31–40 of 47 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say alphabets, languages, religions, fashions. Numbering systems? Is there an advantage in going base 10 vs base 11? Now that I think about it base 8 may be better.
Arguably, Duodecimal would have been better. 12 is divisble by a large number of factors and it has some more interesting aspects outlined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
For those who don't know, Maurice Wilkes invented subroutines and microcode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes
I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.
> I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. This is just the anthropic principle. The fact that somebody was first doesn't mean something wasn't obvious. I like to complain about De Morgan's Laws, which state that: (1) If neither of two things is true, then they're both false. (And vice versa.) (2) If two things aren't both true, then one or both of…
Not very satisfying but utilitarian.
Vernor Vinge’s 1993 Technological Singularity is worth a read: https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/book98/com.ch1/vinge.singularity... “ Progress in hardware has followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades. Based on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater-than-human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles Platt has pointed out that AI enthusiasts have been making claims like t…
At around that time, there was popular press site from some MIT people extrapolating our brain computing capacity from some studies about our retinas. They compared it with the Moore's law progression to conclude by ~2030 supercomputers would be as capable as our brains. Now, of course, it was known at the time that the studies underestimated our brains, and that it was very unlikely that Moore's law would continue f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.
> I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. This is just the anthropic principle. The fact that somebody was first doesn't mean something wasn't obvious. I like to complain about De Morgan's Laws, which state that: (1) If neither of two things is true, then they're both false. (And vice versa.) (2) If two things aren't both true, then one or both of…
> The fact that somebody was first doesn't mean something wasn't obvious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On topic for the article: I don't think the Turing Test is a very good test at all. It's trivial by having the robot pretend to be stupid, a child, or not a native-speaker. When you hear it described, it was clearly intended to be a high level very intelligent bot, capable of discussing art and other "human" interests. In practice, these bots tend to just regurgitate random comments from their corpus, acting essentia…
We need a real intelligence test. Good luck doing better. Turns out Turing was pretty smart when he thought this up. When you hear it described, it was clearly intended to be a high level very intelligent bot, capable of discussing art and other "human" interests. In practice, these bots tend to just regurgitate random comments from their corpus, acting essentially as electronic parrots Whilst this is true, Google's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure I would claim because a computer can be a human in a game that it has human level intelligence. We probably need to come to some sort of agreement on how to define human level intelligence.
I agree with you. The point was not that this proves we reached human level intelligence. However we should keep in mind that the goalposts have been moved numerous times already. Once a problem that was initially considered an AI problem was solved, it was no longer called AI anymore. It is likely that any realistic goal we set ourselves and that will be solved at some point will suffer the same fate. Perhaps that’s…
That's why things that were considered a sign of intelligence a century ago (things like being good at basic calculus, having a good memory of facts or events, being able to retrieve some piece of information from a big of documents) have not been considered intelligence, after all, as soon as computers appeared. Chess playing was stil the typical intelligent activity, but it stopped being so as soon as deep blue won a game. Being able to go from point A to point B with nothing but a map, and being able to say "hmm, let's avoid this road, there's usually a lot of traffic at this time of the day" was, too, before the advent of connected GPS. And so on.
Now that we're getting closer and closer to Turing's test, there are more and more people claiming this test is pretty bad, after all, and isn't a good way to assess intelligence.
In a way, "artificial intelligence" is an oxymoron. It's a battle that cannot be won.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is there an advantage in going base 10 vs base 11? Yes, you can divide by powers of two and five and exactly represent the result. When did you last feel an urge to divide something into 11 parts? > Now that I think about it base 8 may be better. Well, that would have given us nicer shutter-times and screw sizes, "Megabytes", max_ints and better floats for money calculations as well as slightly better numerical pro…
> When did you last feel an urge to divide something into 11 parts? When did you last feel an urge to divide something into 5 parts?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.
> I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. This is just the anthropic principle. The fact that somebody was first doesn't mean something wasn't obvious. I like to complain about De Morgan's Laws, which state that: (1) If neither of two things is true, then they're both false. (And vice versa.) (2) If two things aren't both true, then one or both of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably, Duodecimal would have been better. 12 is divisble by a large number of factors and it has some more interesting aspects outlined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
Came here to say this. We got 10 instead because we have 10 fingers to count on.
Also, quoting parent's link:
> It is possible to count to 12 with the thumb acting as a pointer, touching each finger bone in turn. A traditional finger counting system still in use in many regions of Asia works in this way, and could help to explain the occurrence of numeral systems based on 12 and 60 besides those based on 10, 20 and 5. In this system, the one (usually right) hand counts repeatedly to 12, displaying the number of iterations on the other (usually left), until five dozens, i. e. the 60, are full.