An interesting piece in Science Daily on the evolutionary aspects of humor.

On a related but different note, I have always wondered whether there was more to the familiar movie cliche where someone challenges a king’s authority and the room goes silent, then suddenly the king laughs and everyone follows. The object of laughter is let off the hook, in exchange for looking like he or she was joking - making a fake challenge. The cost of this back down is partial humiliation.

Perhaps the origins of humor are a back down mechanism in potential conflict situations, where one party offers a lack of aggression signal in exchange for humiliation, i.e. being laughed at. In game theory terms, it allows for battles to be won or drawn without physical violence, with the same rules as for conflict, but a lesser cost/benefit of losing or winning.

Obviously, this may just be one facet of humor, but since fighting is such a fundamental behavior common to almost all species, whereas joking is not, I would suspect humor is built upon more ubiquitous traits further down the behavior tree.

How to setup a cheap Infinite Disk system using S3 without having to use EC2.

I don’t normally post technical stuff on my blog, but I’m putting this up because I think it might help others.

Wists images are stored in the file system with filenames based upon a hash of their url (principally). This keeps the db small (overloading the directories is prevented by creating subdirectory structures based upon the first few letters of the hash (/b/c/bc267867 etc.)

We want to use Amazon for reliability and unlimited storage, but we need to couple the system to application logic (and our code isn’t multi-treaded), so a straightforward S3 use isn’t possible.

The problem with S3 at the moment is all to do with latency. We don’t want to have to manipulate and store wists thumbnails remotely on an EC2 instance, but if we do it locally then there will be a delay sending the images over the wire and storing them in S3. Furthermore, rsync or rsync style approaches are a real load problem for us so we have to do batch backups every hour based upon the age of files (in theory rsync should be lighter weight, in practice it is not for our particular use). We also use cache.wists.com via a CDN that pulls the images when they are there, using squid. We will keep this piece, because the CDN works out cheaper than S3, but it can’t readily be used as a backup service, however the method below does not depend on it.

Step 1. Setup a cron to call a shell script hourly, that backs up files to S3 that are more recent than 1hour, and deletes files that are older than 1 week (we will keep a weeks images as a buffer in case there is a failure).

Step 2. Point the CDN to S3 (instead of at Wists servers).

Step 3. Change application code so that all image requests are for local local versions, instead of directly from the CDN i.e. wists.com/images/foo (instead of from cache.wists.com at moment), the application logic will check to see if the exists, if not they try cache.wists.com and lastly show a placeholder as default if this in turn doesn’t exist.

This way all files newer than 1 week will be served live from wists and everything else from the CDN which will cache from the S3 backup.

Although this usage is perversely the reverse of the normal way a quid based CDN is used (i.e. CDN usually checks if file exists on each call, and then caches, if not) and this will result in higher webserver loads, the advantages of reliability and simple infinite storage outweigh the disadvantages in our instance.

Amazon S3 PHP Class Update - neurofuzzy, flash game development, rich internet applications, free source code - *alt.neurotica.fuzzy*

Tit for Tat is widely acknowledged as being the most successful strategy in game theory, that this is true is important since it directly affects big things - like foreign policy.

It seem clear that human beings have a capacity to harbour grudges over generations, and that these grudges tend to stem from retribution being aimed at the wrong person, or an innocent person who is a member of a perceived group through no choice of his or her own. This creates positive feedback, such that any person who has been a victim of mis-applied retribution is likely to feel injustice and seek revenge, which can also be mis-applied ad infinitum.

Tit for Tat models that I have seen imply perfect information flow, whereas the real world case of in-group/out-group mentality and grudges could be simply modelled by adding noise to the system.

I believe it would be simple to model this and to test whether it has any impact on the assumption that Tit for Tat is universally successful.

__________________________________

A very simple game theory model is based upon a game where two subjects are told some rules of co-operation and play multiple rounds of a game where there is a proportional reward for their choice to either Defect or Co-operate during each round.

This game can be seen at the 10th minute of the Documentary ‘Nice Guys Finish First’, here.

