hagiograffiti

Big Bad Uzbek Solar Laser

2011-12-31T05:09:00.000-08:00

I'm ending this year with an uplifting example of engineering, Uzbekistan's 1MW solar-powered Nd:YAG laser research facility. I'm not exactly sure what the intended research objective is, but if I had to wager a guess, I'd say it has something to do with energy transmission from orbit. What (relatively) poor, resource-rich, Uzbekistan, with its large deserts, is to gain from orbital solar power is somewhat unclear, so I may be wrong here. Still, while I'm posting this for the obvious Dr. Scaramanga connotation, this project is an example of rationally justifiable, cost-efficient science with a clear objective, at least if compared to madman's schemes such as magnetic confinement fusion, the Space Launch System, or the occasional FP7 project (link in German), or most of what I've seen at AGI-11 this year. Cheers to 2012 !

A Change to the Link List was Overdue

2011-09-16T10:39:00.000-07:00

I'm no longer linking to the Singularity institute blog, as I do no longer wish to be associated with this organization in any way. Dresden Codak gets the boot for displaying Megatokyo Syndrome (glacial pacing, asking for donations for broken computers, etc.) and Pink Tentacle seems, sadly, to be defunct since April (I dearly hope this guy is OK).

Replacing them are Gene Expression, a blog on "human evolution, genetics, genomics and their interstices"; something like a 21st century Rassenlehre without any of the associated wickedness; Hark! A Vagrant, a webcomic, by the wonderful Kate Beaton, on topics like Sherlock Holmes, Canadians, Tesla, Chopin and Liszt, book covers, and much more; and Monsieur LaMoe (moderately NSFW), who lends a unique voice to the world's hikikomori, and whose status as a real person vs. a consortium of writers is still under debate. (I'm leaning somewhat towards "real person".)

Loriot is Dead

2011-08-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

German comedian Loriot died yesterday, aged 87. He will be missed.

Paper Drafts

2011-08-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

Here are draft versions of two short papers. They are on machine ethics and decision theory in the context of reinforcement learning. Comments are welcome.

Altruistic Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:

This article presents a modification of reinforcement learning where an agent’s action lead to rewards being received by a second agent interacting with same environment. This model can be useful in the development of powerful AIs. Agent policies are proposed for dealing with observable rewards, with non-observable rewards in perfectly rational agents, and with non-observable rewards in bounded rational agents.

Newcomblike Problems and Optimal Agents

Abstract:

This article discusses the family of Newcomblike problems in the context of reinforcement learning. It reframes the problem of rational decision making as one of obtaining maximal rewards in a wide range of environments. Newcomblike problems are characterized by correlations between agent and environment policies. An optimal policy, taking into account these correlations, is given for known environments. For unknown environments, a quality criterion for policies is formulated.

Spy

2011-08-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

The picture above shows an East German spy. I am not making this up.

It was taken during an official course on how spies should dress, and was recently dug out by artist Simon Menner. See his online Stasi gallery for more spy pictures.

Make now mistake - despite the occasional screw-up, the East German state security was in fact a (deadly) effective, and ruthless, organization.

Another spy pic, more Austin Powers style:

The End of the Shuttle Program

2011-07-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

LUKE:You were raised Jewish, right?

ELIEZER: Well that’s what I used to think, and then at one point I was watching a space shuttle launch on TV and getting tears in my eyes and realizing that I didn’t really get tears in my eyes for anything Judaism-related. That was when I realized that my childhood religion that I’d sort of grown away from over time, but still had the power to bring tears to my eyes, wasn’t Judaism so much as space travel.

(Luke Muehlhauser interviewing Eliezer Yudkowsky)

Celebrating the last launch of a space shuttle earlier today, a little music video by Yours Truly. Yoko Kanno's "BLUE" (performed by Mai Yamane, Yoko Kanno & the Seatbelts) from Cowboy Bebop set to Discovery's last launch, and a slideshow of a few shuttle-related images. This is in personal memoriam of A.K., who didn't make it for Discovery's final flight by a few weeks.

The 34 Year Old Scientist

2010-12-17T09:06:00.001-08:00

Watson discovered the structure of DNA when he was 24. Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty principle when he was 25. Newton claimed to have developed his gravitational theory when he was 24. Darwin embarked on the Beagle when he was 22.

I could go on for hours like this.

But wait. Crick was 37 when he discovered the structure of DNA. Schroedinger was 38 when he published on wave mechanics. Newton cast his gravitational theory in mathematical form when he was 37, his earlier insights likely being purely speculative. Darwin finalized the theory of selection when he was 47 (Wallace being 33 at the time.)

Of course I may be biased here. Ever so many examples and counterexamples don't prove a point. One has to look at the data that's out there.

Falagas et al. (2008) ask "At what age do biomedical scientists do their best work?" and answer with the following age histogram of the top 5 highly cited articles for a random subset of 300 bioscientists:

(The corresponding histogram for the single-most cited paper looks noisier, propably based on people's tendency to cite summary reviews written in later years.)

Costas et al. (2010) perform a more thorough analysis for scientists working at the Spanish National Research Council. Their results indicate that while the number of publications per scientist per year increases somewhat with age, the expected number of citations per publication decreases. However, their study lumps together all age groups younger than forty. (Top, Low, and Medium refer to three performance classes of researchers).

Finally, the widely cited and awesomely titled Kanazawa (2003) "Why productivity fades with age: The crime–genius connection" examines the age at what 280 famous scientists made their single key contribution to science:

Quite depressing overall, but it seems you don't have to go fishing before you turn 40 (Einstein was 41 in 1920). At 34, chances are 50:50 that the best of your work still lies ahead. Even better (or worse, depending on your personal situation), the corresponding curve for the 72 scientists in Kanazawa's dataset who never married looks significantly different:

(This might be somewhat confounded by the unknown fraction of (closet) gay scientists in the sample.) Newton, Erdös, Tesla (and Anton Bruckner) immediately come to my mind as straight men who denied themselves the pleasures of female company, and were productive well into their forties, or later. (The catch being that Tesla and Newton became funny at around 50; Erdös was born that way; and Bruckner, well, that depends on your opinion on watertight underwear.) Crick, Schroedinger and Darwin were all married.

Falagas, M. E., Ierodiakonou, V. and Alexiou, V.G. (2008): At what age do biomedical scientists do their best work? The FASEB Journal 22,12 4067-4070

Costas, R, Van Leeuwen, T.N., Bordons, M (2010): A bibliometric classificatory approach for the study and assessment of research performance at the individual level: The effects of age on productivity and impact . J ournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61, 8 1564–1581

Kanazawa, S. (2003): Why productivity fades with age: The crime-genius connection. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 257–272

Credit Assignment & The Singularity

2010-11-20T00:58:00.000-08:00

There is no limit to what a man can do so long as he does not care a straw who gets the credit for it.

(Charles Edward Montague)

Technological breakthroughs are often difficult to assign to a particular person, time, or place. Some methods are "in the air", and are reinvented independently in short succession. Financial and emotional motives complicate matters further. Inventors may regard each other's ideas as special cases of their own, more general insights. In 1910 the Smithsonian Institute congratulated the Wright brothers "for bringing [Samuel P. Langley's] aerodrome..to the commercial and practical stage", and only in 1942 issued an official statement that the Wrights, not Langley, had invented the airplane. Only in 1914, after 8 years of court struggles, and strong opposition from Glenn Curtiss, was the Wright's plane patent declared valid. I myself am currently witnessing, in my field of work, a similar patent war, albeit at a much smaller scale.

However, with the Singularity, things are different, as a friend recently pointed out to me over dinner in Berkeley. (Of course, the same idea had occurred to me already, independently!) If a breakthrough in AI results in the creation of a very powerful entity, this entity will likely find it trivial to sort out who contributed how much to its coming into existence. If the entity is benevolent, it will likely take care of proper credit assignment. Spin, PR, old-boy-networks and lawsuits are probably no match to superintelligence, nanotechnology, and non-invasive brain scanning.

With that in mind, the hopeful AI researcher can focus his attention on maximizing the chances for a benevolent Singularity. That means he should publish his work. Credit assignment can be of higher order, such as when his published ideas enable someone else's breakthrough. In the context of a normal invention, this is less desirable than holding back ideas and achieving the breakthrough himself, a little later maybe. In the context of the Singularity, however, earlier is better, all else equal, given ~60 million people dying per year. While his competitor may have beat him to the finishing line, he enabled the competitor's early success by releasing his ideas. That the competitor won't acknowledge this, is no longer a problem after the Singularity, and speeding things up by a mere week may save a million lives.

So if you have an idea that could matter for AI, and the Singularity, set it free. You know it wants to be.

What I, as a Transhumanist, Believe.

2010-09-11T12:12:00.000-07:00

As a transhumanist, I believe a world without fear is possible.

As a transhumanist, I believe the world is very, very, very, big.

As a a transhumanist, I believe I can become something else, and still be myself.

As a transhumanist, I believe in the power of truth.

As a transhumanist, I believe in happy endings.

Quote of the Day

2010-08-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

"Reality is a non-ergodic partially observable uncertain unknown environment in which acquiring experience can be expensive."

Marcus Hutter, Feature Markov Decision Processes

Quote of the Day

2010-07-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal’s Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God."

Julie from Crystal Nights by Greg Egan

Is Google Growing Linearly ?

2010-07-18T16:41:00.001-07:00

Could make sense if (1) a fixed percentage of total ad spending is moved to google every year and (2) the amount not yet moved over is much smaller than the total amount that will be eventually moved. Not too unreasonable. Fit is minimal-relative-error (least squares). Extrapolation to 2015 gives 48-56 Bio USD in annual sales and 10% year-on-year sales growth, to which the overall growth in ad spending may contribute a few percent.

Happy Baby Bunny Pony

2010-02-22T10:11:00.000-08:00

At Less Wrong, Alicorn (or is it really Eliezer?) discusses how the fact that some (pictures of) baby animals are more cute than all (pictures of) human babies fits with human evolutionary psychology. We're after all supposed to find our own offspring to be the cutest of all species. According to the theory of supernormal stimuli, proposed by Konrad Lorenz in the 1940s, this is due to the bunny possessing the features that make human babies cute, like big eyes, small nose, rounded forehead, to an even greater extent than any human baby does. This is certainly true, but why isn't our perception of such features maximized for values found in actual human babies ?

I think the answer lies in what isn't there in the bunny. If we ever encountered a real, living human baby with the eye/nose proportions and forehead curvature of the bunny pictured above, we'd be grossed out. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, (not from an ethical point of view), as the carrier of such body proportions would have no real chance of survival. The "cuteness ratios" are there, but our overall gestalt perception kicks in, and adds a big "gross!" factor. So mother nature needs not bother to make our ratio- or feature-based cuteness detection the shape of an inverted U, as low-level shape and texture perception will take care of any outliers. Within the region of "normal" babies, the bigger the eyes, the better. The bunny, however, is clearly not of human gestalt, is furry, has long ears, therefore doesn't trigger any "icky" response and can make our feature-based cuteness perception go berserk.

What's true for babies, also holds true for babes. Men find slender legs, big eyes, small chin, etc., attractive in women, but there's a limit that. Manga and anime, however, feature characters with extreme body proportions that still manage to be highly attractive to some people. While Scott McCloud proposes in his book Understanding Comics that the heavily abstracted visual style of cartoon characters serves primarily to allow a broad range of readers to recognize themselves in them, I would like to add that, by introducing a clear non-humanness, it also allows to explore regions of cuteness-feature-space that are off-limits to naturalistic art forms.

