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Vernor Vinge has died

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Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#121

Post by fl7305 »

griffey wrote: post #99

I had the privilege to interview Vernor back in 2011, and continued to have interactions with him on and off in the intervening years. He was, as others have said, just immeasurably kind and thoughtful. I'm sad that I'll not have the opportunity to speak with him again.

I had him as a CS teacher at SDSU for a class. I had no idea he was a sci-fi author when I started the class. Bought his books and was hooked.

He taught me how to implement OS thread context switching in 68000 assembly language. We also had a lab where we had to come up with a simple assembly function that executed slow or fast depending on whether it used the cache efficiently or not.

Great teacher and author, and a very nice guy in general.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#122

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

dmd wrote: post #117

Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.

The key insight always was hexapodia.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#123

Post by jart »

nabla9 wrote: post #32
trenchgun wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He popularized and advanced the concept, but originally it was by von Neumann.

The concept predates von Neuman. First known person to present the idea was mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet in the late 1700s. Not surprising, because he also laid out most ideals and values of modern liberal democracy as they are now. Amazing philosopher. He basically invented the idea of ensemble learning (known as boosting in machine learning). Nicolas de Condorcet and the First Intelligence Exp…

That essay is written by a political scientist. His arguments aren't very persuasive. Even if they were, he doesn't actually cite the person he's writing about, so I have no way to check the primary materials. It's not like this is uncommon either. Everyone who's smart since 1760 has extrapolated the industrial revolution and imagined something similar to the singularity. Malthus would be a bad example and Nietzsche would be a good example. But John von Neumann was a million times smarter than all of them, he named it the singularity, and that's why he gets the credit.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#124

Post by throw1234651234 »

gcr wrote: post #53
Simon321 wrote: post #20

He coined the concept 'singularity' in the sense of machines becoming smarter than humans what a time for him to die with all the advancements we're seeing in artificial intelligence. I wonder what he thought about it all. >The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge first in 1983 in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a techn…

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

Singularity doesn't necessarily rely on LLMs by any means. It's just that communication is improving and the number of people doing research is increasing. Weak AI is icing on top, let alone LLMs, which are being shoe-horned into everything now. VV clearly adds these two other paths:

            o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
              may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
            o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
              human intellect.
https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#125

Post by jerf »

mnsc wrote: post #55
gcr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with respect, we don’t know if he was spot on. Companies shoehorning language models into their products is a far cry from the transformative societal change he describes will happen. nothing like a singularity has yet happened at the scale he describes, and might not happen without more fundamental shifts/breakthroughs in AI research.

Imagine the first llm to suggest an improvement to itself that no human has considered. Then imagine what happens next.

LLM != AI.

An LLM is not going to suggest a reasonable improvement to itself, except by sheerest luck.

But then next generation, where the LLM is just the language comprehension and generation model that feeds into something else yet to be invented, I have no guarantees about whether that will be able to improve itself. Depends on what it is.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#126

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #120
SECProto wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.

It's a bad book, nowhere close to the first two in any regard.

It's not bad. It looks to be what would have become the first of a trilogy. It's just slow and sets the stage for something that culminates in another Fire Upon the Deep tier finale.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#127

Post by jerf »

rsynnott wrote: post #56
rakejake wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Deepness in the Sky was perhaps the first "hard sci-fi" novel I ever read (this was before I knew of Greg Egan). The concept of spiders and the onOff planet was just awe-inspiring. While Egan's idea-density is off the charts, I found Deepness in the Sky to be the most complete and entertaining hard-scifi novel. It has a lot of novel science but ensures that the reader is never overwhelmed (Egan will have you overwh…

> If you've read the book, Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Maybe he just didn't anticipate that computers could do what they do today. I mean, I don't think LLMs have been notably useful in decoding unknown languages, have they?

All currently-unknown real languages that an LLM might decode are languages that are unknown because of a lack of data, due the civilization being dead. An LLM won't necessarily be able to overcome that.

In the book the characters had access to effectively unbounded input since it was a live civilization generating the data, plus they had reference to at least some video, and... something else that would be very useful for decoding language but would constitute probably a medium-grade spoiler if I shared, so there's another relevant difference.

Still, it should also be said it wasn't literally LLMs, it was humans, merely, "affected" in a way that they are basically all idiot savants on the particular topic of language acquisition.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#128

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

rakejake wrote: post #98
n4r9 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vinge had literal human LMs in the novel to decode the Spider language. Could you elaborate on this? It's been a while since I read the novel. I remember the use of Focus to create obsessive problem-solvers, but not sure how it relates to generative models or LLMs. Thinking about it, I'm not sure how useful LLMs can be for translating entirely new languages. As I understand it they rely on statistical correlations…

I do not recall the exact details but I remember that some of the focused individuals were kept in a grid or matrix of some sort. The aim of these grids were to translate the spider-talk and achieve some form of conversation with the spiders on the planet. It is also mentioned that the focused individuals have their own invented language with which they communicate to other focused individuals, which is faster and mo…

The zipheads were crippled with a weaponized virus that turned them all into autistic savants. The virus was somewhat magnetic, and using MRI like technologies, they could target specific parts of the brain to be affected to lesser or greater degrees. It's been awhile since I've re-read it, but "focused" was the propaganda label for it from the monstrous tyrannical regime that used it to turn people into zombies, no?

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#129

Post by thrtythreeforty »

dmd wrote: post #117

Please mirror, because more people should have a copy of this: https://3e.org/vvannot This is Vinge's annotated copy of A Fire Upon the Deep. It has all his comments and discussion with editors and early readers. It provides an absolutely fascinating insight into his writing process and shows the depth of effort he put into making sure everything made sense.

Thanks for mirroring this! This was only published on an old CD for the '93 Hugo winners, and I had a devil of a time trying to find a copy (inter-library-loan, etc) before realizing someone had archived it on archive.org. It is indeed well worth the time spent if you're a fan of Fire.

Re: Vernor Vinge has died

#130

Post by mercutio2 »

My favorite author of all time. 80 years is a good run, but I wish he’d seen another 20.

I would’ve loved to read his reaction to the 2020s. Rainbow’s End is by far the best prediction of what this decade has been like, from 30 years ahead.

I wish we’d gotten to read a few more books from Vinge.

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