[ExI] hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered

[Anders Sandberg]

From: spike <spike66 at att.net> 





 One of our Extropian RSPs Hal Finney was reading all this and (being Hal) went off and co-developed or invented a system which does something like that, performs some kind of special calculation and creates numbers which can be traded as currency.  Hal Finney read our Mersenne Prime as currency discussion, then went off and invented BitCoin.



I am reminded of John Baez post
https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/bPCvcDTDysi
He starts out with a great quote ("What's the saddest thing about being a mathematician?  Seeing worlds of soul-shattering beauty - but being unable to share this beauty with most people.") but it is the ending that really links it to Hal's story:


"You may be wondering: So, what's this all good for?


And the answer is: nobody knows yet.  But this amazing fact about the number 6 is connected to many other amazing things in mathematics, like the group E8 and the Leech lattice, both of which show up in string theory.  I don't know if string theory is on the right track.  But I hope that someday, when we understand the universe better than we do now, these mysterious and beautiful mathematical structures will turn out to be important - not just curiosities, but part of why things are the way they are."


Many of these things turn out to be important, yet in ways we cannot fathom when we discover or learn about them. Today I made use of a piece of math I learned back at the start of the 90s to say something relevant about the brain. Google's pagerank algorithm is based on the link between eigenvalues and graph theory - and the reason it runs so well is pretty deep. Whatever beats Google from being the biggest, coolest company around is IMHO likely to be based on a small piece of math or other understanding that come from a completely different area from its applications. Maybe the secret of AI is hidden in intersection theory or tropical geometry. 


Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University


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