There is an old saying:

Admiration is the most genuine form of mimicry

I find frequently that other blogs I read will publish very similar content as my own on very odd topics. I think either great minds think alike, or we’re all caught in the great tide of the media cycle, or you copied my idea, or I copied yours. It doesn’t matter the causal relation of who thought or said what because of what.
The topics discussed on this blog are addressed far from comprehensive and satisfying. In the great ocean of bits of human thoughts and desires, this blog is essentially a big fat zero.

I hope everyone who needs it can benefit from this blog and gain new tinder that spark thoughts in your minds that will burn long and bright. I comfort you in the knowledge that I too shall seek you out when I have lost the prime for my mind-well.

I’ve now seen two pediatrician, not our primary doctor, perform a “special move” on my baby by first demanding to turn lights off, and then making the baby cry. I secretly wonder if they shook my baby while all lights are off. What the heck else could they possibly be doing? One took the baby into the bathroom, the other one just shut the lights in a tiny examination room.

It’s really hard to tell what people do in the cover of darkness. Sometimes I do not even trust the baby’s own mother… that hard stomp on the floor did that reverberate through the baby’s brain too?

And God knows what their grandmas and grandpas has done to them…

So fragile they seem, so tired we seem, so easy injury seem!
How do human babies survive?

Whom do we trust? What do we trust? Perhaps this is one best way to understand or explain our fear of robots.
There are some almost axiomatic principles that we, as individuals or as collection of individuals, choose to believe in: That all men are created equal for example, or that omnipotence means also having power to be purely evil, or that google doc is most secure way to write and track history, or that my own reasoning power is the only thing I trust, or that open source participation by entire humanity is the only knowledge base and thinking process that I trust, or that The Book is the only wisdom I believe in, etc. There will also be declaration of allegiance: In God we trust! Etc.

The problem with robots is that we do not trust them. The implementation process may be buggy–who can raise their hand and say they’ve never deployed a bug to production? The design could be flawed. Just look at humans! Evolution creates flaws too. The metal could bend and break. And most important of all, the actions of a robot cannot be summarized into simple and universally understandable axioms. Asimov’ three laws of robotics is one such an attempt to resolve the dissonance between fear and need for robotics. It may or may not be possible to have this in advance. In retrospect, after some millennium of work, we may know a set of rules but I do not see it as a solution to our fear of robots.

Another heuristic we have are processes. When we do not know of a near-constant time determiner of actions, we routinely use process to ensure results. Democracy is a process, it is a solution we came up with to solve a really hard organization problem. Registration for credit card is a process, another really hard problem with multiple parties taking actions each having disparate power and utilities. Application for admission to colleges. The doctor’s appointment… all of these are process that arriving at very simple outcomes: one leader chosen among 2 or dozen, credit granted or not, admitted or not, healthy or treatment.

One wonders if robotics will simply be enrolled in a process. Just as a child grows and earns the trust of her parents, peers and society, robots may need to go through the same process in order to be accepted into roles that adults human perform. It’s actually kind of like how the movies envisions it. After a while, the fearsome loathsome thing is gradually accepted by one, two, and more people.

There is still separation between systematic social acceptance, like legalizing self-driving cars, and personal acceptance–that I let it drive me. These are two different decisions that need to be made on a case by case basis. At least for now, until such a time when we have agreed upon our version of laws of robotics.

Chinese people built the largest wall ever, the Great Wall. Actually I guess it’s actually The Great Walls, as it was built and rebuilt a few times.

It would seem to me that Mexican wall could have an upside. It is bottom-up stimulus basically if it is built by American hands. It would cause a large migration of certain construction workers to migrate to live nearer to the fence southern United States. Nothing terrible here.

Let’s see, one definite possibility is placing solar panels on the side of the wall and on top to generate electricity: might pay for the wall this way. But the Mexican or American kids might throw stones and break the panels. Fine add drone monitoring, maybe let autonomous drones shoot rubber pellets at kids throwing stones.

Maybe there would be a chat bot, multi-lingual of course, that tries to reason with the perp. Or maybe several drones will swoop down to surround her barraging non-lethal body parts with non-lethal deterrent-say pepper spray. Is it allowed? Heck yes, they do it to college students in America, of course it’s allowed on Mexicans…

Face recognition of course, although it might learn faces of a lot lizards too.

All this seem somewhat unimaginative today. 

One wonders if it would stop drug imports? If so, that actually seems like a very bold step to take. According to America dramatization this making and shipping of drugs from Latin America to the US is huge business! Apparently it is also very violent. Any small town person might not even know about it (the voters) actually one wonders if these powerful drug dealers have actual power in the United States that politicians fear to fight them? Perhaps president Trump is actually an unacknowledged hero?

Then there is the pure and unadulterated dislike for Mexicans. Maybe a lot of people here actually do literally want less Mexicans. I mean I see a lot of Chinese visitors when I go hiking and some times I wish there were less people, and consequently a lot less Chinese people, on the hiking trails. Com’on even if by world population ratio, it should be reasonable to expect around 20% of hikers and not 75% or more the way I see it. But of course that should be done within the framework of American human freedom and capitalism. (This would create a problem for smaller minorities where there is not enough population here to admit even one individual due to proportionality requirements. But that isn’t the problem right now. Heck one can probably disproportionately increase population of smaller minority Asians just to keep these darn Chinese under control!)

I think we need to satiafy this need to control our immigration. If it is perceived that we have no control, then that’s a perceived incompetence that needs to be overcome.

Mexico is a growing manufacturing power house. I cannot imagine that China is very upset about straining relationship between the US and Mexico. Putting up a wall and charging a passage toll of some sort based on value of goods being transported might be a good way to recover wall building costs of the wall. Of course, matching toll shall be levied on Chinese goods for good measure to pay for all these hiking trails.

Curious how this would play out. Also, this blog calls for all American politicians to respect human rights and human equality within confines of America. It would also be great if people who are here feels that the system for admission is a just one.

After some games it seems that the Ancient Chinese Weiqi game does expose additional implicit information about the board. Give any vertex and edge it is clear the axis on which it lie and the direction from the vertex it emanates: e.g. north of the vertex. This information is lost when we represented the game as a graph.

Therefore the information is injected by using directed graph and labeled edges. Therefore, let the board be

• Set of players P, typically players are distinguished by color. E.g. black and white.
• Set of verteces V.
• Set of directed edges between them: V X V.
• Disjoint sets of edges known as axis representing edges that lie in the direction of that axis: eg the north-south axes is one set, east-west a separate and disjoint set, up-down a third set.
• Liberty can only flow in the direction of edge. A stone s receive 1 liberty from an unoccupied vertex c if (v,s) is an edge. A stone s may benefit from all liberties of a second stone t if (t,s) is an edge.

Previously, I had been thinking that civilized contest among people should have rules that prevent the use of non-productive strategies. For some definition of productivity, maybe it means don’t hack other peoples’ computers, maybe it means something physical structure or that something has to be manufactured or transformed, maybe it just means don’t damage something someone else constructed within the confines of this contest.

Perhaps that’s too naive? Take Chess for example, built into the game is the requirement to kill pieces to win. What fun is a game that is not confrontational? What fun is a game in which the loser is not destroyed? The need to win seem to, at least at this moment, far outweigh the need for reason and civility.

One wonders if there is another way to frame competitions so that they are still fun and exciting but somehow punishes destruction or interference of opponents productive actions.

Perhaps one important thing to distinguish, for myself, is the difference between symbolic exercise and “real world” contests. In real world contests, winning typically have physical meaning of achievement as a part of the winning process: the battle is won, by the process of my army advancing, and in the process of winning we achieve the original goal of physical control of the space.(and the same sequence for hacker taking control of a computer, the taking of control is physical “real world” acquisition) In civilized humanity, we have added thoughts and declaration of rightful status of the winner(e.g. ownership)–after we win, we acknolwedge related believes: that this was ordained by some higher power, or that we believe we are superior in ownership than former owner, etc. and this civility is not a 20th century thing. Ancient contests are won and written about with similar theme as well. The winner always justifies the status of the winner beyond the mental and mechanical efforts it took to win. AFAIK

What my mind demands of constructive competition is that it be constructive in practice and constructive in that mental narrative that eventually expounds on how rightful and great it was for he winner to have won. I suppose here is a near equivalent of nonnegative contest.

For those who insist on breaking things as a means of innovation, I believe this is the answer. In physical world, as well as in some rigid rule based society, it is impossible to progress without breaking things. And it maybe discovered later that given the means available, destruction is the most efficient way to progress. (And this includes little progress as well). So reallistically we allow for breaking things.

In principle, with the voice that declares us the rightful winner at the end, we would point out that the destruction represents deconstruction of something that is wrong. This is probably why people destroy statues of thought leaders when their thoughts have failed to lead to happiness. This could be the destruction of some mental constructs, or some social norms, etc. something nonreal is destroyed.

So therein is the problem. Is there a way to frame constructive contest, in the real world, that has a natural utilitarian narrative? What is the minimum of such formulation?