\'\'\'WELCOME!!\'\'\' Hello, Black Carrot! I want to personally welcome you on behalf of the Wikipedia community. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you haven\'t already, you can put yourself in the new user log and the list of users so you can be properly introduced to everyone. Don\'t forget to be bold, and don\'t be afraid of hungry Wikipedians...there\'s a rule about not biting newcomers. Some other good links are the tutorial, how to edit a page, or if you\'re really stuck, see the help pages. Wikipedia is held up by Five Pillars...I recommend reading about them if you haven\'t already. Finally, it would be really helpful if you would sign your name on talk pages, so people can get back to you quickly. It\'s easy to do this by clicking the button (next to the one with the \"W\" crossed out) one from the end on the left. If that\'s confusing, or if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a ♪ at my talk page (by clicking the plus sign (+) next to the tab at the top that says \"edit this page\")...and again, welcome!-- Violin\'\'\'\'\' G\'\'\'\'\' irl ♪ 16:23, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
(Moved from Reference Desk: Science)
Most of the information I can find on neural nets is either very basic and general, or owned by a company and unavailable to outsiders. Where can I find information on the construction of neural nets that leans towards the conceptual (I only know Java, and don't have time to decipher other languages) and towards a large number of inputs, say on the order of millions? Black Carrot 21:46, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
Wow, you've really given this a lot of thought, I'm impressed. I still think the number of calculations necessary to search all of Google for all pictures of trees would take way too long to be practical for a search at present, but perhaps it would be good to have the technology ready and waiting for when such computing capacity comes along. Of course, just like voice recognition, I doubt if once you have the program optimized to find trees if it will be any good at finding, say, birds, until you alter the program significantly, then the same for every other object it needs to recognize.
I think some of the steps necessary for this to work might be valuable in and of themselves, however. I listed one above, another that interests me is "reverse pixelization". That is, I would like to be able to take a bitmap of a line and a circle, say, and create a vector representation of the geometric elements. One application would be to take a low res picture and generate a higher res pic of the same thing. Edge recognition is one aspect of any such program, that might be mentioned under machine vision.
Well, as I say, I'm quite skeptical that you will get the full program to work anytime soon, but still think it is valuable for it's side benefits. And, if you can write and sell such a program, I'm sure it would be worth millions! StuRat 06:14, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
Neural nets are (amoungst other, equivilent descriptions) a statistics object. It might be worth persuing them from that angle, particularly if you're looking for rigourus descriptions. Also, with the resoulution upscaling, there's a lot of work on statistics applied to images that would be useful background reading. Syntax 22:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering where this post ended up...it sounds like you could use a pretty well grounded textbook in artificial intelligence...here try this one: [1] :-) . The letters A, O and E do not matter, I just picked them out from thin air. Your neural network should be sufficiently good that it can detect a range of styles for these letters. You'll need at least one layer of hidden nodes to do this. -- HappyCamper 05:55, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Continuing discussion here per your request....
One pt I made earlier bears repeating and elaboration. Unlike voice recognition, where there would be considerable agreement from listeners on when a word is "tree" and when it is not, I don't believe there will be much agreement on when a random picture from Google is of a tree or not. Keep in mind that many pictures found via Google will be a part of a tree, many trees, a tree and something else, something that looks like a tree (like a frost pattern or a tree diagram), etc. Also, trees take many forms, some with lots of branches and some with no apparent branches, like a palm tree. Those with branches may also have those branches totally obscured by leaves or, in the case of fir trees, needles and possibly snow. So, developing a single method for identifying all trees seems impossible. You would rather need a collection of many recognition methods. For example, one for fir trees, one for deciduous trees with leaves, one for deciduous trees without leaves, and one for palm trees. And how would you classify a saguaro cactus, is that a tree ? I really think this problem is far more complex than you realize. However, I'm impressed with your knowledge on the subject, especially for a high school student. I just don't want you to get frustrated by taking on an impossible task, hence my advice (and somebody else's) that you start on some manageable task, then slowly add to it. StuRat 09:51, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
I apprecitate your concern, but I don't think there is any way to start small on this. It's an all-or-nothing proposition.
I think the problem isn't quite in the form you think it is. It's not a matter of building up a library of terms, or of translating a word into picture form. I just used Tree v Not Tree because it seemed clear. It's a matter of getting what's in a person's head out of the mass of pictures available. This would most likely involve them going through screens of google-like grids of pictures, clicking Yes, No and Ignore for each one. The net would then, as is their talent, figure out for itself what the user sees in them. This method is, of course, open to improvement.
