Fair enough. This stuff is actually kinda fun
Hmm… I didn’t convey my point well enough. A characterstic that annoys me in geeks is that they pursue escapism (thus the D&D and pot references), rather than actively working towards to make what they supposedly dream about to happen. Pursuit of D&D–yes–pursuit of knowledge–no. And, while geeks are quite more intelligent than the populace at large, most I’ve met don’t carry that elusive spark of creativity. There’s nothing wrong with pot or D&D or any other form of entertainment–but when a person lives for these things, it’s not going to be a turn-on to me.
Come to think of it, it probably isn’t intelligence that limits geeks from achieving the great, but rather psychological oddities which for some reason seem more prevalent among geeks than in the populace by large (by definition, maybe?!). I know several Linux fanboys who would never advance in a company because they have zero cooperation ability, for instance. Many scientists have similar shortcomings, of course, but IMHO the key difference between a scientist and a geek is in what drives them.
I’ve only came across a very few people that I’ve felt like I could consistently communicate with as equals. Emphasis on felt–because it has not been established that I’m intelligent and therefore somehow “above” my peers–it might very well be my strutting ego. But, I’d like to be the “dumb one” in a relationship for a change.
Heh. You’re absolutely right. The dumb & cute act’s slowly being sloughed away, and will be completely gone this time next year. Innuendos aside, it got me pretty far when I was younger but my plans will force me to come out of the proverbial closet very soon.
Yes, although I do quite empathize with a person who’s faced obstacles to get where he or she is now. Sometimes I feel as if my life was a litany of FU’s directed towards those who said I couldn’t or shouldn’t pursue a certain goal.
Probably–our disagreement probably is in the degree that altruistism is embedded in human nature. Babies are basically screaming poop machines that keep you up 20 hours a day and suck away your money. If not innate biology–what explains mothers’ strong attachment to them?
Actually, I do agree with you more than not on this point. For clarification, let’s go back to the original point I was trying to make: you said that:
I interpreted your point to mean something akin to the cliche “don’t endeavor and be someone you aren’t”. If you interpret the “you” as being untouched and unshaped by external influences, then “you” becomes little more than a beast. If I believed in a “real me”, it’d be my neurons’ current state, which of course, has been influenced by environmental stimuli in large part. Whether it is prudent to mold yourself to a stereotype/ideal or not is another argument altogether.
Feh. You called me on it. Last time I’ll ever do math on this little sleep.
BTW, now that I’m a little more clear-headed, the total number of strings that have fewer than length 2^n is 2^n-1 (mixing up quite a few symbols). Calculus isn’t needed to prove this; consider the pattern 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32… add it up and the next number in the sequence will be the cumulative total of the previous numbers plus one. However, the conclusion that at most 2^(n-1) strings can be compressed from source strings of length n is true even if my original reasoning was completely nonsensical, and the reason why would involve me digging up my book on Kolmogorov complexity, and I’m not about to do that on 6 hours-in-48-hours’ sleep.
Depends on your definition of human activity. True, using n-order encoding for very large n will greatly compress human activity (it has been estimated that the English language requires only one bit to represent a single letter on average), but there are more chess games than electrons in the universe, let alone bits on a DVD disc: MathsNet Ltd:
Yup; however, the mad scientist in me must add the nitpick that everyone organic will have been born.
Sooooooo… how you doin’?
Except that actually working towards one’s dreams, particularly dreams other than “get rich and have a boat”, is rare among ALL groups. I’d like to think it’s actually LESS rare among geeks, if only because geeks tend to exercise their imaginations more than the average person (although we shouldn’t fall into “oh, 99% of the American public is just mindless sheep being spoonfed the hygienic pablum that The Media feeds them, and they never had a creative thought in their lives” mindset either.) But I’d rather hang out with 10 geeks, 4 of whom have Big Dreams, and 0.5 of whom might actually attempt to achieve them, than people with no dreams at all. And even people without Big Dreams sometimes have interesting thoughts about YOUR big dreams, etc.