You can of course combine it all into ueber-cute cartoon animal babies.

As a transhumanist, all this offers me a nice glimpse of a future where we will have reeingineered our perception (and possibly our appearance) to accomodate an affective dynamic outside the human range.

Surreal Xmas Films

2009-12-31T11:26:00.000-08:00

And we're back. Seems like in September, some wicked kids removed my batteries and left me outside in the rain to rust. Least that's what it feels. Maybe more on this later.

Over the years, I have, I don't know why, developed a cherished tradition of watching surreal films around Christmas. Maybe this is because it brings back memories of watching, as a kid, often somewhat surreal, at least from a kid's perspective, animated films on the 24th (think Animal Farm). Maybe it's because I feel the surrealism of Christmas itself (virgin, manger, kings, star, etc.) is completely lost on my surrounding.

A good point to start ist The Yellow Submarine (UK, 1968), (tvtropes). They showed this on Austrian public TV when I was in grade school (ca 1985), but for me, it got "pinned" to the Holidays in 1991, when I watched it on the afternoon of the 31st of Dec. in a hotel room in Hamburg, where I was with my mom to celebrate New Year's Eve with a harbor cruise (Austrians...). The Yellow Submarine features good music, superb animation, and, unique among the films mentioned here, a plotline more coherent than the average dream.

Fast forward to Christmas 2003, which is where I watched Angel's Egg (Japan, 1985), (tvtropes). I had the strangest feeling then, that I had already seen this, as a kid, around the time it was first released, which is highly unlikely for too many reasons to name. I really like re-watching this one almost every year.

But I will never again watch Jan Svankmajer's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, (Czechoslovakia, 1988), which I rented from Blockbusters around Christmas 2005, when I was in Palo Alto. Set in a filthy, claustrophobic, apartment building in the Eastern Bloc, using stop-motion to achieve the creepiest imaginable effect (putting glass eyes in animal skulls, and animating them as disembodied skulls), this film put me in a mild shock-like state for days. You can find some scenes on youtube, but be warned.

Compared to this, Die Reise ins Glueck ("Journey into Bliss", Germany, 2004) by German dilettante director Wenzel Storch, is only mildly disturbing. Eight years in the making, the film features fantastic backdrops and stage props (most of them scrounged, or outright stolen), terrible acting, and a scene showing the mating of a sentient snail-shaped ship and a church, which, of course, results in the formation of a time-machine. I gave this, as a present, to a friend of mine, this Christmas. I think I'll opt for a tie next year.

The most surreal of all films in my list, however, is the Star Wars Holiday Special (USA, 1978) (tvtropes). I tried watching it this year, but, but ... Bea Arthur?!?!? This film is chock full of "Wait. I can't believe they did that." moments. And the advertisements fit seamlessly into the overall strangeness ("Tobor is robot spelled backwards"). If you've ever wanted to catch a glimpse of a parallel Universe, this is as good a substitute as you can probably get.

That Is So Amazingly Amazing I Think I'd Like To Steal It.

2009-09-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Makoto Shinkai's 5cm per Second is one of my favorite movies. Shinkai's storytelling, visuals, and sound effects show incredible attention to detail, and have made him the new top dog amongst Japanese animators.

Enter the Chinese Communist Party Propaganda Department, an their latest gift to mankind, "Soul's Window" (心灵之窗), a “moral anime,” featuring, "themes of selfless dedication to party and state...[]... and the heroic actions of the People’s Liberation Army ." (Hat tip to Sankaku Complex!)

The attentive critic may find some resemblance between Soul's.. and 5cm..:

See the many more screenshots like these at Sankaku Complex. This may be the biggest thing since the Great Lion Theft.

You can watch what seems to be a trailer for Soul's Window here or here.

Or you can watch Shinkai's one-minute short "A Gathering of Cats", which is approximately a Zillion times better, here.

Eight Ways To Spot A Mediocre Scientist.

2009-07-20T01:51:00.000-07:00

It's easy to spot a poor scientist. Lack of publications, inability to communicate, and blatant incompetence are hard to overlook for more than a few hours. Sorting the mediocre from the first-class, however, is much more difficult. Brilliance sometimes looks like biasedness, and vice versa. Sub-par people may still publish good papers through a combination of luck, the right working environment, the right supervisor, and good funding. Eloquence can mask shallowness (for a while.) On the other hand, smart guys may be too young for a strong track record (or may have been unlucky), may be deliberately soft-spoken, may use self-deprecating humour, or may agree to stupid statements out of politeness.

One would need to have excellent insight into the relevant field in order to recognize true outperformance. If you're teaming up with a collaborator across domains (e.g. a computer scientist teaming up with a linguist) you will lack this level of insight. (If not, why team up?) Getting stuck with a mediocre scientist as a collaborator, student, supervisor or colleague is guaranteed to cause frustration, a dent in your career, lots of extra work, and mild to severe psychological damage. Over the years, I learned, the hard way, that mediocre scientists (henceforth MS) share some traits among themselves, which can serve as a early warnings:

1. Monologue
The MS likes to elaborate. Droning on and on, the MS will not have time to listen. Make casual, but relevant, statements, and check later whether he remembers any of them. Look for email responses to simple questions of over four pages in length.

2. Quirky Categorization; Meta-Theory
The MS has usually developed idiosyncratic systems of categories for several domains. He regards these, as well as his general meta-theory of scientific insight, as absolutely essential in order to get any work done. Without using those categories, nothing makes sense. Anyone not using his "system" (i.e. everyone except himself) has no chance to make real intellectual progress. He will, however, freely share this insight with anyone (remotely) interested (cf. point 1).

3. BSing outside of his Speciality
When discussing topics outside of his field of expertise, (which he will be eager to do, cf. point 1), the MS will quickly talk some form or another of utter BS, like, e.g. US per capita GDP being hundred times bigger than global average. The MS may be aware, and admit, that he has only the most casual knowledge of the domain in question, but will nevertheless deliver his statements with utmost certainty (cf. next point).

4. Preaching, Teaching
The MS is sure of what he says. Absolutely. He has had this discussion a hundred times before, with people smarter than you, and none of those people were able to provide solid counterarguments to his position. Sure, some tried, some tried really hard, but after a few hours of discussion, or a few 5-page-long email exchanges, their arguments all melted away, and they admitted defeat. Or at least stopped responding. Check the archives. The MS is as sure of his access to privileged knowledge as a maths teacher in front of grade-schoolers, and it shows.

5. Misses Appointments
When working with you, the MS will be late, will, at first, rush, to make up for the time lost, but then slow down, and suggest having a coffee or two together. Then he suddenly realizes he needs to be elsewhere, and leaves early.

6. Belittles Textbooks, People, Publications, Institutions, Methods...
Nothing is good enough for the MS. He will give you an earful about the textbooks being confusing, too detailed or too superficial, everyone except himself lacking true insight (cf. point 2), publications being based on flawed methodologies, institutions funding the wrong kind of people, and so on and so forth. This is not the usual whining of the underprivileged - he himself may have good funding. It's more of an aesthetic complaint.

7. Doesn't Follow the Literature
When Caliph Umar the Great ordered the books of the Library of Alexandria to burned for heating bathing water, he is said to have stated that "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, in which case they are superfluous." (Wikipedia says this is a hoax.) The MS, however, has an analogous view of the literature in his field (the "Koran" being his own work, in particular his meta-theory, cf. point 2). Pick his brain, and you will find he's completely unaware of publications which could help him a lot in his efforts.

8. Would Prefer to do His Own Stuff
The MS is an independent spirit. He will not compromise. He will not team up. He demands flexibility. He will not precommit. He will not allow anyone to "interfere" with his work. He'll play it by ear. While all this can also happen with a truly great mind working in a destructive environment, in combination with the seven points above it's an indication that you have an MS in front of you.

Carving Up Reality.

2009-05-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

In a wonderful choice of words, the Wall Street Journal yesterday mentioned in an article that Agilent Technologies Inc. "[...] makes machines to analyze DNA, chemicals, sound waves and other items [...]".

Not to mention that Kolmogorov complexity is completely irrelevant to intelligence.

2009-05-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Michael Vassar, the President of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence recently gave an interview on Accelerating Future where he favorably mentions Marcus Hutter's work on AI:

AF: Why should someone regard SIAI as a serious contender in AGI?

Vassar: The single biggest reason is that so few people are even working towards AGI. Of those who are, most are cranks of one sort or another. Among the remainder, there is a noticeable but gradual ongoing shift in the direction of provability, mathematical rigor, transparency, clear designer epistemology and the like, for instance in the work of Marcus Hutter and Shane Legg. To the extent that SIAI research and education efforts contribute to rigorous assurance of safety in the first powerful AGIs, that is a victory as great as the creation of AGI by our own researchers.

Now that's an interesting contrast with earlier statements by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Ben Goertzel, co-founder of and Director of Research at the SIAI, respectively:

I seriously do NOT think there is any practical value to be gotten out of trying to create a pragmatic AGI system by "scaling AIXI down." Ben Goertzel, 2007 http://www.mail-archive.com/singularity@v2.listbox.com/msg00509.html

To sum up: (a) The fair, physically realizable challenge of cooperation with your clone immediately breaks the AIXI and AIXI-tl formalisms. (b) This happens because of a hidden assumption built into the formalism, wherein AIXI devises a Cartesian model of a separated environmental theatre, rather than devising a model of a naturalistic reality that includes AIXI. (c) There's no obvious way to repair the formalism. It's been diagonalized, and diagonalization is usually fatal. The AIXI homunculus relies on perfectly modeling the environment shown on its Cartesian theatre; a naturalistic model includes the agent itself embedded in reality, but the reflective part of the model is necessarily imperfect (halting problem). (d) It seems very likely (though I have not actually proven it) that in addition to breaking the formalism, the physical challenge actually breaks AIXI-tl in the sense that a tl-bounded human outperforms it on complex cooperation problems. (e) This conjectured outperformance reflects the human use of a type of rational (Bayesian) reasoning apparently closed to AIXI, in that humans can reason about correlations between their internal processes and distant elements of reality, as a consequence of (b) above. Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2003 http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg00862.html

AIXItl is a different story. It's computable, and is vastly less useful than Novamente. It's a ridiculous algorithm really, since at each time step it searches an infeasibly large space of possible programs. It's useful purely for theoretical purposes. Ben Goertzel, 2003 http://www.mail-archive.com/agi@v2.listbox.com/msg00765.html

Not to mention that *Kolmogorov complexity is completely irrelevant to intelligence*. Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008 http://www.sl4.org/archive/0811/19505.html

Solomonoff Induction Breaks Egan's Dust Theory

2009-04-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City, which features unlikeable characters, wooden dialogue, and a depressing storyline, is one of the most thought-provoking works of science fiction ever written. It’s basically a book-length expansion of Egan’s “Dust Theory”. The related Church-Turing thesis implies that I couldn’t know whether I’m made of real atoms or just accurate computer simulations of atoms. The Dust Theory expands this to the case where the output of the atom-simulation undergoes a permutation – I still couldn’t tell what’s happening in the “basement”. Since any pattern of sufficient length can be permuted to a simulation of my atoms, and therefore my subjective experience, I can never discern from the “inside” whether I’m made of atoms, of simulated atoms, or of a random pattern of black-and-white flowers in a field on a small planet orbiting Betelgeuse.

