The Dot

Nov 6

DARPA Network Challenge

“a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems”

Nov 5

“People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.
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The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization, as people try to establish different kinds of romantic attachments with different people at the same time.
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It seems to encourage an attitude of contingency. If you have several options perpetually before you, and if technology makes it easier to jump from one option to another, you will naturally adopt the mentality of a comparison shopper.” David Brooks

Oct 31

“The first moon lander in 1969 had a system equivalent to about 10,000 lines of code. By the estimates, the next Lunar mission to come in 2019 would have about 10 million lines of code! We would surely have the necessary hardware technologies to handle such a system, but it is inevitable that the number of defects also increase with such a large system. In Gerard’s own words “the human brain is not going to get bigger that soon” and at current rate about two residual defects are found per 1000 lines of code. Geralds guiding principle is “if we don’t learn to use computers to analyze our programs, we are in a losing battle.” Ajith Ranabahu

Oct 23

“The psychologists thus tend to gravitate toward a different view of conduct. In this view, people don’t have one permanent thing called character. We each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context. As Paul Bloom of Yale put it in an essay for The Atlantic last year, we are a community of competing selves. These different selves “are continually popping in and out of existence. They have different desires, and they fight for control — bargaining with, deceiving, and plotting against one another.” David Brooks

Oct 15

“This whole process: input, processing, comparing output with correct answer, and adjusting connection strengths is called one ‘back-propagation cycle’, or often just one ‘iteration’. The net is then presented with another picture and its answer is compared with the correct answer, the connection strengths adjusted where needed. This process can often take hundreds or thousands of iterations. Eventually, the net should become fairly proficient at identifying males and females. There is always a risk however, that the net has not learned to discriminate males from females, but rather that it has effectively memorized the response for each picture. To test for this, the pictures (or whatever input is being used) should be divided into two groups: The training set, and the transfer set. The training set is used during back-propagation cycles, and the transfer set is used once learning is complete. If the net performs as well on the novel transfer stimuli as it did on the training set, then we conclude that learning has occurred.” http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/nn.html