the hot new programming language

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 10:03:07 +0100, Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 08/07/2015 16:55, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 15:19:39 +0100, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 07/07/2015 00:19, John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 06 Jul 2015 19:07:12 -0400, Phil Hobbs
pcdhSpamMeSenseless@electrooptical.net> wrote:

On 7/6/2015 6:52 PM, John Larkin wrote:

The whole singularity thing is a red herring. It's a symptom of the
decline of thinking in our age that most folks assume without proof that
'modern science' has proven that the human mind is just the pure
physical operation of the human brain under physical causation and
nothing else.

It is likely that the computational singularity exists somewhere in the
future of computer hardware. When I was an undergraduate the idea that a
computer could beat me at chess was risible. Now any one of a dozen
chess engines is stronger than our best human world chess champion.

David Levy only just won his bet. Turns out though that computer chess
was a false dawn and is an easier problem than we first thought.

Go requires much deeper pattern matching skills to play at any kind of
serious competitive level and computers are way behind human masters.

More impressive still are the self driving cars which are just into road
trials now. Even with some bugs they may be safer than humans.

A few things like highway collision avoidance, maybe warnings and
applied braking, might be good. I can't imagine a self-driving car
being feasible in a dense city.

It might well work best there since the average speeds are low and
predictable vehicles can convoy together much closer together under
machine control than with human reaction times 100-1000ms.

The legal liabilities alone would end it. Kill a few pedestrians and
see what happens.

Too many drivers these days are using cell phones or worse texting.

That is probably why google wants self-driving cars, so people can be
online 100% of their waking hours. Everybody will have their own
version of the Google Bus.

The model of a brain as a bunch of threshold logic gates (the Neural
Network approach) is silly. Prop delay alone makes the idea absurd.
Single-celled critters can do pretty cool adaptive stuff.

It is only silly if you choose not to understand it.

The brain must be quantum mechanical at the cellular level, with all
the mysticism and noncausal behavior of quantum mechanics.

New age weirdo thinking. Presently advocated by Penrose in his various
popular science books. I remain unconvinced. The crux of the complexity
of a human brain is a huge number of tiny simple computing elements and
the insanely large number of permutations of possible interconnects.

Single-cell and few-cell brainless critters do impressive things, like
hunting and hiding and defending themselves and finding mates. Why

Complex apparent behaviour can emerge from the interaction of a few very
simple rules. Conways simple 2D automaton Life is Turing complete.

I designed a color graphics generator board for the PDP-11 in the
early 70's, for pipeline control systems. As soon as the hardware
worked, I coded Life in assembly. Fun, but it's still just a machine.

would neurons be limited to acting like slow majority logic gates,
dumber than a bacteria? The Neural Network model is popular because
people don't understand how cells actually work; it's cargo cult
science. What might the image recognition processing time be for a
trillion element neural net computer with millisecond element prop
delay? It wouldn't win many tennis matches.

Yours is the cargo cult science. Anything you presently don't understand
you put down to handwaving quantum mysticism.

Wrong. All I suggested is that neurons are not simple logic gates and
may use quantum computing techniques internally. The conjecture is not
unreasonable and, if it can work to advantage, would be naturally
selected. It's interesting what hostility that suggestion invokes.

There is no compelling reason to invoke anything more sophisticated than
a lot of non-linear differential equations to model neurons.

OK, post some. Show how a bunch of pulses in a nerve bundle convey
sound and sight and sensation. Cover consciousness while you're at it.

Why wouldn't neurons use quantum computing principles inside? If it's
possible, evolution would have taken advantage of it. So you are
saying that it's not merely a weird idea, but it's impossible. Pretty
strong statement.

I am saying that on the scale of a typical cell quantum effects are
largely limited to the individual molecules.

DNA is a molecule. Enzymes are molecules. That's what we are made of,
molecules.




There is no cellular aura

of new age quantum mysticism needed to explain what is observed.

This could change but at the moment it looks exceedingly unlikely that
anything other than the huge network combinatorial factors are relevant.

Orthodoxy which explains nothing is large in the history of science.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 9 Jul 2015 16:37:02 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
<fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:

On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 19:20:02 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 02:39:27 +1000, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 09/07/15 07:43, John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles wrote:
Moderately complicated computational tasks involving sensory and
motor tasks are moderately well understood relatively near the periphery based
on these models.

For very small values of "moderately." When you can tap into an optic
nerve and project the image on a computer screen, or go the other way
and fix blindness, I'll be impressed thet you understand how this
stuff works.