Something that seems to have gotten lost: based on what I'm doing, can you recommend any material I can study for ideas? Black Carrot 13:06, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
HappyCamper- Thanks for suggesting that AOE thing. It's helped a lot. Here's been my thinking on it so far. There are a few basic things the net would have to be able to do. First, it would have to recognize a shape in black on white. Second, it would have to recognize that shape moved around on the board, possibly even rotated. Third, it would have to recognize shapes similar to that shape as being the same. Fourth, it would have to (possibly have to, but I'll get to that) differentiate between different shapes. Fifth, if I want this to bear any resemblance whatsoever to the final product, it would have to at least be able to deal with a greyscale. The last on this list is the first thing I decided to work on.
(dark 0 - 1 light) So, how would this work, having a greyscale? The shape pixels would still be seperate from the non-shape pixels. The shape pixels would still be dark, and the non-shape pixels would still be light. But, if the shape pixels are too similar to the non-shape pixels, there are problems, and if any of the shape pixels is lighter than any of the non-shape pixels, it ceases to be part of the shape. So, I'm thinking it would make sense for the net to accept anything where the pixels that are supposed to be in the letter are at least, say, 0.5 less than the pixels that aren't. That is to say, the lightest of the pixels in the letter are at least 0.5 darker than the darkest of the pixels that aren't in it. The simplest way to do this (which took me a surprising amount of work to realize) would be to just find the min() of all of one group, the max() of all of the rest, subtract one from the other, subtract 0.5, multiply by a huge number and run through the sigmoid. Of course, a slightly better way would be to find the min() of all of them and the max() of all of them, but add either 0 or 2 to everything in the min and either 0 or -2 to everything in the max, with what number each one gets depending on whether it's in the letter. What took me a long time to figure out before I stumbled on the max() thing, was how to do it with more normal functions. I did find a good way, involving absolute value, but I think the max() thing is better for now. -- Black Carrot 01:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I feel your pain. I'm usually constantly reading back over conversations to make sure I didn't miss anything, and I usually have. What neural nets have you encountered in a successful application? What do you do that brings you into contact with them at all?
I do indeed. I know exactly what I want to do with it now, and I know what I wanted to do with it when I started, which are not quite the same. Because this idea was around for a fair few months before I decided to actually do it, and has been going for a long time since then, and because there are a lot of good reasons to do it, it's hard to pinpoint what started it, but I'd say it was when I discovered (much to my disappointment) that Google is entirely incapable of searching the web successfully for pictures of girls in pajama bottoms. I've found a total of three such pictures when not looking for them (with totally other search terms), but never on purpose. This highlights a flaw in Google that I came up against again when trying to do a major English project. We were supposed to find a painting of a person (say, Girl with Pearl Earring), dress up like that person, take a picture as close to identical to that painting as possible, and turn them in with a report. After hours of painful searching on Google, the closest I came to something usable was the Mona Lisa, which I wound up imitating quite passably. What I want to do is find you the pictures you would choose if you had time to go through every picture on the web yourself, and I want to do it in minutes. What I want to do by the end of this school year is get something close enough to that that I can ace my independent study project. Black Carrot 22:04, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
Hey again. In case you haven't already done so, you should keep up with the goings on here as there will be a strong interplay between the new Main Page design and ASK. hydnjo talk 03:29, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
For example, this, your own talk page contains entries over a one month period and is thus reasonably easy to navigate, review and keep in your memory. However, as time an discussions progress, your talk page may become so lengthy that you might want to chop off a chunk of stale conversation. Since it's you own talk page you could elect to just delete the "old" stuff and shorten the page that way. Most folks however elect to save those past discussions in their own archive, why not most of us reason, who knows what I may want to reference a year from now. In any event, even if you deleted, it would still be available from your talk page history (there's NO erasing that) so archiving just makes things more convenient. Please don't hesitate to come to my talk page for anything you think I could help with. We really do try to be helpful. :-) hydnjo talk 02:21, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
I've added links on each draft at for example Draft 6A to all of the other drafts, it's really the only way to make comparisons. If you think this is stupid then let me know, otherwise I'll keep it up. hydnjo talk 03:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
A discussion has begun on how to handle an official election for replacing the Main Page. To ensure it is set up sensibly and according to consensus, your input is needed there. -- Go for it! 22:48, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
Why are you backslashing single and double quote marks all over the Talk:Mentat mentat page? Justin Johnson 16:56, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
(moved from User:Black Carrot 01:30, 15 June 2006 (UTC))
You appear to be using some sort of mis-configured webproxy. Is there any way that you can correct this, please? Best regards, Hall Monitor 18:47, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
Hi. I'm sorry if you were offended by my cleanup action with regard to your post. The prime reason it was removed was that it offered no valid answer to the question that was posted. The q and a page is not designed for people to offer mere opinions, but rather to offer direct answers to questions. Again I am sorry if you were offended.
