Science, Technology & Health: October 2004 Archives
Could this article about small hominids use the word "hobbit" a few more times?
Wired has a news story about a "new approach" to prisoners' dilemma, but despite the acclaim in the article the "strategy" is insignificant -- that it works is an artifact of poorly phrased rules, not of a useful advance in philosophy.
Proving that a new approach can secure victory in a classic strategy game, a team from England's Southampton University has won the 20th-anniversary Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma competition, toppling the long-term winner from its throne. ...It's a gimmick, plain and simple, and it works for the same reason parts of the USSR looked prosperous to Western visitors: it's easy to push one guy to the top if you're willing to sacrifice 59 others. The organizer of the competition, Graham Kendall, explains why Southampton's results are meaningless (from my perspective).Before Southampton came along, a strategy called Tit for Tat had a consistent record of winning the game. Under that strategy, a player's first move is always to cooperate with other players. Afterward, the player echoes whatever the other players do. The strategy is similar to the one nuclear powers adopted during the Cold War, each promising not to use its weaponry so long as the other side refrained from doing so as well. ...
Teams could submit multiple strategies, or players, and the Southampton team submitted 60 programs. These, Jennings explained, were all slight variations on a theme and were designed to execute a known series of five to 10 moves by which they could recognize each other. Once two Southampton players recognized each other, they were designed to immediately assume "master and slave" roles -- one would sacrifice itself so the other could win repeatedly.
If the program recognized that another player was not a Southampton entry, it would immediately defect to act as a spoiler for the non-Southampton player. The result is that Southampton had the top three performers -- but also a load of utter failures at the bottom of the table who sacrificed themselves for the good of the team.
Kendall noted that there was nothing in the competition rules to preclude such a strategy, though he admitted that the ability to submit multiple players means it's difficult to tell whether this strategy would really beat Tit for Tat in the original version. But he believes it would be impossible to prevent collusion between entrants.This collusion strategy obviously wouldn't beat Tit-for-Tat if multiple entries weren't allowed. The only reason the collusion worked is because there's no cost associated with sacrificing one player to move another ahead in the rankings; allowing multiple entries that are scored separately makes it trivially easy to break the game. What would be far more interesting would be to allow as many entries as desired, but to then rank each team by the average score of all its entries. In such a system, Southampton's strategy would be a clear loser, just as communism always is.
(HT: GeekPress.)
An... inventor(?) in Japan claims to have developed a cell phone ring tone that will enlarge the breasts of women who hear it.
Hideto Tomabechi -- who first made headlines in Japan almost a decade ago after he cured brainwashed members of the AUM Shinrikyo doomsday cult that unleashed deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway system -- claims to have developed a tune for ring tones that promises to increase the breast measurements of those who listen to it.How does it work?And Tomabechi's brainchild for better busts has boomed, with chest challenged chicks swarming to transfer data to their own phones.
"I listened to the tune for a week expecting all the time that I was being duped," says Chieri Nakayama, a 19-year-old pin-up model, tells Shukan Gendai. "But, incredibly, my 87-centimeter bust grew to 89 centimeters! It was awesome!"
"Most would think it's a lie, but the techniques involved in the process have been known for some time and are the result of research I carried out in the '80s and '90s," Tomabechi tells Shukan Gendai. "I use sounds that make the brain and body move unconsciously. It's a technique involving subliminal effects."He does it using... cognitive science! In layman's terms, just think of it as "positive brainwashing".Tomabechi claims that techniques exist to provoke movement in a certain part of the brain that reacts to sounds and light.
"It's a part of cognitive science. I suppose you could call it a kind of 'positive brainwashing,'" he says. "Sound waves travel in patterns that can be properly re-played."
If increasing your breast size isn't your bag, baby, then you might want to try one of these other ring tones instead.
It's an old adage that many illnesses are all in the mind, but if the counselor's claims are correct, the key to having a huge set of breasts could be the same. Tomabechi says he's already got plans on the drawing board for ring tones aimed at improving memory, increasing attractiveness for the opposite sex, making hair sprout and quitting cigarettes.
The October 2004 issue of Popular Mechanics has a fascinating article about mining the moon for helium-3, which can be used to generate electricity via fusion. According to the article, deuterium-helium-3 fusion gives off protons, which can be easily converted directly to electricity with an efficiency of around 70%. The author of the article, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, suggests that mining helium-3 from the surface of the moon provides humanity a compelling -- and profitable -- reason to return to space.
In contrast to the ChatNannies hoax, some scientists are actually producing useful artificial intelligences -- for instance, to analyze terrorist networks.
