Any OS that must be aware of how many cores it is running on is obviously doing it wrong. Does an OS have to be aware of how fast (in Mhz) the processor is running? What happens when processors reach 1000 cores or more? Will Windows choke at that point?
Well, if you RTFA, you will see a video showing a knot being untied into a loop. This is the reason that I asked whether it was possible to have a mathematical knot that cannot be untied back to its original loop. Of course, if it cannot be untied, it cannot be tied either.
You _are_ free. You can stay away conferences and journals. You can create a new concept called Science 2.0 and convince people to join you exclusively on YouTube, blogs, Wikipedia, your new revolutionary idea for Science 2.0 review and publishing, or whatever.
You're right, we are free but with one little but important exception. The taxpayer's money is being used to promote and fund non-free science.
Everybody knows who I am. At least have the decency to identify yourself when you attack someone personally. Ohterwise, you're just a gutless coward. No backbone. Or just small fries, as you put it. LOL.
You're fighting a strawman of your own making. Nobody said anything about being oppressed. And it's not a matter of ignoring the moderation. The Slashdot system does prevent people who have been moderated down frequently from posting. Indeed there are other competing discussion sites that do not use Slashdot's moderation system and I bet you that Slashdot has been feeling the heat lately. I suspect that your taking offence means that you are either associated with Slashdot or you like its moderation system because it makes you feel good about yourself when you're a moderator. Hey, more power to you. Too bad you can't mod me down, right now, eh?
Your point is well taken. Let me just say that the old ideas may not have been about censorhsip but they ended up that way due to human nature. Hence the need for periodic revolutions a la Thomas Kuhn. This is not good, in my opinion. Readers (consumers) should have a say so on who's doing the vetting. Who's vetting for the vetters? That is the question. It was not easy in the old days but now it is, thanks to the computer and the internet. We need to change to a better, freer system.
Elitism isn't a bad thing. I like reading papers which have been vetted for quality.
Yeah, but but that is your prerogative. You trust a segment of the scientific community to do your filtering for you and that is fine. I, on the other hand, don't trust them and I should not be forced to rely on their judgement.
Show me one modern paper which had a truely brilliant idea but was rejected by multiple established journals, and I might lend your idea some credence.
That's just it. We don't know what the ideas are for the most part because they don't get published. However, history is replete with instances of people being rejected by the scientific consensus (the Wright Brothers come to mind) and end up being shown right through their own efforts and courage. In fact, I sense that science is due for a major paradigm shift and I expect the next revolution to come from outside the scientific community.
Well, nobody wants to read BS but why should anybody be forced to rely on others to decide for them what is BS and what isn't? Usenet has been around for ages and people have learned to use the killfile mechanism to get rid of most of the crap. It is not perfect but it can be improved upon on sites like this one because the web is not restricted to an antiquated format like usenet.
Usually, the BS comes from a consistent segment of posters. I believe that social sites should forbid anonymous posting and require registration. Every registered reader should be given the means of privately rating other readers as they see fit. Members should also have the freedom to adopt the ratings of a trusted friend or a group of friends IF they so desire. Freedom should be the guiding principle, always. As an aside, I suspect that this approach would significantly increase Slashdot's membership.
Who needs peer review when you got YouTube and the Internet? The entire world should be our peers, not just a small elitist group. Traditional peer review is mostly a censorship mechanism that is used to suppress minority opinions. It creates an incestuous situation whereby science becomes stuck in a rut of its own making from which only a Kuhnian revolution can extricate it. This is no good. The cross pollenization of ideas is essential to progress and should be welcome by all scientists. The writing is on the wall. The Internet will kill the old-style peer review system and I, for one, will not shed any tears. Just cast your idea upon the waters and see how it fares. If it's any good, it will grow. If not, it will die. That is the new trend. What could be better?
As a case in point, the Slashdot moderation mechanism is a prime example of an old-style peer review mechanism that is due for a serious revision. It allows a small group of regulars (with time on their hands) to change what others should perceive according to their perspective. Where is the freedom in that? We don't need chaperones, thank you very much. A private kill-file/rating system would be better, in my opinion.
OK. Now mod me down if you disagree and make my point for me.
Howard Stern makes fun of Obama voters, ahahaha... Harlem Voters
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
on
Loebner Talks AI
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
I would argue Creationists don't exhibit intelligence, so should be excluded from such an analysis.
