I disagree with your conjectures, except in the sense that that "aesthetic pleasure" sense brought us greatly enhanced creativity, which allowed us to beat the crap out of everything that got in our way... but that's a very loose way to link it to survival. The point I was trying to get across is that pleasure is not always linked to procreation. Be it due to a fluke or any other reason, somehow we've moved to the point where we can enjoy doing things that have nothing to do with reproduction. Good that we can, too, or most of the slashdot community would be pretty unhappy:-P
Daniel
Re:You mean what would they do if they were sapien
on
AI in Sci-Fi
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· Score: 3, Informative
According to dictionary.com, you are partially right. The first definition is actually The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness, which supports my definition, but the second is Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought (which supports your definition).
But being partially right makes you wrong on the idea that the first definition of sentience is a "sci-fi misunderstanding". It's the primary dictionary definition of "sentience", so it's certainly not a misunderstanding.
Any research that can make dealing with prime numbers easier can make cracking RSA asymmetric encryption (the most widely used atm) easier, and thus directly affect your privacy.
Apart from that, of course it's extremely boring, but so is everything, until you think of the applications.
It's a common misconception that Buddhism is just about "negating the self". In fact, the purpose of it is precisely to be able to do what you want better. A buddhist also has a self and has desires, needs, etc, just like any other human being. The difference is just that he's aware that those are desires and needs and he has more control over them. He also has the discipline to listen to his intuition to decide whether a particular desire is worth pursuing or not. But he's not some empty zombie that doesn't desire anything.
Daniel
Re:You mean what would they do if they were sapien
on
AI in Sci-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sentience is awareness that you exist. Machines can't really be said to be aware that they exist, at the moment. Of course, this is all far out philosophical bullshit, very hard to prove one way or another, but intuitively, unless you're trying to be a pedantic asshole, you'll probably agree that whilst, say, a dog is aware of its own existence, the computer you're typing on isn't.
So, then, why do people feel good when they read a nice poem? Why do they feel good when they hear a good song? Why do they feel good when they get that friggin' script working at last?
Surely such esthetic pleasures are very far removed from reproduction... yet they are there. I saw a documentary recently which claimed that the reason we split off from other human-like races back 50'000 years ago or so and started evolving (socially, technologically, etc) much faster (than the pre-humans who took 3 million years to get to this point) was precisely because this esthetic pleasure appeared suddenly as a major component of homo sapiens.
So no, sex is not everything (not for everyone, at least).
Really depends how big the pieces are. I'm sure you won't find it hard to believe that a ton of rock and a ton of dust don't quite have the same consequences if they hit the atmosphere at 20k/sec. The rock will go through, burning some outer layers, while the dust will disperse when it gets into the thicker parts of the atmosphere.
Of course, if you have a 10km large rock and you break it into two halves, the improvement will be pretty minor. But if you broke it into 10'000 pieces it would cause lots of little bits of damage over a large area, instead of utterly wiping out that large area.
Wouldn't it be pretty fast if you start with A, put z = sqrt(A), then search around z already knowing all the prime numbers from 0 to z? If the method accelerates things enough, it's equivalent to knowing all the numbers from 0 to z. I would have thought that going through a few zillion numbers and trying to divide to see if we get an integer shouldn't take that long - at least it would take many orders of magnitude less time than trying ALL the integers in there.
Oh, and from what I've seen, it does take a fair amount of time to check whether a large number is a prime. At least, if it doesn't, you need to tell Sun that their random large prime generator sucks ass as it takes more time the more certainty you need about whether the number is really a prime.
What I mean is that given Microsoft's history of bugs and security problems, it wouldn't be too surprising to find that the Microsoft implementation is riddled with them, while the Mono implementation, once mature, is faster, works on both windows and unix, has no bugs and doesn't crash.
And that wouldn't help the M$ PR machine, now, would it?:-P
Hmm... remembering that one of MS's strongest point is their PR work, I fail to see how having a stronger.NET implementation on Linux than on Windows is going to help them...
Microsoft shuts down Mono effort for breach of intellectual property rights.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
The only interesting question remaining is whether they'll shut it down before or after Mono becomes a better, stabler, more standards-compliant implementation of.NET than Microsoft's own.
He was talking about RSA. And yes, if someone figures out a way to use these patterns to calculate large prime numbers more quickly, this could definitely have huge consequences on asymmetrical encryption like RSA. Depending on how much faster it makes calculation of large primes, it could either require much larger RSA keys (say 40kbit instead of 4kbit) or even make RSA and other prime-number-based encryption schemes inherently insecure.
