Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, & Futures

I will be presenting a talk on Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, & Futures at the 2020 Capclave (virtual). That’s this coming Sunday from 1:30 to 2:25. Capclave is running Saturday & Sunday.

Virtual, yes, but they have rather a good line up of former guests of honor, kaffleklatsches, talks, panels, and so on. I’m looking forward. As to my talk:

Artificial Intelligence: Past, Present, Futures (Ends at: 2:25 pm)
Participants: John Ashmead (M)
From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from fighting the Coronavirus to flying Killer Drones, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? risks? and how should we manage AI going forwards?

The Elephant Versus the Bug

Depending on the project, debugging can take 50 to 90% of development time. But it usually gets less than 10% of the press. PostgreSQL has great tools for debugging, but they are most effective when deployed as part of an overall strategy.

Ten days from now I’m doing a webinar on how best to do this. That’s 1pm, July 29th, 2020. You can register here.

It’s a fun talk: I focus on the key ideas, give a few good examples, have a quick quiz “There are three bugs on this slide: you have the next two slides to find them!” and then finish with some of my favorite debugging references: selected as particularly readable & practical.

[Update: the talk was given as planned. Thanks to Lindsay Hooper for great support! Video is online. And the audience of invisible Zoomers upped the number of bugs on the quiz slide from three to five!]

Last time I did this talk, my favorite piece of feedback was from Bruce Momjian, a founder of PostgreSQL and a member of the core team: Bruce said there was stuff he knew but hadn’t heard put into words, and stuff he just hadn’t seen yet.

And that’s how I hope this will be for you!

We will look at strategies for debugging PostgreSQL: how to find bugs, how to fix them, and how to keep them from happening in the first place.

We’ll look at root causes, technical tricks, and scientific strategies, and why — even if you can’t always write perfect code — it is usually a good idea to try.

We’ll hear from Bjarne Stroustrup, Sherlock Holmes, Kernighan and Ritchie, Pogo, & the experts of the PostgreSQL community.

Goal: less time debugging, more time building great tools and apps that stay up & get the job done.

If you can’t wait or just can’t make it, I have the latest version here: PDF, KeyNote, and PowerPoint, name your poison.

Update

Talk went off smoothly, about 65 or 70 attendees. The invisible Zoomers found two more bugs on the “quiz” slide! The event organizer, Lindsay Hooper of the PostgreSQL conference, did a great job setting every thing up, watching over a dry run, and giving feedback during. And she recorded and edited the webinar, so if you are interested in see the video “live”, herewith.

Time dispersion in time-of-arrival measurements

I will be presenting a paper “Time dispersion in time-of-arrival measurements” at the International Assocation for Relativistic Dynamics this coming Wednesday (6/3/2010). The conference was originally scheduled to be held in Prague but has been moved online because of COVID-19. It may still be held as a physical conference as well, we will see.

My own paper is a follow up to my “Time dispersion in quantum mechanics“, published last year as part of the Institute of Physics Conference Series. That took the hypothesis: the quantum wave function should extend in time as it does in space & worked out the implications. The new paper is about experimental tests of the hypothesis: how would we determine if this hypothesis is true. Since it is real science however I turned the question around & made it “how do we prove that the wave function does not extend in time”.

In the new paper I shift focus to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (HUP), specifically to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in time and energy. Einstein & Bohr both held it was true, in fact essential if quantum mechanics was to be consistent with relativity. Bohr’s demonstration that it was was the end of Einstein’s direct attempts to falsify quantum mechanics.

Note that the formulation “the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to time/energy as it does to space/momentum” is loosely equivalent to “the wave function extends in time as it does in space”. If the wave function extends in time, then we would get the HUP in time/energy as a side-effect. And the most direct tests of the wave function extending in time are really tests of the HUP in time/energy.

The test I primarily focus on is that if the wave function extends in time all measurements in the time dimension would be just a bit fuzzier. In particular, if you are measuring when a particle is detected, if you are measuring the time-of-arrival, then if the wave function is extended in time you expect to see it both sooner & later than otherwise expected.

The advantage of this as a test is that the additional fuzziness if present at all must be present everywhen. Any time-varying experimental setup can potentially serve as a test.

The main problem — somewhat to my surprise — was that we really don’t know how to predict the time-of-arrival in standard quantum mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics with time in play as well! I’m trying to make a pincer attack on time: left jaw — standard quantum mechanics (SQM), right jaw — quantum mechanics with time (TQM). I was focused on the right jaw, but found that actually it was the left jaw that was weak. So I had to backtrack & deal with this problem. Interesting. And this turned out to be the single trickiest bit in the paper.

