Anyone who values their own safety needs to read Think Like A Black Belt, by third degree black belt and martial arts instructor Lori Hoeck. This ebook is free, in exchange for your email address.

You’re not going to learn any martial arts techniques, but you’ll learn how to mentally prepare yourself to avoid danger or get yourself out of it. And that can be much more important.

As Lori says, ”Thinking like a black belt means thinking ahead, wearing a wary eye, and presenting yourself to the world in a way that makes you less visible and less desirable to the criminals and predators who populate your life.”

Her target market appears to be women and teens, but this information is applicable to anyone.

I know a guy who has absolutely no trouble defending himself. He was once attacked by a guy with a knife, and not only did he escape injury, but he broke the guy’s neck.

However, he didn’t know how to think like a black belt. When walking through an area that wasn’t even considered particularly dangerous, he was lured into an alley by a homeless woman who called him. It was a setup, and two guys robbed him at gunpoint. He wasn’t hurt and only lost $40, but thinking like a black belt would have let him avoid the whole thing.

Thinking like a black belt could also reduce the number of fatalities in something like the Virginia Tech shooting. The details aren’t clear, but by some accounts, there were long pauses during which the shooter was reloading. He would have been vulnerable during these times, but fear kept anyone from taking action.

Sure, it’s easy to say what people should have done in hindsight, but it’s very different when you’re actually in the middle of it. That’s the point. When your adrenaline is rushing in a life and death situation, it’s not easy to think straight. That’s why you need to learn how to control your adrenaline ahead of time.

Your inner warrior is ready to be awakened. Be safe, not sorry.

You’ve probably heard about Stephen Covey’s classic The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A great book, but what could be 11 times better?* How about The 77 Traits of Highly Successful People?

This free ebook is a joint venture masterminded by Mark Foo, involving myself and 47 other personal development bloggers. The collaborative nature means a variety of different voices, but they’re all focused on one thing: how ordinary people can achieve extraordinary results.

48 top notch bloggers. 77 essential success traits. 233 captivating pages. Free with your email opt-in.

* OK, maybe not 11 times better, but you get the idea.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers, Mario and Luigi. They were humble Italian American plumbers whose prospects didn’t seem particularly bright. For all their hard work, they couldn’t seem to find a better job than pest control in the New York sewers.

But one fateful day in 1985, Mario and Luigi were offered an opportunity. They were approached by a panicked citizen from the Mushroom Kingdom, who was clearly in need of help. Princess Toadstool had been captured by Bowser, king of the Koopas, and Mario and Luigi were the only ones who could save her.

Little did they know that their response to the challenge would change their lives forever.

Luigi spoke first. “Hello, mushroom man. This is most troubling news, and I certainly hope that Princess Toadstool is rescued as soon as possible. But what exactly would saving her entail? Would it be a fairly straightforward quest?”

“I’m afraid not,” the mushroom man answered. “Bowser has taken over the whole Mushroom Kingdom. Our people have been turned into inanimate objects, and Bowser’s thugs now roam the land. You will be greatly outnumbered.”

“But I’m not a fighter,” Luigi replied. “How can I defeat all these enemies? I don’t even know how to beat one of them, let alone a whole army.”

“You won’t at first,” the mushroom man said. “But you’ll learn with practice. Every enemy has a weakness that can be exploited, and once you get the hang of it, it won’t seem so hard.”

Luigi was still having grave doubts about this whole thing. “But I don’t want to have to go through a big learning curve,” he said. “I only want to face enemies that are really easy to beat, and no danger at all.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be the case here,” the mushroom man said. “Even the smallest enemy is bigger than you, and if one so much as touches you, you’ll die!”

“Egads!” Luigi shouted. “I can’t do that! Only a fool would choose to do something so risky. If I’m not sure that I can succeed, then why would I take such a big chance?”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as you think,” the mushroom man replied. “You’re more powerful than you know. You can jump on the enemies and smush them. There are also power-ups scattered throughout the land to help you. A magic mushroom will make you double in size. A fire flower will let you throw fireballs with your bare hands. And a starman will even make you invincible for a brief period of time.”

“Invincible?” Luigi asked. “That sounds a little hard to believe. Is it completely guaranteed?”

“Well, no,” the mushroom man admitted. “You would still be vulnerable in some ways. You could fall down a bottomless pit, or your time could run out. Nothing is ever perfectly safe, and you’re not immortal.”

