An animated GIF of the degradation of the block agar in Conway's game of life. The "camera" pans diagonally up and to the left at the same rate (3c/4) as the agar degrades. It's four generations per frame, which keeps the untouched blocks in the same (relative) place in the frame.
The other image is a snapshot of the whole thing (huge image, may crash your browser or operating system) at generation 8000.
One thing we can do in our dreams, easily, is for something or someone to be simultaneously two or more things at once. We cannot observe this in the real world, constrained by Maxwell's Laws of Electromagnetism (not even quantum superposition can maintain two simultanous states under observation).
Why can we dream this?
Inspired by the angel with three faces in X Files.
Lossless H.264, e.g., x264 -q 0, is interesting as it invites a contest, compress a video as much as possible (I suspect even lossless encoding has degrees of freedom) while still being decodable by a standard H.264 decoder.
Does winning help? Simply discard the residuals to decode lossy.
In order to make chess more accessible and interesting to spectate, the two players, probably placed in separate rooms with their own analysis boards, give live commentary about what they are thinking during the game as they play it, which is relayed to the audience.
Inspired by the Diary Room of Big Brother.
A simpler implementation of the POSIX cksum program, calculating CRC32 big-endian, not using a lookup table. This is slower, but may be useful pedagogically.
#include <cstdio>
typedef unsigned int U32;
const U32 polynomial=0x04C11DB7;
void update_crc(U32 *rem, unsigned char in){
*rem^=in<<24;
for(int j=0;j<8;++j){
U32 top_bit=*rem&0x80000000;
*rem<<=1;
if(top_bit)*rem^=polynomial;
}}
int main(){
U32 rem=0;
long long bytecount=0;
for(;;++bytecount){
unsigned char in;
int code=fread(&in,1,1,stdin);
if(1!=code)break;
update_crc(&rem,in);
}
//append the length, LSByte first
for(long long datalength=bytecount;datalength;datalength>>=8){
update_crc(&rem,datalength); //auto-truncate U32 to byte
}
rem=~rem; //seems a bit superfluous, given we are appending the length
printf("%u %lld\n",rem,bytecount);
}
A spectre is haunting chess -- the spectre of cheating using computers, because computers these days can play chess much better than people. There is an escalating war between cheaters and anti-cheating countermeasures. It may be interesting to consider the problem of cheating in chess information theoretically.
In the presence of countermeasures, the communication channel between a cheating player and a computer (possibly a confederate consulting a computer) is very limited. Given bidirectional parameters on the communication channel, exactly what information should be sent across the channel to maximize the increase in performance of the player? This is an interesting general problem in its own right; let me present a possible solution for a specific case.
We consider one very minimal situation: the channel capacity or bandwidth from the computer to the player is a very small one bit per move, and the bandwidth from the player to the computer is zero (no communication possible in this direction, the player is under intense scrutiny, and any unusual behavior will be spotted). Actually, it's the covert bandwidth from the player to the computer that is zero; we assume the game is live and public, so the confederate, a member of the audience, can see the moves as they are made. Thus, the channel is such that the player cannot ask, "is this such-and-such a move a good move?" (because of the zero covert bandwidth in that direction), nor can a confederate signal "such-and-such a move is the best move in this position" (because such a message requires more than one bit per move). Nevertheless, one bit of information will be enough to provide a significant advantage to the cheater.
This "one bit of information" may be transmitted, for example, by the player seeing the confederate in the audience. It is helpful if the confederate situates him or herself where the player does not have turn his or her head and adjust his or her gaze. The confederate performs a subtle pre-agreed signal to transmit the bit: perhaps arms crossed left-over-right versus arms crossed right-over-left.
My proposal for the one bit that is transmitted is, "Did the opponent just blunder?" Computers excel at discovering blunders, and a human, armed with the information that an opponent has just just blundered, can engage in a radically different thought process than searching for a "normal" move in a "normal situation. Instead, the player can conceptually search for the flaw in the opponent's previous move, and search for a specific attack to punish the mistake. I predict a strong player can become a lot stronger with just this one bit.
The naive confederate may consult a computer after every opponent move, checking if it was a blunder. A more sophisticated confederate, consulting a more powerful computer, can explore and memorize several ply deep at a time, so only having to consult the computer occasionally.
