After my previous post on quantum theory idea, I went through a lot of emotions: 'uncertain', 'kinda stupid', 'I-shouldn't-have-posted-this', sleepy, and then 'hmmm-there-could-be-something-in-this..' and then 'whatever'.
But I didn't know if whether I am correct or not. So take this with a grain of salt (and pepper too, really, it's ur call).
It's a very simple and small thing, which is why ofcourse I am building up towards it with all these fluff. Ok, imagine someone throwing a ball straight up. Let's say that this someone is doing the said innocuous activity in the USA, so that it is easy to imagine when I say that he is being spyed upon by a camera mounted on a street-side pole. This camera observes the ball travelling at 10km/hr.
Let's say an Alien spaceship that was passing near the earth had suddenly stopped because their fuel had run out (poor them) and they were watching the earth with Acme Super Magnifier at this now almost-popular someone in the USA, at this exact same moment.
The aliens will notice that the ball was thrown at almost 107,005 km/hr, much to their surprise, by a puny mud-man.
Ofcourse, their surprise wouldn't have lasted a few milliseconds because they would've worked out the revolution speed of earth on which the mud-man was enjoying a ride himself (which is, ofcourse, 107K km/hr).
Now the moral of the story is that we have to add the speed of the "platform" or frame of reference to get the absolute speed. But getting the absolute speed here was possible only because I take it that that's the absolute speed of the earth. I don't know if considering the possiblity of bubble universe theories, which would've meant that the universe itself might be translating in it's mother universe, would've changed the speed of every object.
(Of the Bubble universe theories that I know of, one says that universes are made in clusters, much like bubbles in a foam. Another theory says that bubbles of universes form inside a much bigger universe to explain the uniformity of the present universe ("uniformity of matter in the present universe" is in itself a much bigger and interesting concept). Sounds like some pot-smoking-60's-hippy created theory? Tell me 'bout it.
Now, if u have read my this post over here, which I somehow doubt that any soul other than me did, you could've gotten a fleeting glimpse of what I am arriving at. Basically, I thought that if parallel universes suggested by quantum theory is how I imagine it to be, then you can imagine the universe you (THIS you) exist is one of the (temporal)leaves of an immense tree that branches out whenever a chance exist in that universe.
Now to tie "relativity" and quantum physics together. Imagine our world is shrunken down to sub-atomic level and that u are banging your head on the walls of your sub-atomic house. Now according to quantum tunnelling, even though you don't have enough energy to smash the walls with your head and enter your house, there is a finite probablity that you will eventually do go through the wall without breaking the wall and head (Kinda like "no clip" cheat code in games. Get it? I don't either). This happens only when your energy level and the wall's has a small difference. But the probablity is very small. Let's imagine, for our sake, that the probablity is 0.1, so as to avoid writing too many zeroes. This is what I am calling "relative probablity", if there can be such a thing.
Relative to what? The big tree of probablity that I was talking about, ofcourse. So what is the probablity that we are looking for in this tree? It is the probablity of THIS universe being possible. Add to this probablity the 0.1 that we assumed, and you will get what I call "absolute probablity" (again, if there can be such a thing) for you to quantum-tunnel yourself into your house in our little thought experiment without smashing anything.
Rest assured, that even if what I supposed was correct, this probablity should be so small that it can be ignored completely and still things will work the same as they have did. After all, when u are on earth, there is little difference if the earth is moving at 30km/sec or at 30.1km/sec (except for projectile calculations, ofcourse).
[Edit: Oops, I've rushed it. The way to calculate the current unverse's probablity of existence should be using "Particular probablity", not direct addition.]
Referred this wonderful lecture for earth rotation and its effects. Read the other lectures in that site too.
I also recommend u read this simple explaination of quantum tunnelling. Read the wiki on this too.
For bubble universes, I could point you to this explaination on the web, but I suggest reading a good simple book on the subject. I am reading Time Travel in Einstein's Universe and Stephen hawking's books on universe and stuff.
Friday, August 05, 2005
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Consoling the PC.
Given a choice between PC and a console, I would definitely go for the PC (first). I can do all sorts of things with a PC than I could with a console, I would say. But I may say something different with the XBox 2 and PS3 in the horizon.
I won't go into the spec details of them black and white boxes. It's old news. To convert to the console religion would, of course, require there be support for all of the applications I run and will buy in the future. I am not sure how good the Linux in the xbox1 ran, but that's the kind of thing that will move cell processors into the PC world, I think. But I don't see myself converting, so why bother.
Recently, I did convert to another's camp following my recent purchase of an AMD based system. The base I left was Intel and the target base is, ofcoure, AMD. Here's an article that would convert a few of the intelites.
But CPU fanboyisms apart, one must choose one's processor according to one's need. The Big question in any bewildered CPU shopper's mind is this: AMD or Intel?
After more than a week of continuous research on AMD and Intel CPU and motherboard reviews and forum posts, I found out what to choose. It is simple: If you want your computer to render 3D scenes, encode videos and compile code faster, then go for Intel. Rather, if you want to do number crunching work and play games, go for AMD. I had decided to go for Intel, obviously. But there are catches abound ofcourse. One main thing involves Bill. AMD costs a lot lesser than Intel's similarly rated processors. So I had to change my decision in favour of AMD after a seriously non-technical point broke Intel.
Coming back to the topic, I was kind a amused to look at what's happenning with consoles and PC. I mean, the first gaming consoles were made out of Atari's and other architectures. Later on, PCs were being used for general purpose computing. PCs were more powerful than consoles. Later, PS and XBOX adopted the PC architecture. But consoles were using triflingly (but adequately) powerful PC components. But now consoles are using cell processors which are much more powerful than PC. Now if Matrix has taught us anything, the counter-part (PC) must gain as much power as consoles have :) So will we see the PC migrating to cell processors to maintain the "Equilibrium"? Will we see the PC do a console and overtake it in terms of perf?
I think the guys at Intel can be trusted to hold good their precious Moore's law, atleast out of desperation.
I won't go into the spec details of them black and white boxes. It's old news. To convert to the console religion would, of course, require there be support for all of the applications I run and will buy in the future. I am not sure how good the Linux in the xbox1 ran, but that's the kind of thing that will move cell processors into the PC world, I think. But I don't see myself converting, so why bother.
Recently, I did convert to another's camp following my recent purchase of an AMD based system. The base I left was Intel and the target base is, ofcoure, AMD. Here's an article that would convert a few of the intelites.
But CPU fanboyisms apart, one must choose one's processor according to one's need. The Big question in any bewildered CPU shopper's mind is this: AMD or Intel?
After more than a week of continuous research on AMD and Intel CPU and motherboard reviews and forum posts, I found out what to choose. It is simple: If you want your computer to render 3D scenes, encode videos and compile code faster, then go for Intel. Rather, if you want to do number crunching work and play games, go for AMD. I had decided to go for Intel, obviously. But there are catches abound ofcourse. One main thing involves Bill. AMD costs a lot lesser than Intel's similarly rated processors. So I had to change my decision in favour of AMD after a seriously non-technical point broke Intel.
Coming back to the topic, I was kind a amused to look at what's happenning with consoles and PC. I mean, the first gaming consoles were made out of Atari's and other architectures. Later on, PCs were being used for general purpose computing. PCs were more powerful than consoles. Later, PS and XBOX adopted the PC architecture. But consoles were using triflingly (but adequately) powerful PC components. But now consoles are using cell processors which are much more powerful than PC. Now if Matrix has taught us anything, the counter-part (PC) must gain as much power as consoles have :) So will we see the PC migrating to cell processors to maintain the "Equilibrium"? Will we see the PC do a console and overtake it in terms of perf?
