All current crypto is based on the idea that large numbers are hard to factor into large primes. Proof of the riemann hypothesis makes large primes easier to find, and large numbers somewhat easier to factor
This is just plain wrong, the RH has been shown to be true for billions of zeroes, knowing that's it's true won't help you factorize huge numbers. If it did, you'd only need to assume that it's true, and go from there, which is what so many papers do nowadays with the RH. This is actually the basis of a standard way of making a proof (or rather here, a disproof): you assume A is true among other things that you know to be true (they've been proven before), and if you get a contradiction later on, then A must be false. If A is true, it's a bit more complicated, but once more, proving the thing doesn't give you anything practical, all it does is change an hypothesis into a theorem.
So if you prove the RH, it becomes the Riemann Theorem (in fact it should become MrX Theorem for the proover, something that didn't happen with Fermat's theorem, but it should really have been called Fermat's Hypothesis before anyway), and by doing so, you've done a great service to the mathematics community by showing that thousands of papers around are relevant, but you still can't factorize large numbers any quickier...
Solutions for values to the left of the vertical axis are considered 'trivial' because their zeroes occur at regular intervals on the real line (with imaginary part 0). On the right of the vertical lines are the 'interesting' solutions, where zeroes seem to all be aligned on the vertical line 1/2 (real part) with varying imaginary parts. The RH says there is no solution that yields a zero that is not on that vertical line with real part 1/2.
For art, perhaps not. But for mathematics, elegance is often simply defined as a combination of minimizing the number of axioms and lemmas leading to a proof, and maximizing the number of corollaries arising from that new fact.
A few comments about the other posts of this thread : Of course, some problems have just too many aspects to be naively number crunched. In the case of the 4C theorem for example, it took humans to write a software that would reduce all possible maps to a finite set of all possible local configurations. This is not simple number crunching, you need the insight to find the algorithm that does that, and this was the target of the dilemna with a computer proof : it relies on the proof that the algorithm finds all configuraitons, and on a bug-free implementation. Once the program is done, you can naively check all the configurations and confirm that all of them require no more than 4 colors, but that's the easy part.
Another example is the prime number theorem. You could never just 'crunch' it, since it involves 'imagining a last prime and folowing the consequences'. The computer algorithm needs to be have the capability of making leaps of imaginations. Though these can be hardcoded in the algorithm, there is an infinite number of them, so you can't generate an algorithm that covers all of them, or it couldn't come up with itself, which is sort of what Goedel has been known to be inconvenient for.
One way to get out of the problem is to map a generic problem about numbers into a specific problem about p-adics. p-adics are complete, they basically are number systems with a finite number of primes and a limit at -1, which neatly 'closes' them and makes each p complete. Phenomenologically speaking, you can 'fold infinities out'. Most RH proof proposals involve p-adics in some way or another.
I don't know... personally I think that without AOL, the internet might indeed have taken some more time to mature. AOL introduced the idea in the US that there were those millions of people who would just buy anything online, and the idea was then exported to europe as part of AOL (and lookalikes) expanding there. Problem is the notion just wasn't true. This is a part (only a part of course, but a part nonetheless) of what led to the dot bomb and the current situation.
Of course we can never know how something would have been.
Note that I'm not saying AOL is bad necessarily, just that the good it did to the internet is sort of offset by the bad it's bring.
I think the way you should be looking at it is, assuming A is true, how should I expect B to behave ? Once you've worked out the expectations, you check with real life. If the result is close, that does lend credence to A.
Write the smallest possible.com program that does the following: 1, Input a number from the keyboard, call it N 2, Go in mode 13 (vga), draw N 3x3 squares without the central pixel (N * 8 pixels to draw), no square should be adjascent to another. 3, Wait for Enter 4, Exit
Er... 99.9% ? Whenever I see a number like this, I can't help but strongly suspect that it was pulled out of someone's ass.
Is this an estimate ? How was it arrived to ? What is the error of margin ? Could we see the numbers please ? Did I miss them ? Sorry if that's the case.
