“turing”
3 posts under this tag.
A math experiment was carried out recently when Alex Smith —an Electronic and Computer Engineering undergraduate with “a background in mathematics and esoteric programming languages”— proved that the Turing machine below is in fact universal, making it the simplest universal Turing machine possible. In other words, the cute graph below are the instructions for an abstract symbol-manipulating machine that can in principle do anything your computer (or any other computer for that matter) can do.
Stephen Wolfram, who made the conjecture and offered a $25k reward for proving it, reports:
We’ve come a long way since Alan Turing’s original 1936 universal Turing machine—taking four pages of dense notation to describe.
We did an experiment; and PCE [the Principle of Computational Equivalence] was validated.
But unlike some science experiments, it didn’t take a multibillion-dollar particle accelerator. It just took a 20-year-old undergraduate with a PC.
[It’s] a wonderful monument in the computational universe—a marker at the edge of universality for Turing machines.
It’s a very satisfying way to spend $25,000.
Now, ain’t this just breathtaking?
Just good fun writing. On the singularity to boot. To be read with that eemadge from Moravec I always quote in such settings.
Perhaps the week’s biggest and scariest robot news, though—certainly for journalists—was the robot reporters story.
Thomson Financial has been using automatic computer programs to generate news stories for almost six months. The machines can spit out wire-ready copy based on financial reports a mere 0.3 seconds after receiving the data. Thomson management likes its reporter robots so much that it has decided to expand the fleet.
Flesh-and-blood journalists were quick to decry the move. “Those editors who can’t wait to install computers at the expense of journalists should beware,” warned Mark Tran in the Guardian article “Robots write the news.”
“Look at what happened in Space Odyssey, when HAL took over the spaceship. Or worse still, think of Terminator 3, when the Skynet network of computers unleashes nuclear war.”
Tran was joking. Well, half joking. But his joke was also a poignant plea. A robot may be able to turn a share report into three pithy paragraphs in less than a second, but it can’t go and watch movies about other robots and turn that into a warning for the world.
Because it can’t live, it can’t think. Or so we think. Tran’s conclusion isn’t very reassuring. “We endangered financial journalists could prolong our lives in the short term by slapping more adjectives into our copy,” he suggests, “but the writing does seem to be on the wall, as far as earnings reports go.” If all that stands between a writer’s job and redundancy is a few adjectives, well, that’s plain scary.
”Scary”—yes, nice adjective. It’s got human emotion, empathy, experience. Good, we’re still on the right side of the Turing Test the side the robots can’t get to.
Or can they? I can hear the laments already, with 20/20 hindsight. First they came for the bomb disposal crews, and we said nothing. Then they were spot-welding and spray-painting on the auto plant assembly lines, and still we said nothing. Only now that they’ve come for the journalism jobs do the journalists scream. But it’s too late.
Mistrust and paranoia have set in. How do we know Mark Tran isn’t already a robot? “Tran”—does that even sound like a human name?
It’s a losing battle. These days, it seems, there are fewer and fewer jobs a robot couldn’t do. Even automatic translation, which some said only humans could do properly (because meaning requires context and context requires lived experience) is coming on by leaps and bounds, pulling jobs out from under the feet of the lower-level human translators.
Heh, that “first, then, now” schtick never grows old. Here’s another instance of it.
That last paragraph of the quote was included simply for Chepe & Andrea, the two wonderful translators-to-be in my life, to read and grok. It’s not that I don’t support such a lovely liberal-arts profession (I’ve surely considered it for myself in several occasions). I simply believe it’s going to be among the next professions to be submergedEE by AI, and seafaring success thereon will require a different skillset and attitude.
- A patternist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy patterns.
- A form is a linguistic pattern.
- A formist is someone with an unusual ability to discern, manipulate, and enjoy forms.
- Formists are prone to strange and seemingly dumb language misunderstandings. A subtle error in form in a sentence can led a formist completely astray. This is often irritating to non-formists—who, as if they wore cognitive sunglasses that dull them to form, remain undazed by its glaring inconsistencies.