This being Slashdot and all, the bastion of atheist nerds, I would argue that your comment was modded up primarily because of that last sentence. The fact remains that the Turing test is a stupid test. Passing the test would prove absolutely nothing other than that a programmer can be clever enough to fool some dumb judges. Computer programs routinely fool people into believing they're human. Some of the bots on usenet do it all the time. Big deal.
Like I said, intelligence is about pattern recognition, operant and classical conditioning, anticipation, goal-directed and adaptive behavior. Over the last centrury, psychologists have perfected excellent procedures to test for those things. Use those tests instead. Anything else is spinning your wheels; or just another way of worshiping Alan Turing, a man who really contributed nothing interesting or useful to the field of AI that anybody can point to.
The truth is that Turing is a false god. Even the so-called Turing machine is completely useless as far as helping with the really nasty problems (e.g., the parallel programming and software reliability crises) that the computer industry is currently struggling with. In fact, I would maintain that it is the academic community's enfatuation with the Turing machine that got us into this sorry mess in the first place. I think it is time for the Turing madness to end. I always tell it like I see it.
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
on
Loebner Talks AI
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is what psychologists define it to be. It has to do with things like classical and operant conditioning, learning, pattern recognition, anticipation, short and long term memory retention, associative memory, aversive and appetitive behavior, adaptation, etc. This is the reason that the Turing test and symbolic AI have nothing to do with intelligence: they are not conserned with any of those things.
That being said, I doubt that anything interesting or useful can be learned from writing those Loebner/Turing programs. It would be much more interesting to write programs that learn to play a good game of GO. I suggest that Loebner change his competition accordingly.
Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
on
Loebner Talks AI
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The Turing test has nothing to do with AI, sorry. It's just a test for programs that can put text strings together in order to fool people into believing they're intelligent. My dog is highly intelligent and yet it would fail this test. The Turing test is an ancient relic of the symbolic age of AI research history. And, as we all should know by now, after half a century of hype, symbolic AI has proved to be an absolute failure.
Now, with context and improved technology, I don't think that handwriting recognition is impossible. I have a feeling that it will be a technology like speech recognition: never perfect, and it will require training.
I agree but only if we are stuck with making incremental improvements to current technology. We already have proof that excellent handwritten character recognition is possible since we humans can do it. We use all sorts of cognitive tricks to recognize handwriting, not the least of which is, as you point out, that we usually have a good handle on the historical context surrounding the writing in question. This sort of knowledge requires a lifetime of training and learning. A French person will find it a lot easier to recognize handwriten letters if the words are written in French. Change to different language and his/her performance will suffer. He/she uses a technique called pattern completion which is entirely based on learning from previous experience, and not just reading experience. Our future machines will have to do likewise. In my opinion, good recognition in this field will require a breakthrough in our understanding of intelligence. I am optimistic.
The Cell is a perfect example of how not to design and build a multicore processor. It's a powerful processor but it's a pain in the ass to program. The worst thing that a multicore designer can do is build a processor before the programming model is designed and tested and all the chinks ironed out. But Sony and IBM are not alone. Intel is making the same mistake with Larrabee. AMD is soon to follow suit with its Fusion hybrid. It's enough to make a grown man cry. The truth should be clear to everyone by now. Heterogeneous processors are not the way to go simply because there is no easy software model that makes them easy to program. GPUs are not the answer either because they lack universality. As Tim Sweeny said recently, what is needed is a homogeneous processor. It will do wonders for productivity. Homogeneity and universality is what is called for. The Cell is anything but.
In my opinion, both the CPU and the GPU are doomed for the simple reason that they are not universal. There is only one type of parallel processor core that can handle anything you can throw at it and that's a pure MIMD vector core. None of the multicore vendors have one none are planning to build one. Why? Because they don't have the right programming model. Unless they see the error of their ways, some other organization will do the right thing and rocket past them. They won't know what hit them until it's too late. The writing is on the wall.
You keep trying to turn my words into a carricature of what I'm telling you
Not true. I quote you verbatim. You say there is no parallel programming crisis and I prove that you don't know what you're talking about.
stop with the slashdot posts
LOL. What are you, Mussolini? You can't stop me, man. I am a free man in a free country.
follow your own advice: if you think having "the answer" will make Microsoft/Intel be "thrilled and reward you accordingly" go there and make your point, and become a millionaire.
