[FRIAM] Graal VM

[Steven A Smith]

Marcus -

Thanks for that great example...   I didn't want to invoke Quantum
Superposition, but this very real/practical application from the domain
of QC makes it less esoteric.   It reminds me that the last time I
looked very closely at QC, it was all pretty nascent and theoretical and
that there is now significant experience, offering real, tangible
results as well as new metaphors for thinking about problems in other
domains.

I also like your MiB reference.   As much as I resent many of the
implications of the Trump/FoxNews post-Truthiness,  it does feel like
the experience of trying to take in the news (or have any significant
public discourse today) while many players in the game have low-grade
Neuralyzers focused on you, scrambling conventional logic enough to
provide something akin to annealing as you might be suggesting.

This takes me sideweize to Nick's questioning of Dave's endorsement of
hallucinagenics/entheogens for their contribution to "quality of
life".   Nick tends to characterize (all?)
mood/perception-altering/psychoactive drugs as simply being
damaging/disruptive of the structure/function of the brain/mind.

Dave is less specific about the qualities of these
substances/experiences and *how* they improve Quality of Life, but I
think it is fair to say he endorses them (with various qualifications).
  I've not read Michael Pollan's "How to Change your Mind", but I have
read Oliver Sacks widely including notably "Hallucinations" which does
make a case for the value of psychoactive drugs and other
hallucination-inducing experiences.  

Others here are surely much better prepared for defending/framing these
things, but in the light of Post-Truthiness, Neuralyzers, and Quantum
Annealing, I see a clear *potential* value to introducing noise (both
dimensions of Marcus' annealing energies) in the search... but I am also
interested in what an everyday interpretation of Quantum Superposition
might be when applied to collective
knowledge/consciousness/decision-making.  

My recurrent harping on ranked-choice voting is a very thin appeal in
that direction... a reduction/projection/collapse of these more esoteric
idea(l)s into something more practical/pedestrian?

- Steve

> Steve writes:
>
> < "But when and how do we force the system into an anarchist mode
> of exploration?"  I don't know the term off the top of my head, but I think there is one
> which fits a similar role to that of annealing (both in materials
> science and computer simulation) where the dimensionality is "pulsed" or
> "phased". >
>
> With quantum annealing, one distinguishes between the energy of the problem (goodness, defined somehow) and the energy of a transverse field which is used to conduct the search for solutions.   The two are different axes of angular momentum.  When the transverse field is high, proposition are both true and false, when it is low they must be true or false.   One can perform this procedure from things that are true or false toward things that are true and false or the vice versa.   
>
> The anarchist in this metaphor turns up the x axis amplitude like the Men in Black would activate their Neuralyzers.   Classically, one might turn up the temperature to get propositions bouncing between true and false at different rates. 
>
> Marcus 
>  
>
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