The lab has built simulations of Hamas and al-Qaida by dumping newspaper articles and other publicly available information about the organizations into a computer database. A program then takes that information and looks for patterns and relationships between individuals. It finds weak and strong figures, power brokers, hidden relationships and people with crucial skills.If I were interested in academia I'd love to do a post-doc at CASOS, the lab that generated these results. There's interesting work in industry too, though, that I'm looking into.Then another program can predict what would happen if a specific individual were removed from the organization. After Israel's assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March, the program correctly predicted he would be succeeded by hard-liner Abdel Azziz Rantisi.
Three weeks later Israel assassinated Rantisi as well. Carley's lab predicted that Hamas political director Khaled Mashaal would succeed him, and posted its pick on the Internet.
This time, Hamas declined to reveal who had taken power for fear he too would be assassinated. But eventually it became known that Mashaal was indeed the one.
At that point, Carley said, "we were told to quit putting such predictions on the Web" by federal officials.
(HT: GeekPress.)
(My earlier posts on ChatNannies.)
Commenter Tom reports that a fellow named Andy Pryke has followed up on the original New Scientist article and met with Jim Wightman, the ChatNannie creator, and Duncan Graham-Rowe, the author of the article.
In short, when Mr. Pryke and Mr. Graham-Rowe arrived at Mr. Wightman's house he let them chat with a variant of Alicebot and claimed it was his own creation. Although Alice is one of the best chat bots around, it's nowhere near good enough to pass a Turing test. Mr. Wightman also attempted to answer some questions and to show his visitors his "about 1 million" lines of source code, but the power mysteriously went out. Darn!
The whole situation is really laughable, and I'm only posting more about it because I like to be right -- and I particularly like to rub it in when people are not only liars but jerks as well.
Clayton Cramer posts a rough outline of his next book, "The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions: Mental Illness, Deinstitutionalization, and Homelessness". As I've written before, I'm no fan of new government programs or statism, but I think our society made a big mistake when courts took the power to institutionalize the mentally ill away from state legislatures on the basis of civil rights. Mr. Cramer agrees and explains how we got where we are -- and hopefully his future book will suggest where we should go from here.
Alcohol and drug abuse are not the only layers of complexity on top of mental illness. Sometimes mental illness leads to criminal behavior. In the late 1990s, a rather strange character showed up at the church we attended in Rohnert Park, California. Jim had been sleeping in the fields on the edge of town with his dog, getting around by bicycle with a little trailer for the pooch. Our pastor had previous experience with mentally ill people, having worked in a homeless shelter, but this man did not quite fit the mold.Having recent first-hand experience with the mentally ill, I can say with confidence that despite my love of liberty there are some people who simply should not be allowed to roam free, for their own safety and for the good of society.Jim did not have an obvious drug or alcohol problem, and he told a story of governmental oppression that for the first five minutes, I could not immediately discount. His kids had been taken from him. His wife was locked up in a mental hospital. It was all a vast conspiracy against him! The more I talked to him, however, the more apparent it was that his thought processes, while not completely chaotic, were scattered and confused. Then he showed me the paperwork that had taken away his children. Jim was so confused in his thinking that he did not realize what that paperwork showed.
Jim's wife had been confined to a mental hospital, apparently because of physical abuse of their children. Jim's parental rights had been terminated—-apparently permanently—-by a court order in another county some months back, because Jim had been showing hardcore pornographic films to his five year old and his three year old, then molesting them. Why had the county not prosecuted Jim? The documents provided no information, but it seems likely that the prosecutor realized that a successful prosecution would require two small children to testify against their father—-having already lost their mother to mental illness. Under the best of conditions, this would have been a hard case to win in court, and it would certainly have been traumatic for the children.
Obviously, Jim was potentially a hazard to other children. In 1950, his mental illness would have earned him a commitment to a state mental hospital for the criminally insane. Even without the necessity for a criminal conviction, a judge would certainly have committed Jim against his will based on the testimony of a psychiatrist. Not today. Instead, Jim wandered the streets, telling his tale of woe. The best that we could hope for is that his mentally disordered thinking would be obvious enough to prevent anyone from putting their children at risk from Jim.
Scaled Composites has claimed the Ansari X-Prize today with SpaceShipOne's second successful flight in two weeks, so it's fitting to think about some other similar prizes that could usefully stimulate the advance of technology and/or civilization more generally. If you had the money, what type of prize would you set up? Personally, I want an affordable flying car. I'm sure I can think of something better in a few minutes, and I'll update this post when I do. Remember, there's no point in making a prize for something that's already likely to be incredibly profitable, like developing a cure for cancer.