In the scientific community, proof is established by repeated experimental repetition, in Mathematics, testing this theory lots of times with lots of different numbers (see computers).
Apparently you've just started your degree (or maybe not even yet) so you haven't heard of proof by induction. In proof by induction, you prove that if a statement is true for q=n, it is also true for q=n+1. That's step 1. Then you go and prove that it's true for q=1. Once you've done those two steps the statement is proven for all integer values of q.
Are you seriously claiming that Microsoft has made enough money from Windows? I can't believe you can uphold such horrible beliefs!
Understand this: No corporation has ever made enough money out of something. The only way that would happen would be if that corporation was the only corporation in the whole world, and made ALL the money. Then things would be right, and the world would be a happy place.
not fair, I posted this 3 hours ago, all well formatted and very informative, I guarantee you. I guess it wasn't on BBC World yet.
Anyway, I'm not a doctor but this is really scary. They seem to say that you need intravenous antibiotics to have a good chance to survive this. Coming from south east asia, this disease seems like it could easily spread to, say, Africa... can you imagine how many deaths there will be if it does?
Let's hope they actually listen to that. That proposal, to have copyrights expire unless some token amount is paid in (ie someone clearly takes an interest) would put enormous amounts of material into the public domain. It would be brilliant!
2 gigs of mp3s? Do you have some super-l33t compression system or something? I don't see how you can fit any decent collection in 2 gigs, not even if you maim the sound with 8kbps or something...
Hmm, I wonder how fast Swing would be on a C64... it's already slow as hell on an Athlon XP 1800+, so on a C64 it probably takes half an hour to draw a button:-P!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree with your conjectures, except in the sense that that "aesthetic pleasure" sense brought us greatly enhanced creativity, which allowed us to beat the crap out of everything that got in our way... but that's a very loose way to link it to survival. The point I was trying to get across is that pleasure is not always linked to procreation. Be it due to a fluke or any other reason, somehow we've moved to the point where we can enjoy doing things that have nothing to do with reproduction. Good that we can, too, or most of the slashdot community would be pretty unhappy :-P
Daniel
According to dictionary.com, you are partially right. The first definition is actually The quality or state of being sentient; consciousness, which supports my definition, but the second is Feeling as distinguished from perception or thought (which supports your definition).
But being partially right makes you wrong on the idea that the first definition of sentience is a "sci-fi misunderstanding". It's the primary dictionary definition of "sentience", so it's certainly not a misunderstanding.
Daniel
Any research that can make dealing with prime numbers easier can make cracking RSA asymmetric encryption (the most widely used atm) easier, and thus directly affect your privacy.
Apart from that, of course it's extremely boring, but so is everything, until you think of the applications.
Daniel
unless you're a Buddha seeking to negate the self
It's a common misconception that Buddhism is just about "negating the self". In fact, the purpose of it is precisely to be able to do what you want better. A buddhist also has a self and has desires, needs, etc, just like any other human being. The difference is just that he's aware that those are desires and needs and he has more control over them. He also has the discipline to listen to his intuition to decide whether a particular desire is worth pursuing or not. But he's not some empty zombie that doesn't desire anything.
Daniel
Sentience is awareness that you exist. Machines can't really be said to be aware that they exist, at the moment. Of course, this is all far out philosophical bullshit, very hard to prove one way or another, but intuitively, unless you're trying to be a pedantic asshole, you'll probably agree that whilst, say, a dog is aware of its own existence, the computer you're typing on isn't.
Daniel
So, then, why do people feel good when they read a nice poem? Why do they feel good when they hear a good song? Why do they feel good when they get that friggin' script working at last?
Surely such esthetic pleasures are very far removed from reproduction... yet they are there. I saw a documentary recently which claimed that the reason we split off from other human-like races back 50'000 years ago or so and started evolving (socially, technologically, etc) much faster (than the pre-humans who took 3 million years to get to this point) was precisely because this esthetic pleasure appeared suddenly as a major component of homo sapiens.
So no, sex is not everything (not for everyone, at least).
Daniel
Hmm... doughnuts.
Daniel
Really depends how big the pieces are. I'm sure you won't find it hard to believe that a ton of rock and a ton of dust don't quite have the same consequences if they hit the atmosphere at 20k/sec. The rock will go through, burning some outer layers, while the dust will disperse when it gets into the thicker parts of the atmosphere.
