GeoGuessr is also not a “solved problem” in the sense that if you give the model a photo of an outdoor location that is not covered by Google Street View, then it will just make an educated guess which might still be many kilometers away.
I'm not ashamed to say that for about 6 months I played Geogessr thinking that you could not move around, but only look around... and I did pretty good in my mind.
Much of the interior of Western Australia (an area 3x the size of Texas) can be divided into very few cells which essentially look near identical in all directions, coupled with few roads for the area and not much in the way of uploaded snaps coverage.
There's a lot of flat lands with spinifex in certain areas (easily a couple of United Kingdoms in size) and even a touch of mesa won't help narrow a location down from the general are as there are many of those with identical edge profiles.
But sure "Pilbara", "Kimberley", "Wheatbelt" can be geo guessed .. it's a real challenge to narrow down (I spent some time doing wet film photogrammetry prior to sheperding in WGS84 differential GPS locating and digital film and multi spectral geophysical aquisition).
No so hard if there's a few relatively unique man made features.
Because seem like someone who might have an interesting answer:
A GeoGuessr player, GeoWizard, has done a few “straight line challenges”, where he attempts to walk across a country in as straight a line as possible, usually planning beforehand with Google Earth and PostGIS. This got me thinking of what could fairly be thought of as “crossing”, since obviously you couldn’t describe e.g. walking from one side of Florida to the other as “crossing the USA”.
My best thought was to set the ending point of the line by following the border of the country in each direction til they met on the other side. To avoid the fractal coastline problem, use the challenger’s stride length as the unit of measure for the border.
But perhaps there is a better, more rigorous way of defining the opposite point on the edge of an arbitrary polygon.
As an abstract geometric problem the greatest width of an abstract polygon in a Euclidean 2D plane is found be looking at the greatest distance between all pairs of parallel lines that have been pulled together to clamp the polygon. The maximal diameter as opposed to the minimal waist.
Some might then say that "crossing" that polygon is to travel that longest line across the greatest width.
This simplistically avoids the question of concave polygons, complex polgons with exclusions (the Vatican state is removed from the Italian contry bounds), polgon collections (the nation of Fiji has many islands and can be tricky to traverse on foot .. not forgetting that perhaps the longest diameter might be from one island to another with no other islands between).
There's also the challenge of parallel lines on a 2D 'spherical' manifold, the almost spherical abstract ellipsoid of earth (or very non ellipsoidal Geoid if we take a constant gravitation value as the surface). On such manifolds lines are Great Circles (more or less) and always intersect.
Still, lets just say you're looking for the longest walkable(?) great circle path across a country that might go outside that country and perhaps is best travelled by a crop duster at 80m ground clearance to avoid getting feet wet.
The challenge itself takes some posing.
Meanwhile, less abstractly, I do like a jolly that "crosses a country" in a manner accepted by a (Wo)Man on a Clapham omnibus.
A far more apropos comparison would be the internal combustion engine and the horse, in a military context. Though sticking with steam engines, military logistics advantaged over a wagon caravan.
The question here isn't a casual guessing game, but threat models (as directly addressed in TFA), and general informational hygiene.
> Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere.
No, that is a seriously weird and imaginary perversion that you've invented, unless you have some citation to a doctrine. Christians do not consider body organs as "devices" nor do our churches teach doctrine on "external computers", if you refer to the Holy Trinity as such? Are you thinking of Latter-Day Saints mythology, or Scientology?
Your description is quite reductive in many aspects, including temporality and misuse of technical nomenclature. Thanks for telling religious people what we think and claim, though, and thanks for the amazing overgeneralized blanket dismissal.
In fact, humans used to be called "Computers" in terms of their job roles, that is, a human in an office was given math/physics problems to solve, and they'd use tools such as slide rule, paper and pencil to "compute" those problems and solve them.
There was more than one example of a fantasy "panopticon" by which a central observer or observers could watch everything going on, for example in a prison facility, and those observers could report findings to human computers, who would process the data and submit it up to the authorities, for meta-analysis and taking action on new developments or trends.
