Category Archives: Uncategorized

Most surprising thing since 1999?

Posted on 16 June, 2009 by Shane

I just read this article on the scale of time by Mike Treder. Part the way through it has an interesting question: What would surprise a person from the year 2000 most about the year 2010? As I don’t know … Continue reading →

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The innovator’s dilemma

Posted on 28 February, 2009 by Shane

The way in which technological change occurs in industries has always interested me. One quite well known book on this subject is “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen. Here’s a nice post on a friend’s blog that summarises the … Continue reading →

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Tick, tock, tick, tock…

Posted on 9 February, 2009 by Shane

I recently read about IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer that will be operational in 2011.  It will perform 20 Peta FLOPS and have 1.6 Peta bytes of RAM.  To put that in perspective: if it were to attempt to simulation a human … Continue reading →

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Learning to predict the future

Posted on 7 February, 2009 by Shane

One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is the prediction of the future.  Many people really enjoy doing this and come up with all sorts of wild speculations.  It’s kind of like having the liberty to write your … Continue reading →

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An imitation test for moral capacity

Posted on 9 August, 2008 by Shane

Yudkowsky has been posting a lot on Overcoming Bias recently about his theory of metaethics.  Today he posted a summary of sorts.  Essentially he seems to be saying that morality is a big complex function computed by our brain that … Continue reading →

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LaTeX and lulu.com

Posted on 10 July, 2008 by Shane

So you’ve finished writing your thesis, your magnum opus. Next step, get it printed as a book for the world to admire. Of course, being the misunderstood genius that you are, no professional publisher will want to touch your great … Continue reading →

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Kolmogorov, Solomonoff, AIXI etc. questions

Posted on 25 June, 2008 by Shane

Many people seem to have questions about Kolmogorov complexity, Solomonoff induction, algorithmic probability theory, AIXI, the universal intelligence measure and so on.  I don’t always have time to watch all the email lists where these things get discussed, but if … Continue reading →

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SIAI Canada Academic Prize for 2008

Posted on 23 June, 2008 by Shane

This morning I received the wonderful news that I’ve won the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence – Canada Academic Prize for 2008! The award is in “recognition of [my] efforts to improve AI theory” and is worth CAD $10,000.  This … Continue reading →

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Roadrunner reaches a Petaflop

Posted on 9 June, 2008 by Shane

According to this article the Roadrunner supercomputer has now reached a Petaflop.  Although it doesn’t sound like an official benchmark result yet, given that the International Supercomputing Conference starts in a week I guess the timing of the article is … Continue reading →

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SciPy – some more thoughts

Posted on 9 May, 2008 by Shane

With over 20,000 visitors in 2 days I discovered what my poor web server’s maximum capacity is: about 70 visitors a minute.  It doesn’t sound like that much to me, but a number of times I had to ask my … Continue reading →

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