Re: Pi Forums

This is to about 6 people. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf and your replies. I'm feeling rather weary as I haven't had my after lunch nap and will be getting ready for bed after this. I'll read your replies more carefully tomorrow and hope to get the RPi connected up again. It's not easy as SWMBO gets very concerned when she sees me doing anything that requires mental or physical effort, so I try to do it very early in the morning. (I had a slight stroke recently.)

I'm a bit of a nit-picker, so I like John's comment about the spelling of "complement".

Frank

I can never aspire to be as good a writer as Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, W. C. Fields or any number of worthy gentlefolk who despised spellling. Although the actual provenance of the genre of quotes that contain the meme "I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word only one way" is unknown, I take it as a truism. At best it demonstrates a lack of imagination.  I do believe that it is a skill [?] which will go the way of the buggywhip industry as spell checkers continue to encompass an ever increasing share of the written word.

It must itself contain no domain-space semantics nor built-in value judgement functions internally of course, nor weights

I am perplexed by the requirement of "nor weights".

The judicial system is entirely based on the notion of weights.

See for example "Lady Justice"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice

the personification of balancing the scales of truth and fairness.

You have probably heard the saying, "if the facts are on your side,

pound on the facts; if the law is on your side, pound on the law;

otherwise pound on the table".

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/07/04/legal-adage/

Aside from the humor, the message is that facts count more than

legal technicalities.  If you are a defendant with a good alibi, don't

argue legal technicalities, but if you were caught red-handed,

then by all means argue any legal technicality you can come up with,

but don't count on the court ignoring that you were caught red-handed.

Another example is literal statutory language vs. legislative intent.

The plain language of a statute counts more than the intent of the statute.

If the plain language is on your side, argue that.  If not, argue the intent

of the statute, but don't count on it overcoming the plain language.

Another example in US constitutional law is that different constitutional

amendments have different weights associated with them.  A novice

mistake is to ignore that.  The 1st amendment (free speech) counts

a whole lot more than the 10th amendment (states' rights).   I don't

think anyone has won a case solely based on the 10th amendment.

Lady Justice's balance scale actually should be a balance beam,

where weights can be attached at different distances from the fulcrum.

A strong amendment such as the 1st is reduced in effective weight

based on how tangentially it is applied.  For example, it still has some

effective weight when applied to privacy cases, but not as much.

Similarly, precedents are weighted according to how factually similar

they are.

Sometimes weights are combined additively, where a lot of small

weights can add up to a large weight, and sometimes thresholds

are used in the analysis, where there has to be enough weight to

meet a certain threshold before continuing with the analysis.

Some arguments with little weight are not worth mentioning, because

they make you look like you are grasping at straws.

The early days of such a system would be especially interesting, as people compare the performance of human judges against the automaton running in parallel.

I believe Leibniz proposed applying computers/AI to the field of law.

You could test such a system's ability to guess the outcome of prior cases

before letting it loose on current cases.  But predicting the stock market is

more lucrative than predicting legal outcomes. 

It would be interesting, and maybe someone has already done it, to see

what percentage of the time a case is won that implicates each of

the US constitutional amendments.  It would also be interesting to have

a comprehensive list of legal technicalities that have won cases that were

otherwise hopeless.

I think that to predict supreme court decisions you would benefit most by

studying the voting patterns of each individual justice, because who is appointed

to the court seems to matter more than the legal merits of the case.

coder27 wrote:

 

I am perplexed by the requirement of "nor weights".

The judicial system is entirely based on the notion of weights.

You misunderstood me there.  It's the automaton that must contain no weights itself, because the automaton is the semantic-free formally specified engine (an executable program) that implements the fuzzy logic by processing the factual inputs of a case against the large external ruleset of piecewise linear merit functions.  It's the external rules which are weighted.  The engine knows how to apply weights and rules, but carries none internally.  This is a case of separation of mechanism and policy not just for general goodness, but as a crucial part of how this would work fairly.

There is no judicial policy in the engine as it's specified and implemented by programmers who have no business hardwiring any judicial semantics into the engine code.  That's why the engine must be open source and visible to all, so that its agnosticism to policy is verifiable by anyone with programming skills, and so that anyone can track the judgements in their own versions of the automaton if they wish.  It doesn't change unless someone finds an error in this specific implementation or in the general specification.

It's the external public database of weighted fuzzy rules that would change, and do so continually as society evolves.  It's by growing and honing and reweighting this external ruleset that the citizenry determines judicial policy.  They don't touch the engine for this.

It's the external rules which are weighted.

OK, but external rules don't normally come with weights,

the weights need to be deduced by some sort of regression analysis.

For example, there is nothing explicit in the US constitutional amendments

that says how much weight to apply to each amendment.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

Note that evaluating utility would be stillborn if the automaton were being fed with prior human value judgements as input data, so that has to be disallowed.  If you recall the concept of Fair Witness in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, that would be the kind of input required --- pure facts.  Humans are really bad at leaving out their own assessment of a situation.

