lohankin

Why do we need artificial intelligence when we have natural intelligence galore everywhere around us?

Human is intelligent, monkey is intelligent, raccoon is intelligent... clearly, it all goes all the way down to bacteria.

Bacteria is intelligent, that's where all other intelligence comes from. For any organism is a colony of bacteria (and/or their cousins - cells).

It has long being my theory that human's "I" comes from a single cell (which is essentially a variant of bacteria) living somewhere in the brain. The rest of the cells just ensure survival of this one and supply it with information.

Bacterial intelligence is a result of billions of years of evolution. At some point, they learned about their DNA and mastered an art of self-modification. Then they learned how to create colonies of specialized instances of themselves. This colonies gradually became more complex. Human is just one of these designs.

A bit better modification of the argument: continue cycle of 5th. After 12 steps, you get (3/2)^12=129.7, which is really close to 128=2^7 (whole number of octaves). That's where 12 steps come from!

And from here, the natural idea follows: what if we take not exactly 3/2 for fifth, but value x such that x^12 is exactly equal to 128? This leads to equal temperament.

Yeah, that might be it! (Not sure that it's true historically though).

Answer to question 1 is simple: good resolution is a semitone up, but scale step down (normally, whole tone). No symmetry here. If you play backwards, you won't get resolutions - it will sound as nonsense.

I'm not learning it from wikipedia. I'm playing for 50+ years. Best resource is Jazz Piano Book by M.Levine. (I read lots of others, but... everything I learned, I learned from this one).

Please read the part of the article starting with "The twelfth root of two may be irrational, but it turns out to almost create several nice ratios". The author excludes minor third from the set of "nice ratios". I referred to this while calling it a voodoo.

Please read wikipedia article on temperament. 7-note scales were "discovered" long before equal temperament was introduced. Equal temperament is a relatively recent invention, initially was very controversial, and remained so for a long time. In other cultures, there's still a variety of scales and temperaments that have nothing to do with 7-note scales at all. (Jazz uses variety of scales, too - some even with 2 semitones in a row). There's only one thing people seem to agree on: the role of fifth (3/2).

Interesting idea indeed. I need to think about it.

Edit after thinking: still, it doesn't explain the number 12 IMO. It could be 17 or something else. Probably, it's a long chain of coincidences at play: Western music settled on 7-note scales long time ago (long before equal temperament was invented), and we should start looking for explanations from here.

Another edit: one of the important coincidences is that number 12 makes possible the existence of diminished scale, which serves as a "universal glue" due to 2 tritones. (There's not enough space here to elaborate, but you probably know what I mean). And maybe tritone itself is one of factors leading to number 12.

No, it's not the same. Current music notation is a result of long evolution, unlike QWERTY. Try to invent usable alternative - then you will appreciate the convenience of current notation.

The explanation of the origin of major scale in the article is pure voodoo. Minor third is not a simple fraction - is that the reason to exclude it from the scale? How do you explain minor scale then? Maybe it should be excluded, too?

Here're my thoughts on the subject.

For some reason no one can explain, Western music settled on a system of 12 tones with equal temperament, This system emerged as a result of long evolution of Western music, and experimentally proven to be very rich in possibilities.

Scales used in Western music (of which jazz is a part of) are built on two simple principles: 1) interval between adjacent notes of the scale is either tone or semitone 2) there's no two semitones in a row.

It's easy to check that all scales that satisfy these 2 rules are:

major scale and its modes (7-note scales; 7 modes)

melodic minor scale and its modes (7-note scales; 7 modes)

diminished scale and its modes (8-note scales; 2 modes)

whole-tone scale (6-note scale, single mode).

(Whole tone scale is not used very often, except by T.Monk)

But even after we "explain" scales, we need to figure out how to use them, what their role is, what the properties of each mode are. There's no hard science behind this, the properties just "emerge", and you have to experience them - theorizing is not of much help, math formulas don't explain anything, just lead to confusion.

In short: you have to play AND think; thinking alone won't help. It's an experimental subject.