Technically, because blunders happen rarely, the actual entropy in the channel averages less than one bit per move, so perhaps a even cleverer and more subtle encoding than suggested above is possible and even less likely to be caught.
However, the moral of the story is, catching cheaters in chess is going to be very, very difficult, needing to block extremely tiny amounts of information which is enough to gain a significant edge.
P.S.: A nice article: Cheating in Chess, by Frederic Friedel (This paper appeared as a contribution to the book "Advances in Computer Games 9", edited by Professors H. J. van den Herik, University Maastricht, and B. Monien, University of Paderborn. It was published by the Universiteit Maastricht in 2001. The paper on Cheating was written and submitted by the author in 2000.)
Americans spend too much, everyone becoming horrendously in debt. One possible cause of the problem is the effectiveness of advertising, inciting us to buy, buy, buy. We rarely see information urging us not to buy a product, telling us what is bad about it. One normally needs to search long and hard to find such information, a review by a consumer report, for example.
However, in this capitalist world, it ought to be a lot easier to find criticism of a product you are considering buying: simply look to a competitor, for whom it is in their best interests to attack their competition with negative advertising. However, we rarely see this. Why?
One reason might be because of fear of lawsuits from the competitor. The legal cost of fighting such a lawsuit (even if the negative advertising is permitted by the freedom of speech) might outweigh the gains from the negative advertising. If so, in the best interest of consumers, we are in need of laws that make it more difficult for one producer to successfully sue another producer for disparaging their product.
A competitor is often in a uniquely qualified position to criticize their competition. For example, consider cell phones, and the problem of discovering a reliable, well-designed cell phone that won't break after a year. A third-party consumer report can only (easily) rely on consumer surveys of the product, statistically measuring their defectiveness rate. This may take months, if not years, and by that time, the cell phone in question is obsolete. However, a competitor cell phone manufacturer, by virtue of being a manufacturer, is (probably) an expert in cell phone manufacturing, and can disassemble the competitor's cell phone, examine its parts, materials, design, and other manufacturing details to determine the robustness of the phone.
Another reason we see little criticism between producers might be some sort of game-theoretic cooperation between competitors. If two competitors criticize each other's products, the consumer buys neither, and both producers lose. Ultimately, this will lessen the consumer's tendency to end up in debt, which might be a desirable outcome.
Extend the low energy Interplanetary Transport Network for interstellar transport.
Idea: use the IPTN to get to a Sun-Jupiter Lagrange point, and use that to launch out of the solar system to Alpha Centauri. Use the binary star system of Alpha Centauri to launch to anywhere (Because of its binary nature, I'm guessing it has Lagrange-like unstable points.)
Or, further away, the white dwarves Sirius B or Procyon B offer extremely deep gravitational wells for powerful slingshots.
Because of the risk of theft, most people will never get to hold a gold brick. But it should not be too hard to build a mechanical simulation of one, for example for a museum display. Take an object of the right shape and gold electroplate it. Attach it with strings coming out the bottom to pulleys and weights (like an exercise machine) to simulate the right weight.
You could go the tungsten route, but that much tungsten is valuable enough to steal.
How would the Internet be different if the "port" field in packets were 128 bits wide instead of 16?
Take the text of a bill before Congress and analyze it automatically using natural language processing and other artificial intelligence techniques attempting to predict its future economic and social effects, unintended consequences and perverse incentives.
Use as training data previous passed Acts of Congress and the historical outcome of each Act's effects.
Of course, the intelligence need not be artificial. Human think tanks can play, too. Comparing the past predictions of a think tank with the actual outcome, produce accuracy grades of various think tanks.
What is it that causes the mass of men to look beyond their lives of quiet desperation, beyond their immediate well-being, and become inspired, or even incensed, to take action to support an abstract principle or distant cause?
Paine, Stowe...
Suppose you wished to selectively breed canaries for use in coal mines to alert miners of the presence of poisonous gas. The fittest canaries die from the lowest concentrations of gas, to give the miners as much advance warning as possible. Unfortunately, those fittest canaries are now dead, unable to breed.
Siblings.
Unconscious but revivable.
People talk loudly into cell phones, annoying others nearby, but the technology exists (has existed for a very long time!) so that they don't have to. Pick up quiet speech with a microphone placed close to the mouth, even in a loud environment.