Nope. They won't listen to me because that would jeopardize their own jobs. They do visit my blog everyday though. Besides, they're are married to the ideas of the last century. Adopting my ideas would mean that they have failed. So it won't happen. But you are always welcome to go talk to them about CUDA and GPUs. They like that stuff.
highly emotional rhetoric on Slashdot is the least effective way to convince me or anyone
You seem to be the emotional one, amigo. I'm cool as a cucumber. And you are wrong. I don't need to convince you or anyone in particular. There are a few people who read Slashdot who are not know-it-alls like you and who are actually interested in what I have to say. I am not selling anything to anybody. I just want to see progress in the field. I use Slashdot because their reader demographic is younger than the industry at large. I have given up on the aging baby boomers with their antiquated and obsolete perspective on computing. This is what got us into this mess in the first place.
PS. You sound like an old frustrated computer nerd. If you don't like what I write, don't read it. After all, nobody's twisting your arm, right?
Well, it must also be in the head of computer science professor, Kunle Olukotun, who said recently, "If I were the computer industry, I would be panicked, because it's not obvious what the solution is going to look like and whether we will get there in time for these new machines" (source: CNN Money). Glad to know you already have the answer. The fact remains that the vast majority of programmers have trouble programming parallel computers. And no, most parallel applications are not programmed for GPUs with CUDA and the like. Besides, programming for GPUs is not a common skill, nor is it easy. Ask Tim Sweeny, he'll tell you. The parallel programming approach chosen by the multicore industry for general purpose parallel apps is multithreading and, as everybody in the business knows (except you, apparently), multithreading is a pain in the ass.
But you're missing that we do use parallel programming extensively nowadays. Do you know what CUDA is? Do you know of Apple's OpenCL project?
So CUDA and OpenCL are the solution to the parallel programming crisis? Quick, go tell that to Microsoft and Intel because they're wasting tens of millions of parallel programming research dollars at Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Illinois at UC and many other research labs around the world. I'm sure they'll be thrilled and reward you accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
Any OS that must be aware of how many cores it is running on is obviously doing it wrong. Does an OS have to be aware of how fast (in Mhz) the processor is running? What happens when processors reach 1000 cores or more? Will Windows choke at that point?
Well, if you RTFA, you will see a video showing a knot being untied into a loop. This is the reason that I asked whether it was possible to have a mathematical knot that cannot be untied back to its original loop. Of course, if it cannot be untied, it cannot be tied either.
I'm just wondering. One never knows with math.
Even National Geographic fell for it hook, line and sinker. LOL.
Thank you. It's all about results and we don't need elitist peer review for that.
You're right, we are free but with one little but important exception. The taxpayer's money is being used to promote and fund non-free science.
Everybody knows who I am. At least have the decency to identify yourself when you attack someone personally. Ohterwise, you're just a gutless coward. No backbone. Or just small fries, as you put it. LOL.
You're fighting a strawman of your own making. Nobody said anything about being oppressed. And it's not a matter of ignoring the moderation. The Slashdot system does prevent people who have been moderated down frequently from posting. Indeed there are other competing discussion sites that do not use Slashdot's moderation system and I bet you that Slashdot has been feeling the heat lately. I suspect that your taking offence means that you are either associated with Slashdot or you like its moderation system because it makes you feel good about yourself when you're a moderator. Hey, more power to you. Too bad you can't mod me down, right now, eh?
Your point is well taken. Let me just say that the old ideas may not have been about censorhsip but they ended up that way due to human nature. Hence the need for periodic revolutions a la Thomas Kuhn. This is not good, in my opinion. Readers (consumers) should have a say so on who's doing the vetting. Who's vetting for the vetters? That is the question. It was not easy in the old days but now it is, thanks to the computer and the internet. We need to change to a better, freer system.
Elitism isn't a bad thing. I like reading papers which have been vetted for quality.
Yeah, but but that is your prerogative. You trust a segment of the scientific community to do your filtering for you and that is fine. I, on the other hand, don't trust them and I should not be forced to rely on their judgement.
Show me one modern paper which had a truely brilliant idea but was rejected by multiple established journals, and I might lend your idea some credence.