Edit: forgot to say: scale is a very useful notion, but in some contexts, it's more convenient to think in terms of triads and interpolation. I know this all sounds hand-wavy, and it is! Unfortunately, without piano, it's impossible to to illustrate what it all means. The subject doesn't easily lend itself to verbalization.

From other news: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Backpropagation

"... attached to it with atomic specificity" - and then what?

They cracked some vulnerability in HN ranking algo. "Go" is a magic word

This seems to be changing. Hardware is trying to move closer to java -by adding support of GC, bounds checks, etc - something that won't help C programs as much.

BTW, where's the guy who replies "What an amazing time to be alive!" to every go post? I'm worried.

The main problem of rust is that it's not implemented in go. The reverse is also true.

No, I meant something different. Let's consider primes, say, between 1 and 1000000. a) Compute the number of cases when p is prime AND p+2 is prime; b) number of cases when p is prime AND p+4 is prime; c) number of cases when p is prime AND p+6 is prime. My claim is that a is approx. equal to b, and c is approx. equal to 2a (which is the same as 2b). You can easily test it (which I did), and it's easy to see why.

Let p-prime. Consider 3 "probabilities": a) p+2 is prime; b) p+4 is prime; c) p+6 is prime. Obviously p(c)=2p(a)=2p(b). Probability of p+30 being prime is even higher.

Possible generalization (example):

23=(7)3+(2);

7=(2)3+(1);

2=(0)3+(2);

0=(0)3+(0);

Take only remainders, and form a vector a=(2 1 2 0) What can be said about components of the vector for the prime next to p? E.g., do i-th components repel, like the 1-st ones?

By taking away the ability of programmer to read and understand the code written by somebody else, or by himself 1 week ago

Noisy, unreadable code, obsessed with ownership, may give rise to whole new classes of errors that otherwise won't be there. Good that someone experimented with building a language around ownership, but for me it all demonstrates that the idea is not viable. I tried to read 10 tutorials already, each leaving me more confused than ever before.

Some serious voodoo science is going on here, with a good chance to become a next fad. Programming is difficult as it is, but apparently not difficult enough for someone's taste.

are there ready-to-use soft synthesizers for specific instruments, e.g. piano?

doesn't work for me on Chrome. What exactly is this emulator supposed to emulate?

Behavior becomes more interesting if you replace (in any formula) time with (time+sin(time)) - and, more generally, with (time+ksin(wtime))

Author makes generalizations based on her own individual experience - the process which she doesn't understand. Rot-learning in music (mentioned as example of good practice) produces millions of classically-trained musicians that don't understand anything about music, and can't play even Christmas song by ear.

Much simpler derivation of Lorentz transform: http://www.jackpenkethman.com/speedoflight/speedoflight.html

There was a recent article on code optimization technique in Safari involving on-the-fly javascript -> LLVM compilation. So the entire chain now will look as C++ -> LLVM -> javascript (asm.js) -> LLVM Things are getting curiouser by the day...

Sorry for the question that might be a bit off-topic. Will we ever have support for sound fonts in a browser? E.g. piano sound fonts? With at least rudimentary support for MIDI (e.g. noteOn, noteOff)?

> To assume humans are not special among all life is to ignore evolution and our dominant position on Earth.

And bacteria didn't evolve during last 2 billion years, right? Whoever downvoted me: you can't have it both ways. Average means average. We are not dominant species on Earth - bacteria is. I can imagine how they would laugh reading about such preposterous idea. No, I'm not kidding. I firmly believe we were created by bacteria by intentional effort, and every cell of our body is a specialized bacteria. One of them (probably, neuron) believes he is "me". But you won't like the idea, hence the objection. Simply NOT LIKE. Nothing to do with science or principles, just arrogance and pride. Please continue downvoting.

What follows immediately from the principle is that humans are not special among species. We are average. Most of the life on Earth is bacteria life. At least half of bacteria must be more intelligent than we are. Instead of pursuing futile AI idea, we need to find a way to cooperate with bacteria, as equal partners, and make use of their talents.