X-Message-Number: 8524
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 1997 21:42:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: Digital Shakespeare
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On Mon, 01 Sep 1997 "John P. Pietrzak" <> Wrote:
>It's wonderful that such a simple device [a computer] can do so much.
Nothing simple about it. If something, anything, is complex then it must be
made of many parts, if not it wouldn't be complex. If the parts are still
pretty complex then, for the same reason, they must be made of many subparts.
Eventually you will come to a point where the sub sub sub parts are pretty
damn simple, an on off switch is pretty damn simple, however I don't
conclude from that the universe contains nothing complex.
>getting a genetic algorithm to evolve to have the ability to interact
>with the real world involves the same problem that real-world
>genetics does: it takes lots and lots of time to get anywhere.
Genetic computer programs would have a huge advantage over evolution because
they could have the ability to inherit acquired characteristics, something
nature never figured out how to do.
>The argument that a monkey randomly punching keys on a typewriter,
>given infinite time, would eventually (and, in fact, always) manage
>to come up with the complete works of Shakespeare is more of a
>comment on infinite time rather than on computability.
It has absolutely nothing to do with infinite time. True, the number of years
it would take for a random monkey to duplicate Shakespeare's work would be a
tad on the large side, but it would be no closer to being infinite than the
number "1" is.
>Right now, I believe humans have a distinct advantage in the
>storage capacity, power consumption, and portability of their
>internal memory store. :) )
If that was true nobody would bother making computers because they'd have no
use, people do. By the way, computers have one thing I really wish we had,
a way to make a backup, if we could do as well we wouldn't need Cryonics.
>all of computer science is the design of state machines; whether
>those machines actually represent what we mean by "intelligence" is
>yet to be determined for certain.
30 years ago everybody said that playing Chess or doing Calculus required
intelligence, they don't say that now and we both know why. Now they say
true intelligence is whatever a computer can't yet do as well as a person and
the definition keeps shrinking. I have no doubt that if today's computers
were great a pattern recognition and common sense but terrible at Chess they
would say that Chess is the proper measure of intelligence and common sense
trivial.
>Oh Ghod, how I hate the Turing Test. [...] his test manages to
>entirely miss the point of intelligence.
To me it always seemed strange to hear people say that the Turing Test is not
a test of consciousness, but to say it's not even involved in intelligence is
utterly bizarre. I have a few questions.
I'm sure you've met people you consider brilliant and people you consider
morons, how do you tell one from the other?
The physicists Stephen Hawking is perhaps the worlds greatest authority on
General Relativity and Black Holes, he is also paralyzed except for one
finger of one hand, he uses that finger to tap out (literally digital)
messages, that's how he writes his scientific papers and books and performs
all communication with the outside world. Do you think Steven Hawking in
intelligent and if so why?
Einstein was not intelligent, he just talked wrote and behaved like he was.
Do you see anything crazy about the preceding sentence?
>around WWII and for a short time after, there was a class of
>"analog" computers which used properties of electrical current and
>resistance to perform calculations which are, in fact, not equivalent
>to those performed by digital machines. Digital computers can
>approximate the results given by an analog computer, but it's not
>exactly the same.
A ten year old home computer could easily reproduce the output of any
"analog computer" ever built, but the reverse is most certainly not true,
it couldn't even simulate a 20$ pocket calculator. The reason I used
quotation marks is that an analog computer is a continuos devise so it must
contain an infinite number of internal states, no such machine has ever been
built or will ever be built.
John K Clark
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