How can you transfer nothing from one place to another in such a way that it will have an effect on the destination?
Language is not nothing. Language is patterns which we have learned to connect with things in the real world. Words are just ink on a paper if you don't understand the language, but if you understand then it is information.
Language is sensory experience converted into another format. When experience is converted to "random" symbols we call words or sounds, then those words can be converted back to experience, and by combining words (experiences) you can create all kinds of experience and information like this.
Re: Warp
The ink and paper didn't transmit anything. It was the arrangement of ink on the paper which did. And what was transmitted was information, measured as surprise. If I can predict every mark on the paper perfectly after only seeing one line, the paper didn't convey any informaton - I already knew it. But since I learned something new by reading it, the information was there - because I couldn't've predicted the arrangement. You can actually measure the information content stored on the paper by counting the marks and their arrangement, and you can distinguish between useful information and randomness through a second measure.
To: everyone
I've been playing a lot of Guilty Gear XX^Core lately, and I'm not very good. I want to learn how to be an aggressive player who never lets up pressure and is always rushing towards the opponent. So far my best character is Ky, but since I have like 15 hours experience I could learn anyone easly enough. What characters are reccomended for this playstyle, and how should I learn it? (my playgroup consists of about 10 people divided into three tiers of skill and I'm at the bottom of the 2nd tier - I can beat 100% of the time all the casually interested people, I lose 100% of the time against all the tournament level people, and I can beat the middle people only when they make mistakes or choose characters that aren't their main characters).
someone is out there who will like you. take off your mask so they can find you faster.
I support the new Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun.
Boco, get the faqs and try to master every combo in practice. then, try to beat the computer at the best level. if it gets too easy, switch characters.
then, make sure you keep playing with the best players you can find : the more difference there is between you and them there is, the quicker you will progress. patience is the key.
note that this is true to every fighting game, as well to many video games. the more you loose, the more you learn.
I never sleep, 'cause sleep is the cousin of death - NAS
Joined: 5/2/2006
Posts: 1020
Location: Boulder, CO
Information and entropy are both things taht are measurable, and quantifiable. It may not be reasonable to measure it in a particular situation or scale, but knowing that a measurment of it could theoretically exist seems to add creadence to the idea that there is some other, measurable, tangible thing that was transfered in that case.
Ok I think I figured out how to measure the information transfered when you give one recipe to another person. According to wikipedia a recipe consists of the following components:
The name (and often the locale or provenance) of the dish,
How much time it will take to prepare the dish
The required ingredients along with their quantities or proportions
Equipment and environment needed to prepare the dish
An ordered list of preparation steps
The number of servings that the recipe will provide
I don't really think the top and bottom instructions are that relevant to following a recipe so lets focus on the middle 4. Now we need to figure out the maximum total state space of each of those 4 components.
The first component is how much time it will take to prepare the dish. Now lets assume the lowest amount of time for this is one min. Lets assume the highest amount of time it could take would be 32 mins. This information could easily be stored in 32 bits in a computer so I think thats a good way to measure the state space of this first component.
Now the second component is the number of ingredients. I can't really see a recipe having more than 16 ingredients so lets store the number of ingredients in 16 bits. Now we come to the total number of ingredients possible that could be used in a recipe. I really have no idea what to set this number at but I think I will set it at 1024 bits.
Now for the types of equipment. Once again don't know what to set this at so I will set it at 1024. I don't really think the environment will have much of an effect on a dish so lets set that at 8 bits.
Now for the the last component. I don't know what to set this at so I will just set it at 1024 again.
Now I think you multiply these bits together and you get the total number of bits (also know as the amount of information in the recipe) the recipe takes up. I hope I did this right.
To emphasize. Imagine you had a machine which made random pen marks on papers all day. You would agree that most papers have no message on it. But maybe one random mark comes out to look like "Hello world." Was the message intentional? No. I would argue the message isn't on the paper, only random pen marks are. It's your brain which incorrectly finds meaning where there was none. (It just so happens, most of the time our brain finds meaning where there is some.) But the point is, the message isn't there without our brains.
That doesn't explain what is it that is being transferred. You are simply describing one property of this mysterious "thing", not what is the mechanism by which it's transferred from one place to another.
I could compare your description to this:
Q: "What is it that makes a car advance? I can't understand it."
A: "Note that for a car to advance in a meaningful way it needs a person inside it, looking where the car is going and steering the wheel as necessary. Else it will just advance without control and crash."
Yes, the "answer" is describing a property of cars, but it isn't answering the original question.
Sure, to transfer information from one person to another we need two persons: The writer and the reader. This is quite obvious. There are also some other properties needed for these persons (eg. a common language). However, these are just requirements for the transferral to work, it doesn't really explain how the information is being transferred, ie. what is the physical phenomenon acting here.
