Yes, because the general philosophy of the programmers seems to be "we don't need any simulation of memory, learning, goals etc; we'll just spit back things others have said or read some lines from a script." I've argued this concept on a discussion group frequented by Mr. Loebner, and have tried (with very limited success so far) to do better. To have an AI that's better than the likes of George, it'd be helpful for it to have goals and memories and senses other than the totally context-free chatter the programs are exposed to now. Actually implementing those things is hard, of course, but so far hardly anyone entering the contest even seems to be trying them. How can words ever mean anything if they're never rooted in some kind of real-world (or virtual-world) context?
We're waiting for that Hellen Keller moment. (See the play "The Miracle Worker.")
The cheaper of the two hardware variations was originally priced at ¥59,800 ($515) but was reduced to ¥49,980 ($430), at the same time as a HDMI video port was also added to the unit.
That's an improvement, but $430 is still very high for a game system! Yes, yes, it's also a Blue Laser media player, but since I had no plan to buy one of those, I still think of the PS3 as a vastly overpriced gaming system.
As a side note, given that Dead Rising for the X-Box 360 apparently requires HD to dispay some of its text properly, the implication is that I'll need a whole new TV just to play some PS3 games. Since I had no play to buy an HDTV either, that's yet another cost. No thanks.
This may be the first generation of consoles since the 8-bit era that I don't jump into!
I had read an argument somewhere, possibly here, that the "moral distance" between Europe and China is shrinking as China moves towards capitalism and Europe deeper into socialism. Considering that England is working with China on face/gait recognition research for the UK's expanding network of Orwell cameras, I can see that. But not because China has become especially free.
I suspect the point of this exercise isn't so much to adopt the latest technology for innovation, but for censorship. The free world's Internet/Web was built around the idea of decentralized control and individual initiative, two things the Chinese government opposes. So, rather than convincing Western tech companies to help them let the Internet in through a sieve, why not start a massive make-work project to build a new network, Chinese-style? This way China can get valuable practice in solving technology problems while trying to wall its subjects off further from foreign ideas. (See eg. Baidupedia.)
It won't work though; how can their government expect to trade with the whole world -- which means travel and the study of English, Spanish and Hindi -- without some contamination from us barbarians? That's even before considering whether a scientific mindset is compatible with blind obedience to the state.
Well, for one thing, without our messing with nature you would probably never have been born. You owe your life to mass-produced fertilizer, industrial farm equipment, and other agricultural advances, judging from the increase in the world's population of about 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.
You could also say that a higher population makes it more likely we'll be able to solve our problems, because there are that many more scientists working on them.
Let's assume there are going to be all sorts of problems caused by people living to extreme old age. Even so, I'd much rather be 200 and worried about stuff than dead!
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Can you point out a useful assembler tutorial? Best I can think of existing for free, online, is Core Wars.
Re:Languages continue to evolve into ... Lisp
on
Python 2.5 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You jest, but it is good to learn as many aspects of a problem as possible. The extreme opposite case would be a programmer who thinks he's a whiz at giving magic incantations to the glowing mystery box, and ends up sacrificing AOL CDs to it when it breaks.
In education in general, I'd like to see everyone know how to make things like one of those shaking-powered flashlights. A hands-on program like that would give people more of a sense of ownership over science and technology.
Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist, while letting people be crippled by the financial burden of a major illness is true-blue American. Lovely.
Without arguing the merit of a national health-care system directly, I'll say that the above wording is misleading and common. You can't "give everyone" health care without taking wealth by force from others, so what advocates of a national system want is better described as "forcing taxpayers to fund health care for others." It would do us well to look at that (and all government programs) that way.
You laugh, but actually there were several attempts at the MIT Media Lab to build animal-interface gadgets! See here. It's an interesting thought exercise, with relevance to interface design for the disabled, too.
Interesting. If OLPC includes Squeak, won't that also mean increased popularity for Croquet, that 3D environment project?
I'd be happy to see wider use of Python (and Pygame) by kids, as I've found it easy to learn and use. One thing Python needs for beginners on Windows, though, is an obvious link to IDLE (the IDE). Currently it's buried in a subdirectory, so a newbie won't quite know how to open the editor and start saving/running programs, seeing error feedback, using the console, etc..