I agree, this is definitly exploiting the antivirus software, not Win32. The bad press should go to the company who made that AV, as the weekness was introduced by the administrator who trusted it and installed it on his workstations.
Bad programming practices happen all the time, but when you start fiddling with System priviledges, you should not rely on quick'n'dirty-type developpers, or it will lead to this.
It has indeed been known for years, and many legitimate softwares have taken advantage of this already, Windowblinds, E-Sense (win32 E), and many many others. It's a very well known entry point to inject code in an process.
If your system-level developpers don't understand that, should they be working for you ? There are many capable people out there...
This is silly. The universe is far too simple to be explained by mathematics
Actually the book has more to do with cellular automatons than with mathematics,
although, arguably, you could describe cellular automatons using link theory (which is a theory of structure, logic and math, and Wolfram's automatons are specially well suited for it) and with more classic mathematical tools.
Here is my little biased review (biased because I have a take in that kind of stuff, only more mind related).
I wont reiterate the claims of the book because you can find all sorts of review that do that (oh wait, now that I reread this it appears I'm doing just that later, oh well, still not bad an intro, heh), suffice to say, this book could become the "Bible of Reductionism" for many generations of scientists to come. I do not use the word Bible trivially here, this book is about belief, and that is the biggest problem anybody will have with it. You can agree or disagree with Wolfram as to wether or not the boradness of his conclusions will hold up to scrutiny, but the transfer of those conclusions to to the real world is a completely different step. It is a matter of belief.
If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything. (Fred Menger, Emory University Organic Chemist)
Nobody is immune to this mistake, a good part of the field of artificial intelligence research is faulty of the same (I myself do it often, but I don't publish), it is the reason why connectionism as a paradigm was so succesful among the community even if it still has to deliver on some of its most basic promises.
In a nutshell, Wolfram found a set of simple rules for cellular automatons that lead to complex behavior. The second part of his discovery is the principle of computational equivalence, again, summed up, it means that passed a 'threshold' (more or less), two computational processes can be regarded as equally complex. This is a BIG claim, one that will be investigated thoroughly by mathematicians. But the point is that if it holds, you have explained many things : randomess, free will, and you have put in terms that are all but vague what it means for connectionism to cross the threshold of self awareness (in a broad sense).
How, you aks, can he do that with cellular automatons ? Simple once you drop the concept of linear time. What he realized along with many other researchers (and I'll grab the opportunity to pat myself in the back and include myself in that group), is that time is a poorly defined concept today, until you dive into quantum physics when it starts to make sense. What is needed is to redefine causality. Again in a nutshell, classical causality says that an effect always follows a cause, but that is a definition that itself includes time, and since causality is supposed to define the arrow of time, this definition is not acceptable.
The new definition becomes "an effect always has a cause", now you can immediately see that the idea of causal directionality has been removed, but that doesnt mean that time flows backward, just like things didnt start falling up once Newton realized up and down were foolih concepts. Shortly put both future and past exert constraints on a local event (think about Marov states in the future and in the past). When equally balanced, those consraints map to classical quantum physics.
So Wolfram's cellular automatons integrate that concept, you can link events to cells that are in the same discrete time slice as your event. You can link to events in the past, or (like in classical physics), link to events in the future. That itself assumes that time is a discrete phenomenon, it is again a BIG assumption, it is a statement of Wolfram's belief (he uses that word) that time in the physical universe IS indeed discrete, and that thus, his discoveries about causal networks map directly to our world. Lets make it clear here that if he is wrong, then none of these claims map to the physical universe, and the book is just about having fun (a lot of it, tho) with computers and the concept of time (now of course that in itself could be very useful for quantum computing).
And then he goes on to describe how you can then use this stuff to make elemetary particles, or even space-time itself.
