Notes on two presentations by Gordon Bell ca. 1998
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From: Robert Myers on 2 Feb 2010 19:13 On Feb 2, 6:26 pm, eug...(a)cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) wrote: > That's the nature of hindsight. > You had a stand alone Cray? How luck of you! > You likely really mean shared Cray. > > It would also depend whether you were in the COS or similar batch side > of the world vs. the insistent interactive CTSS side of the world. > Let's put it this way. I could hear the disk drives grinding away while I watched the screen buffer slowly fill with pixels, and I could see the dedicated Cray at it's single-minded task, but, no, I did not actually *own* the machine. It was there that I, who had previously only used COS, was introduced to CTSS, and I'm still getting over the shock. There was also a VAX front-end. You've been lots of places, and maybe you've even been where I was. I was only a player as far as the hydro was concerned (but, in that role, I was a key player), but I did get to hear what was sold in terms of graphical capabilities, and I did get to sit with the money men who referred to us weenies as "smart guys" who would undoubtedly get it done with the application of the appropriate amount of cash. You probably know lots of people who talk that way. HAL is nonsense. The numerical wind tunnel is nonsense. Computer- generated movies are a reality and they are getting better all the time. It's been a long time since supercomputers in any conventional sense have been in the movie business. Robert.
From: Robert Myers on 2 Feb 2010 20:20 On Feb 2, 6:08 pm, eug...(a)cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) wrote: > >> >Do larger scale, faster, longer run times, increase problem insight > >> >and not just total flop or flops (second R Myers prize to G Bell in > >> >one presentation) > >> >Challenge to funders: Is the cost justified? (THREE R Myers prizes to > >> >G Bell in one presentation). > > >> It's like Alice and the Red Queen: to stay in place, you have to run faster. > >> If you don't, you might consider getting out of the game. Just try it. > > >> Do I think it's justified? Personally, no. > > >> But you also only see part of the playing field as most people do. > > In article <0e6f1487-396f-44f8-ab8b-141382400...(a)k19g2000yqc.googlegroups..com>, > Robert Myers <rbmyers...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > >If I, as a taxpayer, can't see what you are doing, and > >it's not classified, what right do you have to be spending my money? > > What makes you think that the taxpayer's money is directly involved? > Consider mapping the human genome. It wasn't all Francis' money. > Did you understand the computing issues involved and whose machines were > used? Do you think it is/was different in other fields? (I do.) > You've brought this up before. People who are deeply invested in some particular thing often can't see clearly what they think they are so certain of. The current Secretary of the Treasury is my current bête noir. I'm sure that he or any of his mafia would talk to me with similar condescension. I don't really understand because I can't see the whole picture. Do you think I'd buy that from you any more than I'd buy it from the masters of the universe? > >As to the running faster to stay in the same place analogy, that's > >what I have long suspected is going on, and it's one of the most > >disheartening things you have said to me. > > Pick up a copy of of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I've had Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice since I was attending a well- known trade school in the Cambridge that Nick doesn't work in. > The world was like this before you were born. That's the nature of the > progress we are in. > > It's economics Robert. My own agency realized that it could not support > the exist of nearly a dozen supercomputer facilities. Not only that, > many of the competing facilities were poorly run. > That's an argument I'll buy. If these "supercomputers" are really throughput machines, then it's a whole different story. I doubt very seriously, though, that the Congress realizes that it is buying the equivalent of tens of thousands of well-managed personal workstations. > >Computers have fulfilled their promise only in the area of computer > >graphics and animation. > > I'm not certain what promise you are thinking. > > Wouldn't say that, and I headed a SIGGRAPH chapter for two years. > > I ran into a lot of people in my chapter who only thought of generating > synthetic images. I had an image analysis and processing background as > well. The only people who got boxed in really didn't did think and > analysed scenes well. This even concerned friends at Pixar and > Lucasfilm who knew where to look for their warts in their work. > Everyone has their own perspective. I've described an important part of mine in a different post. > >Maybe computers will one day succeed as the artificially-intelligent > >devices that once were imagined. So far, I see little progress, and > >I don't think that more flops is going to speed progress in that area. > > They need better understanding of natural intelligence first. > They mistook a clear view for a short distance. > I don't think anyone has enough insight to have a clear view. At this point, all we can say is that we don't even know a path. > >As to computational physics, I have long had serious doubts as to > >whether bigger computers at this point are producing anything more > >than more visually-engaging graphics. They may well be an obstacle to > >insight and real progress--especially as the vested interests that are > >more interested in the computers than in the science become ever more > >vested, visible, and powerful. > > Code production (human time) vs code execution (long machine run time) > are two different topics. Many fields > (e.g., cryptanalysis, machine translation, etc.) don't have graphical products. > > Every one should buy Knuth's new book in about 2 weeks on > Selected Papers on Algorithms. > I had Knuth's old book of selected papers on algorithms. Yes, he's smart. Lots of people are smart. Robert.
