Exactly. Given the unusual specificity of the desired technological approach the DARPA project appears to be a request for proposals whose grantee has already been determined in secret.
The article in "network world" also claims that it's DARPA scientists doing it---no, DARPA pays money to scientists.
http://www.alexandria.nu/ai/blog/entry.asp?E=41
There's no royal road to AI, and it's very unlikely there is any "one" magic approach or algorithm is critical. Natural intelligence is likely the confluence of a large number of evolutionarily tuned mechanisms.
There is a range of more or less biologically inspired machine learning methods, and HTM is Yet Another One.
JULES My coinpurse is the one With "Blasted Oedipus" stitched upon it. I pray you, open it and count its hoard. How much find you?
PUMPKIN I guess at ten times five score sovereigns.
JULES That sum is yours; add it to thy purse. Consider, if you add to that The balance from our innkeepers' till And the tally of what is in the others, It may be thought a sum That any would be glad of.
VINCENT Sirrah, I pray, Let not these ruffians rob thee, Or I may slay them for the spite.
JULES O, thou shall not, thou cur! Be still, be silent and stand down! They do not rob me, nor is it a gift; It is payment for a purchase. Knows’t thou what I purchase, friend?
PUMPKIN I know not.
JULES Your life. If I give it to you thus, Then thou and I are spared My need for vengeance for thy thievery. I pray, do you often read the Bible?
PUMPKIN Not regularly.
JULES There is a Scripture verse; I did commit it to my brain.
Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."
I have for years recited thus. If thou didst but hear,It was as clear a sign of your demise As found in any witches' scry. Yet never had I ponder'd its intent; T'was simply fiendish sounds I could thus speak/ Before I dealt my foes the final stroke That sent them on to God's Own Realm../ But just this morrow hence, I saw such things/That lead me to reflect upon my words And divine what the meaning was therein./Perchance, I guessed, you are the evil man,And I the righteous man. As for the shepherd, Methought it could have then stood for my blade../Anon, perhaps the righteous man is you;I then may be the shepherd, and the evil and the selfish Is all that stands about us in this world. Such is a pleasing thought. But such is also false. In truth, you are the weak. And I, the tyranny of evil men.Yet, henceforth, I assure you, I shall try In all my ways to now become the shepherd.
[Jules lays down his sword. Pumpkin and Yolanda run off. Jules takes a sip of his ale.]
JULES Anon, my ale is warm.
[He pushes it aside.]
VINCENT My friend, mayhap we should depart.
JULES An excellent idea, my friend; And so, let us be gone.
[Vincent throws a coin on the table and Jules grabs the chest. They exeunt.]
"When guys playing with toys (I'm one of those types of guys;) can do it, your big billion dollar space ship doing it is hardly impressive."
Yes it is.
The ratio of control forces to mass is much smaller on a big rocket, and the ratio of money lost per bug is much much higher. And they got it to go sideways and back the same amount and hit a calibrated target.
I can set up a web server by installing 5 standard linux packages. Does this meant that Google's search infrastructure is no big deal?
Scale-up, commercialization and having a hundred million dollars riding on your software really is a big deal.
Where Do You Want To Go Today? <xxx> Do you mean _Wally Mart_? There are Many Attractive Offers of Name-Brand Merchandise today. No! Got It. Wally Mart has a fine selection of store-brand items at major discounts, perfect for your.... h.e.m.m.o.r.r.h.o.i.d.... interest. We'll be there in about 17 minutes. Stop ! I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that, we are not at our destination.
Sure. That refers to all the Federal courts set up by statute since the beginning of the government.
I'm pretty sure the Constitutional authors didn't believe in secret courts, where an accused or target was unable to seek redresses or question witnesses, and whose authoritative case law was completely secret and unreviwable even by the Supreme Court.
Can you appeal a judgement from FISA to SC? Didn't think so.
Climatology is as scientific as geophysics and astrophysics. It is plenty hard.
"And you can't repeat the experiment to see if it would have supported the conclusion, you just have to trust the original researcher's models." as in astrophysics, and yet it is highly predictive since it is based on physics.
