Turing's cathedral
Monday, February 27, 2006, 02:42 AM - Beautiful Code, Theory
The digital universe was conceived by Old Testament prophets (led by Leibniz) who supplied the logic, and delivered by New Testament prophets (led by von Neumann) who supplied the machines. Alan Turing (1912-1954) formed the bridge between the two.
In a digital computer, the instructions are in the form of COMMAND (ADDRESS) where the address is an exact (either absolute or relative) memory location, a process that translates informally into "DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result." Everything depends not only on precise instructions, but on HERE, THERE, and WHEN being exactly defined. It is almost incomprehensible that programs amounting to millions of lines of code, written by teams of hundreds of people, are able to go out into the computational universe and function as well as they do given that one bit in the wrong place (or the wrong time) can bring the process to a halt.
Biology has taken a completely different approach. There is no von Neumann address matrix, just a molecular soup, and the instructions say simply "DO THIS with the next copy of THAT which comes along." The results are far more robust. There is no unforgiving central address authority, and no unforgiving central clock. This ability to take general, organized advantage of local, haphazard processes is exactly the ability that (so far) has distinguished information processing in living organisms from information processing by digital computers.
READ Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson.
30 comments NES Games and Statistical Analysis
Sunday, February 12, 2006, 03:42 PM - Games
"The New Gamer has published an article which tackles the topic of averaging gameplay. The accompanying video features 15 different players simultaneously shooting their way through the first stage in the NES game Gradius. From the article: 'The average time taken to kill the end level boss was 20.055 seconds, with the fastest player finishing him off in a mere 10.01 seconds. Six people finished the boss off at nearly identical moments. It would seem that the boss, bored with the player, actually self-destructs after 27 seconds. Beyond the almost perfectly synchronized explosions, further proof of this self-destruction can be found in the videos: no 10,000 point bonus (given to players when the boss is defeated) was awarded to these six players and, in a few of the runs, the boss detonated when there wasn't a single bullet near it.' Can we apply other statistical methods to gameplay?"
Link via /.
Weapons of Business Destruction
Tuesday, February 7, 2006, 11:56 PM - Copyfight
How a tiny little "patent troll" got BlackBerry in a headlock:
What would happen if a rogue actor managed to get hold of a powerful patent and threatened to detonate it and destroy e-mail as we know it? You'd have the BlackBerry NTP v. RIM case—the tech world's very own Dr. Strangelove. NTP, a one-man Virginia firm, armed with nothing but patents, currently threatens to bring down BlackBerry and with it the sanity of millions of e-mail addicts. A textbook "patent troll," he wants a billion dollars to stand down. What to do?
It is telling that the dilemmas created by software patents today are routinely compared to those created by nuclear arms, with patent trolls playing the role of the nuclear madman. But while it's easy to bash trolls as evil extortionists, to do so may be to miss an important lesson: Patent trolls aren't evil, but rational and predictable, akin to the mold that eventually grows on rotten meat. They're useful for understanding how the world of software patent got to where it is and what might be done to fix it.
The Slate discusses the obvious differences between patenting an algorithm and a drug.
via /.
Internet game provides breakthrough in predicting the spread of epidemics
Thursday, February 2, 2006, 02:09 PM - Games
Searching for a way to model the modern spread of disease became the focus of discussions among the co-authors: Theo Geisel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization and professor at the University of Goettingen; Dirk Brockmann, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Plank Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization; and Hufnagel. Following a conference in Montreal, Brockmann met with a friend in Vermont, a cabinetmaker, who showed him the internet game for tracking the movement of dollar bills, located at www.wheresgeorge.com. Participants can register a dollar bill, of any denomination, and monitor its geographic circulation.
The physicists were intrigued: Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. They found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws (from local to regional to long-distance scales). Using the game data, they developed a powerful mathematical theory that describes the observed movements of travelers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometers to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.
Blink!
stop in the name of copyright!
Thursday, February 2, 2006, 12:55 AM - Copyfight
FAIRYLAND was in turmoil. During a tech rehearsal for the October 2004 Off Off Broadway production of "Tam Lin" — a play about a clash between mortal and immortal worlds — a real-life clash threatened to derail the show. Exactly what happened has become, literally, a federal case, and the sides agree on very few details. Did the playwright, Nancy McClernan, insist that the director's staging was incompetent? Did the director, Edward Einhorn, refuse to alter it? Did the producer, Jonathan X. Flagg, smash some furniture on the set? One thing's clear: the morning after the tech rehearsal, after two months of unpaid work, Mr. Einhorn was fired.
Please learn how everything could have been different if only some people had given away a few dollars on time. Around $3M.
Copyright has a problem: It's called the Internet.
Sunday, January 22, 2006, 10:57 PM - Copyfight
Protecting stuff comes from fear. Believing that someone is out to take it, raises the question of what led you to the conclusion that whatever it is has such a potential for destroying your way of life? And since you have reached this conclusion, where did the idea come from to put it on the web?
As seen in Gapingvoid, a great rant on Copyright in The Head Lemur
Hollywood to Google (on video over IP): don't take it away from me!
Saturday, January 21, 2006, 06:21 PM - Copyfight, Media
Major article from the consultant office i2 Partners War of the Worlds: Hollywood Opts Out of the 'Google Economy':
Hollywood believes large-scale broadband video distribution would only destroy proven value, fail to provide alternative value, and alter a business model that is still far from being in decline. With near-total control of the most valuable program libraries and the business models governing their distribution, a shift towards broadband media will come largely on Hollywood’s terms and at an incremental pace.
Read the article
Download the PDF
TY Damien
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