Carving Up Reality.

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*.

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

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

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

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

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

(Found on Pink Tentacle.)

The Leibniz Drive

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

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.

• 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 ?

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.

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 ?

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

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

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.

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

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

"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.

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

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

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.)