Erdos Had The Number First

Do I look that old?

Well, I’ve found him. The web is a crazy thing. On a lark I googled for Josh Endicott, a guy I lived with my sophomore year
of college (in a 6 man in Shaw, if I remember correctly). He left denison for Amherst to get a better school
and be closer to his then partner Hollis.

CfASLS

Here he is now. He looks so much older than I remember him. Do we all look that way? It’s been almost 10 years
since I last saw him, and while it’s entirely possible he doesn’t remember me perhaps I’ll take a detour through Eugene
this summer on my way to my cousins wedding and say hello.

But is it right? Is it right to drop in on people you haven’t seen in years? That’s what I’d like to know. People now are not who they were and neither am I. But, maybe I’ll do it anyway, talk to him about my plans for biodiesal.

One of the problems with peer-to-peer systems is that searching them can be a big problem. Pure p2p systems have scaling problems as the search space widens, centrally managed (like napster) have scaling problems handling the number of queries.

Agent (automaton) based queries can bassically reduce to pure broadcast searches is the agent is allowed to replicate and depth/breadth first searches otherwise. None of these options is efficient enough to handle really huge,huge (like sum total of human knowledge huge) datasets.

So, agents get a credit card. Each agent has a certain amount of credit in it’s account. If it has enough credit it can repliate itself. Credit is gained by answering questions from other agents (which takes credit from those agents). Even if the answer is NO. Some places cost more, and if you’re percentage of correct answers is high you can charge whatever you like (you can actully always charge whatever you like, but no one will talk to you unless you’ve got a good average).

All agents have ownership, no agent can not have an owner (and ownerless agents are always rejected).

So, a little gedanken to help verstahen –
agent get’s kicked off. Queires the first (highest score) in the its list
of server’s who know stuff. Agent makes query of server. Sever checks
to see if agent has enough credit to get question answered. Anwers in the negative cost
less (server can always lie) If server answeres in the negative, itmay provide a list
of other sserver it thinks might know. List providing is very cheap. If server knows answer, it first tells the agent how much the answer will cost. The agent can decide if it’s willing to pay
and if it is, it takes the “payment” gives the answer and that’s that.

Servers may also gossip. Gossip is in the form of reporitng ratings for other servers. This one is fast, this one is slow or this one cheats or that one isinexpensive but never knows tha answer.

The system does not have a global accounting system set up. The credit is between server, and the agents and servers record their own transactions. This works because a cheating owner begins to be ignored. A cheeting owner that keeps changing his name cannot generate enough credit to be abusive. A web of trust get’s built automatically and enforced by transactional costs.

Agent owners can also set costs for their friends (or for anyone really) to be whatever they want. If you build
a web of people you know and you let your servers gossip to their agents you get reasonable redistribution of informationwithin peer groups. You can also do things like have the agents able to access your information (like your schedule or the report you’ve been working on).

I’ll point out here that I am being deliberately ambiguous about exactly where the agents are running. This is something to be figured out later.

I have few friends. This is not entirely by design. I have always had difficulty creating and maintaining relationships. The few friends I do have are very important to me. This is not an attempt to gain sympathy, but rather stage setting for discussion.

While they are important, this is not to say that the relationship is without conflict and confliction. I do not treat my friendship lightly and do not give it easily or ever really renounce it. There have been very few cases where I’ve drawn the line and killed a friendship. I’ve let many die of their own devices. I am not proud of this, but I am honest. That I do not take friendship for granted is more than just saying it. A relationship is more than words, which is part of the problem.

Part of the reason I have few friends is my own abrasiveness. I pride myself on not saying things about people I would not say to their face (perhaps not word for word, but the content would be the same). But sometimes I don’t know where to draw the line between honesty and frivolous opinion. But truth is truth, right?

If we cannot be truthful about our friends then who can be? If the closeness of a relationship only affords one the ability to lie then is the relationship worth keeping? Anyone can say good things, saying good things is easy. It’s saying the hard things that is, in my opinion, the duty of ones friends. It is unfortunate that the hard things are often the bad things, the mean things, the critical things.

It is easy for me to say these things, because I am naturally judgmental. Judgmental and often holding people to unrealistic expectations of behavior and life (including myself). Lovers and therapists have tried to help me with this little problem for years.

This is something I struggle with every day. Success, and success at any cost is not success. Life is not war and (perhaps more importantly) war is not life.

I have a point.

The point is that as I get older I come to realize that sometimes you have to say something. Sometimes people you care about do things you’d rather they not have done. It’s OK to be angry at them. Sometimes the relationship cannot survive. Sometimes it can. You cannot know until afterwards, and even then sometimes you can’t really know.

But you can hope. And you can be truthful, most of the time. And for me especially, you can forgive and allow
yourself to be forgiven. It’s near the end of the year, and this next year I am going to endevor to be a better friend and a better person. I am going to hope that the costs are not too high.

There is no reason why people should design bridges. In fact, structual skeletons of any kind should not be designed by
humans. I should define what I mean by designed.

A human architect should describe the shape of the thing. However, the actuall structure should not be laid out by the
the Architect. Chip manufacturing has long used automated processes to lay out the internals of chips and cirucuits to
maximize function. Bridge builders should do the same.

The program should take basic measurements like width, max load and GIS information about the span to cross
(including geological information about the surface, soil and shelf) and the general shape contrainst of the bridge
and it should generate a bridge that meets these requirements for the least costs in labor and materials.

GA + computing time = bridges

This would work for any construction project, really. add in a smattering of constructor bots and skyscrapers could
be assembled in days for little cost. Houses : no problem. In fact, you could even just use transposed cellular automata
to create the design for you (though that would be harder computationally).

I’ve found another problem with blogging. So I figured I’d report it here: CSS.

The problem with CSS is that I’m tempted to fuck with it. To tweak and tweak until it looks just right only to find that I’ve wasted all the time I was supposed to be writing. It provides a built in procrastination mechanism that the geek in me cannot resist.

This puts a dent in my productivity, in a big way. Maybe that is part of the problem. It is always easy to find something to do other than what one is supposed to be doing. You’ve got to fight that, and do it anyway.

Luckily, my franklin planner has a little bloging space, I can set up time to blog three times a week. You’ve read it here first, the CSS distraction is NO MORE. The CSS rain of Terror is behind us and now only before us an open road of productivity and passionate writing.

Do I sound convincing?

This is my programing blog. This will host software type stuff. Questions I have for myself or anyone else reading. Answers I’ve found. Software I’m trying to publish. You know, the normal stuff.

Think of it like a pre-abandoned SourceForge site.

I’m still searching for a good webclient for blogging. The interface that MT provides is really pretty bad. No spell check, no nothing. It’s ugly too.

But ugly isn’t really the point. I lost a post yesterday because of a misunderstanding of features of my current sometimes client w.bloggar. Lost the whole post. It was a good one too, full of euridite thoughts and feelings about stuff. Gone gone gone, now and I blame my client.

I think this is one of the problems that blogging has as a concept. You don’t need a client to write with (though you could argue that clients are analaous to pens or other writing instruments). You just write when you write. While when you blog you need a lot of infrastructure that does get in the way a bit.

I’m sure there are blog-by-email scripts out there, maybe I could find one. But that wouldn’t let me have control over when I post (not that I post that often, but I don’t always want the draft to be posted).

I’m rambling again.

The thing is, I would pay an amount of money (small though it would be) for a good blog client. That client would:

1) have a spell checker
2) SAVE posts periodically so that you can’t EVER loose a post
3) Have a usable interface
4) Have an easy method of inter-post linking (wiki-like really).

These four things and whatever features I’ve forgotten would be really, really good to have. Did I mention I’d pay?

Recently, the war on SPAM has taken a new turn. Meaningless messsages.

The important thing about these messages is that they are designed to destroy bayesian spam
filtering methods by poisioning the well. Bayesian spam filtering was originated by Paul Graham in his groundbreaking paper A Plan for Spam.
He was the first person to use the technique and it proved extremely successful. A host of implementors came forward with bayesian spam filters and they have been keeping my inbox clean for some time now (I’m a Spamassassin man myself).

Anyway, these bayesian filters have a weakness: training. By flooding auto-learning Bayesian filters with dictionary words the spamers seem to hope to render the filters useless. I would expect to see a huge influx of new spam right in time for the holiday season, thanks to the assault these nonsense bombs are creating.

In case you’re wondering, that’s my new word ” Nonsense Bomb”. I am Shocked and Awed by the this move from the spammers, and we thought we’d won the war.

Condos are great. They offer a good amount of space at a price far
less than the cost of a townhouse or (god forbid) a real house.
We pay far less for our condo than we did for our last rental
apartment[1]. And it’s our place. I mean really, our place. we could
live there for the rest of our lives and never worry about moving or
rents going up or anything else besides association fees and taxes.

BUT.

And here’s the but.

Condo living means you have to live with other people. That, in and of itself, isn’t a problem.

Footnotes:
[1] I should point out that our last apartment was a top-floor luxury
type place with two bathrooms and an unobstructed city view.

For her birthday, I gave my wife a gaming set. It has chess,checkers, backgammon, cribbage, dominoes, and something else. It’s pretty complete.

She and I learned to play backgammon on our honeymoon (that I’ll probably write about at some point). Implicit with the gift of the gaming set was that on mondays we will spend time together playing games.

She loves board games, and I love my wife. So.
We played a round of backgammon. She won. No surprise there, part of the reason we like backgammon is that there is enough chance to it that neither one of us will get so good as to always win.

Then she talked me into playing a game of checkers. I thought “sure, checkers”. She kicked my ass. I haven’t been beaten at a game so soundly since the CIL chess tourney in 2002. She noted halfway through the game that she used to play a lot when she was younger. Yeah, I’ll say.

but it’s OK. when you’re married to someone whose as competative as you and they totally wipe the floor with you there’s only one thing to do. Switch games.