And yet we have done both those things already with hearing, and the
operation to implant the bionic ear is approaching routine.

Have they? Cochlear implants just stimulate local sections of the
cochlea; they don't drive the auditory nerves and are hardly a bionic
ear. Similarly, people can tickle spots on the retina and produce
crude images, sensations of light, but nobody can decode or encode
data in the optic nerve.

You're wrong - cochlear implants _do_ drive the auditory nerve.

In the same way that hitting your thumb with a hammer drives the
sensory nerves. Sticking electrodes into the cochlea requires no
understanding of how hearing works; it's just fiddling.




The

most common maladies that lead to these implants involve a loss of the
inner hair cells, which ordinarily transduce the vibration at the
basilar membrane into vesicular releases which trigger the auditory
nerve. It is these hair cells that are so commonly damaged by drugs,
loud sounds, certain diseases, and other physiological insults.

No, we don't _completely_ understand the coding of sound OR light in the
auditory or optic nerves.

I sure agree with that statement.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 02:54:22 +1000, Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 09/07/15 07:17, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 1:19:17 AM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:
The brain must be quantum mechanical at the cellular level, with all
the mysticism and noncausal behavior of quantum mechanics.

Penrose made much the same claim in "The Emperor's New Mind"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

Nobody took him seriously, and he's got a rather better track record than you have.

Paul Davies is a proponent of this magical thinking too. It's all an
unnecessary attempt to salvage free will (and hence, significance, and
the ancestral spirit world) from the machine.

David Pennington (who's no slouch himself; studied under Dirac,
worl-class mathematician and also an Anglican priest!) unwittingly
showed me why that salvage attempt is unnecessary, and put the clincher
on my personal non-theism.

He said, more or less:

"Consider the molecules of air in this room, which collide elastically
(like billiard balls, except for the shape), such that in a tenth of a
nanosecond each molecule will experience an average of 50 collisions.
How much do we need to know about a molecule and its environment
in order to be able to predict its direction and momentum after those
50 collisions?

The astounding answer is that if you omit from your calculations the
gravitational attraction (the weakest of the known physical forces) of
a single electron (the smallest known stable particle) at the opposite
end of the universe (the most distant known location), then after 50
collisions, a tenth of a nanosecond, you know *nothing*, you cannot
predict *at all*, the direction or momentum of that molecule."

In other words, without even invoking any quantum effects, everything in
the universe is inextricably linked to everything else.

Just because

there is some non-local causation happening is no reason to disclaim
personal responsibility, or to regard your actions as non-free. They're
just free in a different context, and that's all that matters.

Clifford Heath, CTO, Infinuendo.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 02:54:22 +1000, Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 09/07/15 07:17, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 1:19:17 AM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:
The brain must be quantum mechanical at the cellular level, with all
the mysticism and noncausal behavior of quantum mechanics.

Penrose made much the same claim in "The Emperor's New Mind"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind

Nobody took him seriously, and he's got a rather better track record than you have.

Paul Davies is a proponent of this magical thinking too. It's all an
unnecessary attempt to salvage free will (and hence, significance, and
the ancestral spirit world) from the machine.

QM is magical thinking? Actually, it is, but that's the way this
universe works.

Maybe you don't have consciousness or free will, but I do.

I haven't read Penrose's book, but now I'll have to. Sounds like good
stuff.

David Pennington (who's no slouch himself; studied under Dirac,
worl-class mathematician and also an Anglican priest!) unwittingly
showed me why that salvage attempt is unnecessary, and put the clincher
on my personal non-theism.

He said, more or less:

"Consider the molecules of air in this room, which collide elastically
(like billiard balls, except for the shape), such that in a tenth of a
nanosecond each molecule will experience an average of 50 collisions.
How much do we need to know about a molecule and its environment
in order to be able to predict its direction and momentum after those
50 collisions?

The astounding answer is that if you omit from your calculations the
gravitational attraction (the weakest of the known physical forces) of
a single electron (the smallest known stable particle) at the opposite
end of the universe (the most distant known location), then after 50
collisions, a tenth of a nanosecond, you know *nothing*, you cannot
predict *at all*, the direction or momentum of that molecule."

In other words, without even invoking any quantum effects, everything in
the universe is inextricably linked to everything else.

