Post by thread:[OT:] Challenging - Another thought applied to Pic

well, most of the 35 can have parameters. First calculate all possible instructions. I will cheat a little for times sake. Say 16f series uses 14bit instructions. thats 2^14. Thats 16384 possible instructions combinations. Really it is of cource quite a bit less because some of the bits are ignored for some instructions. Now take 16384^1024 Windows calculator gives me this: 3.681440950105214388934181504608e+4315 Not to mention the config word ;-) I wonder how many 286 it took them to come up with windows 3.1 Actually it would be neat to perform a genetic algorithm on smaller bits of code to make subroutines, and then try combinations of those. With self-programming chips you could make evolving robots. They would even die after a while from flash overuse. - Ben On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 17:25:21 +0100, Dominic Stratten <spam_OUTdominic.strattenTakeThisOuTntlworld.com> wrote: {Quote hidden}> > Heres something I've been thinking about for a while. > > If you took a 16F627 Pic Microcontroller with 1024 words of memory and 35 > instructions, how many possible programs could be generated for this > microcontroller (working or not). > > This brings me back to the theory that Microsoft have a million high powered > computers generating random code for Intel Cpu's. > > Every now and again a usable program drops out of one of these machines and > they package it and sell it as an operating system or office package. The > downside of this method is that the software is usually very buggy and > normally needs fixing before its even been released ;-) > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: > [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads > -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads

It's actually pretty cool to think of being able to get useful images, programs, stories, etc. from random combos of bits, but I see the biggest problem being not the generation of said information, but rather the recognition and capture. Say with the latest supercomputers, we can write 1,000 random novels a second. How do you sort between the purely junk ones and the useful ones? Given that computer sorting could get rid of the absolutely random junk, to get a perfect novel, program, or picture would take an incredibly smart, and therefore incredibly slow program or a huge group of people. Still would be fun tho... kinda like calculating pi to the umpteenth digit just for the heck of it. - Robert -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads

There'd have to be some recognition feedback system to keep it moving in the right direction if it were ever to happen in our lifetimes. There are way more words in the english language than PIC instructions, and way more words in a novel than a PIC program (see earlier post for the math). But of course any sort of guidance would destroy the cool random-factor, making it sound a lot more like boring-old-evolution. With such a system it might not be too hard to pair nouns, verbs, punctuation, names, etc. in the right places to form sentences. Sort of like an out of control mad-libs game... And then the grammatical correctness would of course not guarantee any sort of coherent plot, almost certainly no underlying themes. First we need a computer that simulates a human brain and can read really really fast, and feed in all the best human productions to teach it what is suspenseful, erotic, happy, sad, entertaining, boring, etc... and THEN use it as a feedback system and see what evolves. Might make for some interesting reading after a few hundred years of untended revisions. Of course the flaw with this is that it would only produce things it *thinks* are enjoyable to humans, i.e. what we programmed it to think we like. My bet is it would rewrite the Die Hard trilogy. {Original Message removed}

> >With self-programming chips you could make evolving robots. They would >even die after a while from flash overuse. Robotic Alzheimers. I thought of doing this. I've done a tokenized language interpreter in both the PIC and the AVR, for various projects. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads

Computing pi to the umpteenth digit is actually rather easily achieve nowadays by good maths software and and a average desktop pc. In Mathematica 5 i enumerated pi to 1 million digits. Didn't take very long too. I do computer science related topics as part of my training, and being able to recognise a "perfect novel" is really really hard. For one, we ourselves cannot really define easily what makes a perfect novel. Plot? Writing style? Length? and how do we define these? If the computer were able to do such stuff, my we would have made another great breakthough in what is known as Natural Language Processing. People have working hard on this problem as as far as my limited knowledge is i don't think its been done yet. Recognising images is again the same problem. How do you know what a valid image is? Perhaps a smart computer could use algorithms to create a black white kinda outline of figures in it by looking for edges (where the colour difference between pixels is great) and from there try and look for specific figures. But like you said, this would take time. And how many shapes would you want to look for. After that, some screening by humans has to be done. Difficult task no doubt. However instead of a supercomputer perhaps what could be done is to take an approach like SETI, by using screensavers to utilise Personal PC power. By ensuring your function that generates the images generates distinct range of images based on input, you assign a range of images for the computer to generate and analyse. My 2 cents ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Daniel Chia "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison E-mail: .....danielcjhKILLspam@spam@yahoo.com.sg MSN: danstryder01KILLspamyahoo.com.sg ------------------------------------------------------------------------ {Original Message removed}

> > Computing pi to the umpteenth digit is actually rather easily > achieve > nowadays by good maths software and and a average desktop pc. In > Mathematica > 5 i enumerated pi to 1 million digits. Didn't take very long > too. > I wonder if instead of monkeys typing away forever and coming up with a Shakespear sonnet, if that same sonnet could be found ASCII encoded somewhere in the sequence of PI? So for example, instead of an MP3, I just have a file that says, start at the nth digit of PI (or sqrt of 2?) and go for n digits and play the song. This may be similar to the paradox where the spaceman comes to Earth, scans all our known literature and creates one big number. He then represents this number as a fraction, takes out a rod made of a special space material and makes a mark on it. Decoding all the Earth literature when he gets back is only a matter of precise measuring and a bit of calculation. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.699 / Virus Database: 456 - Release Date: 6/4/2004 -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics

From: "Lindy Mayfield" <.....Lindy.MayfieldKILLspam.....EUR.SAS.COM> Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2004 1:13 AM > I wonder if instead of monkeys typing away forever and coming up with a Shakespear sonnet, if that > same sonnet could be found ASCII encoded somewhere in the sequence of PI? There's a theorem in math that PI (or any irrational number) contains every finite substring, but as far as I know, it's still an open problem; there is no proof the the theorem is true or false. > So for example, instead of an MP3, I just have a file that says, start at the nth digit of PI (or sqrt of 2?) > and go for n digits and play the song. This would be true if the theorem is, but for a lot of strings, expressing the starting index would be longer than the string itself even if you take advantage of very large number notation like Knuth's notation. > This may be similar to the paradox where the spaceman comes to Earth, scans all our known literature > and creates one big number. He then represents this number as a fraction, takes out a rod made of a > special space material and makes a mark on it. Decoding all the Earth literature when he gets back is > only a matter of precise measuring and a bit of calculation. That would assume matter is infinitely divisible so he can put the the mark anywhere he wants. Our present understanding of quantum mechanics says that matter is granular in nature. JAson -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.