The 'emotion and rhetoric' comes when some people don't like the consequences of the answers.
"Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals."
Microsoft was not unaware of that at all. They tried very hard for a long time, after all Windows Phone was worked on for many years before iPhone.
Microsoft's problem was that they weren't good at it. Vista was another example. The common problem is internal corporate politics, and the key to that problem is at the top.
The comment above is a classic example of a phenomenon you often see: a commenter with reasonable general education takes a small number of facts about the world and uses them to make wholly unsupported assertions and snarky criticisms. They may be entirely wrong but the original commenter is defiantly confident.
In reality, in any technical/environmental/engineering issue, people who have done this for a living have examined all the issues far more thoroughly, with quantitative estimations based on real physical facts and investigations. Yes it's an appeal to expertise, because the experts are far more likely to be right than an offhand remark or guess from gut feel.
Not infrequently a confident-but-wrong commenter then tells people to "learn something about science". It is much more frequent than the reverse than the opinions of this sort of person are on the side of opposing changes for environmental sake or any common benefit.
Actual ignorant people don't act this way, they don't think they know the answer already about something complicated. It's like somebody who's had a few weeks of biology class believe that they know more than a board-certified cardiologist.
Microsoft had a near monopoly. Like IBM for many years with lousy management---the recurring revenues coming in from backward compatibility let mediocrity evade responsibility.
One thing is true, Ballmer did not ram through a value-destroying merger over the objections of Gates, for instance the way Fiorina did with HP.
But the destruction of valued corporate culture is the same.
JPL did the previous mission themselves (Pathfinder), and JPL like all scientists used metric. A later mission, a congressdroid insists that some of it gets outsourced to one of the military-aerospace contractors with a plant in his district. This contractor has an old geezer running the division who insists only on imperial.
So JPL and Hockleed have to go back and forth for their navigation procedures. Contractor puts a fresh college graduate on the program, you know to lower costs.
"Nobody has ever been in a dogfight with a drone. That day may come, but when it does the drone is going to look a lot more like a F18 than a Predator."
A few years previously the Iraqi air force was waxed by the Iranian air force with F-14's.
Even today the Iranian air force, with the same F-14's would be much more of a challenge. (F-14's were built for carrier duty--if you use them only on nice tarmac in a dry desert, they last quite a long time).
"that's what they said about guided missiles. It's the future, guns are obsolete because jets are so fast now, all air combat will be beyond visual range."
It wasn't completely true in 1968. Today, it actually is. Simulations and training are more realistic---the side which can get off targeted missiles before being targeted wins.
"(Also also, simple speedboats loaded with explosives and a suicide crew, see the Millenium Challenge [wikipedia.org] where one such retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper who is the type who thinks these things manage to take a third-world force and hand our simulated asses to us. )"
Some comments about that.
a) Yes, General Riper had a very good strategy. b) The US Navy learned from the results. c) The 'simple speedboats' were not what did in the USN in that simulation. Riper launched, in a simultaneous surprise attack, *hundreds* of anti-shipping cruise and rocket-powered *guided missiles* to destroy the Navy's sensors and air launch facilities. It was the missiles which were the power, the speedboats were just suicide torpedoes to sink already crippled ships.
Really, what chance would 40 knot suicide speedboats have against an aware Navy which had attack helicopters and F-18's? Missiles and submarines are dangerous, not light surface craft with no modern weaponry.
"Did you ever stop to think that it was the South Americans that leaked the false info? Just because they're poor, doesn't mean they're dumb."
But the CIA could have figured it out because of its implausibility. Because it isn't the Bolivians who have the final say.
Right now Snowden is under the control of Russian FSB. It was the FSB who "said" something internally to try to plug the electronic or human espionage which they KNOW is happening to them right now.
The scientists above are not "playing" programmer, they're working programmer.
Why don't you just compile the damn libraries and 'gcc' for deployment?
"I/must/ have the very latest version of libbar because maybe that will fix this strange behavior that I can't explain even though it means compiling from source rather than simply installing packages from the distro and have no idea what changes the latest version even has that might be related to my problem."
