Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson

Re: Naming Schemes

We have a group of three compute servers (64-core Opteron machines) that three groups ordered together. The fluid dynamics group's one is called Poseidon, the AI group's one is called Pallas, and mine is dubbed Zeus, king of gods, as it is the most expensive one, with 512 GB instead of 256 GB RAM. Fairly boring, compared to some of the schemes mentioned.

I also rather liked the names of various Beowulf clusters in the past, like Hrothgar, and other figures from that epic poem.I suggested calling a cluster at our university Grendel, but that didn't take off, for some reason.

Re: I could not agree more

What about BOFH / Luser? Totally clear to anyone in IT (or should be)

Re: Captricity

You could also look for nominative determinism in their CEO: Nowell Outlaw!? Really?

Re: Unintelligent design

Utterly indifferent indeed. Whenever you shake your fist at the universe, shouting "It's not fair!!" the only answer you can expect is "So?" although no answer will be forthcoming, of course. I tend to think that if a god exists it can either be omnipotent or benevolent, but not both at the same time, given the indifference of the universe to all we hold dear on our little blue dot. I therefore cannot be bothered to believe in any of that kind of mythology, although creation myths are very interesting, not because of what they say about cosmology, but what they say about people, as Terry Pratchett put it so eloquently.

Re: Is ABC...?

Also sounds very much like Mr. Gumby

Well, maybe these were White Russians, seeing as they pre-date the revolution by quite a margin, unless they were revolutionary volcanoes banished to Siberia

Don't knock whiteboards!

A whiteboard is an essential software development tool! It requires no internet connection, doesn't use power, is multi-user, multi-tasking, and zero start-up time. Bliss.

When we had to move to a new building, I (successfully) insisted that my old, really big whiteboard be transferred to my new office, even though they claimed it couldn't be done. It was too heavy for the idiotic wire-suspension system the architect insisted on using, and we were not allowed to attach anything directly to walls (architect's orders, again). After some delays, my whiteboard magically attached itself to the wall, and there it still is, helping me design new (parallel) algorithms for image analysis, amongst many other tasks.

Re: So let me see if I've got this right

Don't forget: requirements elicitation will only just have started IF you are lucky, and even such requirements as are known will be shifting continuously.

On day one, I would just start writing that report saying we are up excrement creek without a means of propulsion, or indeed floatation, and those handy logs we spotted hopefully just now, have a suspicious number of teeth, and are closing in. After that, see to it that you get airlifted out of there quickly

Re: None of these patents should ever have been granted

That might not work at all. A research lab or university might hold patents that they license out to others, rather than selling them to manufacturers. These institutes would be penalised under your proposal, whereas they are not acting like your regular patent troll. Indeed, it is not the place of universities or research institutes to compete in the market, but they can earn extra income from licensing. Money earned this way can be put back into research and innovation. The main problem seems to be the broken patent system in the US, as patent trolls seem to be a rare species elsewhere.

Re: So, why don't we still have dinosaurs?

This is not quite correct. It is reasonable (from an evolutionary standpoint) to assume that the very first thing we could call life (like the auto-catalytic cycles proposed by Stuart Kaufman), we less efficient at replicating themselves, using available resources like food and energy, or even simply maintaining their own structure than later, more advanced cells. Once these more advanced life forms had evolved from more primitive ancestors, they most likely spread exponentially, and would out-compete any new life-form trying to start from scratch. There may have been many other "starts" that were obliterated by our very, very distant ancestors, simply because they used resources more efficiently. There may also have been many starts before the successful one that lead to us, that somehow got wiped out by some disaster. Alternatively (more or less like the much later merger of proto-eukaryote cells with prokaryote, in which case the latter turned into organelles such as mitochondriae and chloroplasts within eukaryote cells), the new forms might have been assimilated within the older ones.

Let us assume that on a planet the size of earth, under the right conditions you could have a "new start" once every million years (and following Kaufman's reasoning, that is a pessimistic estimate). If we have a successful start, on average, it will have a million years of evolution before any competing "new start" arrives on the scene. That is a very long head start for the first comer.

In conclusion, there may have been multiple starts, but these multiple starts either got assimilated with the first successful one, or got out-competed.

That graph is highly suspicious. If a student presented results like that to me in a report, I would certainly give them a thorough grilling, and probably report them to the board of examiners. It certainly looks like data were "massaged" (ineptly at that). Just from the graph I cannot be sure, but I would be highly suspicious. As I teach students in our scientific ethics lessons: the two worst things in science are plagiarism and manipulating data. Plagiarism is usually quite easy to detect nowadays, so it is just stupid to do it. Fabricating, or otherwise altering data is inexcusable, as it can be near impossible to detect. Both plagiarism and data manipulation are reasons for dismissal.

Re: Bad idea

That is a real risk. As has been said before: Scientific discoveries usually start with "hey, that's odd" rather than "eureka!"

More importantly, will we be able to stand the intolerable air of smugness these AI lab assistants generate whenever they have performed an experiment well?

(Doffs hat to the late, great Douglas Adams)