As I said in my original post, the amount of mass and energy in the written paper is not all by itself the thing that transfers the information. The amount of mass and energy can be completely *identical* in another piece of paper, yet that another piece of paper may not transfer any information at all from one person to another. Given two papers with the *exact* same amount of mass and energy, what is it that makes one contain "more" than the other, what is it that makes one cause a reaction while the other doesn't? It's not energy. What is it, then?
I think entropy is a fine answer though: it is a cumulative product of human culture, which can only arise as the entropy in the universe increases.
Btw, I'm not sure if you have a confusion about what entropy is. I think you have it backwards: The more entropy there is, the less order there is. You have to decrease the amount of entropy to get a less chaotic system.
Besides, reading the wikipedia article about entropy doesn't give one the feeling that it has anything to do with this.
"In physics, entropy, symbolized by S, from the Greek μετατροπή (metatropi) meaning "transformation",[3][4] is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work.[5] Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics and the combined law of thermodynamics, which deal with physical processes and whether they occur spontaneously. Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how far this smoothing-out process has progressed."
"Quantitatively, entropy is defined by the differential quantity dS = δQ / T, where δQ is the amount of heat absorbed in an isothermal and reversible process in which the system goes from one state to another, and T is the absolute temperature at which the process is occurring.[6] Entropy is one of the factors that determines the free energy of the system. This thermodynamic definition of entropy is only valid for a system in equilibrium (because temperature is defined only for a system in equilibrium), while the statistical definition of entropy (see below) applies to any system. Thus the statistical definition is usually considered the fundamental definition of entropy."
According to these definitions entropy has everything to do with energy. The more entropy there is in a system, the less "useful" energy there is (energy which can be used to do work).
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjavík, Ísland
^
I think i got it now. The paper with the recipe doesn't contain any "more" of anything in any way than the paper with nothing. The difference is simply in how other people react to it. It makes no difference that someone deliberately altered the appearance of it. A person reading the recipe then interprets the paper in his/her own way, actually completely independent of what the author did. It just happens that we have this system of writing that we all use in (roughly) the same way. Thus, the knowledge isn't actually transferred in some "intrinsic" way, the person receiving the message simply interpreted the world in his/her own way, in exactly the same way that she would interpret a blank piece of paper, a rock, or a pair of pants. This same line of thinking could be applied to any other kind of human contact.
Maybe the structure? For example, if you take a type writer, it has a certain amount of mass and energy. If you disassemble it, it still has the same amount of mass and energy, but it no longer works.
Maybe the structure? For example, if you take a type writer, it has a certain amount of mass and energy. If you disassemble it, it still has the same amount of mass and energy, but it no longer works.
But the reason why it doesn't work can be explained with physics: Forces no longer act in the required way and energy is no longer transmitted in the required way for the typewriter to work as intended.
However, there are no forces nor energy in a certain pattern of ink on a paper (compared to some other pattern).
That's not true. Ink in a certain pattern emits photons in a certain pattern to my eyes in a certain pattern. If my eyes can interpret recipes only if they fit a certain pattern, then I can't interpret recipes if the ink doesn't match one of those patterns. The interpretation of the recipe is a big mechanical system involving paper, ink, photons, my eyes, and my brain. Just like the type writer, if you change it around, it won't work. If you change the ink pattern around, the big mechanical system won't work.
Warp:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy
It's an entire branch of mathematics.
Ramzi and Bisqwit were exactly right. You are moving entropy, in your case, a certain arrangement of characters, over a channel, in your case, the paper with the writing on it.
If you can't read English, than the recipe is useless. Therefore, the more important part is the encoder, the person that wrote the recipe, and the decoder, the person that reads it. Otherwise, it is just random characters. Hence, how the term entropy fits in.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
This may seem like a trivial question, but I've seriously wondered about it many times. The pages and ink used in many of my textbooks have some weird reflective properties that basically make them unreadable if the light source is within a certain distance or at a certain angle to the book. This is quite inconvenient, as you may imagine. Does anyone know why such paper and ink is used?
The ink is probably the same used in any other publication. The paper may be heavier than what you find in a magazine, for durability's sake. What you are likely experiencing with the reflectiveness is mainly from the book's finish — glossy or maybe semi-glossy.
Glossy finishing is used because it is shiny, appears more vibrant and colourful, it has the best optical density and it's pretty much the industry standard. It probably accounts for about 20% of the cost of your textbook, by the way.
Newspapers use a matte finish in stead of glossy, and are a much lighter paper. And a lot easier to read, I think.
This may seem like a trivial question, but I've seriously wondered about it many times. The pages and ink used in many of my textbooks have some weird reflective properties that basically make them unreadable if the light source is within a certain distance or at a certain angle to the book. This is quite inconvenient, as you may imagine. Does anyone know why such paper and ink is used?
