Thursday, October 29, 2015

crastinus

Just need to get that 'idiot' post off the top. How's it going?

Lots of news!

Not going to tell you any of it, though. Wait till later.

-andrew

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

sports


The above is a 3D multidimensional scaling representation of the similarity of 14 popular sports. At least 3 dimensions are necessary to represent the similarity matrix; here I've rotated the plot so as to make the different points (sports) clear.

Euclidean distance between the sports is closely related to their similarity, but since this is a 2D projection of three coordinates, I also included edges (lines) between the sports as an extra cue to distance. The thickness and coloring of the edges is mapped to the similarity values (red/thin is "dissimilar", while blue/thick is "similar"). For each sport edges were drawn to the three nearest neighbors - sometimes those were very similar (e.g. the hockey triangle), sometimes very distant (baseball is very close to cricket, but it's next nearest neighbors are very far away: golf and ping pong).

Okay, so what constitutes "similarity" here? I made a list of 28 "sports properties" based entirely on my own subjective knowledge of the included sports. Undoubtedly a better list could be composed, but this is an okay first approximation. The set of properties works as a "present or not" binary value for each sport.



Tuesday, January 27, 2015

IIT and Sci-Fi

(Fake date on this post - wrote it in 2015, not sure of the date - back-posting it here)

This isn't a coherent post - just a list of some random thoughts having to do with IIT and science fiction scenarios that I'm familiar with. I can't claim to have any strength in the latter category: I'm not a big sci-fi reader (especially not in the last few years), and even the best sci-fi movies (I watch 20 times more movies than I read novels) don't tend to take you very far (excepting good time travel movies).

I just think that some of these examples (or others that you, dear reader, might think of) could help in illustrating some interesting IIT-based possibilities.

1. The book Foundation's Edge, by Isaac Asimov, ends on a question about a "supermind", a world where all life - human and otherwise - shares a single planetary consciousness. But it's something earlier in the book that has stuck with me; when the main character, Golan Trevize, is exiled from planet Terminus, he is given an advanced starship. Trevize is confused by the lack of traditional controls - instead, he learns that the ship is piloted by connecting a user's mind to the ship itself. In doing so, Trevize finds that he is now aware of not only the ship's control system, but his perceptual awareness now seems to include the space surrounding the ship: his consciousness now includes the ship:

"And as he and the computer held hands, their thinking merged and it no longer mattered whether his eyes were open or closed. Opening them did not improve his vision nor did closing them dim it. 
Either way, he saw the room with complete clarity—not just in the direction in which he was looking, but all around and above and below. 
He saw every room in the spaceship and he saw outside as well. The sun had risen and its brightness was dimmed in the morning mist, but he could look at it directly without being dazzled, for the computer automatically filtered the light waves. 
He felt the gentle wind and its temperature, and the sounds of the world about him. He detected the planet's magnetic field and the tiny electrical charges on the wall of the ship. 
He became aware of the controls of the ship, without even knowing what they were in detail. He knew only that if he wanted to lift the ship, or turn it, or accelerate it, or make use of any of its abilities, the process was the same as that of performing the analogous process to his body. He had but to use his will."

In IIT terms, the connection between his mind and the ship's systems has been made that allows states of the ship's electronics to causally constrain states of Trevize's brain - at the same time that states of his brain constrain those electronics. There is an irreducible global maximum in integrated information that extends outside Trevize's skull, and into the ship's computers.

Asimov doesn't elaborate on what it is "like" for the ship without a pilot - does it integrate information on its own, constituting a waiting ship's consciousness, ready always to link up with the pilot? If so, the link is like an artificial corpus callosum, joining two independent minds into one whole, and we can suppose that the ship persists as a conscious agent even in the absence of a pilot. Or maybe the ship is disintegrated without a human component - in a state something like slow-wave sleep, with systems online but carefully disconnected in such a way that without a pilot, there is no "ship" - just a collection of parts and mechanisms, like an ordinary machine.

2. Speaking of artificial corpus callosums, there is the excellent Pacific Rim to consider.