P2P Could Help Avoid Internet Congestions

Check out this article from Technology Review. It shows the structure of the Internet as it has been measured in a new study.

One interesting fact is that shutting down the Internet's core of about 80 critical nodes cannot entirely shut down the Internet. that's good news: actually the Internet (Arpanet as it was called in those days) was invented precisely to get around that issue.

Just as interesting is the idea that we could use the Internet in a more decentralized fashion, i.e. use more P2P connections, and that should help in avoiding most of the congestions that can happen at the core.

Closer, Closer, Hot!

You know what? Hot Pixel, the pixedelic PSP game from zSlide just got reviewed on IGN.

To celebrate that, and to wait until the release in Europe on June 22, here is a bunch of exclusive screenshots:

SIAI: Humanity's Stand Against The Terminator & The Matrix

SIAI - The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

A non-profit organization working on the most important issues of Humanity: The Singularity. What does it mean? SIAI has opened a blog and is putting some energy in explaining the Singularity to us:

• read about it in this 5 minute text intro
• or watch a couple of videos below

To be honest I am pretty curious about how you feel about that. Believer / non-believer? Go ahead and let me know in the comments.

If you ask me, these guys are forming the early stage of our most important line of defense. Will smarter-than-human AI be friendly? or will it decide to enslave us or exterminate us? Stop smiling for a second, and realize that this is the biggest challenge we have ever faced. The outcome could be spiritual elevation and the end of material limitations. But if we don't make it right, it could also spell Doom and all Terminator/Matrix Hell could break loose.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is one of the world's foremost researchers on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow. In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence," a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers forthcoming in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2007), "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks" and "Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk."

Let's Become Smarter

I just read this post by Michael Anissimov on Accelerating Returns. Read it.

I don't fully agree with the way he kind of limits the effect of intelligence to "getting it right the first time". Getting it right eventually is not stupid either in my humble opinion.

On the contrary, I do love his conclusions.

But what we naively label “impossible” might be “easy” even to a mild version of superintelligence, say a human being with an artificially expanded neocortex.

[...]

It seems like only transhumanists are capable of really stepping outside of that box of Homo sapiens and saying, “what if we were really and truly fundamentally smarter?” If more people could do this, then pursuing intelligence enhancement technology might become a national or even global priority.

Think about it. If we become more intelligent then we will be able to solve almost all of our current problems.

Think about our ancestors before the wheel was invented. Or before Fire was tamed. Well from their point of view, we have solved already a good part of the issues they had in the old-days: eating, surviving as a species.

So what could we expect/hope to solve in the Future with greater intelligence? I guess we wouldn't mind curing cancer and aids for starters. Then what about solving world hunger and cleaning up the Planet. And what about curing the aging process...

That said, unlike Michael I wouldn't put too much emphasis on expanding our intelligence with neocortex implants. They sound spectacular but they also sound scary, and technically I suppose it could be harder to achieve these implants than to simply run that advanced intelligence on digital hardware. But that doesn't matter: it is only a question of timing, and technology progresses ever faster.

So, as a conclusion, should we work hard to build a greater intelligence? Yes we should, because it is the only way for us to get to the next stage, and leave our "homo sapiens sapiens" daily problems behind.

The good news is that we are already flying in that direction: exponentially accelerating progress is happening right now, as it always has, for our technologies. And ultimately our technology will outsmart our minds.

5 Ultra Vintage TechCrunch Profiles: Digg, Flickr, Delicious, Feedburner, Technorati

By now we should all agree that the "Web 2.0" moniker is past its climax. This decline has nothing to do with a bubble and it doesn't mean that all the innovation and venture capital is going to end. It is just a "has been" buzz word.

Now is the time to remember how it started, and where the juicy juice came from in the beginning...

So let's go back through time and (re-)discover TechCrunch's profiling of some of the most significant Web 2.0 companies:

• Technorati:
  http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/11/technorati-new-improved/
  

• Feedburner:
  http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/14/feedburner-profile/

• Flickr:
  http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/16/profile-flickr/
  

• Delicious:
  http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/16/profile-delicious/
  

• Digg:
  http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/06/18/profile-digg/
  

Thanks Michael Arrington for writing the profiles in the first place.

Thanks Bastien for the heads-up.

Puzzle Game Training

Are you good at puzzle games?

Check out this video, showing how fast these stupid puzzles can be solved...

Relating to Greater Intelligence

Mitchell Howe entertains us with a short story about Greater Intelligence on the blog of the SIAI (Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). Set in the context of a termite colony, he shows how non-intuitive it would be for one egocentric intelligence to relate to a higher intelligence.

His point is well made even though, as Roko notes in the comments, these anthropomorphic termites seem to reason and talk like humans. Actually their vision of the world is impeded by the limitations of their natural environment. They don't grasp the world of men, they don't realize there is something beyond the woods. They are clueless. They can't get it.

Oh My - Parallels To Support DirectX

I have mentioned Parallels Desktop a few time already. This is a geek news all right but an awesome news. The new release "3.0" planned for this summer will support DirectX. This simple geeky fact outshines, if you ask me, the improved applicative integration which only promises to let you choose to open this type of files with that windows app automatically.

I found out by reading TechCrunch, but here is the news to Parallel's official blog post. And here is a screenshot of Quake 4 running within Windows within MacOS X:

This means, as an amazing side effect, that I will be able to run the Windows version of Hot Pixel on my Mac without rebooting. Awesome.

Hot Pixels Inside

Hot Pixel is coming soon to a PSP near you on June 22nd.

Meanwhile you can read Jordane's interview on IGN or Jordane's interview on Spong. He is one crazy game designer!