Had a 40th birthday! It's completely just another day. It feels different, but not much and most noticeably when filling out forms - I now might find myself in the 40-49 bracket rather than the 30-39 ... Sad face.
I noticed recently that Max sometimes says the words "sad face" after a sentence. I asked him about it and he says it's a sort of verbal version of the emoticon representing sadness. It's a complex linguistic form that I'm not sure has been written about very much. If I have time I should investigate, but the essence of it is that its a deliberate transferral of the same meaning from text to spoken word. Language often works the other way around, but it seems unusual in this order.
The way it's used is definitely humourously, similar to the emoticon in text, but there's an underlying realisation that it has some deeper meaning and I think the fact that the verbal manifestation has more intrinsic meaning is very interesting to me (but not surprising when I consider it).
I hope to come back to this theme: language evolution. It's fascinating to me how language changes and I'm listening intently to my boys to see what they'll come up with next. I'm definitely not one of those morons who thinks that language needs to be fixed (it never is!) and that grammar, syntax or spellings etc are even remotely important. Cognition is where it's at, baby! The revolution in the next 100 years will be cognitive and language will be shown up for it's shallowness. The link between cognition and language is little known to individuals - mostly because we happen to be innately shielded from it!
Friday, November 30, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Perpetuity, Prometheus and Pragmatics
I've written about this before, but the idea of storing human-made data for longer than the lifetime of the individual is quite interesting and it's been mulling around my head for many years now. Of course it's extremely egotistic to want one's information to perpetuate after one's death, but this isn't a new phenomenon - the Great Pyramid at Giza is a fine example of this. I can't get away from the idea, though, that I'd like information about me to be available after I die. It's a kind of foresight that many people don't seem interested in. I've said before that I'd like my great-grandchildren to be able to read my blog or see pictures of me. I imagine this will happen whether I like it or not, but if I can somehow control the storage of my data for perpetuity it would be pleasing.
This is very difficult to achieve due to the requirements of data storage as we know it. Imagine I wanted to keep electronic information safe. It would need some kind of device that takes electrical power. Any storage mechanisms we know that are non-power based don't last very long.
So where is the electricity going to come from in 100 years to power this computer? Can I leave an amount of money in the bank that will earn interest to keep it going? What happens if, at some point, humanity develops free energy or wipes itself out in a viral pandemic? How will the computer survive?
Why would I want it to survive? What's special about me? Well not much except that I'm conceiving the idea so perhaps I warrant the idea to be saved. Or similar ones.
What about other people's ideas? What if our society does die out in the next few hundred years. Would we want our species' ideas to be saved for future ET wandering the galaxy in search of the best ideas from creatures around the universe. In the galactic museum of the future would we want the best of humanity to sit next to other beings' exemplars? I think we would.
How, then, do we preserve data over much longer spans of time? We could put a solar powered device on the moon and upload via lasers from Earth. It's out of reach of pesky humans at the moment, but for how long? How about Mars (newly being explored as I write)? We could blast hard disks out into the void, but in reality it's quite hard to make things that can escape the sun let alone Jupiter or any of the other local solar systems.
These aren't really long-term solutions. Instead of thinking in human limits we could start to think outside the constraints of our planet and homely corner of the galaxy.
I was looking forward very much to the recent movie Prometheus. I haven't been to the cinema for about 10 years since acquiring an aversion to the ghastly experience people seem to love these days: crappy food seems more important that the experience of seeing the film; people's individual right to crinkle packets through the movie outweighs the cinematic experience that I relished when I was young. It's a shame and thankfully I'm not the only one to notice this (Mark Kermode recently started a campaign).
Anyway the point is that I wanted to see this movie so much I actually booked tickets to the local flicks! It was a slightly disappointing film although still very enjoyable. My favourite scene is the very first one - the humanoid destroying himself to spill the DNA-seed onto the planet and thereby create the Earth we know today - teeming with life. This is, in particular, a highly implausible concept since it does away with the idea of evolution and doesn't quite work scientifically, however the idea is wonderful and not new at all. Scott Adams had a lovely theory about a distant alien child's science project being the creation of a molecule that could replicate and evolve; this therefore being the origins of our species and an interesting take on the God idea. To take it further why couldn't the child's project be the creation of an entire universe populated with particularly weird particles and energy that interacts in a certain way that ends up creating the features of matter than would allow coagulation and interaction thereby ultimately leading to our planet and ourselves?
Again as an alternative why couldn't the over-arching container created by this distant and unfathomably complex creature be a computer simulation? I've blogged about this before too and it's one of my favourites, but, at the moment, there's no way to prove that none of these theories are not true.
Combining some of these ideas I came to the conclusion that our species and all life that does exist and has ever existed on our planet is part of a data storage mechanism from some other being that may or not still pay attention to us. A million years ago a society with extremely advanced technological abilities compared with ours of today in a distant corner of the galaxy created a mechanism to store their data in perpetuity. They encoded all their information about them: their history, their ideas and dreams into a structure lying underneath what we perceive of as life on this planet.
You could take this idea further, as previously, and say that this race of beings encoded their data into the very structure of the universe as we perceive it. The atoms, quarks, bosons and the gravity and other forces we register with our senses and machines is their data. We perceive it as something else, but this is only because we haven't realised it yet.
The idea that we're just cogs in someone else's machine is certainly not new either and is both appealing and horrifying. Still, it's just an idea... right? Bit of a wacky one for sure, but if our species had the technology wouldn't we do the same? We already engineer molecules and we've only been at it for 50 years. What will we be able to do in 1,000? If non-human, supremely intelligent creatures exist in the universe then why wouldn't they do the same?
Of course this doesn't explain how you can save information across universes. There is the Cyclic Model of universe creation and destruction that says that our universe expands and contracts forever and each time it contracts all the energy becomes crushed into another big bang situation. How could data be maintained over successive cycles? We would need to encode data into the very energy itself or find some way to project information out of the universe. All mad ideas and bordering on religious, but certainly interesting.
Not wishing to jinx anything, but I hope to be accepted onto a MSc by Dissertation course at Essex University starting in a few weeks. I have found an excellent supervisor who is willing to help me with a year-long research project. This would be extremely exciting to me and would allow me to take some time from work to concentrate on the things that I care more about and want to pursue academically and as a "career" if possible. Computational Pragmatics is the field and not doubt I'll be writing about this in future to. Wish me luck!
This is very difficult to achieve due to the requirements of data storage as we know it. Imagine I wanted to keep electronic information safe. It would need some kind of device that takes electrical power. Any storage mechanisms we know that are non-power based don't last very long.
So where is the electricity going to come from in 100 years to power this computer? Can I leave an amount of money in the bank that will earn interest to keep it going? What happens if, at some point, humanity develops free energy or wipes itself out in a viral pandemic? How will the computer survive?
Why would I want it to survive? What's special about me? Well not much except that I'm conceiving the idea so perhaps I warrant the idea to be saved. Or similar ones.