The thing that gets me is that I cannot see an endgame to the Neocon strategy as it is based on a continued fear and principals of isolationism. What are they getting out of the deal by giving away our rights?
You seem to assume that there's a conspiracy of "Neocons" to "give away our rights," and to be looking for a way to elaborate on the theory because it doesn't make sense as written. Two possible ways of dealing with that problem are:
-Propose that maybe there isn't really a conspiracy and that like other aspects of the War on Terror, maybe the misdeeds of our side are exaggerated; or
-Come up with an elaborate explanation for what the Neocons' real goal is, possibly by playing that "Illuminati" card game. Al Gore with the Bavarian Gnomes, working for the Girl Scouts to increase Thin Mint sales? =)
Because this will be hardware made through the Chinese government, won't this tech give them an unprecedented to build various spying and censorship tools right into the chips? It seems to be true that many US printers print hidden ID codes, so if you think TCP/DRM/etc. are bad, imagine what the Chinese will have imposed on them.
Part of the problem is the use of rare "continue points." I remember part of Jak II where you had to blast through a big room with a zigzag walkway over a pit, swarming with troopers; hoverboard past lasers; and jump on tiny platforms over another pit. None of that would've been too bad except that you had to do the whole sequence in one go. After a while, the first parts stopped being fun! I'd rather have had the game let me save, or help me out a bit as with boss battles in the first Sly Cooper game.
I don't know where to stand on this issue despite having studied it, but couldn't copyright itself be considered a form of censorship? If the US Constitution didn't have a clause specifically authorizing the creation of Patent & Copyright Offices, then a law forbidding publication of certain books by anyone but the owner of a magic "C" would violate the First Amendment, wouldn't it?
Thomas Paine, Deist, famously agreed with you in his book The Age of Reason:
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel."
And ironically, the Bible's got its own clear policy on censorship: Deu 13.
But historically, it was probably banned for that content far less often than for the fact that it encourages people to worship something other than the State.
When you take a picture with some cell phones, they make a loud noise that you can't disable, right? (Hm, my current one doesn't.*) As I understand it, this "feature" was added after people -- not the phones' buyers -- complained of being secretly photographed. Also consider that the e911 system is a mandatory feature usable to find you within 300m. With those and the growth of for-someone-else's-convenience technologies like DRM, it seems likely that your next phone will also have features that make targeted advertising and automatic monitoring easier.
"If the majority of the Chinese are content with their government or its actions (which is the case otherwise their country would be in a civil war until it changed) we as a world community have to respect their right to govern their country."
I respect the right of the Chinese people to govern their country, and to decide what news to read. Their government emphatically does not!
If the Chinese people really had no great interest in reading Western news and didn't care that they didn't have access to it, then there wouldn't be a need for censorship -- people just wouldn't read/watch the stuff! The fact that the censorship exists at all tells me that there's a great demand for our subversive Western media, and that only pointing guns at people keeps them away from it. Ditto for Net censorship; if the Chinese didn't want to use Wikipedia, their government wouldn't need to use theats and Western collaborators to block access to it.
Reputation is an idle thing, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. -Iago
Having a basic reputation system like that of E-Bay or Slashdot is fairly easy for individual users, but harder to do for the text itself. Wikipedia tracks changes by paragraph, so that you can see that on such-and-such a date, I changed Paragraph 3 by deleting X and adding Y, and added a new paragraph below. But it's hard to say that a piece of text is "mine" and link it to my reputation, since it's a subjective judgment how much of my writing is left after a dozen people have edited it. And you can't just judge text by the average reputation of its editors, since the trolls will drag it down. If a piece of text has been edited a lot, that might mean it's really good, because many people have been polishing it, or really bad, because there's an edit war between people who don't know their stuff anyway.
A more basic problem is that we're not just judging factual assertions like "The diameter of Mars is 4,200 miles." If we stored raw factual data only -- and we do have such data as part of sidebars for certain articles -- people could challenge that data in a fairly objective way and we'd know exactly what facts are disputed. But what about disputes that involve emphasis of different points, or order of presentation, or associations to other concepts? For instance, do you agree that the subjectivity of Wikipedia's main article text is "a more basic problem" than how to identify frequently-altered text? A lot of the brainstorming about large-scale changes to articles seems to happen on the Talk pages, which makes it hard to notice that aspect of an article's evolution.
