Want to survive a nuclear war? The DISTRIBUTED NETWORK structure offers the best survivability.
“The pioneering research of Paul Baran in the 1960s, who envisioned a communications network that would survive a major enemy attacked. The sketch shows three different network topologies described in his RAND Memorandum, “On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Network” (August 1964). The distributed network structure offered the best survivability. “
“Baran developed the concept of distributed adaptive message block switching during his research at the RAND Corporation for the US Air Force into communications networks, that could survive nuclear wars.”
“Report P-2626 described a general architecture for a large-scale, distributed, survivable communications network. The work focuses on three key ideas: use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points, dividing user messages into message blocks, later called packets, and delivery of these messages by store and forward switching.”
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Also credit goes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davies who *independently* came up with the same findings and called it Packet. They each get alternating credit but both deserve it equally.
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”
Baran says that his direct inspiration was Claude Shannon’s machine in which he trained a mechanical mouse to find its way through a maze as an existence proof. This led Baran to build on the idea and hypothesize that a message could be broken up into individual packets of information that could then find their own way to the destination through the network.
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Baran was also inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Sturgis_McCulloch ‘s work on Neural Networks.
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should be familiar with McCulloch as his pioneering work in Cybernetics.
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An interesting conclusion from all of this is that the very internet ITSELF is based upon a 1940s mathematical model of the brain, the very SAME basis upon which neural networking in AI is based upon.
By participating on the internet, we *are* a part of a collective neural network already – by design.
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Oh this is awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmR6X2w8Tg
Here McCulloch in 1969 at the age of 70 – same year he died, while he was the head of Cybernetics at MIT.
A true eccentric. This should be fun to watch.
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Oh wow. his collaborator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Pitts – had one of those brains that just… burned out but burned brightly when it did.
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oh boy I’m getting sucked into their story now…
http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic
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“The following June, 1945, von Neumann penned what would become a historic document entitled “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” the first published description of a stored-program binary computing machine—the modern computer. The EDVAC’s predecessor, the ENIAC, which took up 1,800 square feet of space in Philadelphia, was more like a giant electronic calculator than a computer. It was possible to reprogram the thing, but it took several operators several weeks to reroute all the wires and switches to do it. Von Neumann realized that it might not be necessary to rewire the machine every time you wanted it to perform a new function. If you could take each configuration of the switches and wires, abstract them, and encode them symbolically as pure information, you could feed them into the computer the same way you’d feed it data, only now the data would include the very programs that manipulate the data. Without having to rewire a thing, you’d have a universal Turing machine.To accomplish this, von Neumann suggested modeling the computer after Pitts and McCulloch’s neural networks. In place of neurons, he suggested vacuum tubes, which would serve as logic gates, and by stringing them together exactly as Pitts and McCulloch had discovered, you could carry out any computation. To store the programs as data, the computer would need something new: a memory. That’s where Pitts’ loops came into play. “An element which stimulates itself will hold a stimulus indefinitely,” von Neumann wrote in his report, echoing Pitts and employing his modulo mathematics. He detailed every aspect of this new computational architecture. In the entire report, he cited only a single paper: “A Logical Calculus” by McCulloch and Pitts”
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Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency.
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Oh yes I was looking for you:
”
In the model network each “neuron” has elementary properties,
and the network has little structure. Nonetheless, collective
computational properties spontaneously arose. Memories are
retained as stable entities or Gestalts and can be correctly re-
called from any reasonably sized subpart. Ambiguities are re-
solved on a statistical basis. Some capacity for generalization is
present, and time ordering of memories can also be encoded.
These properties follow from the nature of the flow in phase
space produced by the processing algorithm, which does not
appear to be strongly dependent on precise details of the mod-
eling. This robustness suggests that similar effects will obtain
even when more neurobiological details are added.