Peace. Raven.x16 12:43, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labeled " Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:
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Hi - Thanks for the post at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics re my number theory question. I really am interested in continuing this conversation if you're up for it. Email works for me. I suppose we could converse on talk pages if you'd prefer. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. -- Rick Block ( talk) 23:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
No, sorry, I haven't had time to think about it much. I understand what you're saying, though. I'll give it some thought today, and maybe I can ask some other people about it. — Bkell ( talk) 18:16, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Hi. I wasn't sure if you saw my replies to your Real Genius Songquestion, so I thought I'd drop you a quick note here. -- LarryMac 16:04, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
It took me a while to notice that you had asked more at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2006_November_7#Evolution. I have since responded. Cheers, Scientizzle 21:48, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
Hi there Black Carrot. Happy new year! Have you recently lost your sight? My email is in my profile if you'd prefer to talk off-wiki. Cheers Natgoo 13:26, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
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I was sifting through unused images and found your frog: Image:Chameleon Frog.jpg. If you want to keep it, may I suggest using it either in an article or your user page? Otherwise it may get deleted. cheers. — Gaff ταλκ 19:29, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
Here is Nimur's note on your post, and my reply. FYI.
One of the assumptions of behaviorist school of psychological thought is that the behaviors are inherently dispassionate. The notion of isolating a specific stimulus and a specific response is hardly a complete theory of psychology, for animal subjects or for humans. Our psychology article has a good section on the rise of behaviorist thought and some of the later ideas that it spawned. Maybe this will give you some context - there are definitely realms where the simplistic experimental view of single-stimulus, single-behavior, single-response mappings do not really hold well, and you have described exactly such a case. Nimur (talk) 16:17, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
What does this sort of pychobabble mean, Nimur? If you are saying that animals feel no pain, then why bother with the animal cruelty laws? And as post-Darwin we all know that humans are animals as well, why should we get upset concerning human suffering? If someone forced your hand into a pot of boiling water and observed your sweating and screaming and face-pulling, would you approve of his dismissal of your extreme, albeit subjective, pain as an unscientific phenomenon? I would have thought this sort of uber-“scientific” rubbish had been thoroughly refuted by now. Here is a self-explanatory par I added to the talk page of Cetacean intelligence. As the page is transcluded now, I am posting both Nimur and OP Black Carrot this note on their talk pages.
With ref to Michele Bini’s comment above, dolphins are NOT the only animals that engage in self-destructive behaviour when panic-stricken or in extreme pain. All the ‘higher mammals’ including horses, cats, dogs and apes can present with human-like symptoms of severe stress. Dogs which lose a much-loved master can show every sign of ‘nervous breakdown’ and clinical depression, both behaviorally and physically. Other mammals will go on rampages, chew their own fur and eat their own excrement, refuse food and howl incessantly. Apes will throw themselves against their cages. In a series of notorious but well-conducted experiments of the 1960s, researchers tormented dogs to the point where they not only had ‘breakdowns’ but showed every sign of having become permanently insane through terror and pain. These were ‘higher’ animals. I have no idea whether you can make a butterfly mad, or drive a snail to distraction. Myles325a (talk) 04:36, 20 February 2008 (UTC) Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cetacean_intelligence"
Hi Nimur, thanks for your note re” “what you really meant”. Find below my response, which I am also posting to your Talk Page, and to OP Black Carrot.
There are many things in life that make me want to get down on the ground and pull up carpet tacks with my teeth, and one of the main ones is people who write or say something that reads as muddled or dead wrong and then, after they are taken to task for it, aver that the critic has misunderstood what was intended. The ensuing “debate” takes up everyone’s time, and WP talk pages, and archives, and bandwidth, and patience, and produces much more heat than light.
Your contributions, Nimur, are a copybook example of just such a skew-whiff dialogue. As WP is full of people waving hands and employing phrases that could mean any number of things, I will try to show you why writing clear English and saying EXACTLY what you mean in as concise and unambiguous way as you can, will render you far less misunderstood than you are at the moment. Before I continue might I ask you and others to re-read this and the preceding paragraph? You might not AGREE with the content, but is there anything at all there which you find less than crystal clear? Good. Then let's pass on to your recent offerings. I have put your words in bold type and my own comments in plain.
One of the assumptions of behaviourist school of psychological thought is that the behaviours are inherently dispassionate. Now what significance does dispassionate take on here? Let's not beat around the bush. Does this mean that animals don't feel pain, or that behaviourists don't believe they do, or don't care if they do, or don't believe that pain exists, or don't believe that animals feel pain the way humans do, or consider the subject of subjective feelings of pain as a metaphysical hobbyhorse external to scientific research?
And why would you opt for the murky term "dispassionate" rather than write "behaviours are inherently without emotion"? Dispassionate muddies the waters in this context because it can ALSO mean impartial, disinterested and the like. Are you using it as a "weasel word" because while it connotes "without emotion" it also tempers it with a soupcon of "impartial". Are the animal behaviours themselves "dispassionate" or are the scientists "dispassionate", or is it the methodology itself?