Uh okay but let us not be reductive, because again you are confusing physicality and temporal space with spiritual reality, which is nuanced. A Christian would never say that “the soul [never] exists inside the body” because what do you mean by “inside”? That begs the question. Look up hylomorphism:
While the soul, in death, can indeed exist apart from the body, even after the destruction of the physical human body, the soul is immortal, and lives on, in anticipation of its reuniting with that body. Whether in Heaven or Hell, the soul and body shall be reunited.
Even if the body is “destroyed” by physical means, that is a subjective judgement by human senses, and that glorified body will be reconstituted by Almighty God for everlasting unity with the soul.
> emergent property of the brain
Unfortunately, even this scientific definition is reductive. It ignores the theology of the Soul as an animating principle of everything that is created. Animals have souls [thus their name derived from “anima”]; rocks and stones have souls; trees have souls rivers have souls: everything that we can detect in this world, and every invisible thing, possesses a soul.
The difference with human souls regards their essence and immortality. But material souls are likewise considered souls in orthodox theology, and this should be considered by scientists.
Even in an “eternal death” in Hell, the body and the soul will be reunited there for eternal torture, body and soul.
inside is a reference to a physical property, the brain is an organ that exists inside the body, we can discern which part of the body is brain and which is not, the soul evidently has never been so identified, although there have been conjectures throughout history that various body parts were the seat of the soul.
So the Internet is basically a series of tubes, and http packets are like mustard and ketchup that you pop into the tube, and it zooms along with air-pressure determined by the Chinese government. and then your bank puts dollar bills into the tubes on the Internet, and those tubes connect to vaults and safes underground, and that is how money gets into your account. Money doesn't come out of your account; it's just converted into dogecoin and then every User Interface automatically converts Dogecoin figures into USD before you can read it.
Also your computer is like a car. Your car works because there's a hamster or three in there and they keep them well-fed. Your computer also has a hamster, or a guinea pig sometimes. And your computer sends http packets over next door by means of carrier pigeons, or sometimes by semaphore.
Also men enjoy action-adventure films. Men enjoy films with lots of shooting. All men enjoy films with loud noises and special effects. Men like rock music with distorted guitars and loud drums. Men like loud soundsin general; that's why men are soldiers because we can blow stuff up and we listen to it.
Not to put words in the parent’s mouth, but I think they were pointing to the idea of the soul or consciousness, concepts that mean very different things in religious vs. scientific contexts. One sees it as an immaterial essence; the other as an emergent property of the brain.
I don’t think “organic computer” is a good way to think of a brain. The fact that human brains + some scratch paper can implement any Turing-complete model of computation is very interesting. But that’s not true of chimpanzee brains or orca brains or crow brains, all of which belong to intelligent, thinking animals.
Going the other way, it’s not clear that a Turing-complete model of computation can tractably implement (say) crow cognition. Turing machines can solve arbitrary systems of Schrödinger equations, so theoretically we could simulate every atom in a crow’s body and get an AI crow[1]. But that’s obviously intractable for any known physical computer, and would remain intractable even if we moved to proteins rather than atoms. So are there higher-order “primitives” of crow cognition that can be implemented on a Turing machine? Or is the problem akin to integration, where neat “symbolic” solutions are impossible for most brains, and only “numeric” approaches work?
[1] This is also true for humans: even if you take a loopy quantum consciousness approach, AGI is theoretically possible. Sometimes you see people arguing against AGI on the grounds of Gödel-incompleteness, but this is a mystical nonsense understanding of what Gödel actually proved.
GeoGuessr is also not a “solved problem” in the sense that if you give the model a photo of an outdoor location that is not covered by Google Street View, then it will just make an educated guess which might still be many kilometers away.
I'm not ashamed to say that for about 6 months I played Geogessr thinking that you could not move around, but only look around... and I did pretty good in my mind.
Thats the only legit way to play IMO.
No moving, no panning, and no zooming is too hard. Moving is too boring. Pan and zoom is just the right balance.
Much of the interior of Western Australia (an area 3x the size of Texas) can be divided into very few cells which essentially look near identical in all directions, coupled with few roads for the area and not much in the way of uploaded snaps coverage.
There's a lot of flat lands with spinifex in certain areas (easily a couple of United Kingdoms in size) and even a touch of mesa won't help narrow a location down from the general are as there are many of those with identical edge profiles.