What about other people's ideas? What if our society does die out in the next few hundred years. Would we want our species' ideas to be saved for future ET wandering the galaxy in search of the best ideas from creatures around the universe. In the galactic museum of the future would we want the best of humanity to sit next to other beings' exemplars? I think we would.
How, then, do we preserve data over much longer spans of time? We could put a solar powered device on the moon and upload via lasers from Earth. It's out of reach of pesky humans at the moment, but for how long? How about Mars (newly being explored as I write)? We could blast hard disks out into the void, but in reality it's quite hard to make things that can escape the sun let alone Jupiter or any of the other local solar systems.
These aren't really long-term solutions. Instead of thinking in human limits we could start to think outside the constraints of our planet and homely corner of the galaxy.
I was looking forward very much to the recent movie Prometheus. I haven't been to the cinema for about 10 years since acquiring an aversion to the ghastly experience people seem to love these days: crappy food seems more important that the experience of seeing the film; people's individual right to crinkle packets through the movie outweighs the cinematic experience that I relished when I was young. It's a shame and thankfully I'm not the only one to notice this (Mark Kermode recently started a campaign).
Anyway the point is that I wanted to see this movie so much I actually booked tickets to the local flicks! It was a slightly disappointing film although still very enjoyable. My favourite scene is the very first one - the humanoid destroying himself to spill the DNA-seed onto the planet and thereby create the Earth we know today - teeming with life. This is, in particular, a highly implausible concept since it does away with the idea of evolution and doesn't quite work scientifically, however the idea is wonderful and not new at all. Scott Adams had a lovely theory about a distant alien child's science project being the creation of a molecule that could replicate and evolve; this therefore being the origins of our species and an interesting take on the God idea. To take it further why couldn't the child's project be the creation of an entire universe populated with particularly weird particles and energy that interacts in a certain way that ends up creating the features of matter than would allow coagulation and interaction thereby ultimately leading to our planet and ourselves?
Again as an alternative why couldn't the over-arching container created by this distant and unfathomably complex creature be a computer simulation? I've blogged about this before too and it's one of my favourites, but, at the moment, there's no way to prove that none of these theories are not true.
Combining some of these ideas I came to the conclusion that our species and all life that does exist and has ever existed on our planet is part of a data storage mechanism from some other being that may or not still pay attention to us. A million years ago a society with extremely advanced technological abilities compared with ours of today in a distant corner of the galaxy created a mechanism to store their data in perpetuity. They encoded all their information about them: their history, their ideas and dreams into a structure lying underneath what we perceive of as life on this planet.
You could take this idea further, as previously, and say that this race of beings encoded their data into the very structure of the universe as we perceive it. The atoms, quarks, bosons and the gravity and other forces we register with our senses and machines is their data. We perceive it as something else, but this is only because we haven't realised it yet.
The idea that we're just cogs in someone else's machine is certainly not new either and is both appealing and horrifying. Still, it's just an idea... right? Bit of a wacky one for sure, but if our species had the technology wouldn't we do the same? We already engineer molecules and we've only been at it for 50 years. What will we be able to do in 1,000? If non-human, supremely intelligent creatures exist in the universe then why wouldn't they do the same?
Of course this doesn't explain how you can save information across universes. There is the Cyclic Model of universe creation and destruction that says that our universe expands and contracts forever and each time it contracts all the energy becomes crushed into another big bang situation. How could data be maintained over successive cycles? We would need to encode data into the very energy itself or find some way to project information out of the universe. All mad ideas and bordering on religious, but certainly interesting.
Not wishing to jinx anything, but I hope to be accepted onto a MSc by Dissertation course at Essex University starting in a few weeks. I have found an excellent supervisor who is willing to help me with a year-long research project. This would be extremely exciting to me and would allow me to take some time from work to concentrate on the things that I care more about and want to pursue academically and as a "career" if possible. Computational Pragmatics is the field and not doubt I'll be writing about this in future to. Wish me luck!
Monday, June 18, 2012
What's goin' on.
Cripes - it's all happening!
There's just too much going on right now to put into a single blog post so I'll try to condense it. And keep it sensible: there are things afoot that shouldn't be published, but are having deep affects on me.
It's 12.30 on a Sunday night. We've had a nice day with the boys. Max has done his Mathletics homework and his piano practice. Max and I also had a game of Risk. He thrashed me! Finn has played in the playroom and generally hung out with us. Both boys enjoyed a trip to the playground near Sainsbury's. The weather was sunny and warm.
Max still fixates on Minecraft and YouTube movies about Minecraft. The subject matter is fine by us as long as it's suitable for his age, but his fascination and devotion sometimes makes us worry that he watches too much TV/Computer. Finn the same although he's younger.
I have a clear memory of being about 8-years-old and falling foul of a friend on the small green space opposite 38 Guildfords where I lived at the time. Whatever possessed me I'm not sure, but I played "dead" for probably at least 10 minutes. That feeling of being aware of people watching me and trying to help whilst I ignore them stays with me today. Obviously this is fairly normal for an 8-year-old and I don't worry too much about doing it.
From the same era I also have clear-ish memories of wondering over field and vale, miles from my house without a care from my parents. It's funny that it's taken me 30-odd years to realise it's not quite so simple. I drove down to Harlow yesterday and parked up in Guildfords. I managed to find a pathway through to the old river that I remembered being a focal point for me and my friends of the time. It's actually only about 50 yards from the house I lived in. I'm not disappointed by this revelation, but it's interesting how one's perceptions of youth remain until being challenged by the "reality" of adulthood.
I'm still working on MMOUKI. It's a fascinating project for me and if nothing else is stimulating and enjoyable. I regularly add notes to my phone so that I'll update the latest diagram to reflect new changes. I emailed an academic at the University of Essex yesterday to ask for help deciding whether to apply for an MSc By Dissertation. I had a reply saying that he's travelling and will reply in a week or two. I'm pleased to have something interesting to latch on to and hope to be able to study later this year with some help academically. It might be enjoyable to be able to extend my MMOUKI ideas in a more formal, academic direction.
It was also Father's Day today. Was lovely to have the two boys present me with chocolates and a great book - Sciencia - very informative and useful.
Still working at Virgin although they kindly allow me to be at home for two days per week.
Discussed Wittgenstein with Christina today. I professed a liking for the ascetic ideal of burying oneself away in Norway or Connemara. I think it must be a male thing.
Beyond all he problems a photo like this (link) that I have never seen before still makes me very happy!
There's just too much going on right now to put into a single blog post so I'll try to condense it. And keep it sensible: there are things afoot that shouldn't be published, but are having deep affects on me.
It's 12.30 on a Sunday night. We've had a nice day with the boys. Max has done his Mathletics homework and his piano practice. Max and I also had a game of Risk. He thrashed me! Finn has played in the playroom and generally hung out with us. Both boys enjoyed a trip to the playground near Sainsbury's. The weather was sunny and warm.
