November 02, 2016 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
When David Hilbert in 1928 at Bologna, Italy asked: Is Mathematics Decidable?
When David Hilbert in 1928 at Bologna, Italy asked: Is Mathematics Decidable?
To digress a little bit, you will be surprised to know that even
before the Willams-Kilburn cathode ray tube, the ingenious human ape had
devised yet another form of memory devise.
It came from men working with radar during the World War II (World
War II had quite a lot of technical spin-offs unlike most other wars and
battles in the history of ape kind).
Now all of you must have seen radar display screen at least in
Hollywood movies if not for real.
All of you must also be aware about the basic working of radar.
To reiterate, a radar consists essentially of a transmitter (with
an antenna) of radio energy which is sent out in brief pulses.
The radio energy if it encounters an object, will bounce away from
it, return back at certain speed and angle and will be captured by a receiver
(also with an antenna).
This is then sent to a display screen.
Biology has been using this “technology” for quite a long time
having “developed” it multiple times considering the enormous time it had on
its hands (more than 3.7 billion years).
You only need to consider aquatic mammals such as whales or
dolphins, flying mammals such as bats, oilbirds and swiftlets, some shrews,
tenrecs and even some rats.
So when someone says that machines will remain machines and can
never show intelligence or become “alive”, it reflects very poorly on our grasp
of evolutionary time scale and what can be achieved given enough time.
In comparison to nature’s 3.7 billion years (or more), our
electronic Turing computing machine is not even a century old idea.
You may be surprised to know that the idea of a Turing computing
machine came from a question posed by a mathematician David Hilbert in 1928:
“Is mathematics decidable?”
Anyway, echolocation depends on time lag, the time taken for the
echo to return; further the object from the source or origin of sound, the
longer the time taken to return.
But their props up one unnecessary obstacle.
What about the stationary objects all around?
They would always show up on the screen and thus become an
impediment in the visualization of the moving target that is desired.
This hurdle was earlier taken care of by aiming the radar towards
the sky thereby keeping most of the terrestrial stationary obstacles out of the
radar screening.
As you can imagine, this is hardly ideal or even possible to carry
out in every scenario.
A clever innovation was made.
What was that?
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an IIT graduate and
a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I
suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
The Radar Problem: How to keep the echos from stationary objects getting displayed on the display monitor
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