People also l talk loud so they can hear themselves speak. This can be done in a loud environment by echoing what the microphone picks up through the earpiece.
Old landline phones did these just fine. Create a cell phone that does these. For nostalgic effect, or for highly practical reasons, one might reuse the form factor of old handset phones.
Submarine patents should be eliminated. Patents take effect when published.
If someone else comes up with the same invention in between the time when the patent is applied for and approved, it is proof that the invention is not sufficiently novel and ingenious to be granted a patent.
A simple way to provide every process with its own scratch space is for the operating system to call mktemp -d before spawning a new process, and set the TMP environment variable to it for the process. And the process is free to use or ignore the variable.
For shells, the value of the child is provided to the parent.
A more complicated way to do it involves the OS restricting a process to only its temp space, and maybe its parent's if the parent has granted permission. And probably child processes.
The LED glows red when a memory instruction is being executed and green when an ALU instruction is. A human will not be able perceive individual instructions going by at gigahertz, but will be able to perceive the tint of the instruction mix.
Another color for FPU/SSE?
Number each of the dots of one color, e.g., Red 1 through Red 6, so that each dot has a unique name.
A twister choreography is a set of specific directions: Player X places which limb onto which dot. Instead of relying on random chance to tie the players in knots, we rely on a choreographer to have designed an interesting sequence.
Artistically, it is a living sculpture of human bodies, encoded in Twister directions.
With additional kinds of instructions, it is a choreographed form of contact improv dance.
I am skeptical about, though have not investigated, the hubbub over trans-unsaturated fats.
How much more unhealthy (expected decrease in life expectancy per gram consumed) are they compared to cis-unsaturated fats?
Compared to fully saturated fats?
Compared to the equivalent quantity of sugar that the body will convert naturally into body fat?
America's age 21 drinking law is interesting from a democratic standpoint: 18 to 21 year olds are too young to drink, yet old enough to vote, to participate in the political process to change the drinking age if they wished. Probably every 18-21 year old has either been affected or knows someone who has been affected by the law (perhaps being denied entry into a 21+ venue).
Perhaps a majority of 18 to 21 year olds actually do believe the drinking age should remain 21.
Or perhaps this is like a canary in a coal mine: a sign that there is something deeply wrong with our political process.
The way to do attempt to change it (probably the way to do anything in politics) is to target a closely contested election. 18-21 year olds generally rarely vote, so if they can be induced to vote on an issue that they care about, they can tip a closely contested election. Ask candidates in such an election where they stand. Perhaps one will dare break ranks to support lowering the drinking age in order to win the votes of this potentially decisive voting bloc. Perhaps both will, in which case it simply becomes an issue of holding either winner to their campaign promise.
An interesting exercise in rocket science: consider a craft that shuttles between the Moon and Earth transporting Helium-3. Mass of the craft, energy efficiency of rocket fuel (you cannot recover the energy spent in escaping the Earth's and Moon's gravity), mass of Helium being transported. Under what conditions is it energy efficient (energy from fusion exceeds transport energy)? Under what conditions is it cost efficient?
Inspired by the 2009 film Moon.
With products like WiebeTech Hotplug, one wonders what the next step of this perpetual escalating war will be.
One possibility is a device securely connected to the wall power supply so that the connection point between the plug and the wall socket cannot be accessed without disrupting a tamper detection switch.
A simple, though probably not too effective, technique to prevent to wall socket cover from being removed is to have the power plug plug into both sockets obscuring access to the plate screw which is normally in the center between the two plugs. (And superglue the plugs to the wall.)
Differently shaped connectors, inspired by the cylindrical DC power connectors and Apple magnetic laptop power seem more difficult to hot swap than one with all the leads exposed.
Another possibility is for the computer to detect the phase change when such a device is used.
Another possibility is to lobby the legislature to make such a device illegal to use by law enforcement, perhaps under the argument of "reasonable expectation of privacy".
How often is this device, or similar techniques, successfully used by law enforcement?
It you wish to record your entire life 24/7 in video, how much would it cost in terms of storage?
We leave it an unsolved problem of how to do this more practically than a camera crew constantly following you around.
