My TODO list

1. Reading books
2. Watching online lectures
3. Playing chess
4. Gym
5. Drawing

Stanisław Lem - Google Doodle

Hurray! Google is celebrating the 60th anniversary of my favourite author's first book! And Stanisław Lem gets the most sophisticated Google Doodle so far (see DailyMail article).

The animation of this doodle shows Trurl - a genius robotic engineer and some of the (shortened) adventures he encounters while marching through the high-tech pseudo-Medieval landscape. Most of them revolve around robots, machines and technology. The grand finale is inspired by the story of the almighty machine that is able to produce everything as long as it's starts with a letter 'n'. So we see Trulr wishing for a needle followed by a bowl of noodles. Then his dear friend Klapaucius, a brilliant robomechanic himself, tells the machine to produce nothing, which ends up as you would imagine.

I was lucky to read Bajki Robotów (~Tales of the Robots), which includes part of The Cyberiad cycle, this summer holidays on a train back home from Germany. And it was a nice touch from Google to remind me about it today.

I would really recommend reading Lem's books to anyone that is even slightly interested in artificial intelligence and the philosophy that follows.

Still, lets not forget:

Dopóki nie skorzystałem z Internetu, nie wiedziałem, że na świecie jest tylu idiotów.

(I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet).

Stanisław Lem

Use in case of procrastination.

What is Science?

People sometimes say something like ‘Oh. He’s really into doing science’ or ‘Stand back. I’m going to try science’. It may indicate that science is a kind of activity people do (which by the way may not be entirely safe). Some others might say ‘Science is developing and growing really quickly nowadays’ which suggests it might be some sort of a living entity on its own. Some may argue ‘Our lives would be so miserable if we didn’t have science’ which perhaps means that it is some type of object we all have, carrying it around in our back pockets.

The truth is a bit different though. Science is about an idea. It is about human knowledge; and a way to get to that knowledge. It is about experiments, about discoveries and about inventions. It is about finding universal truths. It is about the understanding as well as the explanations. Science may be called a belief system, a one that we have built by rigorously questioning and validating our upcoming hypotheses. It is about arguments and objections, however most of all it is about a prove. Contrary to religion or any other spiritual belief system, it is based on observable phenomenons instead of primitive superstitions. Science is there to enlarge the range of our knowledge - moving to the known limits and going beyond, pushing forward until the boarder breaks. Those breaks are how the progress in science is measured. As long as we find something original and useful the science is progressing.

Is there any definite limit to where our knowledge can get? Quite possibly. After all, we are only humans and there are (and will be) certain things we would not be able to explain. Our senses are imperfect, vision and hearing limited. We work on the same level of abstraction that our bodies operate. We don’t know how electrons really look like, neither we can smell distant stars nor touch the edge of the observable universe. Still, we can explain why such and such nucleotides bind together, we can calculate the mass of a distant pulsar or even tell the elemental composition of the universe a second after it was born. Of course some progress can be achieved without science at all - every species evolves and changes, they progress based on the sheer randomness of their mutations. However, we are not considering bacteria the pioneers of science. Science is far more than that.

For me science is about Discovery Channel. It is about a 7-year-old solving a jigsaw puzzle. It is about comparing limbs of a male figure in respect to a golden ratio. It is about thinking of a semi dead cat in a box. It is about doodling a prime spiral during a particularly boring meeting. It is about literally sacrificing your life for the studies of ionizing radioactivity. It is about stopping the sun and moving the Earth. It is about a metaphoric, perfect black monolith gliding through the outer space to the music of Strauss. It is about finding something that nobody has found before.

It is about looking into the unknown.

How to explain Monty Hall Problem better than I did

... and in just 3 minutes. All videos come from Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford University. Hope you enjoy.



