AI: The Computer Revolution, Again

I'm lucky to have experienced personal computing from the beginning, from Sinclair's Black Watch, ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum through Pick R83 and MS-DOS 3.3 to today's herding into Microsoft's pen for Windows 11 survivability.

We are perhaps the last human generation to believe we could understand electronic digital computers at every level, from transistors and logic gates through to automated online banner ad auctions, Bitcoin mining, botnets, etc.  It's got so complex, newcomers have to choose which slice of the tottering stack in which they will specialize; code is becoming ephemeral, beyond human scope if it is to be kept on track.

In the 16-bit home computing era, computers became our toys, while futurists were still telling us we needed to learn binary arithmetic at school to prepare for tomorrow's careers.  Hobbyists were asked to justify the time and effort they lavished on their FREDs (Folking Ridiculous Electronic Devices), who would reply "Look, I can create a page of printed text in minutes!" ...not counting minutes spent waiting for code to load off audio cassette at one end, and the noisy printer at the other.

So it is now, with "AI", i.e. the extension of expert-system pre-loaded wisdom, to machine learning.  We play with ChatGPT etc. as toys, while bigger budgets put AI to work; new but transient careers beckon, and early adopters may find the skills built in advance are as mis-aligned as trying to apply only binary arithmetic to higher-level programming languages.

Performance is not yet there; early AI-capable laptops and PCs are as rare and costly as the first round of "multimedia" (sound card, CD-ROM, video playback, a handful of available titles) before Windows 95. Nvidia's monster AI chips are as unattainable for us as 3DFX's dedicated 3D accelerators were way back in the day, when affordable "Windows Accelerator" graphic cards just couldn't cut it for new 3D games.  Industrial-grade AI thrives on ye olde IBM mainframe budgets of half a century ago.

This time round, I'm content to watch from the sidelines - if I was 20 years old again, I'd have jumped into Android when toy smartphones escaped Apple's iron grip, I'd have years of Linux under my belt, and I'd be very actively involved in "playing with AI".

Rewinding a Computer

Here's a thought experiment, based on a simple computer a la Turing. Start with three parts:

• Read-Only Memory (populated with code)
• Processor (interprets code, a la Turing)
• RAM Memory (empty)

Consider the ROM as the input, the RAM as the output, and the processor as the functional engine. Add to this, a clock to sequence the processor's interpretation of the ROM, and a known start point to run the code. There are no external inputs, so everything that happens in the RAM is purely the result of the code in the ROM - thus dependent on the nature of the processor, and contents of ROM.

Consider the system as a pair of 3D cubes, with the following axes:

• X axis, data in memory cells
• Y axis, address of memory cells
• Z axis, states at successive clock pulses

As such, the ROM (input) would be the same 2D X x Y array repeated for all clock pulses along the Z axis, whereas the RAM would start off as undefined (or zero, if we assume empty cells to hold that value) until completely or partially painted in by code activity.

The simple case is where code interpretation is limited to the ROM; the larger case is where code within writable RAM can also be interpreted.  The overall code will either:

1. Continue running indefinitely (open system, e.g. the irrational number Pi)
2. Fall into a repeating loop (closed, e.g. 1/3 expressed in decimal)
3. Stop (closed. e.g. 1/100 expressed in decimal)

We'll avoid the Halting Problem by assuming case (3) for starters, which may also require us to consider only the simple case, where only the code in the ROM is interpreted.  Now, the questions...

• If we gather only the full 3D X-Y-Z array of the RAM, can we deduce the ROM?
• If we know both 3D RAM and 2D ROM arrays, can we deduce the processor?
• Do these answers change, if pre-used ("empty") RAM values are known?
• Do these answers change, if pre-used RAM values remain flagged?

The elephant in the room

The processor can be considered a complicated operator that takes an input value, and produces an output value - but if each output value may arise from different inputs, then the processor is not a function - it is "blurry", in the same sense that quantum particles are blurred as waves.

We manufacture our processors, i.e. they arise from a template of arbitrary pattern, as opposed to "crafted" (one-off creation with no template retained for re-use).  In contrast, "naturally-arising" processors may grow from a recursive self-similarity basis, which we may expect to be easier to derive from the output.

Examples

One example would be the ZX Spectrum running a program that ignores external inputs. This 1982 home computer had a 16k ROM, either 16k or 48k or RAM, and a Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 3.5MHz, 16-bit addressing, 8-bit data bus.  So, the "size" of the system would be 0-65535 on the Y axis, 0-255 on the X axis, and 3.5 million x seconds to end of runtime on the Z axis.

That's a far larger computational mass than the initial program "seed", so needs a larger computer to fully model it; so far, so in keeping with our info-theory, and probably doable on today's hardware.

Another example is how the genotype is converted to the phenotype, where the nature of the processor is largely unknown.  Ironically, the way "ROM" DNA is read to run-time mRNA, for ribosomes to "knit" mRNA into protein threads, is closer to Turing's endless-tape model than our Z80 processor!

