I will be sure to check out Creatures, it looks like a very impressive technical feat. However, what happens in creatures is a bit different from the type of recombination necessary to overcome Muller's Ratchet.
Wikipedia claims they are haploid, and without additive variance (the brain is almost exclusively additive in my understanding), and the ability to "screw up" recombination and duplicate large chunks of the genome (thereby duplicating chunks of the neural network - these areas are then repartitioned for other tasks in higher lifeforms).
The program analogy is very clever, but programs are specific to function and NNs need to be able to retask a single set of neurons to a completely new function. E.G. a person recovers from a stroke by rerouting processes around damaged neurons, but a web browser will always be a web browser. Programs are a pretty good analogy to life in general, though.
I've thought a bit about this before and concluded that it just won't work for the above reasons.
I DO NOT NEED TO HAVE A GLOWING RED LIGHT JUST TO KNOW MY DEVICE IS TURNED OFF.
I've heard that the 360 has no less than THREE red lights that come on just to let you know when the system is on (otherwise it's impossible to determine on from off). Seems like overkill to me, but what do I know.
Well said. I'd like to add that the separation between consciousness and a simple computer is very likely the ability to "meta-think", that is, have synapse creation controlled by the synapses of other neurons. I've seen a couple of models for this (one likening neurons to amoebas using cAMP for signaling), but nothing that's close to AI...yet.
Additionally, it's easy to get confused over intelligence as the GP has; we have several hundred-thousand times more neurons in our brains than our computers do, each of them functioning as an extremely slow (10hz) processor, so it's pretty hard to compare the two.
Another thing differentiating computers from humans is that the human processor grows and evolves over generations (novel functions, neuron types, repressors and transmitters, etc.), while our most advanced neural networks are unable to recombine (recombination allows fixation of multiple beneficial alleles simultaneously), are subject to poor (and often conflicting) selection pressures, and are aimed at reaching an objective (the human brain is thought to be the result of runaway sexual selection, although I personally don't believe this).
Besides, as the saying goes, the most highly advanced forms of a neural network are indistinguishable from a soul.
I hate to be the one to bring reality into this little discussion, but for HP to dump Windows and start selling Linux (or any other OS) instead is really, really stupid.
I admit, I'd buy one. You'd probably buy one, too. But almost everyone else in the known universe wants Windows on their computer. Those that don't are buying Macs. This means that if HP wants to stay alive, they need to sell Vista.
I especially like this piece:
while they may suffer for it in the short term, the long term looks a whole lot brighter
I'd like to see the company that could actually look that far ahead. Investors demand short term profits, and especially in the computer world, a couple of bad years might be enough to kill HP altogether.
It's the unfair result of Microsoft's lock-in, but for the foreseeable future it seems to be pretty much an all or nothing Windows vs. Linux (OK, Dell has Windows vs. [hidden on the back page behind a sign reading "beware of the penguin"], but you get the idea).
I'm a biology major, and let me say that I am as shocked to learn that there are bacteria still living as I am to learn that there are people who can't recognize sarcasm.
Either way, you've got to put in more energy than if you used atoms that are stored in a higher energy state to begin with. The gray goos that use carbon instead will do better in the long run, and will out compete the goo that insists on eating only silicon.
I think the fact that all bacteria are now extinct pretty much proves that humanity will also be in the next billion years.
Also, bacteria, adaptable as they may be, do not (so far as we know) have the ability to plan ahead. We can predict that the sun will go supernova and that we need to get the hell off the earth, bacteria just hope to hitch a ride with us. I think this gives us the potential to be one of the most adaptable species (on an evolutionary time scale) ever.
We still lose at fecundity to millions of other species, though I must point out that we are nowhere near our maximum for fecundity (we have imposed artificial restrictions - condoms).
I agree that the parent is overrated, and that we won't run out of fossil fuels in 100 years (or ever: we will reduce our usage, and prices will increase, but we can still synthesize fossil fuels from just about anything with carbon in it).
Also, we are already starting to see the exponential human growth curve level off (suggesting a logistic population growth model).
This is a result of a variety of factors; We can (and should!) debate the human carrying capacity of the earth, but the important trend we are seeing is this: First world countries that have access to birth control are willing to have fewer children and give them more biological resources (money, food, vaccines, etc.) (the classic evolutionary trade-off between many weak offspring or a few strong offspring), meaning that the world's population will level off (and maybe even decline) sometime before we hit 12 billion.