I think the guys at Intel can be trusted to hold good their precious Moore's law, atleast out of desperation.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
To Smoke or to Smoke
Nah, I am not missing a "not" in the title of the post. This post is about the two huge ideas that went from smoke to smoke. Here's what happened:
After quite a bit of ramblin' over the topic for THE project that we are supposed to do at the end of under-graduate degree, we finally had come at a fork in the road.
The "we" was made of THE TWO guys of IT department in my college plus me. Sure, you can easily run a word-count on the words I spoke at college and still not hit anything more than a few thousands, but it seems whatever little I said have given me some recognition. The other two were vociferous when it comes to voicing anything. Sriram krishnan and Balak are the two best brains that you can have around if you are planning a brainstorming session. I was definetely out-of-league here. I take in things bite-by-bite and come up with something...in the end.
Me and balak were fascinated by p2p and network related research stuff, while the microsoft employee sriram wanted to do something that will give "instant-gratification" to the masses. My suggession was that we do something with BitTorrent to alleviate ordinary web servers' bandwidth problems. (Yeah, I like BT). Initially, my focus was on eliminating slashdot effects. Then I wanted a one-code-to-solve'em-all thing. I had planned to write a replacement web server and a replacement webclient (actually, a browser) which would incorporate all of BitTorrent goodness in it.
Then when I actually sat and talked about it, sriram wasn't exactly sure people would like to change their web servers "just because a bunch of undergrads told'em so". So we sat down and refined the idea and pointed it at a slightly different but more appropriate angle. Since not a lot of them do podcasting and videocasting, we may as well provide a distribution media for them. But for a more short-term focus, we chose text blogs. Thus was born "Smoke". Read all about it in sriram's blog posts here.
(There's a running gag that if balak or I were asked "Why name it Smoke?", that we would reply with a "Ask sriram's GF" ;) )
Sriram was more into employing intelligent search engines, retro-fitted with intuitive visualizations and putting that behind a MS-legacy-usablity-for-the-masses UI. But now he wanted to build a machine. A machine so powerful that...ok, it's a virtual machine :)
I was not in favour of doing a virtual machine. Partly because I wasn't sure I could crank out something as big as a virtual machine, and mainly because I wanted a p2p project in my resume. But later, I accepted to be a builder of the virtual machine, partly because I knew sriram had no problems with doing a p2p thing so I shouldn't have one working on a VM, and mainly because neither me or balak was able to come up with a project worthy p2p idea.
One interesting idea I came up with involved "TorrC"s, or TorrentContainers which are just Torrent files containing hash of torrent files. Basically, my idea was to give the main tracker server the abilty to make a tracker out of the peers, dynamically and transparently. I hoped that this would halt the tracker server shutdowns for some time and give the BT sites more robustness and more bandwidth. I didn't really go into the details as this seemed too small a project and was dropped. Recently, I found that the BTHub project (@isohunt.com) is a similar, but more centralized, implementation.
So, thus began the construction of this awesome machine. And it was thus named ....(wait for it).....Smoke! It even has a proper little home at sourceforge.net. Sriram follows the building of the SmokeVM at his end in parts: Here's First, second, third and fourth parts (for now).
Since sriram was the authority on programming languages, virtual machines and stuff like that, we let him split the workload amongst us. Sriram enlisted more help from the outside. Aarthy and kaushik were invited to join the coding work force. Before long, each one of us were assigned our task. Sriram would muscle with the main smokevm engine, while balak and I would produce a python-to-smoke compiler, kaushik would produce the parser that reads-in the smoke code file and Aarthy would script out a Lisp-to-smoke compiler.
Not before a month passed, schedules changed followed by our plans. So, in the end, we wound up having to dump the Lisp compiler and post-poning a few of the ambitious goals for the college project deadline. I wound up coding the Python compiler, while balak wrote the project documentation (for the college version of the code). Though we got it all planned and stuff a full three months early, the entire code and documentation that was submited to the college was done in less than three weeks.
The entire project was filled with a lot of everything. I was helpless as I listened to a LOT of geek noise between the head-geeks (sriram and kaushik) both in chat conferences and in the smokevm mailing-list. I had fun coding something and sending it over to sriram for checking it with the VM, who would check it out immediately and reply. We were initiated to the world of cvs through this project. I had my own moments when I n00b'ily created a few modules on the cvs tree and sriram had to "patiently" delete those. I had great fun constantly updating my compiler code once I finally got the hang of the cvs thingy. I experienced responsiblity when I started creating Change logs for all my coding updates. We all had our own goof-ups in the project and I believe that we learnt a great deal from this.
I remember being baffled at the very thought of coding a compiler for a language that I hardly knew existed (python). But after I wound up learning that language, I was happy to write the compiler in Python itself. In retrospect, it only seems perfect to write it in python because it has excellent library support to examine it's own bytecode output. I had promised a be-all-end-all python disassembly guide after I am done with the python compiler and it will be posted.
Throughout the project, sriram was kind enough to ask me to have fun doing this python stuff. I really was having a good time.
PS:
There was another project we were considering at that time but it never had a definite goal to it. It was for the Microsoft Student Project program 2005. It was basically a contest where you can register your final year project with microsoft and compete among other students from other colleges for the best project. The winner also gets a chance to enter the Imagine cup 2005.
We had a [Search engine + Blog + p2p = Cool!] theory that we wanted to make a project out of. Since I got to register the project, I whipped out the name DEBIAN, a retronym for Distributed Enhanced Blog Itemiser And Navigator. A cool insult to microsoft if the project was awarded the best. I had to endure quite a few words from sriram before he tried to forget what name I gave the project (being a pro-MS guy that he is).
After quite a bit of ramblin' over the topic for THE project that we are supposed to do at the end of under-graduate degree, we finally had come at a fork in the road.
The "we" was made of THE TWO guys of IT department in my college plus me. Sure, you can easily run a word-count on the words I spoke at college and still not hit anything more than a few thousands, but it seems whatever little I said have given me some recognition. The other two were vociferous when it comes to voicing anything. Sriram krishnan and Balak are the two best brains that you can have around if you are planning a brainstorming session. I was definetely out-of-league here. I take in things bite-by-bite and come up with something...in the end.
Me and balak were fascinated by p2p and network related research stuff, while the microsoft employee sriram wanted to do something that will give "instant-gratification" to the masses. My suggession was that we do something with BitTorrent to alleviate ordinary web servers' bandwidth problems. (Yeah, I like BT). Initially, my focus was on eliminating slashdot effects. Then I wanted a one-code-to-solve'em-all thing. I had planned to write a replacement web server and a replacement webclient (actually, a browser) which would incorporate all of BitTorrent goodness in it.
Then when I actually sat and talked about it, sriram wasn't exactly sure people would like to change their web servers "just because a bunch of undergrads told'em so". So we sat down and refined the idea and pointed it at a slightly different but more appropriate angle. Since not a lot of them do podcasting and videocasting, we may as well provide a distribution media for them. But for a more short-term focus, we chose text blogs. Thus was born "Smoke". Read all about it in sriram's blog posts here.
(There's a running gag that if balak or I were asked "Why name it Smoke?", that we would reply with a "Ask sriram's GF" ;) )
Sriram was more into employing intelligent search engines, retro-fitted with intuitive visualizations and putting that behind a MS-legacy-usablity-for-the-masses UI. But now he wanted to build a machine. A machine so powerful that...ok, it's a virtual machine :)
I was not in favour of doing a virtual machine. Partly because I wasn't sure I could crank out something as big as a virtual machine, and mainly because I wanted a p2p project in my resume. But later, I accepted to be a builder of the virtual machine, partly because I knew sriram had no problems with doing a p2p thing so I shouldn't have one working on a VM, and mainly because neither me or balak was able to come up with a project worthy p2p idea.
