We Are the Robots | Hacker News Reader

We Are the Robots

contraptions.venkateshrao.com

15 pointsjger1517 comments

> the group was German, so I don’t know why the song is in Russian+English

Kraftwerk wrote and released both German and English versions of most of their music. For example, in Germany this song was released as "Die Roboter".

Occasionally they also mix other languages in their lyrics, another example on top of my head is the Numbers song. I assume that it makes them sound more international which helps a lot with the "futuristic" sound.

There is a idea of a robot (on the album "Die Mensch-Maschine", "The Man Machine") as the perfect worker (russian "rabotnik") and also the relationshop to russian suprematism as an art form (see the cover).

The robot as an ideal socialist worker.

Lyrics:

    Я твой слуга (Ja tvoi sluga) (I'm your slave)
    Я твой работник (Ja tvoi rabotnik) (I'm your worker)

Your translation seems much more apt than the one provided in the article. Side note I guess the villain in the Sonic series is 'the perfect worker' by name.

Side note to side note, here's the etymology to villain, "farmhand"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villain#Etymology

side³ note: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churl

Side^4 of a southern hemispheric flavour

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/boor

[ok Bauer can also be perjorative, but im guessing it might require importing to render out the paisani]

Side^5

https://youtu.be/Bie1TnmBc70

>а во втором — «пришелец», «чужеземец», прибывший добровольно или привезённый насильственно из чужих краёв, одинокий человек, не имеющий родственников, близких

[Reflecting on Mario's brother non ironically (mostly) as A Hero of Our Times, I was forcefully reminded of a very model of a modern Ritter-Dichter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lermontov#/media/File:...

]

funny the difference between the classical symmetry of the sat portrait vs the romantic asymmetry* of the self portrait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lermontov#/media/File:... !

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZpHxr0xs0Q

(who is at 2:27 & 2:29? AKAK?)

* Да, да, да, да, да это Кавказ!

Some of them might be the other Kadyrov?

https://ar.culture.ru/en/subject/portret-kadyrova-abdulhamid...

>The word robota means literally 'corvée, serf labor', and figuratively 'drudgery, hard work' in Czech and also (more general) 'work, labor' in many Slavic languages

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/origin-word-robot-rur/

When he's talking about robots machine learning motions beyond simple poses and human created grammars, it reminded me of when Offensive bias was free to maneuver it's ships in ways that would be fatal to its occupants after the Halo rings fired. I guess the same will be true of full autonomous war drones.

There's even a "hyperorganic" Rubik's Cube algorithm: the stereotypical organic algorithm solves the cube layer by layer, only pulling out the fanciest moves to get the last few cubies in place. The hyperorganic algorithm is intensely group theoretic, and starts by allowing any kind of movement, but then cuts it down: from any quarter turns to half turns only, etc. (apparently just at the time no legal moves are left according to the algo, the cube should be solved), and the distinguishing feature is that instead of having clear progress layer-by-layer, it still looks mostly, inscrutably, scrambled until almost the final steps, when it suddenly "crystallises" into a solved cube.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-yTrFDHpbw

I don't understand how this comment relates to the article, or how that video relates to the rest of the comment.

The "hyperorganic" algo behaves like hyperorganicity in TFA:

> Things that are more structurally complex present as statically inscrutable ... Things that are more behaviorally complex present as chaotic even if they’re not.

The video relates to TFA independently of the rest of the comment*, specifically Kraftwerk's lyric « Я твой слуга » [and more distantly to Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)]

* a "lagniappe" is a freebie, a bonus item.

I appreciate your comment and video bonus. The article was free ranging and entertaining and not particularly focused and so when someone asks how your comment and video could relate to the article... Well did they read the whole article?

I'd mused about how we learn solve the cube in a structured approach and that there perhaps could be a better way and in my mind it would be exactly as you described. Have any humans mastered this approach despite it's hyper organic label?

Depends upon whether or not we count (table-assisted) mathematicians as humans.

The description I remembered comes from 5.6.A (p39) of https://maths-people.anu.edu.au/~burkej/cube/singmaster.pdf (ca.1980)

> [Morwen B. Thistlethwaite's] current algorithm requires at most 52 moves, but ... it may be reducible to 45 with a lot of searching. The method involves working through the following sequence of groups:

    G_0 = <L,  R,  F,  B,  U,  D>
    G_1 = <L,  R,  F,  B,  U^2,D^2>
    G_2 = <L,  R,  F^2,B^2,U^2,D^2>
    G_3 = <L^2,R^2,F^2,B^2,U^2,D^2>
    G_4 = {I}

> Once in G_i, one only uses moves in G_i to get into G_i+1 ... The results for stages 3 and 4 require extensive tables comprising about 500 and 172 entries respectively as well as some preliminary reductions. However MBT has told me today that he has reorganized stage 3 and that it no longer requires such extensive tables.

                           S T A G E
    Max # of moves     1    2    3    4   Total
    --------------     -    -    -    -   -----
    Proven             7   13   15   17    52
    Anticipated        7   12   14?  17    50?
    Best possible      7   10?  13?  15?   45?

compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rkp29f7QTU&t=24s

EDIT: way more at https://www.jaapsch.net/puzzles/thistle.htm