“The difference between a scientist and a geek”? As in, geeks can’t be scientists? What planet are you from, precisely? There is a LARGE overlap between scientists and geeks. I’ve been to JPL and seen people’s cubes. Trust me on this one.
Well, I have two suggestions for you:
(1) Spend the entire relationship slightly drunk. Then your boyfriend will seem EVER so smart
(2) Date my father. OK, not really.
You “plans”, eh? An ominous statement if I’ve ever read one, particularly from someone with a mad scientist fixation. Really, I’m just being nice to you so that when you’re choosing what region of the country to vaporize with your secret blackmail terror weapon, you’ll look kindly on the bay area. And, trust me, there are TONS of smart guys here.
I still think you’re going a bit overboard about the bleakness of existence. There are plenty of perfectly rational reasons to be happy every day without having to (for instance) believe in an afterlife. If nothing else, here’s a simple one: My being happy or sad about the fact that I’m eventually going to die isn’t going to stop me from dying. So I might as well be happy, because hey, it’s better. I don’t think that makes me either a fool or a Massive Boulder of Individuality and Manliness.
Ahh, spite. Where would human civilization be without it? 
The mother-child bond seems like it’s almost CERTAINLY biological. Actually, my pet theory of sociology (not a very radical or surprising one) is that a LOT of human behavior can be explained by the fact that we evolved to live in tribes and small groups. Humans have an incredible ability to bond with other people, befriend them, do good for them, protect them, work with them, even die for them. They also have both a disturbing ability to view other people as OTHERS, and a truly frightening inclination towards following authority figures. All behavior patterns that basically go back to small groups with a single dominant leader, competing against other groups for food and territory.
I agree with you, I think. As for molding yourself to a stereotype/ideal, everyone does that to some extent. And sometimes, that’s a good thing. Being a good father and a good neighbor, for instance, seem like fine stereotypes to generally emulate. The trick is twofold: (1) What stereotypes and ideals do you emulate, and (2) how able are you to basically use a line item veto and exclude parts of that ideal which you don’t agree with, for whatever reason. But that’s all kind of getting away from the original point I was making that you quoted, which is that while children turn into adults, they struggle both to belong and to differentiate themself (note how I’m speaking with apparent authority about both sociology and the psychology of adolescence here, neither of which I know a damn thing about. Next week I’ll be doing Greek cooking and chess openings). And one way to differentiate themselves is to pick a quality or trait they have which is somewhat unique and go way overboard in emphasizing it. I think that’s how a lot of geeks get as geeky as they do… what makes me a unique individual? “Well, I like Star Trek more than most people… so if I liked Star Trek more, and liked everything else less, I’d be MORE of who I am…”
(a) wow, your dizzying mastery of the binary number system has wowed and amaze me. OK, I might be being a bit sarcastic
(b) it’s arguable whether “1” belongs in that sequence. If we’re counting strings, does the empty string count? It might, but then again, it might not. I suppose it probably should, from an information theory standpoint, as not sending a message at all does (in some setups) communicate information.
I think that you’re still missing a trick here. Basically, the number of strings of length precisely N is almost exactly equal to number of strings of length N-1 or less. It’s off by 1, in fact, as we’ve discussed before. Therefore, I could easily devise an algorithm intended specifically to compress strings of length 1000 that reduces the length at least slightly for all but one of those strings. However, this algorithm would have very little practical use, and would reduce by only a tiny amount for the vast vast vast majority of length-1000 strings, and would only work for strings of length PRECISELY 1000.
But there are WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY more possible DVDs than there are possible chess games. There are 64 billion bits on a DVD, but there are 2^(64 billion) possible DVDs, a number far beyond meaningful comprehension. In fact, here’s a trivial way to observe that: Any game of chess could be recorded on a DVD. In fact, every game of any game or sport every played that lasted 6 hours or less could be recorded on a DVD, without even beginning to come close to scratching the shell of the edge of the total number of DVDs.