“
”
In the model network each “neuron” has elementary properties,
and the network has little structure. Nonetheless, collective
computational properties spontaneously arose. Memories are
retained as stable entities or Gestalts and can be correctly re-
called from any reasonably sized subpart. Ambiguities are re-
solved on a statistical basis. Some capacity for generalization is
present, and time ordering of memories can also be encoded.
These properties follow from the nature of the flow in phase
space produced by the processing algorithm, which does not
appear to be strongly dependent on precise details of the mod-
eling. This robustness suggests that similar effects will obtain
even when more neurobiological details are added.
“
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The money for the creation of the internet came from a desire to create a “crash-resistant” communication system for computers in case of nuclear war.[I’ve been reading up again on this this morning, so it’s fresh knowledge again]The design for a fault-tolerant design came from two men, independently working on the problem, ultimately adopted by ARPANet first in 1969, growing ever since to end up with the internet we have it today.One of the two designers was inspired by the work of Warren McCullough and Pitts on Neural Networks from 1943.I was watching a video of McCullough as an old man – same year he died in 1969 – a true eccentric scientist – as “hippie” as it comes. [he used to have wild sex parties in the 1940s + 50s]Anyway, he was asked in this interview, “Should scientists ever get into politics?”He said, “No”.Then goes on to describe two kinds of people. Those who like to move things such as information and those who want to control those who move things – something like that. He feels they’re fundamentally different mindsets.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmR6X2w8Tg
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Of course I *much* prefer the Intergalactic Computer Network narrative but if you want to get funding from a stingy Congress, you gotta throw “threat of war” in their faces. Same as today.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network
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we’re already there though. The internet is a neural net. We’re channeling the message through the medium of the hive mind as we speak.But McCullough-Pitt neurons had no memory. So it’s a transparent message carrying medium. Still, a memory-less brain nonetheless. You and I are a part of it now – thanks to hippie-style scientist thinking.
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The only hippies worth caring about are the cybernetics minded imo. The luddites style earthy hippies are fine too but they can join the militia groups stockpiling for war, the left to that right.
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I’m 45. Mom read Mother Earth News before it was a glossy. Fed us yogurt. Grandmother did yoga. Yet my grandmother worked in engineering and my mother in government. Wasn’t ’til well into adulthood that I realized they had eclectic outlooks on things. I, too, am a strange mix of cybernetic, pragmatist and even a bit of back-to-earth. I live on 5 acres, walk around barefoot as much as possible. Even have long hair.
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You have to convince them there’s a strategic benefit. [hence : PSI work in the 70s. I’ll give the spoon-bending boy’s media attention some credit there too.
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I wouldn’t have any ethical dilemma working for the military, say for https://www.iarpa.gov/ .They get involved in some REALLY interesting projects, and have the $$$ to do so. Had I the computing power and a team of people to help, I’d have put a bid on their Metaphors project a few years ago.That they’d use it for war and stuff? Well, they do what they gotta do, don’t they? Oddly, I’m a peacenik. Don’t believe in war. But just ’cause I don’t believe in it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t hapen.
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Well, the US feds have been gearing up for a “Putin’s gonna do it if you don’t first” for about a decade+ now.They even introduced bills from mid-2016 which ultimately passed, giving Congress the discretionary power to fund anti-Russia stuff.The PRC wasn’t really on the radar. Still isn’t, except maybe in Trump’s mind.
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Well I see it as “pick your battles” as it were. Once the knowledge is created, it’s created. Can’t take it back can you?So, some people use it for shitty things. Those times will eventually pass. Yet the knowledge remains doesn’t it?
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I don’t try to figure out other people’s intent. Waste of time. Courts waste their time on it. People waste their time on it. Asking me “Did you think I was [x]?” doesn’t usually get far ’cause I mostly take people by what they say, unless they have dead-obvious intent, or there’s already an ethos of dry-humor about.
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I know people that would love to get on a building with several machine gun and gun town random people. Their fantasy-lands. I know furries too. they all got their fantasies. Enacting it is where the rubber meets the road. ’til then, it’s just la-la.