One interesting idea I came up with involved "TorrC"s, or TorrentContainers which are just Torrent files containing hash of torrent files. Basically, my idea was to give the main tracker server the abilty to make a tracker out of the peers, dynamically and transparently. I hoped that this would halt the tracker server shutdowns for some time and give the BT sites more robustness and more bandwidth. I didn't really go into the details as this seemed too small a project and was dropped. Recently, I found that the BTHub project (@isohunt.com) is a similar, but more centralized, implementation.
So, thus began the construction of this awesome machine. And it was thus named ....(wait for it).....Smoke! It even has a proper little home at sourceforge.net. Sriram follows the building of the SmokeVM at his end in parts: Here's First, second, third and fourth parts (for now).
Since sriram was the authority on programming languages, virtual machines and stuff like that, we let him split the workload amongst us. Sriram enlisted more help from the outside. Aarthy and kaushik were invited to join the coding work force. Before long, each one of us were assigned our task. Sriram would muscle with the main smokevm engine, while balak and I would produce a python-to-smoke compiler, kaushik would produce the parser that reads-in the smoke code file and Aarthy would script out a Lisp-to-smoke compiler.
Not before a month passed, schedules changed followed by our plans. So, in the end, we wound up having to dump the Lisp compiler and post-poning a few of the ambitious goals for the college project deadline. I wound up coding the Python compiler, while balak wrote the project documentation (for the college version of the code). Though we got it all planned and stuff a full three months early, the entire code and documentation that was submited to the college was done in less than three weeks.
The entire project was filled with a lot of everything. I was helpless as I listened to a LOT of geek noise between the head-geeks (sriram and kaushik) both in chat conferences and in the smokevm mailing-list. I had fun coding something and sending it over to sriram for checking it with the VM, who would check it out immediately and reply. We were initiated to the world of cvs through this project. I had my own moments when I n00b'ily created a few modules on the cvs tree and sriram had to "patiently" delete those. I had great fun constantly updating my compiler code once I finally got the hang of the cvs thingy. I experienced responsiblity when I started creating Change logs for all my coding updates. We all had our own goof-ups in the project and I believe that we learnt a great deal from this.
I remember being baffled at the very thought of coding a compiler for a language that I hardly knew existed (python). But after I wound up learning that language, I was happy to write the compiler in Python itself. In retrospect, it only seems perfect to write it in python because it has excellent library support to examine it's own bytecode output. I had promised a be-all-end-all python disassembly guide after I am done with the python compiler and it will be posted.
Throughout the project, sriram was kind enough to ask me to have fun doing this python stuff. I really was having a good time.
PS:
There was another project we were considering at that time but it never had a definite goal to it. It was for the Microsoft Student Project program 2005. It was basically a contest where you can register your final year project with microsoft and compete among other students from other colleges for the best project. The winner also gets a chance to enter the Imagine cup 2005.
We had a [Search engine + Blog + p2p = Cool!] theory that we wanted to make a project out of. Since I got to register the project, I whipped out the name DEBIAN, a retronym for Distributed Enhanced Blog Itemiser And Navigator. A cool insult to microsoft if the project was awarded the best. I had to endure quite a few words from sriram before he tried to forget what name I gave the project (being a pro-MS guy that he is).
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Drink your own spiddle!
It's always annoying when someone drinks water off of a glass(or silver) tumbler and not drink the entire contents. I always find this puddle of spit ridden water at the bottom of the glasses kinda disgusting and always(mostly/sometimes) get rid of that water and then rinse it before drinking off that glass.
It's been quite a while I've been doing this but today it suddenly it hit me that there was no actual word for this kinda water. So why not make my own. So here's my word for it: SPIDDLE.
How spiddle? Spittle + puddle = SPIDDLE !
All hail Spiddle (the word, that is).