In fact, you could take all the 8 billion humans who are now alive, each of the 8 billion squared pairs of these humans, have each pair play all however many possible chess games, record each of those pairs of humans playing each chess game, and you STILL don’t come close to the total number of possible DVDs.
So, do you think that sentient AIs will exist by the time our generation dies?
Response coming later today, but re: 2^64 billion… I LOVE being caught in a simple, absurd mistake and reduced to humilation. grin
Sorry, I’m taken. You seem nice, though. Maybe I can whip you up a clone or something.
And they LAUGHED when I said I wanted to be a math major in order to impress women. Well, who’s laughing now?
Anyhow, I thought a bit more about what percentage of strings can be compressed by an optimal algorithm. It’s actually pretty easy to see that it can’t be greater than 50% without any of your fancy pants “Kolmogorov complexity”. Basically, the total number of strings of length N or less is 2^(N+1)-1. The total number of strings of length N-1 or less is half that. Any string of length N or less that runs through our algorithm and is shortened by at least 1 digit will end up as a string of length N-1 or less. No two strings can be mapped to the same string by our algorithm, or it will be lossy. Therefore, only at most half of the strings of length N or less can be shortened, due to a lack of range space.
Interestingly, that’s pretty much precisely the opposite of the way any useful compression algorithm would work. There’s a tradeoff between how many strings get shortened, and how much shorter they get. Any useful algorithm will only shorten a minute fraction of strings, and lengthen the rest, but will actually shorten that minute fraction by a significant margin, which is (of course) the whole point.
Peeking in… over SSH and Lynx, naturally.
MaxTheVool, so that’s what I was missing. D’oh! I was thinking the domain in terms of ONLY strings of exactly n length and confusing with the 2^(n-1) maximum rule.
Kolmogorov complexity is post-Shannon information theory. Don’t know why colleges seem to stop at Shannon–I self-studied it (and not that well, evidently).
IIRC, the 2^(n-1) rule is the theoretical maximum and quite often goes to far less than that, contingent on the particular compression engine chosen (IIRC, the maximum varies on the order of 2^(n-x)). Just about the only way to reach perfect 2^(n-1) would, of course, be to directly map all compressed strings to a value, which is, of course, the opposite of what compression algorithms do, as you stated
Another thought about the DVD scenario: Suppose you could generate every movie ever made using the DVD. However, the set of all possible movies clearly is a subset of all human activity; therefore, if each individual movie is a separate human activity, you cannot compress all possible human activity on a single DVD disc.
The way I understand the DVD conversation is that there are two points:
- The number of possible unique DVDs is greater than the number of possible human actions
- Given an infinitely long DVD all human action could be represented.
Now, with regards to these two premises:
I raise the question: “What is a human action?” Furthermore, how are you representing this information? For now let’s take the simplest way of representing this information, and not compress it at all. So we make a movie with this infinitely long DVD from premise two. Who, though, makes the movie? Does the act of making the movie not constitute a human action that the movie would have to record? Everything in this movie has to start with human action, and yet nothing can. Similarly, if we use a different encoding scheme, say, writing down what is happening, you get stuck repeating: “Here I am writing that I am writing that…”, forever.
Therefore, I would argue that the number of possible human actions is unable to be represented on an infinitely long DVD. If you tried, it would never start, since making a movie of someone making a movie is a possible human action.
Point conceded. The question now becomes: would I rather date a geek or a scientist? I know that many scientists are geeks, having been lucky enough to make friends with a few when I was in school, but let’s define geek as a geek who isn’t a scientist. Important distinction.
