I have defeated the hydra! (I had to cut off 670 heads). Feels like playing Diablo.
loup-vaillant
Karma: 923
But when you think of it, if you assume the centaur Firenze wasn’t dead, Imperius is probably not the best option anyway
I took the survey (answered nearly everything).
(7): indentation error. But I guess the interpreter will tell you
iis used out of scope. That, or you would have gotten another catastrophic result on numbers below 10.def is_prime(n): for i in range(2,n): if n%i == 0: return False return True(Edit: okay, that was LessWrong screwing up leading spaces. We can cheat that with unbreakable spaces.)
I don’t like your use of the word “probability”. Sometimes, you use it to describe subjective probabilities, but sometimes you use it to describe the frequency properties of putting a coin in a given box.
When you say, “The brown box has 45 holes open, so it has probability p=0.45 of returning two coins.” you are really saying that knowing that I have the brown box in front of me, and I put a coin in it, I would assign a 0.45 probability of that coin yielding 2 coins. And, as far as I know, the coin tosses are all independent: no amount of coin toss would ever tell me anything about the next coin toss. Simply put, a box, along with the way we toss coins in it has rather definite frequency properties.
Then you talk about “assigning probabilities to each possible probability between 0 and 1”. What you really wanted to say is assigning a probability distribution over the possible frequency properties.
I know it sounds pedantic, but I cringe every time someone talks about “probabilities” being some properties of a real object out there in the territory (like amplitudes in QM). Probability is in the mind. Using the word any other way is confusing.
It just occurred to me that we may be able to avoid the word “intelligence” entirely in the title. I was thinking of Cory Doctorrow on the coming war on general computation, where he explain unwanted behaviour on general purpose computers is basically impossible to stop. So:
Current computers are fully general hardware. An AI would be fully general software. We could also talk about general purpose computers vs general purpose programs.
The Idea is, many people already understand some risks associated with general purpose computers (if only for the various malware). Maybe we could use that to draw attention to the risks of general purpose programs.
That may avoid drawing unwanted associations with the word “intelligence”. Many people believe that machines cannot be intelligent “by definition”. Many believe there is something “magic” between the laws of physics and the high-level functioning of a human nervous system. They would be hard-pressed to admit it outright, but it is at the root of a fundamental disbelief of the possibility of AI.
As for actual titles…
The Risks of General Purpose Software.
General Purpose Computers can do anything. General Purpose Programs, will. (Sounds better as a subtitle, that one.)
(Small inconvenience: phrasing the title this way may require to touch the content of the book itself.)
Or, “Artificial intelligence as a risk to mankind”. (Without the emphasis.)
Good luck finding one that doesn’t also bias you into a corner.
Maybe we could explain it by magical risks, and violence. I wouldn’t be surprised if wizard kill each other more than muggles. With old-fashioned manners, may come old fashioned violence. The last two wars (Grindelwald and Voldemort), were awfully close, and it looks like the next one is coming.
If all times and all countries are the same, with a major conflict every other generation, it could easily explain such a low population.
Thus it had been with some trepidation that Mr. and Mrs. Davis had insisted on an audience with Deputy Headmistress McGonagall. It was hard to muster a proper sense of indignation when you were confronting the same dignified witch who, twelve years and four months earlier, had given both of you two weeks’ detention after catching you in the act of conceiving Tracey.
Apparently, contraception isn’t always used 7th year students. I count that as mild evidence that contraception, magical or otherwise, isn’t widespread in the magical world. Methods of conception promotion are probably just as rare —though if they exist at all, Great Houses are likely to use them.
War. With children.
I fear the consequences if we don’t solve this.
Edit: I’m serious:
This was actually intended as a dry run for a later, serious “Solve this or the story ends sadly” puzzle
I don’t see Hermione be revived any time soon, for both story reasons and because Harry is unlikely to unravel the secrets of soul magic in mere hours, even with a time loop at his disposal.
More likely, Harry has found a reliable way to suspend her, and that would be the “he has already succeeded” you speak of.
The key part is that some of those formal verification processes involve automated proof generation. This is exactly what Jonah is talking about:
I don’t know of any computer programs that have been able to prove theorems outside of the class “very routine and not requiring any ideas,” without human assistance (and without being heavily specialized to an individual theorem).
Those who make (semi-)automated proof for a living have a vested interest in making such things as useful as possible. Among other things, this means as automated as possible, and as general as possible. They’re not there yet, but they’re definitely working on it.
The Prover company is working on the safety of train signalling software. Basically, they seek to prove that a given program is “safe” along a number of formal criteria. It involves the translation of the program in some (boolean based) standard form, which is then analysed.
The formal criteria are chosen manually, but the proofs are found completely automatically.
Despite the sizeable length of the proofs, combinatorial explosion is generally avoided, because programs written by humans (and therefore their standard form translation) tend to have shapes that lend them amenable to massive cuts in the search tree.
It doesn’t always work: first, the criteria are simple and bounded. Second, combinatorial explosion sometimes does occur, in which case human-devised tweaks are needed.
Oh, and it’s all proprietary. Maybe there’s some related academic papers, though.
I do not lie to my readers
Eliezer
I think the facts at least are as described. Hermione is certainly lying in a pool of blood, something significant did happen to her (Harry felt the magic), and Dumbeldore definitely believe Hermione is dead.
If there is a time turner involved, it won’t change those perceptions one bit, And I doubt Dumbeldore would try too Mess With Time ever again (as mentioned in the Azkaban arc). Harry might, but he’s out of his Time Turner Authorized Range. Even then, it looks like he’s thinking longer term than that.
Recalling a video I have seen (forgot the source), the actual damage wouldn’t occur upon hypoxia, but upon re-oxygenation. Lack of oxygen at the cellular level does start a fatal chemical reaction, but the structure of the cells are largely preserved. But when you put oxygen back, everything blows up (or swells up, actually).
Harry may very well have killed Hermione with his oxygen shot. If he froze her before then, it might have worked, but after that… her information might be lost.
One obvious objection: Hermione was still concious enough to say some last words, ruling out advanced brain de-oxygenation. That could be only for the drama, but still.
One obvious consequence: that magic feeling upon death might be linked to plain muggle information-theoretic death somehow. But then, we have horcrucxes and Avada Kedavra… I’m quite confused by HPMOR’s “laws of physics”.
Furthermore, a “continuous” function could very well contain a finite amount of information, provided it’s frequency range is limited. But then, it wouldn’t be “actually” continuous.
I just didn’t want to complicate things by mentioning Shannon.
I disagree with “not at all”, to the extent that the Matrix has probably much less computing power than the universe it runs on. Plus, it could have exploitable bugs.
This is not a question worth asking for us mere mortals, but a wannabe super-intelligence should probably think about it for at least a nanosecond.
Here’s my guess:
“Continuous” is a reference to the wave function as described by current laws of physics.
Eliezer is “infinite set atheist”, which among other things rule out the possibility of an actually continuous fabric of the universe.
I, on the other hand love my cello. I also happen to enjoy practice itself. This helps a lot.