Science, Technology & Health: February 2011 Archives
(HT: RB.)
The Speculist asks "did the Singularity just happen on Jeopardy?" The answer is "no". Not that Watson isn't incredibly cool, but the Singularity will require self-improving super-human artificial intelligence.
"Self-improving" probably isn't quite the right term. I don't mean that the AI needs to "learn" in the sense that it can improve it's score on Jeopardy each time it plays. That sort of improvement is necessary, but not sufficient. In order to reach the Singularity, an AI will need to be able to create new AIs that are qualitatively more capable than itself. Each new AI generation will need to have a broader domain of capabilities than the previous generation, not just be slightly better at accomplishing the same tasks.
Maybe "self-expanding" is better than "self-improving".
(HT: Autoblog.)
To revisit an issue I've blogged about several times, does President Obama support health care "death panels" or not?
Obama: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.
Leonhardt: So how do you--how do we deal with it?
Obama: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.
As James Taranto notes, this sounds like a literal death panel.
Obama proposed a "conversation" between "doctors, scientists [and] ethicists" for the purpose of giving "guidance" to government bureaucrats making decisions outside "the normal political channels" as to when to deny medical care."Death panel" describes this perfectly. Sarah Palin was even more right than we gave her credit for.
Yep! There's a reason why the majority of Americans want Obamacare repealed.
This actually made me cry. It's absolutely amazing.
(HT: Gizmodo and Instapundit.)
Using statistics to crack the lottery.
The trick itself is ridiculously simple. (Srivastava would later teach it to his 8-year-old daughter.) Each ticket contained eight tic-tac-toe boards, and each space on those boards—72 in all—contained an exposed number from 1 to 39. As a result, some of these numbers were repeated multiple times. Perhaps the number 17 was repeated three times, and the number 38 was repeated twice. And a few numbers appeared only once on the entire card. Srivastava’s startling insight was that he could separate the winning tickets from the losing tickets by looking at the number of times each of the digits occurred on the tic-tac-toe boards. In other words, he didn’t look at the ticket as a sequence of 72 random digits. Instead, he categorized each number according to its frequency, counting how many times a given number showed up on a given ticket. “The numbers themselves couldn’t have been more meaningless,” he says. “But whether or not they were repeated told me nearly everything I needed to know.” Srivastava was looking for singletons, numbers that appear only a single time on the visible tic-tac-toe boards. He realized that the singletons were almost always repeated under the latex coating. If three singletons appeared in a row on one of the eight boards, that ticket was probably a winner.
The story contains a few more examples, as well as informed speculation that several state scratch games have been "broken" without detection.
And then there’s Joan Ginther, who has won more than $1 million from the Texas Lottery on four different occasions. She bought two of the winners from the same store in Bishop, Texas. What’s strangest of all, perhaps, is that three of Ginther’s wins came from scratch tickets with baited hooks and not from Mega Millions or Powerball. Last June, Ginther won $10 million from a $50 ticket, which is the largest scratch prize ever awarded by the Texas Lottery.
As a computer scientist with knowledge of pseudorandom number generation algorithms, I can add to the discussion slightly: obtaining tickets in the same sequence they are generated would also give insight into the number sequence. The tickets I've seen are printed in perforated rolls (like toilet paper). The best way to crack the lottery would be to get access to these rolls.