After getting the left jaw in better shape, good enough to take a punch anyway, I did a recap of TQM. This was probably the 2nd trickiest bit of the paper: how do you describe a hypothesis that took over a hundred pages and nearly five hundred equations to work out in a just a few pages? I found the core ideas coming a bit clearer in my own head at least. That’s gotta be worth something.

Then the payoff bit, the actual tests, is only the last quarter of the paper. And after working out how the additional fuzziness in time plays out, I got to my favorite test: the single slit in time. This is the single cleanest test of the idea. Not an easy experiment however.

Really the best part of tests of TQM is that if it is proved true, great. But if it proved false it will be taking down one or two of its neighbors with it. TQM is built by applying the quantum rules to relativity (or applying relativity to the quantum rules). If it is false, one (or both) of those two has a problem. And that in turn means there are really no null experiments.

And if I know my experimentalists, there is nothing they like more than proving a bunch of theorists wrong. If I have setup the arguments correctly — we’ll see — then they are sure to break something. As the well-known quantum experimentalist Nicholas Gisin said to me a long time ago (I paraphrase, it was quite a long time ago) “Look, I don’t care what your theory of time is. Just give me something I can prove wrong!”

Physical Balticon Cancelled — Virtual Balticon on

Due to the Covid-19, the physical 2020 Baltimore Science Fiction Convention — Balticon — has been cancelled.

The organizers, nothing if not game, are putting on a virtual Balticon. Looks pretty good. And free (tho they ask for a donation to a GoFundMe for new writers and to help Baltimore’s disadvantaged youth).

Unfortunately I had already made other commitments, after the physical Balticon was cancelled and before I knew it was being replaced by a virtual one, so will not be able to speak at the virtual event.

But I hope to catch a number of the events this coming Memorial Day weekend and hope you will be able to do so as well.

The Past, Present, and Futures of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is in the news, no question. The last few science fiction conventions I’ve been at, panels on AI have been getting filled rooms & lots of questions. It’s all over the news as well. And it’s a subject I find interesting: and — being a professional programmer — an area where I may be able to contribute, perhaps looking at the use of AI techniques to generate physics experiments.

What is meant by AI is one problem: is it anything that uses AI techniques, as Neural Nets or Genetic Algorithms? Or do you need to be pointing in the direction of some kind of sentience for it to be true AI? Will it replace us? Should it? The hype/content ratio sometimes hits near Trumpian levels.

So good subject for a talk. But what line of attack to take? Last week I caught a great talk at DataPhilly on the use of AI for sports betting (and other things). The formal title was:

Practical Scaling: How to Use Simple Tools to Create and Implement Complex Modeling Systems — James Piette

For “complex modeling systems” think practical AI. My personal favorite of his slides cited three principles:

• Moravec’s Paradox: AI and humans are good at opposite things. So use AI for what it is good at (crunching) and let the humans do what they are good at (intuiting).
• Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 rule. 20% of the work gets you 80% of the value, so focus on the high value parts of the problem.
• The Scientific method: observe, hypothesize, test, repeat. This works for science — and it works for software debugging (another favorite topic of mine), startups, and AI.

And this strikes me as the kind of no-nonsense, practical, even scientific approach that a subject like AI needs. (Thanks James!) So for my 2020 SF Convention talk:

The Past, Present, and Futures of Artificial Intelligence. — From Oz’s Tik-Tok to the Mechanical Turk, from Neural Nets & Genetic Algorithms to Chess & StarCraft, from Medical Diagnosis to Robot Frogs, from Facial Recognition to Fakes, Deep Fakes, & Anti-Fakes, AI is everywhere today. How did it start? What do we mean by AI? What are the basic AI techniques? How is it being used? What are the benefits? risks? and how should we manage AI going forwards?

Be seeing you:

• Balticon May 23rd, 2020
• Capclave October 17th, 2020
• Philcon November 9th, 2020

Philcon 2019 — Precap

The Philcon 2019 schedule is up. I’m doing my Time Dispersion in Quantum Mechanics talk — the tightrope walker is one of the slides, gives you a sense of the style of the whole, balancing ideas against math, time against space, classical against quantum, … — and four panels, all interesting. The con runs from Friday 11/8/2019 through Sunday 11/10. Details:

LOOKING FOR LIFE IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Fri 8:00 pm. John Ashmead (mod), Earl Bennett, Dr. H. Paul Shuch, John Skylar. What’s the latest evidence that we’ve found? Where are the best places to look?

