Imprecise programming: How to stop worrying and love the bug May 3, 2011
Posted by olvidadorio in Programming.3 comments
A bug walks into a program…
…Nay, it rather puts on a suit, and becomes a program!
In this article I suggest a novel approach to programming that’s more like poetry and hopefully a lot less sucky… Caution, it’s a rough draft, but I’m quite keenly interested in making it intelligible, so if it isn’t please hit me. So here goes the story:
This afternoon, I was sitting on the loo, letting the usual trivialities flow through my mind; visual programming and such, the usual. One of my thoughts was: How cool would it be to have a user-interface that returns to the expressiveness of command line interfaces and the days of programming languages as operating system. That once again makes the average user an applied programmer as opposed to a mere button pusher along the lines of “select from this range of three fuckin’ fabrics”, nothing more than a consumer of pre-programmed options.
So while sitting there trying to figure out what that kind of user-interface might look like this idea for a new programming language paradigm (re-)struck. This paradigm kind of goes in the direction of natural language interfaces but might also be combined with some visual approach. But let’s try to put it together:
Poetic programming or the imprecise language
An interpreted programming language that is not precise, where the interpreter doesn’t let you or make you fully control, predict or understand the syntax or actual execution steps of your program. This language gives you the freedom to do “not all things considered” style programming in exchange for giving up control of well-defined execution behavior. Essentially it treats your code not as a drab cookbook but as a deep and mysterious poem, full of unexplored subtleities.
..But you say: This is bullshit. I don’t care if it hurts! I wanna have control. Heaven forbid if things go horribly wrong?!
Well, then we need fault-tolerance built into the language. Because, coming to think of it, we need fault-tolerance anyway. We should constantly be monitoring and testing our applications’ behavior anyway. Because things are going to go wrong anyway, anyhow, anywhere, at any time, and preferably while you’d rather be doing something else…
So a few fault-tolerance characteristics:
- Undo everywhere. All actions are journaled and undoable if ever possible.
- A limited and access-controlled set of non-undoable actions
- Possibly “let-it-crash” supervision and process capsuling mechanisms as known from Erlang, Akka etc.
- Context, context, context. The interpreter basically performs anaphora and general reference resolution on the tokens used in the programmer’s instructions. This may be an unsolved problem – in general and in natural language – but since we are creating an iterable artificial language from scratch, reference resolution might actually be tractable. I imagine a system in which various methods could be plugged in and refined bit by bit. Maybe one could even create a kind of economy/evolution, with selection criteria and feedback. But fundamentally this is a part where the language must be very malleable and customizable.
- Side effects all over the place; While functional programming languages such as Haskell try to get rid of all side effects altogether in order to get safe programs, we take the opposite approach, put side-effects into everything. Let functions’ execution affect each other, this allows for context, more information, less work. And then make sure you can undo it when things go wrong.
- Case-based programming. Have various views in which to do things, these actions are automatically journaled and can then be recalled using incomplete references.
Why I’m kinda pro-nuclear April 25, 2011
Posted by olvidadorio in Earth, Economics.add a comment
As Bill Gates succintly makes the case for, as a global society we’re running into an energy/fuel crunch at the same time as we’re heading into a global climate catastrophe. Ramifications are pretty harsh. In this environment the Fukushima reactor melted, Germany decided to take its nuklear plants off the grid and everybody else is pushing off construction of new ones. Pro-nuke flaks have been re-iterating this one chart which supposedly shows nuklear to be so un-deadly compared to other sources of energy while using the severly downplayed version of statistics on Chernobyl – no, I don’t believe only 40 people died as a result of that, inflating numbers for coal – anybody with a bad lung is eligible, and ignoring the perils of long-term storage of nuclear waste (who’s going to guarantee a stable political system 500 years from now). But exactly that concern about stability makes me support widespread nuclear research and deployment. I really don’t see any of the renewable/sun-based energy sources cutting their mustard; they just do not have the necessary energy density to power an industrial society. And to make things worse, all those new-fangled wind and solar farms can only be constructed so relatively cheaply using an industrial process that’s heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Even more general, all our transportation is reliant on fossil fuels and will become much more difficult and potentially inefficient when based on electricity (which we’d have to produce somehow, don’t ask me how).
