那些最重要的科学新发现

• 边文博

  2018-05-29
  The three scientists postulate that three core ideas characterize intelligence. First, intelligent agents have goals and form beliefs and plan actions that will best reach those goals. Second, calculating ideal best choices may be intractable for real-world problems, but rational algorithms can come close enough (“satisfice” in Herbert Simon’s term) and incorporate the costs of computation. Third, these algorithms can be rationally adapted to the entity’s specific needs—either offline, through engineering or evolutionary design, or online, through meta-reasoning mechanisms that select the best strategy on the spot for a given situation.
• 边文博

  2018-05-28
  “If they are seeking contact, we must welcome them in the best manner possible. We must take care of their health, block out the boundaries of their territory, give them some time to adjust to the madness of our world.”
• 边文博

  2018-05-28
  But in pursuing these searches we should remember two maxims, both oft quoted by Carl Sagan. First, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and second, “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”
• 边文博

  2018-05-22
  For the 2014 Edge Question, I wrote that our fundamental concept of spacetime seems ready for retirement and needs to be replaced by a more basic quantum structure.
• 边文博

  2018-05-21
  lifestyles once considered abnormal have gained acceptance.According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
• 边文博

  2018-05-21
  If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes religion and the language particular to it.
• 边文博

  2018-05-21
  life is merely an inevitable consequence of thermodynamics.
• 边文博

  2018-05-21
  The moral is that a modest fraction of the astronomy budget, perhaps as much as a third, should be reserved for small and cheap projects.
• 边文博

  2018-05-21
  Fortunately, as the bugs in human cognition have become common knowledge, the workaround—objective data—has become more prevalent, and in many spheres of life observers are replacing gut feelings with quantitative analysis.