I haven't read Stranger in a Strange Land but I've read and seen Rashomon (1950) as well as works derived from it, which causes me to doubt the ability of humans to tell stories accurately -- not so much because they want to lie, but because their brains cannot accept the truth as seen and substitute an alternate version.

The concept of pure facts reminds me of Luigi Pirandello's It's the Truth (if you think it is).  In that play, there's a strange situation going on and a small group of busy-bodies insist on an explanation from the parties involved.  The man gives an explanation, and while it's somewhat odd it fits the facts and makes sense.  His mother-in-law gives a completely different explanation which also fits the facts, but is completely inconsistent with the man's.  All the physical evidence that could have determined who is telling the truth was lost in an earthquake.

William Goldman wrote in The Princess Bride:

 

Inigo Montoya:  I must know...

Man in Black:  Get used to disappointment.

coder27 wrote:

 

 

 

OK, but external rules don't normally come with weights,

the weights need to be deduced by some sort of regression analysis.

You must be thinking of something else.  These fuzzy rules are each weighted by the citizenry to specify their relative importance.  Fuzzy logic doesn't deal in just true OR false.  An input can be both good and bad at the same (across any number of dimensions), but in different measures --- those are the rule weights, and they can't be determined analytically.  Assigning those weights to rules in the public database is where human commonsense gets applied.

they can't be determined analytically

Google translate works by analytically determining weights, based

on having scanned lots of documents, rather than having lots of

English teachers write down lots of grammar rules.  

I think a computerized legal system would have to work the same way.

John Beetem wrote:

 

... causes me to doubt the ability of humans to tell stories accurately -- not so much because they want to lie, but because their brains cannot accept the truth as seen and substitute an alternate version.

Yes, I think that's quite accurate, and in fact extremely common (example in next paragraph).  With training though, I suspect that we can discipline ourselves to approach the goal of being purely factual.  We could still be mistaken because our perception is sometimes not clear, but that's slightly different to succumbing to a false reality imposed by our brain.

The example of this that I often give relates to door edges, as follows.

(Don't try this yourselves unless you accept full responsibility for the consequences.

This is not encouragement to try it, only a description of my own experiments.)

If you look at a well illuminated straight door edge with normal eyesight, it does of course appear straight.  It appears straight even if you put your eye right next to it, which anyone who is well acquainted with photographic lenses (especially fisheyes) probably realizes is highly unlikely.  If you then consider the organic nature of the component parts of the eyes and their optical quality compared to a highly engineered photographic lens, you realize even more that a real optical straight edge being projected by your eye's lens on your retina is even less likely than you first thought.

But here's the acid test.  If you now close one eye and deform the eyeball of the open eye by applying gentle pressure, the edge of the door still remains straight despite the fact that the optical projection is being messed up deliberately.  Apply steadily more and more pressure (as I said, don't do this) and the door edge continues to be straight until a point where the nice image suddenly breaks up and distorts.

It's clear what is happening here.  We don't "see" the image that is cast on our retinas.  Instead, our minds model the world around us, and as long as there is a rough correlation between the model and incoming optical data, the mind assumes that the model is still the correct one.  We know that door edges are straight, so that's what our mind tells us we see despite a wide range of optical distortions actually entering the mind as raw data.

In addition to the above test, by concentrating you can train your eye-brain system to display imperfections in the two humours of the eyeball as a fuzzy shimmering of the image.  They're organic gel/fluids and are certainly not perfectly transparent so that shouldn't come as a huge surprise, yet we never see the imperfections under normal circumstances because what we're really seeing is a mental reconstruction, not the actual optical image.

So, I think my little experiments in personal optics (done many years ago) are consistent with what you wrote.  Our brains really do supply an alternative reality ... continually.

Wow, we really are making this thread drift.

Morgaine.

Wow, epic thread. I would do proper quotes and whatnot, but it seems the only way to do that here is longhand HTML and it's 2013 already...

Morgaine: you're right on the money with the way that the brain applies post processing to the raw signals from our organic transducers. It can at times yield misleading results, but on balance it works pretty well - maybe well enough for designers of smarter technology to take some cues, rather than reinventing the wheel (only using half a dozen triangles...)

A trick I discovered in my teens: Open a text book and focus on a word at the centre of the page. Now, without moving your eyes, try to make out as many words as possible around your chosen word. Two things will become apparent:

1) It's very hard to stop the eyes from scanning the surroundings.

2) the actual field of detailed view is very narrow.

It's clear that much of what we "see" is actually a seamless patchwork of recent memory and guesswork based on previous experience (wot we've learnrd). Peripheral vision is sensitive to change (not just motion), but it's definition is pretty low. How could we apply this? Well, say we had some autonomous robot with a stereo pair of gazillion pixel cameras. We could either give equal weight to every pixel and process a load of garbage, or we could have an area of high definition surrounded by less sensitive areas. The pixels are baked on the CCD's, so we can swivel the sensitive areas around pretty easily if we detect peripheral interest, but we save a lot of bits.