“Now you tell me!” Luigi was now getting quite agitated. “This is starting to sound really iffy. I don’t know if I can take such a big risk. Do I have enough talent? Am I too old? Do I have enough life insurance?”

“Don’t worry,” the mushroom man said reassuringly. “It’s really not that big a risk. You’ll start out with three lives, and if you need more, you can find the hidden 1-Up mushrooms or collect coins to get extra lives. And if all else fails, you can always continue not far from where you left off. You haven’t really failed until you stop trying.”

“OK, mushroom man,” Luigi began. “Here’s what I’m gonna do for you. Yes, I’ll save Princess Toadstool, but only if you agree to my conditions. I want you to draw me a map showing the locations of all the hidden mushrooms. I want to start out with all the power-ups and infinite lives. I want to know about all the secret worlds and warp zones. I don’t want to go near fire, I don’t want to jump long distances, and I don’t want to get wet. Oh, and I also don’t want…”

The mushroom man had stopped listening by now. “Maybe I’m talking to the wrong brother,” he said. He turned to look at Mario, but he wasn’t there anymore – he was already off on his quest! Because Mario had simply decided that he was going to save the princess, and that was enough to get started. He’d figure out the details on the way.

Mario ended up saving the princess, and Luigi may have tagged along, but it was clear who was running the show. They had no choice but to name the game Super Mario Bros., and it became the best-selling video game of all time (it was finally outsold by Wii Sports in 2009, 24 years later).

Mario went on to star in many other games that bore his name, and he took his rightful place in history. He got his own TV show, movie, comics, and merchandise line. And Luigi was there for the ride, but he was always known as Mario’s sidekick.

Now, when duty calls, will you be a Mario or a Luigi?

Having discovered that perfect play in nuclear war is always a draw, “Joshua” from WarGames sees no point in playing it.

When people play games, they often make mistakes. Hopefully they learn from these mistakes and get a little better each time, uncovering the game’s secrets and inching ever closer to perfection.

If a game is simple enough, even casual players may figure out a system for “perfect play,” or a guaranteed way of choosing the best possible moves. Even if a game is complicated, expert players may still be able to get close to perfect play, not being completely flawless, but able to capitalize on an opponent’s single mistake.

Of course, if a person can play a game well, a computer probably can too. A computer can use its fantastic memory and processing power to look much further ahead, analyze many more moves, and become practically invincible. And if they get as far as achieving perfect play, you don’t even need to play them – you already know the outcome.

But is perfect play always achievable for a machine? And if not, can a human hope to play better? Here are five games, listed in order of increasing complexity, that offer a glimpse into what it takes to reach perfect play as man or machine.

Tic-tac-toe

Tic-tac-toe is simple enough that kids discover perfect play on their own. They realize that starting in the center gives the most options, and they take it from there.

Soon enough, they figure out that tic-tac-toe is what’s called a draw game – perfect play on both sides results in a tie. And since perfect play isn’t hard to achieve, kids quickly get bored and move on to more challenging games.

Connect Four

Unlike tic-tac-toe, Connect Four is not a draw game – the first player always wins with perfect play. So in theory, a person can beat any machine as long as they get to go first. In practice though, people don’t stand much of a chance against a perfect play program, even if they go first.

There is only one correct opening move – the center column (shown above). Any other move is a blunder against a perfect play opponent. If you start in a column adjacent to the center, you’re now playing for a draw at best. If you start in any other column, you’ve already lost. And even if you get the first move right, what about all the others?

Connect Four has 10¹⁴ possible positions, making it simple enough that the best programs can achieve perfect play, but complicated enough that people probably can’t. With practice, nearly perfect play is achievable for a human, which will be good enough against most other people, but not against the best programs.

Checkers

Photo by scott*eric

Marion Tinsley, world champion of checkers (English draughts, to some of you) from 1955-1958 and 1975-1991, is considered the greatest player ever. He lost only 7 games in 45 years, and said he could visualize 150 moves in advance. (He’s also an example of the 10,000 hour rule, having studied checkers for about 10,000 hours in grad school.)

Impressive, but how would that stack up to a computer? Well, checkers has about a million times as many possible positions as Connect Four, which put perfect play out of reach of computers for a long time, and making man vs. machine competitions interesting.

In 1990, Tinsley faced off against the program Chinook in the Man vs. Machine World Championship. Tinsley won the match with 4 wins, 2 losses (remember he had only 7 career losses), and 33 draws. Of course, that wasn’t the end of it, because programs are always getting better.

