I just hacked up something like variant 3; haven’t tried to do anything interesting with it yet.
darius
- 6 Jun 2013 0:10 UTC; 11 points) 's comment on Prisoner’s Dilemma (with visible source code) Tournament by (
There might be more agreement here than meets the eye. Drexler often posts informatively and approvingly about progress in DNA nanotechnology and other bio-related tech at http://metamodern.com ; this is the less surprising when you remember his very first nanotech paper outlined protein engineering as the development path. Nanosystems is mainly about establishing the feasibility of a range of advanced capabilities which happen to not already be done by biology, and for which it’s not obvious how it could. Biology and its environment being complicated and all, as Jones says.
Freitas in Nanomedicine addresses applying a Nanosystems technology base to our bio problems, or at least purports to—I haven’t been able to get into it because it’s really long-winded and set in tiny type. Nanosystems was more inviting.
About this article’s tags: you want dark_arts, judging by the tags in the sidebar. The ‘arts’ tag links to posts about fiction, etc.
ObDarkArts101: Here’s a course that could actually have been titled that:
Writing Persuasion (Spring 2011) A course in persuasive techniques that do not rely on overt arguments. It would not be entirely inaccurate to call this a course in the theory, practice, and critique of sophistry. We will explore how putatively neutral narratives may be inflected to advance a (sometimes unstated) position; how writing can exploit readers’ cognitive biases; how a writer’s persona on the page—what Aristotle might call her ethos—may be constructed to influence her readers.
‘Something to protect’ always sounded to me like a term for a defensive attitude, a kind of bias; I have to remind myself it’s LW jargon for something quite different. ‘Definite major purpose’ avoids this problem.
If you’d rather run with a very small and well-defined Scheme dialect meant just for this problem, see my reply to Eliezer proposing this kind of tournament. I made up a restricted language since Racket’s zillion features would get in the way of interesting source-code analyses. Maybe they’ll make the game more interesting in other ways?
You bring up cryonics and AI. 25 years ago Engines of Creation had a chapter on each, plus another on… a global hypertext publishing network like the Web. The latter seemed less absurd back then than the first two, but it was still pretty far out there:
One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. We provided lots of explanation. We had pictures. We had scenarios, little stories that told what it would be like. People would ask astonishing questions, like “who’s going to pay to make all those links?” or “why would anyone want to put documents online?” Alas, many things really must be experienced to be understood.
I believed Drexler’s prediction that this technology would be developed by the mid-90s but I didn’t expect it to be taking over the world by then. Probably to most people even in computers it was science fiction.
As far as computers in general, their hardware reliability’s the least intuitive aspect to me. Billions of operations per second, OK, but all in sequence, each depending on the last, without a single error? While I know how that’s possible, it’s still kind of shocking.
the brain misfires. It didn’t make me crave liver and shellfish and molasses, it made me crave water in frozen form.
I think it’s been suggested that this craving made sense when cracking bones with your teeth released iron-rich marrow, and ice cubes were not available. (Hearsay from Seth Roberts’s blog; I don’t have a reference.)
There’s a Javascript library by Andrew Plotkin for this sort of thing that handles ‘a/an’ and capitalization and leaves your code less repetitive, etc.
“Does this position win?” has a structure like “Is there a move such that, for each possible reply there is a move such that, for each possible reply… you win.”—where existential and universal quantifiers alternate in the nesting. In a SAT problem on the other hand you just have a nest of existentials. I don’t know about Go specifically, but that’s my understanding of the usual core difference between games and SAT.
Stephan Guyenet’s blog is my favorite on diet from the kind of perspective presented in this post. It’s wide-ranging with regular critical discussion of research, with links to the sources. (My layman’s opinion.)
I also reviewed some of his prototype code for a combinatorial prediction market around 10 years ago. I agree that these are promising ideas and I liked this post a lot.
Radical Abundance, came out this past month.
Added: The most relevant things in the book for this post (which I’ve only skimmed):
There’s been lots of progress in molecular-scale engineering and science that isn’t called nanotechnology. This progress has been pretty much along the lines Drexler sketched in his 1981 paper and in the how-can-we-get-there sections of Nanosystems, though. This matches what I saw sitting in on Caltech courses in biomolecular engineering last year. Drexler believes the biggest remaining holdup on the engineering work is how it’s organized: when diverse scientists study nature their work adds up because nature is a whole, but when they work on bits and pieces of technology infrastructure in the same way, their work can’t be expected to coalesce on its own into useful systems.
He gives his latest refinement of the arguments at a lay level.
Yes—in my version of this you do get passed your own source code as a convenience.
A quick-and-dirty server-based webification (no Javascript): http://wry.me:7002/ with source code at http://github.com/darius/wason/ (only lightly tested).
- 20 May 2009 5:13 UTC; 10 points) 's comment on Positive Bias Test (C++ program) by (
Isn’t an H atom more like 0.1nm in diameter? Of course it’s fuzzy.
I agree with steven0461′s criticisms. Drexler outlines a computer design giving a lower bound of 10^16 instructions/second/watt.
Should there be a ref to http://e-drexler.com/d/07/00/1204TechnologyRoadmap.html ?
Quibbling about words: “atom by atom” seems to have caused some confusion with some people (taking it literally as defining how you build things when the important criterion is atomic precision). Also “nanobots” was coined in a ST:TNG episode, IIRC, and I’m not sure if people in the field use it.
A doctor faces a patient whose problem has resisted decision-tree diagnosis—decision trees augmented by intangibles of experience and judgement, sure. The patient wants some creative debugging, which might at least fail differently. Will they get their wish? Not likely: what’s in it for the doctor? The patient has some power of exit, not much help against a cartel. To this patient, to first order, Phil Goetz is right, and your points partly elaborate why he’s right and partly list higher-order corrections.
(I did my best to put it dispassionately, but I’m rather angry about this.)
Here’s the argument I’d give for this kind of bottleneck. I haven’t studied evolutionary genetics; maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong.
In the steady state, an average individual has n children in their life, and just one of those n makes it to the next generation. (Crediting a child 1⁄2 to each parent.) This gives log2(n) bits of error-correcting signal to prune deleterious mutations. If the genome length times the functional bits per base pair times the mutation rate is greater than that log2(n), then you’re losing functionality with every generation.
One way for a beneficial new mutation to get out of this bind is by reducing the mutation rate. Another is refactoring the same functionality into fewer bits, freeing up bits for something new. But generically a fitness advantage doesn’t seem to affect the argument that the signal from purifying selection gets shared by the whole genome.
Ah -- .1nm is also the C-H or C-C bond length, which comes to mind more naturally to me thinking about the scale of an organic molecule—enough to make me wonder where the 0.24 was coming from. E.g. a (much bigger) sulfur atom can have bonds that long.
Thanks! Yes, I figure one-shot and iterated PDs might both hold interest, and the one-shot came first since it’s simpler. That’s a neat idea about probing ahead.
I’ll return to the code in a few days.
Robin Hanson proposed much the same over 20 years ago in “Buy Health, Not Health Care”.