Eques Peregrinus

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About Eques Peregrinus

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  1. Did the U.S. really go to the moon in 1969?

    Obviously not. For propaganda purpose, the NASA mandated Stanley Kubrick to make a fake Moon landing. Due to his perfectionism, he went with his whole crew to the Moon to add more realism to the scene.
  2. Any spiritual techniques to increase intelligence and IQ?

    The best way to increase your IQ is to practice answering questions found in IQ tests, but given all the more useful and interesting things we could do with that time, this is definitively a stupid activity. More seriously, a whole part of western magical practices is dedicated to improve intellectual faculties, from gaining knowledge through demons in the Goetia, to obtaining the "vision of God in Glory" in the Liber Juratus. What looks the most to what you are looking for seems to be the Art of Memory, or mnemonic practices which were and still are practiced today to optimize our memorization. Yates wrote a nice book on it. To illustrate briefly in what consists this Art of Memory, it is easier to remember the image of a woman having bull horns on her head and sitting on a crab than to remember that the domicile of the Moon is Cancer and its Exaltation is Taurus.
  3. Computer Advice

    A warning on solutions to wipe specific files instead of entire drives: If it is rater easy to erase an entire drive, it is not possible to guarantee that the content of a file is completely erased in a modern file system. File systems are designed to avoid data loss at all costs and implement several strategies to ensure this. The same can be said for SSD, but for different reasons. So it is not surprising to find these lines in this software's website: A better option to ensure that sensitive data remain secret would be to use an encrypted drive, there are a few tools that exists for that, like BitLocker or dm-crypt.
  4. Music works extremely well to "transmit energy". In general, it's also nicer to listen than ASMR.
  5. simplify

    nichts
  6. Is the USA now a rogue state?

    Don't worry about world population, Trump and the jihadists have already found a solution. To quote Scott Adams: "There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved through a suitable application of high explosives."
  7. Monoatomic gold

    It can turn you into a smurf... Well, not really, to be a real smurf, you have to be communist and practice polyandry... To be more serious: a relatively high consumption of colloidal gold over a long period of time could cause chrysiasis, which is a medical condition where gold accumulates under skin and turns it to a greyish color. The same phenomena happens with colloidal silver, in this case the condition is called argyria.
  8. constant 'error with SQL server'

    Maybe it is due to how the cache deletion is handled by your browser. Have you tried reloading the page while pressing on Ctrl to bypass the cache? Complete explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bypass_your_cache
  9. Mass spell against TRUMP by witches

    A few months ago, there already were some witches who casted a mass spell to make him lose the election, I wonder whether they are the same?
  10. Is this a picture of Mohamed?

    Here is a list of images of Mohamed: http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/islamic_mo_full/
  11. Artificial Intelligence & the Downfall

    This online book is nice if you want to learn about neural networks. At the moment, I don't think researchers have as a priority to develop a "quantum AI". In fact, a mathematically unsolvable problem is not solvable whether in a classical or in a quantum framework. But a few problems hard to solve with a classical computer can be solved faster with a quantum computer. This is the case for the discrete logarithm and the integer factorization problems, which are used, respectively, in the El Gamal and RSA algorithms. (These algorithms are used in cryptography, for key exchange.) Also: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
  12. Artificial Intelligence & the Downfall

    Consciousness is not computable, but an AI does not needs to be sentient to be dangerous. This is why I took the example of a competition to build "hacking AI". When an attack occurs on a system, it will, in general, be detected by a program (which uses sometimes an AI) called an IDS (intrusion detection system), which is going to identify, and block the attack then log it for the administrator. The problem is that the IDS, being a program, is subject to the same limitations you mentioned. Therefore, in this situation, we can have a fight between equal opponents (as long as the admin is not doing any intervention). A few years ago, even a simple program, attacking a very specific weakness, could spread worldwide in minutes (this is what is called a worm). Today malwares appears by thousands each day, and sometimes they are programmed to hide from the anti-virus by changing some parts of itself to change its signature. Given their increasing complexity it would not be surprising to see malwares using machine learning techniques to search for certain common vulnerabilities in the future. On the good side, such techniques could also be used by developers to test their software.
  13. Artificial Intelligence & the Downfall

