xkcd

Right, dividing everything by sqrt(2) does make it easier to work with as well as quite a bit more obviously convergent, at least to my eyes.

If it's a conversation that doesn't matter, I'm just letting them talk and I don't care what the words coming out of their mouth may mean. If suddenly it should happen that the conversation does matter, then I can ask questions. If they're offended that I need to, fuck them, maybe this conversation...

freezeblade wrote:it seems this show, even more so than GoT, is more explicit with sex scenes than I prefer

Is there anything other than the portrayal of penises that makes this more explicit than GoT?

It does converge, since F_k = sqrt(F_(k+1)) ... That right there is false, though. F k = 2^(2 k )+1 F k 2 = 2^(2 k+1 )+2^(2 k +1)+1 = F k+1 + 2^(2 k +1) You'd need to show that 2^(2 k +1) is less than or equal to the whole rest of the nested radical chain for the rest of your sketch to work at all.

Mega85 wrote:Why are humans referred to as "human beings"? Dogs aren't called "dog beings", cats aren't called "cat beings", sharks aren't called "shark beings" etc.

Could be because "dog", "cat", and "shark" were never adjectives.

All the interest is in formulas and algorithms that tell us something about primes *without* first needing to count all of them one by one.

What you've produced, if it's accurate, may be interesting to you, but it is not a groundbreaking new contribution to the field of number theory.

Also, humans can run down pretty much any other animal, even if we can't outrun them over short distances. More importantly, even if it were a better body plan, evolution finds local maxima, but there's no reason to expect it to jump to a global maximum if there are all sorts of low-fitness body pla...

↶ False positives are exactly the thing, I mean, sensitivity is false vs. true positives, and there are no true positives. No, sensitivity is true positives vs. false negatives. That is, it's the proportion of actual positives that the test identifies as positives. Glancing at the Wikipedia page , ...

No, you meant specificity, and I know that was the idea and I explained why I think you're wrong. You're talking about false positives, which are so far exactly zero unless there's been some new development I don't know about. False negatives are much more common because as you pointed out before, t...

I would dispute that the Turing Test would be all that specific, though I suppose it depends on the population under study. The problem is that we may simply become skilled at creating AIs that can pass the test long before we become skilled at creating conscious AIs, which in practice would mean t...

I don't think it's fair to say it's a bad test on the basis that it's testing for something so unlikely. A test with 99.9% specificity and sensitivity seems like it would be a pretty good test, even if we used it to test something with such low prior probability that most positive results are still ...

↶ If the Turing Test can neither prove that something is a person when it passes nor that something isn't a person when it fails, then it's not a great test. As Meteoric points out above me, that's how all tests work. the point of bringing up the converse was to show that conversational ability is ...

For the record, I agree that a single apparently coherent text conversation isn't enough to determine consciousness. I also agree that Bayes should inform our initial assumptions as always. However, a prolonged series of conversations about a range of topics is very strong evidence of consciousness,...

How about every other member of this forum? Do you assume they're conscious? On what basis?

Doogly's point about skin and a face aside, you decide people are conscious all the time based on nothing more than conversation.

Eebster the Great wrote:↶
Everything I have ever met that looks convincingly like a living human has been conscious

[citation needed]

So, you think a genuine consciousness arises? And not just something that behaves identically to a conscious mind but might have no self-awareness? Well, I certainly do. And what do you mean "behaves identically but is different"? That's rubbish. Is it? I thought it was one of the classic...

Yeah, this is a character who completely misses the mark on machine learning and has come up with this ridiculous thing as a result. People responding as though Randall is criticizing machine learning as a whole are in turn completely missing the mark on the comic.

Do I dare to say that this is basically climate models in a nutshell? I think I will. "Do I dare out myself as a complete and total moron? I think I will." No one's head will explode just from seeing another idiot science denier who thinks Dilbert provides insightful commentary on the top...

Sure, it may not be possible to reliably transfer a particular consciousness from one thing (brain, computer, whatever) to another. But that says nothing about whether consciousness is purely physical or whether it could happen on a computer, and thus doesn't really say anything about free will.

