Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
> "Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart"
is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so little documentation around the internal workings of the hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to actually test on was a significant achievement
Multi-worlds is not really relevant here. You are just asking the question how the building blocks of life form in the Universe and how can they reach a planet like ours.
That's not true. If life has the odds of one in a quadrillion of happening, and we're here to discuss it, then we're that one in a quadrillion. If we weren't, we wouldn't be alive. By definition, we were the lucky ones with the perfect conditions that resulted in us.
But I don't think we are "lucky", because we are part of the world, not something that was placed inside it by choice. It is like asking why is Nile in Egypt and not in some other place. If Nile is in some other place, it would not be Nile...So does it make sense to say that Nile is lucky to be in Egypt? No, I think it does not make sense...
Sorry, but nothing you have said here is true or makes sense. Multi worlds are universes, not worlds within our universe. The multiworld interpretation is one of several interpretations of quantum mechanics of the exact same evidence--one or the other interpretation being "true" has no empirical implications. And it is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has nothing to do with the distribution of nucleotides. And it's incoherent to call an observed event "impossible". You seem to mean that you think that it is highly unlikely, but offer no reason to think so ... nor for the bizarre claim that "Multi worlds is the only way". I suspect that you are mixing up a very confused understanding of "Multi worlds" with some version of the anthropic principle. But the anthropic principle is an a posteriori explanation of an a priori unlikely occurrence, it's not a "way" for something to happen.
I won't comment further unless you offer a convincing proof of your assertion.
Ok, what is the mystery in the origin of life? As I understand, it is how all the required molecules came together in the right configuration spontaneously? Is that the question that we are trying to answer?
If this is the question, I think the Multi Worlds Interpretation provides the answer. Because it says that there is some worlds where any given random event will manifest.
So it follows that there is some worlds, where this random event that we call the "origin of life" manifested. And it is just that we are part of one such world.
>multiworld interpretation is one of several interpretations of quantum mechanics of the exact same evidence
I think we might think the other way around. That the origin of life, as well as the fact that we seem to be alone in the universe, as a proof of the MWI..
About the latter, I think we have an overwhelming chance to be alone, because while it is true that there can be universes where random events have lead to origin of life in multiple places, the universes where there is only a single "origin of life" event will vastly outnumber such universes that the chances of us finding oursleves in one such universe (where life has originated independently more than once) is vanishingly small.
> The frequency of an asteroid impact on Earth is ~500,000 years.
Surely you could make this figure be anything you want just by scaling up or down the size of an object you call an asteroid. So as stated it's meaningless.
Those smaller rocks are in the outer solar system, where the solar irradiation is lower. But the way they are composed is lots of ices (volatile molecules in solid form) being built on the silicate/graphite refractory core. The ices remain preserved in the environment provided by the outer solar system.
Please look at the name again. It's "prediction" market. So if you have credible information before resolution, it's no longer a prediction.
Also your premise is incorrect. The goal of prediction market isn't that. It's to represent wisdom of crowd. Informed traders who can influence the outcome are no longer using any wisdom, nor they're part of the crowd.
The actual economic theory behind prediction markets (if you read Robin Hanson's work, efficient market hypothesis, etc.) is that these markets work precisely because informed traders bring private information into the price. That's literally the core mechanism that underpins them.
Yes prediction markets represent "wisdom of crowd", and they do this by rewarding people who contribute correct information. So informed traders are the ones making the system work, and they're putting actual money on the line to back up their claim. Without them you're just left with uninformed guesses, which isn't really "wisdom of crowds", it's noise.
Informed trader needs to be properly defined. Suppose a person just does some research at individual level (read, OSINT, make their own computer models to do prediction etc), then that's permissible.
But if you're defining an informed trader to already know the answer, then it's problematic. I hope you see that as well. The market should reward some logically deduced conclusion, not power. That's my position.
Also it's not noise, an average trader is not choosing a random number between (0,1). They can do research and their guess can be informed. Hence, the use of word wisdom. By your definition, this is gambling then.
Yeah I think where we fundamentally disagree is what prediction markets should be optimizing for.
If the goal is to produce the most accurate forecast possible, then informed traders (especially asymmetrically informed traders) are a feature of the system, not a bug. The market is a system for discovering the truth, and it generally rewards whoever brings that truth to the table first.
If the goal is to create a fair playing field where the crowd collectively arrives at an answer, then yeah someone with private information becomes problematic.
But I'd argue that's optimizing for fairness at the cost of accuracy, and accuracy is much more important.
This looks rather interesting. I implemented a quadtree as part of writing a radiative transfer code during my masters using numpy/numba. Wasn't fun at all, but learnt a lot. But seeing someone try quadtrees in Python refreshed those memories
Well, maybe ask people that claim that HFT is bad and that it's travesty that great minds work on that (if my claims are unverifiable then it obviously follows that their claims are also unverifiable).
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
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