Author: Hjalmar Gislason

About Hjalmar Gislason

Founder and CEO of GRID (https://grid.is/). Curious about data, technology, media, the universe and everything. Founder of 5 software companies.

The Lowest Integer Number not Found on the Web

english, Ideas, Philosophy

A long time ago I heard about a funny paradox. The paradox was about the lowest integer number that was not special in any way. “Special numbers” were defined by certain rules. Even numbers were special, so were prime numbers, any multiple of 5, 2 in any power and any number with two digits alike. There may have been a few more, but they all made sense in the way that the numbers they defined somehow “felt” special.

Finally, the lowest number that was not special, is of course special for the very reason that it was the lowest number that was not special, so in turn we would have to look for another number that would be the lowest number that was not special and so on ad infinitum.

I don’t remember the source of this paradox, but I’m going to suggest another similar one. What is the lowest integer number that can not be found with Google? When you find one, you must post it on the web (e.g. in a comment to this post). It will then be indexed on Google and is no longer the lowest number that can not be found on Google, so that the hunt continues.
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More Monkey Math

english, Philosophy

The Famous Brett Watson has written a detailed and intelligent response to my entry “Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing“. In my entry I discussed that while a thousand monkeys typing randomly might not reproduce so much as a single quote from the works of Shakespeare – ever, a thousand monkeys with minimum understanding of the theory of evolution could actually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare in relatively short time using very simple methods.

With Watson’s permission I post his email response below. He has many good observations. I still have a few objections and intend to answer soon, in the meantime enjoy Brett’s reasoning.
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Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing

english, Philosophy

“A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand typewriters will eventually type the entire works of William Shakespeare.”

This quote is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s most faithful followers in the debate that followed the publication of “Origin of Species” in 1859. Other versions of the quote have a million monkeys or an infinite number of monkeys in each case typing on equally many typewriters. Huxley is said to have used it as a metaphor to argue that chance alone would eventually result in the diversity of life on Earth. The story of Huxley is not true, but regardless of who came up with the notion, it certainly is thought provoking.

Calculations show that even the monkeys just typing “To be or not to be, that is the question.” would be incredibly unlikely to happen by chance. I however decided to attempt to breed Hamlet rather than using pure chance and the results were quite interesting.
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Money Flows: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph

english, General

A couple of years ago I visited the Science Museum in London. Of all the wonderful sights there, one item keeps coming to mind: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph; a “computer” that simulated a nation’s economics using flowing water.

The Financephalograph was built in 1949 by Bill Phillips, an engineer and then student of sociology at London School of Economics (he would later become world famous as an economist for his Phillips Curve).
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The Needs and Rights of Humans and Robots

english, Ideas, Philosophy

In the Wetware post last week on “A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam” I proposed methods that would prevent robots from posting comments. Kalsey commented that there are clear indications that many spam comments are actually posted manually, rather than by robots, rendering my proposed functionality obviously useless in these cases.

The day after Kalsey’s comment, I was reading a paper by Richard Gatarski called “Artificial Consumers: A Role for Computers as Subjects in Consumer-Related Marketing“. In the paper Richard makes convincing arguments that computers are in fact consumers in our world, as they – among other consumer characteristics – consume bandwidth, processing power and information and interact with humans and each other. Richard’s presentation slides give a quick overview of the main concepts.

These two accounts had me thinking about the role that robots play on the Internet. Even more than Richard I’m now not only convinced that robots should be considered consumers, but that they are arguable the most important consumers that visit many websites.
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Discoveries of the Camera

english, General

I went to see a presentation by Sir David Attenborough yesterday. He’s in Iceland for a couple of days as a translation of his latest book The Life of Mammals is being published, following the success of the TV documentary series with the same title.

There’s only one word for Sir David – brilliant! His joyful enthusiasm about his work carries on to everybody around him. It was an unusual sight to see an overcrowded lecture hall ahhh-ing, laughing and crying for the events in the lives of creatures ranging from simple plants to the planet’s most dangerous carnivores. Nice to see that the public can still be interested in something else than the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
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