Max still fixates on Minecraft and YouTube movies about Minecraft. The subject matter is fine by us as long as it's suitable for his age, but his fascination and devotion sometimes makes us worry that he watches too much TV/Computer. Finn the same although he's younger.
I have a clear memory of being about 8-years-old and falling foul of a friend on the small green space opposite 38 Guildfords where I lived at the time. Whatever possessed me I'm not sure, but I played "dead" for probably at least 10 minutes. That feeling of being aware of people watching me and trying to help whilst I ignore them stays with me today. Obviously this is fairly normal for an 8-year-old and I don't worry too much about doing it.
From the same era I also have clear-ish memories of wondering over field and vale, miles from my house without a care from my parents. It's funny that it's taken me 30-odd years to realise it's not quite so simple. I drove down to Harlow yesterday and parked up in Guildfords. I managed to find a pathway through to the old river that I remembered being a focal point for me and my friends of the time. It's actually only about 50 yards from the house I lived in. I'm not disappointed by this revelation, but it's interesting how one's perceptions of youth remain until being challenged by the "reality" of adulthood.
I'm still working on MMOUKI. It's a fascinating project for me and if nothing else is stimulating and enjoyable. I regularly add notes to my phone so that I'll update the latest diagram to reflect new changes. I emailed an academic at the University of Essex yesterday to ask for help deciding whether to apply for an MSc By Dissertation. I had a reply saying that he's travelling and will reply in a week or two. I'm pleased to have something interesting to latch on to and hope to be able to study later this year with some help academically. It might be enjoyable to be able to extend my MMOUKI ideas in a more formal, academic direction.
It was also Father's Day today. Was lovely to have the two boys present me with chocolates and a great book - Sciencia - very informative and useful.
Still working at Virgin although they kindly allow me to be at home for two days per week.
Discussed Wittgenstein with Christina today. I professed a liking for the ascetic ideal of burying oneself away in Norway or Connemara. I think it must be a male thing.
Beyond all he problems a photo like this (link) that I have never seen before still makes me very happy!
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Rick Astley, Finite State Automata and Database
I was watching a video on Udacity tonight as part of a course on elementary Python. It's a good course. Tonight's video was about the technology behind the Internet and the speaker was talking about information. I balked slightly when he said that the Bit is the smallest unit of information. I'm sure this is a common idea not just in computing. I balked because a Bit contains potentially two pieces of information - 0 or 1. The speaker was perhaps referring to an instance of a Bit - either 0 OR 1 - and therefore meaning that there is one piece of information encoded in a Bit when it's instantiated in either form. However, because this would mean that any number system can be said to contain the smallest piece of information, e.g. the number 1729698698729837198273826372 is a single piece of information, then I think that we need to be clearer. Since a Bit is part of a Binary system any instantiation is automatically associated with it's opposite, i.e. every 0 is not 1 and every 1 is not 0. Certainly in computing terms it's as important that a value is not 0 if it is 1 and vice versa.
So what is the smallest carrier of information? I think it's the unary system. This is a very familiar number system that uses a single symbol for each single unit (in this case the unit of one). The denary number 4 is 1111 in unary for example. Very interestingly there is no symbol for zero since the addition of a new symbol would cease to make the system unary. Many early number systems (e.g. Roman) were of this type and also did not have a symbol for zero. I don't think this meant that there was no concept of zero, but just that since the number system everyone used didn't have an explicit symbol it wasn't easy to invent one. Debates were certainly had in ancient Greece and the Middle East (e.g. see Zeno of Elea's questions) about the nature of zero and whether it merited a symbol of its own. It has one now and mathematics would be in a very different place without it.
What we're saying by having a zero is that there is an absence of something. This in itself is information. Only by having a system with one possible state can there be the most basic of information-storage mechanisms. We can't have any workable system with no states.
In effect the addition of the zero to mathematics and also the null state in binary (and therefore computing) is a fudge to enable other mechanisms to take place. Nature does not use nulls. At least not that we know of anyway! This is another interesting line of thinking - is energy itself in opposition to anything, e.g. empty spacetime? In concept elementary particles/energy seem to be in opposition to other particles/energy and exist in a space that bears no relation to them except as containers. Multi-dimensional space and M-theory may say different!. If the universe is just one thing that happens to be "folded" in an interesting and eventful way does that make everything One in essence? That's all very Zen and all very unknown at the moment.
So what happens when we take away the zero from computing? We have a unary system that can only represent information by the presence of data - in this case our data is only 1s. If we think of an array of binary, e.g. 01010101 (represented by the denary value 85) our equivalent unary value would be 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 (interestingly not twice the size!).
Binary computers use various logic transformations: AND, OR gates, Flip Flops etc to build up a logic system that ultimately can deal with complex data and representations. Our unary computer doesn't have the logical flexibility to do the same thing. It can do serial processing, however. Finite State Automata are popular processing mechanisms in Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics and deal with operations on a finite state system, potentially a single state. I don't know enough about the differences between Boolean logic and FSA to go further, but this is intriguing to me since it links AI and linguistics in a single system type that also removes the arbitrary nothingness of the added zero.
When considering Artificial Intelligence I often consider the human brain as a model to measure constructed systems against. One major problem, however, is that we don't know how the brain works! I think we have a fairly good idea how it doesn't work; it doesn't use logic gates and binary state systems. It's much more likely to use a number of different mechanisms including parallel processing, weighted integration and controller hierarchies (my terms) among others. For example the amount of inputs and signals flowing through the old grey matter is astonishing. There must be huge amounts of integration and weighting going on that takes many inputs in order to produce very few, but strongly-weighted outputs. Our brains aren't simply a mass of competing impulses, however. There are great controlling structures that, seemingly by virtue of their physical orientation, garner even greater control over outputs. These systems have their positions of influence and the weights are processed the way they are due to innate structures developed through evolution and the continual population of those structures with information during the brain's lifetime.
The brain doesn't store data in zeroes and ones however. Does it store data in a unary format? It's a very difficult question to answer and we would need to define what data is and what it means to store anything in a system like the brain. Suffice it to say that the brain is a more analogue system and too much biology/physics/chemistry comes into play when talking about how data is stored and retrieved for me to say either way. The importance of an absence of data at all levels is crucial, however.
I'd like to think that unary computing is more important than it would seem on the face of it. An alternative approach is to combine a unary system with a map system. Imagine a grid filled with 1s. We can only have a single-dimensional grid, however. It would be exactly as long as the amount of data to be stored. We can use a mapping of the places in the grid to represent something other than 1s. Since the grid will expand and contract with the data being stored the map will have to be commensurately dynamic. How would this work? Groups of 1s cannot be distinguished from other groups of ones. The only way to differentiate various states would be the total length. If the total length of the grid was used to determine the map to use to lookup meaning then we could define a system that could provide a way to store meaningful data in this way. Is it useful? Perhaps not. Interesting certainly and one to consider further, especially combined with FSA and/or possibly Turing Machines.
