Black [X] Truder

The Omnipotence Paradox

2010-08-06T09:25:00.000+00:00

"Can God create a stone that he will fail to lift?"

This is a question that is often used by non-believers to argue against the existence of God. It is actually a particular form of The Omnipotence Paradox illustrated by the argument that if an omnipotent being exists, then it is capable of creating a task that it will fail to perform and is therefore not really omnipotent.

So does this debunk the existence of God? here are my two cents ...

Disclaimer: this post is meant to discuss the subject from a philosophical point of view only. Any apparent bias towards any set of beliefs, should any exist in the post, is completely unintended. The views presented here are the author's and do not by any means represent facts. Expression and discussion of religious beliefs on this post is not welcome, will not be tolerated and should rather be redirected here.

The question form of the argument can be rearranged into the statement "God can create a stone that he will fail to lift" to which we require a boolean evaluation; either true or false. The answer is trivial but is the source of a lot of confusion: there is no valid logical evaluation!

Actually, there is an infinite number of statements that do not have valid logical evaluations. For example; this statement is false, which again can not be either true or false. This is why these statements are called paradoxes. The real question is; in case of the omnipotence paradox, what does "not having a logical evaluation" really mean?

Non-believers answer this by saying "hence there is no such thing as omnipotence and therefore God does not exist". However, this is not necessarily true. The non-existence of a logical evaluation can simply mean that the model we used to represent and solve the problem is not perfect. The model in this case being logic. Logic says that each statement can be either true or false, so how come such a statement that is neither true or false exist?

Many branches of logic and philosophical reasoning provide different interpretations to the contradiction presented by such statements. In all cases, we have to keep in mind that our science is based solely on observation and the preposition of axioms (statements that can not be proved but are considered true and the base for further inference, such as 1x1=1). Therefore our science is by no means absolute and its failure to capture or model any phenomena should not necessarily indicate the non-existence of the phenomena.

IMHO, when somebody says "Can God create a stone he can not lift?", I see both an argument against the existence of God and a proof of the failure of the science behind the argument!

P.S: the omnipotence paradox is the subject of ongoing heated discussions in the scientific community. For a better overview and understanding on the almost-infinite different stands, check the Wikipedia article on the subject.

7 Girls a Geek Shouldn't Date

2010-08-01T07:39:34.000+00:00

Geeks are peculiar creatures with very specific needs and a life style on their own. It so happens that due to uncontrollable factors such as a nagging mom or a misaligned biological clock that renders his logic temporarily impaired, a geek might find himself obliged to take part in reproduction and the continuation of the human species. This pushes the geek to start seeking a partner. While others falsely interpret this as 'falling in love' and proceed through unnecessary mating procedures, a geek devises his own scheme to secure a partner while trying to fit in as much as possible (at least apparently) with the norms of society.

Being on his own in executing his plans, it is relatively easy for a geek to get confused and fall back to erroneous society-adopted mating models. It is important that a geek develops a thorough understanding of what makes a suitable partner. Here's a list of 7 types of girls a geek should definitely stay away from:

1 - The Emotional, Social or Talkative

Your life as a geek is spent mostly in deep and long silent stares into a laptop screen. Frequent interruptions grab you out of the digital world and make debugging your assembly programs much harder. It is important that your partner never interrupt you when you're focused and rather wait for your food or toilet breaks to approach you with any matters of concern. Your partner must be able to overcome their emotional insecurities on their own and should not propose any social activities that are out of schedule.

2 - The Web Programming Illiterate

As surprising as it may seem, natural selection is still in the process of eradicating these inferior individuals and it may take few more decades for them to completely disappear. A geek has to understand that during his mating endeavour he is at risk of coming in contact with female individuals who lack complete understanding of simple web technologies like DOM, CSS and AJAX. Unless you want to spend your life with somebody who doesn't know what an XMLHttpRequest object is, stay away.

3 - The Poor Server Administrator

Being able to administer and maintain home servers is crucial to a successful and happy marriage. While helping her install some antivirus software on her laptop might seem as a sign of bonding and affection at the beginning of your relationship, chances are such a partner will fail to maintain any future linux-based servers and will probably ask for your help even with a simple kernel upgrade. Your offspring won't have central file storage and might even have to setup their routing tables manually to connect to the Internet. This is preposterous ... ditch her!

4 - The Mac Girl

Geeks understand that Macs are very well suited for design work and presentations but are beaten by hand-held calculators in doing real computations. Girls fancy glowing stuff and sleek appearances and might be easily taken by the looks of a Snow Leopard desktop. It is important that your partner understands the pros and cons of each of the personal computer systems and are able to judge and make their choices objectively. If the female candidate uses a Mac but is neither a graphics designer nor in a job that requires frequent slideshow presentations, take her off the list.

