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🔗 Computing

Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and is called "the first artificial intelligence program". It would eventually prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and find new and more elegant proofs for some.

🔗 Mathematics

A galactic algorithm is one that runs faster than any other algorithm for problems that are sufficiently large, but where "sufficiently large" is so big that the algorithm is never used in practice. Galactic algorithms were so named by Richard Lipton and Ken Regan, as they will never be used on any of the merely terrestrial data sets we find here on Earth.

An example of a galactic algorithm is the fastest known way to multiply two numbers, which is based on a 1729-dimensional Fourier transform. This means it will not reach its stated efficiency until the numbers have at least 2¹⁷²⁹¹² bits (at least 10¹⁰³⁸ digits), which is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. So this algorithm is never used in practice.

Despite the fact that they will never be used, galactic algorithms may still contribute to computer science:

• An algorithm, even if impractical, may show new techniques that may eventually be used to create practical algorithms.
• Computer sizes may catch up to the crossover point, so that a previously impractical algorithm becomes practical.
• An impractical algorithm can still demonstrate that conjectured bounds can be achieved, or alternatively show that conjectured bounds are wrong. As Lipton says "This alone could be important and often is a great reason for finding such algorithms. For example, if tomorrow there were a discovery that showed there is a factoring algorithm with a huge but provably polynomial time bound, that would change our beliefs about factoring. The algorithm might never be used, but would certainly shape the future research into factoring." Similarly, a ${\displaystyle O\left(n^{2^{100}}\right)}$ algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem, although unusable in practice, would settle the P versus NP problem, the most important open problem in computer science and one of the Millennium Prize Problems.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.

Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." This assertion has achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution". Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness".

🔗 Television 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Japan

"The staff ate it later" (Japanese: この後、スタッフが美味しくいただきました, Hepburn: Kono ato, sutaffu ga oishiku itadakimashita; More fully translated as the staff ate and enjoyed it later) is a caption shown on screen in a Japanese TV program to indicate that the food presented during the program was not thrown away after filming. Some have questioned the authenticity of displaying the caption.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

The AI effect is a phenomenon in which advances in artificial intelligence lead to a redefinition of what is considered intelligence, such that capabilities achieved by AI systems are no longer regarded as examples of "real" intelligence.

The concept has been used to describe both a cognitive tendency and a sociotechnical pattern, in which successful AI techniques are reclassified as routine computation or absorbed into other domains.

Historian Pamela McCorduck described this as a recurring feature of AI research, noting that once a problem is solved, it is no longer considered evidence of intelligence. Researcher Rodney Brooks similarly observed that once systems are understood, they are often regarded as "just computation".

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Books

LISP is a university textbook on the Lisp programming language, written by Patrick Henry Winston and Berthold Klaus Paul Horn. It was first published in 1981, and the third edition of the book was released in 1989. The book is intended to introduce the Lisp programming language and its applications.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Books 🔗 Skepticism

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The book was published in three volumes: "National Delusions", "Peculiar Follies", and "Philosophical Delusions". A second edition appeared in 1852, reorganizing the three volumes into two and adding numerous engravings. Mackay was an accomplished teller of stories, though he wrote in a journalistic and somewhat sensational style.

The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics. Present-day writers on economics, such as Michael Lewis and Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles.

In later editions, Mackay added a footnote referencing the Railway Mania of the 1840s as another "popular delusion" which was at least as important as the South Sea Bubble. In the 21st century, the mathematician Andrew Odlyzko pointed out, in a published lecture, that Mackay himself played a role in this economic bubble; as a leader writer in The Glasgow Argus, Mackay wrote on 2 October 1845: "There is no reason whatever to fear a crash".

🔗 Chicago 🔗 Women's sport 🔗 Softball

16-inch softball (sometimes called clincher, mushball, cabbageball, puffball, blooperball, smushball, and Chicago ball) is a variant of softball, but using a larger ball that gradually becomes softer the more the ball is hit, and played with no gloves or mitts on the fielders. It more closely resembles the original game as developed in Chicago in the 19th century by George Hancock, and today it remains most popular in Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Portland, Oregon (where leagues have existed since the 1960s). It also saw some popularity in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early 1980s.

The first set of rules was published in 1937 by the Amateur Softball Association, in the same manual as the rules for fastpitch softball.

🔗 Cognitive science

Shepard tables (also known as the Shepard tabletop illusion) are an optical illusion first published in 1990 as "Turning the Tables," by Stanford psychologist Roger N. Shepard in his book Mind Sights, a collection of illusions that he had created. It is one of the most powerful optical illusions, typically creating length miscalculations of 20–25%.

To quote A Dictionary of Psychology, the Shepard table illusion makes "a pair of identical parallelograms representing the tops of two tables appear radically different" because our eyes decode them according to rules for three-dimensional objects.

This illusion is based on a drawing of two parallelograms, identical aside from a rotation of 90 degrees. When the parallelograms are presented as tabletops, however, we see them as objects in three-dimensional space. One "table" seems long and narrow, with its longer dimension receding into the distance. The other "table" looks almost square, because we interpret its shorter dimension as foreshortening. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences explains the illusion as an effect of "size and shape constancy [which] subjectively expand[s] the near-far dimension along the line of sight." It classifies Shepard tables as an example of a geometrical illusion, in the category of an "illusion of size."

According to Shepard, "any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion." Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder are less susceptible to the Shepard table illusion than typically developing children but are equally susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion.

Shepard had described an earlier, less-powerful version of the illusion in 1981 as the "parallelogram illusion" (Perceptual Organization, pp. 297–9). The illusion can also be constructed using identical trapezoids rather than identical parallelograms.

A variant of the Shepard tabletop illusion was named "Best Illusion of the Year" for 2009.

Christopher W. Tyler, among others, has done scholarly research on the illusion.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Television 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Lenin was a mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a highly influential televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television.

The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel). In the interview, Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became a mushroom himself. Kuryokhin arrived at his conclusion through a long series of logical fallacies and appeals to the authority of various "sources" (such as Carlos Castaneda, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), creating the illusion of a reasoned and plausible logical chain.

The timing of the hoax played a large role in its success, coming as it did during the Glasnost period when the ebbing of censorship in the Soviet Union led to many revelations about the country's history, often presented in sensational form. Furthermore, Soviet television had, up to that point, been regarded by its audience as conservative in style and content. As a result, a large number of Soviet citizens (one estimate puts the number at 11,250,000 audience members) took the deadpan "interview" at face value, in spite of the absurd claims presented.

Sholokhov has said that perhaps the most notable result of the show was an appeal by a group of party members to the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU to clarify the veracity of Kuryokhin's claim. According to Sholokhov, in response to the request one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal cannot be a plant." Modern taxonomy classifies mushrooms as fungi, a separate kingdom from plants.

The incident has served as a watershed moment in Soviet (and Russian) culture and has often been used as proof of the gullibility of the masses.