But sure "Pilbara", "Kimberley", "Wheatbelt" can be geo guessed .. it's a real challenge to narrow down (I spent some time doing wet film photogrammetry prior to sheperding in WGS84 differential GPS locating and digital film and multi spectral geophysical aquisition).
No so hard if there's a few relatively unique man made features.
Because seem like someone who might have an interesting answer:
A GeoGuessr player, GeoWizard, has done a few “straight line challenges”, where he attempts to walk across a country in as straight a line as possible, usually planning beforehand with Google Earth and PostGIS. This got me thinking of what could fairly be thought of as “crossing”, since obviously you couldn’t describe e.g. walking from one side of Florida to the other as “crossing the USA”.
My best thought was to set the ending point of the line by following the border of the country in each direction til they met on the other side. To avoid the fractal coastline problem, use the challenger’s stride length as the unit of measure for the border.
But perhaps there is a better, more rigorous way of defining the opposite point on the edge of an arbitrary polygon.
As an abstract geometric problem the greatest width of an abstract polygon in a Euclidean 2D plane is found be looking at the greatest distance between all pairs of parallel lines that have been pulled together to clamp the polygon. The maximal diameter as opposed to the minimal waist.
Some might then say that "crossing" that polygon is to travel that longest line across the greatest width.
This simplistically avoids the question of concave polygons, complex polgons with exclusions (the Vatican state is removed from the Italian contry bounds), polgon collections (the nation of Fiji has many islands and can be tricky to traverse on foot .. not forgetting that perhaps the longest diameter might be from one island to another with no other islands between).
There's also the challenge of parallel lines on a 2D 'spherical' manifold, the almost spherical abstract ellipsoid of earth (or very non ellipsoidal Geoid if we take a constant gravitation value as the surface). On such manifolds lines are Great Circles (more or less) and always intersect.
Still, lets just say you're looking for the longest walkable(?) great circle path across a country that might go outside that country and perhaps is best travelled by a crop duster at 80m ground clearance to avoid getting feet wet.
The challenge itself takes some posing.
Meanwhile, less abstractly, I do like a jolly that "crosses a country" in a manner accepted by a (Wo)Man on a Clapham omnibus.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robyn_Davidson only went "half way", but that was accepted as an epic crossing. https://thelongridersguild.com/stories/stef-gebbie.htm "only" crossed most of the E-W distance across the lower portion of the country, while https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-03/french-woman-conquers... travelled North - South, the long bit, but not quite coast to coast ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicentennial_National_Trail ).
A far more apropos comparison would be the internal combustion engine and the horse, in a military context. Though sticking with steam engines, military logistics advantaged over a wagon caravan.
The question here isn't a casual guessing game, but threat models (as directly addressed in TFA), and general informational hygiene.
I fail to see the drastic change here. AI was used for this in the past as well. The difference is far from that between steam and combustion engines.
Just like how chess engines ended competitive chess as people were predicting at the time.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
Isn’t a human brain an organic computer? I find the human brain very interesting. The most interesting thing I know of in the universe.
Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere.
Clearly one's interpretation is a function of the paradigm one exists in.
Thin client theory?
It's more of a hypothesis in this case. And some are clearly thicker than others. But that's details.
> Religious people claim it's merely a communication device, and the computer is elsewhere.
No, that is a seriously weird and imaginary perversion that you've invented, unless you have some citation to a doctrine. Christians do not consider body organs as "devices" nor do our churches teach doctrine on "external computers", if you refer to the Holy Trinity as such? Are you thinking of Latter-Day Saints mythology, or Scientology?
Your description is quite reductive in many aspects, including temporality and misuse of technical nomenclature. Thanks for telling religious people what we think and claim, though, and thanks for the amazing overgeneralized blanket dismissal.
In fact, humans used to be called "Computers" in terms of their job roles, that is, a human in an office was given math/physics problems to solve, and they'd use tools such as slide rule, paper and pencil to "compute" those problems and solve them.
There was more than one example of a fantasy "panopticon" by which a central observer or observers could watch everything going on, for example in a prison facility, and those observers could report findings to human computers, who would process the data and submit it up to the authorities, for meta-analysis and taking action on new developments or trends.