Reverse computing is hard

It always seems harder to reverse computing, as seen through a series of problems successively conquered as our computational power grows.  OCR is harder than printing fonts, speech recognition is harder than text-to-speech, etc.  In each of these models of the external "real world", the generated output is easier to read than the "real thing", as it's quantized into a narrower set of possibilities.

This applies to attempts to understand the universe, via models that need the "It's as if..." disclaimer, rather than the unwarranted arrogance of "It is...".  We can only model the universe in our heads (including peer-to-peer and computational extensions thereof); the universe itself can only be passed by value (the part we experience, as local copy), not by reference (complete, writable).

The Clutch Effect

I'll start from the familiar, then delve into the implications.

You have a stack of paper, with a sheet near the bottom peeking out.  You grab that, and pull gently and slowly; the whole stack moves towards you.  You grab it and pull hard and fast; just that sheet emerges, leaving the rest of the pile where it is.

So you scale that up to the "tablecloth trick".  Disaster!

You have an old car with a shot clutch.  If you accelerate slowly and gently, the clutch "works" and the car accelerates proportionally in line with your expectations, based on the engine's revs and selected gear.  But if you stomp the gas, the engine revs speed up nicely but the car doesn't move much faster.

You have Diabetes Mellitus ("peeing lots of sweet urine", as per the tyranny of the measurable... a topic for another day). If you digest carbs slowly, you may be OK; if you digest fast, less so.

You're piloting a fighter aircraft, pursued by a guided missile, and you try to turn and climb to evade it - but at 9G, you black out.  The human-free missile has no such limitations.

You're a 1kg block of whatever, moving through space a nudge above zero.  Your experience is vastly different to that of a similar block moving a nudge below c.  See "The universe has two speeds c, and zero; everything else is just a rounding error" for that and more.

You're a man carrying a bucket of water, and at that familiar scale, a liquid generally sinks to fill a container, with a flat surface on top that usually curls upwards a bit round the rim, unless it's mercury, which curves downwards instead.  Contrast that with an ant carrying a bead of water; though the scale isn't that much smaller than our familiar, the experience is already very different, and the opposite of how liquid helium climbs out of its container.

You're a steady DC current, flowing effortlessly through a coil but stopping dead at a capacitor.  You're perfect (i.e. highest frequency) AC, skipping effortlessly across a capacitor but stopping dead at a coil.  So far, so good... now you're a bolt of lightning striking a phone line, frying almost everything in an old 286 PC, yet the monitor remains unscathed - because the 90 degree bend of the thick copper wires at the graphic card's signal port melted before the current to reach it.  What's going on here, if lightning is DC?  Yes, but that very fast rise time behaves more like perfect AC... so to protect against lightning, tie knots in your cables - big ju-ju, works good!

What's common to all these scenarios that I've clumped together as "the clutch effect"?  It ties in with layers of abstraction, within which certain models work (e.g. Newtonian motion and speeds near 0) but beyond which, different models may be needed (e.g. Relativity at speeds near c).

Wisdom Of The Ages

Starting a new project?  

Ask a 10-year-old if it's ethical

Ask a 20-year-old how to do it

Ask a 30-year-old how to do it better

Ask a 40-year-old who can do it for you

Ask a 50-year-old how to get away with it

Ask a 60-year-old why it's not worth the bother

Weakly Horrorscope

As competitive animals, we are naturally fearful.  Secular fundamentalists such as I should also be modest, if true to their faith. Accordingly, I weakly offer my horroscope...

Sunday

A time to consider the stars* and other large matter(s).

Moonday

Scaling down to rocks large enough to pull themselves round; most detectable when orbiting stars, planets (e.g. moons of Jupiter) or each other (e.g. Luna, Charon). 

Twosday

Duality; a deeply ingrained falsehood?

Windsday

Your climate matters, at least to you; handle with care.

Thorsday

Ponder human hostility, from GBV to WW3.

Faraday

Cage yourself from technology and self-reference for a moment!

Scatterday

Alter your state; zoom out for insight instead of drill-down taxonomy.

* As in "Twinkle twinkle little**..." rather than "dancing with the...".  Snap to grid, humanists/populists!

** Why "little"?

After Scatterday, you'd need a day in the sun to recover  ;-)

Trump, Coronavirus, Disinfectants

OK, let's put this one to bed quickly... the challenge with viruses is not destroying them; that is easy.  It's how to target them within an infected host, without damaging the host.

I can understand the frustration that causes one to wish it were possible to call in an air-strike, but that only works if the enemy and your friends are not mixed.  So, general biocidal strategies are great outside the body, but useless within... unless they can be focused on the target.  That's ID-specific policing and sniping, not a carpet-bombing airstrike!

Internal intelligence

Humans have two intelligent systems, only one of which we experience as our consciousness; the one that stems from the animal strategy of physically moving around.

The other intelligence defends the self internally, and has deeper roots than multicellular animals.  This is the immune system, the highest level of which crafts particular-shaped proteins to bind specifically to stuff that isn't white-listed as part of the body's own organic chemicals.  It is this that is expected to give post-infection immunity, at least until the virus mutates beyond recognition (as RNS viruses like Influenza and Coronavirus tend to do), and this is is the basis for vaccination as a pre-infection defense.

