cybernetics

It's alive and well. The most obvious example of a currently interesting practical outflow from cybernetics is that of Artificial Neural Networks.

Microsoft destroyed all relationships between computing and intelligence.

John

On a sunny day (Wed, 19 Aug 2009 12:02:57 -0700 (PDT)) it happened RichD wrote in :

They live on mars now.

Things have taken a turn toward "squishy" rather than "mech". "Gene Therapy Causes Blind Woman To Grow New Fovea"

It's been superseded by Obamanomics?

Thanks, Rich

All rights to it were bought by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Dave.

-- ================================================ Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast:

Not exactly - the smart software people migrated to Linux a generation ago, where artificial intelligence is still alive and well.

And I know a couple of intelligent people who now work for Microsoft - which doesn't necessarily have to emulate IBM, though its recent trajectory does exhibit a few similaries.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There's never been a lot of intelligence - real or artificial - in economics, and most of the intelligence in that area seems to have been devoted to working out what the people being advised wanted to hear, rather than getting to grips with real markets and their actual behaviour.

In fact Obama does seem to have had intelligent advice and acted on it

- but since the advice was mainly "don't do what Hoover did in 1929" and only the Republicans are stupid enough to think that Hoover was right, this might just reflect Democratic pro-Roosevelt partisan bias.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

There is an increasing appreciation that cell machinery is self- programmed, and creationists will have to come to terms with the proposition that their hypothetical creator-designer came up with some remarkably crude and inelegant hacks.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

But....there a 16 year turnaround time to talk to Sirius. How inefficient. Maybe Dr. Shostak can help.

Of course, "where it's at in cybernetics" is ....(drum roll)...THE GLOBAL BRAIN.

"Oh, Darlene, that man over there is a Global Brain advocate."

"Oh, Suzy, that makes him an ideal sexual partner."

- A Mark Goodman - Bill Todman production.

Fovea"

Let's see *you* do better, starting from scratch and with a six-day deadline.

mment&...

I don't fancy my chances,but then I'm neither omniscient nor omnipotent - which are other implausible components of the the creationist hypothesis.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I agree that the creationist hypothesis contains several implausible components. Unfortunately, so do all the various "scientific" hypotheses.

An enquirer-after-truth asked a scientist friend how the universe was created, and was told that it all stemmed from vacuum fluctuations. So he thought about that for a bit, and then replied: "well, okay, but there are millions of Thermos flasks all round the world, very useful for keeping your coffee hot - and every one of them has a vacuum inside it. So how come we don't get loads of universes springing up all over the place?" The scientist friend replied "well, that's because there isn't enough vacuum". So you can get a universe from nothing, provided you've got *enough* nothing! And they say an omnipotent god is implausible...

Mo: What's the most fantastic invention ever invented?

Joe: Why, the common Thermos flask.

Mo: Why is that?

Joe: Well, it keeps hot things hot and cold things cold.

Mo: What's so great about that?????

Joe: How does it know?

Just go ahead and adopt pantheism. Then SCIENCE =3D RELIGION.

Vacuums are computron sinks, and thus highly intelligent.

Sloman, putting down "creationists"????

Evidently he, likd DfBC, believe that they created themselves and the whole rest of the Universe.

But, hell, what can you expect from a warmingist? The evidence for that is non-existent as well. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

I see it more as the statistical spread of the fluctuations. A big bang that creates a universe is a large statistical outlier.

The fact is though, physics will likely never answer that question. How do you describe, mathematically or otherwise, what exists before existence?

Ed

Geometry turns the trick. Consider a finite line segment suspended within a sphere (without touching or intersecting the sphere).

The line is our familiar space-time continuinuinuum, and the sphere is eternity.

From this perspective, it is easy to see that "exists before existence" is not quite meaningless, because "before" means "further along the stick /that/ way" and, although you can't go further along the stick than the end, you can at least point in that same direction.

If you want to get surreal, instead of an ordinary sphere you could use an n-sphere, for large n.

Complex time, obviously. ;-)

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if God lives in the quaternion plane instead...

Tim