Of course, if you have a 10km large rock and you break it into two halves, the improvement will be pretty minor. But if you broke it into 10'000 pieces it would cause lots of little bits of damage over a large area, instead of utterly wiping out that large area.
Daniel
I meant prime numbers from 0 to z of course.
Daniel
Wouldn't it be pretty fast if you start with A, put z = sqrt(A), then search around z already knowing all the prime numbers from 0 to z? If the method accelerates things enough, it's equivalent to knowing all the numbers from 0 to z. I would have thought that going through a few zillion numbers and trying to divide to see if we get an integer shouldn't take that long - at least it would take many orders of magnitude less time than trying ALL the integers in there.
Oh, and from what I've seen, it does take a fair amount of time to check whether a large number is a prime. At least, if it doesn't, you need to tell Sun that their random large prime generator sucks ass as it takes more time the more certainty you need about whether the number is really a prime.
Daniel
What I mean is that given Microsoft's history of bugs and security problems, it wouldn't be too surprising to find that the Microsoft implementation is riddled with them, while the Mono implementation, once mature, is faster, works on both windows and unix, has no bugs and doesn't crash.
:-P
And that wouldn't help the M$ PR machine, now, would it?
Daniel
Hmm... remembering that one of MS's strongest point is their PR work, I fail to see how having a stronger .NET implementation on Linux than on Windows is going to help them...
Daniel
Microsoft shuts down Mono effort for breach of intellectual property rights.
.NET than Microsoft's own.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
The only interesting question remaining is whether they'll shut it down before or after Mono becomes a better, stabler, more standards-compliant implementation of
Daniel
3141592799 / 3 = 1047197600
So not a prime.
Daniel
He was talking about RSA. And yes, if someone figures out a way to use these patterns to calculate large prime numbers more quickly, this could definitely have huge consequences on asymmetrical encryption like RSA. Depending on how much faster it makes calculation of large primes, it could either require much larger RSA keys (say 40kbit instead of 4kbit) or even make RSA and other prime-number-based encryption schemes inherently insecure.
Daniel
Sorry dude, you're wrong.
In the scientific community, proof is established by repeated experimental repetition, in Mathematics, testing this theory lots of times with lots of different numbers (see computers).
Apparently you've just started your degree (or maybe not even yet) so you haven't heard of proof by induction. In proof by induction, you prove that if a statement is true for q=n, it is also true for q=n+1. That's step 1. Then you go and prove that it's true for q=1. Once you've done those two steps the statement is proven for all integer values of q.
Daniel
Only if you sign an agreement saying that you will delete any mp3s and DVDs you download 24 hours after you download them!
Daniel
Are you seriously claiming that Microsoft has made enough money from Windows? I can't believe you can uphold such horrible beliefs!
Understand this: No corporation has ever made enough money out of something. The only way that would happen would be if that corporation was the only corporation in the whole world, and made ALL the money. Then things would be right, and the world would be a happy place.
Daniel
They don't know whether it's a virus yet (according to most of the accounts I've read, findable on Google News).
Daniel
not fair, I posted this 3 hours ago, all well formatted and very informative, I guarantee you. I guess it wasn't on BBC World yet.
:-(
Anyway, I'm not a doctor but this is really scary. They seem to say that you need intravenous antibiotics to have a good chance to survive this. Coming from south east asia, this disease seems like it could easily spread to, say, Africa... can you imagine how many deaths there will be if it does?
Daniel
Go check the definition of "sarcasm". Honestly, do it. It will do you some good.
Daniel
Let's hope they actually listen to that. That proposal, to have copyrights expire unless some token amount is paid in (ie someone clearly takes an interest) would put enormous amounts of material into the public domain. It would be brilliant!
Daniel
Fans will go to the movie anyway, and they'll buy the special collector edition whenever it comes out.
If they released both, they'd have two products competing for shelf-space needlessly.
Daniel
2 gigs of mp3s? Do you have some super-l33t compression system or something? I don't see how you can fit any decent collection in 2 gigs, not even if you maim the sound with 8kbps or something...
Daniel
Hmm, I wonder how fast Swing would be on a C64... it's already slow as hell on an Athlon XP 1800+, so on a C64 it probably takes half an hour to draw a button :-P!!!
Daniel