The rewards are based upon a points system: 3 points each for mutual co-operation, 2 points each for mutual defection and 4 points for the defector and one for the co-operator, where they don’t mutually agree to co-operate or defect.

This points system implies a benefit for the system as a whole, for mutual co-operation. (i.e. 6 points total vs. 5 or 4 for defections).

Matrix for two player (defect, co-operate)

– C — D –
C 3/3 1/4

D 4/1 2/2

This situation tends to lead to a Tit for Tat strategy for 2 players, over multiple rounds.

[Interestingly, it could be tied to the work expended in gaining a reward (energy burned to hunt vas energy gained from meat etc.) to create a thermodynamic model, and more generally an information theory model.]

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Experiment one
Introduce noise into the system with the intention of modeling real world situations where information flow is rarely perfect.

Extend the original game to include ‘noise’, i.e. where player A or B are given the reward as if their choices had been different, but still consistent with the rules governing their own choice (i.e. if they can’t see the other players rewards, it is impossible to tell that there is any ‘noise’ in the system.). For example choosing to mutually co-operate means that instead of being a 3 points each player game, it is either a 1 point/3 point (player A imagines this as 1 point/ 4 point) or 3 point 3 point game.

Plot the players strategies relative to different values between 0 and 1 for the noise probability, to see if there are any ‘phase changes’.

Experiment two
introduce a third player, where the noise, instead of being a background noise is noise from another player. i.e. sometimes the rewards/punishment are given to the wrong people via swapping. This is intended to mimick the real world situation where stereo-typing means that defection from one person is imagined to come from another leading to a grudge which when applied creates a feeling of injustice, and therefore incentive for retribution.

Setup:
3 players, each player plays the other two simultaneously.

The number of points that an oponent gets must be hidden (i.e. you can imply from your reward, what the other player has done).

A fuzzyness variable can be set to make a random number of games (a game is a single co-operate/defect choice) have their ‘circuit switched’, i.e. as player A, your reward for game A/B is actually based on game A/C without you knowing it.

My hunch is that you need to introduce a degree of altruism (i.e. co-operating after your opponent defects) to compensate for mistaken communication, and that the value of this altruism variable is non-linear.

Perhaps there is a critical upper and lower threshold where its effectiveness works, this being the range of values where tit for tat can be restored through forgiving, altruistic behaviour.

If an online poll based upon the experiments above were created, it could be tested.

Would climate change be a good measure for SETI searches for intelligent life.

It seems that long after the pyramids of Giza have crumbled and the last remnants of our civilizations are swallowed up by the galcial movements of plate tectonics, our single legacy will be our affect on the climate.

If another intelligent species evolves over time - then traces of this would be the most obvious clue that they had intelligent ancestors.

The time difference between us and animals that we evolved from which had similar intelligence to many long extinct species is 2 million years. This is out of a time period of higher life forms several hundred times longer.

We can see our impact on the climate on a scale of about a million years. Can we measure the climate on a scale of hundreds of millions of years? If so, would a sudden spike be as exciting evidence of non-human intelligent life as a radio signal from space, or are we really so special as to necessarily be the pinnacle of all of our forebears?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Deep ice tells long climate story

There are a number of ideas why DNA is base 4, but it seems obvious that the principal reason is that it provides a very elegant redundancy mechanism built into the process of replication.

By being in base 4 DNA provides its own backup, which is very important in an environment which thrives on mutation in the long term but also needs to regulate mutation in the short term.

Given that the process of replication can be used as a method for performing calculations, I wonder if it could be abstracted in a non-parallel computing scenario such as a digital computer.

I hate having to deal with backups and bug fixes.

Quaternary system dna - PDF file

Kottke posts about: Bed Books, the revolutionary way to print books for comfortable reading in bed.”

As an avid bedtime reader (and pathalogically lazy person), I had been thinking about this for a while, and have a simpler solution that does not require reformatting the typeset of books, merely rebinding them.

