Handwritten notes about computer science, artificial intelligence, and mathematics. Essays about philosophy, psychology, and society.
I believe the software industry needs a word to differentiate the design of performant software from the inside (or bottom up) versus the outside (or top down). There is a heavy focus on algorithms and data structures in the software engineering world, which is great if you are designing performant software from the inside out (bottom up). But this will only be performant so long as there is one…
The fundamental problem with symbolic AI is that logic is bounded. There is a shape to any corpus of logical expressions that can be programmatically generated via following a set of manipulation rules. And due to the rigid manner in which the corpus evolves, the corpus is bound by its initial position and the rules of manipulation. This is a problem when the corpus has to choose the direction in…
I find it distasteful that non-mathematicians think that Gödel's work introduces a level of subjectivity to mathematics. I agree that one can construct an arbitrary number of mathematical universes via selecting an arbitrary set of axioms. But I disagree that they are somehow all equivalent in value or structural consistency. I personally believe that there is one mathematical universe (or…
Any time there is displacement in a system, it causes pressure to build on another component in the system. When a drop of water falls in a pond, the ripples spread out causing more displacement. Eventually the ripples reach the boundary of the pond and the waves crash on some shore. If society were managed in a way where every ripple would play out its natural course, it would lead to a lot of…
Virtual reality allows memories to be reused in new contexts. In specific, virtual reality allows repurposing of familiarity with sophisticated control systems. So long as the interface for the control system is kept the same, one can use it to control a remote device. Ideally, the device being controlled has the same interface for the control system, so that the device can control itself (e.g. a…
Traditionally, computers define logical operators on real values: AND 0 0 | 0 1 0 | 0 0 1 | 0 1 1 | 1 OR 0 0 | 0 1 0 | 1 0 1 | 1 1 1 | 1 XOR 0 0 | 0 1 0 | 1 0 1 | 1 1 1 | 0 I believe a similar construct can be made for complex values except that logical equivalency could maybe have two interpretations: either the magnitude is the core comparison value or the frequency (radian representation of the…
Any time measuring method inevitably runs into the issues of partitioning and synchronization. Partitioning deals with the issue of dividing a larger measure into smaller measures, and combining smaller measures into a larger measure. Synchronization deals with the problem of how a set of devices can self-correct if some of them are corrupted. The two are fundamentally related because often a…
Trust is an individual experience and a personal feeling. In a sense, trust only exists as a subjective experience. Objectively, the behaviors that manifest from trust are more akin to chemical reactions, where one's feelings of certainty in regard to one event trigger another event. The source of all trust is individual perception, and if one cannot trust their own senses, they can trust nothing.…
There are few things as intoxicating as knowing something that other people do not know. Exclusive information is perhaps the oldest and most original binding force for cults and radical organizations. Is there anything that can more tightly hold a group together than an absolute certainty of their own conviction? The interpretation of right and wrong often takes dangerous turns and dives under…
To construct a map, there must be an expectation of the environment. The CAP theorem lays out an abstract view of how agents can interact in an environment. The common utilization of a semantic interpretation of a response is what enables a map to be built. As an example, if the expectation of a response is that the responding entity must respond if it is non-failing, then a map can be built…
In a highly chaotic system, such as a high temperature gas, it is not ideal to use an atomic causal model. Instead, the effective causal model is to approximate to what extent each atom is interacting with every other atom. If we increase the temperature, then the number of atoms each atom interacts with should increase. As the temperature decreases, the number of atoms each atom interacts with…
How much information can be contained within a perfectly uniform distribution? Could any single part be said to have more significance compared to any other part of a perfectly uniform distribution? In some sense, the ability to encode information in a signal relies on leveraging probabilistic non-uniformity. A code can only be created if something is more or less likely to happen than something…
Every political and philosophical theory is only as useful as the number of variables the theory takes into account. In some way, every political and philosophical theory can be said to have a certain amount of predictive power, a certain illuminating factor. Every school of thought can be seen as an attempt to define a boundary between that which is inside and that which is outside. Some…
Let us suppose there are two nodes in a computational framework. To make it simple, let us call these nodes neurons, and also think of them as if they were neurons. Computation without the possibility of action is not effective in nature. So let us assume one of these neurons (B) can trigger something, such as a muscle contraction. Now let us imagine that there can be a graph of neurons of any…