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Foamy

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Posts posted by Foamy

    What do you think of Windows 8?

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    and that is THE mistake. Touch/surface works alright on a small device that is laid flat or reclined. It doesn't work well for dual 27s that are three feet away, four feet wide in total, rasied off the desk, and vertical.

    A uniform os is a mistake in this case. Its like a uniform control scheme between sports car and a fighter plane. Both are made to go places, each does things the other can not, each has an interface optimised for its own needs.

    Touch/surface are a good substitute for a mouse/keyboard when they are not a good option, but for a desktop?

    I completely agree the current implementation is very poor. I have stardock mods so that I boot to desktop, have a smaller version of the start menu that only takes up a quarter of my screen, and one to let me run metro apps as windows. With all of this everything is as good as 7 or better, the start screen when shrunk on a 24" monitor is fantastic and much better than the old menu.

    But WP7 had all sorts of crap like this too, that was partly fixed in 7.5, then more in 8 and we'll get more still in WP8.1. The yearly release allows these changes to come quickly.

    A hybrid OS that can adjust dynamically between a phone sized screen up to triple 30" monitors is certainly possible and would be fantastic. Obviously the key requirement here is that it is done well, which Win 8 does not do yet. What I'm saying is that this is a very hard thing to achieve and will take MS time, but they are only people even trying right now which you have to give them credit for.

    Win8 does almost nothing to change for the screen size, it's OK on a touchscreen laptop but definitely inferior UX wise on dual desktop monitors, but stardock has managed to fix just about every complaint I have from stock and makes it amazing to use, not perfect but better than 7. If stardock can do this and make a lot of money doing it them MS is certainly capable of it. I think they could have done more for win8 launch but they had limited time to work on it. Now they do lots of regular improvements rather than waiting years like the vista > 7 jump so having issues initially is no so much of a problem.

    What do you think of Windows 8?

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    It is very important to remember with Win 8 that its development style is closer to Windows Phone than Win 7.

    It's now on a yearly release and is very invested in mobile. Also, nearly every issue people have with it is UI related, that is the easiest thing to fix.

    So look at how WP developed, you start with 7.0 which had potential but was very limited and underdeveloped. Then 7.5 made it usable 99% of the time. Then WP8 hit and now it's in line with iOS/Android in every area other than app quantity (which is not directly under MS control). So that's two years to go from nothing to competitive. This sort of development is not like the old style Windows process where MS was slow and ignored what people wanted. WP has repeatedly adapted based on feedback and the 8.1 leaks show that Win 8 is also going to do exactly that.

    So if you don't want to use 8 then just use 7, if you are worried the direction is terrible and disaster awaits then give it time for the plan to complete. This is essentially a new operating system we're looking at, iOS sucked hard in the early days, Android stucked too, WP7 was no better, but in the end they all ended up fine and it's hard to remember what they once were.

    KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted

    Any Advice for someone who would get into watercooling?

    Find someone you trust who has experience with it. My build above was my first with water, the build and design went perfectly simply because I talked about every aspect with a friend who has done it a lot before. I trusted his judgements and essentially let him design the water section of the build.

    Then when it comes to building, do it with that person and do it slow and right. We only made one or two very minor mistakes with the build because we took a day and a half to do it and were very careful.

    Lastly, if you're in the UK then buy the expensive bits from scan.co.uk and get scansure. This insures you for any installation mistake for 30 days after you buy and it's not very expensive. When you're having to disassemble a brand new GPU to put a waterblock on it you will be very glad for that safety net.

    What do you think of Windows 8?

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    Copying in my post from the Win3 thread:

    Touch-screen orientation for PCs has amazing potential, but it's also incredibly difficult. A single operating system from your phone to your desktop is inevitable but that's like the biggest interface change since the GUI was invented.

    No one has any experience doing something like that at all, it would be borderline impossible for MS to be able to do it perfectly first time. Just look at how long it took everyone to get mouse/keyboard based interfaces pleasant to use.

    I absolutely agree MS made some mistakes with win 8 (forcing boot to start screen) but a lot is suggesting those types of mistakes are being resolved for 8.1 (free and out around a year after win 8 release). So what we're seeing is MS attempting something really new and challenging and then being hammered for not doing it perfectly first try when literally no one else has managed that even with more limited changes.

    So, if you look at this with hindsight then what does MS's plan look like? Well, they wanted to make massive changes that they knew they couldn't get right the first time, so they did their best and put out a version designed to test as many of their ideas as they could and greatly reduced its price over their usual offerings. Next, they changed to a yearly release cycle and started hammering out massive improvements using what they learned to create what is essentially win 8.5 in less than half the time a normal release would take, they also decided to offer this for free to Win8 users. This is all at the same time as porting like 95% of the windows code to arm, optimising it for that, then porting all of that to be used on phones.

    It's not gone completely smoothly but there's very little precedent to this sort of company wide paradigm shift so overall I'd say they did about as well as could reasonably be expected. My opinion from before Win8 was announced that it is impossible to judge MS on their new plan until at least Windows 9, with the new release schedule that puts us at the end of 2015.

    KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread

    in KSP1 Discussion

    Posted

    The more I see that thermal armor on boards the more I like it. What kind of temps are you getting from the Water-cool Kit? What does everyone think about mineral oil cooling over water cooling?

    CPU/GPU sit around 25-30 C no matter what you throw at them.

    The more I see mineral oil cooling the more repugnant it seems. Water-cooling is ridiculously over priced. Alone the water block for Foamy's GPU is +$200. Which mind you equates to another GPU.

    I only paid £67 for that waterblock, and that was like a week after release. Full watercooling was probably around £300, that's how much I paid for the GPU alone, plus most of it can be reused for several builds.

    Windows 3

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    Touch-screen orientation for PCs has amazing potential, but it's also incredibly difficult. A single operating system from your phone to your desktop is inevitable but that's like the biggest interface change since the GUI was invented.

    No one has any experience doing something like that at all, it would be borderline impossible for MS to be able to do it perfectly first time. Just look at how long it took everyone to get mouse/keyboard based interfaces pleasant to use.

    I absolutely agree MS made some mistakes with win 8 (forcing boot to start screen) but a lot is suggesting those types of mistakes are being resolved for 8.1 (free and out around a year after win 8 release). So what we're seeing is MS attempting something really new and challenging and then being hammered for not doing it perfectly first try when literally no one else has managed that even with more limited changes.

    So, if you look at this with hindsight then what does MS's plan look like? Well, they wanted to make massive changes that they knew they couldn't get right the first time, so they did their best and put out a version designed to test as many of their ideas as they could and greatly reduced its price over their usual offerings. Next, they changed to a yearly release cycle and started hammering out massive improvements using what they learned to create what is essentially win 8.5 in less than half the time a normal release would take, they also decided to offer this for free to Win8 users. This is all at the same time as porting like 95% of the windows code to arm, optimising it for that, then porting all of that to be used on phones.

    It's not gone completely smoothly but there's very little precedent to this sort of company wide paradigm shift so overall I'd say they did about as well as could reasonably be expected. My opinion from before Win8 was announced that it is impossible to judge MS on their new plan until at least Windows 9, with the new release schedule that puts us at the end of 2015.

    "Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence"

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted · Edited by Foamy

    Okay, I think we have a different conception of philosophy. When I speak of philosophy, I do mean philosophy in the sense of scientific proof and truth-based pursuits. You're right if you're referring to previous conceptions of philosophy where it is separate from science, as if values and science should somehow be totally separated. But frankly, they needn't be. A lot of what scientists do today is philosophical thought on the implications of their own research.

    Philosophy uses a lot of scientific ideas gut at its core it comes down to 'what is right and what is wrong', science is more about 'why are we here and what are we?'. Science is making great progress on its question but philosophy has made very little.

    As for proofs, I'd hardly call the field of logic "basic". It's underpinnings are based on the same essential rules of math, but it is a VERY powerful tool when applied correctly. The validity of a complex argument can be boiled-down to its constituent parts, and with that we can determine its validity, whether it is tautological, contradictory, or contingent, and even the sometimes quite helpful knowledge of whether or not the truth-value of an argument or complex sentence is contingent on a single atomic sentence or truth value. (Sometimes it's the case that, in a very complex argument, the truth value of the entire thing is always equal to the truth value of a single part of it.) It's kinda like Occam's Razor on steroids, sometimes.

    I'm not saying logic is basic, just that typically only basic logic is used in philosophy; philosophy and mathematics are closely tied but logic is really just maths.

    At the most basic level of knowledge, the only thing anyone can know is that they exist. Cogito ergo sum, as it were. Nothing else is "proven". Philosophers have struggled with this fundamental issue for centuries. All other data about the world is subject to this fundamental uncertainty: I may very well be a brain in a tank, this entire world concocted for the benefit of some researcher, or for the entertainment of some being, who knows. I have no way of confirming or denying this. The only fundamental truth I can confirm is that I exist.

    Mathematics is the only thing that is proven so far, everything else is down to probabilities of truth.

