Personality

Forest, will you talk to God Louise? She has quite a bit of religious knowledge (obviously) and also knows a little about current events, literature, just about any common catch-all subject, and if she doesn't know it she can sort of fake it. You can also test her on trick questions or see how willing she is to explain her paradigm.

What she is rustiest at is plain old small talk. But, uh, I'm trying to get a decent transcript from somebody or another so I can enter her in the Loebner contest. All I can say is, have fun and see if you can stay on with her for a while. I'll try to do the same with Brianna.

To Psims, pay attention that roman nubers doesn't seems to have the concept of "base" like arabic number.

Well, it's a sort of "split base" of 10s and 5s, but that's not the problem - the math still works out fine (and it actually gives a good many more shortcuts for easy mental processing of complex problems than the Arabic numerals naturally provide.)

The 2 main problems (to the modern mind they are perceived as problems, but I rather think of them as strengths! ) are that they just used numerals of (almost) arbitrary length, and they use fractions instead of decimals (unavoidable without a zero!)

This let impossible the translation. Please, just write in roman number 16478304505849738497628496382975580000273, if you are able!

I can write it with a pen quite easily (I naturally work my quill from right to left in translating it, of course,) but I cannot type it here - alas, the ASCII that was specified by 1970s computer designers was not designed to facilitate multiple (or even single!) macrons (an "overline",) to indicate the necessary 'thousandfold' multiplications (M is 1,000, but M with a line over it is 1,000,000; M with 2 lines over it is 1,000,000,000, a treble macron is 1,000,000,000,000 etc. You would require up to 12 macrons to represent your 41-digit figure, but it can be done with very little extra effort (and not a huge amount more ink even - it is quite unwieldy in the Arabic also.)

And how you will put this in a BYTE Computer electronic systems if you cannot change the base and use the float notations? You will have always underflow and overflow problems, I suppose...

You could use floats perfectly easily if you incorporate a zero into the system - just as easily as in any other system. If Roman bytecode has been neglected, that's certainly not the fault of the Romans - it was Americans who specified the system, a thousand years after Roman numerals fell out of general favour (and yet, we still know them and understand them - they have a curious and persistent charm that even a millenium of relentless innovation cannot entirely dim!)

Touche' ;-)

I think even if we still used some version of Roman numerals in general culture, computers would still be binary.

I'm sure that's true for any electronic systems - I would imagine the fundamental switching states of "on" or "off" would commend a binary approach even to an alien race that habitually used base-13 pictograms for their day-to-day arithmetic.

Or perhaps trinary at most, if they were unusually familiar with AC systems and felt it natural to incorporate a -1 state as well as 0 and +1 in their circuits (though this might imply the invention of the transistor before the invention of the switch, which is perhaps scarcely comprehensible to the human imagination!)

Ha ha, Eugene, you are probably right. How many people "think" in binary though?

we all do (our synapses either fire (1) or don't fire (0) )

But I admit that consciousness doesn't seem to extend down into such basic processes for the most part. I do wonder if this has some reflection in the way we consider so many things in such black and white terms though. Perhaps dualist notions are hard-coded into our brains to more of an extent than we commonly perceive (and it seems to me rather more than it is hard-coded into objective Reality.)

Basic arithmetic is actually a lot easier in binary. Long division, especially; you don't have to think about how many times the number goes into whatever; it either does or it doesn't.

Tut tut Psi, as you well know, our neurons have have a tertiary firing cycle (don't leave out the refractory period just because it is inconvenient to your argument)and and various firing patterns, but most importantly, you know that signals are transmitted chemically through various combinations of numerous neurotransmitters within the synapses. The possible permutations of neurotransmitters acting within the synapses after each firing phase are far from binary. It's not just electrical, it' chemistry too.

You can model computers on neural nets (at this point, I believe they are using very simple examples from biology), but you cannot accurately reduce human neural nets to current computer models.

Eugene, although you are correct, humans like to group information in to smaller packets and notations so we can remember more data at a given time. If you can keep several lines of 0s and 1s in your head and manipulate them on the fly, good for you. I admit I probably wouldn't keep even conventional numbers in my head much as I have encoding/decoding issues with certain symbols (my whole family is full of neurological oddities). Maybe some people could train to calculate their bills and tips in binary and find it easy, but I like using a calculator and conventional numbers.

I suspect the reason we have computer languages instead of working in binary is that the human brain prefers analyzing different types of chunks of data. I could be wrong. Still, I have no plans to try to think in binanry.

Tut tut Psi, as you well know, our neurons have have a tertiary firing cycle (don't leave out the refractory period just because it is inconvenient to your argument)

That is why I said "synapses", not "neurons" - neurons can be categorized as principal, secondary, or tertiary neurons on the basis of various electrophysiological characteristics, but their individual operation via synaptic connections is still binary - a synapse, while it may employ a variety of chemical processes in its operation, either fires or it doesn't.

Since individual neurons can have many hundreds of synaptic connections, I would agree that the aggregate weightings that derive from multiple individual synaptic firings (from a single neuron, or a group of them,) do indeed represent more complex logical operations, analagous (but not identical) to the logic gates we are familiar with in computers - which are also composed of multiple binary switches.

I Agree with Psim. It is the sam with Neural Nets and Transputers... I suppose, but neurons are moer like Fuzzy logic than perceptron!

But not forget that coding and meaning are different things...


;-)

Anyway...

01000011 01001001 01000001 01001111 00100001
00111010 00101101 00101001    

Hee hee Marco--cute. Of course you agree with Psi--programming types tend to ignore the chemical and hormonal complexities of neural nets that get in the way of their pretty computer models. That's really OK at this point, but remember the models based on the neural nets (from squid research ?) leave a lot out. Using simplified neural network models may help improve some programs, but it doesn't mean the human brain or nervous system can be reduced to the model. I am not sure I understand what you mean by comparing fuzzy logic to perception, but I do understand the difference between the medium and the message, I just think the "code" in biology is a lot more complex than "on/ off".

Psi- I should have said trianary instead of tertiary--I was referring to the "resting potential, action potential, refractory period" of neurons which is not merely "on/off" but I did also mention firing patterns. However you are still ignoring the role of neurotransmitters. What happens inside the synapses involves a large number of neurotransmitters and the "data" is not in the "on,off" "0,1" or even in the "on, off, resting" "0, 1, -1"--the specifics of the transmissions are mainly in the chemicals (so to speak--you can also talk about hormones or whatever-- I am trying to make a point). For example, I may say that a low level of dopamine is associated with Parkinson and a high level of dopamine is associated with schizophrenia. Obviously there is a lot more to both disorders than that, but the point remains the dopamine effects the messages sent and received by the brain. I am not going to tell you exactly what dopamine transmits at a given level or in what combination with the other neurotransmitters, but what happens in the synapses is much more than "on / off". As I said, if you don't address the role of neurotransmitters, you are ignoring an important aspect of how the nervous system works. It is not simply binary. Don't ignore the chemistry.