Dette er et plot summary fra Wikipedia af bogen 'we have always lived in castles', tror jeg. Der er vist en diskusion, en akademisk diskusion (i den dobbelte betydning af både virkelig at være akademisk og ligegyldig.) der handler om wikipedias unøjagtighed og måske mere generelt om nettets tendenser til at udflade, bl.a. fakta. Som sagt er diskusionen ligegyldig. Der sker hvad der sker og hvis man vil have noget at sige der til, må man skabe noget. Man skaber noget ved at være bagrstræberisk, men det har visse tendser til at afmontere sig selv igen, det man har skabt.
Nå men der er i hvert fald et punkt hvor Wikipedia nogen gange er mange gange mere suverænt end et hvilket som helst opslagsværk, det være et leksikon, eller mere specefikke bøger om forskellige emner og det er i plot opsurmeringer. Wikipedia er den perfekte blanding af saglighed og lidenskab. Der er i nogle af dem en sjælden evne til at kondensere ikke bare handlingens ydre træk, men også handlingens kondeseren af sig selv. Denne opsumering(nedenfor) er et eksempel. Den formår på ret godt tid, at skrue de forskellige elementer ind i hinanden, på en måde så den faktisk også opsurmere historiens bevægelse og ikke bare dens elementer. Det lyder fint, er sikkert ret ligegyldigt, men en vældig nydelse at læse ikke desto mindre.
Plot summary
The people in the village have always hated us.
The novel, narrated in first-person by 18-year-old Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood, tells the story of the Blackwood family. A careful reading of the opening paragraphs reveals that the majority of this novel is a flashback.
Merricat, her elder sister Constance, and their ailing uncle Julian live in isolation from the nearby village. Constance has not left their home in six years, going no farther than her large garden and seeing only a select few family friends. Uncle Julian, slightly demented and confined to a wheelchair, obsessively writes and re-writes notes for an autobiography, while Constance cares for him. Through Uncle Julian's ramblings the reader begins to understand what has happened to the remainder of the Blackwood family: six years ago, both the Blackwood parents, an aunt (Julian's wife), and a younger brother were murdered — poisoned with arsenic, mixed into the family sugar and sprinkled onto blackberries at dinner. Julian, though poisoned, survived; Merricat, having been sent to bed without dinner as a punishment for an unspecified misdeed, avoided the arsenic, and Constance, who did not put sugar on her berries, was arrested for and eventually acquitted of the crime. The people of the village believe that Constance has gotten away with murder (her first action on learning of the family's illnesses was to scrub the sugar bowl), and the family is ostracized, leading Constance to become something of an agoraphobe. Nevertheless, the three Blackwoods have grown accustomed to their isolation, and lead a quiet, happy existence. Merricat is the family's sole contact with the outside world, walking into the village twice a week and carrying home groceries and library books, often followed by groups of the village children, who taunt her with a singsong chant:
Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!
Merricat is a strange young woman, fiercely protective of her sister, prone to daydreaming and a fierce believer in sympathetic magic. As the major action unfolds, she begins to feel that a dangerous change is approaching; her response is to reassure herself of the various magical safeguards she has placed around their home, including a box of silver dollars buried near the creek and a book nailed to a tree. After discovering that the book has fallen down, Merricat becomes convinced that danger is imminent. Before she can warn Constance, a long-absent cousin, Charles, appears for a visit.
It is immediately apparent to the reader that Charles is pursuing the Blackwood fortune, which is locked in a safe in the house. Charles quickly befriends the vulnerable Constance. Merricat perceives Charles as a demon, and tries various magical means to exorcise him from their lives. Tension grows as Charles is increasingly rude to Merricat and impatient of Julian's foibles, ignoring or dismissing the old man rather than treating him with the gentle courtesy Constance has always shown. In an angry outburst between Charles and Julian, the level of the old man's dementia is revealed when he claims he has only one living niece: Mary Katherine, he believes, "died in an orphanage, of neglect" during Constance's trial.
In the course of her efforts to drive Charles away, Merricat breaks things and fills his bed with dirt and dead leaves. When Charles insists she be punished, Merricat demands, "Punish me?... You mean, send me to bed without my dinner?" She flees to an abandoned summerhouse on the property and loses herself in a fantasy in which all her deceased family members obey her every whim. She returns for dinner, but when Constance sends her upstairs to wash her hands, Merricat pushes Charles' still-lit pipe into a wastebasket filled with newspapers. The pipe sets fire to the family home, destroying much of the upper portion of the house. The villagers arrive to put out the fire, but, in a wave of long-repressed hatred for the Blackwoods, break into the remaining rooms and destroy them, chanting their children's taunting rhyme. In the course of the fire, Julian dies of what is implied to be a heart attack, and Charles shows his true colors, attempting to take the family safe (unsuccessfully, as is revealed later). Merricat and Constance flee for safety into the woods. Constance confesses for the first time that she always knew Merricat poisoned the family; Merricat readily admits to the deed, saying that she put the poison in the sugar bowl because she knew Constance would not take sugar.
Upon returning to their ruined home, Constance and Merricat proceed to salvage what is left of their belongings, close off those rooms too damaged to use, and start their lives anew in the little space left to them: hardly more than the kitchen and cellar. The house, now without a roof, resembles a castle "turreted and open to the sky". Merricat tells Constance they are now living "on the moon." The villagers, awakening at last to a sense of guilt, begin to treat the two sisters as mysterious creatures to be placated with offerings of food left on their doorstep. The story ends with Merricat observing, "Oh, Constance...we are so happy."
