it's a little disingenuous to claim human level performance at a sport when you use a robot arm on a track. Humans have to contend with a body not specifically suited to the problem.
A big problem with the idea of physical reversible computing is the assumption that you get to start with a blank tape. Blank tapes are trivial to acquire if I can erase bits, but if I start with a tape in some state, creating working space in memory reverisbly is equivalent (identical) to lossless compression, which is not generally achievable.
If you start with blank tape then it isn't really reversible computing, you're just doing erasure up front.
I don't think your criticism is applicable to any reversible-computing schemes that I've seen proposed, including this one. They don't assume that you get to start with a blank memory (tapelike or otherwise); rather, they propose approaches to constructing a memory device in a known state, out of atoms.
Yes, building a memory device in a known configuration is erasing bits. Once you've built it, you can use it until it breaks. As long as you decompute the bits you've temporarily stored in it, restoring it to its original configuration, you don't inherently have to dissipate any energy to use it. You can reuse it an arbitrarily large number of times after building it once. If you want to compute some kind of final result that you store, rather than decomputing it, that does cost you energy in the long run, but that energy can be arbitrarily small compared to the computation that was required to reach it.
Consider the case, for example, of cracking an encryption key; each time you try an incorrect key, you reverse the whole computation. It's only when you hit on the right key that you store a 1 bit indicating success and a copy of the cracked key; then you reverse the last encryption attempt, leaving only the key. Maybe you've done 2¹²⁸ trial encryptions, each requiring 2¹³ bit operations, for a total of 2¹⁴¹ bit operations of reversible computation, but you only need to store 2⁷ bits to get the benefit, a savings of 2¹³⁵×.
Most practical computations don't enjoy quite such a staggering reduction in thermodynamic entropy from reversible computation, but a few orders of magnitude is commonplace.
It sounds like you could benefit from reading an introduction to the field. Though I may be biased, I can recommend Michael Frank's introduction from 20 years ago: https://web1.eng.famu.fsu.edu/~mpf/ip1-Frank.pdf
What would you recommend newcomers read as an introduction to the field today? Would it be one of your own papers, or has someone else written an overview you'd recommend?
I didn't realize you'd left Sandia! I hope everything is going well.
Nana basically means that floating point arithmetic is predicting that your mathematical expression is an "indeterminate form", as in the thing you learn in calculus.
Despite this being very obviously true to any mathematician or computer scientist, this idea is incredibly controversial among linguists and "educators".
The linguistic analogue, (although the exact example of notation does solidly fit into the ___domain of linguistics) is the so called sapir-whorf hypothesis, which asserts that what language you learn determines how you think.
Because natural languages are cultural objects, and mapping cultures into even a weak partial order (like how a person thinks) is simply verboten in academia.
This has profound consequences in education too, where students are disallowed from learning notation that would allow them to genuinely reason about the problems that they encounter. I admit to not understanding this one.
Sapir whorf doesnt negate the possibility of forming the same ideas using more primitive constructs.
The ability of any language speaker being able to learn the same mathematics or computer program goes to show that.
Id contest that spoken/written language is even necessary for thinking. At the very least, there is a large corpus of thought which does not require it (at some point humans spoke no or very little words, and its their thought/intention to communicate that drove the formation of words/language), so its silly to me to think of learned language as some base model of thought.
I've had arguments on the sapir-whorf idea before. Sucks, as I'm not familiar with the environment that it originated, but it seems that people seemed to have taken an encoding idea and expanded it to experience, writ large.
That is, people will lay claim that some societies that have the same word for the color of the sea and the color of grass to indicate that they don't experience a difference between the two. Not just that they encode the experiences into memories similarly, but that they don't see the differences.
You get similar when people talk about how people don't hear the sounds that aren't used by their language. The idea is that the unused sounds are literally not heard.
Is that genuinely what people push with those ideas?
The argument of notation, as here, is more that vocabulary can be used to explore. Instead of saying you heard some sound, you heard music. Specific chord progressions and such.
I think they push the opposite...mainly a weak Sapir Whorf, but not a strong one. You still have a human brain after all. Do people in Spain think of a table as inherently having feminine qualities because their language is gendered? Probably to some very small amount.
There is a linguist claiming a stronger version after translating and working with the piriue (not spelling that right) people. Chomsky refuses to believe it, but they can't falsify the guy's claims until someone else goes and verifies. That's what I read anyway.
Funny, as I was seeing a lot of people try and push that the gender of language is fully separate from gender of sex. The idea being that there was no real connection between them. I always find this a tough conversation because of how English is not a heavily gendered language. I have no idea how much gender actually enters thinking in the languages that we say are gendered.
My favorite example of this used to be my kids talking about our chickens. Trying to get them to use feminine pronouns for the animals is basically a losing game. That cats are still coded as primarily female, despite us never having a female cat; is largely evidence to me that something else is going on there.
I'm curious if you have reading on the last point. Can't promise to get to it soon, but I am interested in the ideas.
Thanks! I should have been clear on the request, too. I'm curious if there are any good high density reads, as well as if there are some to avoid. It can be easy to fall into poor sources that over claim on what they are talking about. And I don't mean nefariously. Often enthusiasm is its own form of trap.
Ah I gotcha. Sorry, it's just something I've skimmed at the surface level. The videos do refer to the key researchers, do you could look up their papers. I'm not sure what else would make sense.
> I have no idea how much gender actually enters thinking in the languages that we say are gendered.
Not much. It's mostly inference rules, just like in English use of pronouns. I's just more pervasive, pertaining to verbs, adjectives, etc... If we're talking about gendered living organism, then it's just a marker for that binary classification. Anything else, it's just baggage attached to the word.
You are conflating two different ideas of diversity. An ecosystem of businesses is, for instance, more diverse if it contains some companies with racially and sexually diverse workforces and some companies without these properties. This is strategic diversity.
Superstition is mostly just holding beliefs that you refuse to test. You can find plenty of that among dishwasher users, but I think you've also demonstrated a fair amount here.
The level of vitriol, and arbitrariness of the various rituals different people are absolutely convinced I must immediately use to see the light (I don't even own a dishwasher, lol), don't really inspire much confidence.
well, you do seem to hold a belief, that people with dishwashers must pre and postwash dishes by hand.
You could consider placing this belief in the open for people with dishwashers to contradict a sort of test, but you don't appear to consider it that way. Do you still think that everyone in this thread with a dishwasher washes their dishes by hand before and after they put them in the dishwasher?
You're accusing people who use dishwashers of a profoundly inefficient process. I think that you don't recognize this as insulting, but I also think that you derive a sense of superiority from this accusation, and if you are holding onto this belief in spite of people's insistent contradiction, then I think that this amounts to superstition and vitriol on your part.
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