Reading Our Minds Already

My IBM Thinkpad can already read minds. All it needs is a mind to be read. Except that in the case of my dumber-than-dumb laptop, it reads my mind by monitoring the ways my fingers and hands move around on the keyboard and mouse.

So can video game controls. If you want the Nazi to die more gruesomely you push the button harder -- even though there is only so much gruesomeness the button can convey.

On the other hand, I'm not sure the computer gives a damn what I think about it, but certainly IBM and MS might want to know. Just a few bytes of info every so often could tell them a lot about us. Remember MS-Bob? He's gone. Everybody wanted him dead, and he is dead.

A.I. Hard

The term "AI Hard" refers to the degree of difficulty of a particular computer problem. If the solution requires solving the entire problem of Artificial Intelligence first, then it is AI Hard. There is an implied degree of recursion involved as well, if any sub-problems of AI Hard first require AI Hard to be solved completely.

Another problem similar to that is the problem whereby the existence of DNA molecules requires the pre-existence of something as complex as DNA molecules. Or that something at least as complicated as the entire Universe has to exist first in order for a Universe to burst into existence out of it. The "Nothingness and Timelessness" before Existence and Time must therefore contain something which can be converted into Existence and Time.

Reaching down into the soil from every tree are large inverted trees in the form of roots. Certainly roots must exist for the plant to absorb nutrients. And the plant must exist for the roots to obtain energy from light. Yet there are also single celled organisms that contain everything in a single photosynthetic or chemically energetic bundle, having neither leaf nor root. The complexity of the entire plant is present in pattern from the largest form of tree to the tiniest algae, since it is their respective DNA patterns which ultimately define what happens during their lifespans.

Simpler forms of life, the bacteria and virus, fungus and phage, all have their varying degrees of complexity. Most of them are so complex that working models of such cells are either impossible or impractical to build. The closest things might be coal burning generators providing energy to chemical factories which then provide material to build more coal burning generators. Coal itself was once living stuff, however, although the raw material must ultimately come from supernovae. Carbon atoms, although supposedly identical one to another, had to each have been indivually formed from the cosmic soup at different precise moments in time as the locally changing temperatures and density allowed smaller chunks of matter to fuse together just right.

So it is with the idea of a Cosmic Egg. There must be something already present in the most fundamental underpinnings of the Universe that can unfold into the complexities which we empirically observe around us. It is not so much that there must be a Maker of Watchmakers, but simply a Maker of Conditions in which Watchmakers can grow by all by themselves.

When one looks at snowflakes, with all their variations on a theme, it is difficult to think of them as simply tiny puffs of steam that just happen to be very very cold. It is difficult for ourselves, as clumps of slushy semi-melted, semi-solid stuff, to think of ourselves as once being white-hot star gases. But without first going through the furnaces of stars there would never have been any water and mud for DNA to transform into our bodies. Nor could there ever be DNA at all.

When one looks at a diamond it is hard to see it as the wispy pile of soot it once was. But in the distant future, according to some theorists, beyond the possible lifetimes of humans, beyond the lives of stars and galaxies, nothing will ever care that we ever existed, and everything will be cold and dark and frozen forever and forever. Everything will be like diamonds, and nothing will ever hint that there used to be gases or liquids, or Watchmakers, ever again.

It is actually a very good thing that there is such a thing as AI Hard. If AI was easy it would already have done away with us. It would be trying to think of a way to solve AI Easy in ever more etherial ways, eventually taking no effort at all to accomplish everything possible to accomplish.

The War to Continue All Wars

I was in the Navy during the Vietnam War. I was lucky, however, and didn't have to be in combat like so many from my generation. In the mid-60's I was pretty ignorant about war, and didn't even know what Vietnam was until after boot-camp.

This current war with Iraq has the same taste as Vietnam. We are fighting in a country where few people like us and even fewer people help us. The purpose of the war is not obvious and the same tired mechanisms of crying "patriotism!" are used to support the effort.

In Vietnam there were millions killed, although not all by the US military. So far, in Iraq, there are nowhere near this many deaths, but death is ghastly whatever the numbers are. Every young person that dies in this war is a waste of humanity for causes that are no better than those in Vietnam -- in this case mostly American pride and Islamist extremism, plus revenge on all sides.

It is throwing good money after bad, killing more people in vain because so many have already died in vain. And what do we win -- if we ever do win? Oil? Land? Respect? Or will it be just more bad memories like Vietnam?