Showing posts with label selvorganisering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label selvorganisering. Show all posts
Monday, September 27, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Det her er det mest klare udtryk for en romantisk arv, som gennemsyrer al visionær tænkning, alle forestillinger om en anden overskridende verden. Den er åbenlys smuk og den er åbenlys naiv. På mange måder er skønheden dens pragmatiske ledetråd, det som stadig holder den i live og gør den relevant. Naiviteten er det som vi stadig har temmelig store problemer med at overskride og således undgår skønheden os.
When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.
Filosofien havde en drøm om virkelighed: Borges siger “Verden er ifølge Mallarme, skabt til at blive en bog; ifølge Bloy er vi versikler eller ord eller bogstaver i en magisk bog, og denne uophørlige bog er det eneste, som er i verden: Den er, for at sige det bedre, verden.” (s. 156, Andre inkvisitioner).
Drømmen har på mange måder aldrig udviklet sig udover en nærmest kompulsiv trang til at skrive huskesedler, for jeg fik hurtig færden af at det ikke var den drøm jeg ønskede. Jeg vil ikke have orden, jeg tror ikke på den, det er meget svært at tro på den. Men det er endnu sværere i Bloys version, hvis vi skal tage den et skridt videre. Forestillingen kunne være denne, at vi kunne blive istand til at skrive verden. Der er dette forhold mellem talen og skriften, nemlig at talen er givet i tredimensionelt men ikke tidsligt blivende og skriften er givet todimensionelt men tidsligt blivende. Drømmen er måske en kombination, hvor man så og sige skriver verden, mens man er i den, sådan at den foreligger og måske endda så den foreligger som ens eget værk. Dette er en drøm om at være skabende, samtidgt med at man skriver, at det at skrive, sætte ord på, er skabelse af farver osv.
På mange måder er computeren grobunden for at vi overhoved kan forestille os noget der kunne være en sådan forening.
When no longer numbers and figures
Are the keys to all God’s creatures,
When those who sing or kiss
Know more than the greatest wits,
When the world is given back to life
And frees itself from earthly strife,
When light and shade in unity
Create a higher clarity,
And people see world-history
In fairy tales and poetry,
Then all confusion will fly away
At a single secret word.
Filosofien havde en drøm om virkelighed: Borges siger “Verden er ifølge Mallarme, skabt til at blive en bog; ifølge Bloy er vi versikler eller ord eller bogstaver i en magisk bog, og denne uophørlige bog er det eneste, som er i verden: Den er, for at sige det bedre, verden.” (s. 156, Andre inkvisitioner).
Drømmen har på mange måder aldrig udviklet sig udover en nærmest kompulsiv trang til at skrive huskesedler, for jeg fik hurtig færden af at det ikke var den drøm jeg ønskede. Jeg vil ikke have orden, jeg tror ikke på den, det er meget svært at tro på den. Men det er endnu sværere i Bloys version, hvis vi skal tage den et skridt videre. Forestillingen kunne være denne, at vi kunne blive istand til at skrive verden. Der er dette forhold mellem talen og skriften, nemlig at talen er givet i tredimensionelt men ikke tidsligt blivende og skriften er givet todimensionelt men tidsligt blivende. Drømmen er måske en kombination, hvor man så og sige skriver verden, mens man er i den, sådan at den foreligger og måske endda så den foreligger som ens eget værk. Dette er en drøm om at være skabende, samtidgt med at man skriver, at det at skrive, sætte ord på, er skabelse af farver osv.
På mange måder er computeren grobunden for at vi overhoved kan forestille os noget der kunne være en sådan forening.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Chaitin - Chaitin! Chaitin!
The Omega Man
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
He shattered mathematics with a single number. And that was just for starters, says Marcus Chown
TWO plus two equals four: nobody would argue with that. Mathematicians can rigorously prove sums like this, and many other things besides. The language of maths allows them to provide neatly ordered ways to describe everything that happens in the world around us.
Or so they once thought. Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can't actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it's an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.
Mathematics has always been considered free of uncertainty and able to provide a pure foundation for other, messier fields of science. But maths is just as messy, Chaitin says: mathematicians are simply acting on intuition and experimenting with ideas, just like everyone else. Zoologists think there might be something new swinging from branch to branch in the unexplored forests of Madagascar, and mathematicians have hunches about which part of the mathematical landscape to explore. The subject is no more profound than that.
The reason for Chaitin's provocative statements is that he has found that the core of mathematics is riddled with holes. Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck. "Most of mathematics is true for no particular reason," Chaitin says. "Maths is true by accident."
This is particularly bad news for physicists on a quest for a complete and concise description of the Universe. Maths is the language of physics, so Chaitin's discovery implies there can never be a reliable "theory of everything", neatly summarising all the basic features of reality in one set of equations. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but even Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prizewinning physicist and author of Dreams of a Final Theory, has swallowed it. "We will never be sure that our final theory is mathematically consistent," he admits.
Chaitin's mathematical curse is not an abstract theorem or an impenetrable equation: it is simply a number. This number, which Chaitin calls Omega, is real, just as pi is real. But Omega is infinitely long and utterly incalculable. Chaitin has found that Omega infects the whole of mathematics, placing fundamental limits on what we can know. And Omega is just the beginning. There are even more disturbing numbers--Chaitin calls them Super-Omegas--that would defy calculation even if we ever managed to work Omega out. The Omega strain of incalculable numbers reveals that mathematics is not simply moth-eaten, it is mostly made of gaping holes. Anarchy, not order, is at the heart of the Universe.
Chaitin discovered Omega and its astonishing properties while wrestling with two of the most influential mathematical discoveries of the 20th century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel blew a gaping hole in mathematics: his Incompleteness Theorem showed there are some mathematical theorems that you just can't prove. Then, five years later, British mathematician Alan Turing built on Gödel's work.
Using a hypothetical computer that could mimic the operation of any machine, Turing showed that there is something that can never be computed. There are no instructions you can give a computer that will enable it to decide in advance whether a given program will ever finish its task and halt. To find out whether a program will eventually halt--after a day, a week or a trillion years--you just have to run it and wait. He called this the halting problem.
Decades later, in the 1960s, Chaitin took up where Turing left off. Fascinated by Turing's work, he began to investigate the halting problem. He considered all the possible programs that Turing's hypothetical computer could run, and then looked for the probability that a program, chosen at random from among all the possible programs, will halt. The work took him nearly 20 years, but he eventually showed that this "halting probability" turns Turing's question of whether a program halts into a real number, somewhere between 0 and 1.
Chaitin named this number Omega. And he showed that, just as there are no computable instructions for determining in advance whether a computer will halt, there are also no instructions for determining the digits of Omega. Omega is uncomputable.
Some numbers, like pi, can be generated by a relatively short program which calculates its infinite number of digits one by one--how far you go is just a matter of time and resources. Another example of a computable number might be one that comprises 200 repeats of the sequence 0101. The number is long, but a program for generating it only need say: "repeat '01' 400 times".
There is no such program for Omega: in binary, it consists of an unending, random string of 0s and 1s. "My Omega number has no pattern or structure to it whatsoever," says Chaitin. "It's a string of 0s and 1s in which each digit is as unrelated to its predecessor as one coin toss is from the next."
The same process that led Turing to conclude that the halting problem is undecidable also led Chaitin to the discovery of an unknowable number. "It's the outstanding example of something which is unknowable in mathematics," Chaitin says.
An unknowable number wouldn't be a problem if it never reared its head. But once Chaitin had discovered Omega, he began to wonder whether it might have implications in the real world. So he decided to search mathematics for places where Omega might crop up. So far, he has only looked properly in one place: number theory.
Number theory is the foundation of pure mathematics. It describes how to deal with concepts such as counting, adding, and multiplying. Chaitin's search for Omega in number theory started with "Diophantine equations"--which involve only the simple concepts of addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising one number to the power of another) of whole numbers.
Chaitin formulated a Diophantine equation that was 200 pages long and had 17,000 variables. Given an equation like this, mathematicians would normally search for its solutions. There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn't look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.
He did this because he knew it was the key to unearthing Omega. Mathematicians James Jones of the University of Calgary and Yuri Matijasevic of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg had shown how to translate the operation of Turing's computer into a Diophantine equation. They found that there is a relationship between the solutions to the equation and the halting problem for the machine's program. Specifically, if a particular program doesn't ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution. In effect, the equations provide a bridge linking Turing's halting problem--and thus Chaitin's halting probability--with simple mathematical operations, such as the addition and multiplication of whole numbers.
Chaitin had arranged his equation so that there was one particular variable, a parameter which he called N, that provided the key to finding Omega. When he substituted numbers for N, analysis of the equation would provide the digits of Omega in binary. When he put 1 in place of N, he would ask whether there was a finite or infinite number of whole number solutions to the resulting equation. The answer gives the first digit of Omega: a finite number of solutions would make this digit 0, an infinite number of solutions would make it 1. Substituting 2 for N and asking the same question about the equation's solutions would give the second digit of Omega. Chaitin could, in theory, continue forever. "My equation is constructed so that asking whether it has finitely or infinitely many solutions as you vary the parameter is the same as determining the bits of Omega," he says.
But Chaitin already knew that each digit of Omega is random and independent. This could only mean one thing. Because finding out whether a Diophantine equation has a finite or infinite number of solutions generates these digits, each answer to the equation must therefore be unknowable and independent of every other answer. In other words, the randomness of the digits of Omega imposes limits on what can be known from number theory--the most elementary of mathematical fields. "If randomness is even in something as basic as number theory, where else is it?" asks Chaitin. He thinks he knows the answer. "My hunch is it's everywhere," he says. "Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics."
The fact that randomness is everywhere has deep consequences, says John Casti, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Vienna University of Technology. It means that a few bits of maths may follow from each other, but for most mathematical situations those connections won't exist. And if you can't make connections, you can't solve or prove things. All a mathematician can do is aim to find the little bits of maths that do tie together. "Chaitin's work shows that solvable problems are like a small island in a vast sea of undecidable propositions," Casti says.
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
Take the problem of perfect odd numbers. A perfect number has divisors whose sum makes the number. For example, 6 is perfect because its divisors are 1, 2 and 3, and their sum is 6. There are plenty of even perfect numbers, but no one has ever found an odd number that is perfect. And yet, no one has been able to prove that an odd number can't be perfect. Unproved hypotheses like this and the Riemann hypothesis, which has become the unsure foundation of many other theorems (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 32) are examples of things that should be accepted as unprovable but nonetheless true, Chaitin suggests. In other words, there are some things that scientists will always have to take on trust.
Unsurprisingly, mathematicians had a difficult time coming to terms with Omega. But there is worse to come. "We can go beyond Omega," Chaitin says. In his new book, Exploring Randomness (New Scientist, 10 January, p 46), Chaitin has now unleashed the "Super-Omegas".
Like Omega, the Super-Omegas also owe their genesis to Turing. He imagined a God-like computer, much more powerful than any real computer, which could know the unknowable: whether a real computer would halt when running a particular program, or carry on forever. He called this fantastical machine an "oracle". And as soon as Chaitin discovered Omega--the probability that a random computer program would eventually halt--he realised he could also imagine an oracle that would know Omega. This machine would have its own unknowable halting probability, Omega'.
But if one oracle knows Omega, it's easy to imagine a second-order oracle that knows Omega'. This machine, in turn, has its own halting probability, Omega'', which is known only by a third-order oracle, and so on. According to Chaitin, there exists an infinite sequence of increasingly random Omegas. "There is even an all-seeing infinitely high-order oracle which knows all other Omegas," he says.
He kept these numbers to himself for decades, thinking they were too bizarre to be relevant to the real world. Just as Turing looked upon his God-like computer as a flight of fancy, Chaitin thought these Super-Omegas were fantasy numbers emerging from fantasy machines. But Veronica Becher of the University of Buenos Aires has shown that Chaitin was wrong: the Super-Omegas are both real and important. Chaitin is genuinely surprised by this discovery. "Incredibly, they actually have a real meaning for real computers," he says.
Becher has been collaborating with Chaitin for just over a year, and is helping to drag Super-Omegas into the real world. As a computer scientist, she wondered whether there were links between Omega, the higher-order Omegas and real computers.
Real computers don't just perform finite computations, doing one or a few things, and then halt. They can also carry out infinite computations, producing an infinite series of results. "Many computer applications are designed to produce an infinite amount of output," Becher says. Examples include Web browsers such as Netscape and operating systems such as Windows 2000.
This example gave Becher her first avenue to explore: the probability that, over the course of an infinite computation, a machine would produce only a finite amount of output. To do this, Becher and her student Sergio Daicz used a technique developed by Chaitin. They took a real computer and turned it into an approximation of an oracle. The "fake oracle" decides that a program halts if--and only if--it halts within time T. A real computer can handle this weakened version of the halting problem. "Then you let T go to infinity," Chaitin says. This allows the shortcomings of the fake to diminish as it runs for longer and longer.
Using variations on this technique, Becher and Daicz found that the probability that an infinite computation produces only a finite amount of output is the same as Omega', the halting probability of the oracle. Going further, they showed that Omega'' is equivalent to the probability that, during an infinite computation, a computer will fail to produce an output--for example, get no result from a computation and move on to the next one--and that it will do this only a finite number of times.
These might seem like odd things to bother with, but Chaitin believes this is an important step. "Becher's work makes the whole hierarchy of Omega numbers seem much more believable," he says. Things that Turing--and Chaitin--imagined were pure fantasy are actually very real.
Now that the Super-Omegas are being unearthed in the real world, Chaitin is sure they will crop up all over mathematics, just like Omega. The Super-Omegas are even more random than Omega: if mathematicians were to get over Omega's obstacles, they would face an ever-elevated barrier as they confronted Becher's results.
And that has knock-on effects elsewhere. Becher and Chaitin admit that the full implications of their new discoveries have yet to become clear, but mathematics is central to many aspects of science. Certainly any theory of everything, as it attempts to tie together all the facts about the Universe, would need to jump an infinite number of hurdles to prove its worth.
The discovery of Omega has exposed gaping holes in mathematics, making research in the field look like playing a lottery, and it has demolished hopes of a theory of everything. Who knows what the Super-Omegas are capable of? "This," Chaitin warns, "is just the beginning."
Further reading:
* Exploring Randomness by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (2001)
* "A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics" by G. J. Chaitin, Complexity, vol 5, p 12 (2000)
* The Unknowable by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (1999)
* "Randomness everywhere" by C. S. Calude and G. J. Chaitin, Nature, vol 400, p 319 (1999)
* http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
He shattered mathematics with a single number. And that was just for starters, says Marcus Chown
TWO plus two equals four: nobody would argue with that. Mathematicians can rigorously prove sums like this, and many other things besides. The language of maths allows them to provide neatly ordered ways to describe everything that happens in the world around us.
Or so they once thought. Gregory Chaitin, a mathematics researcher at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, has shown that mathematicians can't actually prove very much at all. Doing maths, he says, is just a process of discovery like every other branch of science: it's an experimental field where mathematicians stumble upon facts in the same way that zoologists might come across a new species of primate.
Mathematics has always been considered free of uncertainty and able to provide a pure foundation for other, messier fields of science. But maths is just as messy, Chaitin says: mathematicians are simply acting on intuition and experimenting with ideas, just like everyone else. Zoologists think there might be something new swinging from branch to branch in the unexplored forests of Madagascar, and mathematicians have hunches about which part of the mathematical landscape to explore. The subject is no more profound than that.
The reason for Chaitin's provocative statements is that he has found that the core of mathematics is riddled with holes. Chaitin has shown that there are an infinite number of mathematical facts but, for the most part, they are unrelated to each other and impossible to tie together with unifying theorems. If mathematicians find any connections between these facts, they do so by luck. "Most of mathematics is true for no particular reason," Chaitin says. "Maths is true by accident."
This is particularly bad news for physicists on a quest for a complete and concise description of the Universe. Maths is the language of physics, so Chaitin's discovery implies there can never be a reliable "theory of everything", neatly summarising all the basic features of reality in one set of equations. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but even Steven Weinberg, a Nobel prizewinning physicist and author of Dreams of a Final Theory, has swallowed it. "We will never be sure that our final theory is mathematically consistent," he admits.
Chaitin's mathematical curse is not an abstract theorem or an impenetrable equation: it is simply a number. This number, which Chaitin calls Omega, is real, just as pi is real. But Omega is infinitely long and utterly incalculable. Chaitin has found that Omega infects the whole of mathematics, placing fundamental limits on what we can know. And Omega is just the beginning. There are even more disturbing numbers--Chaitin calls them Super-Omegas--that would defy calculation even if we ever managed to work Omega out. The Omega strain of incalculable numbers reveals that mathematics is not simply moth-eaten, it is mostly made of gaping holes. Anarchy, not order, is at the heart of the Universe.
Chaitin discovered Omega and its astonishing properties while wrestling with two of the most influential mathematical discoveries of the 20th century. In 1931, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel blew a gaping hole in mathematics: his Incompleteness Theorem showed there are some mathematical theorems that you just can't prove. Then, five years later, British mathematician Alan Turing built on Gödel's work.
Using a hypothetical computer that could mimic the operation of any machine, Turing showed that there is something that can never be computed. There are no instructions you can give a computer that will enable it to decide in advance whether a given program will ever finish its task and halt. To find out whether a program will eventually halt--after a day, a week or a trillion years--you just have to run it and wait. He called this the halting problem.
Decades later, in the 1960s, Chaitin took up where Turing left off. Fascinated by Turing's work, he began to investigate the halting problem. He considered all the possible programs that Turing's hypothetical computer could run, and then looked for the probability that a program, chosen at random from among all the possible programs, will halt. The work took him nearly 20 years, but he eventually showed that this "halting probability" turns Turing's question of whether a program halts into a real number, somewhere between 0 and 1.
Chaitin named this number Omega. And he showed that, just as there are no computable instructions for determining in advance whether a computer will halt, there are also no instructions for determining the digits of Omega. Omega is uncomputable.
Some numbers, like pi, can be generated by a relatively short program which calculates its infinite number of digits one by one--how far you go is just a matter of time and resources. Another example of a computable number might be one that comprises 200 repeats of the sequence 0101. The number is long, but a program for generating it only need say: "repeat '01' 400 times".
There is no such program for Omega: in binary, it consists of an unending, random string of 0s and 1s. "My Omega number has no pattern or structure to it whatsoever," says Chaitin. "It's a string of 0s and 1s in which each digit is as unrelated to its predecessor as one coin toss is from the next."
The same process that led Turing to conclude that the halting problem is undecidable also led Chaitin to the discovery of an unknowable number. "It's the outstanding example of something which is unknowable in mathematics," Chaitin says.
An unknowable number wouldn't be a problem if it never reared its head. But once Chaitin had discovered Omega, he began to wonder whether it might have implications in the real world. So he decided to search mathematics for places where Omega might crop up. So far, he has only looked properly in one place: number theory.
Number theory is the foundation of pure mathematics. It describes how to deal with concepts such as counting, adding, and multiplying. Chaitin's search for Omega in number theory started with "Diophantine equations"--which involve only the simple concepts of addition, multiplication and exponentiation (raising one number to the power of another) of whole numbers.
Chaitin formulated a Diophantine equation that was 200 pages long and had 17,000 variables. Given an equation like this, mathematicians would normally search for its solutions. There could be any number of answers: perhaps 10, 20, or even an infinite number of them. But Chaitin didn't look for specific solutions, he simply looked to see whether there was a finite or an infinite number of them.
He did this because he knew it was the key to unearthing Omega. Mathematicians James Jones of the University of Calgary and Yuri Matijasevic of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in St Petersburg had shown how to translate the operation of Turing's computer into a Diophantine equation. They found that there is a relationship between the solutions to the equation and the halting problem for the machine's program. Specifically, if a particular program doesn't ever halt, a particular Diophantine equation will have no solution. In effect, the equations provide a bridge linking Turing's halting problem--and thus Chaitin's halting probability--with simple mathematical operations, such as the addition and multiplication of whole numbers.
Chaitin had arranged his equation so that there was one particular variable, a parameter which he called N, that provided the key to finding Omega. When he substituted numbers for N, analysis of the equation would provide the digits of Omega in binary. When he put 1 in place of N, he would ask whether there was a finite or infinite number of whole number solutions to the resulting equation. The answer gives the first digit of Omega: a finite number of solutions would make this digit 0, an infinite number of solutions would make it 1. Substituting 2 for N and asking the same question about the equation's solutions would give the second digit of Omega. Chaitin could, in theory, continue forever. "My equation is constructed so that asking whether it has finitely or infinitely many solutions as you vary the parameter is the same as determining the bits of Omega," he says.
But Chaitin already knew that each digit of Omega is random and independent. This could only mean one thing. Because finding out whether a Diophantine equation has a finite or infinite number of solutions generates these digits, each answer to the equation must therefore be unknowable and independent of every other answer. In other words, the randomness of the digits of Omega imposes limits on what can be known from number theory--the most elementary of mathematical fields. "If randomness is even in something as basic as number theory, where else is it?" asks Chaitin. He thinks he knows the answer. "My hunch is it's everywhere," he says. "Randomness is the true foundation of mathematics."
The fact that randomness is everywhere has deep consequences, says John Casti, a mathematician at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Vienna University of Technology. It means that a few bits of maths may follow from each other, but for most mathematical situations those connections won't exist. And if you can't make connections, you can't solve or prove things. All a mathematician can do is aim to find the little bits of maths that do tie together. "Chaitin's work shows that solvable problems are like a small island in a vast sea of undecidable propositions," Casti says.
Photo: Kevin Knight
Photo: Kevin Knight
Take the problem of perfect odd numbers. A perfect number has divisors whose sum makes the number. For example, 6 is perfect because its divisors are 1, 2 and 3, and their sum is 6. There are plenty of even perfect numbers, but no one has ever found an odd number that is perfect. And yet, no one has been able to prove that an odd number can't be perfect. Unproved hypotheses like this and the Riemann hypothesis, which has become the unsure foundation of many other theorems (New Scientist, 11 November 2000, p 32) are examples of things that should be accepted as unprovable but nonetheless true, Chaitin suggests. In other words, there are some things that scientists will always have to take on trust.
Unsurprisingly, mathematicians had a difficult time coming to terms with Omega. But there is worse to come. "We can go beyond Omega," Chaitin says. In his new book, Exploring Randomness (New Scientist, 10 January, p 46), Chaitin has now unleashed the "Super-Omegas".
Like Omega, the Super-Omegas also owe their genesis to Turing. He imagined a God-like computer, much more powerful than any real computer, which could know the unknowable: whether a real computer would halt when running a particular program, or carry on forever. He called this fantastical machine an "oracle". And as soon as Chaitin discovered Omega--the probability that a random computer program would eventually halt--he realised he could also imagine an oracle that would know Omega. This machine would have its own unknowable halting probability, Omega'.
But if one oracle knows Omega, it's easy to imagine a second-order oracle that knows Omega'. This machine, in turn, has its own halting probability, Omega'', which is known only by a third-order oracle, and so on. According to Chaitin, there exists an infinite sequence of increasingly random Omegas. "There is even an all-seeing infinitely high-order oracle which knows all other Omegas," he says.
He kept these numbers to himself for decades, thinking they were too bizarre to be relevant to the real world. Just as Turing looked upon his God-like computer as a flight of fancy, Chaitin thought these Super-Omegas were fantasy numbers emerging from fantasy machines. But Veronica Becher of the University of Buenos Aires has shown that Chaitin was wrong: the Super-Omegas are both real and important. Chaitin is genuinely surprised by this discovery. "Incredibly, they actually have a real meaning for real computers," he says.
Becher has been collaborating with Chaitin for just over a year, and is helping to drag Super-Omegas into the real world. As a computer scientist, she wondered whether there were links between Omega, the higher-order Omegas and real computers.
Real computers don't just perform finite computations, doing one or a few things, and then halt. They can also carry out infinite computations, producing an infinite series of results. "Many computer applications are designed to produce an infinite amount of output," Becher says. Examples include Web browsers such as Netscape and operating systems such as Windows 2000.
This example gave Becher her first avenue to explore: the probability that, over the course of an infinite computation, a machine would produce only a finite amount of output. To do this, Becher and her student Sergio Daicz used a technique developed by Chaitin. They took a real computer and turned it into an approximation of an oracle. The "fake oracle" decides that a program halts if--and only if--it halts within time T. A real computer can handle this weakened version of the halting problem. "Then you let T go to infinity," Chaitin says. This allows the shortcomings of the fake to diminish as it runs for longer and longer.
Using variations on this technique, Becher and Daicz found that the probability that an infinite computation produces only a finite amount of output is the same as Omega', the halting probability of the oracle. Going further, they showed that Omega'' is equivalent to the probability that, during an infinite computation, a computer will fail to produce an output--for example, get no result from a computation and move on to the next one--and that it will do this only a finite number of times.
These might seem like odd things to bother with, but Chaitin believes this is an important step. "Becher's work makes the whole hierarchy of Omega numbers seem much more believable," he says. Things that Turing--and Chaitin--imagined were pure fantasy are actually very real.
Now that the Super-Omegas are being unearthed in the real world, Chaitin is sure they will crop up all over mathematics, just like Omega. The Super-Omegas are even more random than Omega: if mathematicians were to get over Omega's obstacles, they would face an ever-elevated barrier as they confronted Becher's results.
And that has knock-on effects elsewhere. Becher and Chaitin admit that the full implications of their new discoveries have yet to become clear, but mathematics is central to many aspects of science. Certainly any theory of everything, as it attempts to tie together all the facts about the Universe, would need to jump an infinite number of hurdles to prove its worth.
The discovery of Omega has exposed gaping holes in mathematics, making research in the field look like playing a lottery, and it has demolished hopes of a theory of everything. Who knows what the Super-Omegas are capable of? "This," Chaitin warns, "is just the beginning."
Further reading:
* Exploring Randomness by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (2001)
* "A Century of Controversy Over the Foundations of Mathematics" by G. J. Chaitin, Complexity, vol 5, p 12 (2000)
* The Unknowable by G. J. Chaitin, Springer-Verlag (1999)
* "Randomness everywhere" by C. S. Calude and G. J. Chaitin, Nature, vol 400, p 319 (1999)
* http://www.cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin/
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Citater om Cybersyn
It says a lot for the good intentions of the Government that the work I shall describe been going on in the midst of such obvious turmoil. It wanted scientific tools to help the country’ problems, and it knew that their provision would take time-perhaps long. So it may be proved. The government has so far had to work with the tools governments have used without success. It also wanted to work out the between science and the people, and that too ought to interest us all. We have moved an epoch in which the misuse of science has created a society that is already close to technocracy. The very language - the dehumanised jargon-in which powerful talk about the wars they wage, or powerful companies talk about the people they frankly makes me vomit.
I am a scientist, but to be a technocrat would put me out of business as a man. Yet I was eighteen rnonths ago, intent on creating a scientific way of governing. And here today, proud of the tools we have made. Why? Because I believe that cybernetics can do the job better than bureaucracy - and more humanely too. We must learn how to expunge technocracy, without rejecting science - because the proper use of science is really the world’ brightest hope for stable government. Some people in Chile share that view; and they reject technocracy as strongly as do I. All of us have already been misrepresented in that respect, just as the scientific work we have done has already been misrepresented as analogous to other management control systems that have failed. Both comments miss out the cybernetics, to discuss which we are here - and a subject, which for government in general,is not at all understood.(ved faktisk ikke hvem der har skrevet det, men artiklen hedder Fanfare for freedom er måske minder om Beer.)
Artiklen Fanfare for Freedom ligger som pdf et eller andet sted. Artiklen er ganske oplysende vedr. Cybersyn og kommer ret godt ned også i det tekniske. Derudover er den interesant fordi den er fra 1973 og altså dermed fra tiden omkring Cybersyn.