- It is also common for a formist to stop people in mid-sentence only to point out a particularly beautiful (or ugly) form they just noticed in their conversation or the surrounding language. Non-formists find this offensive and obnoxious. They shouldn’t—to continue the sunglass metaphor, where they see drab colors, formists enjoy vivid hues.
- Formists are good at spelling and care about it (even in spite of themselves). They just can’t help noticing it.
- Formists make formidable poets, programmers, writers (of all kinds), philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and translators.
- Formists excel easily in school and in academia in general, both having a marked bias towards verbal talents.
- Formists learn new languages faster and better than non-formists—to the point that their enthusiasm and natural talent can be seriously annoying and off-putting to non-formists. Even Norbert Wiener, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, was overwhelmed by his extremely formist father.
Thus it was a familiar part of our life to hear foreign languages spoken in the household. My father, indeed, could speak some forty of them. He was so proficient in linguistic matters that his insistence as a teacher on accuracy and fluency had the somewhat surprising effect of almost completely inhibiting the efforts of my mother and of us children to speak more than one language.
I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener
- Formists have a natural bias against non-formists (and vice versa); they often think (mistakenly, of course) that theirs is the only kind of intelligence.
- Linguistic pedantry is an occupational hazard of being a formist.
- Eemadges is a website for and by formists. So is the lovingly kept Language Hat.
- Homo Sapiens is the formist ape.
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We live in the age of the triumph of form. In mathematics, physics, music, the arts, and the social sciences, human knowledge and its progress seem to have been reduced in startling and powerful ways to a matter of essential formal structures and their transformations. The magic of computers is the speedy manipulation of 1s and 0s. If they just get faster at it, we hear, they might replace us… Life in all its richness and complexity is said to be fundamentally explainable as combinations and recombinations of a finite genetic code. The axiomatic method rules, not only in mathematics but also in economics, linguistics, sometimes even music. The heroes of this age have been Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, Noam Chomsky, Norbert Wiener, Jacques Monod, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Levi-Strauss, Herbert Simon.
[...]
A college student enrolled in economics, once a branch of ethics, will now spend considerable time manipulating formulas. If she studies language, once firmly the province of humanists and philologists, she will learn formal algorithms. if she hopes to become a psychologist, she must become adept at constructing computational models. The manipulation of form is so powerful and useful that school is now often seen as largely a matter of learning how to do such manipulation.
The Way We Think, Gilles Fauconnier, and Mark Turner (both emphases are mine)
- Much (arguably lame) humor is formist in nature. Puns are the quintessential formist joke.
What did the Buddhist monk say to the hotdog vendor?
“Make me one with everything.”
* * *
When the monk asked for his change, the vendor replied, “Change comes from within.”
Formists just want to have fun.
- A formist compliment: “I’m warm for your form.”
- Formists enjoy proverbs, sayings, slogans, mottoes, aphorisms, and quotes in general. Have you noticed how trivial and pedestrian they sound when rephrased? Much of what we love in them is their form.
- Esperanto is the formist language—a mixed blessing.
- Math is the study of patterns through forms. And thus it was so disappointing to find so surprisingly few formists during the time I pursued a Math major.
- Algebra is the most formist of math theories.
- A classic formist comment: ”X is almost a lump of syntactic sugarWP .”
- It takes a formist to enjoy Toki Pona.
- This list of figures of speech is a formist’s field day. So is this collection of aphorisms.
- All sitcom dialogues are formist but The Simpsons is specially remarkable. Here are two noteworthy compilations of Simpsonian formist candy: Beyond embiggens and cromulent and Subtly Simpsons.
Carl [To the MENSA members]: Let’s make litter of the literati!
Lenny: That was too clever! You’re one of them! [punches him]
Episode: AABF18, They Saved Lisa’s Brain
- Touch, a language of making languages, is a formist wet dream.
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