I understand that computational complete programming environments are readily available through many desktop systems so that the usefulness of a unary data system might be moot. What the investigation of different mechanisms in storage and processing might lead to is new insights in AI, however. That's the goal. Not a unary computer interesting though it might be!
All this talk of data reminds me of a recurring theme in my mind of the last few years that I don't think I've blogged about (apologies if I have). When I imagine myself in interviews (please be kind if prospective interviewers ever read this!) I spout wonderful phrases such as "well I consider the entire universe is a database therefore why wouldn't you hire me to transform your varchar data into nvarchar?".
My masters degree in Database Systems taught me many things and I'm sure my colleagues learnt the same things, but I doubt that any of them began to understand the importance of what a database "really" is. My favourite definition of a database is "an organised collection of data". Now I'm sure that many objects would take on humongous meaning when charged with ambiguous definitions like that, but in this case I think it is perfect. In my particularly loose interpretation "data" just means anything that can be represented and "organised" is just the opposite of chaotic. I take it to mean that there is some framework or organisational rule system that governs how the data behaves, but apart from that it's an extremely wide-ranging definition. So much so that I consider the entire universe to be a database. All matter and energy are entities that can entail representation and the whole system has some framework or rule system that governs it, e.g. Gravity, Weak Force etc. What does this mean (apart from being in interesting interview talking point)?
Not much. Except that it gives an upper limit on the size of a database. It also makes us think of the universe and everything in it slightly differently: it adds fuel to my favourite theory that we're all functioning cogs in a machine constructed as some sort of school project by pan-dimensional beings (actually this just sounds good - we are pan-dimensional beings! Perhaps this should be pan-extra-dimensional beings) - see the Simulation Theory that I like here. On closer inspection it seems that it's a somewhat circular argument - we conceive of a governing rule system outside of our perceptible universe that over arches the entire perceptible universe that's remarkably similar to the governing rule systems that we conceive of from our perceptible universe.
I hope to come back to this theme, perhaps when I haven't already rabbited-on for quite so long already!
Which of these jokes is funnier:
1. Rick Astley asked me to lend him a Pixar DVD today. I said "I'll give you Toy Story or Wall-E, but I'm never gonna give you Up".
2. I asked Rick Astley to lend me a Pixar DVD today. He said "I'll give you Toy Story or Wall-E, but I'm never gonna give you Up".
I think that number one is funnier. I have been thinking about why for a day now. I think it's something to do with the expectation being debunked. This is a common comedic theme: to set up an expectation and then to debunk it often causes comedy. By having Rick Astley say the words seems less funny than having me say it because it's more unexpected that I'll say it.
Personally I think this is an even funnier variant, but perhaps shows too much of my warped mind ...
3. Rick Astley asked me to lend him a DVD. I said "I've got this thing by Pixar called Up. I'll give you that?"
So what is the smallest carrier of information? I think it's the unary system. This is a very familiar number system that uses a single symbol for each single unit (in this case the unit of one). The denary number 4 is 1111 in unary for example. Very interestingly there is no symbol for zero since the addition of a new symbol would cease to make the system unary. Many early number systems (e.g. Roman) were of this type and also did not have a symbol for zero. I don't think this meant that there was no concept of zero, but just that since the number system everyone used didn't have an explicit symbol it wasn't easy to invent one. Debates were certainly had in ancient Greece and the Middle East (e.g. see Zeno of Elea's questions) about the nature of zero and whether it merited a symbol of its own. It has one now and mathematics would be in a very different place without it.
What we're saying by having a zero is that there is an absence of something. This in itself is information. Only by having a system with one possible state can there be the most basic of information-storage mechanisms. We can't have any workable system with no states.
In effect the addition of the zero to mathematics and also the null state in binary (and therefore computing) is a fudge to enable other mechanisms to take place. Nature does not use nulls. At least not that we know of anyway! This is another interesting line of thinking - is energy itself in opposition to anything, e.g. empty spacetime? In concept elementary particles/energy seem to be in opposition to other particles/energy and exist in a space that bears no relation to them except as containers. Multi-dimensional space and M-theory may say different!. If the universe is just one thing that happens to be "folded" in an interesting and eventful way does that make everything One in essence? That's all very Zen and all very unknown at the moment.
So what happens when we take away the zero from computing? We have a unary system that can only represent information by the presence of data - in this case our data is only 1s. If we think of an array of binary, e.g. 01010101 (represented by the denary value 85) our equivalent unary value would be 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 (interestingly not twice the size!).
Binary computers use various logic transformations: AND, OR gates, Flip Flops etc to build up a logic system that ultimately can deal with complex data and representations. Our unary computer doesn't have the logical flexibility to do the same thing. It can do serial processing, however. Finite State Automata are popular processing mechanisms in Artificial Intelligence and Linguistics and deal with operations on a finite state system, potentially a single state. I don't know enough about the differences between Boolean logic and FSA to go further, but this is intriguing to me since it links AI and linguistics in a single system type that also removes the arbitrary nothingness of the added zero.
When considering Artificial Intelligence I often consider the human brain as a model to measure constructed systems against. One major problem, however, is that we don't know how the brain works! I think we have a fairly good idea how it doesn't work; it doesn't use logic gates and binary state systems. It's much more likely to use a number of different mechanisms including parallel processing, weighted integration and controller hierarchies (my terms) among others. For example the amount of inputs and signals flowing through the old grey matter is astonishing. There must be huge amounts of integration and weighting going on that takes many inputs in order to produce very few, but strongly-weighted outputs. Our brains aren't simply a mass of competing impulses, however. There are great controlling structures that, seemingly by virtue of their physical orientation, garner even greater control over outputs. These systems have their positions of influence and the weights are processed the way they are due to innate structures developed through evolution and the continual population of those structures with information during the brain's lifetime.
The brain doesn't store data in zeroes and ones however. Does it store data in a unary format? It's a very difficult question to answer and we would need to define what data is and what it means to store anything in a system like the brain. Suffice it to say that the brain is a more analogue system and too much biology/physics/chemistry comes into play when talking about how data is stored and retrieved for me to say either way. The importance of an absence of data at all levels is crucial, however.
I'd like to think that unary computing is more important than it would seem on the face of it. An alternative approach is to combine a unary system with a map system. Imagine a grid filled with 1s. We can only have a single-dimensional grid, however. It would be exactly as long as the amount of data to be stored. We can use a mapping of the places in the grid to represent something other than 1s. Since the grid will expand and contract with the data being stored the map will have to be commensurately dynamic. How would this work? Groups of 1s cannot be distinguished from other groups of ones. The only way to differentiate various states would be the total length. If the total length of the grid was used to determine the map to use to lookup meaning then we could define a system that could provide a way to store meaningful data in this way. Is it useful? Perhaps not. Interesting certainly and one to consider further, especially combined with FSA and/or possibly Turing Machines.
