Computers Before Computers

I had to do a presentation for English class recently. I decided to do presentation on Alan Turing's Turing Machine. It's a really interesting subject.
Right after the Second World War the need arose for a simple set of rules, and if you'd follow those carefully, you'd be able to solve any mathematical problem. This would greatly simplify difficult problems and mitigate errors.

Alan Turing called his invention the Turing Machine and this is how it works. A Turing machine has three components, a read/write head (can either write a 1 or a 0), a strip of tape, and a set of cards. The head can move to locations on the tape, read what the location contains and write or overwrite the value. The cards define in the following order; what to write, which direction to move in and which card contains the next instruction. These definition can be different whether a 1 or a 0 is read.

A Simple card would look something like this:

When I read:	Write:	Move left or right?	Next instructions are on card:
0	1	0	0
1	0	1	0

Note the next instructions are on card 0, this means the machine will halt, and has finished it's calculation.

This card basically tells us the following:

If I see a 0, I write a 1, move to the left and halt.

If I see a 1, I write a 0, move the the right and halt.

This almost seems to simple to produce a usable output, but once you start adding cards, the machine becomes more and more complex. You can add any amount of cards you like, resulting in an infinite amount of possibilities.

Little did Turing know, he laid the foundations for the computer. Computers incorporate a similar technique to run software.

The Decimal System Is Good, The Dozenal system better.

Numbers form an important part of our society. If you want to become anyone or buy anything you need to have a basic understanding of numbers and math. From a young age we're made familiar with a numeral system called the decimal system. Everybody knows we count from 0-9 and an extra digit is added, landing us at 10. The way we count from 0-9 is called the decimal system. Some of you may not know any different, but there's an alternative, a better one.

The dozenal system doesn't know 10 number, it's knows another two. The A and the B. This is best explained by a count from 1 to 30

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	A	B	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	1A	1B	20	21	22	23	24	25	26

So, this may all seem very unnecesary, until you start to do math with these numbers. For example you've got one apple, and you've got to devide it between three people. In the decimal system you would get a weird number .3333333333 etc. In the dozenal system the outcome would be mutch different you'd get .4. This is just one example but there are more examples. with the decimal system we can evenly devide by 1, 2, 5 and 10. The dozenal system knows two more: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12.

With serious math it wouldn't make much of a difference. But in day to day life the dozenal system makes much more sence.

Artificial Intelligence And The Essence of Learning

Computers nowadays are capable of aiding us in many tasks. They even supersede and replace us in many of our daily jobs. But the Holy Grail in computer science hasn't yet been found; Artificial Intelligence (or AI from now on).

Yes I know computers can recognize and interpret our voice, yes I know they can recognize faces. But AI goes far beyond this. The "Intelligence" in AI suggests the computer is able to think for itself. This means it can observe a previously unknown situation, learn from it and adept to it. This sounds easy enough; Just program a computer to learn for itself. To understand what a difficult task this would be we'd have to understand the essence of learning.

Trying to grasp the essence of learning we must look at a human baby. They're born without control over their muscles, they cannot understand or speak words, they're unable to understand words and sentences. There's only instinct, a basic set of knowledge telling them, among other things, to suck at the breast. After they're born, babies have a whole lot of things to learn, some things they learn by seeing and trying. other things they discover themselves, yet again other things they learn by rationalisation and logical thinking. This brings us to a fundamental question. How do babies learn to learn?

So it turns out the essence of learning brings us to a paradox; learning to learn. If we want to teach machines to learn. We should teach them to learn learning.

How do we go about doing this? I'll leave that as an exercise for later;)

Our Minds Are Easily Deceived... Or Are They?

You've probably seen or heard about optical illusions. They trick our minds into seeing something different from reality.
A few of many examples:

Some say our brains are seeing things the wrong way. I say: our brain is seeing it right. Our brains are powerful pattern recognising machines, filling in details that aren't there, and they're almost always right, except for those anomalies called optical illusions.

But think about this, when computers just became popular we thought we'd have to start by teaching them to do mundane tasks in real life... I mean they must be easy to translate into computer language... right? Well they couldn't have been more wrong. They started out trying to make a computer recognize a bird in a tree, leaving chess as an exercise for later. Untill this day, they're still working on the problem of recognizing a bird in a tree, while the simplest chess computer easily defeats a chess grandmaster. So problems of logic, are hard for us, easy for computers. But our brains are still the undisputed champions at pattern recognition.

So, next time you see an optical illusion, be happy you're not so easily replaced by a computer.

The World As We Know It, After the First World War.

Two weeks ago I went to the "I was 20 in 14" expo in liege, it's a very impressive exposition about the First World War. We were guided through all the events that expired, from the events that caused this war, to the signing of the peace treaty. One of the things I didn't know before is that one man (Gavrilo Princip) almost single handedly caused the First World War to happen. In 1914 he shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and in response Austria-Hungary declared war to the Kingdom of Serbia.

This makes me wonder, where would the world be right now, if it wouldn't be for this assassination. Lets imagine Schrödinger was right about his cat and the universe could have collapsed differently. What would the other universe look like?

Let's take a look into this alternate universe. To have a clear picture of all the good and bad that came out of the First World War, we should first understand, the First World War caused the second one, which in turn caused the Cold War and "The golden age of capitalism". So what would be different?

What would the current world population be, if it wasn't for the First World War? The First and Second World War combined counted 97 million casualties. That's about 1.3 percent of the current world population and of course these people would have had children, and their children would have had children. accounting the average birth rate over this period that would account for a total population decrease of 890 million, more than 12% of the current world population! of course many of them would have died but that still increases our population by about 10%.

Our current world is also shaped by the war's innovations. Weapons, airplanes and infrastructure are a big part of this innovation. But other things you might not think about; cosmetic surgery (on the disfigured, after the war). But also the moon landing driven by the Cold War. And I'm not even talking about the horrible experiments the Nazi scientists did on the people they perceived no less then animals. Even this horrible act brought us important medical and scientific information.

Would you like to live in this alternate universe?
Maybe there wouldn't even be internet.