Turing's Wager: If everyone you talk to is really a machine, they exist to serve you. If they're only a human pretending to be a machine, they will serve you anyway. If they're a human or a machine pretending to be human, they won't do your accounts or make you sandwiches. So it's best to assume everyone you speak to is a computer.

(Or of course there's the Pascal Test: Attempt to discover whether an entity is actually divine or a figment of your imagination, only through the means of prayer.)

Hmm. And the usual conclusion of the Turing test is "if you can't tell the difference then it doesn't matter anyway". If applied in this situation, that disturbs me!

If a figment of your imagination is none the less capable of answering prayers and suchlike, then it might as well be treated as a god; if a god declines to interact with the world outside your head, then it might as well be treated as a figment of your imagination. Doesn't seem altogether bonkers to me, though one can and probably should quibble with both halves.

Hmmm, a god who solves NP-complete problems quickly? Such a god could interact only with your head, and yet be far more powerful, and have much further reaching implications, than any figment.

And would therefore be distinguishable by means of prayer from a figment of your imagination. No problem. (Unless you believe that *you* can solve NP-complete problems quickly, I suppose.)

I shall use that one in the pub :)

:)

(I seem to recall the inquisition often WAS a bit like that :))

I'm glad.


I'm glad you let us visit your mind like this.
I'm glad I don't live there, though.




It does lead me to wonder what the "Dilemma of Newcomb's Wager" (aka "Newcomb's Prisoner's Gambit") would be described.

If there exists a Newton's Cradle, does there by symmetry exist Cat's Three Laws of Motion?

Heh :-)

Also, come to think of it, I really don't want to even start speculating on what a Schrödinger's Cat's Cradle might look like.

Schrödinger's Cat's Cradle features swinging blocks of uranium-235, carefully shaped so that in any given minute they have a 50-50 chance of causing a nuclear explosion.

String theory?

A cat at rest will tend to remain at rest.

Unless you accidentally step on it, in which case it will become an exploding mess of claws.

Needing to travel to Mars in a hurry, you step into a machine that takes a detailed scan of your body (destroying it in the process) and then sends one copy of the data to Mars and back at 99% of the speed of light, while the other copy stays on Earth. (Unfortunately, on one of the next five occasions when you do this someone will intercept the data and put it in a vat. You won't know which of the next five occasions until after it has happened.) Your body is reconstructed either once or twice, depending on the result of a coin toss: you must bet on which way the coin will fall. If you lose then your body will be reconstructed twice more, and each copy will continue betting (and being duplicated) until you come out ahead.

What colour is the bear?

By the time this technology has been developed the bear will be extinct.

Brilliant. I laughed so much that a passing neighbour wanted to know what was so amusing. Not a hope of translating it!

May I link?

Of course! Feel free. And thank you :-)

You are on a gameshow with three doors. Behind one is a goat that tells the truth, behind one is a goat that always lies, and the third one either has a goat that lies 50% of the time or a car. You don't know which door is which. You open door 1. The goat behind it says "There's a car behind door 2." Should you open door 2 or door 3?

<geeklove>

Actually, a variant of this is quite interesting.

There are three door, behind which are a car, a goat that always lies and a goat that always tells the truth.

You pick a door, but don't open it. The gameshow host then opens a different door to reveal a goat. You can ask the revealed goat one question about what is behind one of the other doors to which the answer is YES or NO (eg "is the honest goat behind the door I picked?"). However, you must write your question down before the start of the show, and the gameshow host is told what it will be (and can take that into account when, if you pick the door with the car, chooses whether to reveal the liar goat or the truth telling goat).

What question do you ask to maximise your chances of picking the car?

And if the goat says 'Mehhhh', does that mean yes or no in goatish?

Mehhhh.

I deduce: that you are not a car!

*giggles*

I was thinking more of performing horses, and having the goat tap one of two signs, on which YES and NO are written.

Of course, being a goat, it is more likely to eat the signs.

I'm sure there's a pun in there somewhere.

"Would the other goat say the car is behind the door I picked?"

Stick if the answer is no, and swap if the answer is yes.

Order of the Stick (http://www.giantitp.com/cgi-bin/GiantITP/ootscript) answered this one... (though I'm not going to hunt down the particular strip just now)

Give the goat behind door 1 a good swift kick. If it yells that it hurt, that is the goat that tells the truth, open door 2. If it yells that it didn't hurt, it is the goat that lies, open door 3, and maybe it will be a car, or the 50% goat. In either case, you may have just kicked the 50% goat, in which case there is no car, and it doesn't matter which door you open.

If the goat doesn't yell, kick harder.

Schroedinger's Teapot

Orbiting slightly beyond Jupiter, there is a teapot, in a box, with a large hammer wired up to a radioactive atom.

Thankyou and everyone else, these are all *brilliant*.

Morton's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton%27s_Fork) Razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor): Either the hypothesis has many entities, and is therefore rich enough to spare some; or the hypothesis has used few entities, and therefore must have saved enough to spare some.

Saw this and thought of you. (http://www.skytopia.com/project/cpu/cpu.html). Specially, saw this and thought, "Hey, simont got there first!"

Mmm. I note that they cite my top-level article introducing the IM, but didn't find the later LJ post which more closely parallels their topic of what problems you'd choose to solve with one. (Not that that's a surprise, really; my LJ is neither linked from my main website nor Google-indexable.)

They've got an interesting list there; some things exactly match my own thoughts on the matter (simplified computer system architecture since the CPU needs no optimised specialist hardware to do jobs like graphics, eliminate all the hassle of designing code for performance rather than clarity, all 3D graphics done by full-on raytracing in real time, the coolest fractal exploration programs ever), but some seem downright unambitious (solving the TSP optimally in cases where they say the best heuristics are already only 1-3% off optimum, and similarly while the box-packing problem would certainly be done better by IMs it hardly seems like the most pressing issue that would drive their notional development) and some thoroughly unrealistic (greater speed on its own does not an AI make, you still need to actually know how to write AIs that work; similarly I'm unconvinced by the claim that computational improvements will make weather forecasting work properly without needing insanely accurate observations to base the computation on). I think my commenters tended to think bigger, at least, though of course who knows about better :-)

One of these days I keep meaning to get round to rewriting my IM article to incorporate more thought on the implications of the thing existing in the real world (and fix a couple of other points while I'm at it, but anyway). The fact that I have no good answer to the cryptography problem is mentioned in the current article but its social consequences aren't explored: currently we're living in a golden age in which codemaking generally beats codebreaking, but that would suddenly be reversed and nobody's communications would be private or unforgeable or anything unless they'd exchanged an infinite amount of OTP data in person beforehand. Then there's the question of spam: what effect would IMs have on the power balance between spammers and spam filter writers, and what would happen when somebody had the idea of sending an infinite amount of spam so that any nonzero failure rate in the filter was instant game-over? And that's without even getting into more woolly social questions such as whether you could use an IM to accurately model people in quantity in game-breaking ways: IM-derived optimal strategies for politicians? For economists? Stock market speculators? Fraudsters? One colleague to whom I talked about all this suggested that actually, it was a damn good thing Infinity Machines can't exist, because they would represent the end of civilisation as we know it!