Now, no more have you to be baffled when you are trying to refer to this obnoxious pool of stagnation at the bottom of the glass! Just say, "Drink your own spiddle!"
PS: Google says that Spiddle the name of some irish town. Who cares? Let them change their town name if they feel embarrased.
It's been quite a while I've been doing this but today it suddenly it hit me that there was no actual word for this kinda water. So why not make my own. So here's my word for it: SPIDDLE.
How spiddle? Spittle + puddle = SPIDDLE !
All hail Spiddle (the word, that is).
Now, no more have you to be baffled when you are trying to refer to this obnoxious pool of stagnation at the bottom of the glass! Just say, "Drink your own spiddle!"
PS: Google says that Spiddle the name of some irish town. Who cares? Let them change their town name if they feel embarrased.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
"Be 100% sure"
Those were the words that would stare at me whenever I come out of the bath room after a ponderous bath. The words were part of a dettol liquid soap bottle, left unused for ....quite some time. So on my birthday, which keeps getting more uneventful every year that it surprises me, I finally took the dettol liquid soap...thingy (hereafter called "squeezy") to my room and "studied" a bit closely. (much to the anxiety of my mother).
After a few months of modelling petty things like chairs, champagne glass, tables and the irks, I found a technique that could help me model most of the non-baffling objects into 3D studio max. The step I folllow in modelling an object is pretty simple and straight-forward: Look at the objet and try to visualize it in terms of primitive shapes and geometry, then try to figure out how to place those primitives in the software. I don't know how long this method will stay good, but it has, so far.
Back to the squeezy. Designing the squeezy was the most fun thing I had done in quite some time. It had quite some radical new challenges than the chairs and tables: It had curves all over its body. I tried a total of 5 to 6 different approaches to model the sqeezy and all of them turned ..er..ugly, at best. Finally, after some sleep, I got the shape I wanted.
One of the reasons I didn't start modeling humans was 'cause of the curves (no double meanings here). The next challenge was the squeezy's nozzle. It was all curves. Again, when i was sufferring from unsuccessfulness, some sleep cured me. (But I really am not satisfied with the current nozzle).
The next fun part was desiging the label that's stuck on the front side. I never thought I would ever do "real" texturing this early into my designing hobby, but there I was firing up ol'photoshop cs and painting the logo. *sniff*I am so proud*sniff*. After working with an excellent context-sensitive and "sense ful" application like 3ds max, Adobe photoshop felt clumsy like hell. Found my way through it in an hour. (actually, I was searching for the custom shapes button :( ) Struggled with gradients, got fed-up with layers, wrestled with transparency and finally split my head trying to texture-map the squeezy in 3d studio max.
After that, my favourite renderer, Mental Ray started acting up. It would just crash just before rendering the scene. I tried changing the environment map, materials and render settings but to no avail. Since I was reluctant to go with the default scanline renderer, I downloaded some famous renderers like brazil and vray, albeit as trials. Both had a LOT more controls than the default scanline. Brazil(rio, the free version)would only output in 512x384 mode and vray was SLOW. So I went with default scanline renderer. After a lot of burnt-out images, I finally found the lighting that produced the least artifacts and settled with it.
Here are the final renders of squeezy:
After a few months of modelling petty things like chairs, champagne glass, tables and the irks, I found a technique that could help me model most of the non-baffling objects into 3D studio max. The step I folllow in modelling an object is pretty simple and straight-forward: Look at the objet and try to visualize it in terms of primitive shapes and geometry, then try to figure out how to place those primitives in the software. I don't know how long this method will stay good, but it has, so far.
Back to the squeezy. Designing the squeezy was the most fun thing I had done in quite some time. It had quite some radical new challenges than the chairs and tables: It had curves all over its body. I tried a total of 5 to 6 different approaches to model the sqeezy and all of them turned ..er..ugly, at best. Finally, after some sleep, I got the shape I wanted.