Quick example: I recently added to an article on Wikipedia, adding what seemed to me a newsworthy event that happened to cast the article's subject in a negative light. My text got summarily deleted, and I fought a bit over it before giving up. But the dispute was over relevance, not accuracy. How should we distinguish between fights over "this doesn't belong here" and fights over "this isn't true?"
Douglas Hofstadter's book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" suggests that our understanding of concepts comes from "low-level" and "high-level" perception -- from something like a tagging system that recognizes aspects of a thing and uses those to pick a linguistic label to slap on them. If that's so, then language isn't central to identifying things even though it might be needed for complex reasoning. This article doesn't seem to say much about how we get from seeing an apple to thinking of the word "apple." What's going on beneath the surface?
You'd basically just be mandating higher quality porn How awful! =)
The reason I oppose the "literary/artistic/scientific/etc. merit" test is that it still means having a government agency decide what opinions are worthwhile, and punishing those deemed unworthy. It's a concept ripe for abuse. For instance, weren't anti-pornography laws once used in America to outlaw distribution of material about abortion and birth control? Regardless of my stance on abortion, it's stupid and unconstitutional to outlaw discussion of it... In searching for a reference, I found that this type of censorship is still an issue.
And the fact that people are able to argue so much about whether pornography/violent games/Harry Potter books/etc. are harmful to society, by itself, proves that even the really trashy stuff has the cultural merit of spurring debate about things like the social role of women.
Let's shut down that other censorship board, the FCC, while we're at it.
The question, then, is whether this wonderful data mining will be used to identify corrupt or incompetant managers, politicians etc., as well as troublesome underlings.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because the general philosophy of the programmers seems to be "we don't need any simulation of memory, learning, goals etc; we'll just spit back things others have said or read some lines from a script." I've argued this concept on a discussion group frequented by Mr. Loebner, and have tried (with very limited success so far) to do better. To have an AI that's better than the likes of George, it'd be helpful for it to have goals and memories and senses other than the totally context-free chatter the programs are exposed to now. Actually implementing those things is hard, of course, but so far hardly anyone entering the contest even seems to be trying them. How can words ever mean anything if they're never rooted in some kind of real-world (or virtual-world) context?
We're waiting for that Hellen Keller moment. (See the play "The Miracle Worker.")
The cheaper of the two hardware variations was originally priced at ¥59,800 ($515) but was reduced to ¥49,980 ($430), at the same time as a HDMI video port was also added to the unit.
That's an improvement, but $430 is still very high for a game system! Yes, yes, it's also a Blue Laser media player, but since I had no plan to buy one of those, I still think of the PS3 as a vastly overpriced gaming system.
As a side note, given that Dead Rising for the X-Box 360 apparently requires HD to dispay some of its text properly, the implication is that I'll need a whole new TV just to play some PS3 games. Since I had no play to buy an HDTV either, that's yet another cost. No thanks.
This may be the first generation of consoles since the 8-bit era that I don't jump into!
I had read an argument somewhere, possibly here, that the "moral distance" between Europe and China is shrinking as China moves towards capitalism and Europe deeper into socialism. Considering that England is working with China on face/gait recognition research for the UK's expanding network of Orwell cameras, I can see that. But not because China has become especially free.
I suspect the point of this exercise isn't so much to adopt the latest technology for innovation, but for censorship. The free world's Internet/Web was built around the idea of decentralized control and individual initiative, two things the Chinese government opposes. So, rather than convincing Western tech companies to help them let the Internet in through a sieve, why not start a massive make-work project to build a new network, Chinese-style? This way China can get valuable practice in solving technology problems while trying to wall its subjects off further from foreign ideas. (See eg. Baidupedia.)
It won't work though; how can their government expect to trade with the whole world -- which means travel and the study of English, Spanish and Hindi -- without some contamination from us barbarians? That's even before considering whether a scientific mindset is compatible with blind obedience to the state.