Why not antmicrobial drugs?

 

Larger infective agents such as bacteria are easy to attack using simpler chemistry, because their core biological processes involve proteins sufficiently different to our own, so they can be specifically targeted without harming the host.

Viruses are different, because they are pure genetic information that use the host cell processes to reproduce.  So, all those biological processes you can uniquely attack in bacteria, are your own processes when it comes to how a virus "lives".

Viruses coat their genetic material in protein(s) coded within its genetic material.  This coating may both hide the genetic material from the host immune system, and bind the virus to the targeted cells of the host.  Aside from our internal immune systems figuring out how to target this protein and/or genetic material within, cruder chemistry could find ways to disrupt the process whereby the virus binds to host cells, and target that as a means of treatment.

I'm starting to write more about biology here, starting with how it works, and how the biosphere compares with the infosphere, etc.

Pharma As As Service

Covid-19 is the first of what I expect will be many "bio-pollution" crises du jour going forward.  Experience with Ebola and similar previous outbreaks has triggered an unprecedented global response, and brings to light some challenges familiar of software development, e.g.time-to-market, rapid scalability, etc.

The software industry has already changed with this in mind, though driven by vendor's self-interest.  How would Big Pharma look, if adopting the same strategies?  Think about how EUL"A" trump the common-law rights of users, how products are forever in "beta" i.e. unfit to be guaranteed safe for release, how systems are left open for vendor-pushed updates, etc.

Can we wait for formal FDA etc. approval of tests, vaccines, etc.?

What will happen if we don't?

Layers of Abstraction

This could get long, and if it does, I'll break it up into separate posts, with this one being on what I mean by a "layer of abstraction".  Later I'll go onto whether these are artificial contrivances of convenience or hard entities, the nature of their boundaries, the truth or otherwise of "as above, so below", and whether these differences can be tracked back to a small number of meta-level inputs such as the "good or evil" duality.  I'll pepper all this with examples, each of which would be a field of its own, but here I'm interested in whatever common essence can be extracted.

-oOo-

We don't experience stuff as a continuum, but as mind-sized chunks that I'll refer to as "layers of abstraction".  Below and above these are things that may affect that layer, but which cannot be fully described or explained within that layer alone - bringing Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem to mind.

Example: The Evolving Infosphere

At the analog volts and seconds level, it's all about transistor design and the behavior of the electronic shells of different atoms, which in turn drills down to the unique behaviors of small integers - but we don't consider that depth; it's all about what shape and size of blocks of tainted materials to join together to make effective transistors and other components.

At the more familiar digital level, we abstract out all of the analog stuff; nuances of time and voltage are simplified down to x volts = off and y volts = on, and time is pixellated into clock pulses.  But this layer of abstraction is supported by the analog layer only as long as it successfully slews voltage between the "on" and "off" levels, within the timing of a clock pulse - when this fails, the digital layer of abstraction breaks down in ways that make no sense within digital logic.

We have then aggregated transistors into chips, so we no longer have to think about individual transistors; chips onto circuit boards so we no longer think about chips, boards into systems, systems into networks, and networks into The Internet.  When you integrate ourselves and our code as actors within this Internet, you can consider the whole as the infosphere, with its own dynamics of function that may emerge differently to the raw inputs of original human intentions, etc. [discuss: 100 marks]

Building the Infosphere

Our individual minds can only mentally handle a certain volume of complexity, and scaling up by pooling our minds only takes us so far - as well as adding extra wrinkles in imperfect communication between these minds, as well as differences within such minds that cause them to misunderstand each other, differ in objectives, etc.

So, as we've grown the infosphere, we've done so by attempting to simplify the previous abstraction layer to the point we can take it for granted, then build up the next layer.  The internal components of a computer system operate well enough at realistic clock speeds so we can ignore transistors and whether they're loose, within particular chips, or whether those chips on on the same board.

When networking works well enough, we can ignore which system a particular file is on - all systems can be blurred together to be considered as "the network".  Because the Internet and networks are built from the same TCP/IP materials, it's tempting to treat them as the same, ignoring a fundamental difference to our cost; entities on a network may trust each other, but those on the Internet should not!

A set of technologies allows us to melt the edges between systems and networks further; communications tolerably as fast and cheap as internal data flows and storage, effective virtualization of OSs as if they were applications, tolerably effective isolation via encryption, tolerably seamless load distribution and failover between systems and networks (where already, those two words approach interchangeability).  And so we have "the Cloud", which seagues undramatically into AI and The Singularity. [discuss: 10 marks - it's really not that big a deal]

Other Examples

Other examples of layers of abstraction are visible light within the full electromagnetic spectrum, rhythm and pitch within the range of sound frequencies, and the micro/macro/astro-scopic scales.  All of these are based on the limited focus of our senses, which we've artificially extended.