Let us assume a video compression rate of 80 kilobytes per second. This comes from fitting a movie onto a CD-ROM, say with XviD. This works out to about 2.5 terabytes per year, which is feasible: perhaps $1000 per year?
We live in interesting times when this is affordable and possible.
Suppose you have an object appraised to estimate its market value under certain conditions. Then you sell the object under those conditions. In this way, you can measure the accuracy of the appraiser. Averaged out over many appraisals and sales, it should be possible to determine an appraiser's accuracy rating, something which a good appraiser would want to publicize to distinguish him or herself from a bad appraiser.
Inspired by Antiques Roadshow.
I have yet to see a programming language do units and dimensional analysis right. I don't know what it would look like. Types?
Mathcad did a reasonable job for an interactive tool.
The next step would try to do vectors and tensors independent of their origin or basis.
Which man has caused more direct damage: Osama bin Laden (for 9/11) or Bernard Madoff?
Madoff caused $65 billion in damages (losses).
Osama bin Laden, for the September 11, 2001 attacks, caused about 3000 deaths and very roughly $30 billion in property destruction (I could be off by 10), plus about 6000 injuries. Assuming the cost of the injuries to average a million dollars each (very high), Osama bin Laden would have caused more damage if the value of a human life is greater than (65-30-6)/3 = $9.6 million, which is toward the high end of the usual estimate of somewhere between $1 million and $10 million (based on the amount people or governments or insurance companies are willing to spend to reduce the probability of death).
Of course, each man indirectly caused a great deal of indirect damage: Madoff for causing Americans to lose faith in the financial system, causing a drying up of investment and a big step of the "death spiral" of the recession; Bin Laden for well, terror. But these indirect effects are very hard to quantify and cannot be completely pinned on a single person.
I conclude that both men caused a comparable amount of direct damage, with Madoff somewhat more likely to have caused more.
Sarcastically, we can proudly claim that we Americans are better than foreigners, even when it comes to hurting Americans.
Consider at least 4 ordered points. Points 1, 2, and 3 determine a circle. Points 2, 3, and 4 determine another circle (and so on, taking 3 consecutive points at a time). There are now two different arcs between points 2 and 3, from the first and second circles. Construct a curve which is the average of the two arcs (midpoint of uniform arc-parametrization). This curve is probably an ellipse. In this way, we can construct a spline going through all the control points.
This spline has good behavior when tracing circular curved segments, and also with straight segments (taking care to avoid floating point overflow with circles of nearly infinite radius). It is continuous but not differentiable at the control points.
I had good results with this spline in practice when I implemented it 14 years ago for a T-shirt design.
How much of the lack of public support for public transit motivated not by car owners' rational thinking of not wanting to support (via taxes) a service they do not plan to use, but by a psychological desire to avoid regret for having purchased (sunk cost) a car?
Even if a car owner does not plan to ride public transit, he or she will still benefit from it. But reason cannot counteract base psychology.
It is all right if public transit does not recover all its costs in fares. Its benefits extend beyond the fare-paying riders; consequently those receiving its benefits should help pay for its costs. This can be done through public funding.
Public transit has better fuel economy, so everyone (not just the public transit riders) benefits by having cleaner air and less global warming.
People taking public transit cause fewer cars on the road. Regular drivers benefit from decreased congestion.
Although some drivers will not regularly take public transit, it serves as a backup mode of transportation if their car should become suddenly unavailable, for example, due to being out for repair. Public transit is a shared risk-reduction mechanism.
If public transit were not available, a business would have to provide a large parking lot to attract car-driving customers. Businesses benefit from public transit by having lower property costs.
A tourist destination becomes more expensive, and therefore less attractive, if the tourist must rent a car there in order to get around. Public transit benefits the local economy via the tourism dollars.
Thus, public transit should not be forced to increase fares to meet its operating budget. Public transit benefits everyone, so it should receive public funding.
Unsolved problems: What is the socially optimal geographical coverage and schedule frequency? What is the socially optimal rider fare (probably not zero)? How can a public transit agency be induced to provide the best service it can for the funding it gets? Public transit usually operates as a monopoly, so the capitalist optimization effect of the competitive market does not occur.
A CSI style show based on the premise of alternate universes: one in which the victim survives to tell a (possibly misleading) tale, and one where the victim dies and forensic pathology tells the tale.
