Archive for April, 2008

7 Questions [Updated]

April 19, 2008

Here are 7 questions that I would like to ask to the following people: Michael Anissimov, Jamais Cascio, Tom McCabe, George Dvorsky, Steven Smithee, Randall Parker, and ‘Reason’ of Fight Aging.

Guys (no girls in my blogroll, sadly), you don’t have to reply if you don’t feel like it, but if you want to, just post the answers on your blog (I’ll link back to the entry) or in the comments here. Anybody else who wants to participate by answering one or many of the questions is welcome to do so in the comments. Thanks!

1. What would you nominate as the best idea that anybody has ever had? Why?

2. What non-fiction book do you think everybody should read? Why?

3. What fiction book do you think everybody should read? Why?

4. What technology has most changed your life in the past 10 years and why? What technology do you think will have the biggest impact on your life in the next 10 years and why?

5. What piece of music would you want with you on a desert island (that has a functioning stereo, of course)?

6. What is the most interesting thing you are working on/reading about/writing about these days?

7. Looking ahead, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Why?

Update: ‘Reason’ from Fight Aging has answered my questions here. Michael Anissimov has given his answers in the comments below (keep an eye out for his upcoming book!), as well as Jamais Cascio. Someone going by the name of ‘Infidel753′ gave his answers over on his blog. Also in the comments are answers by Jeremy Sheperd, Dustin Parsons, and Zach. George Dvorsky also replied on his blog. Many thanks!

My own answers can be found below.

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Posted in Thoughts | 18 Comments »

Computer Wins Go Game Against Master, But Lets Not Get Too Excited Yet

April 14, 2008

Go Game photo

This story doesn’t seem to have been picked up by the media yet (and maybe it won’t, but these kinds of things usually are because we like to know in which activities we can still beat machines):

PARIS, April 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — During the Go Tournament in Paris, staged between 22 and 24 March 2008 by the French Go Federation (FFG), the MoGo artificial intelligence (IA) engine developed by INRIA - the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control - running on a Bull NovaScale supercomputer, won a 9×9 game of Go against professional 5th DAN Catalin Taranu. This was the first ever officially sanctioned ‘non blitz’ victory of a ‘machine’ over a Go Master.

That’s impressive on its own, but lets not jump the gun and claim that humans have been defeated at Go in the way that they have been defeated at Chess (Kasparov v. Deep Blue, 1997). The reason for that is that a board game usually has 361 squares (19 x 19), and this one only had 81 (9 x 9).

That makes quite a big difference in the size of the ‘tree’ of possible moves that has to be searched by the computer, which means that the brute force approach is less effective and so the software has to be smarter in how it approaches strategy and tactics to perform well.

Not surprisingly the Go master beat the computer in a game on a 19 x 19 board, and that with a nine-stone handicap. But even after that, he was impressed:

[...] the Go Master nevertheless rated the IA system as ‘approaching Dan standard’ in a performance that promises some formidable battles to come between man and machine.

Formidable battles indeed! The final one will be fought over Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Source: Latest Advance in Artificial Intelligence: Computer Wins a Game Against a Go Master

Posted in Science & Technology | 1 Comment »

On the Nature of Time: Implications for Advanced Intelligence and SETI

April 13, 2008

I was reading and article in The Economist about lasers that can pulse extremely rapidly. We’re talking really fast, in the femtoseconds range (one billionth of one millionth of a second).

This got me thinking about the nature of time: Is there a theoretical limit to how fast something can happen? I’m not aware of any, but physics probably gives an answer one way or the other.

Still, even if there’s a limit somehow, there’s still quite a gigantic range. From femtoseconds to how long it takes for universes to die.

What if what we consider to be “real time” - how fast we move, talk, think - happens to be a glacial pace compared to other lifeforms? I’m not sure if biological intelligent life could have a subjective impression of time on such a scale because of limits to the speed of chemical reactions and the minimum complexity required for intelligence, but if an advanced civilization had made the transition to a non-biological substrate (such as super-computers), it would be conceivable that for them seconds could subjectively be the equivalent of millennia (or more) to us.

That would make communication unlikely. It would be a bit like trying to have a conversation with a rock. Even if you knew it was intelligent, you’d probably be bored out of your mind and either you would ignore it, or wait for it to speed up. And even if that’s too anthropocentric a way to look a the situation, there’s still the problem of saying something coherent mentioned below.

There’s always the possibility that such a fast intelligence would remembers how slow it once was, in its original bio-chemical form, and plan for future contact with lesser intelligences. Keep listening on the ’slow lane’, in other words. But even if it did that, could it really communicate with us coherently if between each syllable it had the time to evolve and change a lot (more than Homo Sapiens has had time to evolve so far)? Even if it creates the message in its ‘real-time’ and then slows it down to send it, will the entity that created the message have much in common with the subjectively much older entity that exists by the time the message has been completely sent?

See also:

Posted in Future, Science & Technology, Thoughts | 39 Comments »

Interview with Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey

April 8, 2008

A few months ago I discovered Futures in Biotech, a podcast that “explores the world of genetics, cloning, protein folding, genome mapping, and more” by Marc Pelletier. The episode that first caught my attention was an interview with Dr. Vijay S. Pande of Folding@home. In fact, I might have found Futures in Biotech via a link on the Folding@home blog.

Anyway, I had a look at their archives and saw that they didn’t have anything about Aubrey de Grey or the Methuselah Foundation. I figured it would be a perfect fit and that their listeners would be interested by the SENS platform.

