Needs {Content}

This page collect questions I am very interested in.

General - Social organization - Geopolitics/Strategy - Cognition - Cultures - See also (with Question answering Communities and Engines) - To do

General

• what is actually a good question?
  • see Philosophy#Definition
• what is the evolution of the mathematical syntax?
  • Wikipedia:History of mathematical notation and Wikipedia:Table of mathematical symbols by introduction date
    • Wikipedia:List of mathematical symbols, more complete but history has to be explored through each dedicated article
  • Earliest Uses of Various Mathematical Symbols
  • how does a symbol like † (dagger) appears, why is it kept, why another is not, what decision were corrected afterward, is there link with expressivity?
  • see also Cognition#HistoryOfDominantCognitiveModels
  • Florian Cajori
    • A History Of Mathematical Notations Vol I, The Open Court Publishing Company 1928
    • A History Of Mathematical Notations Volume II, The Open Court Publishing Company 1929
• have non-interactive formal proof checking (thus not like Wikipedia:Coq) been used with evolutionary programming?
  • or is it based on induction? abduction? heuristics? hybrids?
    • ACL2 in presented in WithoutNotesJune11#MachinesReasoningAboutMachines (~min36) uses an hybrid method by gradually moving out of conservative techniques up to mathematical induction
  • Wikipedia:Automated theorem proving
  • see Mathematics#FoundationsAndMetamathematics and AlgorithmicEpistemology
• is there a visualization of the evolution over time of open problems in mathematics? theoretical computer science?
  • inspired by Needs#ComplexityOfInverseFunction as an open problem and before LePouvoirDesMathematiques#LArbreDeLaComplexite
  • could be very useful for AlgorithmicEpistemology
• is there a relation between the complexity of a function and the complexity of its inverse?
  • i.e. if there a relation between O(ƒ(x)) and O(ƒ^–1(x)) and vice-versa?
    • ƒ^–1 <=> g(ƒ(x))=x
    • if O(ƒ(x)) >> O(ƒ^–1(x)) then ƒ is an OWF
    • is there a function such that knowing one, one can know the other?
  • is it possible to know if a function is part of such a family of functions without determining the complexity of its inverse?
    • does such a family have specific properties?
  • Consider Philipppe Roux or rather Adib Rahmouni since I had class with him, check if is there research in controllability and OWFF at IHES
  • moved exploration to Mathematics#OneWayFunction
  • inspired by MardiInnovation07

Social organization

• how are social system sensitive to initial conditions?
  • e.g. democracy and their founding fathers? scientific peer review and the starting institutions especially journals?
  • see also http://www.globalcomplexity.org/Democracy.htm

Geopolitics/Strategy

• what is the epistemological impact of politics?
  • i.e. how are research budgets in the major university hosting the major laboratories with their team and equipment being impacted by new policies from elected governments
    • or through a different route, how independent research, especially fundamental research with its long-term goal and costly equipment, actually is
      • e.g. CNRS in France
  • ask Roberto
  • check ScienceInsider: Breaking news and analysis from the world of science policy.
• map of future estimates of Parts-per notation air measurements, an equivalent of climatology (thus long-term) of pollution
  • to update Projetautonomieenergetique (not necessarily where the factories are but where the wind could blow, etc...)
  • http://geodepollution.org/ from /tmp/lab
  • Multi-Perspective Analysis and Spatiotemporal Mapping of Air Pollution Monitoring Data, Environmental Science & Technology 2010
• militarization
  • stats of #UAV used since 2000 up to now
  • number of kills UAV done total and per UAV
  • curves visual to see the trends
  • underlying strategy (priority matrix, algorithms, ...) per UAV
    • evolution of their embedded strategies
  • where does DoD/DARPA and their robot manufacturers store the data from the last combat situations
    • what size is it, can ML be applied to it, etc
• resources
  • water
  • energy
    • oil
      • who will know when OPEC reach peak oil first?
    • gas
    • uranium
    • nutrition
      • rank species by impact on the trophic web of another specie
        • e.g. what specie has the biggest impact for the human tropic network?
        • see Wikipedia:Food chain (aka trophic web) and http://biology.mcgill.ca/faculty/loreau/
        • inspired by Vers une biodiversité artificielle : l'homme peut-il vivre en symbiose avec les autres espèces ? (moved to DemonsInEden)
      • added to Vademecum
  • computer part required (coltan, silicon, ...)
  • Is there an energy limit to key civilization events?
    • technological singularity consider current earth as a starting point?
      • in general? (not necessarily starting from earth)
      • question inspired by the argument of recursive improvement in AI/Seed AI/AGI
      • see also Energy related ##AGI log (15/03/2010 at 20:28)
    • moving out of earth? terraforming another planet?
  • What is the evolution of the amount of energy available per human over time? (see also Seedea:Content/Newconcepts#EnergySlave )
• cycles used in national supercomputers (i.e. usage not characteristics)
  • what is currently the algorithm currently consuming the energy? what has been the history of such large computations?
  • moved to Analysis.OnThePoliticsOfComputations
• evolution of technologies
  • SantaFe Performance Curve Database see how performance has changed over time
  • see also "if someone else has an exponential going already, you can hop on it for free" by Rodney Brooks
• will the carbon market become faster and more volatile than the energy market?

