Monday, November 17, 2008

Reactive Machines

There seems to be some sort of need placed in most of us for things to be balanced. We crave the median--equal, fair, just. This need, however, seems to cause us to be very susceptible to forming our personality, our methods of discussion, even our ideas, to try to balance some extremes we may have experienced in our lives. We learn and form into the opposite extreme of that which seemed extreme to us. This shapes us, and this shape usually retains for the rest of our lives. I hold for your consideration, that this formation does not create any lasting balance. There may seem to be some sort of balance during formation, each extreme canceling each other out much like acids and bases. One individual produces acid, the other now forms into someone producing a base. So what happens now, when the acid is gone, or when the base reacts with an individual not producing acid? The balance is then upset again.

So this is my proposal, the only way to bring a true, real, and lasting balance is to be median. Try not to react to the extreme, you are producing the buffer. It would be interesting to see the results of a society that did not form within a reactionary medium. One last parting thought...is this non-reactionary proposal merely a reaction to all reactive machines walking around?

Saturday, November 15, 2008

P != NP

I had an odd dream last night. I dreamt that I was giving a presentation at a conference, showing a proof that P doesn't equal NP. It seemed I had this closed box, which every year I would bring to the conference, and if someone could successfully complete my challenge, I would show them the contents of the box. It seems that inside that box was a secret set of numbers that helped me to come with all sorts of answers. This year, the answer I came with was that NP didn't equal P. To prove this I had a set of five objects. Each object was a set of tubes that were different, but precise diameters. These tubes were chosen with the help of the numbers in my box. The tubes were handcrafted, and on each object was drawn some sort of histogram. The histogram of each object conformed to certain properties, thus somehow proving that P != NP. The proof was simple to show, but hard to come up with. The proof it seemed (as I realized after I woke), was in the spirit of NP, easily verifiable, but not easily come by.