TIME DISPERSION IN QUANTUM MECHANICS

Sat. 4:00 PM. John Ashmead. We know from quantum mechanics that space is fuzzy- that particles don’t have a well-defined position in space — and we know from special relativity that time and space are interchangeable. So shouldn’t time be fuzzy as well? Thanks to recent technical advances in measurements at “short times” we can now put this to the test. Discuss!

THE BLURRY LINE BETWEEN CUTTING EDGE AND PSEUDOSCIENCE

Sat 5:00PM. John Ashmead (mod), Charlie Robertson, Rebecca Robare, Dr. H. Paul Shuch, Carl Fink, Lawrence Kramer. Niels Bohr famously said, “Your theory is crazy but it’s not crazy enough to be true”. How do we keep an open mind but not one so open that our brains fall out? A look at how to tell strange-yet-true science from weapons grade balonium.

THE EVOLUTION OF MARS

Sat 7:00 PM Darrell Schweitzer (mod), John Ashmead, Tom Purdom, James L. Cambias, Earl Bennett. How have depictions of Mars changed in SF from the imaginings of Burroughs and Bradbury to the Mars we know now from studying its surface?

DYSTOPIA NOW

Sat 9:00 PM Hildy Silverman (mod), John Ashmead, Karen Heuler, B. Lana Guggenheim. No one should be surprised that climate change, technological over-reach, and political anxieties have translated themselves into a bumper crop of contemporary dystopian fiction. How coherent are their messages — and how good are the stories? Is there a way to make such a work more than a cautionary tale about the present era’s problems?

Capclave 2019 — Recap

Had a great time at Capclave. It’s one of the smaller cons — slightly north of 300 people — and doesn’t have some of the usual con stuff like an art show or cosplay. But for precisely those reasons, you tend to have more of those repeated one-on-one conversations that, for me, are the real life of a con.

Had a good time at the five panels I was on. All were energetic & held the audience.

Technospeed — is technology moving too far too fast? — was the first (Friday evening), with the smallest audience. It was hard to know what to do with the subject, a tad too broad I suspect. Much of the discussion focused on AI, a better subject. (I may take AI that for my big talk next year.) Not a bad panel, with that said: we had a lot of fun with Kurzweil’s Singularity and related topics.

My next two panels (both Saturday), The Coming Civil War & Failed SF Predictions, both had Tom Doyle as moderator. He did a great job, particularly with the Coming Civil War, where he asked the assembled panelists how they would treat present various scenarios from a fictional point of view. How would you tell the story of cities war with the country side? and so on. Kept the conversation from degenerating into what they thought of the [insert-derogatory-noun]-in-chief.

I had a bit of fun with Failed SF Predictions, bringing in some books of pulp age cover art: jet packs, menacing octopi, orbiting cities, threatening robots, giant computers, and attacking space fleets, … The role of women in SF in the days of the pulps is nothing like what it is in the real world today; a lot of the Failed SF Predictions chosen were about gender issues. Not even the first wave of feminist SF writers — LeGuin, Joan Vinge, Joanna Russ, … — fully anticipated how much the field would evolve.

Sunday my first panel was on Secrets of the Dinosaurs. The other three panelists were the GOH Robert Sawyer (author of the Far-Seer trilogy of dinosaur novels), Michael Brett-Surman (Collections Manager of the National Dinosaur Collection at the Smithsonian and co-author/editor of several dinosaur books with Dr. Thomas R. Holtz) and Dr. Thomas R. Holtz (who is the T. Rex of T. Rex scholarship). Being on a dino panel with these three was like being a small mammal in the Jurassic. The primary objective is to not get underfoot and squashed. All three are immensely polite & courteous individuals, who would never think to squash a small mammal who wandered on to the planet panel. I took advantage — as the designated amateur — to ask about dino parental care, how did hadrosaurs defend themselves against a T. Rex (rather easily — those tails are not just ornamental!), and my final q: if dinosaurs lived in groups & relied on visual & auditory display, did they have barn-dances?

My final panel was Exoplanets. My fellow panelists (Inge Heyer & Edward Lerner) were both expert & I had done a fair amount of swotting, so we had a good time going over rogue planets between the stars, planets made of diamond, life within the hidden seas, and various methods of finding new exoplanets — the total of confirmed exoplanets is 4000 & counting!