Now THAT is new-age fuzzthink. If everything affects everything,
scientific causality and high-end DVMs don't exist.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, July 8, 2015 at 11:43:20 PM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:

On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:

On Wed, 08 Jul 2015 08:55:32 -0700, John Larkin wrote:

[snip]

Why wouldn't neurons use quantum computing principles inside? If it's
possible, evolution would have taken advantage of it. So you are
saying that it's not merely a weird idea, but it's impossible. Pretty
strong statement.

I work every day with neurophysiologists who are trying to understand how
memory, decision-making, visual recognition, and other amazing "ordinary"
brain activities occur. I have yet to hear of any talk of quantum mechanics
being necessary for any of these.

OK, explain how those things actually work.

Looking at single neurons or small sets of neurons (and perhaps glia),
there's been no need to drag quantum mechanics
into analytical descriptions of cell behavior. Moderately complicated
computational tasks involving sensory and
motor tasks are moderately well understood relatively near the periphery
based on these models.

For very small values of "moderately." When you can tap into an optic
nerve and project the image on a computer screen, or go the other way
and fix blindness, I'll be impressed that you understand how this
stuff works.

Who care what would impress you? You are impressed by denialist propaganda.

We certainly can't categorically exclude quantum mechanical effects in brain
activity at this point, but there is no need to include it, either. Such a
suggestion adds a certain fanciful noise to the discussion without really
helping to understand or predict anything.

Since nobody knows how nerves or brains work, why exclude any
possibility? And why would evolution discard any useful phenomena?

Neurones know in which order they get their inputs, and react differently to
A then B then C from C then B then A, which is to say they've got short term memory, and can do a lot more than "neural networks".

There's no need to invoke quantum mechanics to explain that - or anything else that anybody has seen. The idea gets carved away by Occam's Razor.

> So many people don't actually believe in evolution.

Most people appreciate that it can do all that's necessary without invoking magic. You don't know enough to understand this.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Tim Watts]

On 09/07/15 16:46, John Larkin wrote:

That is probably why google wants self-driving cars, so people can be
online 100% of their waking hours. Everybody will have their own
version of the Google Bus.

You'd be half way down the M1 and the dash would display "Google has
decided to discontinue Google Bus. Have a nice day! <crash>"[1]


[1] One of the things that makes me dubious about Google is what Google
giveth, Google taketh away. Frequently.

 

[John Larkin]

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 21:19:00 +0100, Tim Watts <tw_usenet@dionic.net>
wrote:

On 09/07/15 16:46, John Larkin wrote:

That is probably why google wants self-driving cars, so people can be
online 100% of their waking hours. Everybody will have their own
version of the Google Bus.

You'd be half way down the M1 and the dash would display "Google has
decided to discontinue Google Bus. Have a nice day! <crash>"[1]


[1] One of the things that makes me dubious about Google is what Google
giveth, Google taketh away. Frequently.

San Francisco is now maybe the most expensive city in the world to
live in. One reason is Google Busses, which have turned SF into a
bedroom/playroom city for Big G in Mountain View.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/SF/Busses_2013.zip


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Thu, 09 Jul 2015 21:19:00 +0100, Tim Watts <tw_usenet@dionic.net>
Gave us:

On 09/07/15 16:46, John Larkin wrote:

That is probably why google wants self-driving cars, so people can be
online 100% of their waking hours. Everybody will have their own
version of the Google Bus.

You'd be half way down the M1 and the dash would display "Google has
decided to discontinue Google Bus. Have a nice day! <crash>"[1]


[1] One of the things that makes me dubious about Google is what Google
giveth, Google taketh away. Frequently.

They probably authored and gave the NSA their "easy" search engine.

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2015-07-08, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:
suggestion adds a certain fanciful noise to the discussion without really
helping to understand or predict anything.

Since nobody knows how nerves or brains work, why exclude any
possibility?

Ockham's Razor.

> And why would evolution discard any useful phemomena?

evolution is lazy, it crawls, it doesn't jump, eg: thers no wheeled animals...

--
umop apisdn

 

[John Larkin]

On 11 Jul 2015 04:26:27 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-08, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:
suggestion adds a certain fanciful noise to the discussion without really
helping to understand or predict anything.

Since nobody knows how nerves or brains work, why exclude any
possibility?

Ockham's Razor.

Oh. Then brains must run on steam and rubber bands.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2015-07-11, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On 11 Jul 2015 04:26:27 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-08, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:
suggestion adds a certain fanciful noise to the discussion without really
helping to understand or predict anything.

Since nobody knows how nerves or brains work, why exclude any
possibility?

Ockham's Razor.

Oh. Then brains must run on steam and rubber bands.