I understand that computational complete programming environments are readily available through many desktop systems so that the usefulness of a unary data system might be moot. What the investigation of different mechanisms in storage and processing might lead to is new insights in AI, however. That's the goal. Not a unary computer interesting though it might be!
All this talk of data reminds me of a recurring theme in my mind of the last few years that I don't think I've blogged about (apologies if I have). When I imagine myself in interviews (please be kind if prospective interviewers ever read this!) I spout wonderful phrases such as "well I consider the entire universe is a database therefore why wouldn't you hire me to transform your varchar data into nvarchar?".
My masters degree in Database Systems taught me many things and I'm sure my colleagues learnt the same things, but I doubt that any of them began to understand the importance of what a database "really" is. My favourite definition of a database is "an organised collection of data". Now I'm sure that many objects would take on humongous meaning when charged with ambiguous definitions like that, but in this case I think it is perfect. In my particularly loose interpretation "data" just means anything that can be represented and "organised" is just the opposite of chaotic. I take it to mean that there is some framework or organisational rule system that governs how the data behaves, but apart from that it's an extremely wide-ranging definition. So much so that I consider the entire universe to be a database. All matter and energy are entities that can entail representation and the whole system has some framework or rule system that governs it, e.g. Gravity, Weak Force etc. What does this mean (apart from being in interesting interview talking point)?
Not much. Except that it gives an upper limit on the size of a database. It also makes us think of the universe and everything in it slightly differently: it adds fuel to my favourite theory that we're all functioning cogs in a machine constructed as some sort of school project by pan-dimensional beings (actually this just sounds good - we are pan-dimensional beings! Perhaps this should be pan-extra-dimensional beings) - see the Simulation Theory that I like here. On closer inspection it seems that it's a somewhat circular argument - we conceive of a governing rule system outside of our perceptible universe that over arches the entire perceptible universe that's remarkably similar to the governing rule systems that we conceive of from our perceptible universe.
I hope to come back to this theme, perhaps when I haven't already rabbited-on for quite so long already!
Which of these jokes is funnier:
1. Rick Astley asked me to lend him a Pixar DVD today. I said "I'll give you Toy Story or Wall-E, but I'm never gonna give you Up".
2. I asked Rick Astley to lend me a Pixar DVD today. He said "I'll give you Toy Story or Wall-E, but I'm never gonna give you Up".
I think that number one is funnier. I have been thinking about why for a day now. I think it's something to do with the expectation being debunked. This is a common comedic theme: to set up an expectation and then to debunk it often causes comedy. By having Rick Astley say the words seems less funny than having me say it because it's more unexpected that I'll say it.
Personally I think this is an even funnier variant, but perhaps shows too much of my warped mind ...
3. Rick Astley asked me to lend him a DVD. I said "I've got this thing by Pixar called Up. I'll give you that?"
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Redolence, cerebral capacity and a protocol for cyborg information transfer
Sherlock Holmes once gave the opinion that the human brain has a fixed capacity and that when new information is encoded then old unused information is automatically lost. Even though this was Conan Doyle's fictional take on the matter I took this to be a fairly serious assertion. It seems obvious to me that the human brain has a limited capacity and therefore when it becomes full it seems evident that in order for new data to be stored then old data must be lost.
There are others who say that humans only use a small fraction of the brain's capacity. This is absolute nonsense. Only when the way that the brain works is understood can this idea be posited one way or the other. The human brain is an almost literally unfathomably complicated structure and it's quite possible that we are simply not capable of understanding how it works let alone be able to derive the workings through science.
Is it possible to say when the brain is full? I don't think so. The capacity is not a function of the number of neurons or connections, but of the integration effects and higher order interactions that take place because of the number of neurons and connections. These mechanisms are still unknown to scientists. In my view it would be possible for two individuals to have the same mental capacity, but with a significantly different number of brain cells.
I'm mentioning this stuff because until recently I was going along with Holmes's idea and not only lamenting the gaining of knowledge due to the commensurate loss of data, but actively trying to filter the knowledge gained in order to retain the info I have already. I was struggling to remember things occasionally and put this down to a combination of tiredness, age and an almost full brain! This seems silly now. I guess I hadn't really thought about it too much. I now don't think I have reached my mental capacity. I still have some serious confusions, however I put this down to causes other than there not being enough "space left"!
The best way to remember things is to strengthen the memories by methods such as repetition, referencing and stress. These are partly described by Cognitive Rhetoric which is a field in which I have particular interest, but that's a topic for another post.
On the same tack, and to use the rhetorical device of Reductio Ad Absurdum, I could say that my brain would be more receptive to new information if I were to remove some old data. If I were able simply to clear out the memory pathways of things I don't care for any longer then that would surely allow them to be used anew for stuff that I now want to remember.
Unfortunately this absurd reduction isn't practical. I can't unremember things easily. The best way to forget something is to not recall it for some length of time, but by recalling it it strengthens the memory so I can't know what has been forgotten - I just need to keep focussed on the things I care about and hope that those old memories just fade away.
I believe that this happens all the time. Our minds don't keep a very good track of the memories we have so when some drift off it's almost as if they were never there in the first place.
There's a feeling that people sometimes experience that we call redolence. It's not the dictionary definition - which is more olfactory - but by explanation I would describe it this way: an other-worldly experience of remembrance or reminiscence similar in its indescribableness to Deja-Vu and triggered often by smells and music.
I experience this quite often. Perhaps I smell a particular odour and instantly a part of my brain is set into action and interacts pleasurably with my mind in order to bring back a memory or moment in time. It's a lovely feeling. There are also some songs that do exactly the same thing although slightly more contrived, e.g.
Emma's House by The Field Mice,
If I could Shine by The Sweetest Ache
Most of Dire Staits' first album or Making Movies
Certain songs of David Bowie, Space Oddity, Fame, Young Americans
Many songs from Big Country's first two albums
These are songs that I listened to in my early teens and I guess they stuck. When I play Down to the Waterline or Espresso Love by Dire Straits I'm instantly transported back to myself at the age of 13 playing ZX Spectrum computer games with my brothers.
I was recently experimenting with a BBC B BASIC emulator. I was typing a very simple BASIC program into the screen copied from the INPUT magazines. I completed the program, typed RUN and pressed ENTER. The program worked nicely. I was then faced with the dilemma of how to go back and view the program. Without thinking it seemed like my brain told my mind exactly what to do. A strange and uncanny feeling came over me like something had been dredged up from a dark corner of my memory - and literally it had - I hadn't typed the LIST command into a computer for about 20 years. That particular data had lain dormant all that time, taking up space in my brain and suddenly popped back up for air and shocked me into the line of thinking I'm on with this post. What other dark and dusty corners of my mind will be resurrected next? It's a little scary.