So if we don’t build lots of nuklear power plants (preferrably of the breeder type and the like, otherwise peak Uranium bites us in the butt) we’re going to run into some serious power-shortage. And with it, shortage of eerything, very much so down to food. And if those kind of things happen, people will start wars. And if wars happen, nuklear plants will become much more of a target.
So building nuklear plants might make us safer from nuklear meltdown. Because they keep us fat and happy.
Options for the middle class May 20, 2010
Posted by olvidadorio in Earth, Economics.4 comments
Even though I study Cognitive Science, oftentimes I introduce myself as a computer scientist – as that is what I am effectively. So I told this guy, while waiting in line at a state office that I study Computer Science. And he said “Good, you know that’s where all the money is.” My reply was kind of “um, well who knows how long..”. Here’s why:
Every Google search supposedly uses as much energy as burning a light-bulb for one hour (it makes sense that Google is getting into the energy-supply business). Computing devices are really the tip of the iceberg of a vast and complex, resource-hungry non-locally maintainable industrial complex that is geared towards constant growth and development, always making this year’s second coming next year’s plastic crap.
I don’t think this’ll go on forever. No bets when things will change, but this world of ever-expanding mass-computing won’t go on they way it is today; I am unsure what its state will be at the end of the great energy-shrinkage that I expect, because there’s no good idea what this energy shrinkage will look like, specifically when it starts and how long it will take.
The Case for Atheism May 20, 2010
Posted by olvidadorio in Me.add a comment
Those who know me might find this post odd, as I usually defend myself from saying most anything definite on religion whatsoever, a la ‘How dare you call me an agnostic. I can’t tell whether I don’t know.’ Well, I don’t really break tradition in the end, but I just showcase an argument that I find compelling and at some level deeply culturally relevant.
The Good old epicurean argument slightly rephrased:
- Is God willing to prevent suffering but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
- Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent!
- Is he both able and willing? Then whence commeth suffering?
- Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
I guess a lot of religious people from our cultural setting will say that he is able and ‘kind of willing’, but that he prefers to give us our freedom so that we can show whether we love him out of our own free will. But what kind of self-serving approach is that, to put us through our misery only to see whether we’re ‘good’, whether we ‘love’ God? And if God is omnipotent, why can’t he make us be free, without suffering? All of this sounds to me more like a sadistic game than benevolence. But what if suffering is just an integral part of our existence? What if we can’t be ‘us’ if we do not suffer? What if our personality, our self essentially hinged on suffering? I personally could not agree more, the question however is how this plays out in the mainstream monotheistic religions; So the idea would basically be that for God to make us be us we would have to suffer. But this directly contradicts the idea of redemption and eternal glory. If the afterlife is – unlike in Greek mythology – more than just a pale aftershadow of this life, and instead a life of sufferingless bliss promised to the people of this world, then how in hell do we get there, being ourselves, assumed that suffering is an essential part of us? Now even out of this argument one could still weasel out by saying that it is essential to us to be part of a process, from suffering to non-suffering. Which is interesting and I currently have no retort to that. So in the end I guess it just doesn’t make sense to discuss religion. You believe it or not. For my own part, I disbelieve words. But religion isn’t just words. There’s a lot of BS.
But to make one thing perfectly clear, I despise most Atheism, with all its scientifico-centric rationalistic hogwash.
The revival of ruthless December 24, 2009
Posted by olvidadorio in Earth.1 comment so far
Go and read Mark Lynas’s account “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room” at the Guardian. (Thanks to Nic for the lead.)
To my Chinese friends, even though it may not help: please do not be offended. I’m taking your leadership as an example of a trend that has grown out of century long ruthless greed and disrespect for nature mostly on behalf of us of European heritage. It’s just in the context of this article on Copenhagen that I’m struck by the idea that the Chinese leadership’s behaviour exemplifies or foreshadows a grand comeback for worldwide ruthless leadership.
Back in the day when the Berlin Wall fell, everyone and their mother’s neighbor’s socks succumbed to the pleasant dirge of consumerist capitalism laced with cushy-feely big-media politics which was essentially one big circus of not losing image. And you lost if you did stuff that looked bad, that was brutal and ruthless.
There’s something rutheless to any war, but even the Bush administration vs. the phantom of Islamic extremism, or Palestinians vs. Israelis were all wars drenched in fear-mongering or moral outrage. You couldn’t just do it because you can. We have these strange asymmetric wars, where asymmetry doesn’t mean anihilation of the other force, instead it means that wars get drawn out forever. E.g. the war in Afghanistan. Or consider how the way Cheney/Rumsfeld pulled off the invasion of Iraq is clearly different from Germany’s Blitzkrieg to gobble up Poland. Back then they just did it because they could. In the last Iraq war we had to lie and squirm our way into it like weasly maggots.
I say, all of this is coming to an end. Good old Obamination’ll be just another spike in direction of the media-moral complex before the US and with it global society and culture moves on to the next big thing: Good old ruthlessness. Already, if you compare Clinton’s wars (mostly Yugoslavia) to Bush you can see a trend. Resources will be scarce, memory of past atrocities gone stale, weapons lying around in heaps and piles…
But this post is not about war.. So what with China and Copenhagen?
Well, the writing on the wall is that climate change will happen. And also that going on polluting won’t help. Furthermore it’s the case that great parts of China already are suffering from pollution and will suffer severely when ocean levels rise. Then let’s assume the Chinese leadership is not stupid; What could be driving them to position themselves against helping the climate?
First of all they certainly know that their current power is based on galloping economic growth. Not only that, they furthermore are aware of the fact that natural catastrophe hardly ever hurts autocratic rulers. It’s more or less immediate and obviously anthropogenic economic downturn that does. So I guess they’re just playing to their own advantage, sacrificing their own costal population (plus the rest of the world then going to be living below sea-level, which is quite a lot).
Rather bad-ass but normal for politicians you think? But this is not where the ruthlessness ends. If you view the world as a block of wood, there’s not only geopolitics, there’s also geo-engineering. The Chinese elite (and their friends in power all over the world, i.e. Russia, US) might not be above a bit of tampering with (toxic) methods of artificial darkening and other weather-manipulation. Which brings us back to the supposition I made above: “Let’s assume the Chinese leadership is not stupid.” Well, if they believe they can tamper in a massive manner with a complex system such as our climate (which is already under severe stress) without running the risk of eradicating the very basic dynamics on which our supporting ecosystem runs — and with it human society — then they are, truly, stupid.
In response.. February 10, 2009
Posted by olvidadorio in Economics.10 comments
.. to @jagalicious (and thank you for your input) :
if fed ties “printing money” to concrete assets cf. sweden 1990s. & pipes toward production, may avoid harsh too many $s chasing 2 few goods that is, avoid classic inflation.
Sweden 1990s definately looks like the type of intervention that I would prefer (basically nationalizing banks).
Piping towards production would be a very, very good idea for the afore consumption-reliant states. But how? There would have to be quite a bit of investment (credit!), but with banks being nationalized they could be forced to extend credit!
An additional problem is that consumer demand is a lagging trend, that is, we won’t be seeing the real slouch until after a few months, exactly in time to dampen producer’s spirits who already have to deal with plummeting prices and overcapacity all over the world (wave to China). [Oh glumm, glumm 
]
It is not really clear whether the US would be able to actually retrieve the value put in to save the banks, as in the case of Sweden 1990s. If the current crisis is changing the global economy fundamentally, then less value will be retreivable. The intervention will have been much larger, also proportionally, after all this goes through, including the feds humungous swap-lines, as well as structural changes all around the world, Sweden was more-or-less an isolated case. But the model is well worth considering as far as I can tell.
so werg, will human nature change enough to invent a better model than money as a medium of exchange?
No, I really don’t believe that human nature will change any time soon (hey, by definition that won’t happen — and I’m convinced that evolution via selection is rather broken among us humans at the moment). The question would be whether the form of money we employ today is truly connected to human nature!
I don’t think so. Sure, the concrete form of coins or similar tokens of value has been around for quite a long time and in many cultures. It’s just dead useful, as long as you have a mercantile society! However, those tokens used to (have to) have society-independent (material- or production-) value! This is no longer the case. Ever since those italian merchants developed modern book-keeping we’ve been messing around with our underlying monetary system, changing it all the time. Nowadays it’s not about money — it’s all about credit! And I’m quite sure that our monetary system will continue to change!
Even though I can’t foretell in which direction, I know which direction I’d find interesting: Make banking and money-issuance a peer-to-peer process along the lines of ripple.
In our current system the role of the bank is more and more superfluous. Clearing is done electronically, there is no need for physical institutions. They aren’t absorbing risk as the should, they hand out credit which in the end needs to be guaranteed for by the whole society anyway. Hence credit procedures must be standardized which leaves little room for actual contribution. The whole sector of investment-banking has kind of bloated (though initially potentially useful system of distributing value to initiative).
Banks and credit-based money have for long been the social method to make people work, even if their work is not directly connected to satisfying basic needs, by giving them buying power via money. Of course all this is totally based on people’s confidence in the currency’s value. To maintain economic confidence in pieces of paper and numbers on hard-drives, such a system necessitates continuous growth and — almost all over the world — big government debt.
Personally I believe that a market-economic system less based on perpetual growth would be better. Changes in such directions need crises, though. Hence my heightened interest. 
The roof is on fire February 7, 2009
Posted by olvidadorio in Economics.1 comment so far
Folks, this economy is going to pot. And it’s just amazing to watch it unfold. It is so striking that this is a necessary and inevetable occurrence of (finally) a dose of economic, even physical reality in the guise of market forces. These have been determined by our overspending, overblown infrastructuring overblown consumption and askew distribution of value in our world economy (i.e. US long-long standing trade deficit & export surplus in Germany, China — the US consumer has been getting a free lunch for decades!). And all these bailouts, stimulus packages and what not are doing is a) pay off those who still are clinging to power (specifically monetary power) and b) increase the pressure for downward adaption of our entire system.
It’s only After Dark January 23, 2009
Posted by olvidadorio in Economics, Humans, Me.Tags: costa rica, inauguration, laziness, nicaragua, obama
1 comment so far
After quite a hiatus (but after all, it was vacation), here are some reflections (warning: glumness may follow):
- I have become slightly more aware of the importance of organization for social prosperity. It is really of utmost importance. It’s what seemed to me to be #1 reason why Nicaragua is 3rd world.
- I have been touched by what I saw on TV, watching President Obama’s inauguration. It is impressive how such sentiment can be connected to a leader. I believe they call it hope, but they gotta pry that from my cold, dead lips. [read a blogpost]
- Living in US suburbia brings to mind the expansiveness of the US-American middle class as a mass of people. People used to such grand life-styles!
On Laziness There is not very much room for laziness in the industrial nations I know. Even the easygoing US. Easygoing here sometimes seems to translate into extra work to be extra nice. (Not that I wouldn’t try to be nice!)
I’m quite lazy — that’s what was so neat about the time I spent in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: I was in a really tight financial situation. But being lazy was a sensible choice there. It saved energy, so I needed to eat & drink less — and I really enjoyed the tropical weather and living outside. Is it sensible here too?
All those nice appliances, gadgets and amenities of industrial life! For example these Computers. All built on this baffling machinery of modern society. It blows my mind again and again, that all these ghosts are alive and moving in such admirable concert. All this system of interdependency sometimes eats on my mind! If something were to go wrong — and I suspect it will, the fear I have is that folks will hurt. (In another only slightly related news, I have been thinking of how the Israeli people are running into pain, I fear — in the long-, the geo-strategic & demographic run.)
Oh, how glum all this is, I do apologize! Very! I am still quite concerned that this or that might collapse at some point, but maybe it’ll take a bit longer than feared, and come more gradually, so we’ll hopefully have plenty of room to wriggle our way through the crisis while having a gratifying life.
But for the proponents of the “people will come up with something, people have always come up with something” thesis: I totally agree. But it’s not at all guaranteed that what they will come up with will resemble our current lifestyle, even in some of its most fundamental amenities. On the other hand, I do not suggest a doomsday scenario, well I kinda suggest it, but I do not expect it. Our lives and our expectations will change, which is just absolutely normal. The difference is simply that I often times live in expectation of social change. You know, it’s change we can believe in… dollars… yeah right.
On a more personal note I notice getting a bit older again. I accustoming myself to my mid-twenties and am nursing some chronic bodily weakness, most vividly present in my everyday life for half a decade now. My hope is very much to get myself on a track of recovery from pain by setting myself up in a more regular life-style now. Please bear with me in your thoughts, that I may.
My aunt has an ant-invasion going on in her house, and she’ll be calling the terminator. At the family I stayed with in Nicaragua this was a non-issue; they had a dirt floor. Ants simply were present.
Well, here’s my actual thesis.. November 11, 2008
Posted by olvidadorio in Machine Learning.Tags: backpropagation, evolution, neural nets, neuro-symbolic integration, thesis
2 comments
.. as was handed in on the 27th Oct.: Subsymbolic String Representations Using Simple Recurrent Neural Nets (Bsc_Pickard.pdf)
@Nic:
- Actually, I’m not flying until Monday.
- Yes, one of the outcomes is that it’s rather difficult to memorize fairly large sequences using feedforward nets and backpropagation. Did I finally prove it? No. But I produced material to support that claim, I guess. And it’s also my strong intuition that regardless of the learning-paradigm used, fairly small (i.e. non-huge) nets just run into big problems. Non generalizing. Most probably this has to do with the fact that neural activation (with non-linear activation-function) can at most encode ordinal information, not scalar data (due to the non-linear distortion). One way or another this makes it hard to encode arbitrarily long sequences, as — and this I haven’t proven — all linearily-decodeable encoding-schemes that press arbitrarily long sequences into fixed-size vectors rely heavily on scaling.
So the problem is that ffNN’s have non-linear distortion which mixes up signals, but only linear means to decode with. - So about that “evolving metadata along with evolution” approach — what do they work on concretely? Like, for what kind of a domain is that useful? I can see that as being a fairly interesting area… I think I read something on that once. One of the issues is that one tends to end up in is solving the problem already within the evolutionary parameters. But no idea. Just keep giving me reasons to move my ass to Amsti! ;}
Strategies 4 AI November 6, 2008
Posted by olvidadorio in Machine Learning, Money.1 comment so far
Had another cherished meeting with the good gang this weekend. Topics ranged from pubic hair to l33tspeak. In between I gave an overview of some of the ideas I had, that haunted my subconscious, but that I couldn’t work on while entrenched before my thesis. Luckily the fortress is bust and so we got to talk our way thru strategies for AI, in length (grab the slides/handout). Most of it’s rather impractical, since requiring command of a slightly larger workforce than the 0.5 portion I’d consider myselves, but the main take-home massages wuz:
- Numerically adaptable (sooft) computing suffers from curse of dimensionality w.r.t. number of parameters. Also, many easily-traineable models (e.g. Hidden Markov Models, Support Vector Machinas) are computationally low-grade (i.e. far from turing-equivalonce). That will not do for semantic & pragmatic generative models. Rule-based, crisp stuff is not adaptable to model our (kinda continuous-valued) world, hence kinda inadequate (at least as stand-alone).
- So we need numerically adaptable methods that really can be used to calculate high-level problems. And we need ways to adapt those parameters.
- Idea 1: Integrate whatever you’re doing into a big, adaptable AI-environment. Let lots of people work on it. Hope that that will give you lots of computational resources and eyeballs to adapt to very specific problems. Caveat: You need a system that basically works, so that people will even start using it — and then they still have to see some benefit in it. So you kinda need a working system to start with, possibly on a restricted domain.
- Idea 2: Dream up some learning-heuristics and other methods that either make your parameters-to-be-learned less, or faster learneable, while still being computationally powerful. I propose a predator-prey learning model, where a generator has outsmart a classifier (and vice versa) to get good learning even if you only have positive and no negative training samples. Also, I suggest ways to spread the parameter-butter (weights of recurrent neural nets) across more bread (memory-capacity) by placing these neural nets like robot-controllers into an artificial world, in which they have read-write access.
Some of this runs under crazy dreams some of it is more like potential Master’s thesis.
…And if you actually read this far and still are following the text, I congratulate you. While reading through I was slightly flummoxed at the rate of reader-unfriendliness some of the constructions exhibit. Maybe it’s just l33t.
