From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Sat Jun 5 11:09:18 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA02251; Sat, 5 Jun 93 11:09:15 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA04946; Sat, 5 Jun 93 11:09:12 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu (5.65/4.0) id ; Sat, 5 Jun 93 14:06:21 -0400 Message-Id: <9306051806.AA25110@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: ExI-Daily@gnu.ai.mit.edu Date: Sat, 5 Jun 93 14:06:03 -0400 X-Original-Message-Id: <9306051806.AA25103@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu> X-Original-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu From: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0300 X-Extropian-Date: Remailed on June 5, 373 P.N.O. [18:06:21 UTC] Reply-To: Extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: OR Extropians Digest Sat, 5 Jun 93 Volume 93 : Issue 0300 Today's Topics: BRAIN: obscure speculation [1 msgs] CHAT: SpaceLords as Extropian Videogame? [1 msgs] COMP: bits into long term memory [1 msgs] Contrapositive Crows [1 msgs] EXTROPRENEUR: Request for Comments [2 msgs] Extropians Digest V93 #0299 [1 msgs] FWD: WHAT IS HILLARY'S E-MAIL ADDRESS (fwd) [1 msgs] Fermi: The Filial Solution [1 msgs] HUMOUR: Fermi & the xenozoics [1 msgs] I'd like to me on your mailing list! [1 msgs] Meta: List Problems [1 msgs] Power Crazed FDA [1 msgs] Reason Magazine [1 msgs] SPACE: Fermi paradox [1 msgs] SPACE: Primordial Replicator Soup? [1 msgs] Speech Recognition [1 msgs] The Late Heavy Bombardment [1 msgs] WHAT IS HILLARY'S E-MAIL ADDRESS [1 msgs] Administrivia: This is the digested version of the Extropian mailing list. Please remember that this list is private; messages must not be forwarded without their author's permission. To send mail to the list/digest, address your posts to: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu To send add/drop requests for this digest, address your post to: exi-daily-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu To make a formal complaint or an administrative request, address your posts to: extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu If your mail reader is operating correctly, replies to this message will be automatically addressed to the entire list [extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu] - please avoid long quotes! The Extropian mailing list is brought to you by the Extropy Institute, through hardware, generously provided, by the Free Software Foundation - neither is responsible for its content. Forward, Onward, Outward - Harry Shapiro (habs) List Administrator. Approximate Size: 50578 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 16:49:15 EDT From: chrism@ksr.com Subject: SPACE: Fermi paradox Mike Wiik wrote: > I've been playing with SimLife lately so naturally this reminds me > again of my favorite Fermi resolution - that we're all in a simulation. > We haven't been programmed to meet aliens yet. This reminds me of the "solution" that occurred to me during the first major outbreak of Fermi Paradox discussions on this list. If, as Hans Moravec has argued, significantly more virtual time will be spent modelling the past than in living it the first time around, then the odds are that we are living in one of the simulations. Then (for us) the Fermi paradox changes from "Where is everyone?" to "Why aren't there obvious signs of other civilizations in this simulation?" (Hmmm, I haven't been following the "Contrapositive Crows" thread very closely. Could the fact that we expect to see obvious signs of other intelligence, and don't, be evidence that we *are* living in a simulation?) Obviously, if some Omega Point intelligences are simulating many/all possible variations on the past we would expect that many of the simulator runs are of odd boundary cases. So perhaps we are just living in one of the "what if there were only one intelligent species in the universe?" cases. However, as a hardware designer, I run a lot of (logic and circuit) simulations myself, and a somewhat more ominous -- from our viewpoint as occupants of the simulation -- possibility suggests itself. To simplify the simulation, one frequently leaves out, or simplifies, anything that is not directly of interest. (To reduce the amount of output that you have to wade through or to speed up the simulation.) Also, when specifying the run length, you often don't think very hard about exactly *when* the event of interest will occur. Instead you just specify some round number like "10 thousand nanoseconds" that is likely to cover the region of interest. So perhaps we are living in a simulation of "What if James Joyce had lived to complete _Ulysses_?" and the simulator clock runs out in the year 2000... -chrism -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Not only is Space from the point of view of life and humanity empty, but Time is empty also. Life is like a little glow, scarcely kindled yet, in these void immensities." -- H.G. Wells, "Outline of History" ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 17:35:25 -0400 (EDT) From: Carol Moore Subject: FWD: WHAT IS HILLARY'S E-MAIL ADDRESS (fwd) The more of us ask, the more likely we'll get it. So we can write the power behind the big butt.. I mean throne...hehehe ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 17:12:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Carol Moore