Also a good point.

We cannot, after all, transfer a complete Mandelbrot from one PC to another - all we can do is transfer the algorithm. This, imho, neatly solves the paradox - consciousness can be created but not transferred. We can't transfer the complete Mandelbrot set because it's infinite. Are you suggesting th...

Yeah I saw the wiki page, but was still confused until I typed it up in my own words here.

Refreshing my memory of the halting problem for the thread in the math forum led me to pages about Rice's Theorem, and it took me a while to wrap my head around that proof so I want to check here if I basically understand what's going on. First of all, we know from the halting problem proof that the...

Keyman wrote:↶
In (approximately?) the same way your burrito is a sandwich, would a taco be a hotdog?

No, for the reasons already mentioned.

I could probably be convinced to count a hotdog (in a bun) as a type of taco, though.

I had a professor who described philosophy as (in part) a holding area for questions science couldn't answer yet, where people could formulate interesting questions and speculate about answers and their implications. The problem is when philosophers want to keep holding onto those questions even aft...

By which reasoning subs are also not sandwiches, so I guess you're a structure purist.

The overall debate will still be a thing in 2087, if a random encounter in Fallout 4 is to be believed.

In English books (i.e. I'm using the Google Books ngrams for this), the lemmas "brother" and "sister" are singular about 70% of the time, whereas "sibling" is singular less than 40% of the time. "Sibling(s)" is used about 7% as often as "brother(s)" ...

I could be wrong here (hapless undergrad checking in), but the naturals and the primes can be put into a "one-to-one" correspondence with one another(infinitude of primes, and primes being a subset of \mathBB{N}), so they have the same cardinality - namely Aleph Nought, so to say "wh...

I'm sure others have put it all in one formula before, it just didn't gain traction because it's not useful. The sieve is brute forcing, and is one of the slowest ways to do anything with primes.

Every complex program has smaller parts inside it, and part of Devious is Oracle. If you think of them written in some programming language, then Devious is just the same program as Oracle, but with a few lines of code before and after all the lines of Oracle. If you think of them as books, then Dev...

Yeah, the main similarity is that they're both proofs by contradiction. Another similarity, which is common in many nonexistence proofs, is that we get the contradiction by looking at one proposed solution and showing that it isn't really a solution. Then we notice or show that the argument doesn't ...

Well more broadly we can use it to prove that no program can be a halting oracle, because any alleged oracle is susceptible the same proof. Also, there are many other things that we can prove by contradiction, by showing that something would imply the existence of a halting oracle.

Pretty much, yes.

I asked my microbiology teacher for a definition of species and he could not give me one. Any definition based on reproduction immediately faces problems because many species reproduce solely asexually. I came up with the idea that any two organisms whose DNA differs by < X, where X is a constant g...

What do you mean, "How can it be?" We've already given many examples of things that look at other things' outputs. Sure, we're sort of tricking Oracle into making a false statement, but there's nothing illegal about that. It's the same thing we'd to with someone who claimed to be able to p...

↶ What is either program going to do without any arguments? Oracle tells us what a particular program does when given a particular input . It needs both of those arguments in order to do anything at all . Devious responds to what Oracle tells us the program corresponding to the one argument for Dev...

What is either program going to do without any arguments? Oracle tells us what a particular program does when given a particular input . It needs both of those arguments in order to do anything at all . Devious responds to what Oracle tells us the program corresponding to the one argument for Deviou...

Oracle is part of the Devious program. A program that takes an input and divides that input by three doesn't need three as an argument, because the three is always part of that program. Similarly, Devious checks what Oracle says about its input. It doesn't need Oracle as an argument, because Oracle ...

Oracle is already part of Devious, by definition. As in, that's how we defined Devious. Devious takes its one argument (the number corresponding to the Devious program, in the case where we want a contradiction), and it sends that argument to Oracle twice . Once as the program Oracle will consider, ...

Devious takes one argument, but to get the contradiction, the argument it takes is (the number corresponding to) Devious itself, not Oracle.

Search found 20792 matches