Her handler det selvfølgelig om et problem som er gået helt i bogen. Forholdet mellem samfund og teknologi og især spørgsmålet omkring hvorledes vi kan implementere tekniske udviklinger i vores samfundsstyring. Det er noget der kommer, som allerede er her og som der på mange måder er rigtig store muligheder for at udvikle.
The viable system model that first appeared in Brain of the Firm (1972) still
stands as one of the guiding concepts behind Beer’s work.45 It is defined as
‘ a system that survives. It coheres ; it is integral _ but it has none the less
mechanisms and opportunities to grow and learn, to evolve and to adapt. ’46
The value of the system ‘variables’ (inputs) determined the system’s resultant
‘ state’; Beer referred to the number of possible states as the system’s ‘ var-
iety ’, a direct reference to Ross Ashby’s important ‘Law of Requisite
Variety’.47 A system able to maintain all critical variables within the limits
of systemic equilibrium achieved ‘homeostasis ’, a quality desired by all
viable systems. From these principles, Beer constructed a five-tier model
for viable systems, which he based on the human neurosystem. In spite of
the model’s biological origins, Beer maintained that the abstract structure
could be applied in numerous contexts, including the firm, the economic
enterprise, the body and the state. (citatet er fra Designing Freedom, regulating a nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allendes Chile - af Eden Medina, den ligger online på hendes hjemmeside, som ligger på linket i forrige post)
Det er den første overraskelse, at systemet fra udgangspunktet bygges op udfra en model der tager udgangspunkt i biologien. Hele Medinas arbejde omkring Chile og Kybernetik er ganske spændende, fordi det handler om hvor mange steder forskningen faktisk fandt sted. Kybernetikken var måske ikke skjult, men Beers første bog om Viable systems theory hedder Brain of the Firm og er en måske ikke kun en management bog, så i hvert fald også det. Den overraskelse jeg har over biologien og dermed analogiens hovedrolle i de første begyndelser af Cybersyn forsvinder derfor, for der var vægt bagved. Beer har arbejdet med tingende før, han har implementeret sine tanker og faktisk udviklet dem imens han arbejdede med organisationelle problemer og forsøgte at løse dem. Udgangspunktet var altså en analogi. Det kunne vi lærer meget af i Dks undervisnings system og i organisations tanker idag. Analogier er noget vi udvikler i samklang med de problemer vi forsøger at løse og ikke den anden vej rundt. Se Paperts bog Mindstorm for en udvikling af denne tanke i matematik undervisningen.
Det er ufattelig centralt perspektiv for denne blog, virkeligheden og teorien er ikke adskilte, hvis de generelt og i udgangspunktet er det, sker der for det meste dårlige ting, eller ikke en skid. Måske er det netop derfor at Kybernetikken er så interesant, fordi dens felt, interdiciplinære felt voksede frem i og med et arbejde med konkrete problemer (i første omgang hvordan man får en raket til at ramme sit mål præcist - problemet blev løst via feedback processer der kunne beregne rakettens bane og forhold til mål udfra ufuldstændige data-set) og hele tiden forblev forbundet hertil. Man opfandt og tænkte med objekter.
Som sådan skal Cybersyns rolle på denne blog ses, som et eksempel på et objekt, et objekt at tænke med. Og som en litterær histoie om at tænke med objekter.
Det er en senere pointe i Medinas artikle, at ‘information without action
is waste.' - som Beer og Flores gør sig. Nu er information altid handling i en eller anden grad og det er en vital del af arbejdet her på bloggen, at udvikle et begreb, som alligevel gør det klart hvad det er de hentyder til. Citatet henviser direkte til den specefikke opgave med at finde et kommunikations system som kan binde alle ledne sammen i Cybersyn projektet. De ender med et telex system, men som det står i artiklen, fungere dette system meget lig internettet i den forstand, at det skal fungere som et "high-speed web of information exchange." Det giver generelt problemer for systemer hvis der bliver produceret en masse information som ikke bliver brugt, som ikke fungere. Distinktioner for funktioner er altså vigtige.
Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose. Beer coined the term POSIWID and used it many times in public addresses. Perhaps most forcefully in his address to the University of Valladolid, Spain in October 2001, he said "According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."[7] -- fra Wikipedia (selvfølgelig). Her har vi selvfølgelig en sammenhæng med Wittgenstein. Det er ikke nogen tilfældighed, Von Forster har den mange steder. Men dette er ikke det positive program, dette er en påstand man kan bruge til analyse. Man kan bruge den til at påpege ignorance og forudtagethed.
Begge artikler er virkelig oplysende og ganske smukke.
I am a scientist, but to be a technocrat would put me out of business as a man. Yet I was eighteen rnonths ago, intent on creating a scientific way of governing. And here today, proud of the tools we have made. Why? Because I believe that cybernetics can do the job better than bureaucracy - and more humanely too. We must learn how to expunge technocracy, without rejecting science - because the proper use of science is really the world’ brightest hope for stable government. Some people in Chile share that view; and they reject technocracy as strongly as do I. All of us have already been misrepresented in that respect, just as the scientific work we have done has already been misrepresented as analogous to other management control systems that have failed. Both comments miss out the cybernetics, to discuss which we are here - and a subject, which for government in general,is not at all understood.(ved faktisk ikke hvem der har skrevet det, men artiklen hedder Fanfare for freedom er måske minder om Beer.)
Artiklen Fanfare for Freedom ligger som pdf et eller andet sted. Artiklen er ganske oplysende vedr. Cybersyn og kommer ret godt ned også i det tekniske. Derudover er den interesant fordi den er fra 1973 og altså dermed fra tiden omkring Cybersyn.
Her handler det selvfølgelig om et problem som er gået helt i bogen. Forholdet mellem samfund og teknologi og især spørgsmålet omkring hvorledes vi kan implementere tekniske udviklinger i vores samfundsstyring. Det er noget der kommer, som allerede er her og som der på mange måder er rigtig store muligheder for at udvikle.
The viable system model that first appeared in Brain of the Firm (1972) still
stands as one of the guiding concepts behind Beer’s work.45 It is defined as
‘ a system that survives. It coheres ; it is integral _ but it has none the less
mechanisms and opportunities to grow and learn, to evolve and to adapt. ’46
The value of the system ‘variables’ (inputs) determined the system’s resultant
‘ state’; Beer referred to the number of possible states as the system’s ‘ var-
iety ’, a direct reference to Ross Ashby’s important ‘Law of Requisite
Variety’.47 A system able to maintain all critical variables within the limits
of systemic equilibrium achieved ‘homeostasis ’, a quality desired by all
viable systems. From these principles, Beer constructed a five-tier model
for viable systems, which he based on the human neurosystem. In spite of
the model’s biological origins, Beer maintained that the abstract structure
could be applied in numerous contexts, including the firm, the economic
enterprise, the body and the state. (citatet er fra Designing Freedom, regulating a nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allendes Chile - af Eden Medina, den ligger online på hendes hjemmeside, som ligger på linket i forrige post)
Det er den første overraskelse, at systemet fra udgangspunktet bygges op udfra en model der tager udgangspunkt i biologien. Hele Medinas arbejde omkring Chile og Kybernetik er ganske spændende, fordi det handler om hvor mange steder forskningen faktisk fandt sted. Kybernetikken var måske ikke skjult, men Beers første bog om Viable systems theory hedder Brain of the Firm og er en måske ikke kun en management bog, så i hvert fald også det. Den overraskelse jeg har over biologien og dermed analogiens hovedrolle i de første begyndelser af Cybersyn forsvinder derfor, for der var vægt bagved. Beer har arbejdet med tingende før, han har implementeret sine tanker og faktisk udviklet dem imens han arbejdede med organisationelle problemer og forsøgte at løse dem. Udgangspunktet var altså en analogi. Det kunne vi lærer meget af i Dks undervisnings system og i organisations tanker idag. Analogier er noget vi udvikler i samklang med de problemer vi forsøger at løse og ikke den anden vej rundt. Se Paperts bog Mindstorm for en udvikling af denne tanke i matematik undervisningen.
Det er ufattelig centralt perspektiv for denne blog, virkeligheden og teorien er ikke adskilte, hvis de generelt og i udgangspunktet er det, sker der for det meste dårlige ting, eller ikke en skid. Måske er det netop derfor at Kybernetikken er så interesant, fordi dens felt, interdiciplinære felt voksede frem i og med et arbejde med konkrete problemer (i første omgang hvordan man får en raket til at ramme sit mål præcist - problemet blev løst via feedback processer der kunne beregne rakettens bane og forhold til mål udfra ufuldstændige data-set) og hele tiden forblev forbundet hertil. Man opfandt og tænkte med objekter.
Som sådan skal Cybersyns rolle på denne blog ses, som et eksempel på et objekt, et objekt at tænke med. Og som en litterær histoie om at tænke med objekter.
Det er en senere pointe i Medinas artikle, at ‘information without action
is waste.' - som Beer og Flores gør sig. Nu er information altid handling i en eller anden grad og det er en vital del af arbejdet her på bloggen, at udvikle et begreb, som alligevel gør det klart hvad det er de hentyder til. Citatet henviser direkte til den specefikke opgave med at finde et kommunikations system som kan binde alle ledne sammen i Cybersyn projektet. De ender med et telex system, men som det står i artiklen, fungere dette system meget lig internettet i den forstand, at det skal fungere som et "high-speed web of information exchange." Det giver generelt problemer for systemer hvis der bliver produceret en masse information som ikke bliver brugt, som ikke fungere. Distinktioner for funktioner er altså vigtige.
Stafford Beer coined and frequently used the term POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does) to refer to the commonly observed phenomenon that the de facto purpose of a system is often at odds with its official purpose. Beer coined the term POSIWID and used it many times in public addresses. Perhaps most forcefully in his address to the University of Valladolid, Spain in October 2001, he said "According to the cybernetician the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment or sheer ignorance of circumstances."[7] -- fra Wikipedia (selvfølgelig). Her har vi selvfølgelig en sammenhæng med Wittgenstein. Det er ikke nogen tilfældighed, Von Forster har den mange steder. Men dette er ikke det positive program, dette er en påstand man kan bruge til analyse. Man kan bruge den til at påpege ignorance og forudtagethed.
Begge artikler er virkelig oplysende og ganske smukke.
Cyber-syn
Stafford Beer er muligvis tænkeren... Cybersyn var et Kybernetisk styret økonomisk system, eller i hvert fald et forsøg på det, som fungerede i Chile under Allende i ca 2 år.
her er nogle links.
http://vimeo.com/8000921
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/lessons.htm
http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/publications/publications.html -- en ganske fabelagtig side, hun har,hvis hun er en kvinde, skrevet ret interesante artikler må man sige. Kan være der skulle komme en gennemgang af nogen af dem senere.
her er nogle links.
http://vimeo.com/8000921
http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/lessons.htm
http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html
http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/edenm/publications/publications.html -- en ganske fabelagtig side, hun har,hvis hun er en kvinde, skrevet ret interesante artikler må man sige. Kan være der skulle komme en gennemgang af nogen af dem senere.
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