What I take from all this is that the reorganisation of my brain is what's important rather than the particular content at various fixed points. I can't do much about the memories I keep, but I can do something conscious about the way it's organised, linked and cross-pollinated.
As human brains evolve over the next centuries it would be surprising if they don't become more aware of the influence of memories and thereby become more aware of the data stored therein. I imagine a brain of the future to be much more self-aware and more logically interconnected. Perhaps a new lobe will appear that will deal with the organisation of memory. A mechanism that can recall specific memories more precisely than now would only benefit the lucky individual who had that mechanism. I would argue counter to that idea, however and say that that individual would perhaps lose out on the experience of redolence I describe above. I value logic and precision, but perhaps humans aren't supposed to be too mentally robotic. It would be a gradual change of course, and my prejudices of how humans are "supposed" to be would be invalid in a society that is based on high technology and logic.
A better solution (perhaps I mentioned this in a previous post) would be to understand the integrations and processing of information in the brain so as to define a translation mechanism to that other great medium for information manipulation - Silicon! I imagine a future where the precise action potentials, inter-synaptic neurotransmitter mechanisms and other communication methods are understood at least in sensory areas of the brain so that a silicon-based transmitter and receiver can be placed in the loop. This may be able to receive signals from the brain at various points in order to create a direct output. Similarly the module could transmit data directly into the brain to produce experience not before possible.
The technicalities of the interface are relatively trivial compared with the deciphering of the data. How is information actually passed around the brain? How can this information be Typed so that it can be stored in Silicon? I believe that it's possible to do this.
Someone wants you to watch their home movies. You press a button that wires their signal directly into the optic nerve pathway to your brain (or more likely it would need to be pre-integrated and fed directly to the Occipital lobe) and hey presto! you're experiencing their home movie effectively first hand.
Obviously this is not my idea. Writers and dramatists have been conjuring this trick for a long time (the Black Mirror recent Channel 4 series on TV dealt with it nicely, if trivially in "The Entire History of You" by Jesse Armstrong). I am, however, very interested in the mechanism by which it might work. How can we translate a feeling into a dataset? The method that I think will work is an ontological one. By defining an ontology the domain can be modelled in a dynamic and flexible way. The key to making it work is to define the Entities and Relationships cleverly. The entities and relationships that I can imagine right now are probably not the ones that will eventually be employed in these devices of the future - I cannot understand because the neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology have not yet brought forth the entities and relationships that are universal enough to capture both the deep processing of our brains and the universal truths of our perceptible universe.
In the meantime I will endeavour to delve into the realm of universal truth if only to skim lightly on the surface tension and perhaps, if I'm lucky, occasionally break the tension enough to make wet my big toe!
There are others who say that humans only use a small fraction of the brain's capacity. This is absolute nonsense. Only when the way that the brain works is understood can this idea be posited one way or the other. The human brain is an almost literally unfathomably complicated structure and it's quite possible that we are simply not capable of understanding how it works let alone be able to derive the workings through science.
Is it possible to say when the brain is full? I don't think so. The capacity is not a function of the number of neurons or connections, but of the integration effects and higher order interactions that take place because of the number of neurons and connections. These mechanisms are still unknown to scientists. In my view it would be possible for two individuals to have the same mental capacity, but with a significantly different number of brain cells.
I'm mentioning this stuff because until recently I was going along with Holmes's idea and not only lamenting the gaining of knowledge due to the commensurate loss of data, but actively trying to filter the knowledge gained in order to retain the info I have already. I was struggling to remember things occasionally and put this down to a combination of tiredness, age and an almost full brain! This seems silly now. I guess I hadn't really thought about it too much. I now don't think I have reached my mental capacity. I still have some serious confusions, however I put this down to causes other than there not being enough "space left"!
The best way to remember things is to strengthen the memories by methods such as repetition, referencing and stress. These are partly described by Cognitive Rhetoric which is a field in which I have particular interest, but that's a topic for another post.
On the same tack, and to use the rhetorical device of Reductio Ad Absurdum, I could say that my brain would be more receptive to new information if I were to remove some old data. If I were able simply to clear out the memory pathways of things I don't care for any longer then that would surely allow them to be used anew for stuff that I now want to remember.
Unfortunately this absurd reduction isn't practical. I can't unremember things easily. The best way to forget something is to not recall it for some length of time, but by recalling it it strengthens the memory so I can't know what has been forgotten - I just need to keep focussed on the things I care about and hope that those old memories just fade away.
I believe that this happens all the time. Our minds don't keep a very good track of the memories we have so when some drift off it's almost as if they were never there in the first place.
There's a feeling that people sometimes experience that we call redolence. It's not the dictionary definition - which is more olfactory - but by explanation I would describe it this way: an other-worldly experience of remembrance or reminiscence similar in its indescribableness to Deja-Vu and triggered often by smells and music.
I experience this quite often. Perhaps I smell a particular odour and instantly a part of my brain is set into action and interacts pleasurably with my mind in order to bring back a memory or moment in time. It's a lovely feeling. There are also some songs that do exactly the same thing although slightly more contrived, e.g.
Emma's House by The Field Mice,
If I could Shine by The Sweetest Ache
Most of Dire Staits' first album or Making Movies
Certain songs of David Bowie, Space Oddity, Fame, Young Americans
Many songs from Big Country's first two albums
These are songs that I listened to in my early teens and I guess they stuck. When I play Down to the Waterline or Espresso Love by Dire Straits I'm instantly transported back to myself at the age of 13 playing ZX Spectrum computer games with my brothers.
I was recently experimenting with a BBC B BASIC emulator. I was typing a very simple BASIC program into the screen copied from the INPUT magazines. I completed the program, typed RUN and pressed ENTER. The program worked nicely. I was then faced with the dilemma of how to go back and view the program. Without thinking it seemed like my brain told my mind exactly what to do. A strange and uncanny feeling came over me like something had been dredged up from a dark corner of my memory - and literally it had - I hadn't typed the LIST command into a computer for about 20 years. That particular data had lain dormant all that time, taking up space in my brain and suddenly popped back up for air and shocked me into the line of thinking I'm on with this post. What other dark and dusty corners of my mind will be resurrected next? It's a little scary.
What I take from all this is that the reorganisation of my brain is what's important rather than the particular content at various fixed points. I can't do much about the memories I keep, but I can do something conscious about the way it's organised, linked and cross-pollinated.
As human brains evolve over the next centuries it would be surprising if they don't become more aware of the influence of memories and thereby become more aware of the data stored therein. I imagine a brain of the future to be much more self-aware and more logically interconnected. Perhaps a new lobe will appear that will deal with the organisation of memory. A mechanism that can recall specific memories more precisely than now would only benefit the lucky individual who had that mechanism. I would argue counter to that idea, however and say that that individual would perhaps lose out on the experience of redolence I describe above. I value logic and precision, but perhaps humans aren't supposed to be too mentally robotic. It would be a gradual change of course, and my prejudices of how humans are "supposed" to be would be invalid in a society that is based on high technology and logic.
