fair enough, I was underwhelmed by your initial post describing it but I agree that showing that your system can handle weird constraints in real examples is an excellent demonstration.
The record thing to me just happens to be a good demonstration that you’re not just another little startup with some crappy schedualling software, you’re actually at the top of the field in some areas.
Or possibly to find an existing company selling office/organization/planning software that’s already got a big share of the market and selling them license to the tech.
if you’re the holders of some records for certain problem types then that grabs my interest.
I’d suggest leading with that since it’s a strong one.
I found it odd as well but I think it’s because it implies that the theoretical reason for that lower bound may be invalid.
There’s likely going to turn out to be a different theoretical lower bound for some other reason but right now we don’t have that theoretical reason.
If true this has some spectacular implications for computing (long term).
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-refutes-famous-physical.html
“Now, an experiment has settled this controversy. It clearly shows that there is no such minimum energy limit and that a logically irreversible gate can be operated with an arbitrarily small energy expenditure. Simply put, it is not true that logical reversibility implies physical irreversibility, as Landauer wrote.”
Some of the limits of computation, how much you could theoretically do with a certain amount of energy are based on what appear to have been incorrect beliefs about information processing and entropy.
It will push the research towards “zero-power” computing: the search for new information processing devices that consume less energy. This is of strategic importance for the future of the entire ICT sector that has to deal with the problem of excess heat production during computation.
It will call for a deep revision of the “reversible computing” field. In fact, one of the main motivations for its own existence (the presence of a lower energy bound) disappears.
Some interesting news: the first autonomous soft tissue surgery, sounds like a notable breakthrough in machine vision was involved for distinguishing all the messy, fleshy internals of the (porcine) patient.
so, parallel genetic algorithm based scheduling app with (ranked?) constraints?
In what way is it more automatic than existing similar apps?
presumably you still need to give it a list of constraints (say a few thousand constraints), possibly in a spreadsheet, some soft, some hard and it spits out a few of the top solutions or presumably an error if the hard constraints cannot be met?
What can it do that, say, optaplanner can’t do?
If you’re going to rely on signed data from third parties then you’re still trusting 3rd parties.
In a dozen or so lines of code you could create a system that collects signed and weighted opinions from a collection of individuals or organisations making encoding arbitration simple. (does the delivery company say they delivered it etc)
You’re just kicking the trust can down the road.
On the other hand it’s unlikely we’ll see any reasonably smart AI’s with anything less than millions of lines of code (or code and data) and flaws anywhere in them destroy the security of the whole system.
This is not a great use for AI until we 1: actually have notable AI and 2: have proven the code that makes it up which is a far larger undertaking.
ok, for some context here, I think a lot of people are getting hung up on the words “contract” or “smart contract”.
If we want to talk about it intelligently it helps to taboo the term “contract” or else people get terribly terribly confused like in some of the existing comments.
I’m going to say “independent program” instead of “smart contract” for clarity
Ethereum allows for the existence of independent programs which can hold and transfer money. The rules have to be hardcoded into them when you create them. They cannot be changed once launched.
For example if you wanted to create a prize fund for people who’ve factored large numbers you could create an independent program which accepts a set of numbers, decides if they’re the prime factors of another number and if it is then it transfers a prize fund to the first person to do so.
Years later, someone factors the number, connects and gets their payment.
You might be a thousand years dead but the independent program is still in the system and has control of the funds.
Depending on how you write it you may even not be able to retrieve the funds yourself without solving the problem.
It doesn’t matter if a court orders you to pay out because they have a law declaring pi to be exactly three and someone has come forward with a kooky proof for their “factored” number. If it doesn’t match the rules of the program there’s nothing you or the court can do.
If you’ve not given yourself control at the start it will sit there until the end of time until someone actually factors the number.
Or perhaps you set up the program badly and it will accept numbers which aren’t the factors as correct and gives a payment to someone who’s not factored anything.
it is not a legal contract which says “I will give money to the person who solves this problem”, it’s a piece of code which, when followed, may give the money in it’s control to someone who connects to it depending on the rules programmed into it.
Some funds have been set up controlled by independent programs and their “about” pages tend to say something along the lines of “you’re agreeing to the code being followed, anything we write here is just our best try at explaining what the code does, here is the full source code, if you’re happy with this then you’re free to give control of some funds to this code or a copy of this code”
You’re still conflating the term “smart contract” and the idea of a legal contract.
That’s like conflating “observer” in physics with a human staring at you or hearing someone talking about a Daemon on their server and talking as if it’s a red skinned monster from hell perched on the server.
Imagine someone says
“This is a river, if you throw your money in it will end up somewhere, we call the currents a ‘water contract’, the only difference to a normal river is that we’ve got the paperwork signed such that this doesn’t count as littering”
It does indeed end up somewhere and you’re really really unhappy about where it ends up.
