Re: [FRIAM] singularity
I wouldn't be surprised if software development was actually exponential, however it is harder to measure improvement, and the improvement is not a smooth as hardware improvement. I guess that we would like to have a general measure of the growth of software complexity, but I don't know if there is anything like that, nor how easy would it be to develop... moreover to check... where could we get the data of e.g. number of lines of code, or source code size in Kb, of software for the last 20 years or so??? A rough and naive way would be to check e.g. the size in KB of the installation files of a certain software, e.g. Linux, Windows, MS Office, Corel Draw, AutoCAD... (with Linux it's quite difficult, because a minimal version of it can fit in a couple of floppies, all the rest are add-ons...) Best regards, Carlos Gershenson... Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ “Tendencies tend to change...” FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] singularity
Crude quantitative measures are no good. For instance, the intro of OO techniques can increase functionality with sometimes a decrease in the number of lines of code. An example close to home for me was the change from EcoLab 3 to EcoLab 4. The number of lines halved, but functionality was increased maybe tenfold (**subjective measure warning**). Then maybe a measure could be the length of the manuals +documentation, which reflect the functionality of a particular program? (Well, Francis just switched to MacOS X from MacOS 9, and the one thing he complained was that there was no manual... he didn't like the amount of help files) If this would be reasonable, I don't see that these have increased too much, since the size of books hasn't increased noticeably... in Unix/Linux you could measure it better with the size of man and how- to pages Best regards, Carlos Gershenson... Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ “Tendencies tend to change...” FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] singularity
Like weighing Stroustrup versus Kernighan Richie ?? I think the C++ book weighs 4 times as much as the C book, but I'm sure C++ is more than 4 times as powerful... Cheers On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 01:36:00PM +0200, Carlos Gershenson wrote: Crude quantitative measures are no good. For instance, the intro of OO techniques can increase functionality with sometimes a decrease in the number of lines of code. An example close to home for me was the change from EcoLab 3 to EcoLab 4. The number of lines halved, but functionality was increased maybe tenfold (**subjective measure warning**). Then maybe a measure could be the length of the manuals +documentation, which reflect the functionality of a particular program? (Well, Francis just switched to MacOS X from MacOS 9, and the one thing he complained was that there was no manual... he didn't like the amount of help files) If this would be reasonable, I don't see that these have increased too much, since the size of books hasn't increased noticeably... in Unix/Linux you could measure it better with the size of man and how- to pages Best regards, Carlos Gershenson... Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ ?Tendencies tend to change...? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] singularity
Tangentally, this question is part of the reason I am very disturbed by the concept of the singularity I made yesterday a blog entry about the singularity: http://complexes.blogspot.com/2006/07/limits-of-moores-law.html Best regards, Carlos Gershenson... Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel Krijgskundestraat 33. B-1160 Brussels, Belgium http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~cgershen/ “Winning or losing does not matter as much as what you learn from it” FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] singularity
Carlos Gershenson wrote: Tangentally, this question is part of the reason I am very disturbed by the concept of the "singularity" I made yesterday a blog entry about the singularity: http://complexes.blogspot.com/2006/07/limits-of-moores-law.html Well, you note, " How the hell do you program a human mind in there??? It takes us several years just to learn to talk!" Part of the answer is, "We just copy the ability from computer to computer". Humans are difficult to clone. Machines much less so. Is it because machines are so much less complex, or that the method nature chose was the best available at the time or that human replication serves other purposes as well not satisfied by an in-depth copy? A bit of all 3. Humans have not evolved terribly quickly, but this model has had relatively long shelf life - much longer than an ENIAC, say. As we digitize data, information and knowledge, it becomes easier to load up a machine with it all. Obviously accessing and integrating this is more important than just having it stored on relatively fast disk, but it's hard to deny that the ability to store tons of knowledge is an advantage. Machines have much faster data transfer internal-to-external. Where humans do seem to win is in internal communications and the software programming. I'm sure as we go to molecular computers we'll pick up some speed on the internal bus bandwidth as well. Not that cognition is all about speed - slow filtering is very useful in places. Regarding the software, well, human development is a little bit stupid. Yes, it takes us years to learn how to talk, and then we spend years learning "Row row row your boat" and other time intensive learn-by-repetition-and-rote tasks just so we can be relatively self-sufficient for 50 years, which means we hold meaningless jobs so we can find time to head to the bar. But our external knowledge and technology cumulate, so in 2016 we'll be able to organize computer knowledge much better than we do know, and presumably as the machines get smarter and smarter, they can play a larger role in programming their descendants. The relevancy of Google answers is much better than we had 10 years ago, in a large part due to comingling requests and answers over millions of nodes and requests, as well as the algorithms that go into the responses. Where will this approach be in 10 years? What new insights, what new applications? Computers will be more capable of aggregating insights from a billion more nodes and applying the insights to new problems. While humans are getting better at programming the ability to have these insights, we are not getting much better at having the insights ourselves. Our creative thinking more and more depends on the machine for its completion. That doesn't mean all computer questions are tackled with ease. There were big linguistics/ machine learning setbacks in the 1980's, AI was overhyped, etc. But these efforts don't so much disappear as they recur as technological and societal environments become more prepared to utilize them. Whether this all leads to a singularity followed by the Cyberiad, or simply continues as a long-term symbiotic relationship (man and dog, computer and man), I don't know - I favor the latter. But not because we can't program, only that the relationship will continue to evolve in ways we find useful, and we've already made great progress on what we'd like machines to do even in the short span of computer science. I don't expect a single algorithm or insight to change everything - I imagine there will be a number of evolving, slightly incompatible approaches, from which a few will gain sway and slowly be replaced. In any case, just because software evolution has historically gone slower than hardware, I don't think it's inherent in programming that that has to be true forever. For one thing, we've used hardware as stable datum - program new tasks, but leave the hardware design consistent and backwards compatible. So while the goal of the hardware is higher performance/efficiency, software has to have better performance and more features. And attempts to improve automatic programming have had poor results. But the state of programming is much improved over 1991, and my guess is that it's only a matter of time before all of our efforts in different approaches hit something that pays off more exponentially. Okay, I didn't address the one question - if you copy my mind out to disk and back into another body, will it have identity as "Bill", self-knowledge, consciousness, etc.? I think Lem answered that in the Cyberiad, but I'll have to re-read it, I don't store data that well. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] singularity
On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 02:07:58PM +0200, Carlos Gershenson wrote: Also agree, but what I claim is that maybe the evolution of software is not exponential, as it is with hardware, so there would be no singularity in sight... I wouldn't be surprised if software development was actually exponential, however it is harder to measure improvement, and the improvement is not a smooth as hardware improvement. During my 25 years of programming computers, I have seen several revolutionary jumps in software: vectorisation, parallelisation, object-oriented programming, higher-level scripting (Perl, Python et al), evolutionary algorithms ... Each of these software techniques has brought orders of magnitude of increased functionality, but in each case the effect is different (generally not across the board), and hard to quantify. During the same period we have seen approximately 8 generations of Intel processors or 5 orders of magnitude in processor performance, measured on the same scale Cheers -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] singularity
Indeed. I'm certainly capable of misapplying statistical techniques several orders of magnitude faster than I could a decade ago.RobetrOn 7/19/06, Russell Standish [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 02:07:58PM +0200, Carlos Gershenson wrote: Also agree, but what I claim is that maybe the evolution of software is not exponential, as it is with hardware, so there would be no singularity in sight...I wouldn't be surprised if software development was actuallyexponential, however it is harder to measure improvement, and theimprovement is not a smooth as hardware improvement. During my 25 years of programming computers, I have seen severalrevolutionary jumps in software: vectorisation, parallelisation,object-oriented programming, higher-level scripting (Perl, Python et al), evolutionary algorithms ...Each of these software techniques has brought orders of magnitude ofincreased functionality, but in each case the effect is different(generally not across the board), and hard to quantify. During the same period we have seen approximately 8 generations of Intelprocessors or 5 orders of magnitude in processor performance, measuredon the same scaleCheers--*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not avirus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify thisemail came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment.A/Prof Russell StandishPhone 8308 3119 (mobile)Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED]Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix+612, Interstate prefix 02 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listservMeets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's Collegelectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