A better solution (perhaps I mentioned this in a previous post) would be to understand the integrations and processing of information in the brain so as to define a translation mechanism to that other great medium for information manipulation - Silicon! I imagine a future where the precise action potentials, inter-synaptic neurotransmitter mechanisms and other communication methods are understood at least in sensory areas of the brain so that a silicon-based transmitter and receiver can be placed in the loop. This may be able to receive signals from the brain at various points in order to create a direct output. Similarly the module could transmit data directly into the brain to produce experience not before possible.
The technicalities of the interface are relatively trivial compared with the deciphering of the data. How is information actually passed around the brain? How can this information be Typed so that it can be stored in Silicon? I believe that it's possible to do this.
Someone wants you to watch their home movies. You press a button that wires their signal directly into the optic nerve pathway to your brain (or more likely it would need to be pre-integrated and fed directly to the Occipital lobe) and hey presto! you're experiencing their home movie effectively first hand.
Obviously this is not my idea. Writers and dramatists have been conjuring this trick for a long time (the Black Mirror recent Channel 4 series on TV dealt with it nicely, if trivially in "The Entire History of You" by Jesse Armstrong). I am, however, very interested in the mechanism by which it might work. How can we translate a feeling into a dataset? The method that I think will work is an ontological one. By defining an ontology the domain can be modelled in a dynamic and flexible way. The key to making it work is to define the Entities and Relationships cleverly. The entities and relationships that I can imagine right now are probably not the ones that will eventually be employed in these devices of the future - I cannot understand because the neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology have not yet brought forth the entities and relationships that are universal enough to capture both the deep processing of our brains and the universal truths of our perceptible universe.
In the meantime I will endeavour to delve into the realm of universal truth if only to skim lightly on the surface tension and perhaps, if I'm lucky, occasionally break the tension enough to make wet my big toe!
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Facebook on Mars
About 12 years ago there was a considerable panic about the so-called Year-2000-Bug. This was a potential problem in computer systems caused by the programs running on them being fit only for dates up to the year 2000. The exact reasons why people thought there would be a problem are due to the way that computers handle dates and are fairly complex, but in effect people believed that as soon as the last second on December 31st 1999 passed then planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear arsenals would spontaneously fire at their targets and fridges the world over would cease to work. This turned out not to be true in the end and I don't think it's known widely why - perhaps a combination of media frenzy (it's a good story) and IT professionals making a bit of extra wonga.
The phenomenon seems to have gone from the public consciousness. Not mine though. The issue of computer programs being fit for purpose has never gone away and perhaps it's only good fortune that we can't think 1000 years hence to the next Millennium Bug. We can, however, predict in our children's lifetimes a proliferation both physically and mechanically across our solar system - Moon bases, Mars bases, Titan outposts, some populated by humans and some not.
Are computer designers today thinking about the implications of where their code may end up in 50 years? I doubt it very much. It's probably less of a problem these days compared with the causes of the Y2K problem - which lie in the 1960s - because there is more awareness, however some things spring to mind.
Of course organisations such as NASA already have to deal with this sort of problem, however this has yet to trickle down to the rest of the computing industry except for a few forward-thinking groups.
I worry for the CEO or CTO of the future. When viewing statistics across the whole solar system group how will they view correctly the time/date-based attribute hierarchies of their MOLAP systems?! At the moment Earth-based data considers a year to be 365 Earth-days (or perhaps 365.25 to be more precise). This will not be the same on Mars. The Martian year is about 687 Earth-days long. Fortunately the Martian day is just over 24 Earth-hours so that should be easily converted.
If you're living on Mars and updating your Facebook status then the how will the update time be displayed to someone on Earth? There are already mechanisms that mimic UTC on a solar-system scale, but are people ready for that?
Is it about time that computer practitioners were made more aware? This is, of course, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but a more serious problem for the West may be that conversion of Western natural language and calendars (English, French, Gregorian, Hebrew etc) into Chinese equivalents (if they exist) is lacking too. If the current trend of space-exploration being led by China continues then those software programs that can't convert in this way will not survive.
The phenomenon seems to have gone from the public consciousness. Not mine though. The issue of computer programs being fit for purpose has never gone away and perhaps it's only good fortune that we can't think 1000 years hence to the next Millennium Bug. We can, however, predict in our children's lifetimes a proliferation both physically and mechanically across our solar system - Moon bases, Mars bases, Titan outposts, some populated by humans and some not.
Are computer designers today thinking about the implications of where their code may end up in 50 years? I doubt it very much. It's probably less of a problem these days compared with the causes of the Y2K problem - which lie in the 1960s - because there is more awareness, however some things spring to mind.
Of course organisations such as NASA already have to deal with this sort of problem, however this has yet to trickle down to the rest of the computing industry except for a few forward-thinking groups.
I worry for the CEO or CTO of the future. When viewing statistics across the whole solar system group how will they view correctly the time/date-based attribute hierarchies of their MOLAP systems?! At the moment Earth-based data considers a year to be 365 Earth-days (or perhaps 365.25 to be more precise). This will not be the same on Mars. The Martian year is about 687 Earth-days long. Fortunately the Martian day is just over 24 Earth-hours so that should be easily converted.
If you're living on Mars and updating your Facebook status then the how will the update time be displayed to someone on Earth? There are already mechanisms that mimic UTC on a solar-system scale, but are people ready for that?
Is it about time that computer practitioners were made more aware? This is, of course, slightly tongue-in-cheek, but a more serious problem for the West may be that conversion of Western natural language and calendars (English, French, Gregorian, Hebrew etc) into Chinese equivalents (if they exist) is lacking too. If the current trend of space-exploration being led by China continues then those software programs that can't convert in this way will not survive.
Monday, January 02, 2012
Homosexuals, women and automated natural language representation.
I have the utmost respect for individual people who achieve something creative and worthy. Gender and sexuality have very little to do with this since intellect is not generally influenced negatively by either. Most societies, however, view gender and sexuality as more important then they are. This certainly applies to homosexuals and women who I believe have had a rough time at the hands of bigots and idiots for millennia.
This imbalance is being addressed most in progressive societies and I feel lucky that I live in one of the most advanced cultures in this respect. That's not to say that there are not problems still and also it's not fair to deny that there are some differences between different classes of humans based on gender and sexuality that are sometimes ignored - these can cause problems too and ought to be addressed as openly as the fact that the intelligence and personality of humans is more important than what they look like, their chromosomal orientation and what they find attractive in other humans.