Do not refresh unallocated RAM.
Bring back the good old days of computing when conserving RAM was critically important.
Power off between keystrokes and mouse clicks. Display remains on.
No drag and drop. Moving the mouse only moves the cursor (an independent system that can run even with the rest of the computer turned off).
Contact bounce prevents reliably counting repeated presses of the same button. Therefore, for a binary encoding, we need at least three buttons.
Assume we wish to encode each symbol with a unique button sequence.
We need the last button of one sequence to be different from the first button of the next.
For three buttons, this means all sequences must end with the same button or begin with the same button, which is weird.
For four or more buttons (and 3 actually), each sequence must begin in one half partition and end in the other. Building a Huffman tree gets weird.
(Two buttons plus backspace to cancel an accidentally repeated keypress works well in practice.)
We consider the differences between a train in pull formation and push formation in the event of an accident.
In the "normal" pull formation, with the engine at the front, suppose the front car, i.e., the engine, derails, perhaps due to something wrong with, or on, the track. After derailing the engine no longer has a grip on the track so is no longer supplying additional energy into the accident. Of course, the unpowered trailing cars still have momentum which will cause them to collide and pile on top of each other.
In "push" formation, the engine is at the back and pushes unpowered cars in front of it. I've seen the MBTA commuter rail run trains in this formation. Suppose the front car, an unpowered car, derails. The rear engine does not derail immediately so maintains a grip on the track. Until the operator shuts it off (though this could be nearly immediate with a dead man's switch at the front), or the effects of the derailment reaches the back causing the engine to ultimately derail, the engine continues to plow forward, supplying additional energy and destruction into the accident.
I dislike restaurants which are too loud, preventing conversation across the table. I have yet to see restaurant designed to aggressively reduce sound.
Sound absorbing foam on all surfaces. Sound absorbing barriers scattered all about.
For tables for two place sections of an ellipsoid above and around the table with the foci on the two diners' heads. For tables of more than two, more complicated geometry. Let the ellipsoid sections be movable to adjust for height. Perhaps even automatic head tracking.
Have you ever looked at a public sidewalk? There ought to be a tax on chewing gum.
I am disturbed that the operation that sends my CPU utilization to 100%, and yet I perceive as not fast enough, is scrolling. In Firefox, it doesn't complete scrolling until a while after releasing the Down key. Scrolling up or sideways for images is especially slow.
In the terminal, if a command produces a lot of output, I don't get my typing, e.g., Control-C, back for a while.
Is there a better way to engineer these?
Rapid scrolling only samples a virtual frame buffer, at at most the display refresh rate . The contents of a framebuffer is calculated lazily on demand (on sampling).
Use moving pointers instead of memcopy.
Courtship among humans (probably other species too) is an imperfect information game, with both sides facing asymmetric information. As predicted by game theory, both sides use signaling mechanisms (fast cars? short skirts?) to appear desirable to the opposite sex. As predicted by game theory again, these signals are often deceptive with men and women looking for entirely different things in each other than who they actually are. Cynically we might describe the situation (is it Nash equilibrium?) as mutual lies.
And yet, almost miraculously, our species manages to successfully breed generation after generation, with no end in sight.
One can legalize yet still control recreational drugs by requiring users and sellers to be licensed. A different license for each drug. Licenses are the way we deal with other things in society where the licensee has potential to harm others or society. Getting a license may require passing an examination demonstrating that the user is knowledgeable about the drug's effects, interaction with other medicinal and recreational drugs, treatments for addiction. It may require a fee which is kind of a down payment against the harm users of this drug are probabilistically expected to cause society. For addictive drugs, one may be required to prove you belong to a support network who are willing and capable (and perhaps even legally required) of providing support, care, and treatment in the event of addiction. The names and sworn statements of the support network are kept on file.
Facebook renders your email address in your profile as an image, but it could do better: provide a different unique forwarding e-mail address to each friend who views your profile. This way, if any of your friends is a spammer, or has a compromised account, you know who it was based on which address they used.
An employee, or anyone, does something, the effects of which cannot be measured for years, if not decades. Let the employer, or other payer, pay compensation then, possibly to the estate. "You'll get paid when we get paid."
