Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing • Hacker News Board

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#61

Post by Earw0rm » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #55

hprotagonist wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah, someone who paid attention in lecture! (incidentally; there’s a fairly deep literature of historians of science that have carefully documented that we describe ourselves as analogous to the most sophisticated technology of the day: see “to lose one’s temper”, “to blow a gasket”, “i got my wires crossed”, “sorry, cache miss”, … as metaphors and idioms of mental state through the centuries that reflect the cool tec…

>as metaphors and idioms of mental state through the centuries after listing a bunch of things from the previous century that barely stretches a bit further back. i would have been impressed if you had come up with a phrase from medieval tech, or roman/greek/egyptian. hell, i'd settle for pioneer days tech to allow for "centuries". otherwise, it just feels like modern day analogies.

He's an open book?

I needed to let off some steam?

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#62

Post by detourdog » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

krisoft wrote: post #39

CuriouslyC wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is turtles all the way down was literal, but heavenly clockwork and computer program perspectives are clear metaphors.

> turtles all the way down was literal Was it? What evidence do you have for that? If anything it sounds like the kind of verbal slapdown someone in authority would subject someone trying to be a smart alec. It is short. Easy to understand. And closes the kind of questioning. I would be very surprised if someone have considered it the literal truth, but of course have seen stranger things. > heavenly clockwork and co…

I believe the universe we live right now is no different than a simulation. Subtle difference in belief but I think it might have a big implication.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#63

Post by sebastiennight » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

waitwhathu wrote: post #46

krisoft wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> turtles all the way down was literal Was it? What evidence do you have for that? If anything it sounds like the kind of verbal slapdown someone in authority would subject someone trying to be a smart alec. It is short. Easy to understand. And closes the kind of questioning. I would be very surprised if someone have considered it the literal truth, but of course have seen stranger things. > heavenly clockwork and co…

[flagged]

That comment was a wild ride.

I'm curious if there is a way that I could phrase a polite request to you to ask if you're a human (that just happened to create your account 30 minutes ago to post this within the same minute) or if this comment was auto-generated.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#64

Post by CuriouslyC » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:18 PM UTC

civilitty wrote: post #44

krisoft wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> turtles all the way down was literal Was it? What evidence do you have for that? If anything it sounds like the kind of verbal slapdown someone in authority would subject someone trying to be a smart alec. It is short. Easy to understand. And closes the kind of questioning. I would be very surprised if someone have considered it the literal truth, but of course have seen stranger things. > heavenly clockwork and co…

> I seriously think that it is within the realm of possibilities that this universe we live in (including us) is a literal simulation. Notice how you dropped the “computer” part. Without that qualifier, the “universe is a simulation” hypothesis goes back at least to Descartes and his evil demon [1]. That’s the GP’s point. The “demon,” “clockwork,” and “computer” are just metaphors to help illustrate the point. Hundre…

Pretty funny to see a constructive comment downvoted faster than sweaty blather. Not a good day for HN.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#65

Post by regularfry » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:20 PM UTC

a2128 wrote: post #11

My completely uninformed hypothesis is that it is edge detection, but on a depth map rather than a color map. A figure in the article even shows a situation where a depth sketch succeeds while edge detection on a color map fails

Kinda both, would be my guess. The brain reconstructs depth from visual information, so where the visual edge can be interpreted as a depth cue, you're faking out that mechanism. It also explains why the pure edge detection image just looks noisy, especially in the hair: most of the edges are effectively incidental colour shifts that don't provide depth information.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#66

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

cnity wrote: post #3

As someone (probably like many here) who graduated from a university which taught computer vision and peripheral neuroscience courses, with such titles as "Computational Neuroscience of Vision", I always felt that trying to understand the human brain as a kind of algorithm was a bit of an artefact of computer scientists as they approach biology. The truth is the visual cortex is vast, and not sufficient to explain th…

Great way to put it

The fields of Cognitive Science would view humans as proto-robots

I'd love to revitalize the field of "cybernetics" because it really answers all of this long ago

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#67

Post by detourdog » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #54

ben_w wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to lose one’s temper Huh, never thought about that one before. Linguistic stuff like this is fun to find; these days I mostly spot it via learning German as a second language, so the artifice in artificial intelligence becomes “Künstliches Intelligenz” where “Kunst” is artist and “Kunststoff” is plastic, and in Middle Low German “kunst” is knowledge and ability. > coined Deliberate choice to exemplify your point, o…

Something I've heard a few times is that computer "logs" refer to ships log books, but log books themselves refer to the actual wooden logs that would be thrown out of the back of ships to help determine their speed.

I always thought it was related to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_ibn_Musa_al-Khwarizmi

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi

I think he was pouring over tables of data when he worked out algorithms.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#68

Post by pavlov » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:22 PM UTC

detourdog wrote: post #60

CuriouslyC wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is turtles all the way down was literal, but heavenly clockwork and computer program perspectives are clear metaphors.

I first heard Turtles all the way down in spoken story by Kurt Vonnegut. Does anyone else have a source of the story or is that the source?

“The world is on a turtle’s back” is Iroquois cosmology, at least.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#69

Post by photonerd » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #34

simias wrote: post #9

Ten years or so ago I was working on a video chip that had an upscaler feature. While prototyping and simulating it, we first started by applying a mathematically-correct (i.e. information preserving) FIR filter to do the upscale. Then we compared the result with other solutions and found that ours looked worse. We asked our colleagues to blind-test it and they all picked third-party-scaled images over ours. At first…

Surely if you're upscaling pixel art you're loosing information when you create gradients between pixels. It doesn't seem to me that your metric of information loss was ideal.

Quite, no new information so no “loss” but not the information that needs to be there.

It’s putting an 8oz coffee brew in a 20oz cup & giving it to the customer as a large saying they had no coffee loss. While true, it’s not the same as delivering a 20oz coffee.

Re: Edge detection doesn’t explain line drawing

#70

Post by lostlogin » Wed, Aug 02, 2023, 2:23 PM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #42

pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also the universe itself is often seen through the lens of contemporary technology. Are we living on an island that floats on a giant turtle’s back? Or are the heavens like giant clockworks? Or maybe it’s all a computer simulation? These cosmological speculations are separated by thousands of years, but they are all simply a reflection of what the person finds most awe-inspiring in their everyday life.

Reasoning by analogy is one of the ways we solve the framing problem. So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity (ie., like how we invent). When explaining the mind we suppose it's like one of our inventions. Absent an analogy of some kind it's quite hard to determine what features are salient. Objects have an essentially infinite number of properties.

> So, when explaining the universe we imagine it's an act of will by a conscious entity

Unless I’m misunderstand you, that line of reasoning assumes one is religious.