I'd say it's more similar to Javascript. In fact all of the examples are valid JS if you replace `fn` with `function`. (Although JS doesn't have implicit returns.)
At a guess, the author chose the syntax because it's familiar and easy to parse. Go's syntax is... eccentric where it differs from typical C-style languages.
Author here. Yes, that's exactly right. I wanted to show how to write a parser/interpreter for something that you encounter every day. JavaScript-like syntax, with curly braces and `if`/`else` is just that.
I mean, it's clearly a very abstract representation based on archaeological data. There's no people or animals in the streets, which wouldn't have been the case even at night let alone midday, and all the houses except the famous landmarks are basic geometric boxes. It's not intended to be a video-game like living city, but rather a semi-immersive virtual museum.
What you're asking for would have required an entirely different budget and likely would run counter to the point of the model. It's not a simulation.
They're comparing to an in-order CPU. Given that most CPUs are out-of-order (at least of the non-embedded variety, and GC is less used in such applications anyway), it would be better and more intellectually honest to actually compare to a typical CPU that performs GC. They kind of address this in the paper but only in a short aside: "Note that previous research [1] showed that out-of-order CPUs, while moderately faster, are not the best trade-off point for GC (a result we confirmed in preliminary simulations)." So they don't quantify what any of this means.
I think it's an interesting idea, but it doesn't bode well when they seemingly choose the wrong target for comparison and hand-wave away the difference as insignificant.
The comparison at least in the abstract is energy efficiency. It's quite likely that a small in order CPU is very good at chasing dependent pointers around the heap for its power consumption.
Imagine a linked list. Each pointer access is likely to miss to main memory, and no concurrency is possible. Both the highest and lowest end cores will sit around making a single request every 80ns.
They claim that the comparison was to the best alternative and I'd probably take them at their word barring any specific evidence.
I think an interesting comparison here is GPU cores, where a core will get blocked on a memory access and it will switch out its state for another. It looks like this is the approach here, which is a bit more aggressive than ordinary out-of-order approach. It's less ordered.
I'm pretty sure that is the first implementation of Lisp. Earlier "versions" of Lisp were hand-compiled, because it was considered too difficult to produce a compiler. Then Steve Russell realized that McCarthy's "eval" function could be implemented in assembly language (which apparently hadn't occurred to McCarthy, he considered it merely theoretical) and produced the first Lisp interpreter. Note that the manual is from March 1960 and McCarthy's first paper on Lisp was published in April 1960, so nobody outside his circle at MIT would have known about Lisp at the time.
The manual also states that it's for "a version of Lisp being prepared for the IBM 709", implying the manual was written while the interpreter was still being developed, and all references I've found state that the IBM 709 version was the first practical implementation.
What Labour actually decided against was not oil exploration, but rather a konsekvensutredning, or an investigation into the possible environmental and social effects of oil extraction in the area. Which is in many ways a more radical position, as they are not even interesting in finding out what possible damage oil production might cause. They're rejecting the preliminary step before oil exploration, which is in turn the preliminary step to actual oil extraction.
Of course the current government never had any plans to conduct any preliminary steps. The two major parties (the Conservatives and the Progress Party) are all for it, but the minor supporting parties (the Liberals and Christian Democrats) are not, and so far they've gotten their will.
Dude, he wrote a detailed postmortem of his own mistakes. That is taking responsibility. You're projecting, for whatever reason. The sentence about the quiet man is clearly referencing the original hero of his story, who might not have saved 10 people but did try to save another man's life while risking his own.
Praggnanandhaa is actually the fourth youngest GM of all time and the third youngest right now, but still, it's impressive. There's no guarantees that this kid will progress at the same rate, but don't let that take away from the feel-good aspect of the story.
Fischer won the US championship for adults at the age of 14. He then went on to become the youngest candidate for the world championship in history at the age of 15 - a distinction he still holds.
The serious statement he makes is that humans have complex motivations, and he thinks any superintelligence would as well--in fact it might be a defining feature of intelligence. The Rick and Morty reference was just a humorous example of what might happen, not an actual argument. The subheading was "the argument from complex motivations", not "the argument from Rick and Morty", so let's try and focus on the serious part and not the humorous aside.
But the orthogonality thesis isn't just some idea that may or not be true. It follows directly from Hume's Guillotine, discovered in 1739: no amount of superintelligent reasoning about facts will allow you to derive goals.
No artificial intelligence will ever spontaneously develop morals, because the questions "what can I do" and "what should I do" are eternally separated by Hume's guillotine.
The motivations will always have to be provided by the people who make the machine, and we have been seen in the past that artificial intelligences are very good at finding loopholes in their moral code. Here are some real examples: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOa...
But if not, and the alarmists are right, deep shit. That's why the author's argument is void. The author needs to show that the chance of an AI with a simple goal and hyperintelligence is negligible. "it might be" is a coin toss, that doesn't help.
The title makes no sense if you interpret it that way, also, it seems to be a very niche term (most of the top google results are not computer related at all). I think 99% of people who saw the headline understood it the correct way.
> The title makes no sense if you interpret it that way
The lesson of weird machines is that weird machines can lurk anywhere; that's why they're 'weird'. Something to do with CPP or bit endianness, perhaps, or exploiting undefined behavior is what I thought clicking on it.
At a guess, the author chose the syntax because it's familiar and easy to parse. Go's syntax is... eccentric where it differs from typical C-style languages.