To: Bill Clinton Subject: WHAT IS HILLARY'S E-MAIL ADDRESS Do you have an e-mail address for Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton? Thanks! (-: Chaos/Order = Yang/Yin -- cmoore@cap.gwu.edu :-) -------------------------------------------- (Notice the subtle signature line.) (-: Like My Short Sig-Line?? -- cmoore@cap.gwu.edu :-) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 04 Jun 93 21:08:47 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: HUMOUR: Fermi & the xenozoics Stanton McCandlish: > Or the "Trelayne" scenario: the only ones that bother with galactic > bugs like us are the kids, and treat us much the same way as a kid > sticking firecrackers down an anthill and pulling the wings off of > butterflies. Would explain the mutilations and abductions and anal > sadism, etc. >;) I know I *really* shouldn't ask, but would you mind going into a bit more detail? There's obviously a whole area of 'rural' myth I'm missing out on here. Also like some *very* strange things going on the UK. You first, though.. :-) Just lowering the tone of the list. > Stanton McCandlish Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk AS member (21/3/93) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 15:33:04 -0700 From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) Subject: EXTROPRENEUR: Request for Comments Since two of my highly esteemed colleagues on this list, Derek Zahn and Nick Szabo, are involved in this thread--and one of them has specifically asked for my comments--I can't stay out of this one. First, some comments on Derek's scanner-OCR-sorter entrepreneurial idea. I'm more skeptical than Nick is, because I don't think a $199 product (as Derek forecasts, though the pricing is not set in concrete, I'm sure) can solve the problems Derek wants to solve. I have a flatbed scanner, a 300 dpi monochrome (Abaton TranScribe 300), which is nearly ideal for OCR work--I have used this to scan-in various articles, pages out of books, etc. I also have "TypeReader," an outstanding OCR package from ExperVision. It runs on both Windows and the Mac and has won awards on both platforms. It "came out of nowhere" to challenge Caere and Calera because it was initially developed for the Japanese market (kanji recognition, using "machine-learned fragment analysis," or somesuch vaguely AI-ish method). It is fairly accurate (better than Caere's top of the line), requires a lot of memory (5 MB minimum...I give it 12-16 MB on my Mac IIci), and takes a few minutes per page (insert sheet, scan, recognize, correct). TypeReader also allows batch processing, with n sheets fed in, and recognition done later. This, I will note, is OK for things I want to send out to the Extropians or Cypherpunks list, as I'm willing to spend the 10-20 minutes to set everything up, scan-in several pages out of Casti's book (for example), and then carefully run the correction process, which involves looking at the raw bit image in a window above the suspect characters and then making manual corrections. (It's nicely done, by the way, but is by no means "automatic.") But spending this kind of time for _large volumes_ of sheets or magazines or advertisements, is not practical! I would not dream of spending this kind of time scanning in newspaper sheets just so I could "automatically" sort the very few articles of interest or the advertisements that Derek mentions as a justification. It is far, far easier to merely clip out any ads of interest for the (relatively) few times a year one is looking closely at ads (for example). To make this point short, I cannot imagine anyone other than the CIA having the need to automatically scan, OCR, recognize, correct, and sort into databases the kinds of volume Derek seems to be implying. Even with my setup (total price, around $700 for the scanner/OCR package, a few thousand for a 486DX/Mac IIci-class system, etc.), it is _painfully_ slow to scan in material. Again, for a few pages, no big deal. But not for bulk scanning. (Higher speed OCR, coupled with automatic sheet feeders, are a way to go. Much bucks! Casual users will not see this technology for many years, is my strong guess. More to the point, casual users have not seen fit to use OCR much at all. Where, for example, are the "OCR kiosks" at Kinko's-type copy centers? Answer: maybe someday.) The storage requirements are also significant. The "Newsweek" article I scanned and OCRed for the Cypherpunks list a few days ago consumed about 1 megabyte for the 300 dpi bit image of the 8.5 x 11'' sheet. Whitespace compression would cut this down considerably (obviously). TypeReader stores it's internal image, prior to OCR, in 256K bytes (for one page). The final OCRed (ASCII) version was only 6K, which is what I posted. I mention this because of the idea many folks have (and Nick mentioned it) the idea of scanning large amounts of stuff at libraries for later OCRing--it just won't work at today's levels of OCR. Further, misscans (tilted pages, missing stuff near the binding, etc.) often occur, necessitating rescans of the affected pages....this is not conducive to scanning at the library and then OCRing at home! (Granted, Derek is talking about improved OCR, so things may get better. Just bear these kinds of calculations in mind.) I wish Derek well, but the OCR market is also--like the voice recognition market--dominated by folks with long experience (one