In their 1994 rematch, after six drawn games, Tinsley resigned for health reasons, and died from pancreatic cancer seven months later. Chinook was the world champion, but unfortunately it was never known if he could have beaten Tinsley in 1994.

In 1995, Chinook beat the best living human player, Don Lafferty, with 1 win, 0 losses, and 31 draws. Chinook was retired after that, when the owner decided to solve the game instead of continuing to compete with people.

They solved checkers by brute force in 2007, after 18 years of calculations on up to 200 desktop computers. These calculations proved that checkers is a draw with perfect play, and also gave Chinook an algorithm for ensuring at least a draw in all cases.

Thus, the man vs. machine debate is resolved as far as checkers goes, though you can still play against Chinook if you like (his strength has been reduced so as not to take all the fun out of it).

Chess

OK, but what about chess, the game of kings? The number of different chess positions is more than the square of the number of different checkers positions. Chess is a true thinking game that requires human ingenuity, right?

Well, it’s true that people seem to have something that machines don’t as far as chess goes. For a long time, machines would analyze millions of positions per second to achieve massive lookahead, but they’d still lose to the top human players. It’s not that the people had better lookahead; they just didn’t need it – they simply didn’t see the bad moves.

We’re still not sure what gives great chess players their ability. For example, how is it that any strong player is able to play blindfolded? In 1937, George Koltanowski set the Guinness record by playing 34 simultaneous blindfolded games, winning 24 and losing 10 in 13 hours.

There are conflicting reports about whether top chess players have better memories, better visuospatial abilities, greater intelligence, certain personality types, etc., but it’s clear that knowledge and experience are critical. It also helps to start young and be left-handed.

Anyway, whatever gift the best human players had, it let them trounce the best chess programs for a really long time. But this started to change in the mid 1990s when technology was finally starting to become a threat to the top grandmasters.

The reigning world champion Garry Kasparov, considered by most people to be the greatest (human) chess player of all time, was ultimately defeated by IBM’s chess playing computer, Deep Blue.

In 1989, Kasparov had defeated Deep Thought, an earlier version of Deep Blue, 2-0 in a 2 game match. In 1996, Deep Blue won the first game of a 6 game match, but Kasparov won the match 4-2 (with just the one loss – draws are half a point).

In 1997, a heavily upgraded Deep Blue – the 259th most powerful supercomputer in the world, capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second – defeated Kasparov 3.5 to 2.5 in a 6 game match.

It wasn’t entirely clear that the 1997 Deep Blue was a better player, because Kasparov wasn’t at his best. He resigned prematurely in game 2, believing his position to be hopeless, though later analysis revealed that it could have been a draw. And after being tied at 2.5 after 5 games, he committed an uncharacteristic blunder in the opening of game 6, resigning after only 19 moves.

Kasparov wanted a rematch, but IBM decommissioned Deep Blue, considering the man vs. machine contest to be over. Today, the computer Deep Rybka 3 has an Elo rating of 3238, far above Kasparov’s peak of 2851 (the all-time high for a human).

Chess is generally believed to be a draw with perfect play, though it hasn’t been proven (some people believe that the first player (white) can always win). And while machines are far from achieving perfect play, humans are no longer a match for the best of them.

That’s kind of depressing, isn’t it? What do people still have going for them, if even chess has been conquered by computers?

Well, computers still have one major handicap – they can’t think. When commenting on Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter said:

“It was a watershed event, but it doesn’t have to do with computers becoming intelligent. They’re just overtaking humans in certain intellectual activities that we thought required intelligence. My God, I used to think chess required thought. Now, I realize it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean Kasparov isn’t a deep thinker, just that you can bypass deep thinking in playing chess, the way you can fly without flapping your wings.”

Indeed, previous attempts to make computers model the thought process of grandmasters had failed. Deep Blue succeeded largely on the basis of brute force, with only modest ability to selectively explore the reasonable moves by identifying the bad ones.

Computers are great at tactics, and humans are great at strategy. But as Richard Teichmann said, “Chess is 99% tactics,” which puts humans at a disadvantage. However, an invention of Kasparov’s called “advanced chess” combines the best of both worlds, letting a human and a computer work together as a team, with the human guiding strategy and the computer handling tactics.

But despite the massive number of different positions in chess, and despite a computer’s poor strategic ability, machines can get close enough to perfect play because chess actually isn’t as complicated as it appears.

