Desunt Cetera

I used to be convinced that mathematical objects are in some sense real. That numbers have an existence independent of humans knowledge of them. Recently, in a Wittgensteinian turn, I’ve come to the realization that the question “are numbers real” is a bad one.

The heart of the problem is that the question is ambiguous. Math is a set of models that attempt to describe phenomena we observe in reality. Those models are obviously invented. We didn’t discover them carved into a rock somewhere. The phenomena in the world they are describing are obviously discovered. So the answer to the (badly phrased) question is both. “Numbers” are a feature of a model humans invented to describe a physical phenomena. The physical phenomena that numbers model is something humans discovered in the world. The only way we have access to those things is through the intermediary that is our models. But this introduces a new problem.
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The genetic algorithm is one method of solving problems in computer science. Although it comes in many flavors, for the purposes of this article I’ll focus on a simple example.

Imagine you have a multiple choice test with 20 questions. Each question can be answered by choosing one of four choices. A compete answer to the test consists of a string of 20 characters, each of which is chosen from the set {A, B, C, D}. The solution to the test is an answer string where every answer is correct.

A valid, but not necessarily correct, answer string would look like this:

ABDCBDABDBCABDCCBABD

How many possible answer strings are there? Well, each position in the string can take on 4 different values, and there are 20 of them, so there are 4^20 = 1,099,511,627,776 possible ways to answer the test. That’s “just” over 1 trillion (over by 99 billion, that is). To give you a sense of perspective, that’s about as many seconds as there are in 35,000 years. Yeah, that’s a lot.

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My wife turned up this post, in which a blogger goes on a bit of a rant in regards to attractiveness and weight. I’d like to throw my two cents into the pot and comment on two specific things she touches on briefly.

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Note: I originally wrote this article almost a month ago, before the incident involving the teenagers and the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo. After that incident, I decided to hold off posting this until the matter calmed down a bit. Now that reddit isn’t being spammed with constant updates on the incident, I feel its safe to throw my two cents into the conversation, though I will not address this particular incidentspecifically.

As explained in this article (Warning: graphic picture), a man was mauled to death by two tigers when he climbed over a protective barrier, and stuck his arm through the bars of the cage to take a close up picture with his cell phone. To paraphrase a comment from bash.org, they should put something in the cage to deter people from getting near it. Perhaps a fierce animal that would attack anyone that got too close?

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I’ve been thinking about a post like this for a while, but what finally pushed me over the edge is this: There Is A Reddit Bot War Going On Right Now. Here’s Proof. The link goes to a reddit comment about a bot war over Ron Paul happening on reddit. Apparently, some people have set up bots to up-vote anything with Ron Paul in the title. Others have retaliated by setting up bots that down vote on the same criteria. I’m sorry, but what the fuck?!?

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Time travel has been a trope of Science Fiction since its inception as a genre. Perhaps the most famous is H. G. Wells “The Time Machine,” which gives us brief glimpses of the future at several points. The idea is certainly seductive. Who wouldn’t want to be able to whiz off to the future to view the progress humanity has made, or travel to the past and witness historic events?

But whether or not time travel is possible is still an open debate among physicists. In this post I want to discuss some of the paradoxes that would seem to result if time travel is possible, as well as an interesting algorithm for solving NP problems using a time machine.

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Sorry for the lack of activity. I got married one moth ago as of yesterday. Things have finally settled back down, and I am working on several posts. The first should be ready in a day or two.

Go and Chess are generally considered to be the paradigm of strategy games and pure intellectual pursuit. But not many people have heard of Go in the western world, at least not compared to Chess. Anyone that likes chess is doing themselves a grave disservice by not at least trying out Go. I learned how to play Go approximately 6 years ago, but only played sporadically until approximately 2 years ago, when i started to play any chance i could. These days, i try to play at least 4 or 5 games a week, and have seen my strength rise dramatically as a result. Frustrated by a lack of people to play against, this is a small attempt of mine to introduce the game to people, in the hopes of increasing its popularity.

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