I hope for our sake that we introduce a higher standard of education (=birth control) to countries that have a high growth rate right now, and adopt greener standards of living in countries that can, because honestly I'm not convinced that 12 billion is a low enough number to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe (that the GP is talking about). If everyone lived the way we do in America, the K of earth would be about 2 billion.
Did you read what the GP wrote? The silicon is already at such a low energy state that it's far more practical to get your energy from places like glucose, where plants have already done the hard stuff (captured the energy of a photon) for you.
Look, I understand what you're saying, but I would say that "eat what we find, settle where food is" explains where agriculture began, but not why.
When I say agriculture is a lot of work, I don't mean it in the same way that hard physical labor is a lot of work (OK, well I do, but what I really mean is that the risks are higher). Odds are, if you try to grow crops, you will fail, and you're entire family/tribe will die.
Because of this, I can't see agriculture getting started without a pretty large critical mass (similar to how eusocial organisms which might want to leave the eusocial colony and try to survive on their own simply cannot make it).
It's much less work to simply raid food from the neighboring tribe, and I think that the persistent 80% violent death rate you cite is evidence to support this: only an idiot would rush into an 80% chance of death if he could farm instead (like you point out), so why did it take so long for agriculture to catch on? The only logical explanation is if you have >80% chance of failure when farming.
The idea of temples to please your God provides enough of a drive that it might overcome this barrier to entry.
Then again, I'm not sure the two theories are mutually exclusive; two distinct convergent selection pressures could have simultaneously pushed us to agriculture; plentiful food lowering the risk of failure and the drive to honor god enforcing cooperation with a new social order.
They used the "swoosh" of jokes flying over heads to establish a binary communication system. "Haha" being 1, and "swoosh" being 0.
This enabled them to tell primitive jokes, such as "There are haha!swoosh! kinds of people in the world, those who are able to communicate and those who aren't".
Anthropologists believe that this gave them an advantage in cultural development, because the Polynesians were able to tell jokes thousands of years before the jokes themselves became funny.
Oh, right, you wanted a reference. Here. It's probably not the best one, but I think you get the idea.
Moraelin, you're a usually freaking genius, and I love reading your posts, but I'm going to have to side with cipher05 on this.
Agriculture has serious problems for an early tribe of humans. For one thing, you have to work, all day long; no more "hunt until you get lucky and then sleep the rest of the day".
I've done a very small amount of "primitive agriculture" and it was really hard. You have to cut trees, burn stumps, till soil, rake and level the ground, remove weeds, and water the plants. I did this with modern tools (shovel, chainsaw, hoe) and modern crops (corn, winter rye, a couple of kinds of wheat that didn't grow very well).
I can't even begin to imagine how much work this would have been for people with tools that constantly broke and crops that were less hardy and had lower yields (this isn't just anecdotal evidence, BTW. We covered this stuff in a natural history class I took, with the same conclusion).
So, I'm kind of inclined to fall into the camp of: "We want to build a bigger monument for our god, how can we support this?" "Oh, I know! We'll grow crops. It's more work than hunting, but it'll show our enemies how devoted we are to god!"
I should point out that now that it's easier to grow crops than hunt, we should ditch "god".
Since you don't have any replies yet I'll give it my best shot.
Influenza (the flu), originates in China pretty much every year. Different strains of RNA viruses arise (mutations in antigens, the process is called antigenic drift), in pigs. These are different enough to be able to get past the immune system (which is resistant to last year's strain, but unable to recognize recombined (new) antigens).
Pigs share a common receptor with people which is hijacked by these RNA viruses; this allows the virus to jump from pigs to humans. (Aside: they also share a different receptor with birds, which is why we're so paranoid about avian influenza: it could jump to pigs, mutate to our receptor, and then jump to humans.)
Every year you'll have dozens of different strains of influenza arising in pigs; only and handful of these use the common receptor and are able to jump to people. From there, only a handful of these are spread (through migration) to other parts of the world. IIRC, the flu spreads west with the climate, eventually encountering a city where it's able to hitch a ride to America (and the rest of the world) on a boat or an airplane.
WHO relies on being able to look at previous strains which reached epidemic and pandemic proportions, and on being able to artificially recombine antigens to create this years major strains. Sometimes they miss a few critical ones (2003-2004), but they're remarkably good about predicting which strains will mutate.
Basically, there are only a few different antigens, and we rely on creating the same new set that nature will create (there's a finite number of viable recombinant strains, after all). I doubt they look at pigs in China; there's simply too many in areas that are too remote.
If there's an epidemiologist reading this, he can probably give you a more detailed answer.
The bottom line is that we do not yet fully understand memory, in much the same way that we do not fully understand synapse formation in the brain. We should just wait and see before jumping to any conclusions (and maybe write a grant proposal or two along the way).
1. People aren't going to magically start living off the government so long as they have a choice. Welfare sucks...you make so little cash that you can't even afford to keep your car running or pay for your World of Warcraft subscription (idiots go without eating before they'd even consider canceling that!). I've worked minimum wage jobs along side of people who used to be on welfare. They all said that they hated it, and they were pretty glad to be working long hours at shitty pay for a tiny quality of life improvement. Besides, as long as there's republicans in the government, they'll keep it from spiraling down so that the "middle class" who make "only" $100,000 a year don't have to pay taxes. Believe me, rich people have plenty of other rich people looking out for them.
If it's socialism to give a tiny bit of extra cash to the very lowest class of people then count me in.
2. People giving to charities...voluntary taxation, trickle down theory. Sounds familiar. We've been there, and it seems to me like rich people put their money in the bank, leaving little to "trickle down", but it's a pretty subjective issue.
Keep the standard of living at 3rd world levels for people on welfare, and they will try to raise themselves above their status.
But who wants/needs the extra weight and expense and unupgradability of an SLI card you're almost never going to use?
Who would ever want more than ~32 megs of video memory in a laptop? No one in their right mind uses laptops for games, and you're just going to get burned in another year or two when the next generation of video cards comes out.
This is a very niche product at best. Now, if this were a laptop that you could somehow upgrade with a full-sized SLI setup (using a dock or something) that might be interesting (RAM and processor last forever, mine are currently 4 years old and doing just fine even on games that recommend duel cores, while video cards need to be upgraded every couple of years to keep playing at max settings).
Slashdot Mirror
I will be sure to check out Creatures, it looks like a very impressive technical feat. However, what happens in creatures is a bit different from the type of recombination necessary to overcome Muller's Ratchet.
Wikipedia claims they are haploid, and without additive variance (the brain is almost exclusively additive in my understanding), and the ability to "screw up" recombination and duplicate large chunks of the genome (thereby duplicating chunks of the neural network - these areas are then repartitioned for other tasks in higher lifeforms).
The program analogy is very clever, but programs are specific to function and NNs need to be able to retask a single set of neurons to a completely new function. E.G. a person recovers from a stroke by rerouting processes around damaged neurons, but a web browser will always be a web browser. Programs are a pretty good analogy to life in general, though.
I've thought a bit about this before and concluded that it just won't work for the above reasons.
40% + 30% + 20% = perhaps the people who designed the Slashdot moderation system were the same ones who designed Bender?
That's the sort of cool feature that needs to be added to VLC.
I've heard that the 360 has no less than THREE red lights that come on just to let you know when the system is on (otherwise it's impossible to determine on from off). Seems like overkill to me, but what do I know.
Well said. I'd like to add that the separation between consciousness and a simple computer is very likely the ability to "meta-think", that is, have synapse creation controlled by the synapses of other neurons. I've seen a couple of models for this (one likening neurons to amoebas using cAMP for signaling), but nothing that's close to AI...yet.
Additionally, it's easy to get confused over intelligence as the GP has; we have several hundred-thousand times more neurons in our brains than our computers do, each of them functioning as an extremely slow (10hz) processor, so it's pretty hard to compare the two.
Another thing differentiating computers from humans is that the human processor grows and evolves over generations (novel functions, neuron types, repressors and transmitters, etc.), while our most advanced neural networks are unable to recombine (recombination allows fixation of multiple beneficial alleles simultaneously), are subject to poor (and often conflicting) selection pressures, and are aimed at reaching an objective (the human brain is thought to be the result of runaway sexual selection, although I personally don't believe this).
Besides, as the saying goes, the most highly advanced forms of a neural network are indistinguishable from a soul.
I hate to be the one to bring reality into this little discussion, but for HP to dump Windows and start selling Linux (or any other OS) instead is really, really stupid.
I admit, I'd buy one. You'd probably buy one, too. But almost everyone else in the known universe wants Windows on their computer. Those that don't are buying Macs. This means that if HP wants to stay alive, they need to sell Vista.
I especially like this piece:
I'd like to see the company that could actually look that far ahead. Investors demand short term profits, and especially in the computer world, a couple of bad years might be enough to kill HP altogether.
It's the unfair result of Microsoft's lock-in, but for the foreseeable future it seems to be pretty much an all or nothing Windows vs. Linux (OK, Dell has Windows vs. [hidden on the back page behind a sign reading "beware of the penguin"], but you get the idea).
That "hypothesis" has been pretty clearly shown to be the cause behind the polio epidemic in the early part of the 20th century.
Also, don't forget that kid's share their mother's immune system for the first year or so of life.
Captain Obvious, is that you? Since when do you post to Slashdot?
I'm a biology major, and let me say that I am as shocked to learn that there are bacteria still living as I am to learn that there are people who can't recognize sarcasm.
What's the difference?
Either way, you've got to put in more energy than if you used atoms that are stored in a higher energy state to begin with. The gray goos that use carbon instead will do better in the long run, and will out compete the goo that insists on eating only silicon.
I think the fact that all bacteria are now extinct pretty much proves that humanity will also be in the next billion years.
Also, bacteria, adaptable as they may be, do not (so far as we know) have the ability to plan ahead. We can predict that the sun will go supernova and that we need to get the hell off the earth, bacteria just hope to hitch a ride with us. I think this gives us the potential to be one of the most adaptable species (on an evolutionary time scale) ever.
We still lose at fecundity to millions of other species, though I must point out that we are nowhere near our maximum for fecundity (we have imposed artificial restrictions - condoms).
I agree that the parent is overrated, and that we won't run out of fossil fuels in 100 years (or ever: we will reduce our usage, and prices will increase, but we can still synthesize fossil fuels from just about anything with carbon in it).
Also, we are already starting to see the exponential human growth curve level off (suggesting a logistic population growth model).
This is a result of a variety of factors; We can (and should!) debate the human carrying capacity of the earth, but the important trend we are seeing is this: First world countries that have access to birth control are willing to have fewer children and give them more biological resources (money, food, vaccines, etc.) (the classic evolutionary trade-off between many weak offspring or a few strong offspring), meaning that the world's population will level off (and maybe even decline) sometime before we hit 12 billion.
I hope for our sake that we introduce a higher standard of education (=birth control) to countries that have a high growth rate right now, and adopt greener standards of living in countries that can, because honestly I'm not convinced that 12 billion is a low enough number to avoid a Malthusian catastrophe (that the GP is talking about). If everyone lived the way we do in America, the K of earth would be about 2 billion.
Would you like to know more?
I've got a plan for those issues. It's a 12 gauge and a 20 gauge, respectively.
Is there any risk of human extinction sufficient violence can't solve?
Did you read what the GP wrote? The silicon is already at such a low energy state that it's far more practical to get your energy from places like glucose, where plants have already done the hard stuff (captured the energy of a photon) for you.
What the fuck, man! You totally ruined the ending of life for me! The least you could have done was put a spoilers tag around that! Come on!
Shit, I should probably say that the above is for XP, I don't know if it works on Vista. Try at your own risk (or use V-Lite).
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
Change the following String values:
AutoEndTasks=1
HungAppTimeout=4000
WaitToKillAppTimeout=4000
WaitToKillServiceTimeout=4000
N-lite can do this and a bunch more stuff as well, if you use it.
Look, I understand what you're saying, but I would say that "eat what we find, settle where food is" explains where agriculture began, but not why.
When I say agriculture is a lot of work, I don't mean it in the same way that hard physical labor is a lot of work (OK, well I do, but what I really mean is that the risks are higher). Odds are, if you try to grow crops, you will fail, and you're entire family/tribe will die.
Because of this, I can't see agriculture getting started without a pretty large critical mass (similar to how eusocial organisms which might want to leave the eusocial colony and try to survive on their own simply cannot make it).
It's much less work to simply raid food from the neighboring tribe, and I think that the persistent 80% violent death rate you cite is evidence to support this: only an idiot would rush into an 80% chance of death if he could farm instead (like you point out), so why did it take so long for agriculture to catch on? The only logical explanation is if you have >80% chance of failure when farming.
The idea of temples to please your God provides enough of a drive that it might overcome this barrier to entry.