The employee may use standard financial instruments to convert an uncertain future revenue stream into perhaps a constant present salary. The market for such instruments does not seem to be accessible to regular people these days.
Vaguely similar to incentive stock options.
The government can give awards for great things that benefit the public. This might lessen the pressure and brokenness of the "intellectual property" legal system.
Agents of the MAFIAA and trojan writers put bad files onto peer-to-peer networks which turn up in a keyword search for a file, making life difficult for legitimate users of the network. (Poisoning)
In response, the network evolves and implements trust mechanisms to filter out the bad users, ultimately resulting in a large robust trust network, which is, among other things, a Holy Grail of public key infrastructure (PKI). This trust network may then be retargeted to help solve so many of the problems of the Internet today: spam, phishing, scams, viruses, denial-of-service attacks...
But alas, this future currently seems not meant to be. Legally, I blame the MGM v. Grokster decision. They could only see short-sightedly the copyright infringement, and not that peer-to-peer networks were the start of something wonderful in how they would affect the internet, and ultimately society. I sincerely hope the decision is reversed someday in court or by law.
Radioactivity today has the same mysterious quality as yesterday's spontaneous combustion: only God knows why the quantum wavefunction of the weak nuclear force decided to collapse at precisely a given moment causing the atomic nucleus to undergo radioactive decay.
What is omitted from the CSI television show?
Are there real CSI techniques that are censored from the show at the request of law enforcement? Based on the argument that it is better if the public remain ignorant about a certain technique in hopes of catching more criminals with it?
Sometimes the characters on the show encounter a villain who is familiar with CSI and attempts to cover up his or her actions to thwart CSI. Are there real techniques that criminals use to thwart real CSI that are censored from the show?
Similar questions may be asked about other cop shows.
For simplicity, define the object of the game of chess to be to capture the opponent's king. (In contrast to the conventional rules which define the end of the game at checkmate where king capture is inevitable but hasn't actually happened.)
Modify the rules of chess so that both players are permitted the same number of moves.
By the modification, black is permitted one move after his or her king is captured. White is not, because he or she moved first. If Black's "extra" last move captures White's king, then the game is drawn by king exchange.
White's first move advantage is greatly reduced, perhaps too much. Black may respond to white giving check by protecting the Black king or by attacking (giving check to) the White king.
The king is the most important piece in chess: if it is captured, the game is over. What if a different piece has this role? The king becomes just another piece.
This is inspired by capped pawn handicap. In order to mark which, say, knight is the important piece, we may place a cap on it.
Should castling be modified so the important piece is moved to safety instead of the king? What if the important piece is a rook?
Another way to do castling, also applicable to Chess 960 is to always castle with the piece on the a or h files. It might alter the parity of the bishops.
Should Awesomeness be dosed in large amounts infrequently or small amounts frequently?
Let the writing system do text compression and error detection.
Frequently used letters should take less space.
If two words differ by one letter, then those two letters ought not look too similar. Or more generally, words which cannot be distinguished by syntactic or semantic context ought to look different. If two words have similar meanings, and differ by one letter, then those two letters ought to look different. Semantic context makes it difficult to computationally optimize a better way of writing the alphabet.
Unfortunately, our writing system, the letterforms, are set in stone, sometimes literally, so cannot evolve to encode our language better.
For each binary blob of a hypertext Web page (images are the most common such blob, but video, flash, PDF, embedded objects, and even HTML, Javascript, and CSS could be), calculate a cryptographic hash of the data. Then, at the user's request, do a web search for the hash value. The search results allow for external commentary on the image or blob, external to the site itself, and free (or freer) from any censorship the site imposes.
If you want to comment on an image, you post on your own blog (or something like Usenet) the hash and your comment. A standard format of comments, ratings, thumbs up/down, would be useful for aggregating many search results.
We would like to avoid the privacy leak of the search provider knowing what images you viewed. Use tor.
One might hash the decoded image data, not the compressed original in order to catch different versions of the same thing.
Hashes of Javascript might be useful for collaborative filtering of whether a script may be trusted to run.
Another blob might be the FEN string describing a chess position.
This mechanism actually frees the site operator from having to run a forum comment board, with all its political difficulties of spammers, trolls, and obscenity. Essentially PageRank is used to filter or rank bad comments. I'm not sure how good it will be.
Like UUID.