of my old Intel bosses, Bob Noyce, financed Caere back around 1974 or so...and Caere took nearly 20 years before making any money, if at all. A friend of mine, Mike Korns, was Chief Scientist on Xerox's OCR program, the large, commercial version, and they had a large staff using neural nets, genetic algorithms, all the latest pattern recognition, ad nauseum). This is not to say Derek does not have a better idea--I respect him greatly--but the odds are slim. Unless Derek has a fundamentally _better_ approach to either of these product areas, a brainstorm or new technique, he faces formidable odds. (This is almost always true, and a few lone inventors do hit it big. But the odds are very slim.) In summary on this point, a $200 product like Derek's would be "interesting," but the scanner, memory, processor power, etc. don't seem to be equally cheap. And not many people seem to think they need to scan and OCR _anything_. (Side note: Cheap hand-held scanners are abysmal...I have used them and for OCR work they are really bad. The Caere "Typist" hand-held scanner/OCR package sells for about $300 and isn't selling well at all. No surprise. Derek should certainly buy one of these and see what makes it so bad, and also see whether he could build a "drop-in engine replacement" for it that would make it acceptable. If he can develop dramatically better software that runs these units, he might find some folks that would pay $200 for it.) Nick Szabo makes a number of points, only a few of which I'll comment on (and then only briefly, I hope), >These technology areas seem ideal for the "product wave" >strategy of marketing. This has been one of the unsung strategies of >Japanese consumer electronics: introduce dozens of slightly varying products, >market them slightly differently (targeting different niches), and >quickly withdraw the failures, leaving behind a still substantial >number of products highly fit for the market. Don't try to fully >anticipate consumer needs; instead anticipate a variety of reasonable >needs and let the market pick the winner. Cypress Semiconductor also >seems to do this; CEO T.J. Rodger's article in this months' _Reason_ >claims they have only 150 "product designers" and 70 "technologists", Yes, but Cypress is not doing all that well. I still own some of their stock, and so I follow closely their products. Their proliferation of niche (of the "first kind") products resembles AMD's ill-fated "Liberty Chips" program, circa 1985, when *every week* they rolled out a brand new design...most of these sank into oblivion adn AMD would've been better advised to figure out what the world really wanted. (To fullfill a "design points" criterion with Intel--the infamous lawsuit deal--they designed a graphics chip called the "Quad Pixel Display Manager." Did anyone every _use_ the QPDM? Have any of you ever heard about it? Intel looked at the design, agreed it had the "quota" of transistors (regardless of market demand, the contract was written to award AMD points toward them getting the 386 by how "complex" their design was!!!), then _barfed_ and refused to use the AMD design...this was one reason TI and NEC captured the graphics controller market in the mid-80s.) Cypress is suffering because Sun did not pick up on the Cypress SPARC, which is why Cypress just sold its Ross Systems subsidiary to Fujitsu. >but sell more than 1,500 products! Intel did this with CMOS in >the early 70's; I'd love to hear Tim May's comments about early >Intel marketing and how they made so many successful products with >such a small effort in those days. For a startup, the product In the early 70s, TI, Fairchild, Motorola, and National all had "shotgun" product families, mostly in bipolar (gates, simple memories). Intel chose instead to concentrate strictly on MOS, initially P-channel MOS (PMOS), then on NMOS. (CMOS did not hit big until the early 1980s, by the way.) This was scoffed at by the Big Guns, as being a "niche." Indeed, it was a "niche of the second kind," a niche in the knowledge space mine that "opened up" into jewel-and gold-encrusted new region of the mine...and since Intel was first into this new vein of ore, this fabulously rich region, they prospered. I joined Intel in 1974 and was amazed that only Intel knew how to make stable n-channel (NMOS) devices! (Lost of tricks, trade secrets...none of them patented or disclosed!) This was the key, along with the world's first CAD system, developed in-house, the first microprocessor, the first commercial dynamic RAM, the first EPROM, the first single-board computer, and on and on. (Intel even hired Gary Kildall to write what was later sold as CP/M, so in a sense Intel pioneered MS-DOS...barf!!). >wave starts with a few narrowly targeted products, then when those >start bringing in revenue use that money to open up the floodgates, >letting loose a barrage of closely related products. The >same small code library and marketing material can be mutated, >crossed-over, and otherwise edited into dozens of forms until >the market finds the best one. It's amazing how many companies >become satisfied with the first flush of victory, and religiously >stick to the initial, quite sub-optimal great idea. Witness Visi-Calc, >DBase, Osborne, etc. Then too, many large companies throw vast >sums into single products instead of produce waves. Startups cannot >afford either mistake. Agreed. Too