Another example; chemistry, with nuclear chemistry below and biochemistry above.  This is a tricky one, because the floor of this abstraction layer seems hard and natural (and interesting - we'll likely come back to that later if we further consider the uniqueness of small integers) while the ceiling is more a matter of our mental limitations, plus the chaotic way that new complexity emerges (and more on that later, too!).

Consider written language; at its base is a combination of two symbolic layers of characters, and the text that can be constructed from these.  It would be interesting to compare the information efficiency (simplistic metric; .zip archive size?) of a rich character set vs. longer words of simpler characters, which is similar to the RISC vs. CISC arguments of the 1980s.  That processor debate appeared to be QED in favor of Intel's CISC, but is now re-emerging with the rise of ARM at a time when our needs and capabilities have changed.

Number theory examples abound, and is probably the best place to test predictions of closure (Goedel) and emergence; real numbers, rationals, integers and so on, and the nature of the "infinities" as expressed within these number systems.

Cause and Distance

"Send this habitat module to Sirius Prime, now!"

' OK ...'

Right-click habitat module, Properties, Location tab, highlight "Earth", enter new text "Sirius Prime", press Enter.  Drone work, really, but Fred just counts himself lucky at being able to find a summer job.

Sharp distance runaround

I find it interesting that despite the strange and counter-intuitive models we've developed for sub-atomic matter, we still cling to the Newtonian idea that cause is carried by force, and force involves objects banging into each other.

So we've had "The Aether" before we could get our heads around empty space, the idea that waves must travel in a medium (neatly solved by counter-generating electro and magnetic fields), and the "problem" of action at a distance that is modelled on throwing particles around.

We understand space and time as interrelated through the speed of light, so that "distance" can be envisaged in either terms. 

Trapped in the mesh

Trying to resist the idea of desire-guided evolution, consider the need for senses (or sensors, if you like).  We sense what we need to attain, avoid or overcome, not what we can happily ignore as irrelevant.  Does hard drive S.M.A.R.T. monitor the tides of the ocean?  Nope.  Does the body monitor radiation levels?  Nope, as this had not been relevant during the timescale when shaped by selection pressure.

We are of the universe and are unable to transcend "distance" (be it conceptualised as time or space) at will, though we have a limited ability to physically move towards or away from things.  So we perceive distance as a dominant property of our environment, shaping concepts such as "cause and effect" and "the arrow of time". 

But this perspective may be a platform-specific perception issue, rather than a universal truth.  Perhaps if we visualize things differently - e.g. consider the distribution of mass as a constant, and "distance" as a particular parameter, then some things may snap in to focus, such as gravity as a "curvature of space". 

Often a graph that has a shape that is hard to grapple with, becomes a tame line drawing when the scaling of an axis is changed; certain problems, such as shapes that tend towards but never reach zero, may resolve themselves.  So it may be with "distance".

After writing this, I found the articles I've linked to, along with this one.  It would probably be more enlightening to fan out from here than to read the post you have just finished reading  :-)

What You Can't See

Last weekend I was at the Festival of Chariots, and got talking to someone there.  After asking what I did, she said "ah, you have a scientific brain; you don't believe in what you can't see".

That's not the case at all; if anything, science reminds us of the limitations of what we can see, and scientific rigor suggests we can't make authoritative claims on what we can't see - including claims as to whether or not such things exist.

In fact, only one of our senses works off-planet, and that is sensitive to a very narrow spectrum of photon energies.  Much of what we currently "see", is visualized via artificial methods, i.e. sensory equipment and arbitrary interpretive processing.

Understanding Integers

Technorati tags: Number theory

Which is the largest of these rational numbers?

• 1.5075643002
• 5.2
• 5.193
• 5.213454

If you say 5.213454, then you're still thinking in integer terms.  If you say 1.5075643002 is the largest within a rational number frame of reference, then you thinking as I am right now.

Is Pi an irrational number, or have we just not effectively defined it yet?  With the Halting Problem in mind, can we ever determine whether Pi is rational or irrational?  On that basis, is there such a thing as irrational real numbers, or are these just rational numbers beyond the reach of our precision?  Unlike most, this last question will be answered within this article.

Rational numbers

I was taught that rational numbers were those that can be expressed as one integer divided by another - but I'm reconsidering that as numbers that lie between fixed bounds, or more intuitively, "parts of a whole".

When we deal with rational numbers in everyday life, we're not really dealing with rational numbers as I conceptualize them within this article.  We're just dealing with clumps of integers. 

To enumerate things, there needs to be a frame of reference.  If you say "six" I'll ask 'six what?', and if you say "a quarter", I'll ask 'a quarter of what?'

Usually, the answer is something quite arbitrary, such as "king's toenails".  Want less arbitrary?  How about "the length of a certain platinum-iridium bar in Paris stored at a particular temperature" - feel better now?

Your cutting machine won't explode in a cloud of quantum dust if you set it to a fraction of a millimeter; within the machine's "integers", are just more smaller "integers".  If you think you understand anything about rational numbers from contexts like these, you're kidding yourself, in my humble opinion.

