lyle_nel

I don't disagree with you on any particular point. However, who do you suppose we trust to decide what is a software implemented weapon and what is not? Of course there are very clear black and white examples, but the in between is where we should be concerned. Consider the USA stance on export of encryption as a historical example of where it can go terribly wrong.

Indeed, I did not take all of the above mentioned things into account.

Emissions of CO2 on its own does not necessarily imply that there is a carbon footprint.

Besides the carbon footprint of transporting food, the food we consume is carbon neutral since the carbon in the food comes from the atmosphere. Therefore the CO2 gas we expel is mostly carbon neutral.

Cars are a different story since their carbon originates from ancient reserves(oil and coal) that has long since been removed from the carbon cycle. This carbon is now reintroduced to the carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint.

Put differently, if our food we eat consisted of carbon extracted from oil or coal, then we would be adding CO2 to the current carbon cycle, thus leading to a positive carbon footprint. However this is not true.

I don't see them claiming to have found the missing link. In any regard, biologists are unlikely to use the term 'missing link' since it implies evolution is discontinuous, which is a common mistake the layman makes.

I have a small cluster of machines that I run experiments on. GNU parallel makes the dispatch of jobs on remote machines very easy.

In addition, I often use it to search for sequences by running grep in parallel. For example

$ parallel 'grep {1} -f haystack.txt' :::: many_needles.txt

Where {1} is a single line in many_needles.txt

Could someone explain to me how this is not a correlation implies causation fallacy?

I don't where a causal relation is demonstrated.

Although not this particular face recognition. I managed to fool face recognition passwords in the past with a simple photograph of the person. As you would expect it works perfectly fine.

I am not sure that this constitutes a proof. It seems induction would be required to show that the property holds.

Most world class athletes are already genetically superior by the measure of athleticism. Even though these favourable mutations or inherited traits have not been engineered, they still exist and it does enhance the athlete's performance.

London does it. http://abstracts.aetransport.org/paper/index/id/2041/confid/... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4oeMB0tYII

The video is a bit cheesy, but it gets the point across.

This seems relevant to your questions. Among other things, it discusses which crops are best suited for salinated soil as well as improving conditions for crops in salinated soil using potasium fertilisers. Also relevant to your question, it discusses desalination strategies. http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5871e/x5871e04.htm

This might be of interest to your temperature question. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18592898

"All practical purposes" for a discovery is not always immediately apparent.

Write me a programs that could write me a program that could write Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician ... and so on and so forth.

The Linux Documentation Project has this to say about flushing of buffer cache: "In traditional UNIX systems, there is a program called update running in the background which does a sync every 30 seconds, so it is usually not necessary to use sync. Linux has an additional daemon, bdflush, which does a more imperfect sync more frequently to avoid the sudden freeze due to heavy disk I/O that sync sometimes causes."

How do you do the shutdown on USB change? I would like to try that out.

I would imagine, depending on how it is done, that the malicious usb device might get a few keystrokes in before the system is completely down.

What sort of supporting infrastructure is required to reliably store it for a long time? Infrastructure such as cooling, dessication and warehousing.

Ah is see. Although I would not put it past people to protest nuclear fusion, it would be strange indeed, since nuclear fusion does not produce the same kind of radioactive waste(shorter half-life) as alternative nuclear technologies.

Something related, vlc has a mode where one can play movies as ascii art. It even works through a terminal.

By just looking at the title and before reading the article, I though they meant that they are checking for illegal strings that are illegal to transmit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

What political problems might that be?

This just in ... one vehicle on the road hit another vehicle on the road.

I would not put it in the category of brute-force since it really does have all the properties of a genetic algorithm. But yes it does succeed to a greater extent at cracking passwords that are intractable(long/complex) with a brute-force approach.

I really appreciate your enthusiasm. It is one of the core concepts and passwords seemed to be a good way to explore my FIFO idea in a practical manner. It might well have been done before, but from preliminary searches I could not find anything on it(not that I searched really hard). Due to its simplicity, I suspect it will lend itself to some pretty efficient implementations.

I would be interested to hear what other kinds of problems you see it being used for.

The part about not deleting organisms, is a small caveat that I omitted in most of the discussion since it makes the algorithm just a bit harder to understand. To clarify that point, since you asked, the organisms can be popped from the front of the container if we provide a maximum population size. If we do not provide a maximum population size, we do not delete the organisms. Older organisms do however lie dormant due to the non-uniform distribution, thereby providing the same advantage as selection while preserving a greater degree of genetic diversity. If there is anything else that is not clear to you then I am open to any questions you might have. I will help where I can to clarify things.

With regard to the fitness function, I think I agree with you that checking if the offspring matches a password will fall in the category of a fitness function albeit a binary one. I will update my description to include that, thanks.

With regard to if it is useful, I will let it stand or fall on its own merits. If people are going to use it to find bad passwords, then I would say yes it is. It might be pertinent to mention that I am interested in genetic algorithms in general and this is a good practical way of exploring my own theoretical ideas.

Yes, "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really is a password. Have a look at the rock_you list of passwords and sort them by length. There are some extremely long but silly passwords in there.

I see what you are saying. To some extent this is already true ,since high frequency ngrams(substrings) already dominate the gene-pool if they happen to facilitate the production of a large amount viable offspring. That is why you would see swearwords with high frequency since that is what many people use for passwords(in the case of the myspace list).

Sure I'll run some tests for you.

I ran 2 experiments each lasting 120 seconds.

For the diceware list as a seed population it finds 4570 passwords. The 6 longest ones are:

11 michelle420

11 karen123456

11 iloveyouu16

11 iloveyou789

11 iloveyou234

11 iloveyou191

For the top 2000 ngrams from the rock_you list(which is the current list used) it finds 5317 passwords. The top 6 longest passwords are:

14 fuckyouhackers

13 fuckyouhahaha

11 sexylove889

11 scooter1234

11 princess123

11 iloveyouu16

I appreciate it.

Yes it is completely useless against random strings as one would expect, but with word salad it not completely useless. For example, it can find words like "tequieromuchogerald" and "paulaalejandrailove" easily enough. I haven't fully explored its ability to do this, but I suspect starting with a dictionary of words instead of a random population might aid it in finding XKCD like random passwords. In general I don't disagree though, passphrases if chosen correctly can be completely intractable to a password cracker.

I understand, I tested it for you and my suspicions where right. The simulation simply stalls early on. Nothing interesting happens after that.