You might think
this time is different,
but as Carmen Reinhart has shown in this
report
it's just not true. If you read just one paper to get some perspective
on the current financial crisis, read hers. The full paper (124 pages)
is archived
here.
virtual <-> physical - posted by
Samium Gromoff- 10/10/2008 14:48:58
"Eight years..." appears to derive its conclusion from purely meta-level analysis, in the sense that it avoids mentioning physical economy issues at all, instead focusing on dynamics of capital flows, debts and notions like "period of euphoria". So typical for "market's invisible hand" people.
And yet, somehow I find it easy to sympathise with the ex-Bear Stearns VP's conclusion.
After being embedded as an observer and participant
in the financial industry for quite some time it comes
as no suprise that even one of the giants on Wallstreet
can stumble and crash.
If a tree falls down in the woods and no one is around to hear it - does it make a sound?
The Singularity Institute just announced the release of the
Open Cognition Framework
developed
by Ben Goertzel.
The Open Cognition Framework (OpenCog) is software for the collaborative development of safe and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence.
OpenCog provides research scientists and software developers with a common platform to build and share artificial intelligence programs. The framework includes:
a flexible and highly optimized in-memory database for knowledge representation,
a plug-in architecture for cognitive algorithms and a cognitive process scheduler,
a built-in LISP-like programming language, and
other components to support artificial intelligence research and development.
Programs written or adapted for OpenCog may be combined and used in concert with one another for experimentation or to achieve better results compared to their stand-alone counterparts.
Hawkins - posted by
ozzie mate- 03/03/2008 09:35:07
I looked at Goertzel's stuff on his web page (someone wanting to give me a free copy of his book feel free to do so). I wonder what you think about his approach vs. Jeff Hawkins' (hatteste da nich mal ne Freundin ...). Goertzel's review of Hawkins' "On Intelligence" on his web site seems to be partially acknowledging Hawkins' ideas (and partially envying him for his $$$) and after reading the book me too I'd rather place my bets on Hawkins.
Ben Goertzel is the safer bet. - posted by
Arthur- 03/04/2008 04:18:38
Ben G. actually knows what he's talking about. He is the leading light in AI today.
- posted by
David Hart- 03/04/2008 05:29:12
Just a minor correction: the OpenCog Framework was not released, only announced on a limited email list. More news is coming later this summer.
Goertzel wins. - posted by
benny- 03/04/2008 22:50:24
EOS.
I will be visiting Boston next week for ten days. So, if you're in the region and would like to meet up for a beer or two drop me an
email
or ping me via Skype (ID: lispmeister).
Things I look forward to:
Bookstores, though my credit card is now labeled "Not valid in bookstores unless holder is accompanied by a responsible person",
visiting the Computer Museum, specifically the CADR shrine and picking up the three OLPC X0 laptops I ordered in December.
- posted by
erikprice- 02/14/2008 04:41:41
You'll be here for 10 days during the worst month of the year? My guess is you'll have to visit a bookstore or two. You may like Quantum Books in Kendall Square (Cambridge). http://rubyurl.com/ZCLU
Jealous! - posted by
Faré- 02/14/2008 05:10:53
Whoa, I'm so jealous: I ordered an XO in November, and they won't give me any information as to when I might maybe possibly get mine.
Be sure to come visit when you're in Boston!
Markus Völter
interviewed
Dick Gabriel at OOPSLA 2007. Don't miss Dick's explanation of Lisp's EVAL!
[via Mike Ajemian]
Dick initiated the idea of a Master of Fine Arts in Software and my recent experience with the software creation process, if you dare call it a process, in the financial industry indicates, we should make it mandatory for any software architecture position.
And in closing let me quote from Dick's essay The Art of Lisp & Writing:
Lisp is the language of loveliness. With it a great programmer can make a beautiful, operating thing, a thing organically created and formed through the interaction of a programmer/artist and a medium of expression that happens to execute on a computer.
Recently
Dan Weinreb mentioned a paper about ObjectStore he co-authored with
Charles Lamb, Gordon Landis and Jack Orenstein in 1991. It's a bit hard
to find unless you have an ACM account. I've made it available
here.
Enjoy!
After reading Dan Weinreb's
posting
I
ordered
three OLPC XO notebooks.
I've met
Walter Bender
some years ago through a licensing deal with MIT Media Lab. He is now heading the OLPC
initiative. This is quite likely the most significant project since Tim Berners Lee's invention
of the WWW.
Some nice features of the XO-1:
Comes with source code for all applications and most of the operating system.
There's even a View Source button on the keyboard that shows the code
of what's running.
Based on Linux, but application code is in Python
1200x900 7.5" diagonal LCD that works without backlight in bright daylight
- posted by
Hendrik- 12/07/2007 05:21:37
Why buy if you can download it?
As for the linked review: "The Give One Get One deal is only available for another 7 days. It may be hard to get them after that since they are going to be sold only to schools and other educational institutions and governments and in the third world." Estimated time until the first Thai kid offers theirs on eBay: 3.5 min. :)
Why - posted by
lispmeister- 12/07/2007 11:49:20
Of course I can run the development environment on my Powerbook or workstation. But the intention is to give the three units ordered to my kids. As for the availability at ebay, that really misses the point. It's a global market, of course they'll be available somehow
Coming back to a
posting
from 2004, I'm happy to report that fiction is now science.
The Science Blog has an
article
on the first official use of MRI to
"investigate the potential innocence of a woman convicted of poisoning a child in her care."
Link
to the source article in European Psychiatry.
During lunch Paul Dale and I talked about self modifying code and how it might apply to real world systems. Later that same day I did a quick check on Wikipedia to read up on the current state of the art. I was surprised to find a link to a paper about self modifying kernel code by Henry Massalin.
Reading his PhD thesis about the Synthesis kernel, like learning Lisp, is a mind altering experience. This guy is a genius! My first thought after reading the introduction was:
This has to be added to the Movitz kernel!
The Synthesis paper lists four new ideas:
Run-time code synthesis — a systematic way of creating executable machine code at runtime to optimize frequently-used kernel routines — queues, buffers, context switchers, interrupt handlers, and system call dispatchers — for specific situations, greatly reducing their execution time.
Fine-grained scheduling — a new process-scheduling technique based on the idea of feedback that performs frequent scheduling actions and policy adjustments (at sub-millisecond intervals) resulting in an adaptive, self-tuning system that can support real-time data streams.
Lock-free optimistic synchronization is shown to be a practical, efficient alternative to lock-based synchronization methods for the implementation of multiprocessor operating system kernels.
An extensible kernel design that provides for simple expansion to support new kernel services and hardware devices while allowing a tight coupling between the kernel and the application, blurring the distinction between user and kernel services.
I was curious what a guy like Henry had been doing since finishing his PhD in 1992. Some googling showed that he's working for MicroUnity, a startup that somehow never got any serious traction, filing one patent after another. He is famous
for giving people piggyback rides (the inventors of UNIX among them) and he is now known as Ms. Alexia Massalin. Talk about self modification!
Wowza... - posted by
Perry E. Metzger- 10/08/2007 12:51:52
I knew (as Dr. Massalin was then named) Henry at the Columbia CS department twenty years ago. Lots of cool ideas -- superoptimizer, real time kernel code generation, etc -- but not a lot of people have taken them up.
Henry used to work a lot with hardware he'd built himself, and would sometimes rewire breadboards while machines were running without crashing them. It was pretty amazing to watch.
BTW, your email is bouncing, or at least was when I last tried sending you a note.
patents + takeup - posted by
anonymouse moocow- 10/08/2007 19:25:43
Uhm. "not a lot of people have taken them up" and "filing one patent after another" just might be related. Patent monopolies have long been known to slow innovation, contrary to the patentist propaganda. If the patent-restricted ideas (in practice, software patents cover ideas, whatever the theory) are any use, expect greater takeup when the monopolies expire, much like with public key crypto (once-RSA) or decent virtualisation (once-IBM).
- posted by
Marijn Haverbeke- 10/10/2007 22:48:45
It is interesting how nicely the partial evaluation could be mapped to closures. It should be possible for a Lisp implementation to re-compile the code inside a closure, substituting known values for the closed-over variables. You wouldn't want to do this for *every* closure, I suppose, so either the compiler would have to be clever enough to figure out when it is worthwhile (hard to do -- after a closure has been called X times?), or the programmer could somehow specify it in his program text.
- posted by
Marijn Haverbeke- 10/13/2007 18:50:19
(that is, if the closed-over variables are not mutated, which could be checked statically)
Comments on Henry Massalin - posted by
Tim Josling- 01/21/2008 21:10:41
I came across Henry's paper at 10:30 the other night and stayed up to 2am reading it. There are some really powerful ideas in there. When I finished reading it though, there is a lot more I would have liked to know eg how exactly did he manage the tradeoffs involved? About 10 years ago I actually implemented a similar design to Henry's. In our case it was a complex table lookup routine which had been rewritten twice already for performance (it was being called over 2X10**8 times per day). We took a high level description of the tables and generated templates for the lookup routines. When the lookups arrived, we used the templates to generate custom code for that set of keys and values. This sped up the routines by a factor of 6 (similar to what Henry achieved). So I know this stuff works. Interestingly the total number of lines of code was reduced with our approach due to the generated templates etc. It was also robust - there was more validation and every one of the ~10**11 calls since then has worked correctly. This sort of thing could be used for dynamic languages to make them as or more efficient than statically types languages. One key to success with this approach is keeping the high level description of the problem space. You generate machine code right from the high level description, which allows a lot of powerful optimisations. Going through layers messes things up.