I believe they are referring to the soul. The soul according to doctrine does not exist inside the body for it can exist after the body's destruction.
> does not exist inside the body
Uh okay but let us not be reductive, because again you are confusing physicality and temporal space with spiritual reality, which is nuanced. A Christian would never say that “the soul [never] exists inside the body” because what do you mean by “inside”? That begs the question. Look up hylomorphism:
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism
While the soul, in death, can indeed exist apart from the body, even after the destruction of the physical human body, the soul is immortal, and lives on, in anticipation of its reuniting with that body. Whether in Heaven or Hell, the soul and body shall be reunited.
Even if the body is “destroyed” by physical means, that is a subjective judgement by human senses, and that glorified body will be reconstituted by Almighty God for everlasting unity with the soul.
> emergent property of the brain
Unfortunately, even this scientific definition is reductive. It ignores the theology of the Soul as an animating principle of everything that is created. Animals have souls [thus their name derived from “anima”]; rocks and stones have souls; trees have souls rivers have souls: everything that we can detect in this world, and every invisible thing, possesses a soul.
The difference with human souls regards their essence and immortality. But material souls are likewise considered souls in orthodox theology, and this should be considered by scientists.
Even in an “eternal death” in Hell, the body and the soul will be reunited there for eternal torture, body and soul.
inside is a reference to a physical property, the brain is an organ that exists inside the body, we can discern which part of the body is brain and which is not, the soul evidently has never been so identified, although there have been conjectures throughout history that various body parts were the seat of the soul.
Lets fast forward this conversation to its conclusion of “its open to interpretation”
and Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on religion or the fungible and unquantifiable soul concept
Thank you for this comment. You have expressed this far more eloquently and magnanimously this I would have.
So the Internet is basically a series of tubes, and http packets are like mustard and ketchup that you pop into the tube, and it zooms along with air-pressure determined by the Chinese government. and then your bank puts dollar bills into the tubes on the Internet, and those tubes connect to vaults and safes underground, and that is how money gets into your account. Money doesn't come out of your account; it's just converted into dogecoin and then every User Interface automatically converts Dogecoin figures into USD before you can read it.
Also your computer is like a car. Your car works because there's a hamster or three in there and they keep them well-fed. Your computer also has a hamster, or a guinea pig sometimes. And your computer sends http packets over next door by means of carrier pigeons, or sometimes by semaphore.
Also men enjoy action-adventure films. Men enjoy films with lots of shooting. All men enjoy films with loud noises and special effects. Men like rock music with distorted guitars and loud drums. Men like loud soundsin general; that's why men are soldiers because we can blow stuff up and we listen to it.
sure - and
"The Unicorn is most particular in its affections and has a fondness for beautiful virgins..."
https://medium.com/luminasticity/meditation-on-the-unicorn-d...
Not to put words in the parent’s mouth, but I think they were pointing to the idea of the soul or consciousness, concepts that mean very different things in religious vs. scientific contexts. One sees it as an immaterial essence; the other as an emergent property of the brain.
I don’t think “organic computer” is a good way to think of a brain. The fact that human brains + some scratch paper can implement any Turing-complete model of computation is very interesting. But that’s not true of chimpanzee brains or orca brains or crow brains, all of which belong to intelligent, thinking animals.
Going the other way, it’s not clear that a Turing-complete model of computation can tractably implement (say) crow cognition. Turing machines can solve arbitrary systems of Schrödinger equations, so theoretically we could simulate every atom in a crow’s body and get an AI crow[1]. But that’s obviously intractable for any known physical computer, and would remain intractable even if we moved to proteins rather than atoms. So are there higher-order “primitives” of crow cognition that can be implemented on a Turing machine? Or is the problem akin to integration, where neat “symbolic” solutions are impossible for most brains, and only “numeric” approaches work?
[1] This is also true for humans: even if you take a loopy quantum consciousness approach, AGI is theoretically possible. Sometimes you see people arguing against AGI on the grounds of Gödel-incompleteness, but this is a mystical nonsense understanding of what Gödel actually proved.
I think growing a baby from nothing is pretty nifty, but brains are up there too.
A brain that replicates itself is indeed nifty!
Normally I dislike these quips for HN; I hate that I love this one.