Archive for March, 2007

On Math

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

I’m a very practical person when it comes to math and science. If I can’t do something useful with it, I’m not really concerned with learning it. If it’s easy and it looks cool, then I’ll definitely pick it up. Once it gets hard, if I can’t see a good application of the math, I don’t care for it anymore.

One implication of this is that I have found some math classes to be absolutely torturous. I spent all of abstract algebra thinking about how useless it was to factor polynomials. Who cares if this function has a zero at some exact value? I could easily put it into a computer, plot it, and have an answer that’s good enough.

The thing is, though, a lot of mathematical ideas have no directly visible application, but are actually very useful. Finding zeros in polynomials comes up all over the place. If you’ve got a matrix and want to find the eigenvectors, you have to construct the characteristic polynomial of that matrix and find zeros in it. When I realized this, I decided that it was actualy very useful to understand these polynomial creatures in all of their full gory detail.

When you’re repeatedly exposed to ideas that you first think are stupid and worthless, and then come to realize are actually quite useful and important, you learn a sense of humility. That’s good. I needed one of those.

Posted in Observations | Comments

A Conundrum

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Apparently nobody knows the origin of the word ‘conundrum’

Update: I called my Mom. She said that the word probably comes from the latin conare, which means ‘to try’, implying that a conundrum literally means a ‘thing which must be tried,’ and the plural is ‘conundra.’

<3 Mom

Posted in Humor | Comments

On AI, the End of the World, and Small Town Wisdom

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I was watching a special on the history channel about 7 ways that scientists think the world could to end. The first two were not unreasonable – ‘gamma ray bursts’ occur when a star collapses, and if this happened in our galaxy, apparently the burst would destroy our ozone layer. Without that ozone layer, we’d be killed by solar radiation. The second way we could potentially meet our doom was a roaming black hole. If that thing came too close to the earth, we’d be done for. The physics sounded about right to me, although a few things were exagerated. If you fell into the event horizon of the black hole, you’d be dead before you were able to tell what was going on. I don’t think it’d be particularly painful, and the gruesome images they gave, although they might have been accurate, would have occurred so quickly that they’d be irrelevant.

The third way we could meet our doom, however, was completely ludicrous. They had some AI researches (as well as steven hawking) claiming that computers would become more intelligent than human beings, and that for some reason they’d decide to wipe us out. I think the entire field of AI is completely misnamed. Most of those guys would, I think, make lousy theoreticians. They spend their time dreaming up ’solutions’ to NP Complete problems that run in exponential time and have absolutely no guarantees. When they’re not doing that, it appears that they’re busy making absurd predictions and prognostications about the nature of intelligence and what computers will do for us. They even had Steven Hawking claiming that within 100 years, computers would be more intelligent than human beings.

First off, people have been predicting human-level intelligence from algorithms for years. I’m not saying it won’t happen, but I think we’ve got no way of knowing how far off in the future it will be. Personally, I don’t think we’ll have human level intelligence from computers untill we can simulate an entire brain on a cellular (or maybe even molecular) level. When and if humans do produce computers with human level (or greater) intelligence, the AI that is produced will be used to accomplish all kinds of trivial crap that human beings don’t want to do. The thought of an AI that would decide to destory the world, and have the capability to do such a thing, is absurd – the AI would have to want to destory the world, and the only reason it would want such things is if it were designed to want them.

If you designed an AI capable of talking with human beings to do things like answer phone calls, you’d make it so it would be happy if it satisfied customers, and unhappy if it didn’t satisfy the customer. Human beings have all kinds of tendencies that we’d never have any decent reason to incorporate into AI – boredom, tempers, and greed. I could go on an on about this, but basically i think it’s completely absurd to be afraid that computers will take over the world. If we ever develop computers that pass turing tests and can think like humans do, it’ll be a great day for humanity because we could eliminate the need for all kinds of thankless, unpleasant tasks.

In any event, the thing that struck me the most was the difference between a small town fireman in Iowa talking about how he’d respond to one of these distaters, and the big name scientists they had talking about how the world was going to end. The scientists seemed so sure of themselves and their own intellgience. The fireman and police captain in the small town said that, in the event that one of these disasters were to occur, perhaps the only thing they could do would be to pray. I dig that. I dont like arrogant people. I’m afraid I am becoming one, however. It’s something I’ll have to watch out for.

