Older blog entries for raph (starting at number 268)

Quote-plus

It is considered good etiquette not to quote email without permission. However, these days, emails are often part of a broader discussion spanning blogs, web fora, and so on. It's increasingly easy to run afoul of this etiquette rule. Conversely, it seems awkward to say something like "permission granted to quote" when I respond to, say, a blog entry in an email.

Thus, I propose the two-character string "+ as a shorthand indicating that permission to quote, with attribution, is granted. Permission is also granted to integrate the email into any copylefted documentation (most copylefts do not require attribution).

Analogously, "- is a request that the email not be quoted, perhaps because it contains confidential or sensitive information. Lastly, when someone is known to be familiar with the convention, "? asks whether quoting is permitted.

Spread the meme! "+

Metamath

Bram pointed me to this thesis on implementing real numbers within HOL. I heartily recommend this thesis to people following this thread (if any). It's very interesting to compare to Metamath's construction of the reals. Unfortunately, these constructions are not compatible. One significant difference is that Metamath seems to support partial functions, so 1/0 is not in the range of the divide function, while HOL wants to have total functions within the type, so 1/0 must have some value (Harrison chooses 0 to simpify the details). As such, proofs from one probably can't be easily ported to the other without serious handwork.

I feel I understand Metamath reasonably well now. It has some issues, but it's overwhelming strength is that it's simple. For example, I believe that a fully function proof verifier could be done in about 300 lines of Python. I wonder how many lines of Python a corresponding verifier for HOL would be; I'd guess around an order of magnitude larger. That kind of difference has profound implications. Norm Megill is certainly to be commended for the "simplicity engineering" he's put into Metamath.

For the purpose of putting doing Web-distributed proofs, Metamath has a few shortcomings. I think they can be fixed, especially given the underlying simplicity. I'll talk about these problems and possible fixes over the next few days.

Definitions in Metamath have two closely related problems. Definitions are introduced exactly the same way as axioms. As such, it's far from obvious when a definition is "safe". For example, you could add definitions for the untyped lambda calculus, which would introduce the Russell set paradox. The second problem is that there is a single namespace for newly defined constants. You wouldn't be able to combine proofs from two different sources if they defined the same constant two different ways.

Here's my proposal to fix these problems. Choose a highly restricted subclass of definitions that is clearly safe. For example, you could say that any definition of the form "newconst x y z = A" or "newconst x y z <-> phi", with newconst not appearing in A or phi, is acceptable. I propose to introduce new syntax that clearly identifies such definitions. You could use existing syntax, so that such definitions become axioms, but can be checked easily, or you could have other syntax that sets the new constant apart from its "macro expansion". That's a style preference.

Now let's talk about namespaces. I have a strong preference for using hashes as global names, because (assuming the hash function is strong), you don't get collisions. As such, it should be possible to mix together arbitrary proofs without danger. Here's an outline proposal.

Take the definition axiom, and replace the newly defined constant with some token, say $_. Hash the result. That is the "global name". When you're developing proofs, you'll probably want a (more or less) human-readable "pet name", but this is actually irrelevant for verification. Here's an example in Metamath notation.

Here's Metamath's definition of the empty set

$( Declare the symbol for the empty or null set. $)
$c (/) $. $( null set $)

$( Extend class notation to include the empty set. $)
c0 $a class (/) $.

$( Designate x as a set variable for use within the null set definition. $)
$v x $.
$f set x $.

$( Define the empty set. $)
dfnul2 $a |- (/) = { x | -. x = x } $.

So here's what gets hashed:

$a class $_ $. $f set x $. $a |- $_ = { x | -. x = x } $.

Take the SHA-1 hash of this string. Then I propose that #274b1294a7d734a6e3badbf094190f46166159e4 can be used (as both a label and a constant, as these namespaces are independent) whenever the empty set is needed. A proof file would of course bind this string to a shorter name, such as (/). When importing a proof file from another, the binding would be local to the file. (Currently, Metamath has only a file include facility similar to C's preprocessor #include, but an import facility with better namespace management would be quite a straightforward addition, especially considering that Metamath already has ${ $} scoping syntax).

Obviously, there are some details to be worked out, particularly nailing down exactly what gets hashed, but I think the idea is sound.

Schooling

Alan's Mindstorms arrived a couple of days ago. These promise to be quite fun (and of course educational :). So far, he's settling into first grade very easily. We begin the half-homeschooling starting on Monday.

Even so, I get the sense that Max is going to be the one most into computers. He's learning the OS X interface impressively well. Last time we resumed the computer, a folder was highlighted, and he said, "it's clicked." Then, when I ran Stuffit to unpack a game demo, he noted the icon and said, "it's squishing it." He's also the one that said, "I love Alan's 'puter".

Spam

Paul Graham has a new piece on spam is different. He also includes my comment in response.