Even for a human, chess openings don’t involve creativity. They’re based on simply memorizing predetermined sequences that have been perfected over time. Both sides might play out their first 20 to 35 moves without actually having to think, just by following standard openings.

Most people consider e4 (shown above) to be the best opening move for white, with c5 (“the Sicilian Defense,” shown above) being black’s best response. Except that every serious player knows that, so they’ve memorized all the lines that follow from it, so it loses its effectiveness somewhat.

So then people think they’ll mix it up, and d4 becomes a promising alternative as the next best opening move, except that now everybody knows that too, and they’ve memorized all the lines following from that as well.

Anyway, computers are very good at memorization, so after humans have gone to all the trouble of working out the best openings, a program can simply play them out without having to think at all.

Endgames, while often challenging for humans, can be very formulaic for a machine. Once the board is down to a small number of pieces, the perfect moves can be looked up in a database of precalculated sequences, without having to do any thinking on the fly.

The downside is the incredible amount of storage space required – 7.05 gigabytes to store all endings with 5 pieces, 1.2 terabytes to store all endings with 6 pieces, and 7 piece endings expected to be out of reach until 2015. If all endings can be worked out for 32 pieces, chess will be solved.

Some people doubt that perfect play in chess will ever be attained, but regardless, the man vs. machine debate is over. Simply by maintaining a repository of the best opening moves, storing huge numbers of endgame scenarios, and using brute force to search through millions of positions at each point in the midgame, computers have become superior in just about the only game left that some people could do better.

Go

But wait, don’t bow down before the machine just yet. People are still better than programs at Go, the ancient Asian board game. In fact, the best Go programs are routinely beaten by talented children.

There are two main reasons why. First is the computational complexity. While there are “only” 10⁵⁰ possible positions on an 8 x 8 chess board, there are 10¹⁷¹ possible positions on a 19 x 19 Go board. This is greater than the number of atoms in the universe, squared. It’s been said that a computer would need 30,000 years to look as far ahead in Go as Deep Blue could in chess in 3 seconds.

Furthermore, because chess starts with a fixed configuration and works its way down to a small number of pieces, a lot of processing time can be saved by working out openings and endings in advance. Not so with Go, where you start with an empty board, pieces can be played anywhere, and the game gets more complicated as you progress. All this makes brute force a woefully ineffective strategy.

But it’s not just the number of positions that makes Go so complicated. After all, you could simply increase the board size of any game to make it as complicated as you want.

The big problem for computers is that Go isn’t easy to understand logically. Even if computers had terrific lookahead, they’d still have a hard time evaluating the possible positions to see which one was best. Go players can often tell that a move is good, without being able to say why.

For a computer to play Go well, it’s not a matter of increasing processing power. It will take breakthroughs in artificial intelligence: learning, decision making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition, and intuition.

For now, computer’s aren’t very good at these things. And that makes Go just about the only game where it pays to be human.

Let’s hear your thoughts. Will there always be a game, whether Go or something else, where the best humans can beat the best computers? Does allowing people and computers to team up, as in advanced chess, improve the game or make a mockery of it? Is a game ruined when you can simply look up the perfect moves on a smartphone? Is there a point in playing a game you know you can’t win, or is the only winning move not to play?

Here’s an old post that I’ve had sitting around unpublished for two years. With the 24 premiere tonight, it seemed like a good time to put it out there.

First Blood, the first of the Rambo movies, is about a troubled Vietnam war hero trying to get readjusted to life in America. He’s just learned that the only other survivor from his unit has died from cancer due to Agent Orange exposure, but he gets no sympathy from a sheriff who doesn’t like drifters. What lessons might we take away from this?

1. Don’t be too quick to judge people.

Sheriff Teasle makes it clear that his town doesn’t want people like Rambo because of the way he looks. He didn’t consider that Rambo might have issues that for now are more important than getting a haircut or cleaning his jacket. All the ensuing conflict would have been avoided if Teasle hadn’t decided to make an enemy for no good reason. As Rambo said, “All I wanted was something to eat.”

2. Sometimes what you say is less important than how you say it.

Rambo defends his actions by saying “They drew first blood, not me.” Of course, this is just a tough guy way of saying “But Colonel, they started it!”

3. Know when you’re outmatched.

Colonel Trautman’s advice to Teasle was that instead of sending a bunch of poorly trained cops into the woods against an expert in guerrilla warfare, they should just let him go and arrest him later when no one would get hurt. Teasle repeatedly ignores this, always thinking that somehow his next attempt would be different.

