Human thinking takes vastly less computational effort to arrive at the same conclusions: For example, using a rough estimate for processing, let’s say the DeepMind AlphaGo Zero AI takes 16 quintillion CPU cycles of training, that is, (a thousand raised to the power of six (1018), to exceed a human level of play in Go. On the other hand, let’s say a conscious human being can execute the equivalent of 50 bits per second and concentrates on Go and related skills for an entire lifetime. This effort requires 120 billion CPU cycles, which is less than the AI requirement. Thus, AlphaGo Zero would need to be 100 million times more efficient (a factor of about 100 million for improvement in CPU cycles) Read More ›

Those of us who believe in truth, virtue and “justice” (unadorned with the modifier “social”) are inimical to the “social justice” movement. So says this UN report: “Present-day believers in an absolute truth identified with virtue and justice are neither willing nor desirable companions for the defenders of social justice.” Social Justice in an Open World The Role of the United Nations, The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, Division for Social Policy and Development, The International Forum for Social Development, 2006, 2-3

The Fourier series is a powerful technique that can be used to break down any repeating waveform into sinusoidal components, based on integer number harmonics of a fundamental frequency: Video: This is already amazing, that by summing up harmonically related sinusoids (with suitable amplitudes and lagging) we can analyse any repeating waveform as a sum of components. This then extends to any non-repeating pulse, once we go to an integral, which brings in the idea of a continuous spectrum where some wave “energy” is found at every particular frequency in a band. However, something subtler lurks: As the illustration based on clips from the video shows, a sinusoid can be seen as the projection of a rotating vector (= a Read More ›

The way the media cover AI, you’d swear they had invented being hopelessly naïve: Chances are, you’ve already seen this headline or one of many like it: “Robot that thinks for itself from scratch brings forward rise the self-aware machines” It’s from a story first published inThe Telegraph (UK), then by Yahoo News and MSN, and then (of course) linked on Drudge. Henry Bodkin, “health and science correspondent” for The Telegraph, tells us, with no hint of caution, that “the rise of “self-aware” robots has come a major step closer following the invention of a machine capable of thinking for itself from scratch, scientists have said.” The first problem with both the headline and the story is confusion. They claim Read More ›

Tales from the Tree Bundle of Seedlings, or maybe best called Web of Life: Traditionally, marine microplankton had been divided similarly to species on land. You had plant-like phytoplankton, such as algae, and animal-like zooplankton that ate the phytoplankton. What Stoecker found was that some of these organisms were somewhere in the middle: They could eat like animals when food was present and photosynthesize like plants in the light. “If you think about it, it can be the best of both worlds,” says marine ecologist Dave A. Caron of the University of Southern California. Today, there’s growing realization that these in-between beasties — dubbed mixotrophs — are not only widespread but also play vital roles in the ecology of the Read More ›

You’ve gotta love Sev’s refreshing honesty. In this post I noted that killing little babies was not uncommon in ancient cultures. And then I asked: [Materialists] say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it an affirmatively good thing when an ancient pagan killed a baby girl because she was a baby girl instead of a baby boy? Sev’s response: it was an affirmatively good thing for them then but it is certainly not an affirmatively good thing for me now. Who is right? As far as I can see, there is no absolute standard against which to measure it. Read More ›

Philip Cunningham’s vid on calculations of a single protein forming by chance was picked up recently: Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance: “For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.” Axe is among the science types involved with a fascinating video entitled “Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance.” It’s just over nine minutes long, but beautifully produced and imminently accessible for those who aren’t already cosmologists, physics Read More ›

In time for Darwin’s birthday February 12: The Dissent statement represents a splash of cold water on the great man. It reads, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” The signers hold professorships or doctorates from Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other prominent institutions. They are also an increasingly international group. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences are represented. Discovery Institute began taking names of signatories in 2001 in response to frequently heard assertions that there is Read More ›

I have a question for our materialist interlocutors. As Georgi Boorman summarizes in this article, in many ancient cultures killing certain babies was an acceptable, even lauded, practice. Here’s my question: You say that morality is a social construct; which means that “good” means what the people of a society collectively deem to be good. If that is so, was it an affirmatively good thing when an ancient pagan killed a baby girl because she was a baby girl instead of a baby boy?