MetaFilter posts tagged with computation

We're Going To Have To Find Out How To Deal With Lots Of Idle Hands

The Whelk — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:53:03 -0800

The Forces Of The Next 30 Years - SF author and Mefi's Own Charles Stross talks to students at Olin College about sci-fi, fiction, speculation, the limits of computation, thermodynamics, Moore's Law, the history of travel, employment, automation, free trade, demographics, the developing world, privacy, and climate change in trying to answer the question What Does The World Of 2043 Look Like? (Youtube 56:43)

Computerized Math, Formal Proofs and Alternative Logic

kliuless — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:33:01 -0800

Using computer systems for doing mathematical proofs - "With the proliferation of computer-assisted proofs that are all but impossible to check by hand, Hales thinks computers must become the judge."

Three years ago, Vladimir Voevodsky, one of the organizers of a new program on the foundations of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., discovered that a formal logic system that was developed by computer scientists, called "type theory" could be used to re-create the entire mathematical universe from scratch. Type theory is consistent with the mathematical axioms, but couched in the language of computers. Voevodsky believes this alternative way to formalize mathematics, which he has renamed the univalent foundations of mathematics, will streamline the process of formal theorem proving. Voevodsky and his team are adapting a program named Coq, which was designed to formally verify computer algorithms, for use in abstract mathematics.

also btw, speaking of mathematical revolutions, from a historical perspective, check out The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution - "Before the 13th century Europeans used Roman numerals to do arithmetic. Leonardo of Pisa, better known today as Fibonacci, is largely responsible for the adoption of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in Europe, which revolutionized not only mathematics but commerce and trade as well. How did the system spread from the Arab world to Europe, and what would our lives be without it?"

Loading Noise...

lemuring — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 02:40:45 -0800

Textures Processing... Loading Perlin Noise... Loading Worley Noise... Loading Terrain... Adding Pretty Lights... Enjoy the Refreshing Taste.

SPAUN of the living

kliuless — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 06:09:00 -0800

The simulated brain - "First computer model to produce complex behaviour performs almost as well as humans at simple number tasks." [1,2,3,4,5,etc.]

direct realism

kliuless — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:12:10 -0800

The Nature of Computation - Intellects Vast and Warm and Sympathetic: "I hand you a network or graph, and ask whether there is a path through the network that crosses each edge exactly once, returning to its starting point. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Eulerian' cycle.) Then I hand you another network, and ask whether there is a path which visits each node exactly once. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Hamiltonian' cycle.) How hard is it to answer me?" (via)

This is, simply put, the best-written book on the theory of computation I have ever read; one of the best-written mathematical books I have ever read, period... from beginning to end, and all the 900+ pages in between, this was lucid, insightful, just rigorous enough, alive to how technical problems relate to larger issues, and above all, passionate and human.

also btw...

On the origin of probability in quantum mechanics - "Because the wave function evolves entirely deterministically in many worlds, all probabilities are necessarily subjective and the interpretation does not require true randomness, thereby preserving Einstein's requirement that outcomes have causes."
The Mathematical Origin of Irreversibility - "The key to this rather profound connection resides in a universal property of Markov processes discovered recently in the context of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and known as the 'fluctuation theorem'. Typically stated in terms of 'dissipated work' or 'entropy production', this result can be seen as an extension of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to small systems, where thermal fluctuations cannot be neglected. But it is actually much more than this: it is the mathematical underpinning of irreversibility itself, be it thermodynamical, evolutionary, or else. To make this point clear, let me start by giving a general formulation of the fluctuation theorem that makes no reference to physics concepts such as 'heat' or 'work' "
A nice easy explanation of the abc conjecture [also btw 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]
An argument for the reality of mathematical entities [1,2,3]
From Particles to People: The Laws of Nature and the Meaning of Life [1,2,3,4,5]

Could the Universe Reveal Itself as a Computer Simulation? (previously)

What's gonna happen outside the window next?

cthuljew — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:51:19 -0800

Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

use value vs. exchange value

kliuless — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 00:12:16 -0800

What Is Value? What Is Money? (via via)

What is value about? and how do we measure value? Traditionally, the way of measuring value has been not been through measures of value, but actually through measures of appropriation: measures of the amount of money that you can appropriate through that business, not the value that it generates in society. We're starting to see this difference.