Ex-talk that everyone hates
[spoiler]Here’s a backstory which might shed a bit of light on why I’m not so hot on geeks right now: I dated a geek for 3 years. Met many of his geek friends, we exchanged multiplayer video games for Christmas, and it was a lot of fun. His life revolved around video games, and he’d spend hours talking about how he wanted to be a video game programmer, and what game ideas he had, and I supported him very much. He graduated sooner, found a job at his father’s company, put in his 40 hour work-week… and kept talking about his game ideas and saying that he’d independently create freeware games and work his way up from there.
Fast-forward 2 years, about 1.5 too long… it never happened.
I should also mention that I attended D&D/anime conventions with him, and, gawd, every time I did so, I get soooo depressed watching the crowd.[/spoiler]
To me, engineers and scientists seem of different caliber than geeks… difficult to pinpoint exactly how. A little tidier, a little more organized, and a little more logical in that they view problems as stuff that have to be solved… or maybe I didn’t know enough engineers. shrugs
The thought of being your mother is golden mind-in-the-gutter material. Actually, one of my few online friends is an astronomer, and he’s absolutely wonderful, a treasure to chat with on rare occassions–only if he were a couple of decades younger… Does your father have a home observatory, dome on roof and all?
Not that complicated. Have sex with the CEO of my company to get into a high position. Marry him. Divorce him, take half his assets, and use my newly-inflated resume to apply for a job at another company. Wash, rinse, repeat until I have the sufficient hundreds of billions to fund a mad-scientist army to take over the world and exploit the Earth until it’s a cold ball of iron floating in a sea of noxious gases. Simple, huh?
Who says I’m not already in the Bay Area…
(No, cell regeneration will… but carry on…)
I admire people who can look upon the bleakness of having dust as bodies, and who knows that it is quite likely their actions are deterministically preordained by biology and environmental influences, and still be happy, and struggle against these things. Here’s a bit of the “personal reasons”: when I was 7, my intelligence was determined to be no more capable than an 18-month-old’s. The special-ed teacher (home schooling wasn’t known in these days) tried to sic the CPS on me since my mother wouldn’t put me in public boarding school. I’ve faced many such similar events and naysayers throughout my life. My greatest thrills come in achieving goals where others would deem impossible, and I will devote my life to conquering so-called scientific impossibilities (from the layman perspective, not theoretical). Call it a fetish if you like.
Aye… quite pleased to meet someone else who has independently deduced this… extrapolation of this concept forms one half of the foundation for my personal beliefs, including morality and what constitutes an utopian government (the other half being game theory, of course).
Can’t disagree with your observations–I wasn’t immune to this as a teenager, unfortunately. And, indeed, deliberately trying to be a emotionless mad scientist would not be a Good Thing ™.
A formal definition of sentience in the mathematical sense is a futile endeavor; however, we can look at the gap between humans and machines in terms of problem-solving. Humans excel at this little thing called algorithimic induction; it has been formally proved that all problems can be reduced to that of algorithmic induction.
Algorithmic induction nutshell: basically, ability to predict the next step in a pattern in giant, a completely axiom-free, context-free sequence: forget about universal grammar and all that–what I am writing right now may be considered as the product of a giant sequence learned from birth, the total sum of all my vocabulary and knowledge. Enough n-order encoding and you’ll be able to pass the Turing test easily (consider how few responses that make sense to “how are you?”) . If you want to delve into this … do a Google for Marcus Hutter… he created an universal algorithmic induction algorithm; the problem is that it has O(2^n) runtime. There are privately held solutions more tractable, and there are a few startups being attempted in relation to this. Guess what they’ll be honing on… the stock market.
So, in a way, machines will be like superhumans… more humans than we are. The dumber the pet you own, the more you can predict its actions, behaviors, and responses. And, naturally, eventually the gap between machine and us will be greater than the gap between us and fish. Hmm…
How did this become a thread about information theory? It makes me want to study.
I wonder how many of us in this thread are in the Bay Area.