Unfortunately, it's far sexier to just toss bus width and processor speed at these problems - which is what happens when you leave engineers in exclusive charge of creating solutions! Consider the humble mp3 (and ogg). An ingenious solution to a data rate problem that uses human psychoacoustics to toss out the chaff. Given that now everyone takes broadband and huuuuge data storage as a given, one wonders if it would even be considered as necessary to invent today, because instead we could all be downloading 32bit float wavs (or some proprietary Apple aiff with drm and all the trimmings).

Did someone (coder27) mentionGoogle Translate? LOL, as my friends' children would say. Evidence, if any were needed that it takes more than a mere warehouse full of computers and a bunch of smart people to ape the intelligence of a fruitfly. "The pen of my aunt"...

A computerised judiciary? Hmmm.

Fuzzy logic? Why fake analogue when you can have the real thing? Although to be fair, everything is digital, It's just that electrons are very small and prone to nearly being in two places at once while at the same time nearly being in neither. Trying to ape that bit depth and data rate is hard, so why try if you can avoid it?

So, the Foundation's forum? Pretty much company support forum model 1*. Heavy handed, evasive, letting the fanboys weave their spin, exploiting the minority of people who are diligent enough to answer the same three queries month after month. The usual.

*Model 2 is the company that lets their forum go all Lord Of The Flies. Funny, if you have nothing invested in their product, or their stock.

The educational thing? This is what it's all about after all. It is a little quiet on that front (and has been since day #1).

Perhaps the fact that Pi sales have exceeded expectations by two orders of magnitude means that (apart from commisioning that new kitchen) they will be hiring people, rather than herding the community cats (who are too busy consuming pirated media and whatnot). I dunno. I'm willing to cut the Foundation a little slack here, because it's all so unprecedented. Perhaps this little pcb is the indirect means of change, rather than the specific piece of hardware. Hardware is less than nothing without well written software that doesn't take the patience of a saint to get running, after all. They do have to deal with Gove too. The man is an imbecile chasing a flawed and naively populist model.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things that the Pi can do is make school boards of governers ask "Why are we paying a stupendous lease on PCs that are apparently no use to anyone at all? Perhaps it's not the machines, but the people in charge, no?"

Whither Linux? Not in my lifetime. Pidora? Pot smoking hippies who couldn't run a bath. As a life long socialist it pains me to say so, but there's just no imperative. We demand value (i.e. cheap) so when once companies like Bell Labs would do pure research and the results would end up in the public domain it just doesn't happen any more. Google and the like do nothing "for free". Public institutions like NASA, the BBC and such are being increasingly put under the cosh, so don't expect freebies from them either. Nor will it happen in FOSS, because under it all it's just as self-serving. Sorry, but that's how I feel, based on a couple of decades of watching glacial ineveitability.

ARM? Well, it's nice to have so many low cost boards out there - and to have the profile of the platform rsised by the Pi, but it's not the x86 killer yet. Nor is it the Windows / Mac killer. Room for both, with just a little crossover right now. And market share is no guarantee of profit.

BTW I gave up being an engineer when I bailed from aerospace to join a band more than half a lifetime ago and these days I'm just a technician who fights the corner for ordinary people who would rather that "stuff just worked", so feel free to disagree with my pov. I'm used to it. There was a time before colour TV when motoring enthusiasts might expect to stop at the roadside to e.g. reseat a leaky exhaust valve with a smear of oil and a bit of roadside grit, or toss a handful of Fuller's earth into their clutch bell housing so as to get  up a steep hill. That period has long gone in the automotive world, but in computing we're still there, after more than fifty years. It's just not good enough and it's not the fault of the users.

Perhaps if we put a ten dollar tax on qwerty keyboards the personal computer would improve as a labour saving device overnight. We might even get more intuitive modular programming environments that creative people can just get creative with. It's not like your average compiler isn't doing most of the hard work anyway. Perhaps it's time for the nerds to let go.

epic post.

btw, the "Quote Previous Message" icon has a second purpose.

If you have selected text in your draft, it will quote that. 

So to selectively quote, just paste the quote, select it, and hit

the Quote icon.

coder27 wrote:

 

btw, the "Quote Previous Message" icon has a second purpose.

If you have selected text in your draft, it will quote that. 

So to selectively quote, just paste the quote, select it, and hit

the Quote icon.

Aha thanks, I think that worked - we'll see.

Call me a Luddite, but this is the first forum I've seen that required an instruction manual.And an undo button.

coder27 wrote:

 

btw, the "Quote Previous Message" icon has a second purpose.

If you have selected text in your draft, it will quote that. 

So to selectively quote, just paste the quote, select it, and hit

the Quote icon.

Aha thanks, I think that worked - we'll see.

Call me a Luddite, but this is the first forum I've seen that required an instruction manual.And an undo button.