5 - The Materialist

This genre of people is often the source of great distress to their partners. They are obsessed with superficial things that possess no real life value and often render the life of people around them too uncomfortable. To the geek, such people represent an even greater disaster and should be at least avoided if you think that taking their hearts out and slicing them using CNC machines running your customized driving software is a bit of an overkill. To know if she's a materialist or not, ask her whether she'd buy another pair of shoes or rather get herself extra 2GBs of RAM.

6 - The "Challenged by High School Physics"

Your household is the nurturing home of your offspring and the love nest for you and your partner. It is also a complex physical environment that requires monitoring and frequent adjustments to ensure it remains a suitable habitat. Your partner must be completely fluent in Physics to understand your arguments regarding the dynamics of air flow, heat transfer, entropy and electromagnetic radiation. Ideally, you wouldn't need to explain to her why leaving the fridge door open in a sealed environment will increase the temperature.

7 - The Facebook Addict

Choosing a partner who has a Facebook profile is more dangerous than you think. Not only does her usage slow down your torrent downloads and her ignorance regarding Facebook's policy set a bad example to your offspring but she might as well be disclosing sensitive information about you on her profile. Your friends will read that it took you 4 hours last night to debug that silly exception in your C# .NET class and that you still refer to MSDN when you're stuck with something you don't know. If she's unwilling to switch to reading Wikipedia in her spare time, get rid of her.

Life is Poker, not Chess

2010-07-28T11:04:49.000+00:00

In game theory, games can be classified as being of either "perfect information" or "imperfect information". In games of perfect information, all the game data is available to all players at all times. Examples of this include Chess, Checkers and Go, where the pieces on the game board are visible to both players throughout the game and the exact outcome of every move can be determined given enough time and computational resources. Contrary to these are games of imperfect information which rely (often partially) on "hidden data" or "luck" such as most card games.

Poker is a game of imperfect information that I find very resemblant to our everyday's struggle with life. In poker, you can play with perfect strategy only to be beaten by pure luck. Although disappointing, this doesn't make the game any less interesting. Actually, this is EXACTLY what makes a game of such simple rules so thrilling and enjoyable.

Life is similar to poker in a sense that sometimes you still lose even if you play a perfect set of moves. For example, you might have worked twice as hard as any other student in high school only to find that some others have secured jobs that are far better than yours. In this case, the element of "luck" has contributed to the game result much more than your efforts.

Professional poker players understand that although you can't beat the odds at every single game, you can increase your chances of winning by perfect play and accumulate a statistical advantage over a number of rounds. It is important to understand that just because you lost a particular game doesn't mean you were wrong to play. So it is in life, one has to play as good as they can and hope that luck will roll in their favour. It is important not to look back with sorrow at any past efforts that were justified in their time but didn't yield fruit in the present. Again, just because we lost doesn't mean we were wrong to play.

Perhaps most importantly, one has to play with a solid belief that the odds are going to be in their favour one day. Only this way can one be ready to win the game when that day comes.

Fortune is when readiness meets opportunity.

Inception = Genius

2010-07-17T10:47:30.000+00:00

Just came back from watching this movie and I must say it totally rocks!

Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be going for a different kind of plots; I mean 'Shutter Island' and now this? In 'Inception', DiCaprio plays the role of professional mind-breaker or an 'extractor' who can join people in their dreams and direct the course of events to expose the secrets of the minds he's trying to hack. The twist is when DiCaprio is hired to do something of much more difficulty ... implanting an idea is somebody's mind!

When I watch a movie of this complexity it really makes me wonder whether plot writers and directors take into account the fact that if most people can't follow up on the story line and make the connections, the movie is gonna fail. The way I see it, presenting a content of this complexity on screen either assumes that the average Joe has a grasp of philosophical concepts like Brain in a vat and understand the basic reasoning behind virtualization, or that the movie is gonna play for computer scientists exclusively!

Anyways, not to say that it bothers me, au contraire I find it brilliant that a share of directors cater for those of us who enjoy complex themes. I must also express my admiration for the level of details brought up by the plot (time perception in dreams, inter-reality signaling and the butterfly effect to mention few). The director, Christopher Nolan, is also the man behind Memento and The Prestige.

Too bad I was starving and had some salted popcorn which upset my stomach. Judging by the ads it seems we're on to a lot of good movies this summer!

How to tell you need Coffee

2010-07-07T10:29:01.000+00:00

You arrive at the office in the morning, turn on your computer and while it boots you grab your mug and head to the office corner where you store Nescafe, Coffemate and sugar. You fill in the ingredients of your favorite cup of coffee, put some water in the kettle and heat it up. You then take the kettle back to your desk only to find that there's no mug.

You're really surprised ... who could have dared to touch stuff on your desk let alone take something out?