Reinventing Society In The Wake Of Big Data

With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire -- it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big Data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society.

more on 'data science' -No, Really, Some of My Best Friends Are Data Scientists -Data Science: The Problem Isn't Statisticians, It's Too Many Poseurs more on 'big data' -Moving from Big Data to Smart Data -Top 10 categories for Big Data sources and mining technologies -Hadoop 2.0 -Grid computing -NSA Overview of Cloud Computing When Central Is Essential - "economist Glen Weyl* views changes in technology as leveling the playing field between central governments and free markets"

In his famous 1945 article, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," F. A. Hayek argued that despite their inequity and inefficiency, free markets were necessary in order to allow the incorporation of information held by dispersed individuals into social decisions. No central planner could hope to collect and process all the information necessary for social decisions; only markets allowed and provided the incentives for disaggregated information processing. Yet, increasingly, information technology is leading individuals to delegate their most "private" decisions to automated processing systems... While these information systems are [currently] mostly nongovernmental, they are sufficiently centralized that it is increasingly hard to see how dispersed information poses the challenge it once did to centralized planning.

The Optimist's Case For Information Technology

Schools have poured a ton of money into ICT and tech-focused startups are circling the education sector aiming to disrupt it. Something's going to change here. IBM built a supercomputer that can win at Jeopardy which is cool but useless and now they're trying to turn it into a medical diagnostic engine. Computer-driven cars are already a real thing. Right now, price is a big barrier to adoption but if there's anything we know about ICT hardware it's that the price will fall... I don't know that doing a medical consult with your home computer and then having your prescription automatically disatched by autonomous vehicle equals a change comparable to indoor plumbing, but it's a big deal.

Two Types of Knowledge: Human Capital and Information - "Human capital is knowledge that is hard to transfer. Information is knowledge that is easy to transfer." Desire Modification: the ultimate technology - "With humanity divided into clades by motivation and personality type, evolution would be very important." [1,2] --- *The Situation Bears Watching - "Hermann Weyl, the mathematician who was Einstein's friend, was a great uncle."

when woz cries

kliuless — Tue, 29 May 2012 10:10:46 -0800

Apple's Crystal Prison and the Future of Open Platforms (via) Steve Wozniack made a public call for Apple to open its platforms for those who wish to tinker, tweak and innovate with their internals. cf. Smartphones Reignite the OS Wars previously...

Morpion Solitaire

Wolfdog — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 11:19:17 -0800

Morpion Solitaire is a very simple pencil-and-paper, line-drawing game for which the best possible score is not known! New records are still being set.

"Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys."

jeffburdges — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:47:41 -0800

Cory Doctorow's 28C3 talk The Coming War on General Purpose Computation (abstract, transcript) warns that "the coming century will be dominated by war against the general purpose computer, and the stakes are the freedom, fortune and privacy of the entire human race." Doctorow treats legislators relatively sympathetically asserting that "information technology confounds [their] heuristics" about whether regulation has unconscionable side effects, comparing regulating computation or networking with regulating the nature of wheels. A few choice quotes : [18m08] "an appliance is not a stripped-down computer, it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box" [19m30] "attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments." .. "In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!" [20m05] "copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone" [22m50] "The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create." [24m55] "there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys." [25m29] "Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really really important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch." [26m28] "as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship" I hear Doctorow's book Little Brother contains the unabridged version. Ironically, Belarus criminalized using foreign websites and Spain passed SOPA-like legislation a couple days after his talk. In the same vein, The Un-Internet by Dave Weiner at Scripting News discusses about tech companies trying to take control away from users, taking Apple to task for leading a new "push to control users" through their App Store. "Once [Apple] took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too." Doctorow similarly criticizes the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) which restricts newer PCs to only running signed operating systems, noting that "repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations." ¹ And Thom Holwerda concludes that Richard Stallman Was Right All Along. ¹ LinuxBIOS/Coreboot coauthor Ronald Minnich says "[the UEFI authors] make no secret of the fact that a 'core value' of EFI is the preservation of intellectual property related to chipset programming and internal architecture." (see also lwn.net and linuxfoundation.org)

Open Compute Project

Blazecock Pileon — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 17:38:46 -0800

Facebook's Open Compute Project aims to share with the public the social network's efficiency design improvements to its compute nodes. [ via ]

Pretty good for a bunch of plastic blocks

empath — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:39:37 -0800

Lego Antikythera Mechanism More on how it works. (part 2)

Escher Circuits - Software for your Wetware

scalefree — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:57:12 -0800

Escher Circuits. What if you could compute the output of complex algorithms just by viewing an image?

Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to see. Our cognitive powers are, in stark contrast, “slow and painful,” and we have great trouble with embarrassingly simple logic tasks. Might it be possible to harness our visual computational powers for other tasks, perhaps for tasks cognition finds difficult? I have recently begun such a research program with the goal of devising ways of converting digital logic circuits into visual stimuli – “visual circuits” – which, when presented to the eye, “tricks” the visual system into carrying out the digital logic computation and generating a perception that amounts to the “output” of the computation. That is, the technique amounts to turning our visual system into a programmable computer.

transcendental numbers rumble in the technium

kliuless — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:00:48 -0800

Extropy
How did life arise? What is information? In his recent dispatches from The Technium, Kevin Kelly would say extropy (cf. negentropy & Prigogine). [previously 1|2]

Computable data* (conceivably knowable) about people

kliuless — Fri, 01 May 2009 06:42:19 -0800

Stephen Wolfram discusses Wolfram|Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine - at the same time Google Adds Search to Public Data, viz: "Nobody really paid attention to the two hour snorecast" -- like a cross between designing for big data and a glossary of game theory terms -- on Wolfram|Alpha (previously), yet the veil is being lifted nonetheless: "[on] a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before," cf. hunch & cyc (and in other startup news...) [via] *boiling it down to that which can be computed (about the world)

"You named your collaboration QAP? Really?"

fatllama — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:29:37 -0800

The DiVincenzo Code [youtube trailer, geekery]. Faced with a strict demand from a funding agency to allocate research funds towards the dissemination of research ideas to the public, an experimental physics group at the University of Oxford produced a feature-length (55 min) action thriller about murder, ancient prophecy, tea breaks, and quantum computation. [Trailer linked above. Parts 1 2 3 4 5 6] Named after the most basic requirements for a functional quantum computer, the DiVincenzo criteria [pdf], the student-directed effort is a superposition of The Da Vinci Code, The Matrix, and a live-action PhD Comics. Perhaps best viewed with either popcorn or your lab-mate's stash ofThorlabs Lab Snacks.

Teleportation Breakthrough

empath — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 06:30:27 -0800

Teleportation Breakthrough. Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second. But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter. A more technical explanation.

Turing: The Final Years

Blazecock Pileon — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 00:00:30 -0800

Among his collected works, in the few, short years before mathematician Alan Turing was driven to suicide, he published "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis", theorizing how a standing wave-like distribution of "cannibal" and "missionary" chemicals might explain how plants and animals develop their shape and pigmentation. Blogger Jonathan Swinton focuses on this more obscure aspect of Turing's research, and reviews some of his posthumous and unpublished efforts — including one of the earliest known examples of digital computation applied to the field of biology.

Someone to watch over me

adamgreenfield — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 06:23:33 -0800

Once the stuff of academic and corporate experimentation, ubiquitous computation (or "ubicomp") is gearing up for its commercial debut in the very near future. Along the lines of ostensibly "nanotechnological" pants, the reality of ubicomp as made manifest in consumer products may fall somewhat short of the prognostications: buying a personal communicator designed to work seamlessly within a ubicomp context is not the same thing as living in and with a truly pervasive network.

But already there are signs that the ubiquitous visions beloved by the corporate players and enshrined in their hype are coming into being. So which do you think it'll be? Guardian angel or inescapable, panoptical prison? Neither? Maybe both? I have a sinking feeling we're going to find out, one way or another.

The World Is Numbers

stavrosthewonderchicken — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 03:06:01 -0800

Explorations of computation: the world is numbers, and the divine a mathematician. Maybe. [Flash, Javascript]

The Secret life of Plants

kliuless — Wed, 21 Jan 2004 20:15:16 -0800

Emergent computation: Plants seem to do it! Does that mean we do three? [more here :]

The End of equations?

none — Sun, 27 Jan 2002 05:31:54 -0800

The End of equations? Paul Dirac and Albert Einstein thought equations were things of beauty, Stephen Wolfram, by contrast thinks they are antiquated.