I have great hopes for word-based (or "Bayesian") scoring. Paul's arguments for why it will work seem convincing to me. In particular, keeping per-user word lists should help enormously with two big problems: the ability for spammers to "optimize" around a common scoring scheme; and differing opinions about what constitutes spam.

I still think there may be a role for trust, but it's also possible that scoring by itself will work so well that adding trust isn't really necessary. In any case, I'll do my best to write up my ideas for using trust to beat spam.

trust

Bram and I had a great discussion about anti-certs. He is exploring the space of adding anti-certs to the trust computation, but is finding it complex. Many of the proposals would seem to require vastly greater computation than the simple eigenvector and network flow models I've proposed.

The leading alternative to that seems to be a way to use anti-certs as input to a process which removes positive certs from the graph. If you disagree with the ratings of user X, it might be interesting to analyze the influence of X on ratings transmitted to you through the graph, then remove your local edges which carry the most influence from X. In general, this boils down to optimizing edge weights. Lastly, anti-certs don't have be about individual users (nodes in the graph). They can be about ratings you disagree with. You don't really have to know where the bogus ratings come from, as long as you know how to tune your local edges to minimize them.

As always, a big part of the challenge is presenting a sensible UI. I've made the Advogato UI for certs as simple as I know how, and the user community is supposed to be sophisticated, yet it seems that many people can't manage to do certs and ratings the way they're supposed to be. Bram's anti-cert UI is straightforward to implement. In addition to "Master, Journeyer, and Apprentice", you'd just add one or more negative categories.

Metamath

I have more insight into the lambda definition yesterday. I believe that the definition of (lambda x x) is correct - it should be equivalent to the identity relation defined in Metamath. However, it is quite definitely a class and not a set. As a result, trying to use it as a function argument just yields the empty set.

This is probably a reasonable way out of the logic thicket. The problem is that the untyped lambda calculus is subject to the Russell set paradox.

I was talking about this with Bram, and he called ZF set theory a "hack." I more or less agree, but playing with it in the context of Metamath has led me to appreciate how powerful a hack it is. With a small number of relatively simple axioms, it gets you a rich set of infinities, but avoids the particular ones that bring the whole formal system crumbling down. You get integers, reals, tuples, sequences (finite and infinite), transfinites, and functions from set to set. You don't get untyped lambda calculus. Overall, it's probably a good tradeoff.

Metamath

I believe that the formulation of lambda I was wondering about yesterday is:

$d y A $.
df-lambda $a |- ( lambda x A ) = { <. x , y >. | y = A } $.

This lets me prove such things as ( ( lambda x x ) ` y ) = y. I'm probably not at the full power of the lambda calculus, though, because here "y" is required to be a set, while a lambda term is a class. So it's not clear I can apply this lambda term to itself.

School

Tomorrow is Alan's first day of 1st grade. It promises to be exciting.

Metamath

I've been chewing over Metamath in my head some more. It's very appealing in lots of ways, especially its simplicity, but a few things need to be done differently, I think, to make it work as a distributed, web-based proof repository.

The biggest problem is namespaces. On the web, everybody has to be able to define their own local namespace, while also being able to refer to other things in the world. Metamath, by contrast, uses short, cryptic, and impermanent names for its theorems. On that last point, set.mm includes this note: "While this file is complete and correct, it may undergo revisions from time to time (including theorem name changes, which means any new theorems you add may not always remain compatible)." That won't do.

Actually, I'm pretty convinced by now that the best name for a theorem is the theorem itself. If the size of the name is a concern, a hash can be substituted. However, an advantage of using the whole theorem is that, if a correct proof cannot be found on the web, someone can probably prove it by hand.

The namespace of newly defined keywords is also problematic. In fact, Metamath does not automatically check whether definitions are ambiguous. Having a definition collision could lead to contradiction, which would be bad. For definitions that simply expand as macros, I suppose you could use the expansion (or a hash thereof) as the permanent name. However, not all definitions in Metamath have this form.

The second big problem, as I've mentioned earlier, is whether to keep theorems abstract, or pin them down to a single model. Metamath does the latter, which helps keeps theorems simple, but it also makes them nonportable to other models. I think it's possible to do abstract theorems in Metamath (you quantify over all possible models that satisfy the axioms), but probably notationally very cumbersome. Even so, it's similar to the way a lot of mathematics is done: you see a lot of theorems over, say, fields, without them pinning down which field is meant.

I'm still not sure whether formulae should be represented as strings of symbols (subject to implicit parsing through wff rules), or as trees. My gut feeling is the latter, because it sidesteps the issue of whether the parsing grammar is ambiguous. The former is a slightly simpler representation, though, and also closer to human-readable mathematics.

