Tuesday, June 28, 2016

nice kickstarter going on right now



System shock was a nice game, and this kickstarter looks ace.  Will get the new remake version when it's out.

Nice computing tech



The intel NUC, a nice compact pc, iirc it can be augmented with an external graphic card if more power is desired.   Has decent ram capacity and is pretty powerful for the small form factor.  I like the look of the case quite a lot.

Link to intel site with more info

Sunday, June 26, 2016

kurzweil ai post on mathematical realism

By that reasoning all art is "discovered".
Animals have a sense of numerosity, and can be tested on numerical competence, their competence is not zero. This suggests evolution happened upon hardware able to handle numerical quantities to some extent, humanity's mathematical abilities rest on biological hardware able to handle numerical concepts and quantities, damage to the tissue performing this function can have profound consequences(as seen in the book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics).
So if numbers and numerical competence are a man made invention on what exactly did evolution happen upon? Were cometh animals competence which predates man?
The answer is that man made symbols, and man made rules to define what can be considered a "number", these rules, iirc, have expanded over time. Like the physical laws, man attempts to define what governs nature, but these rules the physical laws obviously exist and operate independent of 'discovery'. Thus man's definitions tend to be an approximation to the truth, but the truth must obviously underlie reality. Man's abilities rest on biological hardware that provides a basic sense of numerosity and small numerical quantity, this serves as a foundation to all higher numerical thought, even as a baby man's numerical competence is not zero.
As for art, again, afaik, all art can be stored as digital files in a digital system. This being the case, even a procedure as simple as repeated addition will generate ALL POSSIBLE art past present or future(this includes all video, all qualia representations for BCI devices, all sound, all texts, all images, all everything). If we take any finite device of finite resolution, such as a modern TV, this will be the case, also for any finite resolution full brain BCI thus encompassing all possible thought and sensation by a finite brain. The number of images and sounds a modern TV can produce is finite, and this includes all possible past present future or imaginary content as the form of videos, sound or still images(including pictures of all possible events and book and journal pages in all possible languages).
Again numerical relations exist in the outside world, nature developed hardware to perceive these existing relations and behave accordingly. When I see a binary sequence, it doesn't seem sensible to say that it was "invented", the possibility of a system with two types of values likely exists independently of all implementation as a possibility, digital systems also have plenty of naturally occurring implementations(for example using more types of values in dna.). There is something that makes 4 billiard balls similar to 4 legs similar to 4 apples similar to 4 planets, something that makes 3 candies more similar to 3 towers than 4 candies in some aspect, whether a human or animal can perceive this or not, there is a relationship between these, and it can only be seen as numerical in nature.
All one needs is an immortal indestructible machine with infinite computation and a similar body for one's self, which might be one and the same if there's no (hidden) fundamental physical property behind the brain's production of consciousness. Such a machine would allow one to experience all possible experience and have all possible knowledge. If digital physics is true, then that would be equivalent to attaining godhood, the ability to know everything, be everywhere and be all powerful. You wouldn't need to conquer anything or fight anyone, in isolation such a system will make the wielder the absolute embodiment of the law.
An interesting thing is as I mentioned previously, all the content that is in a single 4k(at least one of the 4k definitions if we keep color fidelity the same.) image is already contained in the set of all 1080p images, albeit in 4 different 1080p images, the set of 4k images contains no additional information, also a scaled down single 1080p image exists which provides the gist of the 4k image. The obvious question is what happens with regards to things like journal papers, would adding resolution provide additional content? Again it doesn't seem likely as said all the visible content of a single 4k image is available in the set of 1080 images. All 4k can do is combine a set of 1080p images in different orders, and there's a finite number of 1080p images and a finite number of combinations. So returning to the question again, it seems that eventually the set of images of journal pages will start repeating large quantities of content, the higher the resolution you go, it is still finite but changing to a significantly higher resolution will only provide reorganization of a finite number of pages you would have already seen at a lower resolution.
Can you imagine that entire pages with exactly the same say Billion lines of texts repeating with copies of themselves, in a finite number of combinations of the same blocks of a billion lines of text(or empty space, etc.) for a given resolution. This would give the illusion of infinity, but it would seem in my eyes like a house of mirrors, simply repeating what would seem like an amount of finite content repeated in different orders. Eventually the moment you start repeating not just words, sentences, paragraphs, but entire books worth of unchanged content, well there comes a point where any reader has seemingly already experienced it all.- link to thread

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

nice quote on toy story

"Smith's Law. In 1999, Alvy Ray Smith, Microsoft graphics guru and co-founder of Pixar, said "Reality is 80 million polygons." Joi Ito notes that Toy Story had 5-6 million polygons per frame. Toy Story 2 had twice that. Our best digital faces today have 100 motion control points. The actual Reality Transition may be 800 million polygons per frame and thousands of control points. We will reach that threshold within 15 years. What then?"-link

It has been said that games in the xbox 360 ps3 era were already near the toy story polygon per frame figure, some clocking 4 million polygons per frame according to sources.   The ps4 and xbox one are several fold stronger.  PCs stronger still.   Right now, year 2016, realtime graphics are mind blowing.    I believe when we reach 100Tflops we will be seeing realtime graphics that can easily pass for real in many occasions.


PS comment on star citizen vs god of war ps4.  While the close up of the star citizen  old man face looks ace*(still have trouble seen mark there), most of the other characters seen(2016) show a far lower quality with more plastic and less detailed look.  Even the character with the superimpressive armor, has hair that reminds of last gen.   That is there is inconsistency between characters and even within the same character, and the environments look less impressive in gameplay than god of war( saw a few months ago, don't know if things have changed).   In gameplay, don't know if things have changed but when I saw star citizen gameplay a few months ago it looked rather unimpressive.

Monday, June 13, 2016


“We already know that many important parts of the old testament are either fiction or likely fiction by our knowledge of scientific facts.  When the teachings of man contradict reality, the ultimate testament of truth, they are not divinely inspired, they are nothing but falsehoods.  That is the foundation of the abrahamic faiths, fiction, and upon it rests the beliefs of billions.  A God of fictional tales is nothing more than a fictional God.”-DSS

Saturday, June 4, 2016

interesting vid




Europe needs order, censoring is not the way.   The whole of it needs a firm, a just, a strong hand to guide it.  Let's hope that power can concentrate in those who're fit to lead such that the unfit to lead no longer lead but are led instead.  

Thursday, June 2, 2016

comment on consciousness

Interesting that someone who believes in quantum mysticism would defend traditional computational views. His escapades regarding an open universe depend on neither something causing the universe to re-collapse, nor there being a physical way for intelligent entities to remold the universe such that its spatial configuration changes. In any case fundamental unpredictability rests on true randomness, which is magic, and can't reasonably be taken seriously. There are an infinite number of irrational numbers, there's also a finite number of possible configurations of the universe, it doesn't matter what sequence of actions you do, there's a number which represents that exact sequence from birth to death, it is was and ever will be, it thus serves as a perfect prediction of whatever it is you've done and will do for the rest of your life, it exists out there. Likewise there's a prediction for the evolution of the entire planet in existence somewhere out there, there are predictions for any possible sequence of events.
Still I found the whole idea of bringing quantum phenomena into this to be unacceptable. Consciousness has content, it has correspondence with macroscopic phenomena, saying that if in someway we made it predictable it would suddenly not be conscious despite being causally and physically identical seems nonsensical and superstitious.
Here's the thing, we have no reason to believe that consciousness can't expand or contract while retaining uniqueness of identity, so we have additional tissue that will acquire identity and tissue that will lose identity depending on the case... While a hypothesis, I believe it might even be possible to connect two brains such that they share one identity, if this actually is the case, there would be no reason to suppose that separate identities are nothing more than an illusion given by limitations of nonshared memory.
As for computers, it is said that universality is possible with just addition and branching. Meaning that basically moving from one number to another is enough to replicate all possible computations. That suggests that whatever is consciousness likely resides not in the process of computation, that is equivalent to moving from place to place and performing addition, but in the actual patterns embodied by the numbers themselves. We already know that depending on the way you analyze a number quite a variety of possible interpretations are possible. There are interpretations that basically emerge out of it with minimal or simple analysis, other interpretations might require more elaborate analysis, in some sense depending on the procedure the procedure itself might introduce what you're looking for. A question is can we say that the pattern contains an essence, some information? is the mere presence of patterns enough to correspond and contain consciousness itself? or is there a physical process or phenomena, perhaps uncomputational that actually manifests as conscious sensation?
Basically every sensory modality is likely encodable in digital form, no reason to doubt this, and from digital form connected to the brain expressible as qualia. Does this process of brain activity add something more, something fundamental? I've doubts about that, and also about anyone who considers true randomness as something that is sensible.
so too I can declare, “give me a big enough computer and the relevant initial conditions, and I’ll simulate the brain atom-by-atom.” The Church-Turing Thesis, I said, is so versatile that the only genuine escape from it is to propose entirely new laws of physics, exactly as Penrose does—and it’s to Penrose’s enormous credit that he understands that.
That was a nice comment. What people have to understand is that the only things that don't truly need an explanation to exist are the abstract, the truths, the patterns. The idea that something could come from nothing seems nonsensible. Only something that is eternal, and something that is equivalent to nothingness can actually exist, something like truth.
Some people will object to platonic ideas, but in the end mathematics is discovered not created, you may choose arbitrary rules like an author chooses arbitrary words but the set of combinations of patterns is finite, the patterns already exists in myriad numerical sequences, only the length along dimensions varies, and this infinity often merely results in endless repetition of the finite in different orderings.
A simulation need no explanation to exist, the entire sequence of patterns can exist at the same time atemporally. Trying to bring notions such as free will and true randomness in just results in nonsense.
Regards predictability what you have to ask is whether what you did yesterday is predictable to you today, of course it is, and can be easily verified by taking a live camera around. You have to say the nature of the present and future are fundamentally different from the past, and that there is some mechanism or phenomena that transitions between them and fundamentally changes the nature of one to that of the other, such that future becomes present becomes past.
On the other hand a block time view based on simulation only requires that some pattern exist as a possibility, and it simply is with all its glory.-link