Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagInformation Theory

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Minecraft: A World of Information

The world's bestselling video game captures the insight that information is created and consumed by human minds

What if I told you intelligent design theory is responsible for the most successful computer game of all time? This game is Minecraft. It has sold over 238 million copies, the highest selling game of all time.  What makes the game even more extraordinary is it was created entirely by one man, Markus Persson, over a weekend, who then later sold the game to Microsoft for $2.5 billion dollars. Hard to make this sort of thing up. How does Minecraft work? You can think of Minecraft like a computer game form of Legos, the popular building block toy, with added monsters.  You are dropped into an algorithmically generated world where you have to discover resources, find food, and build structures to survive the Read More ›

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The House Always Wins In The Long Run

In statistics, there’s a theorem called the law of large numbers. It teaches you can’t win in the long run at casino games. It’s why casinos always get rich, and the gambler always gets poor. Robert J. Marks and Sal Cordova discuss gambling, statistics, and mathematics. Show Notes 01:06 | Introducing Sal Cordova 03:11 | The Famous Team: Claude Shannon Read More ›

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Blockchain Network, Data Stream

Define Information Before You Talk About It: Egnor Interviews Marks

Has anyone ever given you some useless information? What does it even mean for information to be meaningful? This week, on Mind Matters News, guest host Dr. Michael Egnor interviews our own Robert J. Marks about information, as well as the creative limits of artificial intelligence, and why evolutionary algorithms aren’t the magic bullet they’re often presented to be. Show Read More ›

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gray rock formation under white clouds during daytime

Robert J. Marks on Specified Complexity and Meaningful Information (Part II)

What is specified complexity? What makes some information more meaningful than other information? How does information theory affect artificial intelligence? Dr. Michael Egnor discusses information theory, artificial intelligence, and mimetic contagion with Dr. Robert J. Marks. Show Notes 00:37 | Mount Rushmore vs. Mount Fuji 05:11 | Specified complexity 10:38 | How does a statue of Abraham Lincoln differ from Read More ›

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Code on computer monitor

Robert J. Marks on Information and AI (Part I)

What is information? How is information created? Will artificial intelligence ever be creative? Dr. Michael Egnor discusses information theory, correlations, and creative artificial intelligence with Dr. Robert J. Marks. Show Notes 00:27 | Introducing Dr. Robert J. Marks 01:14 | What is information? 06:44 | Exact representations of data 08:29 | A system with minimal information 09:27 | Information in Read More ›

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concept of future technology 5G network wireless systems and internet of things

Valley Insider Peter Thiel’s Comments Last Year Proved Prophetic

China’s recent takeover of Hong Kong and the campus Cancel Culture spotlight his warnings for our culture’s future in the age of 5G

Peter Thiel, who spoke by interactive video to the COSM conference last October, is probably the most remarkable of the Silicon Valley insiders. A fuller version of his discussions with tech philosopher George Gilder has just been released. What makes Thiel (think PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Airbnb, Lyft, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX) unique is that he so much contradicts the Valley stereotype and is certainly not afraid to tell the Valley its faults. In fact, he moved down to Los Angeles in 2018, fed up with the Valley as a one-party state. He suggested in 2019 that Google be investigated for treason for refusing to work with the Pentagon but helping the Chinese military. Most of the time, though, Thiel prefers Read More ›

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Could Information Be — at Long Last — the Missing Dark Matter?

Materialist thinkers may need to see information as material, whether that approach fits information or not

There is no evidence that information is dark matter or that consciousness is physical but materialists understandably long for evidence that would make their theory more viable.

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The coins are stacked on the ground and the seedlings are growing on top, the concept of saving money and financial growth.

2019 AI Hype Countdown #4 Investment: AI Beats the Hot Stock Tip… Barely

At the end of the day, AI-based investing actually performed like a bad index fund

Artificial intelligence may do well summarizing data, but the new insights that will lead the economy forward cannot be gleaned that way. What we need is not old data but new truths.

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Can Free Will Really Be a Scientific Idea?

Yes, if we look at it from the perspective of information theory
It is possible to empirically distinguish an entity with free will from an entity that runs according to chance and necessity alone, while staying entirely within the methodology of modern science. Read More ›
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Why can’t monkeys typing forever produce Shakespeare?

Before communication can begin, there must be an intention to communicate

Practitioners in the field of artificial intelligence often assume that intent does not matter in defining intelligence or that intent does not exist, that it is a useful illusion. Neither of these two approaches will work. Real communication requires intent.

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How Can Information Theory Help the Economy Grow?

New information is the true source of new wealth; everyone wins when we learn how to produce it more efficiently
What gives humans the ability to increase in prosperity, according to Eric Holloway, is our ability to “read” from Plato’s Library of new ideas, thus providing an ever-growing supply of side information that powers the economy. Read More ›
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Does information theory support design in nature?

William Dembski makes a convincing case, using accepted information theory principles relevant to computer science
Intelligent design theory is sometimes said to lack any practical application. One straightforward application is that, because intelligence can create information and computation cannot, human interaction will improve computational performance. Read More ›
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Artificial intelligence is impossible

Meaningful information vs artificial intelligence
Because the law of independence conservation states that no combination of randomness and determinism can create mutual information, then likewise no Turing machine nor artificial intelligence can create mutual information. Thus, the goal of artificial intelligence researchers to reproduce human intelligence with a computer program is impossible to achieve. Read More ›
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Who Creates Information in a Market?

Do exchange-traded funds (ETFs)' algorithms make personally gathering information obsolete?

Algorithmic strategies can only be as good as the information that goes into them.  Ignoring how the information is created causes us to misunderstand the dynamics of value creation.  Algorithms can leverage information, they can’t create it.

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Reconciling mind with materialism, twenty-five years on

Jerry Fodor posits that the reason "we're all materialists" is the alternatives seem even worse

Thinking of philosophical materialism as a science must have seemed like a step forward at the time. Over twenty-five years later, there have been dozens of theories of consciousness jostling for the podium, most of them “worse than wrong,” even in the eyes of a sympathetic observer (2016). Not only has the materialist approach failed but in recent years, its failure has brought serious intellectual figures round to such views as consciousness is an illusion or that everything is conscious.

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