All in all this is genius stuff, if not completely revolutionary. I would describe it as the Game of Life meets Link Theory. It is a brilliant reformulation of Link Theory in terms of cellular automatons, and since Link Theory is a bit hard to work on, an easy way to use it with computers is extremely welcomed. For my part, I cannot wait for a version of Mathematica that integrates non-linear time processes. My own neural net models would become that much easy to write as I wouldn't have to deal with C++ journaling memory templates, and once quantum computers are out, I can just run the thing and not wait an arbitrary long time.
But again the flaw is one that we often make, if usually not that publicly: we start to believe in our stuff. Yes, it could work that way, but everything here is the result of a computer experiment, and that is the hard truth of it. It is a beautiful theory, easy to understand, even for the non scientist, but its predictions are minimal, distinguishing it from a physical model of reality in order to test it is going to be a hard task.
Arguably connectionism's biggest problem is that its promises are quite vague, and thus, it is hardly disprovable as a paradigm, and the same problem applies to Wolfram's work, it is very apealing, but things are explained in very tiny details or in broad strokes. There is no equation that will tell you the bigger picture because there is no bigger picture, the world is a soup of events, and as apealing as this might be, as natural as the patterns the simulation generated seems to be, this does not mean that the physical world is actually operating like this.
Even going further, it is worthless as a replacement for 'bigger laws', laws that supervene other laws, gaz propagation can be predicted by such laws, but Wolfram's laws are too tiny, their nature is to lead to chaos and non predictibility, to actually generate the supervenient laws, but again, predictive power is non existant or lower than current science.
But again, this will not prevent many from holding this book quasi religiously, even unknowingly (as many people do today with broad connectionism), because it is simple, elegant, and accounts for a lot, or so it seems (but again, some people think that the pyramids were built by aliens because they think it's simple, elegant, and explains a lot). This book will be about belief, in the next decades and centuries, it will be held as the Bible of Reductionism, because it provides the self consistent argument some philosophers like Dennett needed to explain away consciousness as a pure illusion.
This is my second problem with this book, Wolfram basically says he is presenting us with a theory of everything, but there is not much about perception, qualias, and more generally, the phenomenal aspects of consciousness. Wolfram, as the Priest of Reductionists I think he is going to become, simply leaves the matter out, talking about perception in terms of representational spaces (even if not in quite those terms), but the phenomenal aspect of those spaces is let out, as if we actually were Chalmers' zombies.
To conclude, this will be a delightful read for most slashdoters, at least, all of those with a scientific 'way of life' (no strong backround needed), they will see it as the crystalization of their materialistic views. Religious people might have a problem with this book as it depicts us as automatons, literally.
And then there are people like me, lost between the duality of phenomena and matter and the universe being-causally-closed-sad-state-of-affair. To us, sometimes known as naturalistic dualists (qualia as part of natural laws), the strong deterministic framework that Wolfram imposes seems to point to a strong epiphenomenalism for consciousness, where other theories based on quantum indeterminacy (and quantum theory has been throughly tested for 60+ years) do open possibilities of weak epiphenomenalism. In a few words, I'm not completely convinced by Wolfram's version of free will.
I'm a bit more than two third into the book, reading it quickly at first to grasp the feel of it, and then to read it slowly a second time, so it is possible that some of the things I have said may not be fair, and for this I apologize in advance.
I'm loving every part of it, and if you feel my remarks are too harsh, just assume that I'm jealous I didn't write it. If anything this will make mentioning reverse causation much easier in academia without being laughed at, and Link Theory is going to get a huge boost. Having made 4 computer languages already, I plan to have my fifth be able to run reverse causation in typical link theory problems or simulate my causal backpropagation neural network model. If I can use some of Wolfram's formalism to help this task and if he has cleared up the mess with causality, or helped people make the distinction between predictability and determinism for the rest of us too, then I'll be eternally grateful.
>My own music purchasing has declined substantially since napster went away and getting music got "harder"
It's really not about sales, it's about making it easy for you to find what they want you to find and hard to find what they don't want you to find. The last thing the recording industry wants is you being able to find and then buyANY kind of music.
