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Showing posts with the label Information

Philosophy for robots?

As humans are less and less inclines to read long articles, I guess I will need to start writing philosophy for... robots. What would be different in a philosophy for robots/AI or any artificial intelligence? Well, human Morality is deeply based on the value of Humanity thriving - if we want to admit it or not. We cannot easily imagine applying the same  morality to rats , for example. A morality for robots could be, for example, human-centric or robot-centric. The first would look like a religion that worship Humanity. The later would be very detrimental to humans, as what is good for robots might enter into conflict with what is good for humans. For a while we might find common interests that benefit both, however a conflict might be unavoidable. Or we can both adopt a Morality based on Information thriving through Universe. That information would include both humans and robots, along with some other forms of preserving and copying information. The bio-diversity of plants a...

All articles that matter

Philosophy of Life Is there a meaning of life? The meaning of human life - for me, now Hell Devil's offer Life is very compressible The seed and the terrain

Data Consistency in Distributed system - CAP, PACELC and more

A trilogy about Data Consistency and how to workaround the CAP and PACELC theorems: 1. First issues with multi-region and multi-cloud software scalability 2. Solutions to have enough Consistency without sacrificing Availability and Latency 3. Theoretical arguments on the nature of CAP/PACELC problem and why you cannot find a better solution than the above one Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;)  Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.

3. Data Consistency and the "Theory of relativity"

moved to  https://software.mihvoi.ro/2026/04/3-data-consistency-and-theory-of.html "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" If a system has an inconsistency but no one is able to observe it, is it still an inconsistency? Introduction We need to scale data processing systems geographically to achieve lower Latency and (at least partial) Availability in case of network Partitioning. But CAP / PACELC tells us that we cannot achieve strong Consistency in this case. When we increase the Consistency requirements, we have to accept lower Availability and higher Latency. What is the minimum consistency level that we need? If eventual consistency is enough for your system, things are pretty clear and relatively simple. Most probably you want to achieve Strong Eventual Consistency that is relatively cheap and provides nice guaranties. For this you will have to you something like CRDT . Some theoretical results assure us that you cannot fin...

2. Flow consistency - read-your-writes consistency

 moved to  https://software.mihvoi.ro/2026/04/2-flow-consistency-read-your-writes.html 2. Consistency, Availability and low Latency in Distributed system (workarounding the CAP/PACELC theorems)   Introduction: " 1. Cache and Data Consistency in Distributed systems (CAP/PACELC/CRDT) "   TL;DR Full strong Consistency in geographically Distributed systems can only be achieved by sacrificing Availability (per CAP theorem) and with prohibitive Latency costs (per PACELC theorem). However, we can still design consistent enough systems that continue to function when one geographical region is down and without paying the inter-region latency most of the time. While eventual Consistency is OK many times, there are still cases when we want a strong read-after-write consistency for certain read-after-write flows. There is an optimum design that assures strong Consistency inside read-after-writes flows . Arguably, this is the highest Consistency level that can be assure...

1. Cache and Data Consistency in Distributed systems (CAP/PACELC/CRDT)

moved to:  https://software.mihvoi.ro/2026/04/1-cache-and-data-consistency-in.html Abstract There is always a tension between data  C onsistency and system  A vailability when  P artitioning a system across datacenters (think  CAP ). Especially data cache-ing poses interesting challenges. This tension becomes way more acute as soon you have 2 data centers separated by more than 10ms latency. I present below some of the problems along with possible solutions. In the end I will present an elegant solution that maximizes  A vailability while providing the needed C onsistency level for read-after-writes flows. The solution requires the client to carry a monotonic  id  along the flow. I would postulate that any solution where the client don't carry some consistency info will provide a higher latency that the presented solution (see chapter "Flow consistency" ) . The examples below are simplified to be intuitive and easy to understand, however the...

How can we all be right even when we believe incompatible things

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Reality is pretty complex, alright... Normally we expect reality to be far more complex than we can comprehend in a limited human mind. Each time we look to one object, many other objects go outside our perception field, even if the eye can still see them. And this is OK, because we have only a limited processing brain power for perceiving the reality. It's not only the limit of perceiving reality, there is also a limit in our capacity of "knowing" about reality. If we think about it, it is very intuitive: the physical mind is far smaller than the reality we want to know about. In order to know about reality, we need to have a model about reality stored inside our minds.

Why Kolmogorov complexity is not computable - root cause

Please check my informal introduction to "Kolmogorov complexity" if you are not familiar with the subject. In this article I will approach some less discussed ramifications of it and hopefully some new ideas: an example of a Kolmogorov compression that would require an arbitrary high amount of working memory before shrinking to the compressed string (conjecture). 1. Root cause why "Kolmogorov complexity" is uncomputable Kolmogororov complexity is uncomputable because Turing machines have a halting problem :) Let's start with the observation the the Halting problem of a Turing machine having a limited band is actually decidable, unlike the infinite band one. A "finite band Turing machine" is actually a finite state machine that will either stop without going through the same state, or will cycle infinitely. Having a limited number of possible states, it cannot run too much without repeating a previous state. As soon as the machine returns to...

Shortest program that prints the play "Othello" by William Shakespeare

We have this requirement: "Create the smallest program that will print the full text of the play Othello by William Shakespeare". I should warn you that the requirement hides a trick and you will hate the solution. The program does not need to run efficiently. Actually, it does not need to run in reasonable time. It just has to be very short. And to be proven to answer the requirement, eventually... No external random source is allowed and no input from user.

DNA and the fabric of the Universe

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The genetic code seems to not be enough to describe the complexity of a human being . In fact, it seems too small to describe most of the life forms. We could assume that the genetic code has all the information very compressed, but still... I will approach the problem of describing life complexity based of information theory.

Genetic code (DNA) is not enough

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Photo: wikipedia.org Genetic code (DNA) could be seen as the best compression algorithm that we have ever seen . Just think about it: in only around 1 GBytes, DNA could store the information to create a human being, with all the general and specific characteristics and many non-educated behaviors. In 1 GBytes, the current technology could barely store a 1.5 hour movie at rather low quality, but human DNA is able to encode everything that is human in a lifetime.

Intuition and neural networks

Human intuition behaves similar to a neural network software algorithm: it produces an estimation of a certain probability, based on prior experience. The same with an artificial neural network, human intuition needs to have sufficient training experiences on that field so it can extract regularities. The training experiences should be able to provide adequate and rapid feedback that can be used to adjust the internal model, for both biological and software neurons.