Well, for one thing, without our messing with nature you would probably never have been born. You owe your life to mass-produced fertilizer, industrial farm equipment, and other agricultural advances, judging from the increase in the world's population of about 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion in 2000.
You could also say that a higher population makes it more likely we'll be able to solve our problems, because there are that many more scientists working on them.
Let's assume there are going to be all sorts of problems caused by people living to extreme old age. Even so, I'd much rather be 200 and worried about stuff than dead!
Can you point out a useful assembler tutorial? Best I can think of existing for free, online, is Core Wars.
You jest, but it is good to learn as many aspects of a problem as possible. The extreme opposite case would be a programmer who thinks he's a whiz at giving magic incantations to the glowing mystery box, and ends up sacrificing AOL CDs to it when it breaks.
In education in general, I'd like to see everyone know how to make things like one of those shaking-powered flashlights. A hands-on program like that would give people more of a sense of ownership over science and technology.
My point is the "compulsory" part. The wording of "giving people" stuff sounds nice until you consider that it has to be taken forcibly from others.
Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist, while letting people be crippled by the financial burden of a major illness is true-blue American. Lovely.
Without arguing the merit of a national health-care system directly, I'll say that the above wording is misleading and common. You can't "give everyone" health care without taking wealth by force from others, so what advocates of a national system want is better described as "forcing taxpayers to fund health care for others." It would do us well to look at that (and all government programs) that way.
You laugh, but actually there were several attempts at the MIT Media Lab to build animal-interface gadgets! See here. It's an interesting thought exercise, with relevance to interface design for the disabled, too.
I always thought the guy was kind of smart, but now I know it's not true.
...In C.
Given that this is Brin, the real question should be, how do we teach programming to dolphins?
Interesting. If OLPC includes Squeak, won't that also mean increased popularity for Croquet, that 3D environment project?
I'd be happy to see wider use of Python (and Pygame) by kids, as I've found it easy to learn and use. One thing Python needs for beginners on Windows, though, is an obvious link to IDLE (the IDE). Currently it's buried in a subdirectory, so a newbie won't quite know how to open the editor and start saving/running programs, seeing error feedback, using the console, etc..
The thing that gets me is that I cannot see an endgame to the Neocon strategy as it is based on a continued fear and principals of isolationism. What are they getting out of the deal by giving away our rights?
You seem to assume that there's a conspiracy of "Neocons" to "give away our rights," and to be looking for a way to elaborate on the theory because it doesn't make sense as written. Two possible ways of dealing with that problem are:
-Propose that maybe there isn't really a conspiracy and that like other aspects of the War on Terror, maybe the misdeeds of our side are exaggerated; or
-Come up with an elaborate explanation for what the Neocons' real goal is, possibly by playing that "Illuminati" card game. Al Gore with the Bavarian Gnomes, working for the Girl Scouts to increase Thin Mint sales? =)
Because this will be hardware made through the Chinese government, won't this tech give them an unprecedented to build various spying and censorship tools right into the chips? It seems to be true that many US printers print hidden ID codes, so if you think TCP/DRM/etc. are bad, imagine what the Chinese will have imposed on them.
Part of the problem is the use of rare "continue points." I remember part of Jak II where you had to blast through a big room with a zigzag walkway over a pit, swarming with troopers; hoverboard past lasers; and jump on tiny platforms over another pit. None of that would've been too bad except that you had to do the whole sequence in one go. After a while, the first parts stopped being fun! I'd rather have had the game let me save, or help me out a bit as with boss battles in the first Sly Cooper game.
I don't know where to stand on this issue despite having studied it, but couldn't copyright itself be considered a form of censorship? If the US Constitution didn't have a clause specifically authorizing the creation of Patent & Copyright Offices, then a law forbidding publication of certain books by anyone but the owner of a magic "C" would violate the First Amendment, wouldn't it?
And copyright has been used in attempts at true censorship, as with Diebold's apparent attempt to suppress embarassing memos regarding flaws in its voting machines.
Thomas Paine, Deist, famously agreed with you in his book The Age of Reason :
"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel."
And ironically, the Bible's got its own clear policy on censorship: Deu 13. But historically, it was probably banned for that content far less often than for the fact that it encourages people to worship something other than the State.
As long as we listen to music with our analog ears, and watch video with our analog eyes, this will be the case.
You realize, then, that you'll have to replace your ears five years from now to fix this flaw.
When you take a picture with some cell phones, they make a loud noise that you can't disable, right? (Hm, my current one doesn't.*) As I understand it, this "feature" was added after people -- not the phones' buyers -- complained of being secretly photographed. Also consider that the e911 system is a mandatory feature usable to find you within 300m. With those and the growth of for-someone-else's-convenience technologies like DRM, it seems likely that your next phone will also have features that make targeted advertising and automatic monitoring easier.
* (Sounds made mandatory in South Korea and Japan.)
"If the majority of the Chinese are content with their government or its actions (which is the case otherwise their country would be in a civil war until it changed) we as a world community have to respect their right to govern their country."
I respect the right of the Chinese people to govern their country, and to decide what news to read. Their government emphatically does not!
If the Chinese people really had no great interest in reading Western news and didn't care that they didn't have access to it, then there wouldn't be a need for censorship -- people just wouldn't read/watch the stuff! The fact that the censorship exists at all tells me that there's a great demand for our subversive Western media, and that only pointing guns at people keeps them away from it. Ditto for Net censorship; if the Chinese didn't want to use Wikipedia, their government wouldn't need to use theats and Western collaborators to block access to it.
Reputation is an idle thing, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. -Iago
Having a basic reputation system like that of E-Bay or Slashdot is fairly easy for individual users, but harder to do for the text itself. Wikipedia tracks changes by paragraph, so that you can see that on such-and-such a date, I changed Paragraph 3 by deleting X and adding Y, and added a new paragraph below. But it's hard to say that a piece of text is "mine" and link it to my reputation, since it's a subjective judgment how much of my writing is left after a dozen people have edited it. And you can't just judge text by the average reputation of its editors, since the trolls will drag it down. If a piece of text has been edited a lot, that might mean it's really good, because many people have been polishing it, or really bad, because there's an edit war between people who don't know their stuff anyway.
A more basic problem is that we're not just judging factual assertions like "The diameter of Mars is 4,200 miles." If we stored raw factual data only -- and we do have such data as part of sidebars for certain articles -- people could challenge that data in a fairly objective way and we'd know exactly what facts are disputed. But what about disputes that involve emphasis of different points, or order of presentation, or associations to other concepts? For instance, do you agree that the subjectivity of Wikipedia's main article text is "a more basic problem" than how to identify frequently-altered text? A lot of the brainstorming about large-scale changes to articles seems to happen on the Talk pages, which makes it hard to notice that aspect of an article's evolution.
Quick example: I recently added to an article on Wikipedia, adding what seemed to me a newsworthy event that happened to cast the article's subject in a negative light. My text got summarily deleted, and I fought a bit over it before giving up. But the dispute was over relevance, not accuracy. How should we distinguish between fights over "this doesn't belong here" and fights over "this isn't true?"
Douglas Hofstadter's book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" suggests that our understanding of concepts comes from "low-level" and "high-level" perception -- from something like a tagging system that recognizes aspects of a thing and uses those to pick a linguistic label to slap on them. If that's so, then language isn't central to identifying things even though it might be needed for complex reasoning. This article doesn't seem to say much about how we get from seeing an apple to thinking of the word "apple." What's going on beneath the surface?
You'd basically just be mandating higher quality porn
How awful! =)
The reason I oppose the "literary/artistic/scientific/etc. merit" test is that it still means having a government agency decide what opinions are worthwhile, and punishing those deemed unworthy. It's a concept ripe for abuse. For instance, weren't anti-pornography laws once used in America to outlaw distribution of material about abortion and birth control? Regardless of my stance on abortion, it's stupid and unconstitutional to outlaw discussion of it... In searching for a reference, I found that this type of censorship is still an issue.
And the fact that people are able to argue so much about whether pornography/violent games/Harry Potter books/etc. are harmful to society, by itself, proves that even the really trashy stuff has the cultural merit of spurring debate about things like the social role of women.
Let's shut down that other censorship board, the FCC, while we're at it.
The question, then, is whether this wonderful data mining will be used to identify corrupt or incompetant managers, politicians etc., as well as troublesome underlings.