To follow up on Inzult's explanation, the glossy finish specifically prevents the paper from absorbing ink. The ink does not sink into the paper and spread, so you can print at a higher resolution and with less color diffusion. I think that's what Inzult means by optical density. You can confirm this by actually erasing ink from textbook pages, which is impossible with newspapers or inkjet printed pages. How to do it: take a normal pencil eraser and gently erase your target area over and over again. The ink will slowly fade away, and finally, vanish. Inevitably you will also erase a bit of the gloss finish on the paper itself, so if you hold it under light at an angle, you can tell it has been erased by the lack of a glossy reflection in the offending area, but you leave absolutely no trace of the ink you removed. I used to wile away many an hour in grade school erasing entire pages from my textbooks :) .
I have a bag of salt, and a bag of sugar. They are of arbitrary size (the sizes of the bags do not matter). I mix the two bags vigorously. What is the best way re-isolate the salt and sugar without changing the state of either (i.e. you can't use melting points to your advantage)? Is this possible without analyzing each grain of salt/sugar?
Kyrsimys gets points for the classical "lateral" solution to the puzzle, but as someone else already pointed out, you can't really get the sugar away from the ants.
Laughing_gas suggested you put the salt and sugar in a solution and then use a centrifuge, but that won't work. Putting the salt and sugar in a solution doesn't magically give you salt water and sugar water, it gives you salt-sugar water, so there aren't two liquids there to separate. Spinning the salt-sugar solution in a centrifuge will create a density gradient, but it won't separate the salt and the sugar. Rather, the concentration of both solutes will change along the gradient.
The only real solution I know of uses good old fashioned chemistry. In the general case, what is needed are two immiscible solvents, in one of which one solute has a high relative solubility, and in the other of which the other solute has a high relative solubility. Pour the hopelessly mixed solutes into a container with the solvents, and stir vigorously. Allow the mixture to sit for a while, and the two solvents will naturally separate. Once separated you can siphon the solvents off and allow them to evaporate, leaving two piles of purified solutes. You can repeat the process until you achieve a desired level of purity. This is a very common procedure used to separate all sorts of things, commonly known as solvent or "liquid-liquid" extraction. Also it should be pointed out that in our case we only need one solvent, namely dimethyl ether. Since ether doesn't dissolve salt at all, you can pour the sugar-salt into ether and remove the salt with a filter.
As I said in my original post, the amount of mass and energy in the written paper is not all by itself the thing that transfers the information. The amount of mass and energy can be completely *identical* in another piece of paper, yet that another piece of paper may not transfer any information at all from one person to another. Given two papers with the *exact* same amount of mass and energy, what is it that makes one contain "more" than the other, what is it that makes one cause a reaction while the other doesn't? It's not energy. What is it, then?
I'm convinced by now you are just trolling, but I'll respond to your nonsense nonetheless. Two pieces of paper with the same mass are not black holes. Conglomerations of matter are defined by more than just their mass, spin, and charge. If the matter of one sheet of paper is arranged differently than the matter in another, then they are different. If the matter of one sheet of paper is arranged by one person to convey meaning through learned patterns to another person who also knows those patterns, then that sheet of paper is capable of transmitting information from one person to another. Information is not magical, and spouting stuff like "information has no energy" or whatever you said a few posts back doesn't make any sense at all.
The matter in our brains is configured in such a way that we can use learned patterns to evoke responses out of other brains that are similarly configured. It's no coincidence. It's because we were both exposed certain kinds of patterns that caused chemical responses in the neurons in our brains, forming links between some, severing links between others, etc. Now our brains respond one way to learned patterns, and another way to meaningless smudges. Even though it is seemingly infinitely more complex, this is little different than the fact that chemical compounds react to some things and not to others, for example N,N-diethyl-D-lysergamide is psychoactive, while N,N-diethyl-R-lysergamide is not, and they have the exact same atoms in them, information energy wtf omg! Hint: the atoms are arranged differently. Anyway, I don't really know what else to say since I don't actually understand what you think the problem is.
I'm not.
I can certainly see why you would think so, though. It's that several people have tried to answer the dilemma with something I think does not really answer it (refer to my "how do cars advance" analogy), and I respond to these answers correspondingly. Either I don't see the connection between the given answer and the dilemma, or there simply is no such connection. Either way, me dissenting with the answers might be seen as "trolling", although it isn't. It just means that I don't think the answer is correct (because I don't understand it or because it indeed is not correct).
Information is not magical, and spouting stuff like "information has no energy" or whatever you said a few posts back doesn't make any sense at all.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean with that. Do you mean that information *has* energy? Or do you mean something completely different?
Anyway, I don't really know what else to say since I don't actually understand what you think the problem is.