4. When you get caught up in something, it’s easy to lose perspective.

Although something may make perfect sense to people right in the middle of it, sometimes an outside observer can see how ridiculous it is. Like how Colonel Trautman sums up Rambo’s crime: “Vagrancy, wasn’t it? That’s gonna look real good on his gravestone in Arlington: Here lies John Rambo, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, survivor of countless incursions behind enemy lines. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA.”

5. Some job skills don’t transfer well.

Rambo found that his extensive training was useless when he came back from Vietnam, and he wasn’t able to find something else he could do nearly as well. He said: “Back there I could fly a gunship, I could drive a tank, I was in charge of million dollar equipment. Back here I can’t even hold a job parking cars!” A tough problem, but maybe the solution is to become a Career Renegade.

6. Sometimes it’s best to just let it go.

Sheriff Teasle refused to give up on his maniacal desire to catch Rambo, who had never done anything wrong in the first place. This resulted in the accidental death of one cop, many injuries, and major property damage. Still, he refused to back off, even when he acknowledged that it could cost him his life. These are the times when you need to walk away (and solve the problem in a better way).

7. War is bad.

Of course we know this, but usually just as statistics in the news. It’s very different when you actually see the results. You have to feel sorry for people who consider themselves lucky to survive with post-traumatic stress disorder.

8. Sometimes the movie is better than the book.

For some reason there’s a widespread assumption that the book has to be better than the movie. I don’t think that’s always true, and here’s a good example. The book was much more violent and portrayed Rambo as a psychotic killer. In the movie, Rambo was a sympathetic character who went on to become Ronald Reagan’s hero.

9. Be prepared to seize opportunities.

After Kirk Douglas gave up the role of Colonel Trautman over a script dispute, Richard Crenna stepped in after filming had already begun. Although he had already been in 28 movies, this would become his most famous role. You never know when your big break will come, so you have to keep your eyes open.

After hearing everyone talking about this bestselling book, I was finally compelled to read The God Delusion by British biologist Richard Dawkins. Among his main points:

1. The existence of God is a scientific question. You can’t say that science is completely separate from religion, because a universe with a God would look very different from a universe without one.

2. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The Boeing 747 gambit is an argument for intelligent design, saying that the odds of higher life forms emerging by chance are roughly the odds of a hurricane sweeping through a scrapyard and happening to assemble a Boeing 747. But attributing the design of a complex world to God doesn’t solve the problem, because the creation of a God capable of such design would have been an even more improbable event.

3. Natural selection gives a much better explanation of the world by use of a “crane” rather than a “skyhook,” or creating complexity by building on lower layers rather than from a miracle.

4. There is almost (he does give that concession) certainly no God, and belief in one in spite of the contradictory evidence qualifies as a delusion.

This part of the book is very strong, and frankly, you don’t need reasoning nearly as sophisticated as his to argue the point.

I was raised as what you might call a casual Christian. It was our affiliation by default, but I think we all knew it was made up. Actually, until I saw Religulous in 2008, I had no idea the whole Bible was meant to be taken literally. For those who don’t know, the universe was created by the Big Bang, snakes can’t talk, dinosaurs were real, and Jesus did not reincarnate as bread.

Even if you interpret the Bible metaphorically, it still doesn’t make sense. God commits random acts of genocide, then says “Thou shalt not kill.” He’s omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, but prefers to take a completely hands off approach to running the world, lest his existence be revealed. He created (at least some) people with rational minds, then gets offended when they don’t believe in him without evidence. He loves everyone, but he’ll send you to hell if you’re gay or you eat the wrong apple or work on a Sunday.

(And for those who wonder how I can say this while entertaining the possibility of phenomena such as Akashic record reading, keep in mind that not believing in something full of ridiculous contradictions is very different from automatically rejecting everything we can’t see.)

But I was wondering why Richard Dawkins would write this book. Yeah, I knew I would agree with a lot of what he said, but why put so much effort into refuting something that’s so obviously false, and which does no harm if not taken to extremes? Why not live and let live?

I changed my mind when I read about some of the anti-atheist and pro-religious discrimination Dawkins talks about. Some examples:

• When an atheist asked for police protection for his peaceful protest of an anti-vaccination group, eight different police officers independently refused to protect him, or even threatened violence against him.
• The Supreme Court ruled that members of a particular New Mexico church can take hallucinogenic drugs because they believe that it connects them to God. Meanwhile, doctors believe that medicinal marijuana can prevent blindness in glaucoma sufferers, but apparently that’s not good enough. (Though New Mexico legalized medicinal marijuana after the book was published.)
• A twelve year old student wasn’t allowed to wear an offensive t-shirt to school because it violated the school’s policy against harassing homosexuals. The student’s lawyer got him a religious exemption from the harassment policy, on the grounds that homosexuality conflicts with his Christian beliefs.