My favorite algorithm, so simple yet so powerful, is the Fast Folding Algorithm, the one used by the seti@home client in your computer to detected repetitions in the signal, it's also used to detect unknown pulsars in space and I have experimented successfully with it on BPM detection in musical signals.
I think I remember a serious discussion between two scientists, one who thinks that gravity reduces past the point of average landlass (weightless center), and one who thinks it increases toward the center. Or have I completely imagined that ? I could dig up the names of those guys if needed.
Will the desk collapse after a while ?:) I mean, I wouldn't want to be on the highway when my window explodes due to my listening of J Boogie - Gemini Dub...
Haven't seen the movie yet, but one of the thing I could gather from the trailer is that it is Arwen who is standing up to the black rider at the ford with a sword in her hand. I still need to see it, but to my opinion this is a grave mistake, this is the first time (to me) that the reader can really appreciate Frodo for what he is: tough, when he stands up agaisnt them, and explains much of Elrond's trust in him at Rivendell. So somehow I fear that might remove something from frodo's character.
Of course I might have completely misinterpreted the trailer, but another point that stands is that Arwen never handles a sword in the book, her story runs deep and is heavily hinted at all through the pages, but one destiny she doesn't have is to hold a sword and directly stand up against evil. This is simply not her kind of destiny.
When Nasa called for design projects for the ISS, they got a few proposals, and they reduced the thing to basically two options: 1) building ISS at sea level, pack it up and ship it in 2 or 3 shuttles flights to deploy it, OR, 2) send it in kit using a hundred shuttle flights and build everything in orbit.
The scientific advisors gave their opinion, option 1 was MUCH easier to do and MUCH cheaper, for the same result.
BUT.
It didn't justify a space shuttle.
ISS (or more to the point, the way it is built) is solely a justification for the space shuttle. I have NO doubt that, if the russians were indeed going to make Mir2 (or whatever they call it), they would not make that kind of mistake precisely because they cannot afford it.
In 10 years, Mir2 might be operational, and ISS might still suffer from budget cuts.
Don't dismiss the idea just because they can't afford an ISS, that's like saying you cannot afford to buy a cesna because a boeing jumbojet costs so much.
>Hey barely have the money for what they are
>supposed to do for the ISS. I don't think the US
>would let them get away with it after all the
>financial problems they have caused us already
And what would the US do about it exactly ? Cancel russia's membership in ISS and dump russian modules ? yeah right:)
Let me think, what did they do again to try to prevent them from sending Tito to the ISS ?
Oh yeah, that's it... they used -political pressure-... that worked so well.
laughable.
lonedfx
--
go ahead, I deserve that troll moderation, come on!
Funny how this is happening just when people are starting to think about space tourism...
Don't come IT SUCKS! You won't be able to plug your hair drier on those russian plugs, and (worst of all) the TV screen is too small. Do not come, We repeat, Do NOT Come. Wait for the next station, it'll be much better, keep your 20 millions.
Slashdot Mirror
>You can never gather all the necessary information unless the universe is finite, which it's not
Evidences please ?
-lonedfx.
Pancake Algebra
not quite the same, but thoroughly enjoyable !
Francis.
All current crypto is based on the idea that large numbers are hard to factor into large primes. Proof of the riemann hypothesis makes large primes easier to find, and large numbers somewhat easier to factor
This is just plain wrong, the RH has been shown to be true for billions of zeroes, knowing that's it's true won't help you factorize huge numbers. If it did, you'd only need to assume that it's true, and go from there, which is what so many papers do nowadays with the RH. This is actually the basis of a standard way of making a proof (or rather here, a disproof): you assume A is true among other things that you know to be true (they've been proven before), and if you get a contradiction later on, then A must be false. If A is true, it's a bit more complicated, but once more, proving the thing doesn't give you anything practical, all it does is change an hypothesis into a theorem.
