Hide'n'Seek

:) I've moved my blog to a new address.  I would gladly tell you how to find my new home, but it would be too easy, wouldn't it? Therefore, we can play a game. First to post the new address gets a chocolate. I can ship all over the world, so.. Let's see how easy it is to find something hidden on the web. 

An anti-gravity kitty called Newton

Quite a lot of time passed since my last post. Seriously, this time, I wasn't lazy, but too busy.

Just kiddin', I played final fantasy and read comics..

Anyway, let's not waste the precious reader's time. Right to the point of this post, namely science and why we actually believe in it *. Actually, all the noise is only due to this quote I wanted to share at any cost, just because it summarises my feelings about the future of humanity thanks to science:

"The oil will never run out. It's not because we have a lot of it. It's not because we'll gonna build a billion windmills. It's because, well, thousands of years ago people had ideas, inventions, technology and the stone age ended. Not because we ran out of stones… "

Richard Sears "Planning for the end of oil" TED

* (I know you expected a picture of cat and here is the official sorry for disappointing you: Deeply, truly sorry!)

not asking the right question

"The question is not whether intelligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions." (Marvin Minsky)

penguins and ostriches

"It's not bad to start with "Birds can fly." and later change it into "birds can fly, unless they are penguins or ostriches". But if you continue to seek perfection, your rules will turn into monstrosities:

Birds can fly, unless they are penguins or ostriches, or if they happen to be dead, or have broken wings, or are confined to cages, or have their feet stuck in cement, or have undergone experiences so dreadful, as to render them incapable of flight.

Unless we treat exceptions separately, they'll wreck all the generalizations we may try to make. 

We almost never find rules that have no exceptions- except in certain special artificial worlds that we ourselves create by making up their rules and regulations to begin with. Artificial realms like mathematics and theology are built from the start to be devoid of interesting inconsistency. But we must be careful not to mistake our own inventions for natural phenomena we have discovered. To insist on perfect laws in real life is to risk not finding any laws at all."

Nonsense

It seems that I have lots of spare time recently. :) I'm still waiting for the Stanford University open courses to start. That will take awhile..

But now for something completely different... I might have mentioned about the "Society of Mind" lectures. In one of them, Minsky started to explain theories about "Why jokes are funny?". According to the mighty Freud, jokes are funny, because they are messing with "not allowed" topics. Things our society try to suppress thinking or talking of, like violence, sex, bad politics, etc.. So our mind is trying to mask our real thoughts by making them seem not serious. And you might say, "Ye, Freud, the guy is nuts!", but I find it reasonable explanation for the majority of the jokes. And here's the funny part, Freud's theory does not explain why the nonsensical jokes are also funny. Does it?

Think about it for a moment. Why are nonsense jokes funny? This is extremely interesting question for me, because I'm a big big fan of Monty Python, and the jokes there are totally nonsensical. It's like a surrealism without the depri-art part. So I needed to know why people are laughing like crazy when they hear a punchline that's completely illogical and sometimes not related to the rest of the joke.

The answer is here. In this wonderful paper, Minsky suggests that the reason people laugh when hearing nonsense jokes is the same as the reason they laugh about all other kinds of jokes . And this reason was originally formulated by Freud - they allow our childish consciousness to play with forbidden things. This time, the forbidden topic is logic, or more precisely, the lack of it. Illogical thinking is considered bad thing in our society and the people speaking nonsense are labeled dumb. Of course, not if you are telling jokes ;) .

And now for something completely the same: a fine selection of toys for your mind I found around the web:

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Two strawberries were sitting in the bathtub, one said to the other 'can you pass the soap' the other replies 'what the fuck do I look like, a typewriter?'

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If you say Jesus backwards it sounds like sausage.

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- Why did the plane crash?

- Because the pilot was a loaf of bread.

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- What's the difference between a duck?

- One's twice as long as itself.

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- Ask me if I'm an orange.

- Are you an orange?

- No.

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Driving down a road Santa sees a sign that says, “Watch for Fallen Rocks.” A few kilometres later, he sees some rocks at the side of the road, so he stops and picks them up. When he gets to the next town, he carries the rocks into the Highway Maintenance office and puts them on the counter. “Here are your fallen rocks,” he says to the man behind the counter. “Now where is my watch?”.

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Inpatient customer, sarcastically:

- "Waiter, do you serve crabs?"

- "Sit down, sir - we serve anyone."

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Descartes is sitting in a bar. The bartender asks him if he'd like another drink. Descartes replies, "I think not" and *poof* he disappears.

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These here are from the paper:

A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it".

--- from Freud (1905).

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"A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach."

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Well, some of them are not complete nonsense, see.. But they are in the same category, since they make fun of false interpretations. (Btw, if you have more, please share! :)

Thinking like a moss :)

Two days ago as I was derping around the web (not surprising at all), I discovered this awesome open course called "Critical reasoning for beginners". What's all about? The title does not say much to me, as I simply cannot catch what's so critical about reasoning. However, the content is circling around the nature of arguments and how by using logic and simple structuring rules to make your arguments stronger.

What's nice about all that stuff is, that even from the first lecture, one learns a lot of definitions formulated in "human understandable language" ( I mean, not only with symbols, as we learned it in the formal systems course, e.g. P or !P = true ). Besides, the lecturer has soooo amazingly wonderful beautiful amusing British accent, which might be the real reason for me listening to the lectures. Btw, she started the lecture with part of a Monty Python sketch (this one)!

Here's some interesting stuff: we are somehow used to say that an argument is true or false. But arguments cannot be true or false, they can be simply good or bad. The premises of an argument can be true or false, for example, but not the arguments themselves. And the good arguments are truth-preserving, because they can preserve the truth of the premises in the conclusion.

There is also this interesting statement I very much like: "There are only 2 sorts of things that can be true or false in this world. One of them is beliefs and the other is the sentences we use to express beliefs." At first, I was little bit confused, because beliefs are kinda subjective. But later on, it became clear, that there is a difference between religious beliefs, etc. and the term belief in the philosophy.

Also, I found out, that there are levels of abstraction and often the reason for a bad argument is when you are not able to make the difference between those. The clarity of thoughts is a consequence of not confusing those levels. And there's a very nice example:

Let's use chair, concept of chair and "chair". Saying that chair has 5 letters is not true, because chairs don't have letters. It also does not make sense to say that the concept of chair that someone has in mind has 5 letters. Therefore saying "Chair has 5 letters." makes sense only when chair is seen as a word. And that's definetely different abstraction level from the first two.

Singularity

Recently, I found some nice graphical novels. Pure pleasure. One of them is Singularity 7 by Ben Templesmith, who is sooooo god damn kiddnapped by UFOs, that my head explodes when I see his paintings.



Another nice stuff is Robotika, which is a story about Niko - steam punk samurai.


Some times ago, I had to buy paper comix, which was pretty expensive, very slow (especially for a person with NO patience like me). But now with my iPad, it is so easy and fast and cheap and does not require extra space to store the decaying paper bodies. *rainbows and unicorns*

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...

the robot competition last week

George the robot

brain deciphering

Gero Miesenboeck reengineers a brain | Video on TED.com

crazy talk

While searching for something, I found a weird conversation. *rofl*