long a committment to an idea can be fatal. >Derek has some great ideas for market niches; I especially find >the scanning of addresses from business letters a promising >area. Here are some more SDP niches, each one of which might >support dozens of slightly different products: In fact, in a walk through a local Mac store, I just saw a product that does exactly this: it scans through all the files on a disk and looks for "address fields," which it then adds automatically (or by user confirmation, if desired) to an organizer. I didn't note the name, as I think such electronic organizers are a waste of time (for me and my needs). >* scan in business forms, convert them to on-line forms >* scan in legal contracts (for style checking, archiving, etc.) >* scan in old blueprints -> CAD files >* scan in prescription, patient status, etc. forms (including doctor's > signatures :-) > Several forms management companies are pursuing things like this. A problem has been the still-high error rate of even the best OCR packages...forms are often typed with typos, smudges, handwritten corrections, out of the boxes, etc. >Here's a more general device I'd be interested in: a hand-held copy >machine, basically a scanner hooked to a small portable computer. >Take it into the library, use it to scan in the pages of >a scientific article, which can then be taken home, uploaded to >computer and printed out on laser printer or posted on the net. >This wouldn't make publishers too happy, but if it fits in a >briefcase tough luck for them. :-) See my earlier comments. Very hard to do. Much more time-consuming than simply Xeroxing the pages, and less convenient to work with to boot. (Photos are a problem, graphs get screwed up, equations are a major obstacle, etc.) I just ordered a PowerBook 170 to replace my 100, and I still couldn't do what Nick is suggesting here. My solution at the UC Santa Cruz library is to have a 4 cents per page copy card, make the Xerox copies, take them home, read them, and (sometimes, but *very* rarely) then scan and OCR them on my home system. (Much easier with a flatbed scanner, fast machine, the chance to correct misscans, the time to walk away and come back an hour later, etc.). >But don't go with any of these ideas just because they sound good. >Buy a list of small businesses in the market niche(s) of interest >who've bought OCR scanners or general-purpose SR in the last couple >years and call them up, asking what they've used them for, or what >they tried to use them for but couldn't make to work. Talk to these >people, don't pretend you more than they do about what they want. >Then hire some of these people to help you design & sell the product. Agreed. And I hope my own experiences with OCR are helpful. I use text databases, scanners, OCR, etc., and am in many ways the kind of customer I think Derek is looking at....and yet I've noted my problems with his scheme. The biggest is that I just don't *want* to scan-in huge amounts of papers! The stuff already in paper form can stay that way, for all I care. (I also have "StorySpace," a true hypertext program, with fully bidirectional links and whatnot...I once contemplated scanning in most of the nanotech papers as a project for the Foresight Institute, but gave this up very quickly when I did some calculations of time required, storage required, etc.) "Scanning in the paper blizzard" sounds attractive, but will actually cause more hassles than it's worth, for the foreseeable future. I hope this helps and is not seen as being "negative." Reality is just what it is. -Tim May -- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^756839 | Public Key: by arrangement Note: I put time and money into writing this posting. I hope you enjoy it. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 04 Jun 93 19:56:35 EDT From: larry900@aol.com Subject: I'd like to me on your mailing list! Please put me on your e-mail list. Thanks! larry900@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 19:28:48 CST From: "" Subject: Power Crazed FDA On Fri, 04 Jun 1993 13:08:39 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote: > >KMOSTA01@ulkyvx.louisville.edu says: >> >> Heath Goebel just does not understand -- you see, FDA really needs to >> ban all life-protecting drugs, because they do not work, every person >> on record who took them eventually died, except for some limited >> number or survivors, and for those death seems likely! FDA must act now! > >Indeed, virtually every person who has ever breathed oxygen has died. >Its time for immediate EPA action to ban this horribly reactive >oxidizer that is polluting our atmosphere. > >.pm I believe that when John Campbell was editing Astounding/Analog, he did an editorial on the dangers of oxygen. And there's the "fact" article titled "The Dread Tomato Addiction" along similar lines. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that H-bombs are perfectly safe. No one has ever been killed by one. If you want to be really safe, of course, you should move to the surface of the Moon. No human has ever died there. Dan Goodman dsg@staff.tc.umn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 19:48:12 -0500 From: "Phil G. Fraering" Subject: The Late Heavy Bombardment >Isn't the question, rather, why did it (relatively speaking) stop after >only 300 million years? According to some of my professors, because the great amount of mass loss from the early Sun had ceased and the orbits of the planets had stopped expanding so much as a result. The orbits of the asteroids did not expand at the same rate as the resonanse gaps from Jupiter were expanding, so they kept getting ejected out of the belt into the inner or outer system. pgf ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 18:13:37 -0700 From: rpeck@pure.com (Ray Peck) Subject: Extropians Digest V93 #0299 >From: ingres@cs.unm.edu >Subject: TECH: DAK = trash > Everyone I've talked to about them has had similar problems. I'm >curious, is there anyone on this list who has bought something from >DAK and been satisfied with the deal? I've bought a few things (ADC sound equipment) from them, and have been very satisfied. But that's because, like with other outfits like them, I made sure I knew exactly what I would be receiving when I ordered. They sell a ton of crap, but a few good things somehow slip into their catalogues. . . ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 93 21:55:04 CDT From: ddfr@midway.uchicago.edu Subject: Contrapositive Crows Don Davis writes: >Note also that if we allow white paper logic, we can also say that >a white piece of paper provides evidence that crows are white. > > Crows are smaller than buicks. > A piece of paper is smaller than a buick. > > If I see this white piece of paper that is smaller than a buick, > then that should increase my belief that all things smaller > than a buick are white. > > Therefore, my belief that all crows are white should increase. That does not work. It does increase your belief that all things smaller than a buick are white. But it does not follow that it increases your belief that crows are white. In order for all things smaller than a buick to be white, it is necessary that all (not enormous) pieces of paper be white, that all crows be white, that ... . You have raised the joint probability by raising the probability of one of the necessary conditions. That tells us nothing about the other conditions. >I no longer have David's original post on contrapositive crows, >so I can't pin down where in the argument we create these problems. >It looks like induction should not play by the rules of deduction. I will send you a copy. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 4 Jun 1993 23:33:24 -0400 (EDT) From: Harry Shapiro Subject: EXTROPRENEUR: Request for Comments I would, in regards to ocr, question in 2 or 3 years what % of material that is printed is not already in digital format. By that I mean, for example, almost all new books, mag. articles, etc. start out life as a word processing file. It might be better to find a way to buy the digital rights to this stuff (a la Nexis) and sell that, rather than develop technology to covert print -> digital. (Being that in the future it will be available totally electronically.) The only reason I can think of to proceed with OCR technology would be 1) to get old stuff in 2) If you think it will be a very long time before such data is available directly in digital format. 3) if you think you can bootstrap a fortune by doing something very quickly with a high profit margin -- Harry Shapiro habs@panix.com List Administrator of the Extropy Institute Mailing List Private Communication for the Extropian Community since 1991 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 05 Jun 93 03:25:48 EDT From: "stuff available list" available on request--just ask for it! Subject: Fermi: The Filial Solution Considering the evolution of primates, aliens might have evolved similarly. The brain has become both larger and more complex. The sexual organs have be- come larger and sexual behavior more complex and frequent. So maybe they evolved a bit more, and decided to stay home and have fun. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Jun 93 5:09:14 EST From: mike@highlite.gotham.COM (Mike Wiik) Subject: CHAT: SpaceLords as Extropian Videogame? I believe someone mentioned the Spacelords arcade game in a recent thread. Spacelords may actually incorporate several Extropian memes. This is my favorite video game of late. It doesn't get discussed on rec.games.video. arcade, so if a detailed discussion of this game doesn't appeal to you, skip to next message now. (people in the Wash D.C. metro area are especially invited to stay). For those who haven't played it, Spacelords is a pilot's-pov 3-D space combat game. You (and an optional copilot) fly around asteroids and gaseous nebulae. Your spaceship may have nukes (which can blow up several machine-controlled ships), hypers (random escape warps), and lasers. The copilot controls a second weapons array and can activate a cloaking device. The alien machine-controlled ships begin in groups of 3, killing the last results in a satellite containing various munitions or spaceship fuel. One might, in theory, play it forever, as alien spaceships with their bonus satellites are plentiful, with more entering the game every second. The gameplay and graphics are excellent, top-notch all around. Extropian relevence is suggested by: 1) It's a nano-spaceship. Six characteristics: initial nukes, initial hypers, shields, weapons strength, agility and speed are modifiable with each "life". Nukes and hypers go from 0-7, others from 1-99. You have a limited number of unseen points to use in building your ship. It reminds me of the changeable spaceships in Greg Bear's _Anvil of Stars_. And like them, it's capable of massive destruction. I admit it's hardly non-coercive, but after all, they're enemy aliens, and they're controlled entirely by the computer, so they're not life as we know it but centrally controlled robots wanting to enslave us, or at least extort quarters from us. 2) It's 4-dimensional. It's a small universe, allright. Travel in a straight line and you're back where you started. Whatever that memes. 