Cognition

• News from specific labs that communicate rarely
  • http://www.neural-prosthesis.com/
  • http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
  • http://www.iss.whu.edu.cn/degaris/ retired since according to his Wikipedia entry
• When did a normal person (financial median) had the computational power of a historically earlier society?
  • Example : iPhone processing power vs. Mayan society?
  • if so, if there a pattern? Is it becoming shorter and shorter, longer and longer? What are the consequence?
• what would be the benefits (and trade-offs) of embedding this wiki on dedicated hardware?
  • moved to ObjectsExoBrain
• is there a meta recommendation engine?
• are there "better than human neurons"?
  • is a rat or a mouse neuron more efficient?
    • how can we compare?
    • why is one better than the other?
    • can we go further and transplant? re-engineer?
• is human thought a local optimization of intelligence? (inspired by Rémy Brague : La légitimité de l'humain, Canal Académie January 2011
  • thus are there a better more general optimum?
• is there a visualization of flexibility and pace of migration over time of areas of a mammalian brain?

Cultures

• difference of topics between western journals of philosophy and asian journals
• is there a repository of non-biological phylogenies?
  • see also Seedea:Research/PhylogeneticFlowProgramming
  • entries to competition could be used to list and rank, e.g. machine learning competitions and the score of each algorithm proposed
• what are the most important archaeological epistemological affordances?
  • e.g. the Rosetta stone

See also

• Offers for tasks with financial compensation (deprecated)
  • a la Erdos
  • assign an absolute value for each need (ideally with an anchor)
    • display a BTC bounty according to its current value Financial#Bitcoin

Question answering

Communities

• Yahoo! Answers
• StackOverflow.com
• Quora
  • cf my own view on it SocialNetworks#Quora
  • http://www.quora.com/How-would-you-build-a-robot-to-answer-questions-on-Quora
  • note that after starting Reward Quora now, late August 2011, supports credit for notifying "experts" about a question

Engines

• Special Issue on Question Answering, AAAI Vol 31, No 3 Fall Issue
• http://www.aaai.org/AITopics/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/AITopics/QuestionAnswering
• comparison page which would send to query to all the selected engines
  • providing a display with the question and then the list of engines with their reply
• Wolfram|Alpha
  • http://duckduckgo.com/walpha.html Perl interface
  • asked for an RSS response in case of no current answer but no reply so far (as of early June 2009)
• True Knowledge with its good idea of Firefox Add-on to "enhance" Google searches
• Powerset (now bing.com by Microsoft)
• IBM - The DeepQA (based on Open Advancement of Question Answering initiative, spearheaded by IBM and CMU)
  • Smarter Than You Think - I.B.M.'s Supercomputer to Challenge 'Jeopardy!' Champions by Clive Thompson, NYTimes.com June 2010
  • plenty of articles on IBM DeepQA in WithoutNotesFebruary11
• Human-based Q&A Services on ReadWriteWeb (similar to Yahoo! Answers)
• OpenCog OpenAnswers or... OpenCog chatbot

To do

• each question must have a target page to update
  • i.e. where should the answer be used
• add a formalism and a notification in order to automatically do queries
  • search RSS using OpenSearch
  • monitoring newly opened datasets
  • Google News Alert
• NASA/ESA/... idea management software?
  • KM in general?
• existing military "threshold of upper intelligence" for embarked software?
  • e.g. are there (DARPA) reports about UAV software that becomes efficient but too unpredictable to be useful?