't think so. Where do we draw the line? Unless one can prove to me that a crab is conscious in a way that differentiates it from a thermostat, I will continue to eat crabs, shrimps, crawfish, lobsters and other animals.
Who said anything about interbreeding and where is the falsifiability in fish evolving into lizards, hippos into whales, lizards into birds, or apes into humans, etc.? Where is it, goddamnit! It's nowhere, that's where. It's chicken shit pseudoscience, pure and simple.
Speciation is simply the result of many small changes (micro) over a long period of time.
That's what is meant by macro evolution and it's the part that is not falsifiable. It is legitimate to point this little fact out to evolutionists but they will not listen to reason. Claiming that part of the fossil record shows a progression is not proof. We see progression over time when we breed our pets and farm animals. Big deal! A chihuahua is still a dog. Its genes did not evolve; they were selected (or deselected) for expression from a pool that had existed for millions of years. The sort of pseudoscience that asserts that hippos evolve into whales (no falsifiability whatsoever) or fish into lizards will flourish whenever science is used to support a pre-existing mindset or ideology. Atheism and refusal to accept the possibility of creation/intelligent design is the ideology that underlies macro-evolution. A priori conclusions do not lead to good science. It is chicken shit science. Live with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The researchers have it backwards. What we should fear is that powerful intelligent machines will remain under human control. Man is his own worst enemy.
What are you, a wise guy? Bell's inequality is about entangled particles and nonlocality. That has nothing to do with superposition of states. The Copenhagen interpretation has to do with the Schrodinger wave function, which is about superposition. You don't even understand the very theory you're arguing about.
The only reason that quantum mechanics is counterintuitive and hard is that physicists are clueless as to what is really going on. This should be a clue that current interpretations are wrong and should be either revised or abandoned.
This is BS and you know it. Superposition is certainly part of the Copenhagen interpretation. The hard irrefutable truth is that nobody has ever observed superposed states. The only thing that is tested is the probabilistic nature of quantum interactions. The entire concept of a wave function collapse is just silly guess work. One could just as easily say that the property has a given state but the state can instantly change when the particle interacts with another (during observation) in order to obey conservation principles.
The problem with quantum physicists is that they don't have a clue as to why nature is probabilistic and they don't even care to know why. And yet, in spite of this glaring lack of understanding, they feel free to come up with all sorts of cockamamie fairy tales to explain phenomena that they obviously don't understand. Worse, they believe in their own fairy tales. But not everybody is fooled. See you around.
Not it doesn't. It only questions the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, especially the concept of superposition of quantum states. An interpretation is not a theory. It is just a guess. In this case, it is a very lame guess and silly on the face of it.
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats."
Howard Aiken
Aiken was right. I know. I've been traveling that lonely road for a long time. Good luck.
It seems that a week does not go by unless somebody, somewhere, claims yet another major advance in quantum computing. But has anybody noticed that this has been going on for at least a decade and we still don't have a quantum computer that we can put our hands on? It's obvious that some people need a constant flow of money to keep themselves employed. I just wish it weren't the public's money.
Quantum Computing Crackpottery
You may mod me down as a troll but I'm right, goddamnit! Quantum computing is both fraud and crackpottery.
Well, that's just it. I does not work. All the claims that some organizations have built quantum computers with a number of qbits are 100% BS. You can take that to the bank.
I have very few problems with quantum mechanics. I accept entanglement and nonlocality. So please don't create a strawman so that you can have a point to argue about. I do have a problem with speculative and highly illogical interpretations that are accepted as facts without evidence. State superposition is one such speculation.
Superposition is an interpretation, not an observation. You don't build a science on an interpretation. Voodoo, yes, but science, I don't think so. Besides, if physicists understood the real physical reason that quantum interactions are probabilistic, they would realize that superposition is as stupid an interpretation as they come. Too bad that they don't.
That being said, don't let me or anybody else make up your mind for you. Just remember that it's always easier to go along with the flow.
Quantum computing is one of biggest hoaxes/crackpotteries in the history of science, on a par with the flat earth hypothesis.
Quantum Computing Crackpottery
Just when Obama is about to spend tens of billions of the people's money on pseudoscientific environmental BS, this story shows up on Slashdot? And here I was complaining that Slashdot was a bastion of polical correctness and a mouthpiece for environmental wackos. Is the tide is reversing on the climate change alarmists/con artists or am I just dreaming?
Watch out, Obama. The public will tear you a new asshole if it so much as suspects that it's being ripped off by the enviro-mafia.
The US government pioneered the internet and, IMO, this has been the greatest enabler of research and innovation since the the invention of the movable type. What we're seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg. I don't think historians will ever be able to comprehend the full impact of the internet on science and technology. The cross-pollination of ideas and the easy availability of information is so mind boggling, it's scary. You are living in truly interesting times.
I am not sure why you make your assumptions since the solution that I am proposing emphasizes intructions and timing more than anything else. Data is just the environment where the program effects changes and reacts to changes. If my solution is dataflow then so is a pulsed neural network that consists of connected sensors and effectors. I have never heard neural network programmers refer to their programs as dataflow programs. Yet, this is what I am proposing: a program should be more like a signal-driven neural network.
AFAIK, dataflow systems do not concern themsleves with a program counter. One of the most important aspects of the solution that I am advancing is that determinism is essential to reliable software. There should never be any ambiguity as to whether any two events/operations in a program are sequential or parallel. This requires a program counter to mark time. Another important aspect is that a program should be 100% reactive, i.e., everything should happen in reaction to a change/event.
Sorry but, IMO, the cell is a perfect example of how not to design a multicore processor. Heterogenous processors introduce nothing new to the table of solutions that was not already there. We had systems with CPUs and GPUs before the Cell (or Intel's Larrabee and AMD's Fusion) showed up. Everybody knows that they're a pain in the ass to program. Neither CUDA nor OpenCL nor Microsoft's much ballyhooed TBB (threaded building blocks) will change that fact.