3) Most importantly, it's networked. Nearby Springfield (VA) Mall has 4 of these units linked together. 4 human pilots + up to 4 copilots can co-exist in the same mini universe. The interaction among the players features limited resources type problems and perhaps the possibility of a sort of 'game singularity' among allied players acting in unison. You can shoot the other human players. If the humans fight among them- selves, the games are usually considerably shorter. When I play there what usually happens is a sort of loose aliance, where the players practice a 'tit for tat' strategy with regards to shooting at each other. I consider only shooting offenses, others appear to consider the taking of 'another' players energy/weapons satellite sufficient provocation for use of force. The occasional dickhead will wander in and shoot at anything that moves. For some reason, these are usually younger (teenage) players. (This game appears to be a favorite among adults). Such a player is often forced from the game as the other players ally to destroy the idiot. Difficult situations arise: you get bonus points for destroying multiple aliens (possible with a nuke). The aliens will occasionaly converge: I've destroyed 12 alien ships at once several times. What to do if a fellow player is right in the middle of them? They'll probably survive unless they're real low on energy. When a player is killed the game displays and vocalizes the human player or alien species that finished him off. There are often collisions between players' spaceships converging on a satellite. If they're low on energy, this can often be disastrous. On the other hand, favors are often exchanged. A player with a high energy level will offer an announce a satellite for use by a low-energy player (there's a low energy alarm for each ship audible to all players). I usually save my nukes for extra-close encounters. Players will frequently converge near some common attractor, with massive alien fleets following close behind. It's actually better to separate (it divides alien efforts) but the attraction of getting really into the action (a target-rich, bonus satellite-rich environment) is there. The resulting battle is an energy-depleting, "nonstop holocaust" (I think this is from a Sunsan Sontag review on _The Mysterians_). I'm the top-scoring pilot, and frequently have a dozen or more nukes collected. If I get low on energy, I become a nonstop holocaust all by myself, expending most or all nukes in an orgy of mass destruction and refueling/rearming from the numerous satellite fields that result. "Friendly Fire" becomes a definite reason to warp from the battlefield when it consists of multiple nuclear warheads. I usually announce "I'm going nuclear" but milliseconds count and I can't wait for acknowledge- ments. (the other players frequently feed on the satellites left after such a nuking). Four individualist pilots practicing a tit-for-tat relationship with each other can play this excellent game at very low cost. Could local Extropians, trained and led by myself, reach a SpaceLords Singularity and play the game for a 4-hour marathon on a buck-fifty each? I would need at least 3 volunteers... please email if interested. -Mike | o==== . : ... : : . |Mail Me Neat Stuff->POB 3703 Arlington VA 22203 --@-- . o o o ... O -O- o o : | mike@highlite.gotham.com | ... : : |----------------------------------------------- mEssAGE fRoM sPAcE ARt stUdiOs | Pun Locally Meme Globally ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Jun 93 3:12:53 EST From: mike@highlite.gotham.COM (Mike Wiik) Subject: SPACE: Primordial Replicator Soup? Well I finished _The Selfish Gene_ and am well into _The Extended Phenotype_. I've had on and off interest in evolution, recently rekindled by commercial and shareware a-life programs. Pure speculation follows... If we postulate a universe filled with von Neumann replicators, it sounds to me possibly analgous to the primordial soup from which life evolved on Earth. We think of them as quietly munching planetvoirs but maybe more interesting is their interactions with each other. Maybe they've eaten most of the universe leaving dark matter as a waste product. Consider evolution where *each gene* is already an artificially intelligent, artificially *alive* nanoreplicator. When most of the matter in the universe is in replicators they'd probably start eating each other. Or maybe... Some replicators might form "vehicles" consisting of many trillions of replicators combining into a single individual being. Presumably this massive parallel computer would have orders of magnitude more intelligence than the entire human race. We're talking Singularity at 99.99% of the speed of light here... Or maybe an adaptation might form where, to conserve energy, and while waiting for a sun to cook up more metals, they become parasites on suitable planets, seed some dna and wait for the intelligent race which