Monday, March 18, 2024

Formal Logic in SF: 'Foundation'

Below is the extract from "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov that I’m mulling over. As a young teenager it first got me interested in Predicate Calculus, which much later I studied in my AI research.


The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

Here's the extract.

---

"Said Yate Fulham: "And just how do you arrive at that remarkable conclusion, Mr. Mayor?"

"In a rather simple way. It merely required the use of that much-neglected commodity – common sense. You see, there is a branch of human knowledge known as symbolic logic, which can be used to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human language."

"What about it?" said Fulham.

"I applied it. Among other things, I applied it to this document here. I didn't really need to for myself because I knew what it was all about, but I think I can explain it more easily to five physical scientists by symbols rather than by words."

Hardin removed a few sheets of paper from the pad under his arm and spread them out. "I didn't do this myself, by the way," he said. "Muller Holk of the Division of Logic has his name signed to the analyses, as you can see."

Pirenne leaned over the table to get a better view and Hardin continued:

"The message from Anacreon was a simple problem, naturally, for the men who wrote it were men of action rather than men of words. It boils down easily and straightforwardly to the unqualified statement, when in symbols is what you see, and which in words, roughly translated, is, 'You give us what we want in a week, or we take it by force.'"

There was silence as the five members of the Board ran down the line of symbols, and then Pirenne sat down and coughed uneasily.

Hardin said, "No loophole, is there, Dr. Pirenne?"

"Doesn't seem to be."

"All right." Hardin replaced the sheets. "Before you now you see a copy of the treaty between the Empire and Anacreon – a treaty, incidentally, which is signed on the Emperor's behalf by the same Lord Dorwin who was here last week – and with it a symbolic analysis."

The treaty ran through five pages of fine print and the analysis was scrawled out in just under half a page.

"As you see, gentlemen, something like ninety percent of the treaty boiled right out of the analysis as being meaningless, and what we end up with can be described in the following interesting manner:

"Obligations of Anacreon to the Empire: None!

"Powers of the Empire over Anacreon: None!"

Again the five followed the reasoning anxiously, checking carefully back to the treaty, and when they were finished, Pirenne said in a worried fashion, "That seems to be correct."

"You admit, then, that the treaty is nothing but a declaration of total independence on the part of Anacreon and a recognition of that status by the Empire?"

"It seems so."

"And do you suppose that Anacreon doesn't realize that, and is not anxious to emphasize the position of independence – so that it would naturally tend to resent any appearance of threats from the Empire? Particularly when it is evident that the Empire is powerless to fulfill any such threats, or it would never have allowed independence."

"But then," interposed Sutt, "how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin's assurances of Empire support? They seemed –" He shrugged. "Well, they seemed satisfactory."

Hardin threw himself back in the chair. "You know, that's the most interesting part of the whole business. I'll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him – but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements."

There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror.

"What of it?" demanded Hardin. "I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been unpleasant; but he didn't, and I have the record, and that's that. I took that record, had it copied out and sent that to Holk for analysis, also."

Lundin Crast said, "And where is the analysis?"

"That," replied Hardin, "is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out."

"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire."

Hardin might have placed an actively working stench bomb on the table and created no more confusion than existed after his last statement."

---

Many people - mostly economists, it seems - have cited psychohistory as the reason they entered their profession. For me it prepared the way for the International Marxist Group.

But today I'm more interested in what ‘symbolic logic’ did for Salvor Hardin.

Within the paradigm of formal logic, the natural language texts Hardin gave to the ‘Division of Logic’ would most likely have been mapped to Richard Montague's baroque fusion of higher-order predicate calculus, lambda calculus and multi-modal logics. Computationally intractable, as it turns out.



Translating English into Montague's formal logic


But a suitable LLM in summarisation mode could do the job in seconds.

Friday, March 15, 2024

San Gimignano (June 2014)

We were in San Gimignano in June 2014, almost ten years ago. It's northwest of Siena and southwest of Florence. Amongst the attractions is a torture museum: click on the link for pictures: I have never forgotten it.



This sketch of Clare on a rampart of the city walls gives a sense of the vacation: also the power of current AI systems to synthesise 'art' from a more mundane picture.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

'In the Courts of Three Popes' - Mary Ann Glendon

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Courts-Three-Popes-American-Diplomat-ebook/dp/B0C5VBNX12/

Here is an edited version of this review, expressing my take on this interesting book.

'"In my years of service to the Holy See, I was a stranger in a rather strange land - a layperson in a culture dominated by clergy, an American woman in an environment that was largely male and Italian, and a citizen of a constitutional republic in one of the world's last absolute monarchies.

So declares Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon as she addresses some of the most vexing issues in the Catholic Church today, from the work to protect women's rights internationally, to responding to clergy sexual abuse, to address hypocrisy regarding sexuality within the clerisy, to the corruption of the Vatican Bank and Roman Curia. 

In Pope John Paul II's words, the Church enters the third millennium on its knees in penance for failures such as clerical sex abuse, or in failing to lead the way for lay women to hold positions of power in the Church. If John Paul II neglected administration, allowing the Vatican bureaucracy full sway, his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, simply buckled under the pernicious pressures of the Vatican establishment. Glendon is not an unrestrained admirer of the current Pope Francis, seeing him as arbitrary, capricious and needlessly losing too many battles with corrupt and self-serving institutions.

Glendon illuminates the issues vexing the Church today: the place of faith in secular politics, relating the Church to other religions, clericalism and the power of laypeople, and corruption at the Vatican Bank and within the Roman Curia. 

Despite its many failings, she argues that the Catholic Church is yet a living, breathing global community. Behind doctrines and policies and institutions lie people, personalities, aspirations, and relationships that still promise to transform lives.'

---

The book is not as interesting as it could have been. In style one may infer that Mary Ann Glendon is a hostess type: gregarious, of firm principles, humane, practical, orthodox.

A Myers-Briggs ESFJ. 

A hard-hitting, forensic analysis of institutional failure this is not: (see, by contrast, "In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy" by Frederic Martel).

Journalists are of course in the business of exposing crime, weakness and hypocrisy. But in the round the Catholic Church is much more than the Vatican bureaucracy. When it is operating with its mission statement and founder in mind, it is a unique force, generally for the good, on our planet. If only the centre could be sorted out!

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long - Robert A. Heinlein

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Enough-Love-Lazarus-Science/dp/0593437241/

I'm back into Heinlein mode.

A human being should be able to

  1. change a diaper
  2. plan an invasion
  3. butcher a hog
  4. conn a ship
  5. design a building
  6. write a sonnet
  7. balance accounts
  8. build a wall
  9. set a bone
  10. comfort the dying
  11. take orders
  12. give orders
  13. cooperate
  14. act alone
  15. solve equations
  16. analyze a new problem
  17. pitch manure
  18. program a computer
  19. cook a tasty meal
  20. fight efficiently
  21. die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

---

I set in italics those obligations which I am either plainly unable to do, or have no idea whether I could (I would like to not italicise numbers 20 and 21).

Where did Heinlein get this list? 

It's implicitly gendered: it says 'human being' but reads as 'man': surely his list for women would be different - indeed we know so from elsewhere. It's a combination of artisanal (hogs; wall-building) and intellectual (invasion; programming). It reflects the culture of the western frontiersman transferred in time to the mid-twentieth century. But it also speaks to deep truths in human nature: the masculine virtues of good men with useful skills courageously banding together to defend against threats to their communities.

The fact that Heinlein's list stirs the emotions witnesses to its elemental truth.

Currently disparaged and despised, the need for Heinlein's ethos will be with us again soon enough.

---

Here are some more Heinlein aphorisms from (the intermissions within) the novel above.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Our 'Pre-War' Situation Today


From OpenArt

British military commentators and some politicians state that we are in a ‘pre-war’ situation today, referencing Russia and China.

We need to revitalise our military, which is undermanned and underequipped (true). We need deeper roots for military culture within our society, to be facilitated by a trained civilian reserve force.

But what is really motivating our presumed adversaries? 

Let me quote from Jack Watling’s book, “The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century” chapter 13.