So if you prove the RH, it becomes the Riemann Theorem (in fact it should become MrX Theorem for the proover, something that didn't happen with Fermat's theorem, but it should really have been called Fermat's Hypothesis before anyway), and by doing so, you've done a great service to the mathematics community by showing that thousands of papers around are relevant, but you still can't factorize large numbers any quickier...
Francis.
>Please explain what "interesting" means
Solutions for values to the left of the vertical axis are considered 'trivial' because their zeroes occur at regular intervals on the real line (with imaginary part 0). On the right of the vertical lines are the 'interesting' solutions, where zeroes seem to all be aligned on the vertical line 1/2 (real part) with varying imaginary parts. The RH says there is no solution that yields a zero that is not on that vertical line with real part 1/2.
Francis
>Computers are not very good judges of elegance.
For art, perhaps not. But for mathematics, elegance is often simply defined as a combination of minimizing the number of axioms and lemmas leading to a proof, and maximizing the number of corollaries arising from that new fact.
A few comments about the other posts of this thread : Of course, some problems have just too many aspects to be naively number crunched. In the case of the 4C theorem for example, it took humans to write a software that would reduce all possible maps to a finite set of all possible local configurations. This is not simple number crunching, you need the insight to find the algorithm that does that, and this was the target of the dilemna with a computer proof : it relies on the proof that the algorithm finds all configuraitons, and on a bug-free implementation. Once the program is done, you can naively check all the configurations and confirm that all of them require no more than 4 colors, but that's the easy part.
Another example is the prime number theorem. You could never just 'crunch' it, since it involves 'imagining a last prime and folowing the consequences'. The computer algorithm needs to be have the capability of making leaps of imaginations. Though these can be hardcoded in the algorithm, there is an infinite number of them, so you can't generate an algorithm that covers all of them, or it couldn't come up with itself, which is sort of what Goedel has been known to be inconvenient for.
One way to get out of the problem is to map a generic problem about numbers into a specific problem about p-adics. p-adics are complete, they basically are number systems with a finite number of primes and a limit at -1, which neatly 'closes' them and makes each p complete. Phenomenologically speaking, you can 'fold infinities out'. Most RH proof proposals involve p-adics in some way or another.
Francis.
I don't know... just a guess... perhaps the clash between usenet and aol-type services would have been forseen and eased up a little.
There really is no way to tell what would have happened...
lone, dfx.
I don't know... personally I think that without AOL, the internet might indeed have taken some more time to mature. AOL introduced the idea in the US that there were those millions of people who would just buy anything online, and the idea was then exported to europe as part of AOL (and lookalikes) expanding there. Problem is the notion just wasn't true. This is a part (only a part of course, but a part nonetheless) of what led to the dot bomb and the current situation.
Of course we can never know how something would have been.
Note that I'm not saying AOL is bad necessarily, just that the good it did to the internet is sort of offset by the bad it's bring.
lone, dfx.
I think the way you should be looking at it is, assuming A is true, how should I expect B to behave ? Once you've worked out the expectations, you check with real life. If the result is close, that does lend credence to A.
lone, dfx.
When has Russia's role NOT been in trouble as a partner in ISS ? Honestly I'm waiting for the news that'll say :
Russia's Role in ISS no longer in trouble!
Now THAT will be news.
lone, dfx.
Wired 1995 Surprize coding compo :
.com program that does the following :
:-)
:-)
Write the smallest possible
1, Input a number from the keyboard, call it N
2, Go in mode 13 (vga), draw N 3x3 squares without the central pixel (N * 8 pixels to draw), no square should be adjascent to another.
3, Wait for Enter
4, Exit
Results were
1: Walken/Impact Studios, 48 bytes
1: (ex aequo) Paranoia, 48 bytes
2: KLF, 51 bytes
For info, Walken's version was drawing the squares at different positions every time his program was ran (don't ask me how)
Our own attempt (aegis) yielded 52 bytes, but we were disqualified because we did not support the key "0"
ahh... fun...
lone, dfx.