comes around 5 billion years or so later. The host race (i.e., us) eventually converts most of it's solar system into nanomachines. That's when the aliens will come. They'll be all around us. Our own nanoreplicators will be absorbed immediately. Sure, in one sense we'll all die horribly as our brains are sucked out and incorporated into the local godmachine, but we *will* achieve singularity. Talk about Uplift. They nova the Sun to get the metals and use the released energy to quantum teleport themselves to another star. One familiar proposed Fermi paradox solution is that maybe we're the first intelligent race. But maybe we're the last. As such, it'd be interesting to see if an intelligent race could find its own way to singularity. -Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Optional poll: (please email direct to mike@highlite.gotham.com) Check one: [ ] I would like to have my brain sucked out and join the local godmachine immediately. All extropian list members get a Jupiter-size brain in exchange. [ ] Humans were meant to struggle, claw our way to the top. Fighting and sweating and dying and farting and bleeding. I'll build my own Jupiter-size brain, thank you. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | o==== . : ... : : . |Mail Me Neat Stuff->POB 3703 Arlington VA 22203 --@-- . o o o ... O -O- o o : | mike@highlite.gotham.com | ... : : |----------------------------------------------- mEssAGE fRoM sPAcE ARt stUdiOs | Pun Locally Meme Globally ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 19:32 EDT From: kwaldman@tanstaafl.extropy1.sai.com (Karl M Waldman) Subject: Reason Magazine Check out this months Reason for an article by T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor. (based on his testimony to Congress,) Absolutely stunning!, better than Atlas Shrugged. Also has some good reprints of letters to the WSJ, in response to same testimony. Too bad Clinton can't read, Karl ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 2 Jun 93 20:29 EDT From: kwaldman@tanstaafl.extropy1.sai.com (Karl M Waldman) Subject: Speech Recognition > Derek Zahn writes: > > > After LONG and careful thought, I've decided that my first area of > > product development would be Speech Recognition. I may abandon > > my current efforts toward a PhD in order to give it proper attention. > > I believe that it will be a MANY billion dollar area in the next > > decade and that I can have a piece of that pie, because my training > > and inclination are all in this direction (maybe I can't have _much_ > > of the multi-billion, but then I don't need much...)... > > I don't know if there's much of a market there for small time players, unless > you can beat the stuff that Apple and AT&T is working on. > BBN just annouced a new product named Hark, a speech recognition package for the Sun. It doesn't require any special hardware, has a very large vocabulary and high accuracy. (It's been operating as a operator at BBN for about a year, you just call the special number (internal only sorry) and say the persons name "Karl Waldman" and it will connect you to that extension. Real neat. I hope to put it on "my" Sparc 2 in the next few months. This might be a good place to start a business, similiar to database programming. (Of course we all know the value of free advice). Note: I have only tangential financial interest in this product as an employee and stockholder of this company. Karl ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Jun 1993 10:41:10 -0400 (EDT) From: Harry Shapiro Subject: Meta: List Problems Do to some funkyness on gnu, edit changes made in the last few days may have been "undone." If you asked to drop the list but are still on, please make another request. /harry -- Harry Shapiro habs@panix.com List Administrator of the Extropy Institute Mailing List Private Communication for the Extropian Community since 1991 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Jun 93 13:14:53 -0400 From: pavel@PARK.BU.EDU (Paul Cisek) Subject: COMP: bits into long term memory Michael Clive Price insists that I justify my criticisms of the 1-2 bit/sec storage capacity estimate... I've gone and dug up the original Landauer article (this issue is somewhat interesting to me...). It's a good article, but it is founded upon a philosophy which I consider completely misled (but more on this later...) First, I want to point out that the value of 1-2 bits/sec completely contradicts the findings of Bela Julesz summarized by Derek Zahn. The eidetic person was able to remember 83 bits/sec, as would be calculated by Landauer's functional paradigm. Ok, the eidetic person is exceptional, but if he/she suffers no major psychological deficits in other areas then their brain capacity must be about 40 times more efficient than a normal person. That's quite a mutation. But OK, let's accept that these eidetics have a better compression algorithm (cringe!). Second, Landauer tested his subject's memory of only the things he was interested in. He did not ask them if they remember the position in which they were seated when they looked at the pictures, or what the shape of the room was, or the color of the table. Sure, their recall of these things would be very inaccurate, but still above chance level. Third, Landauer makes the "simplifying assumption" that the rate of memory storage remains basically constant - a "conservation-of-learning