Non-Huffable Kitten - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Yes, it does. (Score 1) 608

by Non-Huffable Kitten on Sunday August 17, 2008 @01:04AM (#24632105) Attached to: Do Subatomic Particles Have Free Will?

That's what distinguishes determinism from my definition of free will, namely: "not determinism".

Fixed that for you :)

It's a bad choice of identifier for this definition though, since the words are already in use.

That "you" would be able to predict someones actions in a deterministic universe is a really misleading intuition pump. As has been mentioned by another poster, that's wildly impossible for several physical reasons. Some abstruse godlike entity would be able to simulate our actions - that hardly makes them less free.

Submission + - Open Source Mathematical Software

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17, 2007 @05:42PM

An anonymous reader writes: The American Mathematical society has an opinion piece about open source software vs propietary software used in mathematics. From the article : "Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, 'with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.'"

Submission + - Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

Submitted by paleshadows on Thursday August 30, 2007 @11:57AM

paleshadows writes: Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilzes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain "reputation", whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demo (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf).

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