english

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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A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam

english, Ideas

Spam in blog comments has become a problem in the blogosphere lately. Bloggers have been busy manually deleting entries, blocking IP addresses and some people have come up with comment spam filters that use keywords and such in a similar way as spam filters do.

Now here’s a thought: Comments are sent using forms on web pages and these pages are controlled by the blog owners – right? This means it is radically different from email spam, where the sender’s only connection to the recipient is knowing (or guessing) his or her email address.

I believe a solution to the problem would be to require the sender to do something “uniquely human”, similar to the image identification methods used by many free email services to fight of robot registrations.
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