CS and Game Theory
I read Papadimitriou’s article on Algorithms, Games, and the Internet, and found it to be a rather nice overview strongly hinting at future emphasis within the Theoretical Computer Science community. I’ve long thought that a good game theoretic background would…
The Situation with Iraq
Yesterday, a nice youth visited my dad’s weekly gathering. At 22 he brought back pictures of the death and carnage that he’s witnessed as part of his tour in the Mid-East. Now, I dislike the idea of war, and the…
The Cambrian Explosion
Today I watched the Evolution section of a Discovery program about the 100 Greatest Discoveries. In it Bill Nye talked about the Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess shale. I remember that back in High School I had an argument with…
Descriptive Hierarchies
Today, I was reading Sipser’s Theory of Computation and in chapter 6 it said: For statement 3 (Machines cannot self-reproduce) we make the following argument that machines cannot self-reproduce. Consider a machine that constructs other machines, such as an automated…
Summer Philosophy
Ahh, the lazy days of summer, and the delightful philosophy that imbues them. I absolutely love verbal fencing. Because through the dancing around of argument, you get to know more about yourself and why you believe the things you do,…
True Names
Today I read TRUE NAMES by Vernor Vinge, as recommended by Andreessen. It really is a a good novella. I’m am shocked and amazed that it was written in 1984, as it has elements not seen until much later in…
Stock Market 2.0
I was reading Andreessen’s thoughts about Web 2.0 and had a nice thought myself: Wall Street is behind. They have giant festering piles of business and financial logic, and are falling behind on the internet front. What is needed is…
The Entropy
Well, my car battery is died yesterday. It seems that everything in the universe has conspired to attack me this week. On the plus side, I purchased a set of jumper cables, and an Xpower PowerPack 300 EP. It provides…
Universal Turing Machines, Part 9: Fin
The last routine left us with markings on the bits of the current state. Conveniently, it also left us to the left, while the UTM’s Start state has a loop which moves right to check wether or not a symbol…
Universal Turing Machines, Part 8: Lost in Transition
First: Last weekend I met with a friend and we reviewed this UTM subroutine by subroutine, finding a few errata, which have been fixed. Finally, we’ve reached the end. The last step of simulation is to find and mark the…