Integers

To put teeth into integers, they have to enumerate something fundamental, something atomic.  By atomic, we used to say "something that cannot be divided further"; today we might say "something that cannot be divided further without applying a state change, or dropping down into a deeper level of abstraction".

Ah - now we're getting somewhere!  Levels of abstraction, total information content, dimensions of an array... think of chemistry as a level of abstraction "above" nuclear physics, or the computer's digital level of abstraction as "above" that of analog volts, nanometers and nanoseconds.

If layers of abstraction are properly nested (are they?), then each may appear to be a closed single atom from "above", rational numbers from "within", and an infinite series of integers from "below".  Or not - toss that around your skull for a while, and see what you conclude.

Closed systems

Within a closed system, there may be a large but finite number of atomic values (or integers, in the non-ordered sense), being the total information content of that system.  If rational numbers are used to describe entities within the system, they are by necessity defined as values between 0 and 1, where 1 = "the system".  In this sense, 7.45 is not a rational number, but might be considered as an offset 7 from outside the system, and .45 within the system.

You might consider "size" as solidity of existence, i.e. the precision (space) or certainty (time, or probability) at which an entity is defined.  If you can define it right down to specifying exactly which "atom" it is, you have reached the maximum information for the closed system.  So 0.45765432 is a "larger" number than 0.5, in terms of this closed-system logic.

You can consider integers vs. rational numbers as being defined by whether you are specifying (or resolving) things in a closed system (rational numbers, as described within this article) or ordering things in an open system (integers). 

What closes an integer system is your confidence in the order of the integers you enumerate.  What closes a rational system is whether you can "see" right down to the underlying "atoms".

Information and energy

Can one specify an entity within a closed system with a precision so high that it is absolute, within the context of that system? 

We may generalize Pauli's exclusion principle to state that no two entities may be identical in all respects (or rather, that if they were, they would define the same entity).

Then there's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, that predicts an inability to determine all information about an entity, without instantly invalidating that information.  Instantly?  For a zero value of time to exist, implies an "atom" of time that zero time is devoid of... otherwise that "zero" is just a probability smudge near one end of some unsigned axis (or an arbitrary "mid-"point of a signed axis).

Can you fix (say) an electron so that its state is identical for a certain period of time after it is observed?  How much energy is required to do that?  Intuitively, I see a relationship between specificity, i.e. the precision or certainty to which an entity is defined, and the energy required to maintain that state.

Entropy

If "things fall apart", then why?  Where does the automatic blurring of information come from?  Why does it take more work to create a piece of metal that is 2.6578135g in mass than one manufactured to 2.65g with a tolerance of 0.005g?

One answer may be; from deeper abstraction layers nested within what the current abstraction layer sees as being integer, or "atomic".  The nuclear climate may affect where an electron currently "is" and how likely it is to change energy state; what appears to be a static chemical equilibrium could "spontaneously" change, just as what appears to be reliable digital processing can be corrupted by analog voltage changes that exceed the trigger points that define the digital layer of abstraction. 

In this sense, the arrangement of sub-nuclear entities may define whether something is a neutron or a proton with an electron somewhere out there; the difference is profound for the chemical layer of abstraction above.

To freeze a state within a given layer of abstraction, may require mastery over deeper levels of abstraction that may "randomize" it.

Existence

What does it mean, to exist?  One can sense this as the application of specificity, or a stipulation of information that defines what then exists.  Our perspective is that mass really exists, and just happens to be massive in terms of the energy (information?) contained within it. 

There's a sense of energy-information conservation in reactions such as matter and antimatter annihilating their mass and producing a large amount of energy.  How much energy?  Does that imply the magnitude of information that defined the masses, or mass and anti-mass?  Do you like your integers signed or unsigned?  Is the difference merely a matter of externalizing one piece of information as the "sign bit"?  What do things look like if you externalize two bits in that way?

Like most of my head-spin articles, this one leaves you hanging at this point.  No tidy summary of what I "told" you, as I have no certainty on any of this; think of this article as a question (or RFC, if you like), not a statement.

WGA, Product Activation, Kafka

Technorati tags: WGA, Activation, Vandor, Consumer Rights, Surrealism

If Kafka wrote the Windows activation/WGA FAQ...

A: You have been found guilty and have been sentenced to die in 3 days.  Would you like to appeal?

Q: What crime am I being charged with?

A: Our code has found you guilty of being guilty in the opinion of our code.  You have already been found guilty and sentenced.  Would you like to appeal?

Q: What laws have I broken?

A:  The laws you have broken are those we assigned ourselves via the EUL"A" you consented to when you accepted our product.

Q: I don't remember discussions about an End User License Agreement?

A: Well, you wouldn't; we find it more effective to just write that up ourselves.

Q: I need details... what exact laws have I broken?

A:  We find it more effective not to disclose the details on how our code investigates such matters, or what criteria are used to determine the breaking of our laws.  All you need to know is that you have been found guilty and sentenced. 

Would you like to appeal?

