X-Message-Number: 8577
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 1997 21:05:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: Digital Shakespeare
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
On Tue, 09 Sep 1997 "John P. Pietrzak" <> Wrote:
>I've given you a truly trivial algorithm, something practically any
>child could execute. What more do you want!!!!
I want the number.
>Which of these operations did you find too complex: Addition?
>Subtraction? Division? Variable assignment? There isn't anything
>else to the algorithm.
So you're saying no matter how many simple things you put together the whole
never gets one bit more complex and performing a trillion easy tasks is just
as easy as doing one. Hmm, that doesn't seem quite right now does it.
>You're just saying that time equals complexity here.
Give that man a cigar.
>How can all people, requiring examples to train their neural nets,
>have a base of information in common?
You and I live in the same world with the same laws of logic and physics,
these laws put pressure on evolution and rendered most potential mechanisms
nonviable, the remaining tiny minority, life, thus have certain things in
common. And we have more, we're even of the same species so our minds work
in more or less the same way.
>you seem to think that I've already built up a category around
>tears and frowns
Correct, you has the same physiology I do so you also know that tears and
frowns are not totally unrelated.
>How can a purely connectionist person find the opposite of a concept,
>when reasoning requires rules, axioms, definitions?
If a purely connectionist person can't tell the difference between A and
not A then I'm not a purely connectionist person.
>Shakespeare consistently produced text which was a very constrained
>subset of the total possible random sequences
True, and so is "ekomclhsorudnndavnjgya9qtbj" which expresses a very profound
and beautiful thought in the language of the people of the Virgo Cluster.
>the text followed the rules of the English language
An arbitrary set of rules.
>No, sir, I DON'T associate intelligence with mathematics or physics.
So I could talk philosophy with you, write good novels and bad love poems,
make up jokes you thought were funny, solve calculus problems and even come
up with a theory as great as Einstein's and you still would not think I was
intelligent unless I could prove to you I was made of meat and not silicon.
Not too long ago many said much the same thing about black people.
If these things are not intelligence they are certainly something, let's call
it Attribute X. Personally I don't give a hoot in hell about intelligence,
I'm only interested an Attribute X.
>Steven Hawking has written several best-selling books.
He's done more than that, he's materially increased the knowledge human beings
have about the universe, and he's done it all by taping out a digital signal
with one finger on one hand.
>Steven Hawking has made an appearance on Star Trek: The Next
>Generation.
Could this perhaps be your objective definition of intelligence? Well, it is
objective at least, I'll give you that.
>Ah, Grasshopper, you begin to see the truth. Only a slight
>modification of your statement above, and you will see all.
>"In other words, one set of ideas is useful in everyday life and
>another set is useful when arguing philosophy."
If your philosophy has nothing to do with everyday life or how the world
works, if your philosophy is only good for arguing about your philosophy then
it would be no different than the rules of poker which are only good for
playing poker. I think my philosophy is more than a game.
>you were criticizing Eliza's passing the Turing Test based upon
the _tester_, not the test. If it doesn't matter who the tester is,
>why do you make such a fuss about Eliza?
The Turing Test does not produce facts it produces opinions, you wish we had
something better and I do too but we don't, we can only work with what we
have. If the tester is an idiot then you have the opinion of an idiot, if the
tester is a genius then you have the opinion of a genius, but far more
important than either of these is the opinion of John K Clark.
>modern programs going after the TT have advanced quite a bit beyond
>Eliza in recognizing sentential and paragraph structure
Maybe yes maybe no. Eliza is quite a bit beyond paragraph structures in
recognizing sentential modern programs but only going after the advanced TT.
In #8570 Andre Robatino <> On Tue, 9 Sep 97 Wrote:
>If two wave functions psi1(x,t) and psi2(x,t) satisfy
>psi2(x,0) = c(x)*psi1(x,0), where c(x) is a complex-valued function
>such that |c(x)| = 1 everywhere, the two have different probabilities
>for measurements of various quantities other than position at time 0,
>unless c(x) is a constant function. Also, even if one is only
>interested in measuring position, letting c be a function of
>position will cause psi1 and psi2 to have different time evolution,
>so for t > 0, psi1(x,t) and psi2(x,t) will no longer have the same
>intensity at each point.
Yes, changing the wave function can sometimes (but not always) change it's
square, the intensity, but even if you knew the intensity, by measuring the
probability with arbitrary accuracy, you still wouldn't know the wave
function itself because deriving a square root does not give you a unique
answer, such is the nature of complex numbers. The intensity you can know
because you can measure it, and you can figure out some things the wave
function could not be, but if you try to pin down what it actually is you
find it as illusive as a rumor.
>You can only measure the intensity at a given point by creating the
>same wave function a large number of times and measuring the
>likelihood of finding the particle at that point. You can do the
>same with any other physical quantity,
you're free to measure position, you're free to measure momentum, you're not
free to measure both.
John K Clark
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.i
iQCzAgUBNBdqSn03wfSpid95AQEwbQTwo4DokGGrNOz47s1dooUmDCIjfdNK3cRs
dU8EDR2ARi0jp7v18QrJUurVHIblweVr9lefKOI/5g4NNfS+w6+vqa5zDxJ5hnGZ
NRjICwnDdaViwIi46Rm5iPbaqy1hHzFXBonxl1TCsMZwJvoQDbSjM5Wrz8Xvrnl/
sMQAeh31RY43C5SS9HNXbpXLTdEkapxSS8ObYAZ28fVAZHWfVUg=BNEl
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8577