So you want them to do 40-80 hours of debugging completely unrelated to their needs to save you 1 hour of recompiling and 'contaminating' a machine?
Programmers don't use their own custom versions of libraries because they really really wanted to.
"While I like the new auto syntax I'm a little scared about having to deduce what the type is when incompetent programmers start using auto because they don't know what the correct type should be."
foo(bar(arguments))
Are you upset that people don't have to manually, and literally declare the thing being returned by bar()? As in
foo(X::Y::T_handler_Z bar(arguments)) except that X Y and Z are 20 characters long.
auto just makes
auto = bar(arguments)
foo(auto)
work like foo(bar(arguments))
like it should have from the damn beginning .
"Much like my heart sinks when I see code using void* to store and pass pointers around and then cast them when they arrive at their destination."
The 'auto' feature in makes this scenario less likely.
I use C++ and think it is excessively complicated, but I believe the latest C++11 makes things nicer. 'auto' is excellent.
It's not trivial---it lowers the cost to change code. Because sometimes what you really mean to say is "a variable which is able to hold and instance of whatever this method returns".
You have a class where some members return objects compatible with type T, and it's pretty natural that other members take arguments of T. Now you want to change T.
If you write using 'auto', where you mean 'auto' (and similar decltype stuff) any local dependencies of temp variables used in other classes and not exposed in interfaces also change automatically. The type annotations for the local variables you had to write previously were just not very interesting and important. There's really very little downside, and lots of upside to this meagre level of static type inference.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Given the unusual specificity of the desired technological approach the DARPA project appears to be a request for proposals whose grantee has already been determined in secret.
The article in "network world" also claims that it's DARPA scientists doing it---no, DARPA pays money to scientists.
http://www.alexandria.nu/ai/blog/entry.asp?E=41
There's no royal road to AI, and it's very unlikely there is any "one" magic approach or algorithm is critical. Natural intelligence is likely the confluence of a large number of evolutionarily tuned mechanisms.
There is a range of more or less biologically inspired machine learning methods, and HTM is Yet Another One.
http://www.agiri.org/docs/CognitiveArchitectures.pdf
"you architect your systems so there's no downtime"
I think you have TomorrowLand mixed up with FantasyLand and NeverNeverLand.
JULES
My coinpurse is the one
With "Blasted Oedipus" stitched upon it.
I pray you, open it and count its hoard.
How much find you?
PUMPKIN
I guess at ten times five score sovereigns.
JULES
That sum is yours; add it to thy purse.
Consider, if you add to that
The balance from our innkeepers' till
And the tally of what is in the others,
It may be thought a sum
That any would be glad of.
VINCENT
Sirrah, I pray,
Let not these ruffians rob thee,
Or I may slay them for the spite.
JULES
O, thou shall not, thou cur!
Be still, be silent and stand down!
They do not rob me, nor is it a gift;
It is payment for a purchase.
Knows’t thou what I purchase, friend?
PUMPKIN
I know not.
JULES
Your life. If I give it to you thus,
Then thou and I are spared
My need for vengeance for thy thievery.
I pray, do you often read the Bible?
PUMPKIN
Not regularly.
JULES
There is a Scripture verse; I did commit it to my brain.
Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."
I have for years recited thus. If thou didst but hear,It was as clear a sign of your demise As found in any witches' scry.
Yet never had I ponder'd its intent; T'was simply fiendish sounds I could thus speak/ Before I dealt my foes the final stroke
That sent them on to God's Own Realm../ But just this morrow hence, I saw such things/That lead me to reflect upon my words
And divine what the meaning was therein./Perchance, I guessed, you are the evil man,And I the righteous man. As for the shepherd, Methought it could have then stood for my blade../Anon, perhaps the righteous man is you;I then may be the shepherd, and the evil and the selfish Is all that stands about us in this world. Such is a pleasing thought. But such is also false.
In truth, you are the weak. And I, the tyranny of evil men.Yet, henceforth, I assure you, I shall try In all my ways to now become the shepherd.