So I found Marc’s blog and I either emailed him or left a comment (can’t remember) suggesting that he interview Aubrey de Grey, and gave some links to check out.

Today, I returned to Futures in Biotech and was very happy to see that their latest episode is an interview with Aubrey de Grey! I haven’t listened to it yet, and I can’t be sure that it was my comment/email that was the seed from which this grew, but whatever the cause was, I’m quite happy that a few more people will be exposed to SENS.

Maybe some of the listeners of that show are biology students or research scientists and this will start a chain of events that will lead them to help healthy life-extension research directly or indirectly, or maybe some of the listeners will donate to the Methuselah Foundation. This can only help.

You can listen to the interview here.

Update: I’ve now listened to the interview and it’s quite good. Unfortunately, the sound quality for Aubrey’s side of the conversation isn’t very good and I missed some of what he said.

I encourage you to listen to the interview, but know that it is not the best introduction to the SENS platform. A better start would by this TED talk, and the most complete and detailed overview is Aubrey’s book.

Posted in Health, Science & Technology | 1 Comment »

Is There a DNA Puzzle in Alberts’ Molecular Biology of the Cell?

April 7, 2008

Last November, I bought Molecular Biology of the Cell by Alberts (5th edition). I’m a few chapters in, and so far it’s an excellent textbook, I recommend it.

But there’s something that has been intriguing me for months: Once every few pages, seemingly at random, there are groups of 4 red letters inside pointy brackets. At first, I thought it was probably formatting meta-data, some kind of printing accident. But the second time the red letter popped up in a weird place, I noticed that the letters were all DNA letters (T,A,G,C).

Could this be a puzzle? Is this some kind of clever biological joke by the authors?

If it is, what do these code for? Some well-known protein?

It’s a mystery so far.

Update: Unless this is a well-known joke among biologists (it’s a common textbook, after all) and someone tells me about it in the comments or via email, I’ll probably compile a sequence of nucleotide letters long enough for it to be unique and then Google it. I had my “duh” moment and realized there’s no need to go through the whole 1000-page book and compile all of red letters…

Posted in Books, Science & Technology, Visuals | 3 Comments »

How Many Atoms to Encode the Human Genome?

April 6, 2008

We often hear about how the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) macro-molecule that contains the human genome has about 3 billion base pairs, but we rarely hear about the atoms. I was curious to know how many such a complex structure required…

Warning: Back of the envelope calculations.

Here we go:

3 billion base pairs equals 6 billion nucleotides.

The human genome uses 4 types of nucleotides:

  • Adenine (A)
  • Guanine (G)
  • Cytosine (C)
  • Thymine (T)

‘T’ is always associated with ‘A’, and ‘G’ with ‘C’.

Each of these nucleotides is composed of a nitrogen-containing base, a five-carbon sugar, and a phosphate group.

To simplify, we’ll only look at Thymine, which is pretty representative of the others in size.

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Posted in Science & Technology | 1 Comment »

Curiosity: Good Friend, Bad Master

April 4, 2008

I’m realizing more and more than my curiosity has gotten me interested in lots of things, and gotten me lots of places that few people go, but that I need more than that to get to the next level.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great I’ve got this drive to constantly learn new things, and I think I’m pretty efficient at it too. The way it works is, I go through learning phases where I’m very interested by something. It might last anywhere between 2 weeks and a few months, and during that time I usually consume large quantities of information on that thing (thank you, Internet!).

For example, during this winter I went through a photography phase. Over about a month, I went from almost no knowledge to a decent understanding of f/stops, focal lengths, bokeh, the technical specifications of various lenses and cameras, various techniques to take portraits, landscapes, indoor low-light photography, composition, telephoto, high-speed, and some software post-processing. I’ve read dozens of in-depth reviews and specification sheets. I don’t even own a camera yet, but I think I know as much, or more, than many people who own fancy DSLRs.

Another example: A couple of years ago I went through a classical music phase. I went from knowing absolutely nothing except for a few pieces used in Hollywood movies to owning a few hundreds of classical CDs, within about 6 months. I now am familiar with almost all major composers from the Baroque period up to the beginning of the modern post-romantic era. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann Schubert, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovitch, Bruckner, Mahler, Berlioz, Liszt, Grieg, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, Sibelius, Tveitt, Saint-Saens, Bartok, Holst, etc. Got various symphonies, chamber music, piano sonatas, operas, lieders, etc. Even have more than one interpretations of many pieces, because, for example, I like both the grandeur of Gardiner’s St-Matthew’s Passion (Bach) and McCreesh’s smaller choir and period instruments. During that phase, ArkivMusic.com was almost my home page and I devoured Hector Berlioz’s autobiography to learn more about the musical scene of that time. So in a few months, I learned more (on certain levels) about classical music than some baby-boomers I know who’ve been into it for 35+ years.

Since that phase has ended, I’ve been digesting all that music (it’s not something I could have done fully at the time) and acquiring more albums, though at a much slower pace. But still, nothing compares to the incredible productivity of that initial burst.

That’s just two learning phases I went through. Off the top of my head, I can think of many others that happened at various times in my life: Computer hardware, software, other musical genres (jazz, metal, klezmer, etc), literature (science fiction, etc), environment-related fields (climate science, energy infrastructure, transportation, food production, etc), biology (still slowly getting through a few textbooks), transhumanism-related fields (nanotech, biotech, A.I., longevity science, neuroscience, etc), economics, audio equipment, 20th century history, entrepreneurship/startups, astronomy, fighter planes (as a young boy), etc.

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Posted in Thoughts | 19 Comments »