From: nmm1 on 3 Feb 2010 03:44 In article <0be0aa0d-cd89-44a7-a03f-cdd505a662cc(a)r6g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>, Robert Myers <rbmyersusa(a)gmail.com> wrote: > >> >Maybe computers will one day succeed as the artificially-intelligent >> >devices that once were imagined. =A0So far, I see little progress, and >> >I don't think that more flops is going to speed progress in that area. >> >> They need better understanding of natural intelligence first. >> They mistook a clear view for a short distance. >> >I don't think anyone has enough insight to have a clear view. At this >point, all we can say is that we don't even know a path. Worse, we don't even know whether we would be able to understand a path if we were shown one. Nor do we know that we wouldn't, of course. While Goedel's and Turing's limits apply only to axiomatic / algorithmic systems, and the human brain is (probably?) not to axiomatic / algorithmic, we don't know that it doesn't have a similar class of limit on its self-understanding. Libet's work indicates that we don't understand the basic process of decision making. Blow the free will issue; we haven't got that far yet. Regards, Nick Maclaren.
From: nedbrek on 3 Feb 2010 06:37 Hello all, "Eugene Miya" <eugene(a)cse.ucsc.edu> wrote in message news:4b67837f$1(a)darkstar... >>On Jan 31, 8:24=A0pm, "nedbrek" <nedb...(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >>> Are you saying vectors are good or bad? =A0And is it short vectors (SSE) >>> = >>>or long vectors (Arana)? > > What's Arana? It was a proposed vector machine from the Alpha guys. Maybe it was Tarantula. I get my Spider codenames mixed up :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21464#Tarantula Ned
From: Robert Myers on 3 Feb 2010 14:53
On Feb 3, 3:44 am, n...(a)cam.ac.uk wrote: > In article <0be0aa0d-cd89-44a7-a03f-cdd505a66...(a)r6g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>, > Robert Myers <rbmyers...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > >> >Maybe computers will one day succeed as the artificially-intelligent > >> >devices that once were imagined. =A0So far, I see little progress, and > >> >I don't think that more flops is going to speed progress in that area.. > > >> They need better understanding of natural intelligence first. > >> They mistook a clear view for a short distance. > > >I don't think anyone has enough insight to have a clear view. At this > >point, all we can say is that we don't even know a path. > > Worse, we don't even know whether we would be able to understand a > path if we were shown one. Nor do we know that we wouldn't, of > course. > > While Goedel's and Turing's limits apply only to axiomatic / > algorithmic systems, and the human brain is (probably?) not > to axiomatic / algorithmic, we don't know that it doesn't have > a similar class of limit on its self-understanding. > > Libet's work indicates that we don't understand the basic process > of decision making. Blow the free will issue; we haven't got that > far yet. Except that it would imply that I take myself that seriously, and I don't, I'd hand out another R Myers prize for getting it. Robert. |