My argument against the dust theory is that it does not explain anything. I believe I’m made of atoms because that explains a lot, that is, it compresses a description of my perceptions given my actions. (This is an informal paraphrasing of Solomonoff induction.) In fact, I believe I’m Manuel, who is such-and-such a type of guy, because it explains an awful lot of the stuff I’m perceiving, and doing. A world model with a “basement” not of physical atoms, but simulated atoms on a small turing machine, has about the same Kolmogorov complexity as the original model, so my take on that is “who knows?”. But if a theory makes it necessary to specify an extra permutation in the end ... if the permutation is to be Martin-Löf random, its complexity is to be about equal to the length of the string to be scrambled. Whoah, that’s a lot of extra bits! Each extra bit reduces the theory’s prior probability by 50%, so that’s pretty much off the table.

That’s also why I don’t buy into the “We are in Digits of Pi” theory. Granted, pi itself has a small Kolmogorov complexity, but in order to explain my perceptions and actions, in sum N bits, one would have to specify a region that lies some 2^N digits behind the comma. That’s much more costly (N bits) than the “atom” or “Turing machine” based theories above (K(N) bits), and is therefore, by virtue of Solomonoff induction, a stillborn theory.

One of the reasons Egan’s Dust Theory is appealing at first glance is that he introduces it through permutations of low Kolmogorov complexity which nevertheless look “complex” to the human mind. (The general case, which he – I think –doesn’t explicitely state, is known as the pseudo-random number generator.) The big step from there to arbitrarily complex permutations – almost all seemingly random patterns cannot be created with a pseudo-random number generator – is swept under the argumentative rug. I admit the sweeping is not done deliberately, as Egan doesn’t seem to know about Solomonoff induction.

For the record I do believe in Tegmark’s mathematical universe theory. I also believe my laptop’s harddisk contains mostly random data (courtesy 7zip, matroska, and others.) And, yes, I also believe a tiny fraction of myself is in a field of lowers somewhere (not Betelgeuse). More on this soon, hopefully, in a post I’ve been struggling to write for two years.

Michel Djerzinski

2009-03-27T00:13:00.000-07:00

On March 27th, 2009, in the early afternoon, he went to the main post office in Galway. He sent one copy of his manuscript to the French Academy of the Sciences in Paris, and another one to the British journal Nature. What happened thereafter remains a mystery. The fact that his car was found close to Aughrus Point naturally lead to speculations about suicide - something that came to no surprise to Walcott and the technicians at the center. [...] Many witnesses attest to his fascination with this distant edge of the Western world, constantly bathed in a soft, shining light, where he had come so often, where, as he wrote in one of his last notes 'the sky, the sea, the light converge.' We believe that Michel Djerzinski went into the sea.

Michel Houellebecq's Atomised is one of the books most dear to me. I recognize myself in the novel's main character, Michel Djerzinski, who shares many biographical aspects and character traits with me, like, to give a few examples, our close relationships to our grandmothers, our research work in biophysics, our grim view of the human condition, and our relentless attempts to engineer a posthuman species of sentient beings.

As you can read above, today is the day where Djerzinski, having completed his breakthrough theory of SENS, disappears "into the sea". (The book was published in 1998.) I originally had plans of traveling to Galway on the occasion, maybe stay for a few days at the coastguard station outside of Clifden, where Djerzinski took residence during the last years of his life, and take in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, I decided otherwise.

For a certain kind of books, and a certain kind of young men, there exists a considerable risk that the books seriously mess with the young men's self-perception. My guess is that Atomised is one of those books. I love Atomised, and I see an almost creepy similarity between myself and the protagonist, but I clearly understand today that I am not Michel Djerzinski, and should feel no need to resemble him even more than I already do. What helped me understand this (besides from aging ten years), was coming across several other fictional works in which I could also profoundly recognize facets of myself; Thomas Bernhard's Ungenach, and, more recently, Makoto Shinkai's 5 Centimeters Per Second, are just two examples.

So rest in peace, Michel, and thanks for leading me along the way for a while.

Hibernation Redux

2009-03-26T00:20:00.000-07:00

The local newspaper ran a story a few days ago on the accumulated hours of sunshine that we had in Wels, Austria (where I'm located) from Dec. 21st and March, 21st.

What made the fact newsworthy was that the number, due to constant fog and cloud cover, came down to seventy. The nearby city of Linz got 140 hours.

Just to put this into proper context: According to the statistics available from the BBC, the long-term average of total hours of sunshine for January, February, and March, is 180 for St. Petersburg, 210 for Rekyavik, 270 for Stockholm, 420 for Fairbanks, and 600 for San Francisco.

No surprise I've been in deep hibernation mode once again ...

Quote Of The Day

2009-03-12T11:56:00.000-07:00

"The Japanese government outlawed the practice of self-mummification in the late 19th century."

(Found on Pink Tentacle.)

The Leibniz Drive

2009-02-24T00:06:00.000-08:00

Every aspiring Mad Scientist must invent at least one scheme for an FTL drive. So here's mine.

My proposal does not use any speculative physics, such as wormholes or large amounts of negative mass. It is based 100% on physical laws we know today. What I propose, however, is the application of molecular nanotechnology on a very large scale.

First let's make it clear what we want:

Goal: A galactic empire in which Cpt. Cabonza and his motley crew can travel from Arghra V to Balubius II in one day.

We now add the following insight (which, as far as I know, has not yet the status of a physical law)

Insight: Information cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

We derive a conclusion from that:

Conclusion: Cpt. Cabonza's journey must not carry any information from Arghra to Balubius.

Now we know what we have to do in order to construct a scenario where FTL travel is possible:

Plan: Make physical reality an epiphenomenon of a pre-synchronyzed, parallel, redundant, computing process.
In practice that means each star system consists solely of programmable matter. The surface dynamics of that programmable matter, and that of any star system reachable by FTL drive, is pre-computed in a "hidden layer". To repeat: all connected star systems simulate the whole of the "Empire", but control only the "local" manifestations of physical reality. This includes any inhabitants, sentient or otherwise. Balubius can therefore let Cpt. Cabonza pop out of immaterial nothingness one day after Arghra disassembled him (motley crew and all).
Information coming in from outside the empire to Arghra can potentially break this pre-established harmony. It is therefore necessary to funnel any such information through "gateways", which retain the physical carrier of the information for as long as it takes to disclose the information to all connected system (in the case of a galaxy, ~50.000 -100.000 years). After this time, the carrier is released, and is allowed to interact with the "pre-informed" star systems. This does not mean the carrier has to come to a stop - it just has to cross the gateway region sufficiently below lightspeed. (I just retconned the Zones of Thought!)
I will add a FAQ here as questions come up.

Soviet Animation

2009-01-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

My neighbour told me stories of the beautiful animated films the Soviet occupation forces showed in their improvised cinemas in the years after the second world war. Thanks to Al Gore I was able to quickly learn a bit about the History of Soviet Animation.

If you think all animation was like Worker and Parasite from The Simpsons, you may be in for a surprise.

The Magic Flower (part one). 1948.
Beautiful, fluent animation, based on rotoscoping (or, in Russian terms, eclair).

The Magic Flower (part two). 1948.

The Magic Flower (part three). 1948.

The Humpbacked Horse (part one). 1947.
The lack of subtitles makes the story somewhat hard to follow here. Reading the Wikipedia entry helps a bit.

The Humpbacked Horse (part two). 1947.

The Humpbacked Horse (part three). 1947.

The Humpbacked Horse (part four). 1947.
Huh ? The Phoenix looks a lot like Tezuka's Phoenix (drawn in1954) ! The God of Manga a plagiator ? Hmm, no, apparently there exists something like a global consensus on how a Phoenix is supposed to look like...

The Humpbacked Horse (part five). 1947.

The Humpbacked Horse (part six). 1947. Yay, whale island !

The Humpbacked Horse (part seven). 1947.

The Humpbacked Horse (part eight). 1947.

Girl and Dolphin (with substitles). 1978. The matter of dolphin intelligence, or sentience, was indeed vigorously studied in the Soviet Union. I fondly remember reading a Soviet book from the Seventeed on that topic during a voyage to Spitzbergen on a Russian cruise ship in 1990...

Bandar-Logs, from The Adventures of Mowgli. 1973. This adaptation of the story is quite close to Kipling's dark, violent vision.

Every Time.

2009-01-20T10:34:00.000-08:00

Every time you try to drag real life physics into a made-up setting, God kills a catgirl.

Consequentially,

Every time a physicist plays God, we get one step closer to making catgirls reality.
Every time Schroedinger thought about catgirls, Gernsback frowned and sighed "God..." while leafing through a bad manuscript.
Every time someone calls the Singularity "The Rapture of the Nerds", some catgirls get physical with each other.
Every time you ask about Tipler in a lecture on General Relativity, you'll get frowned upon.
Every time a bookstore clerk files "The Call of Cthulhu" under "Science Fiction", a lonely physicist googles for catgirl pictures.
Every time a lonely science fiction fanboy feeds his cat, he fantasizes about studying physics and finding a proof for God's non-existence that'll show those stupid theologians.
Every time a physicist complains about poor characterization in an SF novel, a catgirl quotes Nietzsche.
Every time God checks on his Catgirl Planet, he reminds himself to have a look again at that Monkeyboy Planet soon.
Every time you mention catgirls into a discussion on applied theology, a physicist writes some Permutation City self-insertion fanfic.
Every time a catgirl tries to understand Permutation City, God finds himself in the dust.
Every time a catgirl tries to understand physics, nyaaa!

When Will The Singularity Occur ?

2009-01-13T01:26:00.000-08:00

Now and then I get asked about estimates of how long it will take us to get to the Singularity. Now Ray Kurzweil has demonstrated that this question can easily be answered by plotting various trends on a log-linear scale. Let me demonstrate how this works.

First, we notice that the average age of winners of the Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science (the "Nobel Prize" of this field), has been steadily increasing since the time of its inception in 1966:

Donald Knuth is apparently somewhat of an outlier. We will nevertheless include him in our further analysis.

We now switch to a log-linear scale, which is a much more scientific way of looking at trends, and try to fit an exponential trend to our dataset (including Donald Knuth):

We can now easily extrapolate this trend to the middle of the century.

We learn that by 2050, the average Turing awardee will be a centenarian, which is quite realistic given the expected progress of anti-aging technologies over the next decades.

Now, when the Singularity occurs, Ray Kurzweil will surely get the Turing Award for having foreseen it, either that year or the next, depending on circumstance. We therefore add him to our diagram (note that Ray ages linearly, or, on his own account, even sub-linearly; for fairness, and out of scientific rigor, we just plot the time from his birth in 1948.)

If you squint, you can see that crossover occours around 2035. Therefore, the Singularity will either happen in 2034 or 2035.

Coming soon: posts on "What is the computing power of the human brain?" and "What's the best programming language for writing an AI (like, while I finish high school) ?".

I can't believe he didn't write that one.

2008-11-28T12:18:00.000-08:00

The movie Vanilla Sky, the anime series Scrapped Princess, and the X-files episode The Post-Modern Prometheus have one thing in common (besides being worth watching): They show so much of the handwriting (plot devices, idiosyncracies in dialogue, characterization, setting...) of individual authors that it's hard to believe they aren't based on actual works by those authors.
Vanilla Sky's easy to guess, but can you guess the other ones? Vernor Vinge, and Bob Sheckley, respectively.

In my eyes, though, that doesn't make them rip-offs. More kind of an hommage.