You begin to make up scenarios in which this could have happened; have you been acting extra nice to people at work so that perhaps one of them thought it was Ok to borrow your mug? did the cleaner think it was junk and threw it away? or is someone in the office trying to play some sick joke?

You panic and decide to take a look around the office to see if your precious mug lies on someone's desk or worse in some bin. Your colleagues notice you going around and ask what's going on. You tell them your mug is missing. They ask when was the last time you used it. You say you've seen it only YESTERDAY and you stayed at the office till 1am last night and was the last to leave, which means that whoever took it did it overnight.

You keep looking around till you come back to the same office corner where you store your Nescafe ... the same spot where you left your mug exactly 10 minutes ago.

Rush Hour [Game AI]

2010-06-14T04:46:52.000+00:00

Rush hour is a block sliding puzzle where the objective is to rearrange cars in a park to make way for one particular car to get out. I've installed one implementation of the game on my N900 some time ago and was tempted to do my own, perhaps with a generator. I found it a bit weird that almost all implementations of Rush Hour came with pre-built puzzles and lacked puzzle enumeration functionality (which I think would be really cool).

(Rush Hour: block/car #1 must be relocated to the right edge of the board)

I coded a little solver and a GUI frontend for the game and ran a number of experiments to generate puzzles. For my lack of knowledge of any alternative method, I've set my tool to search for puzzles by generating and evaluating random configurations. While computing solutions for Rush Hour puzzles is straight-forward, generating good puzzles is a complex problem. This is because apart from testing for the existence of a solution, the puzzle must satisfy a minimum (steps to solution) criteria. To illustrate this, consider the following state graph for a minimalistic Rush Hour puzzle:

Each randomly generated configuration represents a single state (say state R) on a graph of reachable configurations for the puzzle being evaluated. First, the graph must be traversed in full to locate all solution nodes (if there are any) and then the node which is furthest away from the closest solution node must be determined (node Q in the above example). This node will be the ideal initial configuration for the puzzle because it would maximize the number of steps required to solve the puzzle.

For the original setup of the puzzle; a 6x6 grid with cars occupying 2 or 3 blocks horizontally/vertically and with the 'special car' being placed horizontally on the 3rd row, one would be surprised to see that some configurations result in graphs with 25k+ states. Traversing such state graphs can be computationally expensive and even tricky to implement programmatically. These challenges make the following an interesting problem for a computer to tackle ...

What is the hardest Rush Hour puzzle that can be generated?

Me and a couple of colleagues at our research group were considering answering this question by brute forcing all puzzle configurations for the original game setup. However, my colleague was able to determine the number of these configurations through dynamic programming and a simple calculation revealed that it would take us about 124 years to evaluate all of them. Therefore we decided to settle for random search for the time being (any other suggestions would be appreciated).

The analysis of Rush Hour seems to have attracted some research interest with few papers being published on the complexity of the problem (example) and also some hard configurations of the puzzle being listed online (such as this list on the University of Brussels' website).

It would appear that a generally accepted definition of a 'very difficult' Rush Hour puzzle is one that needs 40+ moves to solve. Some configurations (such as the ones published by the University of Brussels) maximize the number of single-step slides (where moving a car by 3 blocks is considered 3 separate moves) but this notation isn't widely acclaimed.

I have dedicated a separate machine at work to carry on with this investigation. It has been running continuously for over a week now and has evaluated over 50 million puzzles. The tool was able to obtain a long list of puzzles that are solvable in 40+ moves (very difficult ones). The hardest puzzle that the tool was able to generate (presented below) requires 50 moves to solve. It would appear that this is the hardest Rush Hour configuration ever obtained.

(Solvable in 50 moves; arguably the hardest Rush Hour puzzle!)

En France

2010-05-11T05:59:44.000+00:00

With many bloggers coming back to life including my good friends Lubna and Zeid, I thought I might join in as well with an annual post. It really continues to amaze that despite the fact that I decided to post more often before coming to the UK, I practically stopped posting altogether (with the latest post being over a year old). I almost forgot how fun this thing was.

Many of you know by now that I've started a PhD last September. Things have been going really fast (not that they were going slow anytime before that). Starting my PhD brought along many changes in my life, many of which I'd like to talk about on this blog. Still, I have decided to postpone talking about my PhD experience and dedicate this post to share the details of my latest trip to France.

Me and a bunch of guys from our research group were attending the ASYNC2010 conference held in Grenoble, the capital of the French Alps. The ASYNC conference is one of the leading conferences in the semiconductor industry with main focus on asynchronous system design (clockless digital systems), which is a specialty of our microelectronics design group at Newcastle University. It spanned over three days where people from different parts of the world presented their recent work on asynchronous and synchronous circuit design, simulation, synthesis and verification. Some talks were really magnificent in terms of being related to some of the things am currently digging my head into. Also some other talks touched on the business side of the semiconductor industry with people sharing their experiences in starting their own small businesses.