And here goes the bonus:

Intro

First it hits you with the thrilling sound of the guitar. Those strings set you in a certain rythm. The sweet perils of notes are shaken off the instrument like drops of water from a greenery of maple tree foliage after another pluvial morning. Still there is this split second of anticipation when you are just about to hear it. Then it goes. Tubes appear, extending the background, making it distant, almost bottomless. And in some weird sense even heroic. By that time the roots have been ingrained. And they soothe, relieve the urge. Together with the drums that suddenly kick in a second later. Strong, regular beat marching right into your ears. With such a submerged, deep tone, one of a kind that goes right into the very core of your bones. Now the whole picture is growing, volume slowly climbing up. And the vivid bouquet of intense percussion undertake the role of the saint protagonist. In a moment this crescendo will reach its peak - its most dynamic velocity. Now's the time I usually take to enjoy music. It drives you a bit lower and becomes much calmer, just to prepare you for a hell of a moment... tremendous. And I personally cannot wait for those emotional voices, rather theatrical croon. A multilayered space of interconnecting melodies in this mellifluous harmony. Purely sensational and complete.

Listen, and hear it for yourself. That's just the Intro

I feel so small and insignificant at the end.

What if Alice used Java?

There was a cool puzzle posted on xkcd blag not so long ago. Well, it was actually more than a year ago... Anyway, the puzzle goes like this:

Alice secretly picks two different real numbers by an unknown process and puts them in two (abstract) envelopes. Bob chooses one of the two envelopes randomly (with a fair coin toss), and shows you the number in that envelope. You must now guess whether the number in the other, closed envelope is larger or smaller than the one you’ve seen.

Is there a strategy which gives you a better than 50% chance of guessing correctly, no matter what procedure Alice used to pick her numbers?

I decided to check what would happen if the unknown and mysterious process of Alice was in fact Java pseudo-random generator.

A word about people, the world and everything else

It's pure goodness:

[PL] Paradoks Monty'ego Halla

W odpowiedzi na dyskusję, która pojawiła się pod pytaniem o wybór bramki w paradoksie Monty'ego Halla, postanowiłem napisać notkę, która dokładniej tłumaczyłaby ideę paradoksu.

Ale najpierw przedstawię oryginalny problem. Sprawa ma się tak:

Zawodnik stoi przed trzema zasłoniętymi bramkami. Za jedną z nich (za którą – wie to tylko prowadzący program) jest nagroda (umieszczana całkowicie losowo). Gracz wybiera jedną z bramek. Prowadzący program odsłania inną bramkę (co istotne – anonsując, że jest to bramka pusta), po czym proponuje graczowi zmianę wyboru. (źródło: Wikipedia) 

Pytanie brzmi: czy zawodnik zyskuje coś przez zmianę bramki?

My Daily WTF: [#1] Singleton Field Pattern.

It was yet another sunny and calm day at work for Jerzy K. For the past couple of hours he was doing some updates to the recommendation application and was now ready to submit the code to the shared repository.

Because there was one more guy from another team working on the project, SVN conflicts were nothing uncommon, and so it came as no surprise when one or two of them occured this time as well. Before blindly updating the code to the latest version Jerzy decided to have a quick look. It was the recently committed Product class that was causing the problem. And this is what he saw:

A word about cynicism

The goodness starts about 4:07.

Fail after fail

America will have to wait for me a bit longer as I found out they are not offering me a place on postgraduate study. I guess I am not as awesome as I thought I am. Well, maybe some research projects on the Old Continent will fill the time in between. Or maye not.

I have absolutely no idea at the moment what I will be doing with my life during next academic year...

Secondly, I was asked to write an article about AI

We are not alone in the universe

There is a small voice in my heart. The voice is small, but it can certainly scream loudly. It is the voice of the explorer and it is absolutely full of joy. It is jumping all around me, banging in the ears, beating back in my skull, rattling in the brain.

It seems there is an evidence of life in the universe. Aliens... but nothing too fancy. There was no Kane with a creature attached to his face, and no Ripley with grappling hook and finally no bloody, penis-like chestburster with incisors!

Something much simpler, more predictable, something... expected maybe?

Everything in this world is relative, my dear Watson.

I found this article about Watson - an IBM's super computer that not only is able to play Jeopardy game, but also wins against human contestants. Enjoy the full article and video here: IBM's Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy practice round.

It's truly astounding.