Why Is There Anything, Rather Than Nothing At All ?

2008-11-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

In the last few years, algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics have given me a sort of half-baked intuition that we, as a civilization, have the concept of nothingness wrong. To me, nothingness means the lack of any specification, or description, or restriction, and therefore implies the plenitude of all possible forms of existence. A void, a vacuum, utter silence, a blank slate, is something that needs to be described, or specified. I can't put it any better than that currently, but somehow the question why the "universe" exists seems a bit like an un-question to me now; it's the result of the complete absence of restrictions to existence. This lack of restriction, or description, seems to me the most natural, intuitive, or simple state imaginable.

Naturally Google

2008-10-25T11:38:00.001-07:00

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=what+is+a+natural+language+search+engine%3F

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=what+is+powerset%3F

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Powerset+vs.+conventional+search+engines+-+a+sample+question

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=which+U.S.+state+has+the+highest+income+tax%3F

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=how+much+did+microsoft+pay+for+powerset%3F

The Case Of The Missing Volatilities: A Disillusioned Capitalist's Rantings

2008-09-21T11:37:00.000-07:00

A while ago, someone approached me with a business inquiry. He told me he was working as an investment consultant for Austrian savers who, being both risk-averse and unhappy with low yields from savings accounts, were, in his words looking for something like a "leveraged savings account", a combination of high returns and near zero volatility. That request made me cringe, and I politely let him know that I wasn't interested in doing business with him.

I somewhat pity the people who are consulting him; for they may sooner or later get what they ask for, but not what they want. What they want is a risk-free return above the rate of risk-free return. What they'll get is a smooth curve on some piece of paper. Because it would have been easy to give them a strategy that returns, say, 14 percent p.a. with near-zero volatility. For a few years, that is, long enough to collect some handsome fees. But you don't have to be a Quant for that - even you could have done that. Here's how:

First, find some event that you judge to be reasonably unlikely, like, snowfall on Christmas eve in Wels, Austria (my hometown.) I'd say there's a one-in-ten chance to that.
Second, find someone who judges more or less likewise and is willing to bet (not necessarily fairly) on the occurrence of the event.
Third, put your money in a savings account, and every year, accept the bet to the full height of your savings.
You're basically insuring your partner against the occurrence of a moderately rare event with all your capital. In essence, you're running an insurance company with a single insuree.
As long as things go well, you'll earn something like a 14 percent return every year (odds + savings account). How likely is it that things go well ? Your chance of surviving for five years is almost two-thirds; you can expect to go down only after seven years. Meanwhile, you'll chalk up almost zero volatility.

This may be the right place to mention that, according to a study by Credit Suisse/Tremont, the average return from hedge funds between 1994 and 2005 was about 14 percent before fees. And an often cited number for the average hedge fund's lifetime is five years. Now of course not all hedge funds close shop with total, or even large, losses. And most funds have far from zero volatility. So, uhm, I'm not implying a blatantly simple analogy here.

But I want to sharpen your senses to the fact that it's quite easy to smooth out the volatility from a capital growth curve. For a while. So if someone shows you a nice, smooth fifteen-year curve of 14 percent returns, please don't be impressed. He may just be one of four similar idiots, or frauds, who started out in the beginning. And for god sake don't hand over your money, at least if you can't take a qualified look under the hood to see what produces the returns. Also be aware that in many cases your opponent may be fooled by his own elaborate squaring-of-the-circle constructions, and may have genuine good faith in his strategy, so the terms idiot or fraud are probably a too harsh in most cases. He may loose all your money even if he's a nice guy.

The practice of gambling for small returns against large losses is generally frowned upon, since the tolerability of losses generally decreases stronger than linearly. That means a tenfold bigger loss usually is more than tenfold as bad for you.

And this brings us to last weeks events. Once again, the Fed and the US government demonstrated their determination to smooth out growth curves (gdp, stock market,employment), at the price of a small chance that things turn out really bad in the end (e.g. Fed losing political independence.) This has been going on since at least 2000, and even if the chance are small, someone is sooner or later going to lose their bets. The Fed has just acted like a man who'd learned he wouldn't get a raise this year and decided to make up for that by quitting his health insurance plan.

When I was in my early twenties (ca 1998), I turned from a moderate leftist into a firebrand libertarian. The demise of the eastern bloc, Japan's stagnation and the New Economy seemed proof to me of the superiority of free markets. I'm still much of a libertarian today, but I do not any longer make the mistake of confusing libertarian theory with the actual policies of self-declared free market advocates. I recommend reading books on the soviet system printed in the soviet union. It does wonders at giving you anew perspective on things you may read here and now.

The Most Horrible Weapon Ever Conceived.

2008-08-15T07:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was the Foehn wind we had yesterday who did it (Foehn has an awful effect on people's mood, check the wikipedia entry); maybe the fact I hadn't slept well the night before contributed its share; but at some time in the afternoon I had an idea how to build what is, in a very general meaning of the term, the most horrible weapon in the Universe.

(Oh, and I had had to stand in line really, really long that morning !)

It's basically the same goal-function-hypothesizing AI described in one of my earlier posts, fed with a specification of your enimy's goal function.

Only with the sign reversed, such that the maximizer becomes a minimizer.

A paperclip maximizer might wipe you out; but the above system will do to you whatever is the most horrible thing that can happen, in your eyes, (not necessarily limited just) to you. Do you care about your life ? How about your dependent's life ? Their sanity ? Humanity ? Sentient life in the Universe ? Life in the Universe ? The Universe ?

Too bad.

A somewhat comforting thought is that the enemy's-goal-function-hypothesizer-and-minimizer is highly unlikely ever to be used, or even built, due to it's devastating side effects. (Your value function and your enemy's value function may be at least a tiny bit positively correlated.) A fictional Egg Foam (from EGFM, Enimy Goal Function Minimizer) may, however, come in quite handy as a plot device in hard Singularity-related SF. The Blight from Vinge's A Fire was merely expansionist; Egg Foam, on the other hand, is wicked...

The Colors Of My Digits

2008-07-31T09:07:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I perceive digits as having their own colors:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Zero is glassy-transparent, like acrylic, so actually it's more like digits having textures. When I see digits written down somewhere, they do not appear to be vividly colored, just subtly shaded. But when visualizing numbers, I find it hard not to perceive the individual digits being colored in the above way.

I doubt that this rudimentary form of synesthesia is beneficial to my ability to deal with numbers. Many of the colors are quite similiar to each other, so I tend to misremember phonenumbers, sums or dates in a specific way.

Disclaimer: Universe is NOT simple

2008-07-10T06:25:00.001-07:00

"Why is the Universe so simple ?" asks the mathematician, or more generally, why is simple mathematics (school mathematics) so successful at describing the Universe ?

The Universe, however, is generally not simple to begin with. Rather there are some aspects of the Universe (which we happen to be interested in) that can be computed easily. Put one sheep next to one sheep and you get two sheep (in the short term); so "putting next to each other" is isomorphic to a simple "+" operator. But what about the eddies and whorls in a ravine ? Cloud patterns ? And I haven't even begun to ask *creative* questions here.

An arbitrary, low-Kolmogorov-complexity aspect of the Universe is very difficult to compute. We as a species, shaped by evolution, happen to be interested in many simple-to-compute aspects.

The question should rather be phrased: Why does the Universe have any simple-to-compute aspects at all ?

The Great Goodbye, Everett style.

2008-06-08T03:23:00.000-07:00

In a post-singularity future, people may, with the help of superintelligent AI, have almost arbitrary levels of control over their environment and their own mental and physical constitution. This near-omnipotence, however, will presumably not extend to other people's mind and body. (Argument from symmetry, though a game-theoretically stable society model where each participent has unrestricted control over everyone else seems at least remotely conceivable. We'll leave that aside for later speculations.)

I think it's plausible to assume that those post-singularity people can be modeled as agents trying to maximize (minimize) their respective goal functions on the universe. Given their, in principle, almost infinite capability to maximize those functions, the biggest factor holding back individual agents may turn out to be other, similarly powerful agents with incompatible goal functions. Since we're talking about an agent model that clearly separates preferences from beliefs, Aumann's results don't provide a safety hatch here. Clearly, the agents can compromise, and arguments from symmetry again prevail, but this may, in the face of the otherwise immense capabilities of the agents, result in huge discounts from the theoretically achievable level of goal-function fulfillment.

That is, the posthumans may get in each other's way, and there's now way to rationally resolve the situation without massively stomping on some (or all) people's goal functions.

How likely is it that people's preferences may intrinsically differ after the technological singularity ? If those people have evolved through self- (or mutual) modification from humans, or have otherwise inherited, possibly through deliberate design, human values and tastes, then I'd regard this to be very likely indeed. I may be pessimistic here, but my personal lifelong experience is that people have, in parts radically, different values attached to certain aspects of the world, themselves, and other people, and no amount of rational insight is ever going to make those values compatible. So I think the problem I'm discussing here is real and realistic.

Emigration may be a solution, and is a cherished human tradition that may extend into a post-singularity future. Of course, people's value function will often put strong emphasis on the presence of (certain) other people, so walking away will in many cases be worse than gritting your teeth and getting on with each other. But in some cases, getting out of each other's hair may be the optimal thing to do.

Now posthumans surely have some radical opportunities to venture out into unexplored territory, and the silentium universii may mean that there's a lot of place to settle down. Starw(h)isps traveling at a notch below light speed can carry virtualized passengers for billions of parsecs within a short subjective time. But even this may not be far enough, as those other annoying posthumans with incompatible value systems will presumably have access to the same means of expansion and may be determined to use them, if not now, than maybe later in the future. For their destinies to separate, the opposing parties will have to make their future light cones disjunct. Cosmic acceleration from dark energy may make this possible simply by traveling far enough fast enough, but has at least two disadvantages: It creates an asymmetry between those deciding to move away and those that "inherit the earth", and it may be impractical for posthumans to wait long enough for inflation to catch on - given post-singularity computing capacities, and a foreseeable tendency to virtualize your supporting hardware, even a nanosecond wait in objective time may be unbearable on a subjective scale.

As you may have guessed by now from the title of this post, there's probably another, much simpler way for posthumans to part ways. This method depends on the assumed validity of the so-called many-worlds interpretation of the superposition principle in of quantum mechanics. As a note of caution, however, I'd like to point out that the superposition principle relies on the linearity of quantum mechanics, which may turn out to be false, since general relativity is non-linear. (That is, a linear combination of two solutions describing world-states is not necessarily a valid solution itself.) The basic idea is for all parties to condition their further existence on the output of a quantum random number generator. By accepting to inhabit only mutually exclusive subsets of possible worlds, all participants can have symmetric access to a constrained resource (e.g., they can all "inherit the earth" in their Everett branch.) The superposition principle also assures that their fates are separated once and forever, without the danger of any one party deciding to overturn the deal at a later time point. Furthermore, this approach can be implemented on a very short timescale.

As I believe in the mutual incompatibility of many, if not most, human tastes, values, and likings, as well as in the stability of those tastes, values and likings under reflection, I believe posthumans will use one method or another to eventually part ways. (The fact that I spend some time thinking on such problems shows that I believe I would do so, doesn't it ?) Everett emigration seems to be a rather straightforward way to achieve that. We do not, however, currently understand quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the superposition principle well enough to literally bet our lives on it. (Otherwise, we could already choose to implement it using current technology, that is, a quantum random number generator and some hydrogen bombs ...)