The conference had many intermediate coffee and lunch breaks, which were a good opportunity to meet and get to the know the attendees; their backgrounds and areas of interest. We also got to try a finely chosen range of French food (I tried 10+ different kinds of cheese alone!).

In the afternoon, my colleagues and I spent our time walking around in Grenoble. This trip was my first time in Europe and it was thus quiet an experience for me to walk a European city. Grenoble is a wonderful city, full of high-tech research campuses and situated at the very edge of the French Alps. Mountains extend over the buildings' tops at every corner giving Grenoble a truely magnificent feel.

We were lucky to be invited to a very special dinner as part of the conference program. The dinner was special in a sense that the restaurant (La Bastille) was actually a renovated fortress located on a high hill that overlooks whole Grenoble. We took the cable car (the teleferique) to the restaurant were we had an amazing look on the area and surrounding mountains. Needless to say, the food there was amazing. Below are a couple of shots I took off the hill top.

On my way back to Newcastle I stopped for a couple of nights in Paris. Again like most other cities I've been to, I always start my exploration by taking a long walk on the quayside of any main river; in this case: La Seine. I had the chance to make it to the Eiffel tour, L'Arc de Triomphe, Les Champs Elysees, Le Louvre plus all the other monuments and attractions that our French teacher used to bug us about back in school.

I took a number of shots in Paris but I think it will be a waste of everyone's bandwidth if I shared a yet another photo of the Eiffel tour so I'll just skip it. Instead I'll put in two of my favorites:

I was lucky to be able to visit Paris at this time of the year; the weather was beautiful and the late sunset presented a long and seemingly non-ending soiree for a quayside walk.

I might not have had the chance to brush on my French but at least I learnt to speak English wiz a vary pro-per French axe-ent. On one of our metro rides, I started speaking with my friend in a heavy French accent till we got like 20 guys eyeballing us. My friend indirectly suggested that I'd shut up and try to pay respect to za French, perhaps because we're in their own country?

Seriously though, I found the French very kind and helpful. We didn't get anything except for good advice and a large smile from all the people we asked for directions. I must also say that they have a higher sense of humor!

That was one remarkable week that I spent. I figured that I remember more French from the school days than I thought I would. Would definitely come back on any future journeys.

Note to self: need to go back to have more cheese.

At Newcastle! - Part Three

2009-02-14T03:49:39.000+00:00

Hello everybody,

This blog has been inactive for quiet few months now and I thought it's by time I publish some news. I've been in touch with some of you, filling you in on what I've been up to so feel free to skip on the parts you know.

Many things have happened since October. After spending some time here I realized that keeping a record of my life in this place would be a far more difficult job that I imagined. I've been through a vast number of experiences; academically, socially and otherwise. It didn't take me long to realize that am probably going through the most interesting change in my life.

At the moment, am doing the second semester of my degree program. The first semester was very interesting in terms of subjects, lecturers and schedule. I enjoyed every moment of it, excluding the Christmas vacation when everybody here went back to enjoy the holidays with their families and I was left freezing :P

Despite the stacked schedule, I've been to a number of places during the first semester; notably York and Edinburgh! The latest trip to Edinburgh was magnificent in every aspect! Below are pictures of Edinburgh ...

Some of Edinburgh's Castle ...

and more of Edinburgh from the top of the castle ...

(Photos by Giùlia)

The second semester is going great so far. The courses am doing now are even more interesting than those I did during the first semester. I must say I so much enjoy doing my masters and peruse my studies in gratitude to the chances that brought me here.

Apart from my university, I get to do a whole lot of activities whenever I have the time. I can say my lifestyle has drifted considerably during my stay here. I find myself doing things I never thought I'd be capable of, also enjoying things that never made sense to me ... unbelievable!

Am also adoring the technology available at hand here. Everything starting from life at campus, government work, paying the bills, shopping and down to the simplest things such looking for a place to enjoy a Friday evening is only few clicks away.

The weather in Newcastle is fairly more pleasant than Amman. Although it can get very cold in some days, I still find it more convenient to cope with on contrast to the ridiculously-rapid climate changes in Amman!

Below are photos I've taken for my university during the recent snowfall ...

My friends in this place are adorable! Despite our different cultures, backgrounds, and interests, we still manage to enjoy each others' company and chill like life-time friends. I never bonded with anybody so firmly within months of meeting them. It is really hard to imagine parting ways with them.

Next week I'll be in London to spend a couple of days with the international students society. Chances are I might have something interesting to post about by the time I get back ...

If not ... see ya in some months :P