---

“For Vladimir Putin – prior to the invasion of 24 February – Ukraine was understood to be a recalcitrant Russian province. He believed there was widespread sympathy for Russia in the country. He also believed that a fait accompli seizing a limited number of key objectives in a matter of days would bring about the collapse of wider resistance, and the unwillingness of the West to intervene or oppose the seizure. The Russians intervened without mobilising, and assessed – incorrectly – that the localised correlation of forces was favourable. In short, Russia did not conduct the operation based on an assessment of Ukraine’s aggregate combat power augmented with Western support, but rather based on its belief that it could achieve a rapid and localised victory.

"China similarly views Taiwan as a province of China and its military activities, from the setting up of bastions in the South China Sea on reclaimed atolls to its long-range strike capabilities, are clearly intended to enable the isolation of Taiwan to achieve a rapid limited seizure. It anticipates a ‘local war under informatised conditions’ using long-range precision strike and nuclear threats to deter broader escalation.”

---

The set of countries the Russian leadership takes to be “recalcitrant provinces” (the Baltic states? Poland?) seems unlikely to include Western Europe, however. And all the more so for China.

So we are talking more about preserving the boundaries of the Western sphere of influence (and of course the congenial freedoms of people within this space) rather than an existential threat to our own way of life in the UK.

This surely explains the reluctance of the British state (even more so the western states of the EU) to spend real money and expend political capital on defence.

For what it's worth I am not fond of a future dominated by the arrogant and domineering states of Russia and China. Nor do I approve of incorporating people by force into unpleasant regimes. I would thoroughly support an enhanced British military with broad civil society roots.

You might say: who is really interested in the destruction and human suffering of war? But of course, Leon Trotsky was right.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

"The Arms of the Future" - Jack Watling (review)

 


I asked Gemini to summarise this review from Frank Hoffman, which is quite long, into something more succinct:

"Jack Watling's book, "The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century," tackles a critical question: how should armies adapt to the changing face of war?  Warfare is becoming more lethal, with new drone technologies and a renewed focus on urban combat.  Watling argues that armies are not keeping pace, clinging to outdated structures and simply adding new tech on top.

The book proposes a complete overhaul of force design.  Part 1 dives into the future battlefield, analyzing  increased transparency due to sensor technology, the limitations of armor in the face of rising lethality, and the enduring challenges of urban warfare.

Part 2 gets practical, outlining a new force structure with four key subsystems: maneuver, fires, assault, and support.  This new design emphasizes dispersed formations for better survivability, increased lethality to counter enemy firepower, and the ability to adapt to the unique demands of urban combat.  It also integrates drones more seamlessly and calls for lighter, more agile armored vehicles.

Importantly, Watling doesn't advocate abandoning traditional maneuver tactics.  He acknowledges the role of armor but emphasizes overcoming its limitations through clever tactics that create ambiguity and deception.

"The Arms of the Future" is a well-researched book that draws on real-world conflicts and the insights of military experts.  While it doesn't delve into unconventional warfare or address the specific needs of special operations forces, it offers a wealth of practical solutions and raises important questions about how armies should be structured for the future battlefield.  This book is a must-read for policymakers and military personnel serious about adapting to the ever-changing nature of war. It provides a strong foundation for further discussion and experimentation on how to build a military that can thrive in the coming decades."

---

I would add: the book is undeniably important. Its focus on military architecture and logistics shows a deep comprehension for the realities of sustainable warfighting. However, it is written for military strategy professionals: jargon-rich and abstract in tone. It requires sustained attention.

My concern is that it captures a moment in time, where robotic/autonomous sensor/effector systems and AI synthesis/analysis systems have capabilities impossible to ignore, but not at capability to replace trained soldiers in any current department of warfare. 

But progress is exceptionally rapid: what will the situation look like in five or ten years time?

The problem is that re-engineering a major power's military is a generational process, measured in decades. It seems clear that the journey Watling has charted must be followed, but substantial course corrections seem likely within successive five year windows. 

Will military bureaucracies be up for the challenge, not just of change but of changing change?

Thursday, March 07, 2024

"I don't like confronting people"

 


From OpenArt

A great deal of my life is explicable based on the premise of the title above. I suppose I am scarcely alone in this psychological style - few people are actively belligerent, doubling down on aggression - but I think I may be more consistent than most.

To be clear: I do confront people. Often. If it has to be done I will do it. But I don't like it, I'm not good at it. The unrestrained use of emotion, which is what confrontation is, does not fit well with my self-contained nature.

Instead I seek work-arounds. I’m transactional. I try to transform conflict scenarios. I look for novel outcomes that work for everyone.

One of the reasons I've a fondness for martial arts. In the Chinese and Japanese traditions, conflict decouples from emotion; becomes a technical matter (I can do technical).

So how do I handle that difficult meeting, that stressful phone call? The situation where I need something done... but the other person hasn't done it, or shows little inclination?

Some bosses or project managers would just holler at them. But we already established that I'm not good at yelling at people. I have no idea how to handle the aftermath.

Instead I present myself as helpful and friendly. It's a problem for both of us, isn't it? Do you have an issue I'm not aware of? Can we reframe the difficulty into something we can both work through?

I'm typically imaginative here.

Reluctantly, sorrowfully, if all this has failed, I might finish by wondering if you are really the right person to be assigned these kinds of tasks. Go figure.

It's worked so far, and often well:  INTP as I am.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

QM at the OU: (SM358)

The OU quantum mechanics course I studied back in 2009 was excellent. I spent the first six months (Schrödinger equation, complex vector spaces) as if I were Alice in Wonderland, bemused as to how any of this detailed and comprehensive theory had any connection or purchase on reality.

I spent the final three months realising that I would never know. Because no-one else knew either.

Another QM anecdote. At QM summer school in 2009 (this was a year after the Large Hadron Collider first started up - it was still in testing mode) I asked one of the professors, "Will mastering this course help me understand the physics of the search for the Higgs particle at the LHC?" (it was discovered in 2012).

He scratched his chin thoughtfully for a moment, then gave me his considered answer.

"No.”

I later learned that the prediction of the Higgs comes out of special symmetry considerations of the Lagrangian in Quantum Field Theory. All of this was advanced postgraduate stuff, utterly invisible from the OU course…



And here's Gemini correcting me: https://g.co/gemini/share/983f5af4510e!


Fusion and Fission



Note that 'negative' on the y-axis: this chart is more insightful upside-down

And finally: the difference between fusion and fission. Basically the whole universe - all of the matter in it - wants to be iron. Lighter element nuclei want to quantum-tunnel past the coulomb resistance to aggregate into an iron nucleus; heavier elements (all of which are unstable - mostly with half-lives comparable to the age of the universe) want to fission-decay back to iron, again by quantum-tunnelling through the nuclear force potential.

Friday, March 01, 2024

Hallucination


From OpenArt

In a quaint terraced house in the north of England, Gwen and Charles lived out their retirement years in harmony. As Gwen's hearing began to fade, Charles stood by her, determined to find a solution. Together, they navigated the challenges of Gwen's diminishing senses, finding solace in their unwavering love for each other.

With the help of cutting-edge technology, Gwen's new hearing aids became her lifeline, allowing her to hear the world with clarity once again. The predictive AI in her devices not only amplified sound but also anticipated Charles' words before they even left his lips, creating a seamless connection between the couple.

One day Charles was suddenly called away, forced to embark on an urgent journey to visit distant relatives. He trusted that their well-stocked home and Gwen’s conscientious routines would keep her safe and provided for, until he could return. On her part, Gwen's fading vision and lapses of memory were such that, sadly, she failed to notice his absence. Her hearing aids continued to fill the void, predicting Charles' comforting responses to her words, keeping her company in his stead.

Illness soon crept into Gwen's fragile body but she found solace in the familiar sound of Charles' voice, even though he was actually miles away. Lying in her bed, whispering to her husband, his intimate responses were comforting, a warm presence nurturing her as she finally fell into a deep sleep, one from which there would be no awakening.

There was an additional function built into Gwen’s prosthesis: a last ditch routine, executed when all else had failed. When Charles rushed back he was engulfed in grief, leavened only by the sense that nevertheless, something of himself had accompanied his wife on her final journey.

Do you think?

Thursday, February 29, 2024