society of mind

Long time no writing.. I know.. :) But this time it's for a good.. So many amazing things happen around me and all over the world, that I can hardly find the time to write about them.. I'm learning everyday new stuff and perhaps that makes me happy. The big step is in accepting that knowing everithing is imposible. Which reminds me of that funny story about the little girl, that came to Marvin Minsky and asked him " Do you know what I'm thinking of?". Marvin replied - "No.". "I thought so!" conclueded the girl and ran happily away.. End of story :)

Conquest '11

This year's Conquest was a little bit of disappointment.. Not enough action and this time we (the NPCs) didn't have fortress. So it was more like, players are playing and we were their discomfort element.

The plot was cycling around the closed seal of the "Technische Ratio" (no idea how to translate it properly, sry) It is the 5th and most powerful element of the ostracized (Schwarzes Eis, Untoten, Pestilenz and Leere). For some reason the NPCs cannot open this seal, so the elements got this honor. I personally cannot find much of a sense behind that action, because as we know, the "Technische Ratio" is on the side of the evil. Why should the elements (the good guys) want to set free the biggest evil? Hopefully there is a good explanation, different from "knowing there is a monster behind that door, makes you twice likely to open it". We'll see. Just patience (virtue I don't possess, unfortunately)..

Oh, and there is that awesome LARP I recently found the website of - 42k . A nice mix of futuristic cyber war. DO WANT! Plans in progress…

Bronx vs. Brooklyn

A young man lives in Manhattan near a subway express station. He has two girl friends, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx. To visit the girl in Brooklyn, he takes a train on the downtown side of the platform. To visit the girl in the Bronx, he takes a train on the uptown side of the same platform. Since he likes both girls equally well, he simply takes the first train that comes along. In this way he lets chance determine whether he rides to the Bronx or to Brooklyn. The young man reaches the subway platform at a random moment each Saturday afternoon. Brooklyn and Bronx trains arrive at the station equally often - every 10 minutes. Yet for some obscure reason, he finds himself spending most of his time with the girl in Brooklyn: in fact, on the average he goes there nine times out of ten. Can you think of a good reason why the odds so heavily favor Brooklyn?

:) Yeee, it's not a morally right scenario, but the reason is a good one.. I like the riddle..

paradoxes

Surprisingly, the whole western philosophy and logic are grounded on magic and are full of paradoxes. This doesn't make them less beautiful and useful, however..

Here some questions to ponder:


A classical example of statement, that is a paradox, but not recursive..


The Devil's argument:




BUT:

new Chomsky()

The language is one of the most amazing tools developed by humans. It reflects the way we think and the way we perceive our environment. It helps us transfer and preserve knowledge, emotions, experience. In my diploma thesis at the KIT, I had to work a lot with language and speech. I learned much about the acoustics of a speech. And I realized for myself, that the holy grail is the semantics and pragmatics of the language. We understand the acoustic part of human speech pretty well and therefore created accurate models of it. But the last % of perfect speech recognition performance can be gained only by understanding speech on top of parsing sounds successfully. In my opinion it is time to start more eagerly exploring structures that will capture the meaning and reflect the data organization of human mind. The problem here is, we need knowledge from engineering, linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy and behavioral psychology. We need a concept that will merge these areas and people brave enough to step aside of the path that is thought to be "the right". And while waiting for the new universal genius to be born.. a fun comic-shaped fact:

Richii Majhong Master

And here is the successful recipe: 30% luck, 30% strategy, 40% statistics :)

Oh WAAAAW!

swarming

These little robotic creatures are working hardly. The red army is trying to sort the red blocks, the green army - the green blocks. Of course, this process takes time and unfortunately, I don't have enough space on my cell phone.

:) They have, of course leaders. These are robots that place themselves somewhere and wait for the others from the army to store collected blocks around the selected location.
They can also, communicate with each other, but only with very simple messages, like.. "Hey, I'm here, in front of you, let's both turn left, or we'll crash." (ok, not exactly this way.. however..)

sursum corda

That's what one very special for me person used to say..

My grandpa passed away on 16th December.. It happend the same day I spent on the airport waiting for the plane to take me home.. He was the most amazing human being in the world and what I learned from him is that there is nothing stronger than the human spirit and nobody wiser than the one, who is thinking with the hearts of the other people.

There are moments like this one, when I'm about to lose my belief that the sun will rise tomorrow, but then, I think I can hear him, calm and wise, like always, saying 'cheer up your heart!'.. and, of course, the morning comes...