One of the reasons I didn't start modeling humans was 'cause of the curves (no double meanings here). The next challenge was the squeezy's nozzle. It was all curves. Again, when i was sufferring from unsuccessfulness, some sleep cured me. (But I really am not satisfied with the current nozzle).
The next fun part was desiging the label that's stuck on the front side. I never thought I would ever do "real" texturing this early into my designing hobby, but there I was firing up ol'photoshop cs and painting the logo. *sniff*I am so proud*sniff*. After working with an excellent context-sensitive and "sense ful" application like 3ds max, Adobe photoshop felt clumsy like hell. Found my way through it in an hour. (actually, I was searching for the custom shapes button :( ) Struggled with gradients, got fed-up with layers, wrestled with transparency and finally split my head trying to texture-map the squeezy in 3d studio max.
After that, my favourite renderer, Mental Ray started acting up. It would just crash just before rendering the scene. I tried changing the environment map, materials and render settings but to no avail. Since I was reluctant to go with the default scanline renderer, I downloaded some famous renderers like brazil and vray, albeit as trials. Both had a LOT more controls than the default scanline. Brazil(rio, the free version)would only output in 512x384 mode and vray was SLOW. So I went with default scanline renderer. After a lot of burnt-out images, I finally found the lighting that produced the least artifacts and settled with it.
Here are the final renders of squeezy:
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Quantum theory + NURBS curves + P2P.
I was hallucinating while sitting there on the bed and a few thoughts crossed my mind in a flash. And luckily, I was able to remember them quite vivdly too. Actually, these were the questions I was toying with for quite some time.
So on with the questions:
1. We know that the data from a wave file can be represented in the form of waves, which in turn can be represented mathematically. The mathematical expression can be quite smaller than the sampled version in the wave file.
In 3D softwares, there's an equivalent version of mathematically efficient method of representing a 3D model, NURBS. Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, are mathematical representations of 3-D geometry that can accurately describe any shape from a simple 2-D line, circle, arc, or curve to the most complex 3-D organic free-form surface or solid.
So the question is,
"So why not a mathematically efficient form for defining an arbitrary data file?"
Ofcourse, I understand that wave files and 3D models have certain parameters and a basic structure to it which is lacking in our arbitrary data file. But I want to try and see for myself why and how it WON'T work.
2. If you thought the first thought was crazy, wait till you hear this. I was thinking of the parallel universe as explained by quantum theory. The theory in its basic form tells us that, if the is a probablity of one event happenning is 1 in 100 then, there will be 100 parallel universes where each unique outcome exist in each universe. Mind bogling it may seem, the whole concept of quantum cryptography relies on parallel universes' existence, and it seems to work too. So no questions there.
So, following this theory, if we look into our past, it looks like we have had a pre-determined path down the time line. So I thought,
'Is this what people mean by fate/detiny? And can we predict in which branch we will be in the future? And if so, it is as if there was no probablity in the first place.'
Whatever.
But my real musings were to trace the tree back to its root and find out what the odds of our current universe being created looked like. This looks like the famous 'Sum over Histories' theory by the inimitable doctor Richard C Feynman, though I don't know much of it to conclude if it is the same.
3. Now the third question combines both the quantum theory and mathematical curves with Peer-to-Peer communication. No, it's not encrypting a wave file with quantum cryptography and P2P ing it.
I was involved, along with my friend Balakrishnan, in a project that aimed to create a P2P architecture that eliminated discovery servers in the form of central, napster-like one or a distributed, gnutella-like one. We chose to experiment with pinging the IP addresses of clients returned by a deterministic formula sequentially throughout the ISP's IP space and hope that there is a client running a P2P protocol in the IP pinged. As expected, this is very inefficient and unreliable, since the client is assigned a dynamic IP from a pool of IP addresses by the ISP. There is no pattern for predicting where in the IP address space of the ISP an online client exists.
