tag > Complexity
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The Visible Wavelengths on the Electromagnetic Spectrum
Related: Cthulhu Spectrum - #Science #Philosophy #Space #Complexity #Biology
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Confusing models that predict the future with actual reality is a sign of madness
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‘Amazon forests of the underground’: Why scientists want to map the world's fungi
“These fungal networks have been a global blind spot in conservation and climate agendas," said Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
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Climate Scientists Encounter Limits of Computer Models, Bedeviling Policy (WSJ)
"Supercomputer simulations are running up against the complex physics of programming thousands of weather variables such as the extensive impact of clouds."
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In linguistics, Escher sentences are sentences which initially seem acceptable but upon further reflection have no well-formed meaning.
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AI rivals average human competitive coder?
A journalist asked me to comment on the story "DeepMind AI rivals average human competitive coder". My comments ended up in the CNBC story "Machines are getting better at writing their own code. But human-level is ‘light years away’". Here are my comments in full length:
Every good computer programmer knows, that it is essentially impossible to create "perfect code" and that all programs are flawed and will eventually fail in unforeseeable ways, due to Hacks, Bugs or Complexity. Hence, computer programming in most critical contexts is fundamentally about building "fail safe" systems that are "accountable". In a 1979 presentation, IBM made the statement: "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision". Besides all the recent hype around "AI Coder outperforming humans", the question of the accountability of code remains largely ignored. Has anything changed since IBM made that statement? Do we really want hyper-complex, in-transparent, non-introspectable, so called "autonomous" systems that are essentially incomprehensibly to most and unaccountable to all, to run our critical infrastructure, such as the finance system, food supply chain, Nuclear power plants, weapon systems or space ships?
#ML #Augmentation #Complexity #InfoSec #Robot #Systems #Comment
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How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Is Real
The root of today’s quantum revolution was John Stewart Bell’s 1964 theorem showing that quantum mechanics really permits instantaneous connections between far-apart locations.
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How the Physics of Resonance Shapes Reality - The same phenomenon by which an opera singer can shatter a wineglass also underlies the very existence of subatomic particles. (Quanta Magazine)
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"This diagram is too simplistic." - Margaret Mead
#Comment: A quote that nicely encapsulates the mentality of cryptocratic techno-complexity fetishists, then and now. In a world where "knowledge is fractal and the closer you get, the more you'll find" and paradoxes lurk behind every corner, complexity is the preferred form of masturbation of busy-minded intellectual people that desperately are searching for means to ignore infinity and death. As Leonardo Da Vinci once remarked: "Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication".
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A Conway 'Game of Life' Conjecture Settled After 29 years
In 1992 John Conway raised a question about the patterns in his famous mathematical Game of Life: "Is there a Godlike still-life, one that can only have existed for all time (apart from things that don't interfere with it)?" Conway closed his note by adding "Well, I'm going out to get a hot dog now..."
Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo, a pair of researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, have found a finite configuration in Conway's Game of Life such that, if it occurs within a universe at time T, it must have existed in that same position at time T-1 (and therefore, by induction, at time 0)... The configuration was discovered by experimenting with finite patches of repeating 'agar' and using a SAT solver to check whether any of them possess this property.
Other Game of Life-related news:
- David Raucci discovered the first oscillator of period 38. Remaining unsolved periods are 19, 34, and 41.
- Darren Li has connected Charity Engine to Catagolue, providing approximately 2000 CPU cores of continuous effort and searching slightly more than 10^12 random initial configurations per day.
- Nathaniel Johnston and Dave Greene have published a book on Conway's Game of Life, featuring both the theoretical aspects & engineering that's been accomplished in the half-century since its conception.
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40 quintillion stellar-mass black holes are lurking in the universe, new study finds - "Small" black holes are estimated to make up 1% of the universe’s matter. #Comment: They will do anything to ignore "Infinity"