    OK, I misunderstood it, my English is not perfect. (And now, I notice than I reversed AI into IA, this is because in English the adjective precede the name, while in French it is the opposite.) They really are speaking about a (yet) non existing AI. Current AI can still be used to determine the shape of some proteins with a good accuracy. I am not a specialist in AI either. Still I did not learn of any major discovery made in the last 20 years. Of course multiple variants of neural network or strategies were invented since then, like the Monte Carlo Tree Search you mentioned (which was invented in 2006). They are useful in certain situations, but not really ground-breaking. Because we have way more computation power now, heuristics which can technically be made are also better. It was already relevant in the progress on AI even in 1996 when DeepBlue beat Kasparov (DeepBlue was simulating 200 millions moves per second), but as you mentioned, the heuristic was build differently. I did not find the number of moves computed by AlphaGo, but, according to this article, it ran on 1202 cores to beat the world 2nd best player. The computing power needed to train the neural network, however is not mentioned. I was quite serious in this statement (well almost, the comparison between Muhammad Ali and Kasparov was a joke). It is not really a problem of having or not having a body, an AI analyse a model, in which the data is obtained from a real game. For example, at the moment, an AI is able to determine what is a pick-and-rolls and can be used to help to determine what was a good or a bad throw (but we are still far from placing and directing players on the pitch with an AI). To go back to the dangerous AI, like SkyNet in Terminator, which is able to hack and take control of other systems automatically. Such AI does not yet exists, but there already is a competition to make an ersatz. Currently the binaries hacked are much simplified compared to real programs, but, frankly speaking, this is quite frightening. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/the-world-series-of-hacking-without-humans/ edit: typo
  14. Artificial Intelligence & the Downfall

    Obama seems to understand some basics. For example he make a difference between specialized IA (that is a real IA) and general IA (the sience fiction IA). Unfortunately, he also makes mistakes like claiming that an IA can produce a cure an unknown disease (maybe he meant researchers using IA to optimise certain molecular structures to find a cure, or that it possible to train an IA to recognise a certain known disease by its symptoms). His advisors are also quite correct in claiming we are still a long way away from a general IA. The other guy confirm it by stating that a general IA won't happen without a major breakthrough (and, at the same time, he spread more clichés about geeks). It must also be noted that there were no breakthrough in IA for at least 20 years. AlphaGo is a deep neural network, which exists since the 90s. The difference between now and then is that we have warehouse sized data-centers and we can analyse a large enough subset of the billions of possible moves in a go game to make a good guess about beneficial moves. Currently, the research on IA is oriented toward "fluzzy" problems, for which it is difficult to define "cases". To illustrate it, with games: There are games an IA can beat a human player, like chess, backgammon, cards against humanity, etc... For these games the cases are clearly defines, there is a situation before a move, then an other situation after the move. In the case of games where IA are still weak against a human opponent are soccer, basketball, boxing, etc... For these games the cases are ill defined and beneficial situation difficult to determine. Therefore Muhammad Ali is smarter than Kasparov. And now for something completely different: On the question about the impact of the IA on society, some problems occurs, as stated above, about job replacement. A similar situation occurred in the 19th century with the invention of the mechanical loom. Many people lost their job, which caused social troubles. Later, the same situation happened times to time due to technological progress. Essentially, the problem can be reduced to: "How to occupy these work-less people, knowing that some of them might not have the interest or capacities to work with sophisticated machines?" A few solutions were proposed to this social problem like basic income, or social security. In the current situation, "poor" economies are particularly at risk, because companies might delocalize the production back in the west, where machines becoming cheaper than manual labor. Who knows, depending on how the communists deals with it, we will have a new Chinese revolution.
  15. The Cat Bums