The column is at CIO Insight. Wonder if it'll reach its audience there.
;)
This is slashdot, obviously, it has reached its audience
lone, dfx
Er... 99.9% ? Whenever I see a number like this, I can't help but strongly suspect that it was pulled out of someone's ass.
Is this an estimate ? How was it arrived to ? What is the error of margin ? Could we see the numbers please ? Did I miss them ? Sorry if that's the case.
lone, dfx.
I agree, this is definitly exploiting the antivirus software, not Win32. The bad press should go to the company who made that AV, as the weekness was introduced by the administrator who trusted it and installed it on his workstations.
Bad programming practices happen all the time, but when you start fiddling with System priviledges, you should not rely on quick'n'dirty-type developpers, or it will lead to this.
It has indeed been known for years, and many legitimate softwares have taken advantage of this already, Windowblinds, E-Sense (win32 E), and many many others. It's a very well known entry point to inject code in an process.
If your system-level developpers don't understand that, should they be working for you ? There are many capable people out there...
lone.
This is silly. The universe is far too simple to be explained by mathematics
Actually the book has more to do with cellular automatons than with mathematics,
although, arguably, you could describe cellular automatons using link theory (which is a theory of structure, logic and math, and Wolfram's automatons are specially well suited for it) and with more classic mathematical tools.
Here is my little biased review (biased because I have a take in that kind of stuff, only more mind related).
I wont reiterate the claims of the book because you can find all sorts of review that do that (oh wait, now that I reread this it appears I'm doing just that later, oh well, still not bad an intro, heh), suffice to say, this book could become the "Bible of Reductionism" for many generations of scientists to come. I do not use the word Bible trivially here, this book is about belief, and that is the biggest problem anybody will have with it. You can agree or disagree with Wolfram as to wether or not the boradness of his conclusions will hold up to scrutiny, but the transfer of those conclusions to to the real world is a completely different step. It is a matter of belief.
If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything. (Fred Menger, Emory University Organic Chemist)
Nobody is immune to this mistake, a good part of the field of artificial intelligence research is faulty of the same (I myself do it often, but I don't publish), it is the reason why connectionism as a paradigm was so succesful among the community even if it still has to deliver on some of its most basic promises.
In a nutshell, Wolfram found a set of simple rules for cellular automatons that lead to complex behavior. The second part of his discovery is the principle of computational equivalence, again, summed up, it means that passed a 'threshold' (more or less), two computational processes can be regarded as equally complex. This is a BIG claim, one that will be investigated thoroughly by mathematicians. But the point is that if it holds, you have explained many things : randomess, free will, and you have put in terms that are all but vague what it means for connectionism to cross the threshold of self awareness (in a broad sense).
How, you aks, can he do that with cellular automatons ? Simple once you drop the concept of linear time. What he realized along with many other researchers (and I'll grab the opportunity to pat myself in the back and include myself in that group), is that time is a poorly defined concept today, until you dive into quantum physics when it starts to make sense. What is needed is to redefine causality. Again in a nutshell, classical causality says that an effect always follows a cause, but that is a definition that itself includes time, and since causality is supposed to define the arrow of time, this definition is not acceptable.
The new definition becomes "an effect always has a cause", now you can immediately see that the idea of causal directionality has been removed, but that doesnt mean that time flows backward, just like things didnt start falling up once Newton realized up and down were foolih concepts. Shortly put both future and past exert constraints on a local event (think about Marov states in the future and in the past). When equally balanced, those consraints map to classical quantum physics.
So Wolfram's cellular automatons integrate that concept, you can link events to cells that are in the same discrete time slice as your event. You can link to events in the past, or (like in classical physics), link to events in the future. That itself assumes that time is a discrete phenomenon, it is again a BIG assumption, it is a statement of Wolfram's belief (he uses that word) that time in the physical universe IS indeed discrete, and that thus, his discoveries about causal networks map directly to our world. Lets make it clear here that if he is wrong, then none of these claims map to the physical universe, and the book is just about having fun (a lot of it, tho) with computers and the concept of time (now of course that in itself could be very useful for quantum computing).