My point is that one does not design a parallel processor and then come up with a programming model to exploit it. It should be the other way around. The programming model should come first. One should design a model that makes parallel programming easy and the resulting apps rock-solid. Only then, after you have perfected your model, should you even consider designing a processor to support the model.
IOW, everybody's doing it wrong, and by everybody, I mean the all big players in the multicore hardware/software industry: Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Sun-Oracle, AMD, ARM, Apple, FreeScale, etc. The major computer science centers who are getting a lot of research money form the industry are not helping either since they have to kowtow to the likes of Intel and AMD whose main interest is to safeguard their installed base and preserve continuity.
It makes no difference. When the pain becomes unbearable (it's all about money), it will suddenly dawn on everybody that what is needed is to break away from the past.
If they are inherently sequential, then obviously they cannot be made to run in parallel. The truth is that the vast majority of computing applications, both existing and future, are inherently parallel. As soon as some maverick startup (forget the big players like Intel, Microsoft, or AMD because they are too married to the old ways) figures out the solution to the parallel programming crisis (see link below), get ready for a flood of super complex parallel applications to hit the market, especially in the AI, gaming and simulation fields. Cars will drive themselves and robots will maintain your home, that kind of stuff. The possibilities are mind boggling.
Now the reason that the old timers cannot solve the problem is that they are all addicted to the Turing Machine model of computing and last century's multithreaded approach to concurrency. The Turing Machine model is evidently no help in solving the crisis and threads are inherently non-deterministic. There is an urgent need to move away from antiquated and flawed paradigms that do not contribute to the solution. Indeed, they got us into this mess to begin with.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
I think that Carla Bruni, Sarkozy's wife and model/singer, is the real author of the bill. In fact, the two first met at a official function where Bruni had come to promote copyright enforcement and authors' rights. IMO, Sarkozy is just acting out of love for his wife. The man is dangerous.
It looks impressive (and, from the programmer's perspective, it is very impressive) but, if it's a big deal for a robot, then it's really no big deal. Unless robots can learn to negotiate stairs (and everything else) as easily as humans, I'm afraid that the robot revolution is still a dream. My point is that we really need general AI so as to free robots to learn to perform all sorts of tasks, not just a few domain-specific ones.
The future is parallelism. Unless Apple can come out with a hardware and software solution to the parallel programming crisis within the next few years, this is an investment that will come back to bite them in the ass. Hard.
Anybody who thinks that the conmputer industry should retain last century's multithreading CPU technology should lay off the dope, in my opinion. Heterogeneous processors, too, will lead to failure. What is needed is a new parallel processor, a homogeneous one designed to support a universal, deterministic and easy to program parallel computing model.
Can Apple deliver? Does it have the correct vision? Does it have the courage? I am not so sure. All those hardware experts come from the old conservative school of computer science. That's too bad because what is needed is a radical paradigm shift. Apple needs a true maverick, a rebel with humongous huevos. I wish them the best.
How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis
I agree and this is the reason that the industry must come up with a better face recognition technology. We need a video-based system that can direct the user/subject to perform various facial movements (e.g., smile, frown, move face or eyes left, right up, down, etc...) in real time. If the system can distinguish between a live face and a still picture, it would do wonders for security at ATMs and high security facilities where surveillance cameras are used. However, Internet applications of this technology will always be shaky because it is always possible to generate a list of convincing video frames from a computer. This is not possible with a security system like an ATM that requires that the user be physically present at a given location.
More like the biggest con game since organized religion. Oh wait! It is an organized religion. My bad.
CAPTCHAs are among the best motivators for progress in AI research since DARPA began throwing gobs of money around. The question is, what will happen to online forums and social/financial networks when machines become indistinguishable from humans?
Nope. I don't think evolution has a damn thing to do with it. An appetitive or aversive mechanism is still a mechanism regardless of its complexity. Complexity has nothing to do with consciousness no matter how hard some people (you know who you are) want to believe in their favorite pseudoscientific nonsense. Something other than mechanism is required.
No line can be drawn. That is my point.
I can write a computer program based on well known operant and classical conditioning principles that can "feel" and remember pain too. Big Deal! Does that mean that my program is conscious? Nope. Sure, it would act like if "feels" pain too, whatever "feel" means, but conscious pain? I don't think so.
Does my thermostat feel pleasure when the temperature decreases after it turns the AC on? Does it feel pain when the temperature goes up past 75 at which point it turns the AC on? I don't think so. Where do we draw the line? Unless one can prove to me that a crab is conscious in a way that differentiates it from a thermostat, I will continue to eat crabs, shrimps, crawfish, lobsters and other animals.
Who said anything about interbreeding and where is the falsifiability in fish evolving into lizards, hippos into whales, lizards into birds, or apes into humans, etc.? Where is it, goddamnit! It's nowhere, that's where. It's chicken shit pseudoscience, pure and simple.
That's what is meant by macro evolution and it's the part that is not falsifiable. It is legitimate to point this little fact out to evolutionists but they will not listen to reason. Claiming that part of the fossil record shows a progression is not proof. We see progression over time when we breed our pets and farm animals. Big deal! A chihuahua is still a dog. Its genes did not evolve; they were selected (or deselected) for expression from a pool that had existed for millions of years. The sort of pseudoscience that asserts that hippos evolve into whales (no falsifiability whatsoever) or fish into lizards will flourish whenever science is used to support a pre-existing mindset or ideology. Atheism and refusal to accept the possibility of creation/intelligent design is the ideology that underlies macro-evolution. A priori conclusions do not lead to good science. It is chicken shit science. Live with it.