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One way I know certain sadists enact their sadism is through thought experiments. Getting people trapped in logic puzzles and watching them squirm. Never understood the appeal, but whatever.
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Eh, only if they’re trappable. Certain kinds of people are trappable by that way. Other kinds of people aren’t. Sometimes I play along for fun ’til it gets annoying, then I do payback on them. It’s like playing a game with a ne and letting them win ’til they start getting cocky. Then it’s time to play. It’s sort of like what hustlers do in pool halls except out of necessity rather than money.
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Depends on their foundations. I can’t get trapped by word-games or logic puzzles because they’re not my foundations. But if logic / words are their foundations then yeah, you can get them trapped.
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Some people are fine with being wrong about something
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That’s their social flaw isn’t it?
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So, the equivalent of a kid who brags about having a big dick and paying another kid to pants him in front of the girls as payback? Something like that?
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I’d see that as a public service more than sadism though.
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Totally unrelated but my 11 yr old ne comes out with a large attack helicoper that *apparently* his younger cousin had and says, “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter”. Literally a meme walked out on the porch. This will take me a few minutes to process.
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“it even comes with a vibrator” as he pushes a pulsing part against my arm. First time I heard him use that word. Middle school kids are unpredictable beings.
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ooh I see what you mean. Well, the internet is a hybrid at present. ORIGINALLY it was a distributed network.An example of a still functional distributed information network running over TCP/IP is Usenet. Store and forward to all nodes.But now it’s a hybrid of decentralized and distributed. Yet there’s networks running on *top* of the physical networks which continue the distributed network tradition, and there are local subnets which run in a distributed fashion.But yeah – the global internet is more akin to decentralized at least with the trunks, hubs, nodes… still hopeful to someday move more towards fully distributed network but politics, alas.
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Decentralized but not distributed networks run a similar risk of politically motivated powers shutting down their hubs as you’d find in centralized networks.
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Here’s what awesome though: we have LAYERS of competing internet-linked networks running simultaneously, both distributed and decentralized, government and capitalist in nature.Example : Nauru. The immigrants detained at Nauru (off the coast of Australia) were cut off from the internet – at least it would seem so if you followed the wires.Yet, many smuggled in cell phones and were able to start up a Facebook page to get their plight out to others as well as use the phone network to tie in indirectly (from phone network to internet through BBC reporters for example).This was possible because these networks layer on top of one another, so as long as you have a viable connection to ANY of them, you can get into all of it, somehow.http://coub.com/view/olneg
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In the case of Nauru, the internment camp didn’t have internet. No routers. No wifi. No copper or fiber optic.But because they didn’t put a RF block (like they do in some American schools for example), the service providers for their phones *could* hook into the internet.
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I was thinking some of them might have had satellite phones – but I don’t know what they cost. [they were always expensive]. More likely the government of nauru had a few standard cell phone towers that connected to underwater cable going to a mainland country, but didn’t run any wires into the camp. But the marvelous thing about radio waves – you can often catch them somehow.Shortwave (an older technology) is even more amazing in its transmission capabilities. I have a shortwave radio which I turn on about once a year when bored. I can receive transmissions from China, Russia, wherever directly from the airwaves. A low powered transmitter bounced off the clouds the right way, and I could transmit. [it’d be illegal here but if I were trapped in a bad area, it’d be something].Still, amazes me when I look at my iPhone and go “Yeah, fancy walkie-talkie aren’t you”?
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They gotta be. If nothing else, they’d have to be big ’cause transmitting 100 miles+ straight *up* has to take at least a few watts of power.
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Makes sense. It’s funny – when tin-foil hat folks worry about all the radiation coming from cellphone towers, electric motors, lights, high powered lines, I *almost* can’t blame them for their tin foil hats. Thankfully the people that make the devices follow regulations, although at one time just a couple of years ago there were STILL cell phones for sale that could give you brain cancer (well, make existing cancer worse) if you held it too close to your head.
I don’t worry about it myself though. Sadly, I trust the government in this regard 
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