Anyway, I thought I would relate information theory to theme of the futility of existence. My own personal crackpot hypothesis is that we lose data not because we have imperfect storage materials, but we have imperfect storage materials because the loss of data is a general principle of physics (the second law of thermodynamics). So all attempts to record our cherished moments (sentimenal pictures, videos, etc.), as well as attempts to make our marks on history (from tombstones to achievements in some field), are ultimately futile. I think I’m starting to sound mad now.
I disagree with your analysis. First of all, we’ve already agreed that if we allow trivial and silly answers, human actions outnumber DVDs. For instance, a human could sit down and write out a number that is more than 4 billion digits long. But that’s not really something humans normally do.
Here’s how I’d propose it. I have a video camera, and I’m going to videotape what you do for an afternoon, along with your narration as to what you’re doing, commentary, etc. Aside from some trivial cases like sleeping and meditating, is it possible for you to take two courses of action that seem meaningfully distinct to you, but which can NOT be distinguished from each other on the resulting DVDs? As in, you’d say “well, I sure did something different yesterday than the day before, yes sir”, but that difference is NOT visible on the resulting DVD? Particularly, if you’re NOT just deliberately trying to beat the test?
I mean, I might come up with a different way to spend my afternoon every day for the rest of my life, or even every day for 100 lifetimes, but I’m still not going to end up with a DVD that is indistinguishable from a previous DVD.
I’m quite sure that if we made a DVD documenting the highlights of every day spent by every human being who has ever lived, no two of those DVDs would be identical.
OK, I’m going to defend dre2xl here. First of all, what she said is literally true: there are more chess games than the number of bits on a DVD, which is about 64 gigabits (for the purposes of this conversation; I know there are various formats). As to whether there are more chess games than possible DVDs, it seems that estimating the number chess games is not an easy task.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chess.html
However, if you take the estimate cited in the mathworld article as accurate, then there are more chess games and DVDs: 10^(10^50) > 2^(2^36).
Yeah, people HATE gossip and learning titillating details about other people’s lives. I think we have a genetic disposition against it.
Speaking as a video game programmer, I can say without fear of contradiction that that is a noble, nearly saintly, goal. Video game programmers are the greatest heroes in America today.
Why depressed? What’s wrong with a bunch of people who share an interesting getting together and enjoying it? Have you seen the documentary Trekkies? You might be surprised how many people in that community actually go out and DO things, whether it’s making fan films or organizing charity events or what have you.
Sadly, he does not. He’s neither eccentric nor wealthy enough.
Oh, THAT plan. I thought you were talking about something unique and interesting.
The simple law which states that single SDMB women NEVER live in the Bay Area.
Possible. Even likely. And I almost mentioned it. BUT, my being happy or unhappy is going to have little bearing on whether cell regeneration is perfected in my lifetime, unless I adopt a master plan of first getting fabulously rich and second investing my personal fortune in cell regeneration research. And, bluntly, immortality being invented right now, without many other technologies being invented first, would be a DISASTER, as suddenly, people would stop dying. Really. Think about the actual implications of that for a moment.
I few free will vs. predetermination a bit like I view God. It’s possibe that God exists. I can’t prove he doesn’t. But I choose to live my life assuming he doesn’t. Similarly, I can’t prove that every last one of my actions wasn’t predetermined before I was born, (or, more likely, if one subscribes to the infinite universe hypothesis, ALL of my possible actions were predetermined before I was born), but I don’t see anything useful that can come out of subscribing to that belief.
Seriously? Wow. How on earth did that happen, if you don’t mind me asking?
So you have a establishing-new-scientific-paradigms fetish? You know, they say that there’s porn for every possible fetish somewhere on the internet, but I think you may have them stumped.
OK, I’ll bite. What’s your idea of a utopian government? And would it actually be utopian, or just the closest possible approximation?
I think you’re overstating things. All problems of what sort? The problem of determining the existence of God, or the meaning of life, or how best to make a marriage work, or how to write a hit Broadway musical?