And my Time Dispersion in Quantum Mechanics talk went well (Saturday afternoon). I had a couple of practice run-thrus with a “volunteer” audience, which left it leaner, shorter, and easier to follow. Same content, but no math (except E=mc-squared, which is so familiar it doesn’t count). Talk went well, good audience and great questions: some I answered there, some I dealt with in the hall discussions, and one or two I had to admit “that’s one for the experimentalists!”

And my thanks to Brent Warner of NASA, who corrected — with great politeness — a couple of soft spots in the presentation. I will incorporate into the next iteration, in two weeks as it happens at Philcon.

And the next morning I got what I think is the best compliment I have ever received: the father of a 10th grader said his daughter was so inspired by my talk she is thinking of going into physics & quantum mechanics. “Here’s my email; tell her to feel free to follow up!” Yes!

Capclave 2019 — Talks & Panels

I’m appearing at Capclave this year (October 18th thru 20th), doing my talk on Time Dispersion in Quantum Mechanics (3pm on Saturday the 19th) and five panels, all great topics: Technospeed, Coming Civil War, Failure of SF Prediction, Secrets of the Dinosaurs, & Exoplanets. Prep for these will be a lot of fun. And the other panelists include a number of old friends and I’m sure some new ones.

Capclave — always one of the best organized cons — did a great job on the schedules, sliced & diced by time, track, & trouble-maker. I can’t improve on theirs for me:

Now with more bugs: Debugging with PostgreSQL at FOSSCon 2019 – 8/17/2019

I am giving my Debugging With PostgreSQL talk tomorrow at FossCon. FOSSCon is the annual Free & Open Source Software Convention held every year in Philadelphia.

This version is lightly revised from last month’s version; added back in a few slides that I had to skip last time (I had 40 minutes last month, but 50 minutes tomorrow). And I fed back into the talk a bit of the audience feedback: more of what worked, less of the other stuff.

FOSSCon is fun, with a lot of great talks scheduled on Open Source & related. And it is free (donations are requested but not required.) Be seeing you.

Is time fuzzy?

“Time dispersion and quantum mechanics”, my long paper — long in page count & long in time taken to come to completion — has just been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the IARD 2018. This will be has been published as part of the IOP Science’s Journal of Physics Conference Series.

I had earlier presented this as a talk at the IARD 2018 conference in June 2018 in Yucatan. The IARD (International Association for Relativistic Dynamics) asked the conference participants if they would submit papers (based on the talks) for the conference proceedings. No problem; the talk was itself based on a paper I had just finished. Of course the paper had more math. Much much more math (well north of 500 equations if you insist).

Close review of the talk revealed one or two soft spots; fixing them consumed more time than I had hoped. But I submitted — on the last possible day, November 30th, 2018. After a month and a bit, the two reviewers got back to me: liked the ideas, deplored the lack of sufficient connection to the literature, and in the case of Reviewer #1, felt that there were various points of ambiguity and omission which needed attention.

And right they were! I spent a few rather pleasant weeks diving into the literature; some I had read before, some frankly I had not given the attention that must be paid. I clarified, literated, disambiguated, and simplified over the next six or seven weeks, submitting a much revised version on Mar 11th this year. Nearly ten per cent shorter. No soft spots. Still a lot of equations (but just south of 500 this time). Every single one checked, rechecked, & cross-checked. And a few fun bits, just to keep things not too dry. Submitted feeling sure that I had done my best but not sure if that was best enough.

And I have just this morning received the very welcome news it will be joining the flock of accepted submissions headed for inclusion in the conference proceedings. I am best pleased.

As to the title of this blog post, my very long paper argues that if we apply quantum mechanics along the time dimension — and Einstein & even Bohr say we should! — then everything should be just a little bit fuzzy in time. But if you title a paper “Is time fuzzy?”, you can say farewell to any chance of acceptance by a serious publication.

But the point is not that time might be fuzzy — we have all suspected something of the kind — it is that this idea can be worked out in detail, in a self-consistent way, in a way that is consistent with all experimental evidence to date, in a way that can be tested itself, and in a way that is definitive: if the experiments proposed don’t show that time is fuzzy, then time is not fuzzy. (As Yoda likes to say: fuzz or no fuzz, there is no “just a little-bit-fuzzy if you please”!)

In any case, if you are going to be down Baltimore way come this coming Memorial Day weekend I will be doing a popular version of the paper at the 2019 Baltimore Science Fiction convention: no equations (well almost no equations), some animations, and I hope a bit of fun with time!

The link at the start of this post points to a version formatted for US Letter, with table of contents & page numbers. The version accepted is the same, but formatted for A4 and without the TOC and page numbers (that being how the IOP likes its papers formatted). For those who prefer A4: