...for corporations? I expect that increased security means making it harder for us end users to listen to our music and watch our movies whenever we want rather than protecting us from things like viruses and intruders - after all, that's where the money probably is.
You could have every creation ever created on a 10 gig drive with ease.
Er...you're not thinking hard enough. You could compress that 10 gig drive to 1 byte. In fact, here it is: X. That 'X' contains all the best warez ever written. Unfortunately I'm keeping the decompressor for myself.
...you can see pythagoras's theorem, a map of the earth, a diagram of the solar system and even some ASCII porn of the m/f variety. There's also some DNA in a cell and dividing.
I can't figure out what language it's in though. Those characters are weird. I'm guessing that the mathematical notation, besides using weird characters, is pretty like what we're used to. In that case I think I can also make out A=pi*2^2 and C=2*pi*r next to a picture of a circle.
No. I mean sequences. My argument makes no mention of the word random and that's no mistake (unless I've made a typo somewhere).
A signal worth compressing isn't going to be purely random Absolutely, and that's why lossless compression works in practice.
But the thing you're describing is bogus. Look, take random data and look at it in a complicated enough way then you're sure to find patterns that can be compressed out. But you'll find that you'll also have to describe the complexity of your way of looking at it and that'll take up the same amount of space as you've just compressed out. That press release is 100% bogus. It's not even slightly real. Have you seen how many universities they claim to collaborate with? It's merely a scam to make money out of venture capitalists.
The way you speak, eg. putting scare quotes about the word "line", suggests that you're not comfortable dealing with multi-dimensional spaces. The SF connotations suggest something cool and esoteric to get venture capital cash. Those of us who actually work with these things every day know there's no reason to see compressible patterns if you start embedding things in high diemnsional spaces. People who do things like wavelet and DCT compression techniques quite happily represent data for compression in very high dimensional spaces. But there's no magic and certainly no way to to things that are provably false.
Would it be feasible given existing computing power?
If you can step back to N-dimensions and see patterns you can exploit then it wasn't random data in the first place.
There are 2^N bit sequences of length N. There are 2^M sequences of length M. If M<N then 2^M<2^N. So you can't represent all sequences of length 2^N using sequences of length 2^M. You can't even represent most sequences of length N using sequences of length M. It doesn't matter if you can visualise infinite dimensional spaces with pretty purple knobs on. You can't have an algorithm that packs most sequences of length N into M bits.
For example I can compress the first million numbers generated by rand() into a few bytes.
A similar technique works with the output of drand48() and in fact for a long enough sequence this approach works with every random number generator algorithm available today.
In fact here's the compressed file for the rand() case:
int i;for (i = 0; i<1000000; ++i) printf("%d\n",rand());
Next you'll be publishing stories about squaring the circle and trisecting an angle with straight edge and compasses. Claiming to be able to compress random data is the oldest joke in the CS book and you fell for it.
It's in the nature of idioms that you don't always get at their meaning my analysing them into components. For example they often use archaic forms of the language whose meaning in modern times is no longer fully transparent.
In this case I've a feeling that have has an archaic sense of "to keep hold of".
It's what people do who can afford to hire better lawyers than the rest of us.
Incidentally I expect that the record companies make even more money from tax exemptions due to to what they claim are losses due to piracy in their account books but I don't have hard data on that.
FFX isn't actually a game. It's a(n at least 12 hour long) movie. Sometime you get dumped at the end of a corridor and told to run to the end. You get to the end and then it's back to the movie. Have I missed something. Where's the game?
Another risk, that hackers can implant rogue software on vulnerable computers, was considered more remote because of the technical sophistication needed
And of course technical sophistication is so rare that the chances of finding but one person in the world both able and willing to exploit it is...about 99.99%
Maybe they should call it 'L'. People can then informally call it the L-windows system but in court they can just turn round and say "no yer honour, it's called L, not L-windows, we can't control what everyone else calls it".
...on Mars. Silicon is an important ingredient in the manufacturing of computers and according to some experts it is possible to construct artificial life using computers. The inescapable conclusion is that this is evidence that life once inhabited the Martian surface.
I was using a rhetorical device called understatement which is a form of irony. A very elementary web page on the subject can be found here. This web site mentions the expectations of the reader required to appreciate understatement. There are a few other of sources of information on the subject on the web.
What would happen if *all* terminating algorithms could be made to run instantly?
I'm not sure it's obvious what the answer would be. For example - would we be able to cure cancer? You might just say "simulate the whole human body and simulate throwing a googleplex different drugs at it". But in order to do that you need to have an accurate physical model - accurate down to every molecule in a person. That's still hard.
So imagine an 'oracle' like this suddenly appeared somewhere. What impact would it have on society for the next few centuries?
(There's also the issue of what kind of interface this device would have. Lets say it has some kind of serial port that appears to be able to respond to signals sent into it no matter how fast they are).