Ada Lovelace was a Victorian woman who worked closely with Charles Babbage in the middle of the 19th century in England. Charles Babbage brilliantly developed the theory for a number of different computing engines. One of these was the Analytical Engine which is assumed to be a very early precursor to the modern general purpose computer (a PC for example). Babbage was no doubt a genius for mathematical problems and theorising on computation, however the leap from maths to a general computer is often attributed to Ada rather than Charles. Lovelace's notes on the Analytical Engine contain an explanation of a way to represent alphabetical letters via the mathematical computation and thereby produce computation on language rather than only on numbers.
These notes were mostly forgotten for half a century, but contain the seeds of an idea later developed by Alan Turing in the 1930s. Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who developed a number of ideas interbellum that laid the foundation for modern computing. Working in mathematical theory only he was able to develop ideas about the Turing Machine. This is a model of a computing system that uses algorithms on inputted letters to produce various required outputs. It was used by subsequent computer scientists to develop actual computing devices and is still used today for theoretical work in computer science.
The modern computer is almost ubiquitous in the West, but very few people understand how they work and perhaps fewer still what they actually are! In essence a modern PC is a translation machine. It takes various inputs in binary that are representations of things that are important to humans and translates them via calculations (simple additions, subtractions, Boolean logic etc) into different representations that are important to humans. The computer never has any care or understanding of what the representations mean; it's only the fact that a human can attribute importance to the alphabetical representations (or graphical) that gives a computer any worth.
This is the key idea that Lovelace documented over 150 years ago and that Turing mathmetised and practised at Bletchley Park over 75 years ago. We owe the modern world and computers to a particular woman and a particular homosexual man. This post is a celebration of the positive affect these figures had on the world despite their situation being considered substandard even today by some. In my opinion it's time their contributions were better known and appreciated.
I'm quite sure that there were many, many individuals who contributed to this development who were neither homosexual nor female and I don't wish to forget their efforts too, but that can wait for another post.
As long as computers are representing things we care about in electrical circuits then they will always need attention to keep them up-to-date with what we find informative. The Turing Test is another legacy of Alan Turing and one which is close to my heart since I have wanted to crack it most of my life. It's extremely difficult to fool a human being when it comes to natural language since we are almost without exception experts in it and can recognise innately minute variations from "correctness" almost instantly. I'm not sure that I agree with the idea that the nut is close to being cracked (news item link). Apple's Siri is at the forefront of popular attempts at the Turing Test and even when it can recognise the language itself (not often it seems) it very often fails with "understanding". It's the understanding part that is difficult and it's predicated on many things that come naturally to us as speakers and listeners, e.g. our world knowledge, the context of the situation, body language, how we "feel" at that moment and various complex language recognition mechanisms that we don't even realise we're doing such as Anaphora Resolution.
It's my opinion that an avenue of research to follow that might lead to solving the AI language problem involves the representation of ideas from Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Science. By using the results of research into how human brains use natural language combined with logic systems from philosophy and maths we can create representations that underlie the vagaries of context, grammar and language recognition that can then be combined with other research to develop a computing device that "thinks" like a human rather than "translates" like a machine.
P.S. Britain's treatment of Alan Turing after WW2 is a disgrace in my view and an apology extremely long overdue. This being a year of celebration of Alan Turing might also be a starter for the development of a movement to further quell prejudice and harm to people based on gender or sexuality.
This imbalance is being addressed most in progressive societies and I feel lucky that I live in one of the most advanced cultures in this respect. That's not to say that there are not problems still and also it's not fair to deny that there are some differences between different classes of humans based on gender and sexuality that are sometimes ignored - these can cause problems too and ought to be addressed as openly as the fact that the intelligence and personality of humans is more important than what they look like, their chromosomal orientation and what they find attractive in other humans.
Ada Lovelace was a Victorian woman who worked closely with Charles Babbage in the middle of the 19th century in England. Charles Babbage brilliantly developed the theory for a number of different computing engines. One of these was the Analytical Engine which is assumed to be a very early precursor to the modern general purpose computer (a PC for example). Babbage was no doubt a genius for mathematical problems and theorising on computation, however the leap from maths to a general computer is often attributed to Ada rather than Charles. Lovelace's notes on the Analytical Engine contain an explanation of a way to represent alphabetical letters via the mathematical computation and thereby produce computation on language rather than only on numbers.
These notes were mostly forgotten for half a century, but contain the seeds of an idea later developed by Alan Turing in the 1930s. Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who developed a number of ideas interbellum that laid the foundation for modern computing. Working in mathematical theory only he was able to develop ideas about the Turing Machine. This is a model of a computing system that uses algorithms on inputted letters to produce various required outputs. It was used by subsequent computer scientists to develop actual computing devices and is still used today for theoretical work in computer science.
The modern computer is almost ubiquitous in the West, but very few people understand how they work and perhaps fewer still what they actually are! In essence a modern PC is a translation machine. It takes various inputs in binary that are representations of things that are important to humans and translates them via calculations (simple additions, subtractions, Boolean logic etc) into different representations that are important to humans. The computer never has any care or understanding of what the representations mean; it's only the fact that a human can attribute importance to the alphabetical representations (or graphical) that gives a computer any worth.
This is the key idea that Lovelace documented over 150 years ago and that Turing mathmetised and practised at Bletchley Park over 75 years ago. We owe the modern world and computers to a particular woman and a particular homosexual man. This post is a celebration of the positive affect these figures had on the world despite their situation being considered substandard even today by some. In my opinion it's time their contributions were better known and appreciated.
I'm quite sure that there were many, many individuals who contributed to this development who were neither homosexual nor female and I don't wish to forget their efforts too, but that can wait for another post.
As long as computers are representing things we care about in electrical circuits then they will always need attention to keep them up-to-date with what we find informative. The Turing Test is another legacy of Alan Turing and one which is close to my heart since I have wanted to crack it most of my life. It's extremely difficult to fool a human being when it comes to natural language since we are almost without exception experts in it and can recognise innately minute variations from "correctness" almost instantly. I'm not sure that I agree with the idea that the nut is close to being cracked (news item link). Apple's Siri is at the forefront of popular attempts at the Turing Test and even when it can recognise the language itself (not often it seems) it very often fails with "understanding". It's the understanding part that is difficult and it's predicated on many things that come naturally to us as speakers and listeners, e.g. our world knowledge, the context of the situation, body language, how we "feel" at that moment and various complex language recognition mechanisms that we don't even realise we're doing such as Anaphora Resolution.
It's my opinion that an avenue of research to follow that might lead to solving the AI language problem involves the representation of ideas from Neurolinguistics and Cognitive Science. By using the results of research into how human brains use natural language combined with logic systems from philosophy and maths we can create representations that underlie the vagaries of context, grammar and language recognition that can then be combined with other research to develop a computing device that "thinks" like a human rather than "translates" like a machine.
P.S. Britain's treatment of Alan Turing after WW2 is a disgrace in my view and an apology extremely long overdue. This being a year of celebration of Alan Turing might also be a starter for the development of a movement to further quell prejudice and harm to people based on gender or sexuality.
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