principle". This is the basis of his averaging method. I would say it's a very questionable and potentially confounding assumption, as he himself points out. Another thing he points out is that the functional, observable memory capacity is probably much smaller then the actual form in which it is stored, drawing upon an analogy to databases: the more functional cross-references you want among your information, the more storage you need to devote to each piece of information. With the brain's capacity to draw associations and combine seemingly unrelated data, it must have a great deal of cross-references. (But this is again the type of computer-biased thinking that has led many researchers upon theoretical dead-ends). Fourth, I again question the value of a purely quantitative analysis of something which is not qualitatively understood. But we've gone through this at length... Finally, the question of inappropriate metaphors. To truly criticize the computer analogy I should present an alternative which equally satisfies the listener. I cannot do this for two reasons: The listeners (with a few exceptions) are computer specialists who want the language of the discussion to be within their preferred form of discourse - computerspeak or mathematics. The other reason is the deeper one - I _have_ no alternative metaphor, I also do not understand the brain. But I can mention a few of the thoughts that lead me to doubt some of the inherent assumptions in all the discussions of mind and brain on this list. I will post these in an upcoming message... -Paul (Please note that I have changed the prefix of this thread to COMP. We're not talking about biology here...) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 5 Jun 93 13:29:48 -0400 From: pavel@PARK.BU.EDU (Paul Cisek) Subject: BRAIN: obscure speculation I've promised to post some of my reasons for doubting the assumptions upon which much of the speculation here, and much serious research, is based. Here's a first attempt, but bear with me - this is a difficult issue. \begin{speculation} What is the function of the nervous system? I believe it is not to transform the input into a compressed representation which can be later indexed and decoded and used to guide motor decisions. I'd rather describe it as an extension of the homeostatic processes of the body into the domain external to the organism. Behavior is thus a reactive process, driven as much by the internal states (hunger) as by the external (gradients of tropic substances). There are many examples of simple reactive local processes that result in extremely complex functionality: the construction of termite mounds, blind flying... most of all - the construction of a body through embryogenesis. This extremely complex result does not require any representation of future states, or a motivation, or even an explicit plan. An external observer (say, a computer scientist) might be tempted to describe embryogenesis as a process of decoding the representation stored in the genome. This is _reasonable_, but it is not _enlightening_. Embryogenesis is the result of local interactions, fortunate timing between enzyme productions and structure. It is also affected by the external environment (for example in mammals, where laterality may be determined by in utero factors like the presence of a twin). This process is without a guiding motivation or plan, and only exists because each stage has received positive evolutionary feedback through its own success. There is no explicit representation of a body in the genome (with nucleic "bits" to represent an arm or leg) but rather a description of a process that just happens to produce a body, an implicit representation. The only way to "decode" the stored "representation" is by initiating the implementation process and observing what happens. I claim that behavior is analogous, and that "memory" is more of a side-effect of more subtle fundamental processes. It is a useful description of the fact that an organism seems to behave similarly in similar situations. But the only way to decode the representation is by placing the organism in an analogous situation and observing what happens. I would also suggest that motivated behavior is in a way an artifact of observation, as is causality (but I need to read some Hume before I push this too far...) The information-theoretic and computer science metaphors are accurate, and I suppose even useful. But my point is that they provide little insight into the nature of what they are describing. For example (to draw an analogy :), one can describe a car as a transformation of the input (a key) to the output (the sound made by the motor). Yes, this is useless and stupid, but it is accurate. By the same token, an external observer could conclude that honking the horn causes the car to stop suddenly. (Please don't extract this argument and criticize without considering the rest - I realise that it's a weak analogy). The study of the mind should not limit itself to any particular viewpoint. Computer science, information theory, mathematics, psychology, psychophysics, neurobiology, neurophysiology, evolutionary theory, embryology, ethology, and philosophy are each inadequate. We can only hope that their union is enough... \end{speculation} -Paul ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 Issue #0300 ****************************************