[Jules lays down his sword. Pumpkin and Yolanda run off. Jules takes a sip of his ale.]
JULES
Anon, my ale is warm.
[He pushes it aside.]
VINCENT
My friend, mayhap we should depart.
JULES
An excellent idea, my friend;
And so, let us be gone.
[Vincent throws a coin on the table and Jules grabs the chest. They exeunt.]
"When guys playing with toys (I'm one of those types of guys ;) can do it, your big billion dollar space ship doing it is hardly impressive."
Yes it is.
The ratio of control forces to mass is much smaller on a big rocket, and the ratio of money lost per bug is much much higher. And they got it to go sideways and back the same amount and hit a calibrated target.
I can set up a web server by installing 5 standard linux packages. Does this meant that Google's search infrastructure is no big deal?
Scale-up, commercialization and having a hundred million dollars riding on your software really is a big deal.
Specifically, it sounds like Fox News, not just any American journalism. That's the point. RT is Putin's Fox News.
Where Do You Want To Go Today?
<xxx>
Do you mean _Wally Mart_? There are Many Attractive Offers of Name-Brand Merchandise today.
No!
Got It. Wally Mart has a fine selection of store-brand items at major discounts, perfect for your
Stop !
I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that, we are not at our destination.
Sure. That refers to all the Federal courts set up by statute since the beginning of the government.
I'm pretty sure the Constitutional authors didn't believe in secret courts, where an accused or target was unable to seek redresses or question witnesses, and whose authoritative case law was completely secret and unreviwable even by the Supreme Court.
Can you appeal a judgement from FISA to SC? Didn't think so.
| More importantly, WTF is this corn subsidy doing for anybody?
AC, Archer-Daniels-Midland.
ADM, Anonymous Coward.
Climatology is as scientific as geophysics and astrophysics. It is plenty hard.
"And you can't repeat the experiment to see if it would have supported the conclusion, you just have to trust the original researcher's models." as in astrophysics, and yet it is highly predictive since it is based on physics.
The 'emotion and rhetoric' comes when some people don't like the consequences of the answers.
Expert TeXpert choking smokers
Don't you think the Putin laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in a sty
See how they spied
I'm crying
"The things that cost money are the folks we do CTs and expensive tests on"
In other countries those same tests cost much, much less. Why?
In the USA, those 'costs' are some wealthy and powerful people's paychecks.
"Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals."
Microsoft was not unaware of that at all. They tried very hard for a long time, after all Windows Phone was worked on for many years before iPhone.
Microsoft's problem was that they weren't good at it. Vista was another example. The common problem is internal corporate politics, and the key to that problem is at the top.
The comment above is a classic example of a phenomenon you often see: a commenter with reasonable general education takes a small number of facts about the world and uses them to make wholly unsupported assertions and snarky criticisms. They may be entirely wrong but the original commenter is defiantly confident.
In reality, in any technical/environmental/engineering issue, people who have done this for a living have examined all the issues far more thoroughly, with quantitative estimations based on real physical facts and investigations. Yes it's an appeal to expertise, because the experts are far more likely to be right than an offhand remark or guess from gut feel.
Not infrequently a confident-but-wrong commenter then tells people to "learn something about science". It is much more frequent than the reverse than the opinions of this sort of person are on the side of opposing changes for environmental sake or any common benefit.
Actual ignorant people don't act this way, they don't think they know the answer already about something complicated. It's like somebody who's had a few weeks of biology class believe that they know more than a board-certified cardiologist.
"Your other options are far, far worse"
Apple could build a fabrication plant. Is that a really bad option?
Microsoft had a near monopoly. Like IBM for many years with lousy management---the recurring revenues coming in from backward compatibility let mediocrity evade responsibility.
One thing is true, Ballmer did not ram through a value-destroying merger over the objections of Gates, for instance the way Fiorina did with HP.
But the destruction of valued corporate culture is the same.
It's correct. Empires are ruled. Emperors rule.
None. It wasn't any scientist. The real story.
JPL did the previous mission themselves (Pathfinder), and JPL like all scientists used metric. A later mission, a congressdroid insists that some of it gets outsourced to one of the military-aerospace contractors with a plant in his district. This contractor has an old geezer running the division who insists only on imperial.
So JPL and Hockleed have to go back and forth for their navigation procedures. Contractor puts a fresh college graduate on the program, you know to lower costs.
"Nobody has ever been in a dogfight with a drone. That day may come, but when it does the drone is going to
look a lot more like a F18 than a Predator."
It will look more like a B-2 on a diet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B
A few years previously the Iraqi air force was waxed by the Iranian air force with F-14's.
Even today the Iranian air force, with the same F-14's would be much more of a challenge. (F-14's were built for carrier duty--if you use them only on nice tarmac in a dry desert, they last quite a long time).
"that's what they said about guided missiles. It's the future, guns are obsolete because jets are so fast now, all air combat will be beyond visual range."
It wasn't completely true in 1968. Today, it actually is. Simulations and training are more realistic---the side which can get off targeted missiles before being targeted wins.
Guided missiles are single-purpose drones.
"(Also also, simple speedboats loaded with explosives and a suicide crew, see the Millenium Challenge [wikipedia.org] where one such retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper who is the type who thinks these things manage to take a third-world force and hand our simulated asses to us. )"
Some comments about that.
a) Yes, General Riper had a very good strategy.
b) The US Navy learned from the results.
c) The 'simple speedboats' were not what did in the USN in that simulation. Riper launched, in a simultaneous surprise attack, *hundreds* of anti-shipping cruise and rocket-powered *guided missiles* to destroy the Navy's sensors and air launch facilities. It was the missiles which were the power, the speedboats were just suicide torpedoes to sink already crippled ships.
Really, what chance would 40 knot suicide speedboats have against an aware Navy which had attack helicopters and F-18's? Missiles and submarines are dangerous, not light surface craft with no modern weaponry.
"Did you ever stop to think that it was the South Americans that leaked the false info? Just because they're poor, doesn't mean they're dumb."
But the CIA could have figured it out because of its implausibility. Because it isn't the Bolivians who have the final say.
Right now Snowden is under the control of Russian FSB. It was the FSB who "said" something internally to try to plug the electronic or human espionage which they KNOW is happening to them right now.
If it isn't broke, don't fix it.
Really.
The scientists above are not "playing" programmer, they're working programmer.
Why don't you just compile the damn libraries and 'gcc' for deployment?
"I /must/ have the very latest version of libbar because maybe that will fix this strange behavior that I can't explain even though it means compiling from source rather than simply installing packages from the distro and have no idea what changes the latest version even has that might be related to my problem."
So you want them to do 40-80 hours of debugging completely unrelated to their needs to save you 1 hour of recompiling and 'contaminating' a machine?
Programmers don't use their own custom versions of libraries because they really really wanted to.
"While I like the new auto syntax I'm a little scared about having to deduce what the type is when incompetent programmers start using auto because they don't know what the correct type should be."
foo(bar(arguments))
Are you upset that people don't have to manually, and literally declare the thing being returned by bar()? As in
foo(X::Y::T_handler_Z bar(arguments)) except that X Y and Z are 20 characters long.
auto just makes
auto = bar(arguments)
foo(auto)
work like foo(bar(arguments))
like it should have from the damn beginning .
"Much like my heart sinks when I see code using void* to store and pass pointers around and then cast them when they arrive at their destination."
The 'auto' feature in makes this scenario less likely.
I use C++ and think it is excessively complicated, but I believe the latest C++11 makes things nicer. 'auto' is excellent.
It's not trivial---it lowers the cost to change code. Because sometimes what you really mean to say is "a variable which is able to hold and instance of whatever this method returns".
You have a class where some members return objects compatible with type T, and it's pretty natural that other members take arguments of T. Now you want to change T.
If you write using 'auto', where you mean 'auto' (and similar decltype stuff) any local dependencies of temp variables used in other classes and not exposed in interfaces also change automatically. The type annotations for the local variables you had to write previously were just not very interesting and important. There's really very little downside, and lots of upside to this meagre level of static type inference.