Could this be an explanation of the Fermi paradox ? If technological civilizations reliably undergo technological singularities, and post-singularity societies tend to "atomize" themselves, universes may in fact on average be relatively quiet places. But I don't really hold this argument to be valid, as even isolated posthumans may be very noisy. Furthermore, I think the "Everett barrier" is in fact not that impermeable in the presence of a sufficiently powerful AI, so transhumans with compatible tastes might join each other, even if they originated in different Everett branches - but that's some stuff to discuss in a follow-up to this post.

Reconstructing the Dow

2008-06-06T10:12:00.000-07:00

Recently I had to reconstruct the Dow Jones Industrial Index for backtesting purposes. This turned out to be more painful than anticipated. In case you need to do this, I recommend you start out with this document detailing the historical composition of the DJIA. From this, create a .txt file containing dates and types of change over the relevant time interval. Write some code to read this into your preferred programming environment (MatLab in my case) and create a data structure containing the composition of the Dow at any given time point (daily closings, in my case). Then look up as many ticker symbols as possible at Yahoo finance and the Dow's wikipedia entry. For the rest, I googled, though there's probably some sort of central list of tickers maintained somewhere. I'll list below what I could find for the years between 1990 and 2008. Note that many of the tocker symbols today denote different companies.

3M Company
MMM
AT&T Corporation
T
AT&T Incorporated
T
Alcoa Incorporated
AA
Allied-Signal Incorporated
ALD (ALD today stands for Allied Capital Corporation) ALD merged with Honeywell
AlliedSignal Incorporated
ALD (again, today Allied Capital Corporation)
Altria Group Incorporated
MO
Altria Group, Incorporated
MO
Aluminum Company of America
AA
American Express Company
AXP
American International Group Inc.
AIG
American Tel. & Tel.
T
Bank of America Corporation
BAC
Bethlehem Steel
BS (Delisted)
Boeing Company
BA
Caterpillar Incorporated
CAT
Chevron
CVX
Chevron Corporation
CVX
Citigroup Incorporated
C
Coca-Cola Company
KO
Du Pont
DD
DuPont
DD
Dupont
DD
Eastman Kodak Company
EK
Exxon Corporation
XOM
Exxon Mobil Company
XOM
Exxon Mobil Corporation
XOM
General Electric Company
GE
General Motors Corporation
GM
Goodyear
GT
Hewlett-Packard Company
HPQ
Home Depot Incorporated
HD
Honeywell International
HON
Honeywell International Inc.
HON
Intel Corporation
INTC
International Business Machines
IBM
International Paper Company
IP
J.P. Morgan & Company
JPM
J.P. Morgan Chase
JPM
J.P. Morgan Chase & Company
JPM
Johnson & Johnson
JNJ
McDonald’s Corporation
MCD
Merck & Company, Inc.
MRK
Merck & Company, Incorporated
MRK
Microsoft Corporation
MSFT
Minnesota Mining & Mfg
MMM
Navistar International Corp.
NAVZ.PK (Only on Pink Sheets, delisted from NYSE in 2006)
Pfizer Incorporated
PFE
Philip Morris Companies Inc.
PM
Phizer Incorporated
PFE
Primerica Corporation
??? I have no idea.
Procter & Gamble Company
PG
SBC Communications Incorporated
SBC (delisted after at&t fusion)
Sears Roebuck & Company
S (S now stands for Sprint)
Texaco Incorporated
TX (now stands for ternium)
Travelers Group
TRV (now stands for Travelers Company; unrelated company ! )
USX Corporation
X
Union Carbide
UK (delisted)
United Technologies Corporation
UTX
Verizon Communications Inc.
VZ
Wal-Mart Stores Incorporated
WMT
Walt Disney Company
DIS
Westinghouse Electric
WX (Now stands for Wuxi pharma)
Woolworth
WOW (probably)

Next, link the company names to theire respective ticker symbols, and download stock quotes for all the tickers/date combinations. In MatLab, this is most conveniently done using this routine by Marcelo Scherer Perlin, which acesses free Yahoo datasets. For the delisted titles, or intra-day data, you'll have to resort to proprietary datasets. Opentick may be a good free alternative, but I haven't got around to look at it more closely.

Finally, you'd have to reconstruct the index from the individual quotes. Here's an explanation how the DJIA is calculated. You'll notice you need to know historical values for the so called Dow divisor which, as far as I know, are impossible to obtain in electronic format with reasonable effort. Fortunately, you can backward -compute them from any given single value by assuming that splits, dividends, and changes in the DJIA composition should not have an effect on the index value. This is admittedly somewhat pointless, as historical index data can be readily obtained, but it can serve as sort of a check-sum for the individual quotes you have.

BoCon Reaches 1000

2008-06-04T02:29:00.000-07:00

Three cheers for Matthew Skala of Bonobo Conspiracy: BoCon today passed the 1000 strip mark. Amazingly, Matt managed to post a strip each and every single day during the last three years, while working on his PhD in computer science. (He defended, successfully, a few days ago, nice timing.)

Who's the Ezra Gurney in Cowboy Bebop ?

2008-05-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn't noticed, the characters in Cowboy Bebop map nicely onto those in Captain Future, though it's not a bijective mapping. (And by mapping I don't mean the characters are similiar; I mean they're analogous.)

The Captain <-> Spike Spiegel
Greg, Otho <-> Jet Black
Professor Simon (Ken Scott?) <-> Edward
Ul Quorn <-> Vicious
Joan Randall <-> Faye Valentine
Yiek, Oak <-> Ein

Which leaves out Ezra Gurney, a fairly major character. The best I can come up with is Alfredo ("Punch") from Big Shot. He dons a moustache, he's getting quite some screen time, and he fills the crew in on the baddies.

Radical Luddism (or maybe not).

2008-05-16T11:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, thirst-stricken in front of an organic food store, I bought a bottle of Lauretana mountain spring water, which brags, among other things, about being bottled using only natural gravity, without any pressure. If taken as a rejection of pumping technology, developed about two-and-a-half millenia ago, this is pretty radical even by most luddist standards; if, however, this is intended merely as a criticism of artificial gravity, this is rather conservative.

I'm tempted to take Lauretana's logic one step further and just leave some empty bottles outside to be rained into, which is probably as low-tech as you can possibly go.

Web 2.0 Company Name Magnetic Poetry

2008-05-10T22:09:00.001-07:00

I just spent three weeks in the Bay Area.

This hot new startup is called
which is for .

Alternatively, you can also pick basically any word from one of the Dravidian languages.

Or you can just grow a handlebar moustache, wear bell-bottoms and hang a sign around your neck that says Style is timeless.

A Strategy for Maximization of Global Iron Production employing Universal Artificial Intelligence.

2008-04-06T21:09:00.000-07:00

It's Monday, 4 AM, and singularitarianism is asleep. The SL4 archive doesn't show a message for the last 7 days, which I don't believe, since they had an all-time high of 650 messages last month. The AGIRI mailing list archive ends with a "MindFORTH" message by A.T. Murray in February, acceleratingfuture gives a 404, and the SIAI blog has 4 (in words: four) entries so far this year. Meanwhile, Eliezer is blogging on the questions whether lookup tables have consciousness (Footnote: To me, a static, two-dimensional spatial pattern is a dynamic, one-dimensional spatiotemporal pattern (=Turing machine tape) with the temporal axis rotated into the spatial dimension. So what's the difference?) Nothing much from Peter de Blanc, Nick Hay, Shane Legg, or Michael Wilson, either. (But I like your new wordpress template, Shane.) All this doesn't exactly bolster my hopes for the Friendly AI problem being solved in the near future. Well, there was a message on SL4 last month titled Friendliness SOLVED!, but something kept me from reading it. Maybe it was the boldface, maybe the exclamation mark.

Besides, the website of the publishing company where I'm supposed to submit my manuscript has apparently gone defunct over the weekend, or so it seems after half an hour of re-submitting, and it's still dark outside, and it rains, and I had my coffee already, so I can't go back to sleep, so I say hey, why not write a bit on Friendliness.

Eliezer once formulated the challenge of bringing AIXI to maximize the number of iron atoms in the universe. (Why iron ?) AIXI is an example of a reinforcement-learning based agent architecture, meaning the agent gets a cookie whenever he behaves in way we think is fruitful. It's generally impossible to make such agents do something more difficult than coaxing the reinforcer (us) into handing out cookies by whatever means possible - imagine, for illustration, you're on a deserted island, with a Gorilla and a jar full of cookies. Current reinforcement learners are far too stupid to push us around, but this is not the case for the hypothetical infinitely-powerful AIXI. And maximizing the number of iron atoms is probably much more difficult than, say, secretely putting all humans into a VR-Matrix where things look like as if the number of iron atoms has been maximized. (Or, less elegantly, putting a gun at our head.) On the other hand, the iron-problem is at least an (arbitrarily) specified problem, whereas the more important problem of building a Friendly AI is not even clearly defined. (We don't know what we really want.) So the iron problem can serve as a little finger exercise to warm up for the real challenge.

One way to make a reinforcement learner more controllable is to internalize the reward structure via a goal function. A goal function is a function that takes a description of the world and computes how "similiar" it is to an arbitrary "goal" state, basically, just how good a certain world is. Instead of maximizing the number of cookies, the agent tries to maximize the goal function. AIXI could be modified to incorporate such a goal function.

The challenge here, however, is to explicitely define a goal function that says "Maximize the number of iron atoms". To formulate such a function, we might have to define what an iron atom is, and that definition might, in fact, turn out to be flawed, just as many earlier physical concepts have turned out to be flawed. It's like trying to get an agent to extinguish fire in terms of phlogiston. The agent, if smart enough, may decide there isn't something like phlogiston IRL and therefore he can't, and shouldn't, do anything about that blazing orphanage over there.

So you cannot straightforwardly write down a few pages of axioms describing a ca. 1870 system of atomist physics and then go on to define the number of iron atoms to be maximized. Neither can you go "all the way" and formulate an axiomatic system based on our contemporary understanding of multi-particle wavefunctions, since this a) will make it very difficut to specify what an "iron atom" is in this axiomatic, in fact, only slightly less difficult than specifying what a "Rolex" is in term of iron atoms, and b) our contemporary understanding will, in the long term, turn out to be just as flawed as earlier systems.

This doesn't mean that maximizing the number of iron atoms is impossible, or nonsensical, like computing the last digit of pi. Iron atoms, like porn, do exist, even if we can't give a rock-solid definition. Unfortunately, telling AIXI to maximize that you know, little thingies, will not work, since for to understand that command, AIXI would not only have to have a good understanding of the human mind, but also a goal function that says: "Do what humans want you to do." Now go ahead and define human and want. There's a hole in my bucket...

Nevertheless, this points us already in the right direction. We again write down our atomistic system of physics, and the goal Maximize the number of iron atoms! , but we quote that. Then we go on and define the following goal function: "maximize the goal function of the agent who would say such a thing (quote), that is, who would give this text and this goal function to an AIXI." Specifying what an agent, a goal function, and AIXI is is not all too difficult. Now, in order to maximize this goal function, AIXI will have to speculate about the goal function of agents believing in atomistic systems of physics, and saying they want to maximize "iron atoms". What makes them tick ? What kind of people are they? What experiments might they have conducted, and what reasoning processes might they have employed to arrive at their worldview? The answer could range from a downfallen civilization of robot creatures who need iron for reproduction to something as outrageous as us humans today. What's common to all these people is their somewhat poorly articulated desire to maximize the number of that little metal thingies.