That's just it. We don't know what the ideas are for the most part because they don't get published. However, history is replete with instances of people being rejected by the scientific consensus (the Wright Brothers come to mind) and end up being shown right through their own efforts and courage. In fact, I sense that science is due for a major paradigm shift and I expect the next revolution to come from outside the scientific community.
Well, nobody wants to read BS but why should anybody be forced to rely on others to decide for them what is BS and what isn't? Usenet has been around for ages and people have learned to use the killfile mechanism to get rid of most of the crap. It is not perfect but it can be improved upon on sites like this one because the web is not restricted to an antiquated format like usenet.
Usually, the BS comes from a consistent segment of posters. I believe that social sites should forbid anonymous posting and require registration. Every registered reader should be given the means of privately rating other readers as they see fit. Members should also have the freedom to adopt the ratings of a trusted friend or a group of friends IF they so desire. Freedom should be the guiding principle, always. As an aside, I suspect that this approach would significantly increase Slashdot's membership.
Absolutely, and freedom encourages it.
Well, I want to be the judge of that. I refuse to let others make that decision for me. Freedom is the name of the game.
You make an excellent point. There should no censorship/restriction whatsoever. Freedom must be the name of the game.
A ScienceTube would solve that problem, no?
Who needs peer review when you got YouTube and the Internet? The entire world should be our peers, not just a small elitist group. Traditional peer review is mostly a censorship mechanism that is used to suppress minority opinions. It creates an incestuous situation whereby science becomes stuck in a rut of its own making from which only a Kuhnian revolution can extricate it. This is no good. The cross pollenization of ideas is essential to progress and should be welcome by all scientists. The writing is on the wall. The Internet will kill the old-style peer review system and I, for one, will not shed any tears. Just cast your idea upon the waters and see how it fares. If it's any good, it will grow. If not, it will die. That is the new trend. What could be better?
As a case in point, the Slashdot moderation mechanism is a prime example of an old-style peer review mechanism that is due for a serious revision. It allows a small group of regulars (with time on their hands) to change what others should perceive according to their perspective. Where is the freedom in that? We don't need chaperones, thank you very much. A private kill-file/rating system would be better, in my opinion.
OK. Now mod me down if you disagree and make my point for me.
Howard Stern makes fun of Obama voters, ahahaha...
Harlem Voters
This being Slashdot and all, the bastion of atheist nerds, I would argue that your comment was modded up primarily because of that last sentence. The fact remains that the Turing test is a stupid test. Passing the test would prove absolutely nothing other than that a programmer can be clever enough to fool some dumb judges. Computer programs routinely fool people into believing they're human. Some of the bots on usenet do it all the time. Big deal.
Like I said, intelligence is about pattern recognition, operant and classical conditioning, anticipation, goal-directed and adaptive behavior. Over the last centrury, psychologists have perfected excellent procedures to test for those things. Use those tests instead. Anything else is spinning your wheels; or just another way of worshiping Alan Turing, a man who really contributed nothing interesting or useful to the field of AI that anybody can point to.
The truth is that Turing is a false god. Even the so-called Turing machine is completely useless as far as helping with the really nasty problems (e.g., the parallel programming and software reliability crises) that the computer industry is currently struggling with. In fact, I would maintain that it is the academic community's enfatuation with the Turing machine that got us into this sorry mess in the first place. I think it is time for the Turing madness to end. I always tell it like I see it.
Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is what psychologists define it to be. It has to do with things like classical and operant conditioning, learning, pattern recognition, anticipation, short and long term memory retention, associative memory, aversive and appetitive behavior, adaptation, etc. This is the reason that the Turing test and symbolic AI have nothing to do with intelligence: they are not conserned with any of those things.
That being said, I doubt that anything interesting or useful can be learned from writing those Loebner/Turing programs. It would be much more interesting to write programs that learn to play a good game of GO. I suggest that Loebner change his competition accordingly.
The Turing test has nothing to do with AI, sorry. It's just a test for programs that can put text strings together in order to fool people into believing they're intelligent. My dog is highly intelligent and yet it would fail this test. The Turing test is an ancient relic of the symbolic age of AI research history. And, as we all should know by now, after half a century of hype, symbolic AI has proved to be an absolute failure.