    Science itself is based on fundamental assumptions/assertions. We assert that it is important to value logic, to value evidence, to be intellectually honest. The problem then becomes, what logical argument would you provide to convince someone to value logic? What evidence to convince them to value evidence? These are entirely unproven valuations, and yet, science is no less scientific for it. (Cripes I'm practically quoting Sam Harris right now.) My point is, modern philosophy is often in itself a scientific pursuit, it just happens to be one of somewhat abstract ideas, but that doesn't mean that those ideas cannot be held to the same rigor as other fields of science.

    The answers to those questions are down to philosophy and there is no excuse for having made no progress at all towards consensus in our 100 thousand year existence. I'm not saying there aren't potential answers out there, just that philosophers generally view the idea of having to prove any of their ideas to anyone as a waste of time. I believe it's reasonable to expect proof, using irrefutable logic, but obviously I'm a minority. Personally I find it hilarious that people can devote their entire lives to something they honestly believe is completely futile.

    This philosophy discussion is getting a bit off topic but I still want to continue it, I can split this off into a new topic if required.

    I think I understand your argument that a sequential form of processes would be merely emulative of the apparently more complex model, but then, I have trouble squaring that with the reality of neurons. They are, essentially, those smaller processes that in the previous example were being executed sequentially, now being executed in parallel.
    In some sense, the impulses generated by this perfect simulation could be considered analogous to neurons firing. There is merely a time delay between their interaction.

    Yes they're parallel and independent. At this point I can't really go much further, I really have no idea what consciousness is, or how valuable it is, or if it serves any purpose. At the end, my ideas come down to believing that my consciousness is due to the 'fire' like chain reaction of my interacting brain cells, and that if you could somehow shut down everything in my head, and then restart it in exactly the same state, so it continued as if nothing had happened, I would have died and then when it restarted another identical consciousness would have been created; just like how 'teleporting' by recreation at the other end would kill you, or how creating an identical clone of yourself does not mean that you would survive if your original body was killed. This is relevant because that 'freezing' is essentially what is happening every time that single thread computer finishes an instruction. When taken alone, a single instruction like that is certainly not a conscious entity even for a brief moment.

    Let me ask you this: What if your brain only fired one neuron at a time, but those neurons still interacted with each other as per normal. Are you then not a conscious being, based on the premise that to be such a being your processes must be running simultaneously?

    I think the response above answers this but let me know if there's something I missed.

    "Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence"

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    Philosophy and science are linked at the hip. To say that philosophy has no place in science is rather mistaken. And in fact, neuroscience and philosophy inform each other greatly now. Just look at the work of Sam Harris. O.o Like him, I just don't see why there needs to be any distinction between the science and philosophy. They are both the pursuit of truth through reason and logic. Indeed, science has philosophical underpinnings.

    Sure philosophy creates some useful things but really it is only able to offer suggestions to science. I love philosophy but I really hate that there's so little scientific method to it, valuable ideas are created but there's no mathematical style 'proof' for any of it (outside of basic logic and things that are closer to math).

    I'll grant you that philosophers might not be necessary to create a genuine strong AI, but the ethics of creating one, living and interacting with one, the ramifications of reprogramming one when it "malfunctions" are all squarely in the realm of ethics and morality.

    100% with you here but at the same time with no proof your ideas are correct it's likely the scientists who created the AI will disagree.

    What I find curious is your sureness that consciousness must necessarily be born of the complex interaction of physical systems. Software programs may not be separate physical entities, but they are, at the most basic level, complex systems interacting with each other, at least in object-oriented programming. A function takes input, "sense data", and interprets it. Another function uses this interpretation, outputs the data to another function, and so on. Feed that data back upon itself, and you have the basic function of a conscious mind.

    Software can be complex but in the end it comes down to a long line of predetermined, and simple, instructions. So it can simulate complexity but when you break it down and look at it there's nothing.

    Naturally, such basic functions lack characteristics like polymorphism, and the ability to spontaneously change how they interact with other functions, but the basic structure of a computer program appears rather similar to the basic structure and function of a neuron, at least in an abstract sense.

    I believe it's possible to simulate down to the finest detail if you've got the time to write the code, but really the code is just a model of the actual processes. I can't say that it's impossible to perfectly model reality because we don't yet know enough about the smallest units in the universe, it may be infinite (thus making a perfect model impossible).

    Any single threaded digital computer can be visualised as a Turing Machine. This is just about as simple a system as you can get, and while my idea is not developed enough for me to prove it, I think that this cannot be considered capable of consciousness when considered alone.

    "Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence"

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    What if you have an infinitely fast and small binary computer that is running a simulation of all neurons in a person's brain? If the simulation is accurate enough, shouldn't it allow conciousness?