Then again, I'm not sure the two theories are mutually exclusive; two distinct convergent selection pressures could have simultaneously pushed us to agriculture; plentiful food lowering the risk of failure and the drive to honor god enforcing cooperation with a new social order.
They used the "swoosh" of jokes flying over heads to establish a binary communication system. "Haha" being 1, and "swoosh" being 0.
This enabled them to tell primitive jokes, such as "There are haha!swoosh! kinds of people in the world, those who are able to communicate and those who aren't".
Anthropologists believe that this gave them an advantage in cultural development, because the Polynesians were able to tell jokes thousands of years before the jokes themselves became funny.
Oh, right, you wanted a reference. Here. It's probably not the best one, but I think you get the idea.
Moraelin, you're a usually freaking genius, and I love reading your posts, but I'm going to have to side with cipher05 on this.
Agriculture has serious problems for an early tribe of humans. For one thing, you have to work, all day long; no more "hunt until you get lucky and then sleep the rest of the day".
I've done a very small amount of "primitive agriculture" and it was really hard. You have to cut trees, burn stumps, till soil, rake and level the ground, remove weeds, and water the plants. I did this with modern tools (shovel, chainsaw, hoe) and modern crops (corn, winter rye, a couple of kinds of wheat that didn't grow very well).
I can't even begin to imagine how much work this would have been for people with tools that constantly broke and crops that were less hardy and had lower yields (this isn't just anecdotal evidence, BTW. We covered this stuff in a natural history class I took, with the same conclusion).
So, I'm kind of inclined to fall into the camp of:
"We want to build a bigger monument for our god, how can we support this?"
"Oh, I know! We'll grow crops. It's more work than hunting, but it'll show our enemies how devoted we are to god!"
I should point out that now that it's easier to grow crops than hunt, we should ditch "god".
Influenza (the flu), originates in China pretty much every year. Different strains of RNA viruses arise (mutations in antigens, the process is called antigenic drift), in pigs. These are different enough to be able to get past the immune system (which is resistant to last year's strain, but unable to recognize recombined (new) antigens).
Pigs share a common receptor with people which is hijacked by these RNA viruses; this allows the virus to jump from pigs to humans. (Aside: they also share a different receptor with birds, which is why we're so paranoid about avian influenza: it could jump to pigs, mutate to our receptor, and then jump to humans.)
Every year you'll have dozens of different strains of influenza arising in pigs; only and handful of these use the common receptor and are able to jump to people. From there, only a handful of these are spread (through migration) to other parts of the world. IIRC, the flu spreads west with the climate, eventually encountering a city where it's able to hitch a ride to America (and the rest of the world) on a boat or an airplane.
WHO relies on being able to look at previous strains which reached epidemic and pandemic proportions, and on being able to artificially recombine antigens to create this years major strains. Sometimes they miss a few critical ones (2003-2004), but they're remarkably good about predicting which strains will mutate.
Basically, there are only a few different antigens, and we rely on creating the same new set that nature will create (there's a finite number of viable recombinant strains, after all). I doubt they look at pigs in China; there's simply too many in areas that are too remote.
If there's an epidemiologist reading this, he can probably give you a more detailed answer.
I'd venture a guess that it's not correct (simply not enough evidence supporting it, but that has not yet been ruled out either.
The bottom line is that we do not yet fully understand memory, in much the same way that we do not fully understand synapse formation in the brain. We should just wait and see before jumping to any conclusions (and maybe write a grant proposal or two along the way).
Keep waiting, this being /. he might never exercise.
If it's socialism to give a tiny bit of extra cash to the very lowest class of people then count me in.
2. People giving to charities...voluntary taxation, trickle down theory. Sounds familiar. We've been there, and it seems to me like rich people put their money in the bank, leaving little to "trickle down", but it's a pretty subjective issue.
Keep the standard of living at 3rd world levels for people on welfare, and they will try to raise themselves above their status.
Who would ever want more than ~32 megs of video memory in a laptop? No one in their right mind uses laptops for games, and you're just going to get burned in another year or two when the next generation of video cards comes out.
This is a very niche product at best. Now, if this were a laptop that you could somehow upgrade with a full-sized SLI setup (using a dock or something) that might be interesting (RAM and processor last forever, mine are currently 4 years old and doing just fine even on games that recommend duel cores, while video cards need to be upgraded every couple of years to keep playing at max settings).