Who do you think you’re going to take to court and for what contract?
Though unfortunately for them once launched the particular type of smart contract in question enforces itself (since it handles the transfers itself) and re-writing it isn’t really possible without destroying the entire system so the court isn’t being asked for help enforcing the contract and a ruling asking to change it is about as enforceable as a ruling declaring the moon to be an unlicensed aircraft that needs to cease flight immediately if you can’t get your hands on both parties to physically force them to make adjustments using new transactions.
It’s complicated even more by the fact that contracts can themselves be recipients/actors within this system.
AI is complex. Complexity means bugs. Bugs in smart contracts are exactly what you need to avoid.
What is needed the most is mathematically proving code.
For certain contract types you’re going to need some way of confirming that, say, physical goods have been delivered but you gain nothing my adding AI to the mix.
Without AI you have a switch someone has to toggle or some other signal that someone might hack. With AI you just have some other input stream that someone might tamper with. Either way you need to accept information into the system somehow and it may not be accurate. AI does not solve the problem. It just adds complexity which makes mistakes more likely.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when all you have is AI theories everything looks like a problem to throw AI at.
sure, and the traditional plot line where superman grabs a plumeting jet would actually lead to the jet tearing like tissue paper around wherever he grabbed it.
A certain level of “ok superman has a small physics-free bubble around him” needs to be granted if you want to do anything with superman.
A lot of ink has been spilled by geeks trying to come up with self-consistent systems under which superman could do what he regularly does in the stories.
Ya but I don’t want to buy an apartment in new York.
Again, I didn’t say utility goes to zero. it just drops off dramatically. The difference between 0 and 250K is far bigger in terms of utility than the difference between 250k and 500k. You still can’t buy a new york apartment and having 500K is better than having only 250K but in terms of how it changes your life the first increment is far more significant.
Because at that point I’m tapdancing on the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, extremely financially secure with lots of reserves.
It doesn’t go to zero but it’s like the difference between the utility of an extra portion of truffle desert when I’m already stuffed vs the utility of a few bags of plumpynut when I have a starving child.
Using your net worth as part of the calculation doesn’t feel right.
Even if my net worth is quite high much of that may be inaccessible to me short term.
If I have 100,000 in liquid cash then 100 has lower utility to me than if I have 100,000 in something non liquid like a house and no cash.
Yep, for me 100 dollars provides a nice chunk of utility. 10000 does not provide 100 times as much utility and anything more than a couple hundred K provides little utility at all.
In theory that 1.6 billion powerball lottery had a (barely) positive expected return (depending on how taxes work out) and thus rationalists should throw money at it but in reality a certainty of 1 dollar is better than a 1 in a billion chance of getting 1.6 billion. (I know these numbers aren’t exact)
That somewhat necessitates either the group remaining very small or discussions only happening in small subsets since in any non-tiny group there will be one or more people with issues around pretty much anything.
It also wouldn’t seem to work terribly well in long term and written discussions such as the ones on LW which can run for years with random members of the public joining and leaving part way through.
So the “accessory after the fact” murder example is a very clear and explicit example of where major penalties can be inflicted on pretty much anyone by providing them with particular information which forces them either into certain actions or into danger. 50%+ of the community present are going to be subject to those hazards whether or not they even understand them.
Safe space avoidance of triggers on the other hand are extremely personal, one person out of thousands can suddenly be used as a reason for why the community shouldn’t talk about ,say, Rabies and since most LW communication is long term and permanent there is no such thing as “while they’re not in the room”. The discussion remains there when they are present even if the discussion took place while they were not.
Of course you could limit your safe spaces to verbal communication in small, personal, community events where you only talk about Rabies on the days when ,say, Jessica isn’t there but then you have the situation where the main LW community could have a recurring and popular Rabies Symptoms Explained megathread.
At which point you don’t so much have a “community hazard” as a polite avoidance of one topic with a few of your drinking buddies including one who isn’t really part of the central community because they can’t handle the discussion there but is part of your local hangout.
If something that is tough for even a single member to handle counts as a “community hazard” then this is starting to sound more like safe spaces under a different name rather than what I thought you meant with the example of “accessory after the fact” murder thing.
Oh my god those articles are stupid.
If only there was some way to physically scream “THAT’S THE FUCKING POINT!” at the author. The whole point is to spread the “kill switch” to the wild mosquitoes.To kill them.
The Daily mail article appears to be referring to this:
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2987024/pandoras_box_how_gm_mosquitos_could_have_caused_brazils_microcephaly_diasaster.html
where people started pointing to GM mosquitos having been released in areas where zika has been spreading.
never mind that areas where mosquito’s are the biggest problem are the areas where you try mosquito control, in a similar vein it’s suspicious that most malaria deaths are in areas where bednets have previously been distributed. There can be only one conclusion: bednets cause malaria.