And what is the force of "inherently" here? How is "behaviours are inherently dispassionate" different from the shorter "behaviours are dispassionate". The addition of inherently would suggest that while some external observers might perceive certain animal behaviour as "passionate", objectively, that is "inherently", they are not. If this is not the meaning you intended, perhaps you could explain what you DID intend.
Now let us look at there are definitely realms where the simplistic experimental view of single-stimulus, single-behaviour, single-response mappings do not really hold well… Frankly, Nimur, there are NO interesting cases of animal, or human behaviour, which conform to the single-stimulus, single-response case. I spent a year of a University Psych course under a fanatical behaviourist learning about mice pushing levers for food. In the end, I ascertained that the good Professor preferred to record the highly circumscribed behaviour of mice because, as a scientist, he could not neatly explain what it is that HUMANS were doing, and as a border-line autistic, he was only dimly aware of the world of human experience, and cared even less for it.
A mouse pushes a lever and gets a food pellet. Great! Now, Cindy likes going out and often says "Gee, swell! When do you want to pick me up?" when she gets an invite, uh, sorry, the stimulus of a speech segment over a phone to that effect. But today, Cindy got just such a stimulus and replied to the effect that she was doing her hair. Now, we airy-fairy metaphysical types might just say that's because Cindy did not think that the boy who phoned was a "real spunk rat" or a "hunk". But, and I quote my erstwhile teacher on this, scientifically it should be said that there were "intervening variables" between the stimulus and the response, which made Cindy behave differently. What an absolute laff riot!! Everything—but everything—interesting in this episode lies in these "intervening variables". And as for Cindy, so for all humans, and the great bulk of life. It is another example of weasel words for you to say that the single stimulus – single response model does not (in some cases) not really well. Apart from jumping up when you sit on a tack and the like, there is NOTHING in life which can be described by such a mechanism, and it is an absolute indictment of the entire psychological "profession" that it was not laughed out of business when it was first proposed. So, do tell us, Nimur, what does "does not hold really well" mean?
Nimur, if you cannot quantify the stimulus – response model in life, can you at least quantify how often and in what circumstances human responses DO conform to such models? After all, if we are unable to record and quantify human responses, then we should be able to at least quantify the success to failure ratio of its predictions. My own estimate is that, after all those experiments, the success rate is close to zero. Millions of mice and pigeons pecked and pushed at levers and ran down mazes, and in the wash-up, decades later, I think it was B.F. Skinner himself who gave a description of how behaviourist theory can have some practical significance. Some college was having problems with student stragglers coming late for lunch and thus keeping kitchen staff waiting. Skinner suggested ringing a bell that would summon the students and then denying lunch to those who came more than 30 minutes later! Yes, we are indebted to Skinner and the behaviourists for this and many other such breakthroughs.
You end your piece on another weasel note. After noting that you did not say that animals did not feel pain, you finish with I don't see in any way how this has anything to do with the capacity for the animal to feel pain, nor the ethics of animal testing While OP Black Carrot's original post does not directly deal with animal cruelty, it broaches the subject of highly stressful / painful experiments in which an animal is rewarded and punished randomly for the same behaviour, and links it directly will existential pain felt by humans who might be exposed to such treatment in a social setting. It is hard to credit that you really have no idea how any of that can impinge on the broader topic of animal cruelty.
Moreover, I do not see why you simply do not declare yourself and say that what it is that you DO believe in this regard. Why duck the issue of animal (or indeed) human pain by sweeping it under the carpet of "complex behaviours"? And the question of animal pain is not a red herring. Descartes publicly propounded the theory that animals were no more than machines—a prototypically behaviourist notion—and that the noises they made when they were killed were no different in type to those of a creaking wheel. France, which still venerates Descartes has—for a European nation—a backward attitude toward animal suffering precisely for this reason.
But to get back to the main thread. Nimur, if you said exactly what you INTENDED clearly and without ambiguous weasel-words, then you would find yourself misunderstood on fewer occasions. As it is, if I have misunderstood you, then the preceding will give you fair indication why. Myles325a ( talk) 05:02, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Carrot, Did you ever get an adequate handle on random sequence as described at User_talk:Fuzzyeric#Probability? -- Fuzzyeric ( talk) 22:59, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
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Try Beklemishev, L. D. (2003). "Proof-theoretic analysis by iterated reflection". Arch. Math. Logic. 42: 515–552. doi: 10.1007/s00153-002-0158-7. -- Trovatore ( talk) 01:23, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
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\'\'\'WELCOME!!\'\'\' Hello, Black Carrot! I want to personally welcome you on behalf of the Wikipedia community. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you haven\'t already, you can put yourself in the new user log and the list of users so you can be properly introduced to everyone. Don\'t forget to be bold, and don\'t be afraid of hungry Wikipedians...there\'s a rule about not biting newcomers. Some other good links are the tutorial, how to edit a page, or if you\'re really stuck, see the help pages. Wikipedia is held up by Five Pillars...I recommend reading about them if you haven\'t already. Finally, it would be really helpful if you would sign your name on talk pages, so people can get back to you quickly. It\'s easy to do this by clicking the button (next to the one with the \"W\" crossed out) one from the end on the left. If that\'s confusing, or if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a ♪ at my talk page (by clicking the plus sign (+) next to the tab at the top that says \"edit this page\")...and again, welcome!-- Violin\'\'\'\'\' G\'\'\'\'\' irl ♪ 16:23, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
(Moved from Reference Desk: Science)
Most of the information I can find on neural nets is either very basic and general, or owned by a company and unavailable to outsiders. Where can I find information on the construction of neural nets that leans towards the conceptual (I only know Java, and don't have time to decipher other languages) and towards a large number of inputs, say on the order of millions? Black Carrot 21:46, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
Wow, you've really given this a lot of thought, I'm impressed. I still think the number of calculations necessary to search all of Google for all pictures of trees would take way too long to be practical for a search at present, but perhaps it would be good to have the technology ready and waiting for when such computing capacity comes along. Of course, just like voice recognition, I doubt if once you have the program optimized to find trees if it will be any good at finding, say, birds, until you alter the program significantly, then the same for every other object it needs to recognize.
I think some of the steps necessary for this to work might be valuable in and of themselves, however. I listed one above, another that interests me is "reverse pixelization". That is, I would like to be able to take a bitmap of a line and a circle, say, and create a vector representation of the geometric elements. One application would be to take a low res picture and generate a higher res pic of the same thing. Edge recognition is one aspect of any such program, that might be mentioned under machine vision.
Well, as I say, I'm quite skeptical that you will get the full program to work anytime soon, but still think it is valuable for it's side benefits. And, if you can write and sell such a program, I'm sure it would be worth millions! StuRat 06:14, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
Neural nets are (amoungst other, equivilent descriptions) a statistics object. It might be worth persuing them from that angle, particularly if you're looking for rigourus descriptions. Also, with the resoulution upscaling, there's a lot of work on statistics applied to images that would be useful background reading. Syntax 22:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering where this post ended up...it sounds like you could use a pretty well grounded textbook in artificial intelligence...here try this one: [1] :-) . The letters A, O and E do not matter, I just picked them out from thin air. Your neural network should be sufficiently good that it can detect a range of styles for these letters. You'll need at least one layer of hidden nodes to do this. -- HappyCamper 05:55, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Continuing discussion here per your request....
One pt I made earlier bears repeating and elaboration. Unlike voice recognition, where there would be considerable agreement from listeners on when a word is "tree" and when it is not, I don't believe there will be much agreement on when a random picture from Google is of a tree or not. Keep in mind that many pictures found via Google will be a part of a tree, many trees, a tree and something else, something that looks like a tree (like a frost pattern or a tree diagram), etc. Also, trees take many forms, some with lots of branches and some with no apparent branches, like a palm tree. Those with branches may also have those branches totally obscured by leaves or, in the case of fir trees, needles and possibly snow. So, developing a single method for identifying all trees seems impossible. You would rather need a collection of many recognition methods. For example, one for fir trees, one for deciduous trees with leaves, one for deciduous trees without leaves, and one for palm trees. And how would you classify a saguaro cactus, is that a tree ? I really think this problem is far more complex than you realize. However, I'm impressed with your knowledge on the subject, especially for a high school student. I just don't want you to get frustrated by taking on an impossible task, hence my advice (and somebody else's) that you start on some manageable task, then slowly add to it. StuRat 09:51, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
I apprecitate your concern, but I don't think there is any way to start small on this. It's an all-or-nothing proposition.
I think the problem isn't quite in the form you think it is. It's not a matter of building up a library of terms, or of translating a word into picture form. I just used Tree v Not Tree because it seemed clear. It's a matter of getting what's in a person's head out of the mass of pictures available. This would most likely involve them going through screens of google-like grids of pictures, clicking Yes, No and Ignore for each one. The net would then, as is their talent, figure out for itself what the user sees in them. This method is, of course, open to improvement.
Something that seems to have gotten lost: based on what I'm doing, can you recommend any material I can study for ideas? Black Carrot 13:06, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
HappyCamper- Thanks for suggesting that AOE thing. It's helped a lot. Here's been my thinking on it so far. There are a few basic things the net would have to be able to do. First, it would have to recognize a shape in black on white. Second, it would have to recognize that shape moved around on the board, possibly even rotated. Third, it would have to recognize shapes similar to that shape as being the same. Fourth, it would have to (possibly have to, but I'll get to that) differentiate between different shapes. Fifth, if I want this to bear any resemblance whatsoever to the final product, it would have to at least be able to deal with a greyscale. The last on this list is the first thing I decided to work on.
(dark 0 - 1 light) So, how would this work, having a greyscale? The shape pixels would still be seperate from the non-shape pixels. The shape pixels would still be dark, and the non-shape pixels would still be light. But, if the shape pixels are too similar to the non-shape pixels, there are problems, and if any of the shape pixels is lighter than any of the non-shape pixels, it ceases to be part of the shape. So, I'm thinking it would make sense for the net to accept anything where the pixels that are supposed to be in the letter are at least, say, 0.5 less than the pixels that aren't. That is to say, the lightest of the pixels in the letter are at least 0.5 darker than the darkest of the pixels that aren't in it. The simplest way to do this (which took me a surprising amount of work to realize) would be to just find the min() of all of one group, the max() of all of the rest, subtract one from the other, subtract 0.5, multiply by a huge number and run through the sigmoid. Of course, a slightly better way would be to find the min() of all of them and the max() of all of them, but add either 0 or 2 to everything in the min and either 0 or -2 to everything in the max, with what number each one gets depending on whether it's in the letter. What took me a long time to figure out before I stumbled on the max() thing, was how to do it with more normal functions. I did find a good way, involving absolute value, but I think the max() thing is better for now. -- Black Carrot 01:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
I feel your pain. I'm usually constantly reading back over conversations to make sure I didn't miss anything, and I usually have. What neural nets have you encountered in a successful application? What do you do that brings you into contact with them at all?
I do indeed. I know exactly what I want to do with it now, and I know what I wanted to do with it when I started, which are not quite the same. Because this idea was around for a fair few months before I decided to actually do it, and has been going for a long time since then, and because there are a lot of good reasons to do it, it's hard to pinpoint what started it, but I'd say it was when I discovered (much to my disappointment) that Google is entirely incapable of searching the web successfully for pictures of girls in pajama bottoms. I've found a total of three such pictures when not looking for them (with totally other search terms), but never on purpose. This highlights a flaw in Google that I came up against again when trying to do a major English project. We were supposed to find a painting of a person (say, Girl with Pearl Earring), dress up like that person, take a picture as close to identical to that painting as possible, and turn them in with a report. After hours of painful searching on Google, the closest I came to something usable was the Mona Lisa, which I wound up imitating quite passably. What I want to do is find you the pictures you would choose if you had time to go through every picture on the web yourself, and I want to do it in minutes. What I want to do by the end of this school year is get something close enough to that that I can ace my independent study project. Black Carrot 22:04, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
Hey again. In case you haven't already done so, you should keep up with the goings on here as there will be a strong interplay between the new Main Page design and ASK. hydnjo talk 03:29, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
For example, this, your own talk page contains entries over a one month period and is thus reasonably easy to navigate, review and keep in your memory. However, as time an discussions progress, your talk page may become so lengthy that you might want to chop off a chunk of stale conversation. Since it's you own talk page you could elect to just delete the "old" stuff and shorten the page that way. Most folks however elect to save those past discussions in their own archive, why not most of us reason, who knows what I may want to reference a year from now. In any event, even if you deleted, it would still be available from your talk page history (there's NO erasing that) so archiving just makes things more convenient. Please don't hesitate to come to my talk page for anything you think I could help with. We really do try to be helpful. :-) hydnjo talk 02:21, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
I've added links on each draft at for example Draft 6A to all of the other drafts, it's really the only way to make comparisons. If you think this is stupid then let me know, otherwise I'll keep it up. hydnjo talk 03:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
A discussion has begun on how to handle an official election for replacing the Main Page. To ensure it is set up sensibly and according to consensus, your input is needed there. -- Go for it! 22:48, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
Why are you backslashing single and double quote marks all over the Talk:Mentat mentat page? Justin Johnson 16:56, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
(moved from User:Black Carrot 01:30, 15 June 2006 (UTC))
You appear to be using some sort of mis-configured webproxy. Is there any way that you can correct this, please? Best regards, Hall Monitor 18:47, 28 March 2006 (UTC)
Hi. I'm sorry if you were offended by my cleanup action with regard to your post. The prime reason it was removed was that it offered no valid answer to the question that was posted. The q and a page is not designed for people to offer mere opinions, but rather to offer direct answers to questions. Again I am sorry if you were offended.
Peace. Raven.x16 12:43, 14 June 2006 (UTC)
When editing an article on Wikipedia there is a small field labeled " Edit summary" under the main edit-box. It looks like this:
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Filling in the edit summary field greatly helps your fellow contributors in understanding what you changed, so please always fill in the edit summary field, especially for big edits or when you are making subtle but important changes, like changing dates or numbers. Thank you. — M e ts501 ( talk) 23:51, 15 June 2006 (UTC)
Hi - Thanks for the post at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Mathematics re my number theory question. I really am interested in continuing this conversation if you're up for it. Email works for me. I suppose we could converse on talk pages if you'd prefer. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. -- Rick Block ( talk) 23:49, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
No, sorry, I haven't had time to think about it much. I understand what you're saying, though. I'll give it some thought today, and maybe I can ask some other people about it. — Bkell ( talk) 18:16, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
Hi. I wasn't sure if you saw my replies to your Real Genius Songquestion, so I thought I'd drop you a quick note here. -- LarryMac 16:04, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
It took me a while to notice that you had asked more at Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Science/2006_November_7#Evolution. I have since responded. Cheers, Scientizzle 21:48, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
Hi there Black Carrot. Happy new year! Have you recently lost your sight? My email is in my profile if you'd prefer to talk off-wiki. Cheers Natgoo 13:26, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
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I was sifting through unused images and found your frog: Image:Chameleon Frog.jpg. If you want to keep it, may I suggest using it either in an article or your user page? Otherwise it may get deleted. cheers. — Gaff ταλκ 19:29, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
Here is Nimur's note on your post, and my reply. FYI.
One of the assumptions of behaviorist school of psychological thought is that the behaviors are inherently dispassionate. The notion of isolating a specific stimulus and a specific response is hardly a complete theory of psychology, for animal subjects or for humans. Our psychology article has a good section on the rise of behaviorist thought and some of the later ideas that it spawned. Maybe this will give you some context - there are definitely realms where the simplistic experimental view of single-stimulus, single-behavior, single-response mappings do not really hold well, and you have described exactly such a case. Nimur (talk) 16:17, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
What does this sort of pychobabble mean, Nimur? If you are saying that animals feel no pain, then why bother with the animal cruelty laws? And as post-Darwin we all know that humans are animals as well, why should we get upset concerning human suffering? If someone forced your hand into a pot of boiling water and observed your sweating and screaming and face-pulling, would you approve of his dismissal of your extreme, albeit subjective, pain as an unscientific phenomenon? I would have thought this sort of uber-“scientific” rubbish had been thoroughly refuted by now. Here is a self-explanatory par I added to the talk page of Cetacean intelligence. As the page is transcluded now, I am posting both Nimur and OP Black Carrot this note on their talk pages.
With ref to Michele Bini’s comment above, dolphins are NOT the only animals that engage in self-destructive behaviour when panic-stricken or in extreme pain. All the ‘higher mammals’ including horses, cats, dogs and apes can present with human-like symptoms of severe stress. Dogs which lose a much-loved master can show every sign of ‘nervous breakdown’ and clinical depression, both behaviorally and physically. Other mammals will go on rampages, chew their own fur and eat their own excrement, refuse food and howl incessantly. Apes will throw themselves against their cages. In a series of notorious but well-conducted experiments of the 1960s, researchers tormented dogs to the point where they not only had ‘breakdowns’ but showed every sign of having become permanently insane through terror and pain. These were ‘higher’ animals. I have no idea whether you can make a butterfly mad, or drive a snail to distraction. Myles325a (talk) 04:36, 20 February 2008 (UTC) Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cetacean_intelligence"
Hi Nimur, thanks for your note re” “what you really meant”. Find below my response, which I am also posting to your Talk Page, and to OP Black Carrot.
There are many things in life that make me want to get down on the ground and pull up carpet tacks with my teeth, and one of the main ones is people who write or say something that reads as muddled or dead wrong and then, after they are taken to task for it, aver that the critic has misunderstood what was intended. The ensuing “debate” takes up everyone’s time, and WP talk pages, and archives, and bandwidth, and patience, and produces much more heat than light.
Your contributions, Nimur, are a copybook example of just such a skew-whiff dialogue. As WP is full of people waving hands and employing phrases that could mean any number of things, I will try to show you why writing clear English and saying EXACTLY what you mean in as concise and unambiguous way as you can, will render you far less misunderstood than you are at the moment. Before I continue might I ask you and others to re-read this and the preceding paragraph? You might not AGREE with the content, but is there anything at all there which you find less than crystal clear? Good. Then let's pass on to your recent offerings. I have put your words in bold type and my own comments in plain.
One of the assumptions of behaviourist school of psychological thought is that the behaviours are inherently dispassionate. Now what significance does dispassionate take on here? Let's not beat around the bush. Does this mean that animals don't feel pain, or that behaviourists don't believe they do, or don't care if they do, or don't believe that pain exists, or don't believe that animals feel pain the way humans do, or consider the subject of subjective feelings of pain as a metaphysical hobbyhorse external to scientific research?
And why would you opt for the murky term "dispassionate" rather than write "behaviours are inherently without emotion"? Dispassionate muddies the waters in this context because it can ALSO mean impartial, disinterested and the like. Are you using it as a "weasel word" because while it connotes "without emotion" it also tempers it with a soupcon of "impartial". Are the animal behaviours themselves "dispassionate" or are the scientists "dispassionate", or is it the methodology itself?
And what is the force of "inherently" here? How is "behaviours are inherently dispassionate" different from the shorter "behaviours are dispassionate". The addition of inherently would suggest that while some external observers might perceive certain animal behaviour as "passionate", objectively, that is "inherently", they are not. If this is not the meaning you intended, perhaps you could explain what you DID intend.
Now let us look at there are definitely realms where the simplistic experimental view of single-stimulus, single-behaviour, single-response mappings do not really hold well… Frankly, Nimur, there are NO interesting cases of animal, or human behaviour, which conform to the single-stimulus, single-response case. I spent a year of a University Psych course under a fanatical behaviourist learning about mice pushing levers for food. In the end, I ascertained that the good Professor preferred to record the highly circumscribed behaviour of mice because, as a scientist, he could not neatly explain what it is that HUMANS were doing, and as a border-line autistic, he was only dimly aware of the world of human experience, and cared even less for it.
A mouse pushes a lever and gets a food pellet. Great! Now, Cindy likes going out and often says "Gee, swell! When do you want to pick me up?" when she gets an invite, uh, sorry, the stimulus of a speech segment over a phone to that effect. But today, Cindy got just such a stimulus and replied to the effect that she was doing her hair. Now, we airy-fairy metaphysical types might just say that's because Cindy did not think that the boy who phoned was a "real spunk rat" or a "hunk". But, and I quote my erstwhile teacher on this, scientifically it should be said that there were "intervening variables" between the stimulus and the response, which made Cindy behave differently. What an absolute laff riot!! Everything—but everything—interesting in this episode lies in these "intervening variables". And as for Cindy, so for all humans, and the great bulk of life. It is another example of weasel words for you to say that the single stimulus – single response model does not (in some cases) not really well. Apart from jumping up when you sit on a tack and the like, there is NOTHING in life which can be described by such a mechanism, and it is an absolute indictment of the entire psychological "profession" that it was not laughed out of business when it was first proposed. So, do tell us, Nimur, what does "does not hold really well" mean?
Nimur, if you cannot quantify the stimulus – response model in life, can you at least quantify how often and in what circumstances human responses DO conform to such models? After all, if we are unable to record and quantify human responses, then we should be able to at least quantify the success to failure ratio of its predictions. My own estimate is that, after all those experiments, the success rate is close to zero. Millions of mice and pigeons pecked and pushed at levers and ran down mazes, and in the wash-up, decades later, I think it was B.F. Skinner himself who gave a description of how behaviourist theory can have some practical significance. Some college was having problems with student stragglers coming late for lunch and thus keeping kitchen staff waiting. Skinner suggested ringing a bell that would summon the students and then denying lunch to those who came more than 30 minutes later! Yes, we are indebted to Skinner and the behaviourists for this and many other such breakthroughs.
You end your piece on another weasel note. After noting that you did not say that animals did not feel pain, you finish with I don't see in any way how this has anything to do with the capacity for the animal to feel pain, nor the ethics of animal testing While OP Black Carrot's original post does not directly deal with animal cruelty, it broaches the subject of highly stressful / painful experiments in which an animal is rewarded and punished randomly for the same behaviour, and links it directly will existential pain felt by humans who might be exposed to such treatment in a social setting. It is hard to credit that you really have no idea how any of that can impinge on the broader topic of animal cruelty.
Moreover, I do not see why you simply do not declare yourself and say that what it is that you DO believe in this regard. Why duck the issue of animal (or indeed) human pain by sweeping it under the carpet of "complex behaviours"? And the question of animal pain is not a red herring. Descartes publicly propounded the theory that animals were no more than machines—a prototypically behaviourist notion—and that the noises they made when they were killed were no different in type to those of a creaking wheel. France, which still venerates Descartes has—for a European nation—a backward attitude toward animal suffering precisely for this reason.
But to get back to the main thread. Nimur, if you said exactly what you INTENDED clearly and without ambiguous weasel-words, then you would find yourself misunderstood on fewer occasions. As it is, if I have misunderstood you, then the preceding will give you fair indication why. Myles325a ( talk) 05:02, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Carrot, Did you ever get an adequate handle on random sequence as described at User_talk:Fuzzyeric#Probability? -- Fuzzyeric ( talk) 22:59, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
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Try Beklemishev, L. D. (2003). "Proof-theoretic analysis by iterated reflection". Arch. Math. Logic. 42: 515–552. doi: 10.1007/s00153-002-0158-7. -- Trovatore ( talk) 01:23, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
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