Re:I've got an even better idea
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 2
Where are you going to put them?
Just about any (mostly) uninhabited desert on Earth.
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...for corporations? I expect that increased security means making it harder for us end users to listen to our music and watch our movies whenever we want rather than protecting us from things like viruses and intruders - after all, that's where the money probably is.
They would still suffer from fear and other forms of stress.
Are they really stuck in your memory or are they slowly traversing your brain soon to emerge on the other side...
Er...you're not thinking hard enough. You could compress that 10 gig drive to 1 byte. In fact, here it is: X. That 'X' contains all the best warez ever written. Unfortunately I'm keeping the decompressor for myself.
I can't figure out what language it's in though. Those characters are weird. I'm guessing that the mathematical notation, besides using weird characters, is pretty like what we're used to. In that case I think I can also make out A=pi*2^2 and C=2*pi*r next to a picture of a circle.
It's called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Who's interested in getting responses from dumb aliens?
A signal worth compressing isn't going to be purely random
Absolutely, and that's why lossless compression works in practice.
But the thing you're describing is bogus. Look, take random data and look at it in a complicated enough way then you're sure to find patterns that can be compressed out. But you'll find that you'll also have to describe the complexity of your way of looking at it and that'll take up the same amount of space as you've just compressed out. That press release is 100% bogus. It's not even slightly real. Have you seen how many universities they claim to collaborate with? It's merely a scam to make money out of venture capitalists.
The way you speak, eg. putting scare quotes about the word "line", suggests that you're not comfortable dealing with multi-dimensional spaces. The SF connotations suggest something cool and esoteric to get venture capital cash. Those of us who actually work with these things every day know there's no reason to see compressible patterns if you start embedding things in high diemnsional spaces. People who do things like wavelet and DCT compression techniques quite happily represent data for compression in very high dimensional spaces. But there's no magic and certainly no way to to things that are provably false.
Would it be feasible given existing computing power?
It wouldn't be feasible with any computing power.
There are 2^N bit sequences of length N. There are 2^M sequences of length M. If M<N then 2^M<2^N. So you can't represent all sequences of length 2^N using sequences of length 2^M. You can't even represent most sequences of length N using sequences of length M. It doesn't matter if you can visualise infinite dimensional spaces with pretty purple knobs on. You can't have an algorithm that packs most sequences of length N into M bits.
A similar technique works with the output of drand48() and in fact for a long enough sequence this approach works with every random number generator algorithm available today.
In fact here's the compressed file for the rand() case:
int i;for (i = 0; i<1000000; ++i) printf("%d\n",rand());
Use gcc as decompressor.
Real programmers write perl scripts by editing compressed source files directly so of course they can't be compressed any more...
Next you'll be publishing stories about squaring the circle and trisecting an angle with straight edge and compasses. Claiming to be able to compress random data is the oldest joke in the CS book and you fell for it.
In this case I've a feeling that have has an archaic sense of "to keep hold of".
Incidentally I expect that the record companies make even more money from tax exemptions due to to what they claim are losses due to piracy in their account books but I don't have hard data on that.
You say we should judge him by the standards of his day. Does that apply to Hitler?
FFX isn't actually a game. It's a(n at least 12 hour long) movie. Sometime you get dumped at the end of a corridor and told to run to the end. You get to the end and then it's back to the movie. Have I missed something. Where's the game?
And of course technical sophistication is so rare that the chances of finding but one person in the world both able and willing to exploit it is...about 99.99%
Lindows is a Linux application. Are you confused?
Maybe they should call it 'L'. People can then informally call it the L-windows system but in court they can just turn round and say "no yer honour, it's called L, not L-windows, we can't control what everyone else calls it".
...on Mars. Silicon is an important ingredient in the manufacturing of computers and according to some experts it is possible to construct artificial life using computers. The inescapable conclusion is that this is evidence that life once inhabited the Martian surface.
Is that why the US has the highest standard of education in the world? Because it has the greatest number of computers in the home and schoolroom?
I was using a rhetorical device called understatement which is a form of irony. A very elementary web page on the subject can be found here. This web site mentions the expectations of the reader required to appreciate understatement. There are a few other of sources of information on the subject on the web.
Even the smallest amount of proof will satisfy most people. Unfortunately all we have are suggestions and maybe a little evidence.
Well you don't have to put all of the panels in one place you know...
I'm not sure it's obvious what the answer would be. For example - would we be able to cure cancer? You might just say "simulate the whole human body and simulate throwing a googleplex different drugs at it". But in order to do that you need to have an accurate physical model - accurate down to every molecule in a person. That's still hard.
So imagine an 'oracle' like this suddenly appeared somewhere. What impact would it have on society for the next few centuries?
(There's also the issue of what kind of interface this device would have. Lets say it has some kind of serial port that appears to be able to respond to signals sent into it no matter how fast they are).
Just about any (mostly) uninhabited desert on Earth.