The dilemma I just can't understand is that something *more* than just mass/energy is being transferred from one person to another, but I have difficulty in grasping what this something is.
I suppose the most sensible answer I have got so far about what is this "something more" that is being transferred is "structure". Structure is this "something else than mass/energy" that is being transferred.
However, what I find fascinating is the nature of "structure". What is it? How do you define its existence? It's relatively easy to measure and describe mass and energy, but how do you measure and describe structure? The fact that the structure seems physically so intangible in the case of text transferring information from one person to another doesn't help understanding its nature.
Maybe you limit your view of physics too much. Who says physics is simply particles with mass and energy? Given a specific particle, it contains the property of being some distance from a different particle. Is "distance" physical? Is "distance" made out of mass and energy? Maybe not, but you would still agree that it is a property of the particle.
Maybe it would help to view things like "distance" and "structure" as emergent phenomena. For example, imagine the "wave" at baseball games. This is when the stadium of people stand up and sit down at the correct time to make a wave motion. You can explain the wave with reduction; it is simply the result of all of the individual people. But the wave itself now has properties: velocity, wavelength, etc. Do you view the wave simply as many individual people, or do you view it as something all its own?
Joined: 12/26/2006
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Location: United States of America
Warp wrote:
However, what I find fascinating is the nature of "structure". What is it?
I'm going to take a stab at this. It seems that the only thing actually "transmitted" in a literal sense is the pattern of ink on the paper. The "structure" (there has to be a better name for this) depends on common rules of interpretation on the parts of both the sender and receiver. "Information" is an abstract noun for a reason. Saying that something besides the ink and paper (i.e. the information) is "transmitted" is true only in a figurative sense. "Transmission of information" is nothing more than a metaphor – a handy mental convienence, an abstraction of a more difficult-to-grasp idea.
It seems that the process works as follows:
The sender formulates an intended interpretation of his message based on the believed rules of interpretation of the recipient.
Through a process probably not clearly understood by mankind, the sender encodes the intended interpretation of his message as a pattern of ink on paper.
The recipient, upon receiving the message, again in a process probably not clearly understood, proceeds to decode the patterns of ink on the paper using his own rules of interpretation into his own interpretation of the message.
There are several things to note here:
The sender does not fix the interpretation of the recipient, or even the recipient's rules of interpretation.
There are several things that could go wrong in this process:
The sender may incorrectly encode the intended interpretation of the message. This could be things like accidently writing one word when another was intended, spelling words incorrectly, unintended slips of the hand while writing, and so on.
The rules of interpretation that the sender believes the recipient to use may be partially or totally incorrect. For example, different languages, differing competencies of the same language, differing competencies of subsets of a language, e.g. slang or jargon or use of different dialects, meanings or shades of meanings understood by only one of the parties, incorrect guessing of an intended meaning of a word in the case of polysemy, and about a million other things.
It seems to me that none of these problems would exist if something outside of the "encoder/decoder" relationship were transmitted besides just the ink and paper.
For the record, I have no idea how a person formulates an intended interpretation of a message and encodes that interpretation by manipulation of matter, or how the mental processes of decoding and interpretation actually work. These things are outside my scope of knowledge, and, it seems to me, outside the scope of Warp's original question.
But for what was in the scope of the original question... somebody please blow a hole in this if it's wrong, because, for the number of intelligent people taking part in this discussion, why this is still a question is something I don't understand. It's like asking, "How do computers send pictures to each other if there are only wires connecting them?" The answer to Warp's question is common sense observation of how humans communicate. Hasn't anybody bothered to sit down and observe this?
P.S.
This is an expression of genuine bewilderment; there is no intention to flame or offend anybody. But I guess we'll see how the recipients interpret it. ; P
But for what was in the scope of the original question... somebody please blow a hole in this if it's wrong, because, for the number of intelligent people taking part in this discussion, why this is still a question is something I don't understand. It's like asking, "How do computers send pictures to each other if there are only wires connecting them?" The answer to Warp's question is common sense observation of how humans communicate. Hasn't anybody bothered to sit down and observe this?
P.S.
This is an expression of genuine bewilderment; there is no intention to flame or offend anybody. But I guess we'll see how the recipients interpret it. ; P
Did you miss this? IT HAS BEEN STUDIED EXTENSIVELY. IT IS AN ENTIRE BRANCH OF MATHEMATICS.
DarkKobold wrote:
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
DarkKobold: I hate to call you out on this, particularly since you said I was right, but what does information theory being a branch of mathematics have anything to do with the question? Mathematics is a non-physical abstraction (or is at least easily viewed that way.) Telling Warp, "There is a non-physical abstraction called information theory that studies this," doesn't really answer the question of how something non-physical is transfered physically.