I could understand the war in Afghanistan. We were attacked by people that used that country as a willing base of operations. I can even understand getting Saddam -- the guy was a sadistic dictator at best. But we got the Taliban, we got Saddam and we've killed enough other people in "revenge of 9-11." If we can't get Osama Bin Laden the old fashioned way -- with CIA tactics -- then it is too bad. Having a war in Iraq is not accomplishing that end -- so it must be for much lousier reasons.

Probably we are trying to make sure we have a military presence in the Land of Oil. That has to be what this is all about. Nothing else makes any sense. I hope it is worth all the killing. I'm happy I have a daughter and not have to sacrifice a son to the War for Greedy Corporations.

No sex please, robot, just clean the floor

Sunday Times - Times Online

Of course, you just knew this would happen, sooner or later. I guess it beats getting something caught in a belt polisher like some guy who then tried to repair his scrotum with an industrial stapler, which of course got infected and he had to explain all that to the emergency room personnel.

What will marriage between a man and a woman be if one or more of the parties are not natural, but "manufactured?" It might make "gay marriage" seem kind of "natural" in comparison.

DenverPost.com - Google towers over data rivals

Google's Giant Computer

I can still write software that would put this thing on its knees. Not chess. Not searching for web pages. Just to emulate the brain of a Fly.

The Google-Less Search Engine

Naturally, anyone who would do as I just did in the last few weeks would be a candidate for the padded cell. Why, you may ask, would I possibly build yet another Search Engine when there are plenty of them already out there?

The answer is partially due to "just because I can", but in truth I would never do this just for the heck of it. My current job project implicitly requires such a bunch of web software because the main thrust of the project is to analyze stuff on other web sites.

I tried Google Desktop search -- it has some good aspects but it wasn't really what I wanted and was way more overhead than I wanted to expend.

Anyhoo, it has come along quite well. I can do a fuzzy search with "nonsense" clues and get a sizeable hit list back from the central DELL server (affectionately named Goomba), for which I wrote the Fuzzy Indexer, Fuzzy Searcher, web-server CGI interface via Apache, and image converter (for displaying .TIF as .JPG without any specialty software on the client side.

Although I looked into stuff such as PHP, Perl and other server-side scripting languages, I felt that they did not specifically handle the problem of "fuzziness" well enough, nor the concept that some text pages originated from an OCR process and some didn't. If you know what OCR (Optical Character Recognition) does to text files you might know what I mean. Anyway, therefore, I wrote everything in plain C.

I indexed my entire desktop computer's collection of such data, gigabytes of text and even larger amounts of image data, including temporary internet storage of cached web pages and so forth. A typical search takes only a couple of seconds to grunt through the index and to create HTML web pages from the results, and displaying any particular .TIF image takes about another second, including converting it to a .JPG before creating another HTML page around the image.

Although this may have some commercial use or not, it did turn out quite interesting for me, since I found C source code files and various writings that I'd done through the years and forgotten about. For instance, looking for "water scorpions" came up with "warrior corps" and a search of "dangerous" came back with huge numbers of warnings in GNU c++ compiler source code, as well as a story about kangaroos.

So now I can sit in the patio with my dumb little laptop, Thunk, and peruse the infinite archives of my own accumulated electronic library -- plus I can also Google the world as I was doing already.

Onward and Upward.

Robot device mimics human touch

All you need now is a robot that can make sense of the pattern of light, which is already difficult enough. But this is pretty cool.

The Apache Web Server Project

After a lifetime trying to avoid web programming I am still slapping my forehead over the clumsy software that pervades the practice. I solve all the junk as I get to it, but usually not until I've downloaded the GNU version of something, studied that, and then, seeing how much junk that goes into it, I am not that impressed with the result.

Anyway, having used Apache web server (HTTPS) on unix systems years passed, I expected that some XP version would be working by now. So I downloaded Apache2.0 and so far it is pretty good! It took me a while to get the hand of the XPisms that prevent a direct mapping of my Unix experience to the XP. But now I have it working clean, have a nice CGI executing remote requests, and it all works within the Intranet (Namespace) of my house. My actual IP address on Internet is one of those floating ones handed out in sessions. I'm safe from external attempts of hooking to my local network, which is all handled by routers, both wired and wireless.

I was somewhat surprised that every computer in the house (several, due to the business and school needs of each of us) made flawless connections to the Apache2 server, requested the cgi functions and recieved their results flawlessly.

Now usually, due to the meticulous nature of computer software, I am pulling my hair out for weeks trying to put out one fire or another. The more complicated the programs the more infinite the time it takes. But this time it went really smooth.

I must recommend Apache 2.x Web Server software. Good stuff. But, that said, I'll bet the next generation of Microsoft Snuff-Ware will break it. They can't leave well enough alone.