Category Archives: Mathematics

Humor, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire, Science And Society

It’s Really Quite Simple

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I think I’ve found the pseudocode for Mann’s temperature charts:

input hockey_stick array
input year_data array
For each year (1000 - 2009) {
   while (year_data_of_year less than hockey_stick_of_year) {
      if (year_data_of_year less than hockey_stick_of_year) {
         year_data_of_year += 0.1 degrees
         }
      }
   plot year_data_of_year
   }

See, nothing to it. Poor Harry wouldn’t have had so much frustration if he’d just stuck with the script.

Mathematics, Philosophy, Science And Society

The Evolution Of Good And Evil

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As Joe Katzman says, it’s hard to know whether this should be comforting, or frightening:

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed – helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone – presumably while using a mechanical claw to twirl a silicon carving of a handlebar moustache.

You might be upset by this result, scientific proof that those who say “Evil is utterly fundamental to human nature” actually understates the scope of the problem, there were also silicon souls on the side of the angels. Some robots advanced fearlessly into poison zones, flashing warning lights to keep other robots out of harms way.

This seems to be congruent with Axelrod’s work. I wonder if the successful ones use Tit for Tat?

So, do they have free will?