Note that this is by no means the only information about the universe the AIXI has access to. Being smarter, and presumably more powerful than we are, AIXI will quickly discover the "real" laws of physics governing the universe, as well as insights about the nature and plausibility of various agent structures. This general level of world-understanding is absolutely necessary to conduct the above speculation. For example, the text quoted in the goal function could have been produced by people who want to minimize the number of iron atoms in the universe, but are so neurotic they always ask for the opposite of what they really want. That this is not impossible, but relatively implausible with respect to the more straightforward interpretation, can only be seen with some level of insight about the general way the world works.

My current best shot at making AIXI generally Friendly goes vaguely in the same direction. Instead of an atomistic system one could imagine using the totality of human cultural artefacts, (starting with the internet?) and instruct AIXI to reason about the motivations of the agents who created such things. ("First result: They crave pr0n." OK, start with something else than the internet.) One of the open questions here is whether we want AIXI to care about hypothetical creators of that artefacts (subjunctive humans) too, or just that very people who actually created that stuff. My current guess is the first.

Die Kunst Des Verhörens

2008-03-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

A friend once remarked that the French speak French, and in what a French kind of way they do that! I guess he'd say something similiar about the English, as would most Austrians. Consequently, the art of mishearing foreign words is widely practiced, and not constrained to song lyrics. (Know what Austrians mean when they speak of golden-red rivers ? Think "woof".)
So today I was asking a girl at the newsstand whether they have the Economist. She didn't know, tried to ask her coworker and, well, you can can guess the rest...I had to pretend to fall into a coughing fit and thanked them with wave.

ExaFLOPS in 2012

2008-03-09T08:29:00.000-07:00

Sandia and Oak Ridge recently received a 7.4 M$ grant to "conduct the basic research required to create a computer capable of performing a million trillion calculations per second, otherwise known as an exaflop" (link).
"In this amazing and expanding universe !" I'm tempted to add to that millions trillions, but what I'm even more tempted to do is a back-of-the-envelope calculation of a folding@home-style distributed computing project using 8th-generation gaming consoles ("PS4s").
For a nicely parallel algorithm you can currently milk around 67 GFLOPS from a PS3 under Linux using minimal contortion. If you could access the RSX GPU (which is locked under Linux) , that figure would probably increase about fourfold.
Historically, peak console CPU+GPU computing power increased roughly 60-fold in the 4.3 years between the release of the PS1 and the PS2, and a further roughly 100-fold (the exact architecture of the RSX is unknown) in the 7.7 years to the release of the PS3. That combines to an average doubling time for peak performance of a little less than a year, somewhat faster than the 18-months doubling time for real performance commonly associated with Moore's law (which, strictly speaking, is about transistor counts per die.)
There is currently some speculation about the next generation of consoles being released a few years earlier than the 6-year-cycle we've seen so far. Let's just pull a release date of mid-2011 out of thin air, and "Moore's law" points to a tenfold increase in real computing power, which looks flimsy compared to the above figures. So if we extrapolate the past trend for peak power, and assume we can use the new architecture as efficiently as the current one, we get a more handsome 40-fold increase, which translates to roughly 10 TFLOPS per console.
So you would need 100.000 consoles running simultaneously to break the exaFLOPS barrier. That figure is somewhat smaller than the total number of folding@home clients installed as of 2008, but larger than the number of PS3 clients for that project. And this figure assumes the client is running 100% of the time, which for a gaming console is unlikely to be true. (Running a 150W console 24/7 cost you about 80$ in electricity per year, depending on where you live; other factors are noise, and computing resources used for things like gaming. ) But if an organization can find a cool project and has the necessary PR skills, it should be possible to lay hands on that many clients within one or two years after hardware release. All in all this makes it look possible to do computations at more than one exaFLOPS before the end of 2012, six years earlier than the 2018 horizon for a Sandia / Oak Ridge mainframe.

OK, let's please all agree that's a hoax.

2008-02-29T11:12:00.000-08:00

According to the Telegraph, "The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War."

While the stereotype of the freakish doujinshi artist is well established, Hitler is admittedly something of an extreme case, well known for his obsession with high-fantasy, his spending weeks at a time in his basement, his unhealthy interest in his underaged niece, and his frequent use of hate-speech.

But of course for someone who remembers the Schtonk affair this triggers all hoax alarms. And looking at that drawing of Disney's Pinocchio I really do wish this is a hoax. Otherwise the mental associations to that ruthless, all-consuming machinery of mass manipulation will forever soil for me the picture that I have of that cute, innocent little guy Hitler.

Hibernation

2008-02-04T07:38:00.000-08:00

We Humans don't hibernate, (beginning statements with "we humans" rocks, try it) but maybe we have, like some other non-hibernating mammals, some rudimentary remnants of hibernation on our body-plan. I, for my part, cannot ignore the fact that every January I sleep ten hours a day, gain weight, feel stingy, and procrastinate with all my might. 2 months and not a single posting. Time to get out of the pyjama.

Picture is BTW the chapel around the corner from my mother's house in Altmuenster, Sound-of-Music-Land, taken in late December.

The Trains To Orbit Leave From Platform 5

2007-11-23T13:18:00.000-08:00

Not a road to the stars, but a railtrack to orbit. "The restaurant car is on the top of the train." How far ? Well, like riding the Transib проезда туда и обратно, twice in a row. But the view ! The view ! Sure, it's expensive to build, but that's a cherished tradition. In Austria, too. Equator ? No, no, Linz is +48° 17' 43", but that's no problem, believe me. The Van Allen belt ? I'm more afraid of railroad strikes. And once we're in GEO, you can take the connecting train to the southern hemisphere from platform 3, and go down again over Brazil. Transatlantic bridge !

(Artwork Ticket to the moon by Christoph Steinbrener & Rainer Dempf)

A Simple Heuristic Explanation of Solomonoff Induction

2007-11-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

Solomonoff induction, named after its inventor Ray Solomonoff, is a mathematical method that describes how to take some set of observations and produce an educated guess about possible processes underlying that observations. You could then use that guess, among else, to make a prediction about your next observation. The great thing is that this guess would, in a very general way, be better than any other guess anyone could make using just the same observations. Solomonoff induction is a simple and useful, yet widely misunderstood idea. Here I'm trying to give a very short, heuristic explanation of the basics. You can also try out this slightly more challenging explanation. A follow-up post to this one will deal with possible applications of Solomonoff's results.

Something simple beforehand: A string of 5 bits can take 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 =2^5 configurations. A string of n bits can take 2^n configurations. A string of n+1 bits can take 2^(n+1) configurations, that's an additional factor of two over 2^n. So if we have one extra bit of length, we can make twice as many different strings.

Imagine the following task: You are sitting in a lab in front of a computer screen. The computer is running a simple program, but you have no idea what the program looks like. The program is printing output after output on the screen. After a while, you should give an educated guess about the unknown program's next output.

To make things a little easier, the experimentator is telling you the program is at most 1 million bits in length. This is not part of Solomonoff induction originally, but accept it for the moment.

"Well", you say, "I could look through all possible programs shorter than million bits, see if they could produce the output I've seen, and throw away all programs that don't. That is, programs that output something different, or get trapped in infinite loops, or crash, or don't even compile. Because, it is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Then I'll let this "truth" run on my own computer, and use the output to predict the next output on the screen.

That's a good idea, but what if you end up with more than one program in the end ? Well, there's no reason to think the experimentator tried to make things particularly easy or complicated, and you're not a big fan of medieval philosophy either, so you decide to split the bets evenly between all the remaining programs. If you'd end up with 5 possible candidate programs, you'd say each one has 1/5 probability of being the right program.

But it may take a while to sift through all the 2^1.000.000 possible programs. So the experimentator has mercy and gives you two sheets of paper containing the printout of two programs that do in fact produce the output you've seen. One is 1.999 bits long (it's titled SHORT), the other 2.000 bits (it's titled LONG). The experimentator also tells you that the two programs embody the only two simple approaches to produce the data you've seen, any other approach would be waaayyy more complicated. SHORT will output Cat next, long will output Fish.

You're about to say "there's a 50% chance LONG is the right program, and a 50% ..." but then you hesitate. Because you just found a simple way to create more programs that are using the same approaches as LONG and SHORT: Just insert some comments into LONG and SHORT. The comment doesn't even have to be witty, nonsense will do just fine. The output will be the same, and if the program is shorter than 1.000.000 bits, it'll be OK. These will be valid programs, and although they do the same things that LONG and SHORT do, they must be counted as individuals.

You realize you can make a lot of variations of LONG and SHORT this way. With LONG, you have 1.000.000 - 2.000 = 1.998.000 bits remaining for commentary. With SHORT, you have 1.000.000 - 1.999 = 1.998.001 bits, that's one extra bit. If you can make a Gazillion comments on LONG, this one extra bit allows you to make two Gazillion comments on SHORT, twice as many.

So within all possible programs of less than 1.000.000 bits of length there are twice as many variants of SHORT as there are of LONG. Consequently, you decide to say "I'll bet 2:1 that the program inside the computer is behaving like the program SHORT, and not like the program LONG. So it's 2:1 for Cat against Fish."

OK, that's it, in principle. Be aware that the length limit of 1.000.000 bits is imposed only for didactic reasons. The 2:1 ratio would be unchanged if we increased the limit to a Trillion bits - there's still the extra bit available in SHORT, and we can make twice as many comments. So let's ditch the limit altogether. Let's just say being one bit shorter makes a program twice as likely.

Be also aware that we have shown no preference for short programs in the beginning. We had no idea whether to expect short or long programs, so for simplicity we decided to split the probability even between all programs, irrespective of length. We just put our bets on SHORT in the end because there are more variations of SHORT than there are of long.

To rephrase it: If we had sampled random programs of less than 1.000.000 bits, and at the end of the day had ended up with twice as many programs outputting Cat than programs outputting Fish, we'd probably put our bets on Cat being the next output. But what we did was we found a very short Cat program and a slightly longer Fish program. From this we were able to deduce that there must be more Cat programs out there than Fish programs, because the shorter Cat program leaves more room for crazy comments without hitting the length limit (no matter how big the length limit really is).

So you see the basic idea is really simple - not having the slightest idea beforehand what program to expect means assigning equal probability to all candidate programs. And finding a short program means deducing that there are more variations of the short program than of any longer program - a factor of two for every extra bit - so there are more variations of the short program in our set of candidate programs, so we'll put higher bets on the short program (again, a factor of two for every extra bit.)

Wheelchaired Robot Girl Totally Un-Moemoe IRL.

2007-11-19T10:39:00.000-08:00

Canadian robot enthusiast Le Trung's creation Aiko, the "world's first sexually harassed, disabled Fembot" (Engadget), once again vividly demonstrates the Grand-Canyon-like dimensions of the uncanny valley. Watch the video here. Some comments by various posters:

- "Her right hook punch looks promising." - "I, for one, welcome our wheelchair-bound, face-slapping female android overlords." - "Wow. She speaks perfect Engrish." - "OK, so I'm going to finish that underground bunker after all."

I have to admit that this makes me seriously reconsider my own robot-girlfriend project.

Hey, I'm joking.

Honestly.

And if - I'm saying if - I ever were to hypothetically build a robot girl in my basement I surely wouldn't ever sink as low as to cannibalize an Oriental Industries Candy Girl, as Le Trung apparently seems to have done. (A Nana, if you ask me; notice the slightly more protruding chin in Aiko resulting from added motorization, which is in fact difficult to do without...OK, forget what I just said.)

To make today's cup of weirdness full, I found there is also a Candy Girl available that looks bizarrely like often-spaced-out Osaka-San* from Azumanga Daioh , once again nicely illustrating MIT professor Max Tegmark's cosmological theory of radical Platonism, which states that every logically possible entity does in fact exist somewhere in the Universe, most likely in Japan.

( * = It's the 未来; I will not post a link. It's deplorable enough already that my blog is linking to Oriental Industry's main page. Look her up for yourself, if you think you're brave enough. )

....with science !

2007-11-09T06:29:00.000-08:00

Comic artist Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak fame has decided to quit his day job and work full time on his webcomic. It's nice artwork, it's high-brow, it's fun, and it's got characters you wish you could meet in real life. And DC seems to really understand the hardships of being a Singularitarian. Let's support him through purchasing stuff and through donations ! (It might even get you a place reserved in secular heaven.)

Science Has No Use For Ockham's Razor

2007-11-08T07:52:00.000-08:00

entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
"Please keep things simple."

~~(William of Ockham)~~
(Bertrand Russel)

manus non sunt ventilandae praeter necessitatem.
"Please keep the handwaving down."

(Me)

You know, I've had it with Ockham's razor.

My work in machine learning is more or less orbiting the Solomonoff - Chaitin - Kolmogorov - Hutter - Boulton - Wallace galaxy. This simply means I'm assuming that the data I'm analyzing is the output of a computational process, any computational process. I have no idea whatsoever as to the sourcecode of this process, so I'm trying to assign equal a priori probability to all programs. Now suppose I'm stumbling over two short programs which in fact do output my data. Both programs are 1000 bits long. Let's say the first one is a neural net, and the other's a support vector machine.
Now assume, after playing around with my first program, I'm finding out that only the first 50 bits are in fact important for producing the output. The rest is just random garbage. I could in fact try out all combinations of those remaining 950 bits and get 2^950 different neural nets that all output my data. Now I'm trying the same thing with program two. Here, only the first 49 bits matter, and I could create 2^951 variations of support vector machines, that's twice as many as in the case of program 1. Since I try to assign equal a priori probability to all programs, and possible support vector machines outnumber possible neural nets two-to-one, I'd bet two-to-one that my for the support vector machine and against the neural net.
Note that the "1000 bits" do not figure into the result, I could just have well have chosen 10.000 bits, or 10 Gazillion bits. Also, if the first program had been 723 bits instead of 1000, I could have just padded it with 277 extra garbage bits to make it as long as the second. The argument stays the same. We're cutting a few corners here, but the basic idea is that, when you have to assign probabilities to various models, you calculate the number of bits absolutely necessary to produce your models, and penalize all models but the shortest by a relative factor of 0.5 for every bit of extra length. Let me repeat it, this is just a consequence of assuming the true process that's creating your data (the "world") is a program, any program, and before having seen the data, you have no idea whatsoever which program. Simple, isn't it ?

Welcome to the world of of Solomonoff induction.

The attentive reader might have noticed the complete absence of any reference to Ockham in the above explanation. What Ockham himself really intended to say is not entirely clear, nor is it actually too clear what people today mean when they invoke his name. To repeat it once again, the reason we penalize long models, or theories, in Solomonoff induction, is because we don't know a priori which program created our observation. It's not like we have anything against long models, or that we said hey, remember Ockham! Sure, what we've ended up with seems to go along somewhat with Ockham's razor, but we notice this after we got our results. So if anything, you could try to say Solomonoff induction explains why Ockham's razor works, and not the other way round. But don't, for it doesn't.
To illustrate this think of the two hypotheses "Afro-Americans get comparatively few PhDs because of [a complicated interplay of socioeconomic factors]" and "Afro-Americans get comparatively few PhDs because of they don't have the intelligence gene X." Shooting from their hip, people would say the second hypothesis is simpler. Is it ?
How the hell should I know !! Imagine just for a moment trying to translate those two verbal statements into computer programs which produce the data in question. The data in question being human academic achievement. PhD theses. Social interactions. Application interviews. Then imagine what has to be included in the program's source code: Human genetics, human brain structure, social dynamics, macroeconomic systems...We're talking at least gigabits of data here. Trying to estimate the length of such huge programs down to a few bits is like doing a bit of lattice quantum chromodynamics in your head in order to estimate the proton mass. Humans simply can't do this. If you can, give me call. I have a job for you.
So the connection between the rigorous theory that is Solomonoff Induction, and the intuitive insight that is Ockham's razor is tentative at best. OK, nonexistent. The same goes for machine learning theories like minimum message length (MML), minimum description length (MDL), or the Akaike information criterion (AIC), which can all be shown to be approximations of Solomonoff induction.
Then why do so many people, even those working in the very field, handwavingly invoke Ockham as the forefather of their discipline ?

Ockham’s Razor has long been known as a philosophical paradigm, and in recent times, has become an. invaluable tool of the machine learning community. (link)

Algorithmic probability [comment: the theory behind Solomonoff induction] rests upon two philosophical principles...[]...The second philosophical foundation is the principle of Occam's razor. (link).

Or this, that, and many more examples ?

Let me make it clear that I really respect the authors quoted above as scientist, (the author of the second quote contributed fundamentally to the field of algorithmic probability theory himself !). But really, I cannot imagine any other reasons for summoning Ockham in this context than the desire to look humanistic, or philosophical, the desire to make students nodd in "comprehension", or, I'm sorry, a bit of muddled thinking.

OK, so let's make it clear once more:

Ockham's razor is an intuitive philosophical insight.
Ockham's razor is NOT the underlying principle of Solomonoff induction. It may have been an inspiration to Solomoff, but so may have been, say, talking to Marvin Minsky. Note also the complete absence of the name "Ockham" (or Occam) in this talk.
MML, MDL, AIC, MAP, and even least-squares approaches to theory formation can all be derived from Solomonoff induction. Logically, Ockham's razor is NOT the underlying principle of any of these theories.
Solomonoff induction is NOT a "formalization" of Ockham's razor. Solomonoff induction does NOT proof Ockham's razor is useful.
Ockham's razor is NOT an empirical observation. It's a maxime, a rule of thumb, a heuristic. It's usefulness can in fact be debated, since it's a rubberband rule, i.e. you can stretch it in to various sizes and shapes. Your intuitionist notion of simplicity may not be the same as mine. In the end, we're back to gut feeling.
Ockham's razor is intended for use by human beings. You cannot really translate it into a rigorous mathematical statement. In particular Solomonoff induction is not a "version" of Ockham's razor.
MDL, MML, MAP, AIC are valid mathematical approaches at scientific data analysis. A scientist should not defend the use of these methods by invoking Ockham's razor. And if a scientist invokes Ockham's razor in a non-mathematical situation, be aware he's essentially talking about his gut feeling.

オーストリアの紅葉

2007-11-06T04:20:00.000-08:00

この写真ザンクト・フローリアン(St. Florian)修道院のブナの木が表示されます。ところで作曲家アントン・ブルックナーはこの場所の近くに生まれた。日本人の読者のごあいさつを！

The Absence Of Monologue

2007-10-26T12:32:00.000-07:00

How do I tell them that because of the unfreezing process I have no inner monologue? I hope I didn't just say that out loud...
Austin Powers

I still don't know why humans have an internal monologue. This means I'm seriously wondering about it's evolutionary motivation, and could not imagine why I would include it in an AI design.

But of course, I'm somewhat biased from personal experience, here.

The truth is, until the age of 12 or 13 years, I myself simply had no inner monologue at all. Unlike the International Man of Mystery however, I was not talking out loud. I was simply thinking completely non-verbally all the time. This seemed to have had no negative net effect on my cognitive abilities at all; I was a bit smarter than most kids my age. (Well, maybe a bit smarter than most smart kids, too...) Social cognition or speech production, two likely first casualties, weren't impaired either. Personally, I was not even aware of this anomaly in the first place, since I did not know how noisy other minds were. When I was exposed to inner monologue in film or literature, I interpreted it as a style device, like the "sweat drop" in manga. In the same spirit, I interpreted a sentence like " The pig thought: "I should be going home" " as the pig thinking that it should go home, but not literally subverbalizing "I should be going home".

Curiously, I absolutely cannot remember how or when I started to develop an inner monologue. Neither can I remember being aware of any change for months or maybe even years. But I have biographical memories from when I was about 13 years where I was reflecting on the apparent change.

Bottom line: "thought = language" = BS.

W2V2 Part 4: My Other Car Is A Tractor

2007-10-05T11:42:00.000-07:00

An you thought your SUV makes you look rugged...

The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

Inhaling The Fresh, Clear, And Wonderfully Radioactive Mountain Air.

2007-10-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Last week I went on a holiday in the beautiful mountains of Salzburg. I went to Bad Gastein, a spa resort spectacularly located directly beside a waterfall, which had it's heydays in the 1900s. Bad Gastein offers great hiking in summer, skiing in winter, several spas, a casino, clean air, and many belle epoque grand hotels. But the reason people have been going there since the middle ages is the therapeutic effect of it's thermal water. No one else than Marie Curie was it who discovered the water contains a high amount of 222Radon. Scientific studies have concluded the products of Radon decay (Radon itself has a very short biological half-life of ~30 minutes) stimulate anti-inflammatory cytokine release, corticosteroid release, endorphine release, and trigger various cellular repair mechanisms. If bathing in radioactive spring water for health reasons sounds too much like a Captain Future setting for you, how about this: going a mile down underground in a little train, through an airlock, to a place where the temperature is 40°C, the humidity at 80%, and lying down there, naked, in the dark, for an hour, to get the Radon directly from the source ? This is the famed Gasteiner Heilstollen, and of course I could not keep myself from going down the shaft at least once during my stay. You can't just purchase a ticket at the local train station, though - before you're allowed to go inside the mountain one has to undergo a medical examination and an informational session. We're talking radioactivity here, after all. The dose from a single one-hour session, however, is still pretty moderate (0.2 mSv), about what you'd get in a month from environmental sources anyhow, so you'll still need a flashlight when the night's too dark.

The ride itself is an elemental experience. Wearing a bathing robe, bedsheets over your arm, you start out at something like a subway station, where you board a claustrophobic, yellow, slightly retro-futuristic train. The train picks up speed, and after a few minutes you reach the undressing station, where the air is already hot and humid. From now one, no talking please ! You continue your ride past an impressive airlock (to keep the Radon inside), and to your designated stop. As this is your first ride, you have to get off at the last stop, Station I, where temperature and humidity are lowest. You find yourself in a system of tunnels carved from rock. The rock is exposed, no concrete or painting here, as it is the rock itself that is the source of the Radon. The rock feels eerily warm, quite exactly body temperature. The lights are very, very low. You walk a few dozen meters into one tunnel, put your sheets over one of the beds, and lie down. Thereafter, silence. Some people fall asleep, but you keep admiring the structures inside the rock. You let your hand wander over the warm, rough surface. You don't feel claustrophobic at all, though there's a million tons weighing down on this tunnel. On the contrary, you feel peaceful and protected.
Time goes by surprisingly quickly. A doctor (in Speedos) comes by to check whether you're feeling fine. For emergencies, there's a climate chamber at the train station, where it is bright, and cool, and the ceiling is high. But you tell the doctor you're feeling perfectly fine. After an hour has gone by (presumably; no watches here, please !), you hear the distant rumble of the train. Still, you keep lying down. You have been strictly instructed not to get up until you're called upon. If one stands up too long in here, waiting, one might collapse, the doctor has told you. Then it's time to leave. You're the last one to leave. As you exit, you look back, squint, but you can't see the end of the tunnel in this darkness.
Back on the surface, you're brought to a room overlooking the valley. You lie down in the bed, under thick linnen. The window's tilted, to get in the fresh air, and it's a cool september afternoon. You rest for half an hour or so, then finally get up. Still a bit weak on your knees, you dress yourself, (no showering, please), and go down to the lobby, where someone is going to pick you up for a ride back to the hotel.

And next time I'm going to tell you how I was bitten by a genetically modified lab mouse a few years ago.

Stumbling Across The Fibonacci Numbers

2007-09-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

The sequence of numbers starting with 0, 1 , each number after those being the sum of the preceding two, known as the Fibonacci numbers, can often be found in nature. For example, yesterday I was taking a stroll in the woods of Salzburg, thinking of nothing in particular and suddenly - bang ! - there they were: 0,1,1,3,5,8, and so on, all the way up to 10946 ! A truly satisfying experience for an appreciator of mathematical regularity in nature.

(Artwork by Mario Merz.)

Singularity Satire From 1971

2007-09-11T13:13:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, one of Lem's best stories was never translated to English. Experimenta Felicitologica, set in a quasi-Swiftean pseudo-medievial steampunk-meets-discworld universe, is a story about genius robot inventor (inventing robots as well as being one) Trurl, who tries to once and for all make the world a happy place. So In fact we have here one of the few existing stories about the problem of Friendly AI, admittedly dealing mainly with Friendliness content, but also a bit with Friendliness structure here and there. In passing, the "inevitable" explosion of intelligence is also being mocked. Lem apparently felt comfortable enough with the concept of the Singularity already in 1971 to make it the subject of satire. Lem apparently came up with the concept independent of Good or Campbell, but then, Lem came up with many, many ideas in the sixties...

The following is a short excerpt from the German edition of the Kyberiade translated by myself. At this point Trurl has, over the last 30 pages or so, been struggling haplessly with his goal of universal beatification, and suddenly realizes he may in fact be too dumb for the task. Consequently, he decides to build an AI smarter than himself in order to solve the problem of universal happiness for him.

No sooner said than done. After twelve days of work a huge machine stood in the midst of the shop, an energetically humming, exceptionally orthogonal beauty, consecrated to a sole task: to attack the problem of problems and to victoriously end this fight. He switched it on, but not even waited for the crystal diodes and triodes to warm up, and instead took a well-earned promenade. On his return the machine was radiating with zealousness, fully engrossed in its work, which couldn't possibly be more complicated: for the machine was busy with building, from whatever was at hand, a second, considerably larger machine. This machine, in turn, spent the night and the following day tearing down the walls and the roof in order to make room for the next machine giant. Trurl pitched his tent in the garden and patiently waited for the heavy labor to end, which however, was not yet foreseeable to happen anytime soon. Across the meadow, up to the woods, cracking trees like matches, a towering scaffold had spread; the original computerium was being pushed closer and closer to the riverbank, until it eventually went under with a bubbling sound. When Trurl finally wanted to get a general idea of the whole complex created so far, a hasty round tour took him a solid half an hour. Instantly he inspected more closely the way the machines were connected among themselves - and froze. This was a case he, until then, had known just from theory; because, as the hypothesis of the great Cerebron Pansophos Omniavidaudit, the legendary grand old man of Elementary and Higher Cybernetics clearly states, a computer which is given a task exceeding the limits of it's own capabilities, will - as long as it just crosses a certain threshold, the so-called Barrier of Wisdom -, instead of struggling with the challenge, build a second computer, which, knowing how the wind blows, will again pass on the work to a third, ad hoc constructed, computer, and so this chain of delegations continues ad infinitum. Indeed the steel beams of the forty-ninth generation of computers already towered on the horizon, and the noise of this enormous intellectual undertaking of passing on the problem could have easily drowned the roaring of a waterfall. Because it is this that is the essence of intelligence: making someone else do the work assigned to you. Blind obedience to programs and electronic regulations is therefore just a thing for dunces and sneaks. Having grasped so clearly the nature of the phenomenon, Trurl sat down on a stump, which, like so many, was a relict of the expansive computer revolution, and sighed deeply.

Following these events, Trurl will try to upload a copy of himself to a powerful computer, to control the runaway intelligence explosion. But like Paul Durham in Egan's Permutation City, he will find his uploaded copy to be somewhat uncooperative.

This is BTW not the first time I happen to stumble upon a striking parallel between Egan and Lem (whom PK Dick believed to be a consortium of Soviet writers.) For example, the concept of different intelligences collapsing the laws of physics into different, possibly conflicting states, which is the main plot device of the second part of Permutation City, can be found in the last chapter of the Lem's Perfect Vacuum.

Nuttiest Research Paper In A While

2007-08-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

This is exactly the sort of research the Academy of Lagado would publish today:

New Approach to Financial Time Series Forecasting - Quantum Minimization Regularizing BWGC and NGARCH Composite Model

I partcularily appreciate the matter-of-factness they present the results from their (claimed) application of Hoyer's Quantum Algorithm in table 1.

W2V2 Part 3: Hello Kitty Car

2007-08-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

Old enough to drive.

Young enough to crave Hello Kitty merchandise.

Choose one. Can't have both.

The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

Immune Epitope Database Of Unspeakable Horrors

2007-08-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

The problem with reading Lovecraft is that, after a while, peptide sequences start looking decidedly demonic. Look, as an illustration, on the following sequence from Herpes virus:

YIWPRNDYDGFLENAHEHHG

Definitely Lovecraftian.

" As he translated the inscription at the bottom of the monstrous winged tentacled statue, I felt the blood draining from my face. " The Elder Evil ! " I whispered, " the amorph god of the deep, mentioned in folk lore of certain degenerate Papuan tribes - YIWPRNDYDGFLENAHEHHG ! "

Try for yourself:

http://immuneepitope.org/

"Why have engineers ignored results and knowledge of psychoanalysis ? " Well, there's a hell of a good reason.

2007-07-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

To whom it may concern.

The upcoming "1st international Engineering and Neuro-Psychoanalysis forum" in Vienna, Austria was prominently featured by Austria's state- sponsored news agency today.

It is my opinion that the presentation of psycho- analysis as a discipline relevant to, and respected by, the AI community, is damaging to the scientific integrity of AI in general and AGI in particular.

Unfortunately, this event makes for a good news story, and will undoubtedly receive an amount of coverage widely disproportionate to its scientific relevance or novelty.
The resulting disinformation among politicians, grant agencies and the general public will, in my opinion, work to the disadvantage of AI researchers who seriously attempt to integrate (neuro-)psychological findings into their projects.

Participants of this conference have already implied that they will apply for Austrian state and industry grants. To me, as a "local", it seems very well plausible that a substantial fraction of these applications will be successful, meaning those ideas would be around for years to come, well funded, and well established within the (local) academia.

As far as I can see, neither the decades-long history of the field of affective computing (A. Ortony, C. Elliott, R. Picard..), nor the field of AGI itself have been explicitly acknowledged in interviews or on the conference's web page. Participants might still do so in their presentations and publications. If this silence is, however, kept, (be it the result of ignorance or deliberation) life (at least in Austria) will undoubtedly become somewhat more difficult for those scientists who wish to present their grant proposals with respect to the above mentioned fields.

If you think this is worrisome, and requires action, I'd suggest :

- informing concerned researchers and activists

- possibly delivering a statement to the Austrian ministry of science, the largest grant agencies in Austria, and the news, possibly signed by a number of AI researchers working in relevant fields, making clear that even though there's far from a consensus on how the mind works, there's definitely a consensus out there that the mind isn't working according to psychoanalytic theory.

Modeling of the affective-cognitive interplay is a vigorous and sound research discipline, especially when based on neurobiological insights. It is my impression that reaching out to a subdiscipline of psychology generally regarded as pseudoscience (to use a more printable word) is a challenge to the scientific integrity and respectability of this research paradigm.

sincerely

Manuel Moertelmaier

W2V2 Part 2: Rudimentary Plug-In Hybrid

2007-04-07T12:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, we Austrians know about jumper cables. But why not do something nice to the environment once in a while and recharge a dead battery from the grid ?

The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

The World's Most Beautiful Supercomputer

2007-04-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

The Mare Nostrum supercomputer at the Centro Nacional de Super- computacion, Barcelona, is currently the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, featuring 2560 JS21 blade computing nodes, each with 2 dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP pro- cessors running at 2.3 GHz for 10240 CPUs in total. Residing in a former chapel named Torre Girona, it's undoubtedly an impressive sight. In fact, it would make an excellent real-world incarnation of transhuman AI Golem XIV from Polish SF writer S. Lem's 1973 book Imaginary Magnitude. ImMag, definitely one of the most underrated works by Lem (himself easily qualifying the most underrated among SF writers), casually introduces motives like superintelligent AI, recursive self-enhancement, auto- evolution, synthetic biology, the impossibility of controlling AI with injunctions, and Dawkins' selfish genes - three years before Dawkins himself did so. Oh, and BTW, the book consists mainly of a collection of forewords - but isn't all science fiction a foreword of sorts?
ImMag was the book that introduced me to transhumanism in 1996, and when I later worked through the more popular works on transhumanism, I often found myself thinking "well, isn't this all incredibly old hat ? Haven't SF authors been elaborating on such themes since the Sixties ?" No, by and large, they haven't. Just a guy in Poland, working in isolation, wrote stories on self-replicating nanomachines. the Singularity, and pompous supercomputers.

W2V2 Part 1: Furry Bike

2007-03-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Ainu among bikes ? A tribute to Meret Oppenheim ? Or maybe just a way of proudly stating "I really, really love things *furry*." OK, let's better not pursue that last line of thought any further.

The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

Seven Deadly Haibane

2007-01-08T04:29:00.000-08:00

This is basically correct.
The correct pairing, however, is in fact:

Nemu <-> sloth
Reki <-> pride
Hikari <-> gluttony
Kana <-> greed
Kuu <-> envy
Midori <-> wrath
Hyouko <-> lust

In a TV interview, ABe implied the existence of several Easter
Eggs in HR.What I can come up quickly with is this. Maybe
the world needs www.HaibaneRenmeiOverinterpretation.org ?

Recursive Hickory Smoke

2006-08-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

So, the sad truth is that natural hickory smoke flavor is nothing else than maltodextrin. Maybe someone should sue that company for putting their customer's mind into an infinite loop. Well, there's always the option of a reset. (If you live in Greece, that is.)

Journal Impact Factor And Length Of Title

2006-07-28T13:17:00.000-07:00

All scientists dream of publishing in a journal that has a short title. The temptation of monosyllabicism is simply irresistible. Of course, fewer characters in a journal name also make it easier to write it down, and therefore articles in those journals get more references. Am I serious ? No. But this plot, created from a list of impact factors, shows that Acta Obsc., at nine characters, might not be such a bad choice for you after all.

A Very Small Sea Of LCL

2006-05-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

I had never before realized how much cell culture medium looks like LCL. A subtle reference by Anno ? Or am I overinterpreting here ? Maybe it's because I spent too much time recently helping out here. Anyway, where did I put my orange glasses ?