Charles Babbage against Organ Grinders.
DavidPlumpton
Karma: 133
If it’s a pencil line then it’s got carbon atoms ;-)
Don’t explode when somebody says, “Why?”
Whatever happened with that (Russian?) movie based on the idea?
But of course this whole post is really about playing Go… ;-)
Well, true, a graph implies a discreteness that does not correlate closely to a continuous configuration space. I actually think of it as the probability of finding yourself in that volume of configuration space being influenced by “significant” amplitudes slowing from more than one other volume of configuration space, although even that is not a great explanation as it suggests a ticking of a discrete time parameter. A continuously propagating wavefront is probably a much better analogy. Or we can just go into calculus mode and consider boxes of configuration space which we then shrink down arbitrarily while taking a limit value. But sometimes it’s just easier to think “branches” ;-)
Does anybody else not like the general phrasing “The system is in the superposition STATE1 + STATE2” ?
The way I’m thinking of it there is no such thing as a superposition. There is simply more than one configuration in the (very recent) past that contributes a significant amount of amplitude to the “current” configuration.
Have I got this wrong?
“Everything needs to line up” is the key point, and it once you understand it it’s really quite simple. It just means that there is more than one way to get to the same configuration state. Think about history seeming to branch out in a tree-like way, as most people tend to imagine. But if two branching paths are not far apart (e.g. differing by just a single photon) then it is easy for then to come back together. History changes from a tree to a graph. Being a graph means that some point has two history paths (actually every point has an infinite amount of ancestry but most of it cancels out). When you more than one history path both constructive and destructive interference can take place, and destructive means that the probability of some states goes down, i.e. some final states no longer happen (you no longer see a photon appearing in some places).
Is this making it clearer or have I made it worse? ;-)
It seems to me that both a genotype and phenotype is needed to qualify for labelling something as alive. It’s difficult to see how any form of natural selection could operate on inheritance and variation without a genotype. So that would rule out crystals and so forth.
What phrase would you use to describe the failure to produce an AGI over the last 50 years? I suspect that 50 years from now we will might be saying “Wow that was hard, we’ve learnt a lot, specific kinds of problem solving work well, and computers are really fast now but we still don’t really know how to go about creating an AGI”. In other words the next 50 years might strongly resemble the last 50 from a very high level view.
Free the Everett Branches!
My experience is that the majority of such signalling is around the time that will be needed. You look at a new project and think to yourself it’s probably about 6 months work. Your manager tells you that it “has to” go live in 2 months. And then somehow you end up saying “Okay, we’ll try” instead of “That seems very unlikely”. Even if the previous overdue project was quite similar.
Technical people are not comfortable asserting a realistic schedule to management and management is not comfortable asserting it to shareholders.
IBM claims to be doing a cat brain equivalent simulation at the moment, albeit 600 time slower and not all parts of the brain.
If the Copenhagen interpretation was real then Russian Roulette would get you soon enough. But if Many Worlds is true then all other observers see you die with normal frequency, but you perceive your existence continuing 100% of the time (but your head may be bleeding/brains still thinking while splattered on the wall, etc.).
Actually, I’m still trying to wrap my brains around that last part (ha ha). What if you die, but are spontaneously recreated a billion years later, does that count? I can’t figure out a way to tell the difference...
It’s not just suicide attempts. We should also consider aging. Image 1000 years from now. You are still alive but no other human has ever lived past 130 or so. It would be time for you (the you in that Many Worlds branch) to conclude that Many Worlds is true and you’re in for a bumpy eternity.
I could not follow why living longer raised the chance that the universe would contain an AI that would save you, however.
Just a quick question in case anybody knows… the complex amplitude value that each point in configuration space contributes to the amplitude of some future point in configuration space… the phase can be any value, but is the magnitude variable too? Or are there just lots of vector additions of the same sized vectors pointing in different directions?
Why the singularity is hard and won’t be happening on schedule
Perhaps underpromotion is the rarest move of all.
The compelling reason is that this is what geologists believe, i.e. Peak Oil. Previous centuries of predictions are not relevant as they do not relate to decline (or not) in the production rate of the today’s dominant power sources.
Relying on a small number of strong arguments (or even one) has a clear drawback. Change. A new discovery can invalidate a single argument that seemed very strong in that past. Many weaker arguments have more stability.