Q: What do you mean "die in 3 days"?

A: In three day's time, your heart will be removed and further processing will not be possible.  If you do not have recourse to another heart and/or cardiac troubleshooting skills, you will remain inert.  Your body parts will still be available to those with the skills to access them; don't worry, no personal data will be lost, though of course you will need a new heart from us to work with that data again.

Would you like to appeal?

Q:  OK, I'd like to appeal.  Who do I appeal to?

A: Us, of course.  Phone the number, answer a few trick questions like "press 1 if you have two or more, press 2 if you have only one" etc. and then ask to speak to a human.  Convince the human you are innocent and your death sentence will be set aside.  If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear!

Q:  What do you mean "if I'm innocent"?  You've just told me you've found me guilty, and refused to tell me exactly of what I'm guilty?

A:  This is true, but we are not unfair.  You do have the right to appeal, as at September 2007.

Q:  So how do I present my case?

A: Leave that to us.  We will ask you questions, and based on your answers, we will decide if perhaps we arrested, tried and sentenced you in error, or whether our code works as designed.

Q: Works as designed?  What is it designed to do?

A:  It's designed to determine whether you are guilty or not.  We find it is more effective not to disclose details of how it does this.

Q: Can I review the evidence?

A:  We find it is more effective if the guilty party is not permitted to review the evidence, and thus we provide no tools to do so, nor do we provide documentation of what this evidence may be.  Any such documentation you may find will have been subject to change.  We will not tell you if, when or how it has changed, if indeed it has.  We find it is more effective this way.

Q:  OK!  Hey, everything's fine! I spoke to the human and explained what happened (which was easy in my case; nothing happened or changed, you just charged me out of the blue) and they set aside my sentence!  Thanks you running such a wonderful system that allows a lowly wretch like me to live again!!

A:  It's a pleasure, glad to help   ;-)

Three Little Pigs Build Computers

Technorati tags: Safety, Parable

If you don't like long fairy tales, skip ahead to the conclusions!

Once upon a time, there were three little pigs who set out to become building contractors.

One insisted everyone build their house on his land using only his materials, and charged too much money.  He didn't sell that many houses, and this story is not about that little pig.

One believed that people should build their own houses, and that houses should be built for free.  Many people were very interested in this, and often started building such houses, but found it too difficult and gave up, and this story is not about that little pig either.

Pig Makes Good: The Early Years

All of these pigs grew up in houses made of bricks, but this was a new planet where bricks weren't available (I did say "set out", didn't I?), so they had to make do with other materials instead.  At first, they made houses out of these materials the way their brick houses were made back home, but there were so many people wanting houses in the same place that they started joining them together in various ways.

The main pig became very successful, not only making houses for nearly everyone on the planet, but employing lots of builders to do so; soon, there wasn't a single builder who knew everything needed to build a complete house.

As more people came to the new planet, most of the big's earnings came from building hotels and blocks of flats.  They still built lots of houses, but stopped thinking about how those would be made because that wasn't where the money was, and besides, those folks will always buy their houses anyway.

Wolf Atrocities: The Response

After a while, folks started complaining that homeowners were being eaten by wolves, and the quality of houses came into question.  Wolves will be wolves, it was agreed, but surely the idea of a house is to protect one from them?

Some folks suggested building houses out of sticks instead of straw, but the pig said "we have too many pre-built walls that we already made out of straw; it would take far too long to re-do everything in sticks".

Others felt that building out of straw vs. sticks didn't matter too much, as long as you did something about the open windows and weak door hinges. 

The pig said "if you want stronger doors, speak to the Door Lock team.  What's that about 'hinges'?  We don't have a "Hinge Team", so we can't pass those suggestions anywhere.  I promise we'll make doors with even stronger locks in future! (the squeaky things at the other end of the door will stay the same, of course)"

The pig also said "we've always built with open windows, and other businesses have come to depend on them.  How are folks going to deliver goods and services if they can't climb in through the window?  Why not retire to one of the bedrooms, and lock yourself in?  If you get eaten, it's your fault, because you will insist in walking around in other rooms that aren't meant for you - you are a resident, not a chef or a barman, so you don't belong in the kitchen or living room." 

So the new houses were built with stronger locks and new bedroom doors.  And as folks still needed to eat and go to the bathroom, they'd leave the bedroom doors unlocked and get eaten while in the other rooms.

Conclusions

1.  The past can tell you only so much about the future.

If you focus on large-volume quality data from the real world while designing new products, you will design products that solve yesterday's problems while being wide open to tomorrow's new problems.

To avoid this trap, you need to brainstorm new designs with homeowners from the start, rather than present them with a near-completed beta product where the design is already cast in stone.  You also need to listen to theorists who cannot point to detailed real-world data because what they are talking about does not yet exist in the real world, and pay as much attention to these as you do to the detailed real-world feedback you get on things that already exist.

2.  Straw and sticks will never be bricks.

Know that you're forced to build with weak materials (exploitable code) and design your structures accordingly.  Any functionality may suddenly become a death trap or fire hazard, no matter what it was designed to be; so make sure such things can be amputated or walled off at a moment's notice.

3.  Airliners should not attempt aerobatics.

Know that you are human, and are building with straw and sticks.  Don't build death-defying skyscrapers that pose deliberate and unnecessary risks to homeowners.  In particular, don't build in facilities that allow arbitrary passing wolves to overpower residents in their houses, even if that is appropriate design when you are building hotels owned by wolves.

Risky tricks like DRM, product activation, linking real-time WGA to DoS payloads etc. have no business in teetering edifices built from twigs.

4.  Expose wildcard teams to new ideas.

Microsoft gets better at what they do well, while remaining poor at what they do poorly, or on issues to which they remain oblivious.  Why is this?

Partly this is from over-reliance on rich but historical data, as per my first conclusion in this list.  But it is also because their ability to develop is structured by present resource commitments.  For something they already do, there will be a product team; any idea on how to do that stuff better may reach this team, who will understand what it's about and can swiftly incorporate such feedback.

But if they've never seen the need for something, they will have never formed a team to develop it.  Any feedback on such matters will fall on dry ground; there is literally non-one there to process such material.

5.  Handle unstructured feedback.

Microsoft regularly solicits feedback via surveys etc. but once again, these measure what is measurable, rather than what's important - so the objective of "getting new ideas" remains un-met. 

Yes, it's easier to capture data gathered as responses to radio buttons, checkboxes, ordered pick lists and yes/no questions - but that limits input to what the designers of the survey had thought of already.

At the very least, every survey should end with a generic question such as: "On a scale from X to Y, how well do you think this survey covers what you feel should be surveyed?" followed by a large empty "comments" text box. 

A high dissatisfaction score should warn you that you are digging in the wrong place; the response might be to form a wild-card team and pass the dissatisfied returns to them for assessment of any free-form comments that may give a sense of where you should be digging instead.

6.  The cheapest lunch is where you haven't looked yet.

The saying "whenever I lose something, it's always in the last place I'd think to look for it!" is a truism, because once you find it, you stop looking.  In fact, "lost things" are just the least successful tail of your usual access methods.

You stop looking when you find an answer, but that doesn't mean you have the best answer - there may be better ones if you'd look a bit further.

With a mature product that still has problems, the biggest gains are most likely to be found where no-one's started looking yet - rather than improving existing strengths past the point of diminishing returns.

7.  In the land of the blind, name tags aren't useful.

The Internet is an unbounded mesh of strangers, so identity-based solutions don't apply.  Once you initiate networking, as opposed to generic Internet access (e.g. after you log into a secure site), such solutions may become useful... but even then, only if the user has a template of expectations to match whatever identity has been proven.  Even then, the process is only as robust as the twigs out of which it is built, and the Internet is a very windy place.

For this reason, I'd rate risk management as more important for malware and safety, both out on the web and within the system.  This is the barely-touched area that is most likely to provide your cheapest lunch.

8.  Who are the wolves?

All pigs become wolves in the dark. 

We are the wolves, and so are you.  There's no such thing as a special set of saintly piggies (e.g. "media content providers", "software vendors", etc.) who can be trusted with raw pork.

The Word Is Not The World

We can't use language to describe "the all".

Stated as baldly, this looks rather Zen, doesn't it?

The point being that language goes about defining particulars, i.e. "is this, is not that", and thus chips its way away from "the all".

In number theory terms, it's the difference between infinity and very large; of a limit, and test values that tend towards that limit.

The Waking Hour

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

Technorati tags: Information theory, memetics, evolution

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design = non-issue.

Evolution does not define why things happen. 

It is a mechanism whereby some things that happen, may come to persist (and others, not). 

Graded belief

Human thinking appears to have at least two weaknesses; an automatic assumption of dualities (e.g. "Microsoft and Google are both large; Microsoft is bad, therefore Google must be good"), and an unwillingness to accept unknowns. 

You can re-state the second as a tighter version of the first, i.e. the singleton assumption, rather than duality.

We don't even have words (in English, at least) to differentiate between degrees of belief, i.e. weak ("all things equal, I think it is more likely that A of A, B, C is the truth") and strong ("iron is a metal") belief. 

And I fairly strongly believe we strongly believe too often, when a weaker degree of certainty would be not only more appropriate, but is a needed component in our quest for Word Peace TM.

For example, religious folks have a fairly high certainty of what will happen after they die - but can we all accept that as they have not yet died, that something slightly less than "you're wrong, so I'll kill you" certainty should apply?

What is evolution?

My understanding of evolution, or Darwinian systems, revolves around the following components:

• limited life span
• selection pressure
• imperfect reproduction

That's what I consider to be a classic evolutionary environment, but you may get variations; e.g. if entities change during the course of their lifetime, do not reproduce, but can die, then you could consider this as a Darwinian system that is ultimately set to run down like a wind-up clock as the number of survivors declines towards zero.

In fact, implicit in that classic model is the notion of reproduction based on a self-definition that does not change during the course of an entity's lifetime (in fact, it defines that entity) but can change when spawning next generation entities.

