Faking it, or, Zombie Alan Turing vs. Me
There’s this discussion going on at Crooked Timber about the extent to which being familiar with certain mathematical formalisms is a necessary or sufficient condition for understanding gravity waves. Much of the discussion unfortunately consists of, on the one hand, untrue categorical statements about working physicists’ all-encompassing knowledge of the experimental tools of their trades, and on the other hand, unhelpful analogies involving hypothetical assistive technologies that either don’t make enough sense to exist or, if they existed, wouldn’t do what the analogizers say they would do (either in real life or for the purposes of the argument). But there are some interesting nuggets in there, even if most of them turn on the meanings of words like “understand” and “do”.
So, a thought experiment: Me vs. Zombie Alan Turing. On the one hand, I’m certainly not prepared to prove (or even care a whole lot about) the formal equivalence of all the fancy simulated gadgets involving switches and chains in the later chapters of A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an exercise which Zombie Alan would probably find fairly trivial even if he hadn’t already done it back in 1936. On the other hand, I can solve reasonably complicated threading problems in Java client-server GUI applications, and do so, I dare say, better than the average professional Java programmer (not that this is setting the bar all that high). On the other other hand, it’s taken me ten years of professional programming and another ten or fifteen years of unprofessional fiddling around with computers to get there, and I bet Zombie Alan would pick it up a lot quicker.
So: Which of us “understands computers”? Or which of us “better understands computers”? Or is that a stupid question?
October 13th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
You do realise that if you compete against a zombie in a battle of wits, you’re only making it more appealing for him to eat your brains?
Sorry, you were talking about technology, carry on with your bad gedankenexperimentin’ self.
October 13th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Ah, but if I lose the battle of wits….
October 13th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
Nobody understands computers.
October 13th, 2006 at 8:04 pm
I daresay we all just lost the battle of wits.
I say let’s eat Karen’s brain.
October 14th, 2006 at 3:23 am
Aphrael is correct when he says “nobody understands computers,” but there are people who understand some particular computers.
This insight allows us to answer your question numerically, just as Daniel’s original question can be answered numerically.
First consider some set of m existing computers C (where we define “computer” to be an electronic or mechanical device which can be programmed to to perform calculations), and some set of n people P. Let P(i) denote some particular person with 1
We now simply measure or estimate U(i)(k) for every combination of people being tested and computers available. There will likely be some infinite scores; ie, it is likely that some people would be unable in any length of time to design, build, and program a given computer using a reference set of available tools and instruction.
We can now compare people’s understanding using any of several reasonable methods. I would suggest we first say that any person with a higher number of infinite scores over C has a lower understaning of C than a person with a lower number. Thereafter, to resolve ties, we can simply sum scores for the j computers in C for each person p, [sum(U(p)(1..k)], or we can average said scores, or pick the mode, or whatever looks best.
With this suggested approach, I would hypothesize a decisive victory for Zombie Alan Turing if C contained a large proportion of fairly simple programmable computing devices, and a narrower victory for Immodest Java Weenie if C contained a large proportion of highly complex devices.
Since I suspect there are more simple computers than complex ones being produced even today, I’d put my money on Z.A.T. over I.J.W. for C consisting of “all computers ever built.”
October 14th, 2006 at 3:25 am
Sweet jesus, man, enable the paragraph tag, already. I tried to break that up into readable chunks, but your comments-technology has foiled my efforts.
October 14th, 2006 at 3:28 am
Also, a good bit of what I wrote got clipped out due to my use of less-than signs in the numerical method preamble. That’s probably my fault, but the paragraph tags I used, at least, worked in the preview.
October 14th, 2006 at 7:19 am
while it may be true
that the paragraph tag is not enabled
it remains clear
that the break tag is
and
if you have that
who needs the paragraph tag?
October 14th, 2006 at 7:19 am
odd.
the break tag works in preview
but not in posting.
October 14th, 2006 at 7:20 am
October 14th, 2006 at 7:30 am
dammit, now I want to see those greater than/less than signs. Hang on…
< >
October 14th, 2006 at 7:31 am
Foo.
October 14th, 2006 at 7:36 am
My hypothesis that it’s possible for me to hack WordPress into enabling paragraph tags in comments without screwing up all the paragraph tags in posts in less than infinite time remains untested.
October 14th, 2006 at 7:39 am
> < ?
October 14th, 2006 at 7:41 am
Ah-ha! My mission here is complete. I will now return to Vega 9.
October 14th, 2006 at 7:41 am
while the tags don’t work in my comments section, i can force line breaks by hitting enter multiple times … but only one, no more.
that’s not how i expect it to behave.
October 14th, 2006 at 8:09 am
I think the culprit is wpautop() in functions-formatting.php, which is among other things supposed to put the breaks in. (Or something.) Me, I just made it a no-op. Unfortunately for comments there’s clearly something else going on as well, since it’s also stripping the tags.
October 14th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Look, I would have tried screwing around with entities, but the last time I tried that, I got banned from crookedtimber when I realized it allowed me to put in IMG tags with off-site SRC attributes.
Which is to say, I goatsed the crookedtimber. I’m not proud.
October 14th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
If the lesson you learned from that was “don’t fool around with tags” and not “don’t fool around with goatse”, i’m not sure there’s hope.
October 15th, 2006 at 12:44 am
“Don’t fool around with goatse” is not a lesson that needs to be taught. “Don’t leave your site open to the injection of arbitrary HTML” is a lesson that needs to be taught as emphatically as possible, without causing harm. And since it wasn’t a real goatse, it wasn’t harmful (the harmful bits were covered up with an adorable kitten). What I learned was that the timberites are not entirely immersed in the culture of the interweb, for all their academic study thereof. I try to keep that in mind when I post there, now.
October 15th, 2006 at 2:43 am
You can see the < appear in the preview window when you type the correct entity.
I doubt David will be very much inclined to help you out and fix your post for you, not after you matched Zombie Alan with your own witty little acronym.
You know, I think I can see some errors in your formalism, probably stemming from your definitions… though I can’t see, for example, the definition of U(i)(k) from behind the html tagging. Anyway, “semi-facetious” or not, if you want to re-post, I’d be happy to take it at face value and semi-autistically tear it apart.
(Though may I recommend “Immodest Java Programmer” instead? Or even “you,” or even “David”? Something that doesn’t immediately insult the author of the blog to which you’re posting?)
October 15th, 2006 at 2:44 am
Guess not: < apparently needs the final semi-colon to produce <.
October 15th, 2006 at 8:30 am
Actually, one of the things wordpress helpfully does is lose the original text, although I suppose it might be in the database somewhere. I could probably put the paragraph breaks in, but at this point that would make the rest of this conversation look even sillier than it already does.
October 15th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Narrative structure-wise, I think this would be a fine time to re-introduce the zombies and the brain-eating.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
robotslave: i’m not sure that’s a result of not being immersed in the culture of the interweb. you post goatse at any site where i have the power to make such decisions, and you’re gone; you can make the “don’t leave yourself open to the injection of arbitrary html” point in a much less obnoxious fashion.