Better examples of outsider-scientists from around then include Oliver Heaviside and Ramanujan. I’m having trouble thinking of anyone recent; the closest to come to mind are some computer scientists who didn’t get PhD’s until relatively late. (Did Oleg Kiselyov ever get one?)
darius
Karma: 271
Yes, that’s where I got the figure (the printed book). The opening chapter lists a bunch of other figures of merit for other applications (strength of materials, power density, etc.)
Figure 16.8. (I happened to have the book right next to me.)
Ah -- .1nm is also the C-H or C-C bond length, which comes to mind more naturally to me thinking about the scale of an organic molecule—enough to make me wonder where the 0.24 was coming from. E.g. a (much bigger) sulfur atom can have bonds that long.
Oh, you’re right, thanks.
Isn’t an H atom more like 0.1nm in diameter? Of course it’s fuzzy.
I agree with steven0461′s criticisms. Drexler outlines a computer design giving a lower bound of 10^16 instructions/second/watt.
Should there be a ref to http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html ?
Quibbling about words: “atom by atom” seems to have caused some confusion with some people (taking it literally as defining how you build things when the important criterion is atomic precision). Also “nanobots” was coined in a ST:TNG episode, IIRC, and I’m not sure if people in the field use it.
You could grind seeds in a coffee grinder, as BillyOblivion suggests. (I don’t because the extra stuff in seeds disagrees with another body issue of mine.) Sometimes I take around 5 gelcaps a day while traveling, which isn’t as effective but makes most of the difference for the headaches.
What I do is put on a swimmer’s nose clip, drink the oil by alternately taking in a mouthful of water and floating a swallow of oil down on top of that; follow up with a banana or something because I’ve found taking it on an empty stomach to disagree with me; have a bit more water; then take off the noseclip. The clip is mainly to help with Shangri-La appetite control, which I consider just a bonus.
The first time I took this it gave me heartburn—starting with a smaller amount the first couple of times might be smart.
My headaches mostly went away with daily flaxseed oil or fish oil. I have no particular reason to expect you’d see the same, but it’s easy to try. I take 1 or 2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil per day.
Thanks! Yes, I figure one-shot and iterated PDs might both hold interest, and the one-shot came first since it’s simpler. That’s a neat idea about probing ahead.
I’ll return to the code in a few days.
On message passing as described, that’d be a bug if you could do it here. The agents are confined. (There is a side channel from resource consumption, but other agents within the system can’t see it, since they run deterministically.)
I hadn’t considered doing that—really I just threw this together because Eliezer’s idea sounded interesting and not too hard.
I’ll at least refine the code and docs and write a few more agents, and if you have ideas I’d be happy to offer advice on implementing your variant.
I followed Eliezer’s proposal above (both players score 0) -- that’s if you die at “top level”. If a player is simulating you and still has fuel after, then it’s told of your sub-death.
You could change this in play.scm.
When you call RUN, one of two things happens: it produces a result or you die from exhaustion. If you die, you can’t act. If you get a result, you now know something about how much fuel there was before, at the cost of having used it up. The remaning fuel might be any amount in your prior, minus the amount used.
At the Scheme prompt:
(run 10000 '(equal? 'exhausted (cadr (run 1000 '((lambda (f) (f f)) (lambda (f) (f f))) (global-environment)))) global-environment) ; result: (8985 #t) ; The subrun completed and we find #t for yes, it ran to exhaustion. (run 100 '(equal? 'exhausted (cadr (run 1000 '((lambda (f) (f f)) (lambda (f) (f f))) (global-environment)))) global-environment) ; result: (0 exhausted) ; Oops, we never got back to our EQUAL? test.
The only way to check your fuel is to run out—unless I goofed.
You could call that message passing, though conventionally that names a kind of overt influence of one running agent on another, all kinds of which are supposed to excluded.
It shouldn’t be hard to do variations where you can only run the other player and not look at their source code.
I just hacked up something like variant 3; haven’t tried to do anything interesting with it yet.
I second the rec for Feynman volume 1: it was my favorite text as a freshman, though the class I took used another one. Since that was in the last millennium and I haven’t kept up, I won’t comment on other books. Volumes 2 and 3 won’t be accessible to beginners.
Yes, tentatively. I’ve read the textbook, more like given it a first pass, and it’s excellent. This should help me stick to a more systematic study. If the video lectures have no transcripts, that’d suck, though (I’m hard of hearing).
O shame to men! Devil with devil damned / Firm concord holds; men only disagree / Of creatures rational
-- Milton, Paradise Lost: not on Aumann agreement, alas
A related example that I, personally, considered science fiction back in the 80s: Jerry Pournelle’s prediction that by the year 2000 you’d be able to ask a computer any question, and if there was a humanly-known answer, get it back. Google arrived with a couple years to spare. To me that had sounded like an AI-complete problem even were all the info online.
In Einstein’s first years in the patent office he was working on his PhD thesis, which when completed in 1905 was still one of his first publications. I’ve read Pais’s biography and it left me with the impression that his career up to that point was unusually independent, with some trouble jumping through the hoops of his day, but not extraordinarily so. They didn’t have the NSF back then funding all the science grad students.
I agree that all the people we’re discussing were brought into the system (the others less so than Einstein) and that Einstein had to overcome negative selection even while some professors thought he showed promise of doing great things. (Becoming an insider then isn’t guaranteed—in the previous century there was Hermann Grassman trying to get out of teaching high school all his life.)
Heaviside and Ramanujan accomplished less than Einstein, but they started way further outside.