This quarter I signed up for the course Mobile Music, taught by Professor Ge Wang. It is a course to write music code for Mobile devices, mostly focused on the iPhone.
Yesterday was due the first assignment which was writing three small music apps for the iPhone. I must say that the library created initially for Smule and later modified for the MoPho (Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra) is extremely amazing.
Check out my small apps here. Enjoy titans!
With this great title (A Computer Scientist’s View of Life, the Universe, and Everything), Jürgen Schmidhuber presents a fascinating scientific paper that tries to find an answer to the question “Is the universe computable?”
You can find the paper here.
And here there are some great quotes:
The Great Programmer does not worry about computation time. Nobody presses Him. Creatures which evolve in any of the universes don’t have to worry either. They run on local time and have no idea of how many instructions it takes the Big Computer to compute one of their time steps, or how many instructions it spends on all the other creatures in parallel universes.
Possible limitations of the Great Programmer. He does not need not be very smart. For instance, in some of His universes phenomena will appear that humans would call life. The Great Programmer won’t have to be able to recognize them.
The Great Programmer reappears. Several of the Great Programmer’s universes will feature another Great Programmer who programs another Big Computer to run all possible universes. Obviously, there are infinite chains of Great Programmers. If our own universe allowed for enough storage, enough time, and fault-free computing, then you could be one of them.
More than 2000 years of European philosophy dealt with the distinction between body and soul. The Great Programmer does not care. The processes that correspond to our brain firing patterns and the sound waves they provoke during discussions about body and soul correspond to computable substrings of our universe’s evolution. Bitstrings representing such talk may evolve in many universes. For instance, sound wave patterns representing no- tions such as body and soul and “consciousness” may be useful in everyday lan- guage of certain inhabitants of those universes. From the view of the Great Pro- grammer, though, such bitstring subpatterns may be entirely irrelevant. There is no need for Him to load them with “meaning”.
Conclusion. By stepping back and adopting the Great Programmer’s point of view, classic problems of philosophy go away.
I really enjoyed reading all of this. However, it’s sad to my religion beliefs not to have found anything related to a Flying Spaghetti Monster on this paper.
I’m taking Music-320, a great course of Digital Signal Processing and Digital Filters at CCRMA. We have the last assignment due next week, and since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, the professors came up with this funny excersice that I copy here below.
Damn it, I love this shit.
He llegado aquí, a la Universidad de Leland Stanford Junior. Más conocida como Stanford, la Universidad que vió nacer a Google, a Nvidia, a Cisco Systems, a Yahoo! y a no sé cuantas grandísimas ideas más. He llegado a Silicon Valley.
El campus es grande y precioso. Está en Palo Alto, una ciudad a media hora al Sur de San Francisco, California. Hemos ido a pasear y lo hemos atravesado de punta a punta una vez nos hemos aposentado en nuestros nuevos hogares. Por cierto, por la ventana de mi apartamento veo una cancha de voley playa. Madre mía.
Una vez hemos llegado a la plaza principal, Main Quad, me he topado con las esculturas de Rodin. Sí, hay esculuras de Rodin por el centro del campus. Esto es América.
De momento no hay mucha gente, las clases no empiezan hasta la semana que viene y sólo los new graduate students estamos pululando por aquí. Eso sí, creo que la mitad de estudiantes que vemos por aquí son Chinos. Dicen que estudian mucho. Dicen que hay algunos Chinos -pocos- que tienen un doctorado a los 18 años. Me da miedo.
Voy a seguir haciendo papeles burocráticos. Esto es infinito.