And then he goes on to describe how you can then use this stuff to make elemetary particles, or even space-time itself.
All in all this is genius stuff, if not completely revolutionary. I would describe it as the Game of Life meets Link Theory. It is a brilliant reformulation of Link Theory in terms of cellular automatons, and since Link Theory is a bit hard to work on, an easy way to use it with computers is extremely welcomed. For my part, I cannot wait for a version of Mathematica that integrates non-linear time processes. My own neural net models would become that much easy to write as I wouldn't have to deal with C++ journaling memory templates, and once quantum computers are out, I can just run the thing and not wait an arbitrary long time.
But again the flaw is one that we often make, if usually not that publicly: we start to believe in our stuff. Yes, it could work that way, but everything here is the result of a computer experiment, and that is the hard truth of it. It is a beautiful theory, easy to understand, even for the non scientist, but its predictions are minimal, distinguishing it from a physical model of reality in order to test it is going to be a hard task.
Arguably connectionism's biggest problem is that its promises are quite vague, and thus, it is hardly disprovable as a paradigm, and the same problem applies to Wolfram's work, it is very apealing, but things are explained in very tiny details or in broad strokes. There is no equation that will tell you the bigger picture because there is no bigger picture, the world is a soup of events, and as apealing as this might be, as natural as the patterns the simulation generated seems to be, this does not mean that the physical world is actually operating like this.
Even going further, it is worthless as a replacement for 'bigger laws', laws that supervene other laws, gaz propagation can be predicted by such laws, but Wolfram's laws are too tiny, their nature is to lead to chaos and non predictibility, to actually generate the supervenient laws, but again, predictive power is non existant or lower than current science.
But again, this will not prevent many from holding this book quasi religiously, even unknowingly (as many people do today with broad connectionism), because it is simple, elegant, and accounts for a lot, or so it seems (but again, some people think that the pyramids were built by aliens because they think it's simple, elegant, and explains a lot). This book will be about belief, in the next decades and centuries, it will be held as the Bible of Reductionism, because it provides the self consistent argument some philosophers like Dennett needed to explain away consciousness as a pure illusion.
This is my second problem with this book, Wolfram basically says he is presenting us with a theory of everything, but there is not much about perception, qualias, and more generally, the phenomenal aspects of consciousness. Wolfram, as the Priest of Reductionists I think he is going to become, simply leaves the matter out, talking about perception in terms of representational spaces (even if not in quite those terms), but the phenomenal aspect of those spaces is let out, as if we actually were Chalmers' zombies.
To conclude, this will be a delightful read for most slashdoters, at least, all of those with a scientific 'way of life' (no strong backround needed), they will see it as the crystalization of their materialistic views. Religious people might have a problem with this book as it depicts us as automatons, literally.
And then there are people like me, lost between the duality of phenomena and matter and the universe being-causally-closed-sad-state-of-affair. To us, sometimes known as naturalistic dualists (qualia as part of natural laws), the strong deterministic framework that Wolfram imposes seems to point to a strong epiphenomenalism for consciousness, where other theories based on quantum indeterminacy (and quantum theory has been throughly tested for 60+ years) do open possibilities of weak epiphenomenalism. In a few words, I'm not completely convinced by Wolfram's version of free will.
I'm a bit more than two third into the book, reading it quickly at first to grasp the feel of it, and then to read it slowly a second time, so it is possible that some of the things I have said may not be fair, and for this I apologize in advance.