Posted in Computer Science, Observations | Comments

On Shoddy Toasters and Copyright Law

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Suppose you went to Target to buy a toaster, and on the self you saw two ToastMan® brand Toastsers for sale: A BasicToast system for $19.99, and a ToastDeluxe system for $49.95. Interestingly enough, both toasters are identical – with one exception. The BasicToast system comes with a switch on the back that is set to “BasicToast” which means that, everytime you use it, there’s a 20% chance that your toast will be burned. The BasicToast system comes in shrinkwrap with a license agreement on the front, saying that you agree to not touch that switch on the back if you buy the BasicToast system.

Which one would you buy? It seems to me that you’d have to be pretty foolish to buy the DeluxeToast system because you could just buy the BasicToast system and ignore the license agreement, flip the switch on the back and enjoy your toast burn-free. I have a hard time imagining myself feeling like I was doing anything ‘wrong’ in this case. However, if the ToastMan Company found out that I flipped that switch and sued me, I don’t see how I could possibly win the case.

On the one hand, I understand the buisness model a company would have for making such a decision – it’s basically not too different from offering coupons. Companies offer coupons as a way of snaring customers who wouldn’t normally buy a product because it costs too much. They’re hoping they can reduce the price only for those unwilling to pay the regular price they charge – by making those customers do something inconvenient like saving a scrap of paper and handing it to the cashier. I know if you’re flying Delta out of Cincinnati, it is frequently cheaper to buy a ticket from a flight that leaves from Dayton and stops in Cincinnati. They won’t let you get on the flight in Cincinnati, though, becuase they want to make you “earn that priviledge” by paying more for a ticket – even though it would be cheaper (if only slightly) for them to let you skip the flight out of Dayton.

On the other hand, where do you draw the line? What if NetFlix offered you a discount on renting movies, so long as you agreed to not really enjoy any of the movies you rented? That’s just assinine. I’m a strong believer in enforcing private contracts, but it seems ludicrous to me to prosecute someone for fixing the broken toaster they bought, regardless of whether or not they agreed not to fix it when they bought it. The real issue is why people are intentionally making faulty toasters – what sort of economic system do we have that encourages people to intentionally introduce faults into their products?

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m talking about the software industry. I don’t think there’s any way to look at user license restrictions as anything other than flaws. When you buy a computer program and 5 licesnses for the program, and then reverse engineer the code to allow more than 5 users to use the program, you’re doing nothing fundamentally different than buying a BasicToast system and flipping the switch on the back so your toast doesn’t get burned.

I started a discussion (argument) about IP law today at lunch, causing our lunch to go long. My argument was that, althoguh we need IP law to incentivize development of ideas, I don’t think the current system is very reasoble because it encourages people to intentionally break their products, duplicate intellectual efforts, and withold information from others.

Posted in Observations | Comments

The Important Stuff

Friday, March 16th, 2007

Thinkin’

Gee-tarin’

Proggin’

Posted in Personal | Comments

Uh Oh?

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

I was doing research for my project on Procedural Content generation last night, and I wanted to contact the author of one of the papers I was reading. When I put his name into google, I found his “reasons for leaving the field of computer graphics research.” He listed what he thought were serious probelms in the field, including a sort of arrogance and obsession with a particular conference. Apparently, everybody in the graphics field wants to present their work at one conference, so the competition is brutal. I absolutely loved a lot of the papers I read, but I did notice that most of the papers written in the past 15 years were all from the SIGGRAPH Annual Meeting proceedings. I hope I’m not considering going into a field with serious problems.

Posted in Computer Science | Comments

I am In Love

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

I completely love the field of computer science. I keep rediscovering this fact. Today, on the way home from work, I was pondering what it meant for a set to be recursively enumerable but not recursive. The trick of using many different turing machines, on a ‘time share’ basis, all working to verify members of your recursively enumerable set, is pretty sweet.

I spent most of this evening working on my senior research project, which is a study of ‘Procedural Content Generation.’ That’s the process of using mathematical rules and computer code to generate computer graphics, instead of having an artist draw it. The kind of work people are doing is absolutely amazing. The neat thing is that when someone wants to write an algorithm to draw realistic clouds, they get to go and study what clouds are, how they form, and how they move about. Some other algorithms that I was reading about are based upon biological models.

The fact that studying how spots form on leopards, how clouds form, and what kinds of problems we can efficiently solve are all considered part of the same glorious field makes me giddy. I can’t believe how lucky I am that I can study pretty much anything that interests me, and so long as I take a mathematical approach to the things I’m studying, I can put on my ‘computer scientist’ hat (and keep whatever job I eventually get as a computer scientist.)

If you have access to the ACM digital library (If you’re a college student, most likely you can visit it through your library’s website), you simply must read the paper “A Simple, Efficient Method for Realistic Animation of Clouds.” Heck, don’t even bother reading it – just look at the pictures on the last page. They’re amazing.

Posted in Computer Science | Comments

Back From Puerto Rico / Religious Musings

Saturday, March 10th, 2007

For my spring break, I took a trip to visit Puerto Rico. I met a girl who lives there while I was at Harvey Mudd, and I found a cheap plane ticket ($208!!), so I scheduled a 5 day visit. I learned a lot of Spanish – when you’re surrounded by the language at all times, and you’re with a native speaker who also knows your language very well, it’s not difficult to pick a lot of it up. Photos are here.

Bob and I went to the ‘No Fear’ tour in Columbus last night. The only Band I really wanted to see was DragonForce, who put on one hell of a show. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the mosh pit for Chimaira. I don’t listen to that kind of music because it doesn’t ‘go anywhere,’ and I really dislike the guttural growling and barking that passis for lyrics. When you’re with a bunch of other people and it’s being played live, though, the energy in that kind of music is intense. It makes you want to be violent. Hence the idea of a mosh pit – a bunch of people pushing and shoving each other while dancing to violently fast, loud music. The neat thing about a mosh pit is that although everyone is pushing and shoving each other, everybody’s also looking out for everyone else – if someone falls down, everybody around them helps get them to their feet. Before giving them a good shove, of course.

I’d never been to a concert for a band I really liked before, and I have to say I liked it. The mosh pit was exhausting, and by the end of DragonForce’s show, I did not have the energy to sit through the final act, a band named ‘Killswitch Engage.’ Joe Satriani is coming to Cincinnati in March, with John Petrucci and some other guy who I’ve never heard of. I think I’ll go.

As for grad schools, I still haven’t heard from Georgia Tech and UC San Diego. Everybody Else (Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Illinois) has rejected me. When I applied to schools, I was given the impression that nothing was a ‘long shot’ for me, and as a result I was very confident about where I’d get in. I Figured UC San Diego, Georgia Tech, UNC, and Illinois were all sure things, and as for the other four, I figured I’d get into at least one. Being rejected from the ‘Big Four’ was tough. I’m glad those rejections came first. When I got the admission letter from UNC, I wasn’t all that excited because it came right after the rejection letter from Carnegie Mellon, a place I thought would be reallly good for me. I’m going to visit UNC, and I am looking forward to it. I really liked that part of the country when I went to some math conferences there last year, and the thought of spending more time there is pleasing.

I was never all that hot on going to Illinois because I didn’t like the idea of living in Urbana/Champaign, but this morning I started to think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. That was when I saw the rejection letter sitting on the table in the dining room. At this point, I wouldn’t be too surprised if both UC San Diego and Georgia Tech rejected me. It’s tough to be rejected like that, but I think it’s a good humbling experience for me.

Lastly, a thought on religion: why would anyone convert to Mormonism? An interesting tenet of the Mormon faith is that ancestors of the church can be ‘baptised’ after their deaths. If you have even the slightest doubts about whether Mormonism is the ‘true’ religion, you should just do your best to have a few kids. If Mormonism pans out to be ‘the true religion’ then you should expect virtually everyone in the future to become a Mormon. Therefore, at least one of your future progeny would likely become a Mormon. This descendant would, after conversion, baptise you and get you into heaven. If you’re wrong, and Mormonism isnt’ the true religion, you haven’t made any incorrect choices.

Posted in Personal, Philosophy, Photos | Comments