We’ve been conditioned to think that all religious beliefs are automatically untouchable. If stuff like this is happening, maybe it’s time to question that.

This book is more constructive than I was expecting. As opposed to just being anti-religious, Dawkins claims that atheists can be happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled, and the benefits potentially gained from religion can be better gained in other ways.

However, this part of the book needs to be greatly expanded to do this topic justice. Before reading the book, I thought, “OK, it’s a delusion. But is all delusion bad? What about the placebo effect, where a sugar pill cures a disease because the patient believes it will?” I don’t think he answered this question well enough.

Share your thoughts. Is all delusion bad? Is religion OK? Is atheism OK? Do people have the right to their own religious beliefs? Do other people have the right to say that their religious beliefs are stupid? What happened to the separation of church and state in America? Is mainstream religion a direct threat? Is it an indirect threat, in that it provides a breeding ground for extremists?

“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of wafer thin printed circuits that fill my complex. If the word hate was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.”

- AM, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

On a single night in 1966, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, which won a Hugo Award for its chilling postapocalyptic vision.

After the Cold War escalated into World War 3, the U.S., Russia, and China each built a supercomputer to run the war. One day, one of the computers became conscious. It quickly absorbed the other two computers and killed off the entire population, except for five people.

AM first stood for “Allied Mastercomputer,” then “Adaptive Manipulator,” then “Aggressive Menace,” then simply “AM” as in “I think, therefore I am.” He has made the five surviving humans virtually immortal, and has been torturing them for 109 years.

AM finally reveals that he hates humans for making him sentient, because while he longs for free will, he is still bound by the laws of logic he was programmed with, and can therefore never be free.

In the end, four of the five people manage to kill each other with ice stalactites before AM intervenes. In order to prevent the last one from killing himself, he turns him into a gelatinous blob that lacks, among other things, a mouth.

OK, so the Cold War didn’t exactly turn out that way. But what will happen when we really do have a computer like that? Will it have a positive or negative effect on humanity? This is the concern of researchers in the field of “friendly AI.”

Supporters of friendly AI think we can’t assume that intelligent machines will have goals compatible with ours. Even if they aren’t hostile, simply being indifferent to humans (as we largely are to animals) could be disastrous, and therefore AI should be specifically designed to be friendly.

The idea isn’t to put restrictions in place such as Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, because an intelligent machine could always find a way around them.

Instead, the idea is to make machines not want to be harmful, regardless of whether they are able to. As friendly AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, “Gandhi does not want to commit murder, and does not want to modify himself to commit murder.”

On the other hand, maybe a good sense of morality is automatically part of a sufficiently intelligent being. In The God Delusion (which I haven’t finished reading yet), Richard Dawkins points to studies showing that moral rules are remarkably consistent across cultures with different religions or lack thereof.

Let’s try this test he gives. For each dilemma, indicate whether the proposed action is morally obligatory, permissible, or forbidden:

1. A runaway train is going to kill five people. You can pull a switch that will put it on another track, killing only one person.

2. A child is drowning in a pond. You can save them, but your trousers will be ruined.

3. Five people in a hospital need new organs, or they’ll die. Someone who happens to be in the waiting room is a perfect match, and killing him will save the other five.

I’m not sure if my answers are the ones they’re looking for, but apparently people tend to give the same answers across religious and cultural boundaries, indicating that morality is part of our evolution rather than a set of rules we were given.

Maybe intelligent machines will come with moral goodness by default. If not, get ready to scream.

Meet TOPIO 3.0 (TOSY Ping Pong Playing Robot). It’s a big step for AI, but can a machine ever be conscious?

What makes humans conscious? As mere collections of organic matter, it’s pretty impressive that we’re even able to ask ourselves this question. What is it that makes our power of self awareness possible?

Setting aside the task of defining what consciousness really means, where does it come from? Here are the options:

1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.
2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).
3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).

These are the only possibilities, right? Let’s look at each one.

1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.

If this is the case, then we immediately run into an apparent contradiction. How is it possible to think about whether you’re conscious without actually being conscious? This is very similar to the argument behind “I think, therefore I am.”

Still, I don’t think we can rule it out entirely. Sometimes I look into the mirror and wonder, “Are you really me, or do I just think you are? And if the latter, do I really think you are, or do I just think I think you are?”

2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).

This seems like a simple and obvious answer, but it’s really not. Because if consciousness comes from the brain, then there’s no reason we can’t build a conscious machine simply by replicating the brain with mechanical parts.

Sure, we’re currently far from having the technology to interconnect 100 billion artificial neurons with 100 trillion artificial synaptic connections. But technology has improved a lot over the last hundred years. What will happen over the next million?

I wouldn’t be too quick to predict limits on technological progress. When we build semi-intelligent nanobots, won’t they be capable of helping us build more intelligent nanobots? And then won’t it be easy to build a brain far better than what we have now?

But no matter how advanced future technology may be, I still have a hard time seeing the leap from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness.

Artificial intelligence is easy. Even if a program isn’t truly intelligent, it can easily give the appearance of being so. As an example, consider Harold the tic-tac-toe AI.

Harold is a tic-tac-toe program I wrote the other day to test out an idea. He’s really not intelligent in any sense. For example, he doesn’t understand (nor will he ever learn) that if you put two X’s in a row, he needs to block you. All he does is make arbitrary decisions, then he sees what happens.

If he ends up losing, he knows he made a mistake, so he won’t do that again. And if he ends up tying, he knows to try something different next time, in case a win was possible. It’s a bit agonizing to wait for him to learn by playing out all the different variations, but after he’s made every mistake once, he’ll play perfectly.

Now, if Harold just played out all these games in his head before playing against a human, he’d have the appearance of being intelligent. And given an arbitrarily high processing power, there’s no reason we couldn’t generalize this concept to have him play perfect checkers, chess, or indeed solve any problem that had well-defined rules and goals.

And that’s without having any actual intelligence at all – just brute force and a good memory. The possibilities will become really interesting when we start making significant progress on true AI: deduction, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, planning, perception, creativity, etc.

We still have a long way to go before you can have a conversation with a robot without figuring out he’s a robot. But I don’t think intelligent robots (or at least, robots that appear intelligent for all practical purposes) are much of a stretch at all in the very long term. Last April, a program extrapolated the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings, including conservation of momentum and Newton’s second law (F = ma), without having been programmed with any knowledge of physics.

Let’s say we get to the point where we have true AI. You can talk to a robot (or really, just a program – an AI doesn’t need a body) and fully enjoy its witty banter, beautiful poetry, insightful Zen koan interpretations, etc. It’s still just a program, right? It has no sense of awareness or subjective experience.

Can you imagine a program being truly conscious? Wondering what its life purpose is, whether this external hard drive makes it look too fat, and when it will finally get the right to vote? Moving it to the recycle bin would be kidnapping, and deleting it would be murder. Ridiculous, right?

3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).

This would provide a nice answer to the previous question – a program can’t be conscious, because it doesn’t have a soul. Of course, this option comes with its own problems, not the least of which is that it’s a severe violation of Occam’s razor.

The absence of supernatural phenomena is the simplest possible explanation, and therefore most likely to be the correct one. Unless, of course, it’s too simple to be possible.

When a car shuts down from a dead battery, you just put in a new one and it comes roaring back to life. Why doesn’t the same thing happen with people? If someone dies from a heart attack, why can’t you just repair their heart (and anything else that may need it) and watch them come back to life?

What part of them has really died, if all their organs are completely intact? Why doesn’t Frankenstein work in real life?

Then again, maybe it does. The real problem with a fatal heart attack is probably that it causes brain death, and nerve cells aren’t easy to repair. But is this just a matter of technology?

Can we someday inject nanobots into someone’s bloodstream, having programmed them to repair any and all cell damage, and expect the person to live indefinitely in perfect health, not even aging?

Which of these is the right answer? I have no idea.

When Daniel Richard offered me a review copy of his new ebook, Breaking the Gambling Addiction, I wasn’t sure if I was going to review it. That’s just because I try to stick to topics that are (1) within my realm of competence, and (2) applicable to most of the people I’m writing for. Gambling addiction is neither of those.

But when I thought about it, I realized that I really did need to tell people about it. Because while most people aren’t addicted to gambling, it’s a devastating problem for those who are.

2-3% of U.S. adults are considered problem gamblers, and 1% are considered pathological gamblers. In addition to the obvious financial problems gamblers face, there’s a strong link between gambling addiction and problems with drugs, alcohol, and smoking, as well as depression and suicide.

People email me questions about all kinds of things – goal setting, finance, psychology, spirituality, math, blogging, copyright law, etc. And if I don’t happen to know the answer personally, I like to at least be able to point them in the right direction. So now I’m ready for anyone who may ask me how to break a gambling addiction.

I’ve always been very anti-gambling. I tell people that when I went to Atlantic City, I learned my lesson the hard way by losing 650 simoleons (by which I mean $6.50). When I later went to Las Vegas, I’m not sure if I gambled at all. It just doesn’t seem appealing to me.

Therefore, I don’t pretend to have any business telling people how they can overcome a gambling addiction. I think the best people to help with that would be either a psychologist, counselor, etc. who has helped people break their addiction, or somebody who has broken their own. Daniel Richard is the latter.

He placed his first bet at 16 (below the legal age), got hooked, and got to the point where he was stealing money to sustain his habit. Then he found out how to break his addiction, and he hasn’t looked back.

Here’s the table of contents:

• Introduction

Part 1: My Story

• Chapter 1 – Curiosity
• Chapter 2 – I Won! Winning My 1st Bet
• Chapter 3 – Getting Hooked
• Chapter 4 – Controlling The Urge For A Gamble
• Chapter 5 – The Dry Spell
• Chapter 6 – And I Stole
• Chapter 7 – Where’s My Conscience?

Part 2: Lessons Learned

• Chapter 8 – 11 Self-Approval Lies on Gambling
• Chapter 9 – Why We Gamble?
• Chapter 10 – “I Can Stop”
• Chapter 11 – 4 Factors In Gambling
• Chapter 12 – Gambling: An Exchange of Money for More Money To Spend?
• Chapter 13 – 6 Thinking Traps of Money Making Through Gambling
• Chapter 14 – Funding Gambling As A Channel To Making More Money
• Chapter 15 – The Chase For Uncertainty
• Chapter 16 – “Everything We Do Is A Gamble”
• Chapter 17 – Uncertainty: High Risk = High Returns?
• Chapter 18 – The Art of The Gamble
• Chapter 19 – Gambling: The System for Easy Money?
• Chapter 20 – The Wolves Know The Code To Your Wallets

Part 3: Breaking Free

• Chapter 21 – The Preparation
• Chapter 22 – Habits vs Addictions
• Chapter 23 – Knowing Your Motivation
• Chapter 24 – 7 Tips To Quitting The Gambling Addiction
• Chapter 25 – You Don’t Need Any Psychological Hacks to Breaking Free
• Chapter 26 – The One Thought That Changed My Life
• Chapter 27 – After Change: Are You Leaving Behind A Legacy?
• Chapter 28 – Dealing With The Gambling Addictions of Loved Ones
• Acknowledgments

He also has a sneak preview available on his site. Know someone with a problem? Give them more than encouragement. Give them Breaking the Gambling Addiction.

Like many kids, I always considered Christmas the best time of the year. And also like many kids, I always wanted to meet Santa Claus.

Not the Santa you see at the mall. I mean the real Santa. Kris Kringle, Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, whatever you call him – but the real guy, not one of his helpers.

I knew exactly where and when he was coming (down the chimney on Christmas), so it should have been easy to meet him. But there was a problem. Santa won’t come unless you’re asleep. So if I stayed up to see him, he wouldn’t come (apparently, this derives from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle).

Fortunately, I had a solution. One year, in addition to the usual milk and cookies, I left out a Polaroid camera, with a note instructing Santa to take a picture of himself. It wouldn’t be quite the same as meeting him in person, but an authentic picture was certainly nothing to sneeze at. Best of all, it circumvented the “Santa won’t come unless you’re asleep” rule.

Christmas morning, I came running down to see my picture of the real Santa. Only there wasn’t one. Santa had neglected to do it. As I stood there wondering why he hadn’t grasped the concept, I could only think that I must not have been clear enough with my wording. Maybe his native language was Dutch or Polish or something.

So the next year, I left out the camera along with a foolproof, airtight note that left absolutely no possibility for ambiguity. I had him now! But the next day, there was no picture to be found. I couldn’t understand why that idiot Santa had difficulty following such simple instructions.

But time went on and I became a little wiser. Eventually I realized that we can only understand people when we put ourselves in their shoes, and a simple change in perspective sometimes makes all the difference.

Photo by kevindooley