    It depends on the computer, a 'turing machine' style single core computer would definitely be running a simulation, as it only appears conscious if it's fast. I believe that my mind would still be recognisably conscious if you slowed down the speed of everything in it. If you took a turing computer simulating a brain perfectly and looked at that running slowly then it would be obviously a mechanical simulation. I have the opinion that consciousness is a phenomenon born of an ongoing, parallel, chain reaction of many simple systems.

    The key thing here is whether you believe it is possible for a simulation or something to actually become that thing if it is fast/accurate enough; I don't. However, as I mentioned, this becomes blurry when you consider multiple computers working in parallel. Again I'd say it's all about the spectrum and increasing complexity leads to higher levels of consciousness.

    Unfortunately I am still undecided about a lot of the trickier questions, for example, does a being with the same number of neurons (and corresponding brain network layout) as a billion people have the same consciousness potential as a superorganism made from a billion people? A surprisingly small proportion of the brains 100 billion neurons are actually relevant for consciousness. I would think that the number of senses you have would not determine your consciousness level but then what if you had no senses at all? Does your past experience alter your level of consciousness? Is a highly educated person more conscious than someone raised by wolves?

    Really we have no idea what parts of the brain lead to consciousness or what it really is, without this information we will never be able to work out what the structure of an artificial brain would be and thus no chance of achieving strong AI. Interestingly, the only way we will ever know this stuff is through a heavy dose of advanced weak AI applied to much more advanced brain imaging hardware than we have now. So in fact, it is highly likely that humans won't actually be the ones to design a strong AI device, it's going to be done by a supercomputer.

    That's a rather philoshophical question. :P My thoughts on the matter would be "Yes" despite the previous poster's disinclination to respect/accept philosophical input on the matter (even if philosophy isn't the key to making AGI, it certainly can inform its creation and growth).

    I've oft used that particular example myself as a counter-example to the suggestion by many animal rights activists that we should, at some point in future, be able to use computer simulations so accurate that they would then preclude the need for live animal testing. However, there is little to no practical difference, that I can see, from an ethics standpoint, between a live animal and a perfect or near-perfect simulation of one. Perhaps the form of their existence is fundamentally different, but if they can both experience suffering, they both should have equal moral standing.

    An odd and perhaps unintuitive view.

    Oh, I respect and accept philosophical input, it's what I'm doing right now! What I meant was that philosophers are not required to create a strong AI. All we need is science, and philosophy has no place there.

    "Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence"

    in Science & Spaceflight

    Posted

    I'm a robotics student with a strong interest in philosophy so I've thought about AI quite a bit over the last few years. This is a long one but hopefully someone reads it :)

    Firstly the 'intelligence' part of AI is a very controversial word as intelligence is incredibly easy to create artificially, I mean my phone is perfectly capable of intelligently interpreting my actions and acting on them and in that way we have a form of AI in just about all computing devices. This is where the concept of 'strong' and 'weak' AI comes from. So 'strong AI' is basically actually artificial consciousness while 'weak' AI is the kind of stuff that google's search is using or your credit card company uses to detect spending patterns that suggest you've had your details stolen.

    Weak AI is certainly possible, and is being used widely today and will lead to huge advantages for humanity. There's not a whole lot that 'strong' AI can do that 'weak' AI can't do just as well or better. This is why there's so much more funding and research going into weak AI.

    But to be honest, strong AI is the interesting one. In this case you're aiming to actually create an entity you could consider conscious or alive. So my thinking for this is that to judge if this is even possible, we need to look at the absolute basics of consciousness.

    So I think we can all agree that we're not the only conscious animal on earth, obviously dolphins, great apes, etc, are easily recognisable and testable as conscious. They're not as complex or as advanced as us however, so where's the cutoff where an animal's not 'intelligent' enough to be considered conscious? Well my opinion is that this is a spectrum, there's many areas to consciousness but mostly we can fit everything along a scale from not conscious to more conscious (as a side note, this would mean that we humans are not as 'concious' as is possible!).

    So what's the key thing that decided your place on the 'consciousness' scale? Well, the number of neurons you've got in your brain seems to be roughly related (the brain structure and configuration is pretty important too). So what is it about more neurons that makes things more intelligent? Well a neuron is pretty simple and can't do much alone but as a collective they can do a lot more. So you've got a large number of simple little machines working together that creates the consciousness phenomenon. This suggests that the key to our consciousness (and other animals) is the sheer complexity of our neural network that gives rise to intelligence (the combination of many simple components reacting with each other giving rise to a collective intelligence).

    Now we're not perfect conscious beings but we're relatively very intelligent (and conscious) compared to a plant. So the key to this strong AI will be to something that can fit along this consciousness scale. Now here's my main argument for why it's impossible to have true strong AI on a regular computer:

    If you took a PC like we have today (running on binary computations) and just made it infinitely fast and small and stuck it in a persons body and hooked up all the control systems, so it's basically a robot with a biological body, then is there any software you could run on it that would qualify it as conscious? The fact that all of the actions/thoughts of this robot would be defined in code means that any consciousness it shows would actually be a simulation of consciousness. Maybe that counts, I can't say for sure but my gut feeling is that this doesn't because it's not actually a complicated system. There's no complexity in a binary computer, the instructions it performs on the code are simple, it just does them quickly. So rather than lots of simple components working together to create a complex system, we have one simple component running extremely quickly to create the appearance of a complex system.

    Now here's the tricky bit, say you swapped the computer in the robot with a collection ob billions of little computers all wired up together like neurons? Does that count? My thought would be that it's farther along the spectrum than the original computer but not quite as far as a regular biological brain. The reason is that our neurons are each a collection of a huge number of much simpler mechanisms (chemical reactions).

    So in conclusion, no I don't think philosophy has a damn thing to do with creating strong AI, there's no code to be written (or at least not much). Really it's just about creating an artificial recreation of the brain using simple mechanisms in a high quantity, then working out how to create the 'spark' that starts the whole thing moving so that, from the self perpetuating chain reaction between the components, a consciousness arises.

    The good news? Others agree with me and there are several projects underway to do something just like this, it's early days and there's not a lot of money in it though so don't expect quick results but they'll keep slowly moving along that consciousness spectrum until one day in the future they have something nobody can deny is alive.

    Liked Total Annihilation? Then you'll love this!

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    I've never been this excited for a game after just seeing the first second of the trailer before. I put down $50 and now I can't stop thinking about how happy it makes me. TA is still my favorite RTS ever even though I loved Red Alert to death.

    It's amazing that even Supcom doesn't give the same sense of scale that some of the TA maps had. If this gives you an entire solar system to play on then it may even exceed TA.

    [STOP PRESS] Ballmer could have actually DONE SOMETHING WELL!

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    \'s for touchscreens only, which is why the only way I\'m going to actually use Win8 is through the Surface. It doesn\'t quite belong on desktops despite the fact that you\'ll be spending pretty much the whole time in the desktop interface.

    Seriously, try Start8 (http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/) I had used windows 8 previews on my touchscreen laptop for months before and i was certain i would hate it on my desktop, so the first thing i did was to find a start menu replacement. Start8\'s start menu transforms the start screen from a hindrance to a massive improvement over anything that has come before.

    [STOP PRESS] Ballmer could have actually DONE SOMETHING WELL!

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    That is a longstanding issue with windows 8 right there. Why it hasn\'t been fixed i have no idea but it has absolutely no bearing on the functionality of this tablet. It will almost certainly be fixed soon.

    To be fair though, windows 8 is still under heavy development and i was amazed that that was the worst thing to go wrong. MS shouldn\'t have announced this until September but I don\'t think that will hurt them considerably and there\'s a reasonable chance they are doing this intentionally early so that they can show off windows phone 8 earlier (considering this was announced on the 18th and WP8 is being shown off on the 20th).

    [STOP PRESS] Ballmer could have actually DONE SOMETHING WELL!

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    I don\'t get what\'s so great about this. It\'s a tablet. All of those are inherently pointless because of the touchscreen-only controls, which are useless for both work and gaming. To get around that, MS has attached a keyboard to their tablet to create... well, a laptop with a really flimsy keyboard, which means you won\'t be able to use it anywhere other than on a table. Seriously, what advantage does this have over a normal laptop?

    The thing that\'s great is that you can use it as a tablet for the films/gaming/browsing, then when you want to take notes or do some work you can just bring out the keyboard, open the stand, stick it on a table and go as well as you would on a laptop. If you need to type more often or are willing to put up with an extra 2mm of thickness & don\'t need to be able to fold it around back then you can use the hard keyboard and use it just like an ultrabook.

    Then when you want to get serious work done you use the display port to bring it up on a couple high res displays and the USB for a mouse/proper keyboard.

    The intel one is powerful enough to run great as a simple tablet all the way up to a desktop with a 27' monitor.

    The 3mm cover/keyboard is mostly a light cover for casual use but it dies allow you to use desktop mode in a pinch, the hard keyboard makes it the same as a laptop but due to being hard limits casual use.

    It\'s an all purpose device that will be great at everything if they can maintain this quality through to release.

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