I agree but only if we are stuck with making incremental improvements to current technology. We already have proof that excellent handwritten character recognition is possible since we humans can do it. We use all sorts of cognitive tricks to recognize handwriting, not the least of which is, as you point out, that we usually have a good handle on the historical context surrounding the writing in question. This sort of knowledge requires a lifetime of training and learning. A French person will find it a lot easier to recognize handwriten letters if the words are written in French. Change to different language and his/her performance will suffer. He/she uses a technique called pattern completion which is entirely based on learning from previous experience, and not just reading experience. Our future machines will have to do likewise. In my opinion, good recognition in this field will require a breakthrough in our understanding of intelligence. I am optimistic.
The Cell is a perfect example of how not to design and build a multicore processor. It's a powerful processor but it's a pain in the ass to program. The worst thing that a multicore designer can do is build a processor before the programming model is designed and tested and all the chinks ironed out. But Sony and IBM are not alone. Intel is making the same mistake with Larrabee. AMD is soon to follow suit with its Fusion hybrid. It's enough to make a grown man cry. The truth should be clear to everyone by now. Heterogeneous processors are not the way to go simply because there is no easy software model that makes them easy to program. GPUs are not the answer either because they lack universality. As Tim Sweeny said recently, what is needed is a homogeneous processor. It will do wonders for productivity. Homogeneity and universality is what is called for. The Cell is anything but.
In my opinion, both the CPU and the GPU are doomed for the simple reason that they are not universal. There is only one type of parallel processor core that can handle anything you can throw at it and that's a pure MIMD vector core. None of the multicore vendors have one none are planning to build one. Why? Because they don't have the right programming model. Unless they see the error of their ways, some other organization will do the right thing and rocket past them. They won't know what hit them until it's too late. The writing is on the wall.
You keep trying to turn my words into a carricature of what I'm telling you
Not true. I quote you verbatim. You say there is no parallel programming crisis and I prove that you don't know what you're talking about.
stop with the slashdot posts
LOL. What are you, Mussolini? You can't stop me, man. I am a free man in a free country.
follow your own advice: if you think having "the answer" will make Microsoft/Intel be "thrilled and reward you accordingly" go there and make your point, and become a millionaire.
Nope. They won't listen to me because that would jeopardize their own jobs. They do visit my blog everyday though. Besides, they're are married to the ideas of the last century. Adopting my ideas would mean that they have failed. So it won't happen. But you are always welcome to go talk to them about CUDA and GPUs. They like that stuff.
highly emotional rhetoric on Slashdot is the least effective way to convince me or anyone
You seem to be the emotional one, amigo. I'm cool as a cucumber. And you are wrong. I don't need to convince you or anyone in particular. There are a few people who read Slashdot who are not know-it-alls like you and who are actually interested in what I have to say. I am not selling anything to anybody. I just want to see progress in the field. I use Slashdot because their reader demographic is younger than the industry at large. I have given up on the aging baby boomers with their antiquated and obsolete perspective on computing. This is what got us into this mess in the first place.
PS. You sound like an old frustrated computer nerd. If you don't like what I write, don't read it. After all, nobody's twisting your arm, right?
First of all, that "crisis" is in your head.
Well, it must also be in the head of computer science professor, Kunle Olukotun, who said recently, "If I were the computer industry, I would be panicked, because it's not obvious what the solution is going to look like and whether we will get there in time for these new machines" (source: CNN Money). Glad to know you already have the answer. The fact remains that the vast majority of programmers have trouble programming parallel computers. And no, most parallel applications are not programmed for GPUs with CUDA and the like. Besides, programming for GPUs is not a common skill, nor is it easy. Ask Tim Sweeny, he'll tell you. The parallel programming approach chosen by the multicore industry for general purpose parallel apps is multithreading and, as everybody in the business knows (except you, apparently), multithreading is a pain in the ass.
But you're missing that we do use parallel programming extensively nowadays. Do you know what CUDA is? Do you know of Apple's OpenCL project?
So CUDA and OpenCL are the solution to the parallel programming crisis? Quick, go tell that to Microsoft and Intel because they're wasting tens of millions of parallel programming research dollars at Berkeley, Stanford, the University of Illinois at UC and many other research labs around the world. I'm sure they'll be thrilled and reward you accordingly.