Quantum theory suggests that electrons in an atom are not exactly locatable due to Heisenberg's uncertainity principle. So they are represented as Electron clouds rather than individual particles. If we consider the ISP as an atom, its IP address space as the volume of the electron cloud and each position in that volume as an unique IP address, then each electron is a client. And at any instance, the position(IP address) of the electron (client) cannot be found out, ever. I know that I am omitting the 'momentum' factor here, but I can't find a relevant equivalent anywhere in this picture. So, I wanted to know,
'Can quantum theory be applied in P2P models (if not ours)?'
Wait...where's the mathematical curve idea in the third question? It's just that, I wanted to use the mathematically compressed files in P2P to reduce traffic, that's all.
So there ya go. The awesome ponderings of the idle mind.
(Warning: The above were from my own mind. Some of the information maybe correct and if so, I hold the IP right ;) )
So on with the questions:
1. We know that the data from a wave file can be represented in the form of waves, which in turn can be represented mathematically. The mathematical expression can be quite smaller than the sampled version in the wave file.
In 3D softwares, there's an equivalent version of mathematically efficient method of representing a 3D model, NURBS. Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines, are mathematical representations of 3-D geometry that can accurately describe any shape from a simple 2-D line, circle, arc, or curve to the most complex 3-D organic free-form surface or solid.
So the question is,
"So why not a mathematically efficient form for defining an arbitrary data file?"
Ofcourse, I understand that wave files and 3D models have certain parameters and a basic structure to it which is lacking in our arbitrary data file. But I want to try and see for myself why and how it WON'T work.
2. If you thought the first thought was crazy, wait till you hear this. I was thinking of the parallel universe as explained by quantum theory. The theory in its basic form tells us that, if the is a probablity of one event happenning is 1 in 100 then, there will be 100 parallel universes where each unique outcome exist in each universe. Mind bogling it may seem, the whole concept of quantum cryptography relies on parallel universes' existence, and it seems to work too. So no questions there.
So, following this theory, if we look into our past, it looks like we have had a pre-determined path down the time line. So I thought,
'Is this what people mean by fate/detiny? And can we predict in which branch we will be in the future? And if so, it is as if there was no probablity in the first place.'
Whatever.
But my real musings were to trace the tree back to its root and find out what the odds of our current universe being created looked like. This looks like the famous 'Sum over Histories' theory by the inimitable doctor Richard C Feynman, though I don't know much of it to conclude if it is the same.
3. Now the third question combines both the quantum theory and mathematical curves with Peer-to-Peer communication. No, it's not encrypting a wave file with quantum cryptography and P2P ing it.
I was involved, along with my friend Balakrishnan, in a project that aimed to create a P2P architecture that eliminated discovery servers in the form of central, napster-like one or a distributed, gnutella-like one. We chose to experiment with pinging the IP addresses of clients returned by a deterministic formula sequentially throughout the ISP's IP space and hope that there is a client running a P2P protocol in the IP pinged. As expected, this is very inefficient and unreliable, since the client is assigned a dynamic IP from a pool of IP addresses by the ISP. There is no pattern for predicting where in the IP address space of the ISP an online client exists.
Quantum theory suggests that electrons in an atom are not exactly locatable due to Heisenberg's uncertainity principle. So they are represented as Electron clouds rather than individual particles. If we consider the ISP as an atom, its IP address space as the volume of the electron cloud and each position in that volume as an unique IP address, then each electron is a client. And at any instance, the position(IP address) of the electron (client) cannot be found out, ever. I know that I am omitting the 'momentum' factor here, but I can't find a relevant equivalent anywhere in this picture. So, I wanted to know,
'Can quantum theory be applied in P2P models (if not ours)?'
Wait...where's the mathematical curve idea in the third question? It's just that, I wanted to use the mathematically compressed files in P2P to reduce traffic, that's all.
So there ya go. The awesome ponderings of the idle mind.
(Warning: The above were from my own mind. Some of the information maybe correct and if so, I hold the IP right ;) )
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