Given the ohserved absense of steam and elastomers inside working
brains on what basis do you make that claim.

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have
achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence
you seem to have forgotten that.

--
umop apisdn

 

[John Larkin]

On 11 Jul 2015 23:53:24 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-11, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On 11 Jul 2015 04:26:27 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

On 2015-07-08, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:
suggestion adds a certain fanciful noise to the discussion without really
helping to understand or predict anything.

Since nobody knows how nerves or brains work, why exclude any
possibility?

Ockham's Razor.

Oh. Then brains must run on steam and rubber bands.

Given the ohserved absense of steam and elastomers inside working
brains on what basis do you make that claim.

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have
achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence
you seem to have forgotten that.

Requires? Is Occam's Razor a law of nature, like conservation of
energy?

Is every physical and biological process always the simplest one that
you can imagine? What happens if someone else comes along and
imagines something simpler?


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 2:16:55 AM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:

On 11 Jul 2015 23:53:24 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:
On 2015-07-11, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On 11 Jul 2015 04:26:27 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:
On 2015-07-08, John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Wed, 8 Jul 2015 16:57:48 +0000 (UTC), Frank Miles
fpm@u.washington.edu> wrote:
suggestion adds a certain fanciful noise to the discussion without really
helping to understand or predict anything.

Since nobody knows how nerves or brains work, why exclude any
possibility?

Ockham's Razor.

Oh. Then brains must run on steam and rubber bands.

Given the ohserved absense of steam and elastomers inside working
brains on what basis do you make that claim.

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have
achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence
you seem to have forgotten that.

Requires? Is Occam's Razor a law of nature, like conservation of
energy?

Is every physical and biological process always the simplest one that
you can imagine? What happens if someone else comes along and
imagines something simpler?

There's got to be an evolutionary trajectory connecting what exists (or has existed) with what exists now. Error-detecting -correcting codes are pretty simple, but we don't see them in nature. The DNA to amino-acid decoding scheme is remarkably close to the one that is most insensitive to misreading - about four or five standard deviations away from the mean of all possible schemes - but DNA repair is rather clumsier.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Sun, 12 Jul 2015 02:14:25 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@gmail.com> Gave us:

On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 2:16:55 AM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:
On 11 Jul 2015 23:53:24 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

snip the dumb shit, DAMN!

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have
achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence
you seem to have forgotten that.

Requires? Is Occam's Razor a law of nature, like conservation of
energy?

Is every physical and biological process always the simplest one that
you can imagine? What happens if someone else comes along and
imagines something simpler?

There's got to be an evolutionary trajectory connecting what exists
(or has existed) with what exists now. Error-detecting -correcting
codes are pretty simple, but we don't see them in nature. The DNA
to amino-acid decoding scheme is remarkably close to the one
that is most insensitive to misreading - about four or five standard
deviations away from the mean of all possible schemes -
but DNA repair is rather clumsier.

Yeah... look at the failure that it had when it allowed him to be
produced.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 12:58:28 PM UTC+2, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno wrote:

On Sun, 12 Jul 2015 02:14:25 -0700 (PDT), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> Gave us:

On Sunday, July 12, 2015 at 2:16:55 AM UTC+2, John Larkin wrote:
On 11 Jul 2015 23:53:24 GMT, Jasen Betts <jasen@xnet.co.nz> wrote:

snip the dumb shit, DAMN!

Ockham's Razor requires the explanation to be simplest. You seem have
achieved "simple" instead. It must also agree with the exicence
you seem to have forgotten that.

Requires? Is Occam's Razor a law of nature, like conservation of
energy?

Is every physical and biological process always the simplest one that
you can imagine? What happens if someone else comes along and
imagines something simpler?

There's got to be an evolutionary trajectory connecting what exists
(or has existed) with what exists now. Error-detecting -correcting
codes are pretty simple, but we don't see them in nature. The DNA
to amino-acid decoding scheme is remarkably close to the one
that is most insensitive to misreading - about four or five standard
deviations away from the mean of all possible schemes -
but DNA repair is rather clumsier.

Yeah... look at the failure that it had when it allowed him to be
produced.

We have about 20,000 genes, capable of being regulated to produce some 100,000 proteins. We've all got individual differences (and get roughly one new one every generation). John Larkin is the price we pay for the constructive variations. Primates in general generate a lot more mutations than other species, and so far it seems to be working out okay - though a 30% rate of early miscarriage isn't nice when it happens to somebody you know.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney