Posts by Destroy All Monsters 16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
Creativity is overrated, the last refuge of the wetware-pusher (the other one is "emotion", as if short-circuit decision making was something to be proud of; it is, of course indispensable, but so is machine oil)
There is no creativity to understand because its is not a thing. It is success in search.
Search in very large spaces using Genetic Algorithms has existed since the 80s.
Google's AI chief Peter Norvig believes the kinds of statistical data-heavy models used by Google represent the world's best hope to crack tough problems such as reliable speech recognition and understanding – a contentious opinion, and one that clashes with Noam Chomsky's view.
That would be the view of having a hardcoded grammar processor.
But it doesn't clash. If Noam says "birds fly by flapping their wings" (which may or may not be true), and a Learjet flies by, no views are being clashed at all.
There is a fourth possibility here:
The algorithm cannot be compressed into a reduced set of state machine steps that can then be handled by a human brain.
Most things in nature are like that (though of course one pretends otherwise, in particular to give politicians any hope at all to pretend to be successful at anything)
But postulating random quantum magic dust to explain consciousness is Not Even Wrong.
Penrose never even explained how this quantum thing is going to help doing consciousness in the first place. It was all handwaving flutter with gravity thrown in for good measure. Basically, it's his HOPE that the brain is not just an analog machinery but somehow "special". Then Gödel's incompleteness theorem gets invoked in a totally inappropriate manner. FAIL on this one, Sir Penrose.
And we can even start to build up programs with nothing more than natural language.
Yeah not holding my breath on this one.
Well, it probably IS appropriate to these times where you encounter more and more people who are unable to even specify the problem they want to have someone else solve for them.
Fail for inability to recognize security and availability as separate concerns, bringing in security here and completely ignoring economics like a juvenile do-it-yourselfer.
Meanwhile "The Internet is only vaporware and it never will get any better ... everyone needs a leased line from the incumbent operator, yadda, yadda, herpers derpers."
I like it how Twitter is nowadays immediately used as a safety valve to let off steam and bad karma.
This has probably prevented a few cases of cow-orkers "going postal" and transforming their colleagues and middle management into peppered steak and filleted fish before they can be stopped by the boys in blue.
Neutron tubes. I like it.
And they add animated gifs for Blinkenlights. This is properly Mad Scientist:
> I really don't get quite why these designers do all this bizarre stuff
It's the same reason government needs more and more people and more and more money while promising to get leaner and meaner and more streamlined and provide better service really soon now all the time.
Then people install the same guys as ever.
"Do you not think that if google didn't have a monopoly in the search business, the case would have been thrown out months ago?"
This is called "begging the question".
I may also remind the esteemed AC that "monopoly" used to designate the situation where one single seller of an important good could set prices at his discretion (if the good were not important, no-one would care, right?). This has been redefined, boiling frog style, into the situation where a major seller makes life difficult for smaller sellers (the latter often with friendly ears in government or seen as particularly noteworthy in the nationalistic register) even though there is nothing that would prevent the major seller to be challenged at any time or the situation to change quickly due to customers' fickleness.
Nope. It depends on how rapidly (and precisely) the display reacts.
I was once in a lecture by Fred Brooks where he show diapositives of the VR headset (more like a gigantic shoebox enclosing your head) he was working on at the time. "It's just not fast enough, my wife gets sick in it" was the message. And back then, getting shaded polygons on-screen was a major feat.
You cannot expect to have X-Mas packages in your Hadron collider all the time.
This is the time to work a bit for once and use the toys you have been given already.
There is plenty to do:
Peter Woit: The “Unnatural” Standard Model
The Standard Model is a physical theory of a spectacularly successful sort. It is built on beautiful and deep mathematics, covers almost all known physical phenomena, and agrees precisely with the result of every single experiment ever done to test it. It leaves open a very small number of questions: why this specific combination of small symmetry groups and their representations? What determines the parameters of the model (18 if you ignore neutrino masses, 7 more if you include them)? What about gravity? Does it need to be extended to account for dark matter?
For several decades now, there has been a very active and heavily advertised field of “Beyond Standard Model” physics, the study of extensions of the standard model that remain consistent with experimental bounds. While BSM models have played a role in guiding experimentalists towards things to look for that are not already ruled out by what is known, they have never come anywhere near fulfilling the hope that they might provide some insight into the SM itself. They provide no explanation of the unexplained aspects of the Standard Model, instead adding a great deal of additional unexplained structure. Perhaps the simplest and most widely studied example is the minimal supersymmetric extension of the SM, which not only explains none of the 25 undetermined SM parameters, but adds more than 100 additional such parameters to the list.
Theorists have traditionally followed what has been described as “Albert Einstein’s dream that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful, inevitable and self-contained”, and the SM is our closest approach so far to Einstein’s dream. If you shared this dream, the known BSM (Beyond Standard Model) models would never have much appealed to you, since they just added complexity and extra unexplained parameters. You also would not have been at all surprised by the strong negative results about such models that are one of the two major achievements so far of the LHC (the other is the Higgs discovery). If you’re a follower of Einstein’s dream, the obvious reaction to the LHC results so far would be to rejoice in the vindication of this dream, welcome the triumph of the simplicity of the SM, and hope that further study of the Higgs sector will somehow provide a hint of a better idea about where the SM parameters come from (almost all of them are Higgs couplings) ...
The “New Physics Complications” are the LHC only seeing pure SM behavior. If the LHC had seen a complicated SUSY spectrum, that would have been “natural”, but somehow seeing the simplest possibility has become a new “Complication”. It is a “complication”, but a sociological not physics one. SUSY theorists do have an answer for the complication of their ideas failing: the Multiverse did it.
Contentless remarks to make sure journalists cite him?
He predicted that a hypothesis known as M-Theory, which points to the existence of multiple universes, would soon be proven true
It does nothing of the sort. AFAIK, M-Theory is the hypothetical common ground of the disparate String theory formulation, formulated in a way that it subsumes them. Whether it has any link to actual physics or is only a mathematical object (if it even exists) is not certain at all and indeed is fraught with considerable doubt. The only thing we know is: the Standard Model rules.
"These multiple universes can arise naturally from physical law"
Disparate storylines of Battlestar Galactica might also arise naturally from physical law. That doesn't mean this is what happens. One would also like to see this law first and support it with some experimental evidence.
"Thus, our presence selects out from the vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the Cosmos, this makes us, in a sense, lords of creation."
Lord of the Flies more like. The pseudo-science of the anthropic principle again? There is stuff out there that I can't observe. So it must exist!! Physicist, Please!
Kit where the maker won't release the MIb because it is a 'trade secret'
KILL IT WITH FIRE.
YOU KNOW THAT ... the thing sucks donkey balls if anything as low-brow as a MIB is considered "Intellectual Property" in any way, shape, or form.
Ah, Scientific American (is that an oxymoron btw)?
a cloud of virtual particles around them that continually sweep in and out of existence
If they are virtual particles, they don't "sweep in and out of existence" (what does that even mean? is there a revolving door?). They never sweep "into existence" but you have to consider them in your integrations as if they were actually there, but weighted by their complex-valued probability (inversely proportional to their mass for a given dt and all cases subject to quantum number conservation) That's the trick.
Somewhat like the intermediary results in a classical computation reusing the same memory while working towards a result.
Doing it in one cycle.
And that is because Nature loves to do idle integration exercises to while away the time.
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