29 July 2013

Notes - words and context / post anyway / setting up Pouch 20


        Your mother was born on this date in 1918. You are facing west under the shade of a couple very old oak trees near the center of Rose Hill Cemetery. You took a shorter walk and Carol took a longer one.

         1054 hours. We have returned from our walk. It is another wonderfully crisp morning, another comfortable day. I have been doing my exercises fairly regularly even while I am walking. I feel better in the process. It is very pleasant having the windows open for a few days and nights; another night with the blanket -- warm and toasty.

         Check your email, check those chairs you painted yesterday, and stop concerning yourself with my comment "Whatever works," I am not being Machiavellian here. We don't worship words, you do. - Amorella

         Words are a continual problem. Sometimes a particular word in context; hinders or helps depending on who is doing the reading. It would be interesting to see how the Marsupial humanoids handle this problem of 'meaning open to interpretation. I don't remember any lawyers on the planets but I imagine they have some. Sometimes I think we have two many words, other times not enough. In fact, the further along our species exists the more words we accumulate and the more layers of meanings in a particular context finds humor or anger or maybe both. What would Jonathon Swift do in such a day as ours today or in your tomorrows? The best way for me to handle this mode I'm in is to let it go like yesterday's newspaper. News is only good once.

         And bad news hangs on for generations. - Amorella

         So it is.

         Post. - Amorella


         Doug sent you an article that 'blows your mind' at least that's what you replied to him. Here it is. - Amorella

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Quantum Computers Will Give Artificial Intelligence Big Boost, Studies Suggest
By Devin Powell
Posted: 07/29/2013 8:39 am EDT  |  Updated: 07/29/2013 10:42 am EDT

Quantum computers of the future will have the potential to give artificial intelligence a major boost, a series of studies suggests.
These computers, which encode information in 'fuzzy' quantum states that can be zero and one simultaneously, have the ability to someday solve problems, such as breaking encryption keys beyond the reach of ‘classical’ computers.
Algorithms developed so far for quantum computers have typically focused on problems such as breaking encryption keys or searching a list — tasks that normally require speed but not a lot of intelligence. But in a series of papers posted online this month on the arXiv preprint server, Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and his collaborators have put a quantum twist on AI.
The team developed a quantum version of 'machine learning', a type of AI in which programs can learn from previous experience to become progressively better at finding patterns in data. Machine learning is popular in applications ranging from e-mail spam filters to online-shopping suggestions. The team’s invention would take advantage of quantum computations to speed up machine-learning tasks exponentially.

Quantum leap

At the heart of the scheme is a simpler algorithm that Lloyd and his colleagues developed in 2009 as a way of quickly solving systems of linear equations, each of which is a mathematical statement, such as x + y = 4. Conventional computers produce a solution through tedious number crunching, which becomes prohibitively difficult as the amount of data (and thus the number of equations) grows. A quantum computer can cheat by compressing the information and performing calculations on select features extracted from the data and mapped onto quantum bits, or qubits.
Quantum machine learning takes the results of algebraic manipulations and puts them to good use. Data can be split into groups — a task that is at the core of handwriting- and speech-recognition software — or can be searched for patterns. Massive amounts of information could therefore be manipulated with a relatively small number of qubits.
"We could map the whole Universe — all of the information that has existed since the Big Bang — onto 300 qubits," Lloyd says.
Such quantum AI techniques could dramatically speed up tasks such as image recognition for comparing photos on the web or for enabling cars to drive themselves — fields in which companies such as Google have invested considerable resources. (One of Lloyd's collaborators, Masoud Mohseni, is in fact a Google researcher based in Venice, California.)
“It's really interesting to see that there are new ways to use quantum computers coming up, after focusing mostly on factoring and quantum searches,” says Stefanie Barz at the University of Vienna, who recently demonstrated quantum equation-solving in action. Her team used a simple quantum computer that had two qubits to work out a high-school-level math problem: a system consisting of two equations. Another group, led by Jian Pan at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, did the same using four qubits.
Putting quantum machine learning into practice will be more difficult. Lloyd estimates that a dozen qubits would be needed for a small-scale demonstration.
This story originally appeared in Nature News.
Edited from - Huffington Post dot com

[Thank you Doug, for sending this on. I'm pumped on quantum computer concepts. What will civilization be like in 20,000 years? So very cool to contemplate. I wonder what Ship thinks?]
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            Let's work that into Pouch 20, boy, when you get around to it. Post. - Amorella

         Sometimes you make me nervous making a comment like this. (1805)

         Post anyway.


         2211 hours. We watched last night's Masterpiece Theatre's "Endeavor" with Morse as a young detective and then "Unforgettable" finally back on the air after more than a year off. We had lunch leftovers for supper during the news. I received another note from Doug reminding me of Schrodinger's cat. I had made a reference to it but couldn't remember the man's name. I know I have mentioned him several times before. Doug's comment is:

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". . . Yes it is still a difficult concept for me to understand. How one object can be in two places at the same time and how a computer register can both be 1 and zero at the same time, the cat is both dead and alive."

From Doug's note today.

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Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

From: Wikipedia - Schrödinger's cat
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         2222 hours. What if the quantum superposition never ends? What if that is the way it is for the soul? I wonder if Ship can work that into Pouch 20?

         That will be something for you to mull over before you go to sleep, orndorff. As long as Ship uses several of these points as analogous suppositions or working hypotheses within the greater framework of inductive logic it may be entertaining to consider. - Amorella

         I think I may be mistranslating you tonight Amorella. I'm waiting until morning to mull this over. I'm tired and it's time for bed.

         Tomorrow then, post. - Amorella

         2235 hours. It is hard to hold these abstractions in my head, Amorella. I need to solidify them for enough self-understanding so they might be put to use for machinery built or made 20,000 years from now. Presently I don't feel very credible.

         Very credible, then you must feel somewhat credible to accept such a presentation in Pouch 20. - Amorella

         I have no idea.

         Now, this statement coming from you has some dark humor embedded. Good night, orndorff. - Amorella

         I am not sure I understand what you are saying here. I don't see the humor.

         Of course not. - Amorella


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