Evolution is blind

Evolution per se, is devoid of intent.  I don't know whether Darwin stressed this in his original writings, but I weakly believe that he did; yet I often see descriptions of creatures "evolving to survive". 

As I understand it, game theory is a reformulation of evolution that centers on the notion of survival intent.

Evolution is something that happens to things, and doesn't "care" whether those things survive or not.  The "selfish gene" concept is an attempt to frame this inevitable sense of "intent" within Darwinian mechanics; there is no more need to ascribe a survival intent to genes, as there is to the phenotypes they define.

However, evolution doesn't have to be the only player on the stage, and this is what I meant about "evolution vs. intelligent design is a non-issue".

I don't think there's much uncertainty that evolution is at work in the world.  That doesn't weigh for or against other (intelligent design) players in the world, and that's why I consider the question a non-issue.

Intelligent players can apply intent from outside the system (e.g. where an external entity defines entities within a Darwinian environment, or the environment itself, or its selection pressures) or from within the system (e.g. where entities apply intent to designing their own progeny).

Example systems

I consider the following to be Darwinian systems:

• the biosphere
• the infosphere
• human culture, i.e. memetics

One could theorize that evolution is an inevitable consequence of complexity, when subjected to entropy.  Just as a moving car is not fast enough to exhibit significant relativistic effects (so that Newton's laws appear to explain everything), so trivial systems may be insufficiently complex to demonstrate Darwinian behavior.

This is why I'm interested in computers and the infosphere; because they are becoming complex enough to defy determinism. 

Normally, we seek to understand the "real world" by peering down from the top, with insufficient clarity to see the bottom. 

With the infosphere, we have an environment that we understand (and created) from the bottom up; what we cannot "see" is the top level that will arise as complexity evolves.

This creates an opportunity to model the one system within the other.  What was an inscrutable "mind / brain" question, becomes "the mind is the software, the brain is the hardware", perhaps over-extended to "the self is the runtime, the mind is the software, the brain is the firmware, the body is the hardware". 

We can also look at computer viruses as a model for biosphere viruses.  A major "aha!" moment for me was when I searched the Internet for information on the CAP virus, and found a lot of articles that almost made sense, but not quite - until I realized these described biological viruses, and were found because of the common bio-virus term "CAPsule".

Code

Common to my understanding of what constitutes a classic Darwinian system, is the notion of information that defines the entity. 

In the biosphere, this is usually DNA or RNA, a language of 4 unique items grouped into threes to map to the active proteins they define.

In the infosphere, this is binary code of various languages, based on bits that are typically grouped into eights as bytes.

In the meme space, languages are carried via symbol sets that are in turn split into unique characters, which are then clumped into words or sentences.  Some languages contain less information within the character set (e.g. Western alphabets), others more (e.g. the Chinese alphabet, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, modern icons and branding marks).

When we create computer code, we are laboriously translating the memetic language of ideas into code that will spawn infosphere entities.  This is not unlike the way a set of chromosomes becomes a chicken, other than that we view the infosphere and meme space as separate Darwinian systems.

The alluring challenge is to translate infosphere code into biosphere code, i.e. to "print DNA", as it were.  One hopes the quality of intent will be sound, by the time this milestone is reached, as in effect, we would be positioned to become our own intelligent creators.

Intelligent design

We know that entities in the infosphere are created by intent from outside the system; as at 2007, we do not believe that new entities arise spontaneously within the system.

We don't know (but may have beliefs about) whether there is intent applied to the biosphere, or whether the biosphere was originally created or shaped by acts of intent.

Conspiracy theorists may point to hidden uber-intenders within the meme space, the creation of which is inherently guided by self-intent.

That which was

Just as folks mistakenly ascribe intent to the mechanics of evolution, so there is a fallacy that all that exists, is all that existed.

But evolution can tell you nothing about what entities one existed, as spawned by mutation or entropic shaping of code.

There is a very dangerous assumption that because you cannot see a surviving entity in the current set, that such entities cannot arise. 

Think of a bio-virus with a fast-death payload a la rabies, plus rapid spread a la the common cold.  The assumption of survival intent leads folks to say stupid things like "but that would kill the host, so the virus wouldn't want that".  Sure, there'd be no survivors in today's entity set, but on the other hand, we know we have some historical bulk extinctions to explain.

We're beginning to see the same complacency on the risks of nuclear war.  We think of humanity as a single chain of upwards development, and therefore are optimistic that "common sense will prevail".  Even nay-sayers that point to our unprecedented ability to destroy ourselves, miss the point in that word "unprecedented".  As Graham Hancock postulated in his Fingerprints of the Gods, we may have been this way before.

This blindness applies to malware within the infosphere as well, and the saying "there's none so blind as those who can see" applies.  If we want authoritative voices on malware, we generally turn to professionals who have been staring at all malware for years, such as the antivirus industry.  These folks may be blinded by what they've seen of all that has been, that they fail to consider all that could be.

The Waking Hour