Well, you’re stretching the limits of my ability to meaningfully comment to the breaking point, but… I strongly suspect it’s not that easy. The number of possible conversations that begin with “how are you” is, like chess games, much larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. However, as I don’t really know what n-order encoding is in this context, I’ll have to ask you for further clarification. (Of course, what you’re writing right now is far more than just the sum of all your vocabulary and knowledge, else someone else raised in precisely your circusmtances would be identical to you…)
There are definitely some very smart people who worry that there will be some threshold crossed after which computers will start designing better computers, which will design better computers, etc. I can’t say I’m worried about it. AI has continued to be a VASTLY more difficult problem than people think. Look at how long it took for a computer to beat a human in chess, which is a PERFECT game for a computer to excel at. How much longer will it take a computer to beat a human at, say, writing poetry?
Have you read Godel, Escher, Bach, by the way? It’s the most thought provoking book I’ve ever read, and it touches on a lot of these kinds of topics.
Is it possible for there to be two different chess games which are not identical, but whose differences can not be determined via DVD? They’d have to start differing after a really ridiculous number of moves, as you could encode a chess position into a very small number of bytes. So you’d have to be talking games that were identical for the first several hundred million moves. So yeah, I guess it depends how you define unique chess games. What happens if I encode the digits of pi and represent them by moves of a knight?
I think you’re kind of on to something. But I’d call it more an entropy of desire. Information is being generated FAR faster than people care about it. So if I really want to, I can do some careful backing up, and preserve every digital camera picture I take for the rest of my life with perfect reproducibility. And if I was the founder of a new religion, and humanity decided that preserving my photos was as important as preserving the king james bible, well, those photos would be preserved for a very long time. BUT, there are 8 billion people generating information right now. And humanity as a whole certainly won’t care about perfectly preserving 8 billion people’s worth of digital photos. Far more information will be lost because no one cares or remembers anymore than for any other reason.
Are you suggesting some kind of compression scheme for chess games? For instance, common openings could be encoded as a very small number bits. I don’t dispute that most games played by a human against another could be recorded on a DVD. But when people talk about the number of possible chess games, they usually mean the number of combinatorially possible games; i.e., the number sequences of legal moves that start with the initial board state and end in a checkmate or a stalemate.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to get at here.
Yes, at least when compared to the noncompressed DVD which is just live full-quality video of two human beings playing chess, which has oodles of extra information, and can STILL record every chess game ever actually played.
I’m saying that the number of chess games is either very-large-but-smaller-than-number-of-DVDs or it’s infinite.
If there are no rules other than the normal basic rules of chess, then two players can each move their queens onto an empty row, then start choosing where on that row to move their queen via the next digit of the octal expansion of pi, which will result in an infinitely long game which never ends up stuck in an infinite loop. (You may have to postprocess the digits a bit in order to remove potential loops long enough to trigger stalemate rules). If there are additional rules such as “a piece must be captured every 50 turns or the game ends in a draw”, well, that limits the total length of the game. In that example, the maximum length of the game is something like 1500 moves. And any possible 1500-move chess game can CERTAINLY be recorded on a DVD, in a variety of trivial ways.
My example wasn’t trivial in the same sense your 9gb of data one, but I’ll play 
I need a few definitions first though: What is a human action? What does it mean to record/represent a human action on a DVD?
And I’m absolutely ga-ga over Tall, gangly, Indiana realtors.
But that’s just me.
To the op; Pretty much every discipline/sub-discipline will have some sort of annual convention. And a journal. If you’re hot for, say, mass spectrometrists, pick up a copy of the “Journal of the American (or European, or Australian) Society for Mass Spectrometry,” and make a note of where/when their next meeting will be. Register to attend and voila; a veritable smorgasbord of uber-geeks.
By the way, this year’s meeting will be in Seattle, WA, May 28-June 1. I’ll be staying at the Marriot under the name of “Mr. Pink.”. Wear something sexy and bring your sex toys; I’ll bring a periodic table of the elements.