The idea is to print sequential pages every other page until the end of the book, and then upside down every other page until the beginning again.
I.e, if there are a hundred pages, page 1 has page 51 upside down on the next page and page 2 the right way up on the 3rd etc.

That way you would only ever have to turn in bed once and you wouldn’t have to stand the book completely upright as with ‘BedBooks’.

Most of all the species that have ever existed are extinct and it is certain that human beings will also one day be extinct, or our current cultural history lost through a Dark Age, most probably accelerated by our own doing.

In the spirit of the Internet Archive and the Long Now project, perhaps we should look at mothballing human knowledge somewhere very safe - like on the Moon. A reverse of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ - where we put a monolith on the Moon for others.

It seems like a text only archive would be around 30 Terabytes which could be stored in solid state form in a space the size of a large chest.

I wonder how much this would cost, what the requirements would be to protect against radiation and whether a solar powered transmitter could be built to last for an extremely long time?

I would certainly contribute to such a project.

Internet Archive

Lee Smolin’s answer to this year’s Edge Question: ‘What is Your Dangerous Idea’ is my favorite, touching on something I’ve been thinking and reading about for the last year.

Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin

1. All systems leak - so they are fuzzy and relative.
No system is fully open, or it ceases to be a separate ’system’ and no system is fully closed, or it cannot be observed. Yet most science looks at or approximates closed systems. Just as the motion of objects depends on a frame of reference, I suspect the notion of how systems interact, how entropy flows between them, requires sensitive measurement to provide predictions , since all systems will tend to interact at a fine boundary between chaotoc and stable conditions, over time. Because of the required accuracy, these measurements will be dependent on something analogous to a ‘frame of reference’ since at some level, on the one hand, clear boundaries between systems are impossible and on the other any ‘observing’ system will only be able to perceive boundaries relative to itself.

2. All systems interact over time, and there may be emergent patterns in these interactions creating defined periodic cycles as with living or growing things.
If this is so, why should biological theories of evolution apply only to biological systems of systems made by living things, such as economics? What I mean by this is that evolutionary ideas apply to iterative systems that teeter on the edge of chaos (i.e. crystals presumably only evolve very very slowly) - but what if all interactions between systems tended to become iterative. Only recently has science begun to look quantitatively at the rules governing iterations between systems as over time. i.e. algorithms rather than formulae. I suspect that any all encompassing theory of evolution applies to any set of interacting systems (living or non living)

My dangerous idea is that Darwinism can be expressed in terms of physics, in terms of patterns in entropy flow between systems and more specifically in terms of a new and relativistic look at thermodynamics.

I suspect there may be a relativinstic view of thermodynamics and that a fourth law of thermodynamics may include an extended idea of natural selection, defined in terms of the physics of interactions between systems, where all linked systems tend to become either linked, or ‘iterative’ over time.

T-mobile suck

Here’s an idea - if everyone added the tag: badrank ragerank and a company name to weblog posts about sucky customer service, you could aggregate complaints in one place and also Google bomb them.

Update: ragerank is a better tag name.

I just spent 20 minutes on the phone to T-mobile to try and get a refund on the fees they charged me to reinstall their service because of an error at their end. Unfortunately it was impossible to talk to a human being that wasn’t reading from a script and then the line cut out - because its a T-mobile one and therefore sucks. Ha!

I figured that its easier to give them some bad Google juice instead.

BADRANK RAGERANK T-MOBILE

Anyway, did I mention that T-Mobile suck and just fined me for their own incompetence.

Poor Service - T-Mobile Sucks TMobile sucks T-Mobile bad service T-mobile complaints Tmobile dropped calls

Looks like the pressure will continue for the Chinese Yuan to revalue. In true stupid amateur punter mode, am looking at a few possible investments.

Maybe I should be reckless enough to buy stock in a dotcom like Ctrip.com (CTRP), a consolidator of hotel accommodations and airline tickets in China.

They would benefit from Yuan revaluation in the short term if they don’t buy too many Aeron chairs or hire people who used to work in enterpise software.

Q&A: what price the yuan? - Markets - Times Online