That's interesting. I've never played anyone who suggested giving up a pawn or two as a handicap in chess. I would consider myself a very good novice chess player. I can beat pretty much anyone that doesn't play seriously, but if someone has studied book moves, i don't find it much fun.
With regard to the non-standard board positions, if i wan't clear, i meant that both of us start with non-standard board positions. So it isn't a handicap in the strictest sense, but it forces both players to be creative and not fall back on classic strategies.
....fundamental hurdles to be overcome before we can really say that a brain is reducible to an algorithm/computer
There is no hurdle to overcome in saying that the brain is reducible to an algorithm. Unless you are a religious person who believes in a magical metaphysical mind/soul. The statement "this process can be described algorithmically" is a tautology. The hurdles to overcome are figuring out what the algorithm is.
You can have a deterministic algorithm or a stochastic algorithm. If it turns out that stochastic processes are important for neural computation (which they probably are) then there is an algorithmic description of that stochastic process. If brains are deterministic (highly unlikely) then there is an algorithm for that.
One of the big differences between normal computers (like my mac) and my brain, is that my brain is a dynamical system which is generative. That is, given noisy inputs or no inputs my brain with fill in the blanks and make shit up. This turns out to be useful but also makes me susceptible to illusions, biases, prejudices, etc. We have designed and programmed computers, for the most part, to be very reliable and unprejudiced. But I think we'll see that these noisy generative processes are what make us fast and good at object recognition and speech recognition.
Go has a very well defined and workable handicap system. I learned playing masters, but I would start 9 stones ahead of them.
Chess on the other hand does not. Whenever someone who is good at chess offers to play me i agree but request unconventional starting positions (like bishops and knights swapped) so that the game is actually interesting and not based on the memorization of kasparov games.
Providing real security is hard, and encouraging the use of encrypted mail without considering the considerable challenges of securing endpoints may provide a false sense of security. Until common operating systems become sufficiently secure, it's a hassle to find a safe place to store your keys, or a safe terminal from which to enter your passphrase
I think this is the issue that prevents developers from working on making the process of using PGP easier. They feel that social attack vectors are already a major source of insecurity. And like you say, we don't want to provide a "false sense of security". This is especially true in the litigious USA. But it is unfortunate because unencrypted email allows for data mining, whereas social vectors require a more targeted approach.
Seriously? You link to two posts - one by a blogger and another by someone from the American Trucking Association - on financial derivatives?
You are totally right to call me out. I had read a much better article , i think by Krugman, in the NYTimes but i couldn't find it in the 10 seconds that i tried.
Make a law that you have to hold a stock for at least a day
That's an interesting idea. But it's obviously flawed. Let's say i buy some pharma stock at 9am. At 12 pm the FDA announces that they have found that pharma's main product to be dangerous. Should I not be allowed to sell?
I would argue that derivative speculation and complicated leveraging packages are what make the market insane. Other people have made similar comments.
It always struck me as strange that there hasn't been widespread adoption of PGP. It seems that it would be pretty easy to build almost seamless PGP into thunderbird, Apple Mail, and even web clients, like gmail.
The fact that we don't, as a society, care enough to encrypt our email indicates that either 1) we're not paranoid enough, 2) we don't have anything to hide, or 3) we're lazy and stupid?
For right now, cost and (extreme) battery life are really the only two things kindle has going for it.
And weight. The iPad is 1.5 lbs (1.6 with 3G). The Kindle is 0.675 lbs, less than half of the iPad. I haven't picked up an iPad yet, but according to reviews, it is heavy to hold one-handed. I will go to an Apple store and play with the iPad, but if someone wanted an e-reader primarily, the weight would be a an issue.
Yes, I was really intrigued and confused, after reading the line:
"The new process causes the polymer to conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction,"
I was thinking, wow, is this even possible? If this is true, I think they've just created a material that could behave like a passive air-conditioner, heater, refridgerator, etc., while using NO power, ever. That alone must be breaking some serious laws of thermodynamics..
One dimension" or "one axis," would have been more appropriate than "one direction."
While this also seemed the most intriguing part of the post, it doesn't have to violate thermodynamic laws. A ratchet basically does this. So if you could create a ton of tiny ratchets out of polymers you could in theory create something that "conducts" heat in one direction. A diode conducts current in one direction......
Big picture, it's not costing that many lives. Bad drivers are much deadlier, and simply sitting on your butt in the car and not getting enough exercise is deadlier yet.
mod parent up!
People are amazingly irrational when it comes to policy. Take for example the US response to 9/11. Less than 5000 people were killed. If you look at deaths per year in the US from terrorism compared to car accidents, home accidents, heart disease, etc, terrorism doesn't even come close. And yet, the US public supported mobilizing the whole military for a new war on terror and spent about 1 Trillion dollars of borrowed money on this. (not to mention they didn't fucking catch the guy).
There is something about humans that makes them feel OK about risks that they accept, like i choose to drive drunk or not wear my seatbelt, compared with arbitrary risks like the 1 in 100,000 chance that a computer glitch will result in a car accident. I can't wait until we let computers run the country using some agreed about public health metrics.
That's an idiotic way to look at it considering that the taxes would be taken with or without government funding of the research/development.
Except for the fact that the government dollars drives research and innovation which creates new markets and results in increased tax revenue.
The alternative (which is, i think, proposed by Ron Paul) is to have a lower tax base and no public funding of science. The problem with this is that corporations tend to be short-sighted and often times basic research finds applications 10 or 20 years after the research has begun.
There are exceptions, especially in the tech sector, of companies like Intel, IBM, Bell, and Xerox funding basic research. But AFAIK the pharmas have been riding the coattails of gov't funded research.
This is standard practice. Government grants fund basic and applied research. Scientists get patents based on these discoveries which benefits the scientists and the host institutions and the venture capital companies which commercialize the discoveries. The government collects taxes. Sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
Not really. If you read the wiki article carefully, you will see that SQUIDS are used in "microtesla" MRI. This is not the normal MRI. If you go to a hospital you will probably get a 1.5 Tesla scan. If you volunteer as a research subject you might get a 3 T scan or rarely a 7 T scan.
SQUIDS are used for MEG though. If you are being prepped for brain surgery for epilepsy you might get one of those, although most places still just use EEG, which is an order of magnitude (or 2) cheaper.
I certainly do not support the idea of Microsoft being the authority for these licenses.
But what would be nice is an "Authority" that grants certs or licenses to individuals which require real life background checks that allow people to interact "anonymously" but with the assurance that the person on the other end doesn't have a criminal record and isn't trying to rip you off.
I put anonymously in quotes because the point is that you have some ID of the person you interact with and if they do screw you, you can report them to the authority and there is a system of dealing with complaints (and appeals, etc).
Obviously, like any reputation based system, there will be problems.
I think the right thing to do is take the openID idea and create different levels of verification, which include a personal "real life" check. That way when i interact with someone i can see how "verified" they are and decide how much i want to trust them.
In fact, depending on how you define "curiosity", then there are already many examples of programs that are curious.
This is certainly true. reinforcement learning algorithms trade off between exploitation, choosing actions based on the assumption of a static environment, and exploration, testing alternatives, in case the environment has changed. This could be considered a kind of curiosity. What is more interesting to me, as a neuroscientist, is the human ability detect interesting sights or sounds and focus on them. It's like we have a fast but rough novelty detector that can guide our attention towards some event. There is evidence that the amygdala is key element in the neural circuit that detects interesting events, although the mechanism of detection isn't fully understood.
A robot is only as smart as its smartest programmer.
This, under normal defintions of smart, is clearly false. One example: I can program an AI search algorithm to play chess that will make far smarter choices than i would ever be able to (i'm not that good at chess). Some might argue that a search algorithm isn't smart, it's just fast. But to an external observer interacting with the agent, the AI seems much smarter than me, the programmer.
Have you spoken to any 'normal' people lately?... Normal people believe computers can think
I agree with you that "normal people" (at least in the USA) are quite ignorant.
But I think your example is poor. Many (maybe most?) intelligent people (I'll arrogantly include myself in that category) believe that computers can think. It is a topic of considerable debate amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists what it means to think. But regardless of that debate, many scientists accept that it is just a matter of time before artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.
I am a browser slut. I currently use firefox, safari and chrome. I constantly shift around my browser of choice.
That said, I would pay $1 per year to Mozilla to help support their dev team. According to most estimates there are well over 100 million users of firefox.
If each of us gave a dollar, that would be plenty!!
Slashdot Mirror
That's interesting. I've never played anyone who suggested giving up a pawn or two as a handicap in chess. I would consider myself a very good novice chess player. I can beat pretty much anyone that doesn't play seriously, but if someone has studied book moves, i don't find it much fun.
With regard to the non-standard board positions, if i wan't clear, i meant that both of us start with non-standard board positions. So it isn't a handicap in the strictest sense, but it forces both players to be creative and not fall back on classic strategies.
....fundamental hurdles to be overcome before we can really say that a brain is reducible to an algorithm/computer
There is no hurdle to overcome in saying that the brain is reducible to an algorithm. Unless you are a religious person who believes in a magical metaphysical mind/soul. The statement "this process can be described algorithmically" is a tautology. The hurdles to overcome are figuring out what the algorithm is.
You can have a deterministic algorithm or a stochastic algorithm. If it turns out that stochastic processes are important for neural computation (which they probably are) then there is an algorithmic description of that stochastic process. If brains are deterministic (highly unlikely) then there is an algorithm for that.
One of the big differences between normal computers (like my mac) and my brain, is that my brain is a dynamical system which is generative. That is, given noisy inputs or no inputs my brain with fill in the blanks and make shit up. This turns out to be useful but also makes me susceptible to illusions, biases, prejudices, etc. We have designed and programmed computers, for the most part, to be very reliable and unprejudiced. But I think we'll see that these noisy generative processes are what make us fast and good at object recognition and speech recognition.
Go has a very well defined and workable handicap system. I learned playing masters, but I would start 9 stones ahead of them.
Chess on the other hand does not. Whenever someone who is good at chess offers to play me i agree but request unconventional starting positions (like bishops and knights swapped) so that the game is actually interesting and not based on the memorization of kasparov games.
Providing real security is hard, and encouraging the use of encrypted mail without considering the considerable challenges of securing endpoints may provide a false sense of security. Until common operating systems become sufficiently secure, it's a hassle to find a safe place to store your keys, or a safe terminal from which to enter your passphrase
I think this is the issue that prevents developers from working on making the process of using PGP easier. They feel that social attack vectors are already a major source of insecurity. And like you say, we don't want to provide a "false sense of security". This is especially true in the litigious USA. But it is unfortunate because unencrypted email allows for data mining, whereas social vectors require a more targeted approach.
Seriously? You link to two posts - one by a blogger and another by someone from the American Trucking Association - on financial derivatives?
You are totally right to call me out. I had read a much better article , i think by Krugman, in the NYTimes but i couldn't find it in the 10 seconds that i tried.
This is a bit better
Make a law that you have to hold a stock for at least a day
That's an interesting idea. But it's obviously flawed. Let's say i buy some pharma stock at 9am. At 12 pm the FDA announces that they have found that pharma's main product to be dangerous. Should I not be allowed to sell?
I would argue that derivative speculation and complicated leveraging packages are what make the market insane.
Other people have made similar comments.
It always struck me as strange that there hasn't been widespread adoption of PGP. It seems that it would be pretty easy to build almost seamless PGP into thunderbird, Apple Mail, and even web clients, like gmail.
The fact that we don't, as a society, care enough to encrypt our email indicates that either 1) we're not paranoid enough, 2) we don't have anything to hide, or 3) we're lazy and stupid?
For right now, cost and (extreme) battery life are really the only two things kindle has going for it.
And weight. The iPad is 1.5 lbs (1.6 with 3G). The Kindle is 0.675 lbs, less than half of the iPad. I haven't picked up an iPad yet, but according to reviews, it is heavy to hold one-handed. I will go to an Apple store and play with the iPad, but if someone wanted an e-reader primarily, the weight would be a an issue.
and don't forget the whole e-ink vs. LCD thing
Yes, I was really intrigued and confused, after reading the line:
"The new process causes the polymer to conduct heat very efficiently in just one direction,"
I was thinking, wow, is this even possible? If this is true, I think they've just created a material that could behave like a passive air-conditioner, heater, refridgerator, etc., while using NO power, ever. That alone must be breaking some serious laws of thermodynamics..
One dimension" or "one axis," would have been more appropriate than "one direction."
While this also seemed the most intriguing part of the post, it doesn't have to violate thermodynamic laws. A ratchet basically does this. So if you could create a ton of tiny ratchets out of polymers you could in theory create something that "conducts" heat in one direction. A diode conducts current in one direction......
When was this though? Rents in the East Village used to be relatively cheap.
2000-2006. my rent was over half my after tax income. not so cheap.
I lived very comfortably as a single person in the east village on ~45K a year (before taxes). (but no savings)
Having a family is a totally different story.
Big picture, it's not costing that many lives. Bad drivers are much deadlier, and simply sitting on your butt in the car and not getting enough exercise is deadlier yet.
mod parent up!
People are amazingly irrational when it comes to policy. Take for example the US response to 9/11. Less than 5000 people were killed. If you look at deaths per year in the US from terrorism compared to car accidents, home accidents, heart disease, etc, terrorism doesn't even come close. And yet, the US public supported mobilizing the whole military for a new war on terror and spent about 1 Trillion dollars of borrowed money on this. (not to mention they didn't fucking catch the guy).
There is something about humans that makes them feel OK about risks that they accept, like i choose to drive drunk or not wear my seatbelt, compared with arbitrary risks like the 1 in 100,000 chance that a computer glitch will result in a car accident. I can't wait until we let computers run the country using some agreed about public health metrics.
The government gets their cut. It's called taxes.
That's an idiotic way to look at it considering that the taxes would be taken with or without government funding of the research/development.
Except for the fact that the government dollars drives research and innovation which creates new markets and results in increased tax revenue.
The alternative (which is, i think, proposed by Ron Paul) is to have a lower tax base and no public funding of science. The problem with this is that corporations tend to be short-sighted and often times basic research finds applications 10 or 20 years after the research has begun.
There are exceptions, especially in the tech sector, of companies like Intel, IBM, Bell, and Xerox funding basic research. But AFAIK the pharmas have been riding the coattails of gov't funded research.
The government gets their cut. It's called taxes.
This is standard practice. Government grants fund basic and applied research. Scientists get patents based on these discoveries which benefits the scientists and the host institutions and the venture capital companies which commercialize the discoveries. The government collects taxes. Sounds like a reasonable deal to me.
Do you know that MRI scanners use SQUIDs?
Seriously: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
Not really. If you read the wiki article carefully, you will see that SQUIDS are used in "microtesla" MRI. This is not the normal MRI. If you go to a hospital you will probably get a 1.5 Tesla scan. If you volunteer as a research subject you might get a 3 T scan or rarely a 7 T scan.
SQUIDS are used for MEG though. If you are being prepped for brain surgery for epilepsy you might get one of those, although most places still just use EEG, which is an order of magnitude (or 2) cheaper.
I think you ask some good questions.
I certainly do not support the idea of Microsoft being the authority for these licenses.
But what would be nice is an "Authority" that grants certs or licenses to individuals which require real life background checks that allow people to interact "anonymously" but with the assurance that the person on the other end doesn't have a criminal record and isn't trying to rip you off.
I put anonymously in quotes because the point is that you have some ID of the person you interact with and if they do screw you, you can report them to the authority and there is a system of dealing with complaints (and appeals, etc).
Obviously, like any reputation based system, there will be problems.
I think the right thing to do is take the openID idea and create different levels of verification, which include a personal "real life" check. That way when i interact with someone i can see how "verified" they are and decide how much i want to trust them.
In fact, depending on how you define "curiosity", then there are already many examples of programs that are curious.
This is certainly true. reinforcement learning algorithms trade off between exploitation, choosing actions based on the assumption of a static environment, and exploration, testing alternatives, in case the environment has changed. This could be considered a kind of curiosity. What is more interesting to me, as a neuroscientist, is the human ability detect interesting sights or sounds and focus on them. It's like we have a fast but rough novelty detector that can guide our attention towards some event. There is evidence that the amygdala is key element in the neural circuit that detects interesting events, although the mechanism of detection isn't fully understood.
A robot is only as smart as its smartest programmer.
This, under normal defintions of smart, is clearly false. One example: I can program an AI search algorithm to play chess that will make far smarter choices than i would ever be able to (i'm not that good at chess). Some might argue that a search algorithm isn't smart, it's just fast. But to an external observer interacting with the agent, the AI seems much smarter than me, the programmer.
it was called Jersey Shore, i think.
Not even fluoride in the water (where I live, at least).
that explains the teeth
Well MY computer certainly can't think. It can barely carry out the explicit instructions I give it in excruciating detail.
Don't you see that the fact that your computer does NOT do what it is told as evidence that it thinks for itself!! ;)
>Realistically, how much horsepower is actually needed for anything not involving heavy duty graphics or video editing?
Have you ever played a flash game?
Have you spoken to any 'normal' people lately?...
Normal people believe computers can think
I agree with you that "normal people" (at least in the USA) are quite ignorant.
But I think your example is poor. Many (maybe most?) intelligent people (I'll arrogantly include myself in that category) believe that computers can think. It is a topic of considerable debate amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists what it means to think . But regardless of that debate, many scientists accept that it is just a matter of time before artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.
Is that exorbitant?
I honestly don't know. But i think it is fair for a FOSS company to pay wages that are competitive with for-profit companies.
How much does the CEO of Opera make?
I am a browser slut. I currently use firefox, safari and chrome. I constantly shift around my browser of choice.
That said, I would pay $1 per year to Mozilla to help support their dev team. According to most estimates there are well over 100 million users of firefox.
If each of us gave a dollar, that would be plenty!!