I spent a fair amount of my youth disassembling boot procedures of various copy protection schemes. There one is given a list of numbers that bootstrap an operating system and an application. A small portion of that list of numbers is
relevant to preventing that list of numbers from being copied from one media to another. It wasn’t really necessary to have a theory of the application, generally, to understand how to change the numbers to make that list copyable. If one had no theory
of a computer instruction set or of an operating system, but was just given a disk and the goal of copying it to get the computer to do the same thing when the copied disk was put in to the disk drive instead of the original disk, it is possible to learn everything
that is needed to learn which numbers to change. No oscilloscope needed, no theory of solid state physics, etc. Ok, maybe one reference manual. Biology is the same, but without a concise reference manual.
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of
[hidden email]
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 1:25 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world
All,
I feel like this relates to a discussion held during Nerd Hour at the end of last Friday’s vfriam. I was arguing that given, say, a string of numbers, and no information external to that string, that no AI could detect “order” unless
it already possessed a theory of what order is. I found the discussion distressing because I thought the point was trivial but all the smart people in the conversation were arguing against me.
n
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
From: Friam <[hidden email]>
On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 3:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world
The success of Google's deep learning program in predicting protein folding is impressive. Maybe that is what he meant.
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Steve Smith <[hidden email]>
Date: 11/30/20 21:55 (GMT+01:00)
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New ways of understanding the world
Or a "model of nothing fit to everything we know: useful or merely wrong?"
On 11/30/20 1:41 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote: