What is the longest word you can type on the QWERTY keyboard with just your left hand using the proper position?

I love problems like this.

Especially because I get to toy around with Mathematica and use features that day to day I may not interact with for biz problems.

Finding the solution required only a tiny bit of code.

alpha = “”;
ourdictionary = “”;
alphabase = {“q” | “w” | “e” | “r” | “t” | “a” | “s” | “d” | “f” | “g” | “z” | ”x” | “c” | “v” | “b”};
alpha = StringExpression[alpha, alphabase];

Code

n = 0;
dictionarycount = 0;
ourdictionary = DictionaryLookup[alpha];
While[n < 20 && Length@ourdictionary > 0,
ourdictionary = DictionaryLookup[alpha];
alpha = StringExpression[alpha, alphabase];
n++;
If[Length@ourdictionary == 0, Print[{Length@ourdictionary, n - 1}];
Print[DictionaryLookup[alpha[[;; n - 1]]]]]]

The Answer(s):

{“aftereffects”, “desegregated”, “desegregates”, “reverberated”, ”reverberates”,”stewardesses”}

We want to be No. 1 — but why, and at what?

Yes.  That is a good question.  And “being number 1″ is such a useless statement when talking about anything beyond an amateur sporting event.   When we’re considering what we value and how we teach each other and feed each other chasing these numbers is such as wasteful activity.

I know, we’ve all been taught, if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.   I get it.  The measurement thing is fine as long as you question the measurements too and understand that measurements and any model is just a model.

The articles points out how GDP and other measures aren’t great and how other cultures have stopped focusing on being number 1, etc.  But I think the bigger point is here:

But in the midst of the Great Depression, Congress, showing a great deal more intellectual curiosity than it does today

INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY, as a social value.   We don’t have enough of that.  Our education system, politicians, marketing, media all reflect this.   Perhaps we even have more than we had 200 years ago, but it’s not enough.  Things are more complicated, more connected so we need more than ever.

And be careful before quoting back to me stats on education and literacy and college enrollment and knowledge worker jobs… what we current measure as Intellectual Curiosity is a very limited view.  I won’t propose a measurement myself and I will say the annoying point that you know it when you know it, and most of my interactions out in the world aren’t full of intellectual curiosity.  The movies, shows, news reports, sound bytes, songs, conversations, etc… how many of these things are pushing you, all of us?  is your knowledge job really about uncovering and sharing knowledge?  is facebook, google, twitter really a utility to spread knowledge? engaging in questions?

I don’t have the answer.  I do have questions.

Sounds exactly opposite of our political system.  Might be the problem.

With that in mind, it is worth recalling President Abraham Lincoln’s words during the dark early days of the real Civil War. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed,” he told Congress in December 1861. “Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration,”

The life cycle of a cell is simply amazing. It does work to construct constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct more constraints on the release of energy, which does work to construct even more constraints on the release of energy, and other kinds of work as well. It builds structure. Cells don’t just carry information. They actually build things until something astonishing happens: a cell completes a closed nexus of work tasks, and builds a copy of itself. Although he didn’t know about cells, Kant spoke about this 230 years ago when he said that an organized being possesses a self-organizing propagating whole that is able to make more of itself. But although cells can do this, that fact is nowhere in our physics. It’s not in our notion of matter, it’s not in our notion of energy, it’s not in our notion of information, and it’s not in our notion of entropy. It’s something else. It has to do with organization, propagation of organization, work, and constraint construction. All of this has to be incorporated into some new theory of organization.

…

We don’t know what Darwinian pre adaptations are going to be, which supplies an arrow of time. The same thing is true in the economy; we can’t say ahead of time what technological innovations are going to happen. Nobody was thinking of the Web 300 years ago. The Romans were using things to lob heavy rocks, but they certainly didn’t have the idea of cruise missiles. So I don’t think we can do it for the biosphere either, or for the econosphere.

…

I can begin to imagine making models of how the universe gets more complex, but at the same time I’m hamstrung by the fact that I don’t see how you can see ahead of time what the variables will be.

…

The same question applies to the economy. How can human beings assemble this increasing diversity and complexity of ways of making a living? Why does it work in the common law? Why does the common law stay a living body of law? There must be some very general conditions about co-evolutionary assembly. Notice that nobody is in charge of the evolution of the common law, the evolution of the biosphere, or the evolution of the econosphere. Somehow, systems get themselves to a position where they can carry out coevolutionary assembly. That question isn’t even on the books, but it’s a profound question; it’s not obvious that it should work at all. So I’m stuck.

From “The Adjacent Possible“, Stuart Kauffman

I think the killing of Osama Bin Laden changed the world dramatically.

It won’t change terrorism or our world views… yet.   OBL was a powerful symbol and the media, politics and academics are going to make sure that the symbol carries a lot of weight and reinforces whatever agenda they want to push.

From oil prices, to futures, to political fortunes, the process of killing and marketing OBL has changed everything.

What if all it does is change the political fortunes of Pres. Obama?   isn’t that a big deal?

Perhaps we need to consider different levels of change.  Even if all these things I claim are a big deal actually, in the grand scheme, are just small perturbations in the overall arc of the human and Earth story.  Perhaps this story has played out thousands / millions of times and its just part of it.  No real outlier.

What say you?

RFS

This is a really uncomfortable show to watch.   Asks some amazing questions AND unemotionally explores some answers/approaches.

What got me really thinking was listening to the Drs. and researchers who work on this stuff everyday.   It’s shocking to many of us who don’t deal with this stuff everyday, but for these researchers, its clinical.

Absolutely fascinating research over hundreds of years.   Some really kooky stuff.

There’s a part where this Dr. “MacDougal” attempted to measure the weight of the soul in the 1800s.   WHAT??!?

There’s an amazing part involving the air force testing the effects of G on pilots’ brains.

Definitely a much watch, if you can handle it.  It’s not for everyone.

That strategy can never work.  All things that lead to the above goals are computationally irreducible systems.

The most efficient strategy, and here comes the bad news… is to jump in, do stuff* and see what happens.

*stuff =  take to the streets, code something, write that book, run the marathon, quit that job, join the peace corps, send the letter, have the talk, etc.

I was disappointed at the time and still am a little bit.   The King’s Speech was a fine movie, but when you have a rare baby sitter night you want what you want…

Alas, one facet of The King’s Speech intrigued me quit a bit.   How does someone in a position of fame behave when they realize the reality of the facade.   Colin Firth brilliantly played a fascinating character without anchors.   The scene with Geoffrey Rush sitting in Edward’s throne in Westminster Abbey was the clearest example of this.

“People have carved there names in this chair!   I don’t care how many royal assholes…”

A throne with graffiti still used in a coronation ceremony!   What could be more anchorless!

Even at the end of the movie, Firth still had this look when he was waiving at the throngs of people “What is all this for?!”

Not sure there is a resolution to this quandary for any of us and certainly not for a monarch in name.   Oh, sure, we can all find a justification if we don’t question too hard and profess it out to the world enough….

Other thoughts to follow up on:

Impact of radio/mass broadcasting to politics, power, public policy

Current obsession with Monarchy and America’s own “monarchs in name”

Early versions of this approach go back nearly 50 years, to the first phase of artificial intelligence research. And incremental progress has been made—notably as tracked for the past 20 years in the annual TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) question answering competition. IBM’s Jeopardy system is very much in this tradition—though with more sophisticated systems engineering, and with special features aimed at the particular (complex) task of competing on Jeopardy.

Wolfram|Alpha is a completely different kind of thing—something much more radical, based on a quite different paradigm. The key point is that Wolfram|Alpha is not dealing with documents, or anything derived from them. Instead, it is dealing directly with raw, precise, computable knowledge. And what’s inside it is not statistical representations of text, but actual representations of knowledge.

 

Maybe you’ve seen the latest NOVA episode about Watson, the AI machine that played Jeopardy against former champions.

The first blush answer would be: NO.

The linguistics are simply not there yet.

However, if Jeopardy questions were more “computational” vs. linguistic and fact retrivial the answer might be: YES.

Wolfram|Alpha has the raw power to do it, but it lacks the data and linguistic system to do it.

IBM was clever to combine the history of Jeopardy questions with tons of documents.    It’s similar, but not the same as, common sense engine from Cyc.    It’s not fully computational knowledge.  It’s semantic.   It’s cleverness comes from the depth of the question training set and the document training set.

It would breakdown quickly if it were seeing questions about facts that had never been printed in a document before.   An example would be “How far away will the moon be tomorrow?”

Wolfram|Alpha can answer that!   Now, what’s challenging is that there is a much bigger universe of questions that have never been asked than those that have!   So Wolfram|Alpha already has far more knowledge.   However, its linguistics are not strong enough to clearly demonstrate that AND it will probably never catch up!   Because Wolfram|Alpha can answer questions that have never been asked so people will always ask it questions that will trip it up… they will always push the linguistics.

In the end, a combination of Watson, Wolfram|Alpha and Cyc could be very fun indeed!

Perhaps we should hack that up?

It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn’t even take breaks to play Farmville.

Funny, but seriously…
Who’s to say the evolution of “intelligence” doesn’t involve the evolution of play… in fact in might be necessary.
not quite sure why every contemplation of a super smart singularity future simply involves bigger problems being solved.   history doesn’t suggest that’s how it works.

it’s plausible that other systems in the universe have already passed a singularity.   and perhaps we’re their little toy.  and what they did with their super intelligence was set up an experiment to see how things develop.   their own farmville.

it’s also plausible that ever increasing intelligence in the human sense doesn’t amount to squat in the multi verse.   Maybe the multi verse just does what it does and intelligence is a side effect that burns out like a super nova…  maybe it’s common, maybe it’s rare…

the problem with chasing the singularity is we probably don’t have much control over how things evolve.   Can’t say I want the machines to take over or not.  I’m pretty sure I won’t know the difference when and if they do, just like I didn’t notice how The Internet changed us and I couldn’t really prepare for it.    Other generations could say that about birth control, electricity, the printing press, telescope, the wheel, whatever.   Again, things happen.  we behave.  then occasionally we notice, “Gee, looks like something changed”.