Tinsology

I suddenly recall something interesting a professor of mine pointed out a couple years ago while on a tangent during lecture. It has to do with the nature of infinity and how accepting something perfectly reasonable as true leads to less intuitive, but equally true conclusions.

The following expression is true and most people would not argue otherwise:

1/3 = .3333333333 . . .


Assume, of course, that there is an infinite number of 3s trailing the decimal point. The following expression is also true, and even fewer people would argue otherwise:


1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1


This may seem obvious, but what may be less obvious is what follows logically from the two expressions above:

  .333333 . . .
  .333333 . . .
+ .333333 . . .
_______________________
  .999999 . . .  =  1

You may be reluctant to accept that the third expression is true, but if you accept the first two expressions, there is no avoiding it. Most people with a background in computer science or mathematics probably won’t be blown away by this, but it is fun, nerdy thing to point out to your friends in the humanities department (or anyone with a B.A.)

If coffee were cocaine… I’d be Rick James.

Every now and then I sit down for a test that I am completely unprepared for. In that moment of desperation I think to myself “Maybe I can infer the required knowledge before time runs out”.

——————————–

1.

TODO:
Invent Calculus

——————————–

Every time I have an exam, I show up to class and place my scan tron and number 2 pencil on my desk, in plain sight. This is perfectly normal for exams that require a scan tron, but in those that don’t it may cause people to run to the bookstore and then arrive once again ten minutes late, clearly exhausted.

Variations on this method:

• Show up with a blue book
• Show up with a clearly different scan tron
• Show up with an abacus

That last one may not cause anyone to run to the store, but it may cause them to have second thoughts about how they invested their studying time.

I feel as if my life’s aspirations are suddenly within reach.

http://www.swordsofhonor.com/ca-30-61.html
http://www.swordsofhonor.com/9thcehovihed.html

Today I had my first discussion for a course on Artificial Intelligence I’m taking. In the week since the course started we really haven’t covered much material (as is to be expected) so the TA gave us a very broad topic to write about.

In short the prompt was: What is Artificial Intelligence

To suppliment we were given two definitions:

Weak AI: Machines can act intelligent.
Strong AI: Machines have minds.

My Thoughts:

In my understanding, Artificial Intelligence is the ability of machines to learn and use what it has learned to draw conclusions. As abstract as this is it still boils down to mapping inputs to outputs, which is what machines do every day. The inputs in the case being not only its perception of the current situation, but the sum of all of its experiential knowledge and the output being its action.

To accomplish this, weak AI is sufficient. Strong AI (based on the definition above) requires a machine to be something that I doubt any machine can be: non-deterministic. Having a mind and being conscious are attributes of sentience; something that humans and animals have. I do not believe that human behavior can be described as deterministic, or at the very least, the amount of inputs that are mapped to an output in a human is too difficult to quantify and infeasable to simulate in a machine.

In short, I do not think that strong AI is attainable. This, however, I do not think that this in anyway is a limitation on artificial intelligence. A turing test, though I do not think is sufficient for intelligence, is an example of this. The test consists of a person communicating with either another person or a machine. The two cannot see each other and interact only through text. If the person cannot determine whether the other entity is a person or a machine, then the machine is said to be intelligent. This can be (and currently is being) accomplished by machines that don’t have minds, conscious, or exemplify human behavior. All the machine needs to do is simulate human behavior. This can even be accomplished without intelligence. If a machine has a massive database of answers to questions and when asked a question simply looks up the answer and spits it out, is it intelligent?

If a machine can analyze a question and based on a database of its previous experience conclude an answer to that question does it have a mind?