LARRY
Ah, Charles, my ambulatory
reference book. Chaitin's Omega
Constant...?
CHARLIE
Omega equals .00787499699. Why,
what're you working on?
(sees the file, reacts)
Oh. FBI file.
Chaitin's constant measures the probability that
a
Turing machine will halt.
The
busy beaver game is a competition
to find an
n-state Turing machine that either leaves the largest number of 1s on its tape or makes the largest
number of head movements before halting. A busy beaver is a Turing machine that, when provided with a blank tape,
does a lot of work.
Larry points. Colby grabs the remote, zooms in. In the
corner of the driver's area, a shiny, CHROME HANDLE. On it,
a WILDLY DISTORTED, fun-house mirror version of the Suspect.
DAVID
We see it. What're we supposed to
do with it? It's too distorted...
LARRY
Certainly from the limited
perspective of the human eye it
isn't what we normally comprehend
as a face...
AMITA
The image's been altered by the
refracting nature of the surface,
but the information is still there.
It's called Non-Linear Warping.
The figure shows a nonlinear warp, which maps a regular grid onto a
cylinder or
hemisphere.
The effect is the same as wrapping a flat image around an object and viewing it from afar. The image transformation is a
function of the radius of the cylinder or hemisphere.
AMITA
Contemplation, or second thoughts?
LARRY
(iffy)
Working cell by cell will suffice,
certainly, in producing Splines...
But there must be a more elegant
approach...
In the full Demonstration, each of the four control points can be moved to see the effect on the form of the
spline curves. Either
Bézier or
cubic splines can be experimented with.
CHARLIE
Belief Propagation. Algorithms
that convert scattered information
into a coherent picture, even if
the information is incomplete.
Charlie moves toward the living room FLAT SCREEN --
CHARLIE (cont'd)
It's like... say you're a TV
network on election night...
AUDIENCE VISION - Charlie appears INSIDE the TV, with a
flashy, Network-like chyron - 'Election 2008: America's
Decision.' As Charlie moves to the TV --
CHARLIE (cont'd)
You want to be first to predict a
winner, so you collect information
from all over the country...
The
voter model shows how the views of neighbors can influence a neighborhood. On a given day, several voters
will abandon their current views and assume the position of one of their four neighbors. When run, strong
groupings appear almost immediately, with conflict at the borders. Eventually, some positions vanish entirely.
