ljscharen

Another concrete example is to define BL and BW as any point at which a game B has a negative or positive expectation. A real-life example of using the A, BL, BW strategy were the MIT blackjack teams of the 80's and 90's.

They had a spotter at each table that would count cards and wait until the odds were in the player's favor before calling in the big money player. Assuming that the bets placed by the spotter are negligible, the the big money player could choose from the following games:

   A : Do nothing. E[x] = 0  (break-even)
   BL: Play blackjack when the deck favors the casino, E[x] < 0
   BW: Play blackjack when the deck favors the player, E[x] > 0

Yep. :)

Nothing turns you into a morning person faster than the first time you get 6 straight hours of sleep after 6 months of 3am feedings.

These are the biggest AHA! moments that stuck out for me

  1. Understanding recursion in C
  2. Understanding lazy evaluation in Scheme
  3. Figuring out how to implement lazy evaluation in C

Well, I can't say that an 11 on the Joel Test is a strict criteria. :) I would say we started at a zero and are at a 2 right now. This "field trip" idea is just a way of trying to accelerate the developer's growth curve. Other ideas are welcome.

Sure, but Kurzweil's claim is merely that if DNA can encode everything the brain does with N bits of information, then regardless of how the DNA behaves, we have at least a loose estimate of the level of complexity in the brain.

The problem is that DNA is not sufficient. Organisms don't grow from naked DNA in a vacuum; the DNA is always contained within a cell which is enclosed within a more complex bio structure (egg, womb, etc) which may be contained within the parent organism in the case of mammals.

You need all of this information plus knowledge of the various interactions of the different environments to pursue Kurzweil's approach.

The universe of necessary and sufficient information is much, much larger than the 3 billion base pairs in your DNA.