Motivation

Motivation. Not his main point, but an interesting (possibly apochryphal ?) story from Cringley. [Quote] If you are in the asynchronous logic field, you know who Rajit is. He had a knack for the stuff, that’s for sure. He understood it in a native way that nobody else did at the time, which made chip design, if not effortless for him, say a thousand times easier than it was for the otherwise equally smart guy down the hall. Rajit was a one-man asynch design lab, and both Intel and Sun wanted very much to hire him, though neither ever did. Both companies were unable or unwilling to provide the kind of motivation Rajit required — cats and chocolate. Most likely, they couldn’t even imagine an engineer unmotivated by stock or money, which are the normal currencies of recruitment. Cats and chocolate would have been cheaper, of course, but they didn’t bother to learn enough about the guy to know how to attract him. Today Rajit — smart as ever — teaches at Cornell, which must be chockablock with cats and chocolate. Or maybe it has just the normal levels of each and an absence of crazy product deadlines. [Unquote] [Main topic is chip speeds and the control of the PC marketplace.]

More on Quines

More on Quines. Still intrigued about Quines (even though I still don’t know why it’s relevant here – ever experience just knowing it is ? – Nash / Beautiful Mind – see earlier). Miscoranda gave me the original link. This new link eventually leads to the classic ACM Turing Award lecture by Ken Thompson.

I can see the self-replicating aspect relevant to genetics / evolution, learning / AI and to trojan horse viruses. Something which (in data) contains something defining it’s function (in code). Something akin to RDF here – subject / predicate stuff – content and intent – intension and extension ? I give in for now.

Interesting interview with Ken Thompson under the circumstances. [Quote] … simple yet powerful … see primitives and recognize their power to build structures …. When I see a top-down description of a system or language that has infinite libraries described by layers and layers, all I just see is a morass … interesting conversations, where two people think they are talking to each other but they’re not. They just miss, like two ships in the night … words …. meaning different things to both sides … PAC is vastly superior to MP3 … nobody who actually uses computers today knows what an operating system interface is … the same thing with Microsoft: Until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won’t be displaced …. Anybody who says there’s no more innovation in the world is doomed …. why on earth travel to Russia to fly a Mig-29 ? …. How often does the Soviet Union collapse? It Who wouldn’t do that? When things like that come along, I’ll take them. They’re fun. [Unquote]

Repurposing ?

Repurposing ? From Sean B Palmer [miscoranda], a quote from Tim BL under his “Aphorisms” list.
[Quote] If you say what you mean rather than what you want done with it, you can repurpose it so much better. [Unquote]
Not sure I agree with this one as stated, but there is something in the spirit. Dennett’s Intentional Stance suggests (as I do) that “intention” or “motive” is a key aspect of “meaning” whenever anybody issues a communication. The important thing would seem to be to ensure that the original intent is captured with the record, rather than being the content of the record.

Houskeeping

Just published final version of the Pinker – Blank Slate review.
Created a comprehensive bibliography – an extensible who’s who, who published what works, who expressed what thoughts, who cites who, and who quotes what by who.
Not quite ready for publication yet – technology issue – currently a couple of Excel spreadsheets only.

Cornflowers – Too Blue for Logic

My axioms were so clean-hewn,
The joins of ‘thus’ and ‘therefore’ neat –

But, I admit
Life would not fit
Between straight lines
And all the cornflowers said was ‘blue,’
All summer long, so blue.
So when the sea came in and with one wave
Threatened to wash my edifice away –

I let it.

“Cornflowers” by Marianne Jones

[via James (Gerry) Gerard-Wolff]

Too true – need to work on this dichotomy between the real-world logic and complexity with all it’s emergent semantics and properties and the human rationalisation towards simple syntax and neat rhetorical “logic”. Rational and Logical are becoming overloaded words !

Previously:

Jan 2002: BCS Cybernetics SIG, Cognition and Quantum Computing

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Post Notes:

Jan 2003 – I have a long standing “Computation / Rationalisation as Compression” reference to Wolff’s pages on “SP” and “Compression” on my resources pages – but avoided further direct reference due to the activist politics, but this remains an interesting resource. What does Wolff make of Lomborg, I wonder ? I see Wolff presented recently at the BCS special interest group on AI at Peterhouse Cambridge (10th/12th Dec 2002) – the plot thickens. Wolff makes references to early Pinker and reacts against Chomsky’s “language is too complicated to simulate” stuff.

Sept 2023 – I notice Gerry is still active with his “SP” Theory.

Aside – fascinating in the Jan 2003 note above I refer from Jan 2002 to Jan 2003 as “long-standing” – little did I know 🙂

S for Simplicity … as in compressing redundancy out of any information.
P for Power … as in maintaining / optimising its explanatory value.

And with his cognitionresearch.org domain still active too, and as recently as February 2023 a paper published in MDPI:

The SP Theory of Intelligence – and Its Realisation in the SP Computer Model, as a Foundation for the Development of Artificial General Intelligence
– by J. Gerrard Wolff.

Sadly the BCS-Cybernetics SIG (British Computer Society – Special Interest Group) on Cybernetics and Fundamental / Quantum Information, which first introduced me to people like David Deutsch, Brian Josephson, Peter Marcer and Peter Rowlands as well as Gerry Wolff became defunct, and they recently suggested their AI-SIG would be most appropriate to resurrect such interests?

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