I'm loving every part of it, and if you feel my remarks are too harsh, just assume that I'm jealous I didn't write it. If anything this will make mentioning reverse causation much easier in academia without being laughed at, and Link Theory is going to get a huge boost. Having made 4 computer languages already, I plan to have my fifth be able to run reverse causation in typical link theory problems or simulate my causal backpropagation neural network model. If I can use some of Wolfram's formalism to help this task and if he has cleared up the mess with causality, or helped people make the distinction between predictability and determinism for the rest of us too, then I'll be eternally grateful.
lone, dfx.
http://www.causaergsum.net/
>My own music purchasing has declined substantially since napster went away and getting music got "harder"
It's really not about sales, it's about making it easy for you to find what they want you to find and hard to find what they don't want you to find. The last thing the recording industry wants is you being able to find and then buy ANY kind of music.
Does the word "control" rings a bell ?
lone, dfx.
Now that would definitly give a new meaning to the word "mailbomb".
lone, dfx
My favorite algorithm, so simple yet so powerful, is the Fast Folding Algorithm, the one used by the seti@home client in your computer to detected repetitions in the signal, it's also used to detect unknown pulsars in space and I have experimented successfully with it on BPM detection in musical signals.
Look it up, you'll like it.
lone.
I think I remember a serious discussion between two scientists, one who thinks that gravity reduces past the point of average landlass (weightless center), and one who thinks it increases toward the center. Or have I completely imagined that ? I could dig up the names of those guys if needed.
lonedfx.
Will the desk collapse after a while ? :) I mean, I wouldn't want to be on the highway when my window explodes due to my listening of J Boogie - Gemini Dub...
lone, dfx.
Haven't seen the movie yet, but one of the thing I could gather from the trailer is that it is Arwen who is standing up to the black rider at the ford with a sword in her hand. I still need to see it, but to my opinion this is a grave mistake, this is the first time (to me) that the reader can really appreciate Frodo for what he is: tough, when he stands up agaisnt them, and explains much of Elrond's trust in him at Rivendell. So somehow I fear that might remove something from frodo's character.
Of course I might have completely misinterpreted the trailer, but another point that stands is that Arwen never handles a sword in the book, her story runs deep and is heavily hinted at all through the pages, but one destiny she doesn't have is to hold a sword and directly stand up against evil. This is simply not her kind of destiny.
Hope I'm all wrong.
lone
Touché :)
:)
I like the guy too, he's true to himself and that's enough for me
lonedfx.
He hasn't said it was aweful material, just that it would be even better without the "smartass goddamn comments at the end of every post".
Why is it you need to attack the guy exactly ?
lonedfx
When Nasa called for design projects for the ISS, they got a few proposals, and they reduced the thing to basically two options: 1) building ISS at sea level, pack it up and ship it in 2 or 3 shuttles flights to deploy it, OR, 2) send it in kit using a hundred shuttle flights and build everything in orbit.
The scientific advisors gave their opinion, option 1 was MUCH easier to do and MUCH cheaper, for the same result.
BUT.
It didn't justify a space shuttle.
ISS (or more to the point, the way it is built) is solely a justification for the space shuttle. I have NO doubt that, if the russians were indeed going to make Mir2 (or whatever they call it), they would not make that kind of mistake precisely because they cannot afford it.
In 10 years, Mir2 might be operational, and ISS might still suffer from budget cuts.
Don't dismiss the idea just because they can't afford an ISS, that's like saying you cannot afford to buy a cesna because a boeing jumbojet costs so much.
lonedfx.
>Hey barely have the money for what they are
:)
>supposed to do for the ISS. I don't think the US
>would let them get away with it after all the
>financial problems they have caused us already
And what would the US do about it exactly ? Cancel russia's membership in ISS and dump russian modules ? yeah right
Let me think, what did they do again to try to prevent them from sending Tito to the ISS ?
Oh yeah, that's it... they used -political pressure-... that worked so well.
laughable.
lonedfx
--
go ahead, I deserve that troll moderation, come on!
Funny how this is happening just when people are starting to think about space tourism...
Don't come IT SUCKS! You won't be able to plug your hair drier on those russian plugs, and (worst of all) the TV screen is too small. Do not come, We repeat, Do NOT Come. Wait for the next station, it'll be much better, keep your 20 millions.
It sucks. We swear.
-
lone