There are a few stylistic choices which are unusual, but probably reasonable. For one, the only primitive inference rules are the Modus Ponens and generalization. Equality and substitution are handled through theorems just like everything else. For another, instead of classifying variables as "free" or "bound", Metamath just places distinctness constraints on variables. A lot of the primitive operations such as substitution are cleverly defined to place no more distinctness constraints than necessary.

By the way, does anyone have a formal spec for lambda? Here's what I have, but I don't know if it's right:

( lambda x A ) = { y | y = E. z <. z , [ x / z ] A >. }
y,z,A distinct

Project death

AaronSw notes the demise of Pepper, a shareware text editor. Apparently, the author is tired of it.

This highlights one of the major differences between proprietary and free software. People lose the motivation to work on projects all the time. But free software projects are like extremely hardy seeds; they can dry up and last a long time, and when a fertile environment comes along, sprout and flourish. When the author has particular rights over the code, a big risk is that it can really die.

The history of ncurses might be illuminating on this subject. Throughout its early history, it's license wasn't quite free, and in fact the original author basically had veto rights. It would be really interesting for someone to do a critical history of this project. There was a lot of strife surrounding it. If you read "Homesteading the Noosphere," it might help to know that ncurses provided much of the background for the discussion.

Bytecode interpreters

One of the interesting threads (pphaneuf McCusker JDarcy) that's been bouncing around lately is the design of bytecodes for interpretation. It's a different problem than instruction set design for CPU's. There, RISC is a win because a stripped down instruction set can support higher clock speeds. But for a bytecode interpreter, you're going to have a certain amount of overhead to go through an iteration of the interpreter main loop, so you might as well make it do more.

But a lot of this argumentation leaves me unsatisfied. If you've got a bytecode interpreter in a system, it's a dead giveaway that you're optimizing for something other than raw performance, for example overall system complexity or portability. Both are worth optimizing for, of course.

The stack machine vs. memory transfer machine argument is interesting. I think it comes down to where you're willing to put your complexity. If the compiler from source language to bytecode must be simple, then stack machines are a win, in large part because they support arbitrary depths of expression nesting without any special case code. With memory transfer, you either have to deal with variable sized fields for representing the memory cell (and thus variable sized instructions), or you have to implement spilling when depth goes above (say) 256.

On the other hand, if you're trying to ship virtual machines in tiny embedded devices, then it makes a lot of sense to keep the VM as simple as possible, even at a cost of more sophistication in the compiler.

I note a number of interesting memory-transfer based virtual machines, including Parrot and MMIX. Virtual machine design is a delicate art. I'm happy to see it undergoing something of a renaissance.

Alan

School starts on Monday, and we're starting to gear up. For those of you joining late, we have a hybrid plan. He'll do half a day in public school (1st grade), and half a day at home. For the math-and-science part of the curriculum, one of the things I plan is Mindstorms. We ordered the starter set today. I'm pretty excited; it looks cool.

Ostensibly, Heather will cover language arts and I'll do the Spock stuff, but ironically he started on an illustrated story this evening with me. It's called "Cretaceous Park 1". Ok, so it's a bit derivative, but we're having fun. The words flow easily, and then he puts a great deal of effort and concentration into drawing and coloring the accompanying pictures. I'll probably scan it and put it on the net when he's done.

Max

Max's language development continues to be amazing to behold. He's able to communicate very clearly now. When Alan had a tantrum a few days ago, Max picked up the Nerf rocket launcher and said to us, "I'm going to shoot him." We burst out laughing, of course. Other samples include "I want to press the button on Alan's toy" and "I like your shirt. It has fire on it."

I've been using a lot of the time that's been set aside for writing this diary for other things. For example, I just spent an hour or so talking on the phone with David McCusker. Also, over the last two evenings I read a great book. It's all good, but as usual a challenge to keep everything in good balance. I'm not sure whether writing a diary every day is the right frequency or not.

Raising Blaze

"Raising Blaze", by Debra Ginsberg, is a compelling tale of a child with a high impedance mismatch with the (public) school system, and how his family copes with it. If you have a child that doesn't fit in to any of the neatly defined categories that schools are designed to handle, you should read this book.

Our Alan is a challenging kid, for sure. We've been incredibly fortunate to have good teachers, guidance, and support, and his academic performance has been excellent (by contrast, the Blaze of the book, is labelled a "problem" very early on and struggles with academics).

The book is beautifully written, with gripping narrative at times, and fully human, real characters. Heather is reading it now, and I am sure we will discuss it deeply.

Gnome-Meeting

A couple of people recommended gnome-meeting. I did try it before, but with no success. It was probably a low-level audio driver issue. I'm particularly prone to these kinds of problems because I compile my own kernels. I'll give it another shot.

I also bought a reasonably priced Plantronics headset with microphone, instead of the clunky old Apple microphone I had been using. The ergonomics should be a lot better, anyway.

Video games

Both Alan and Max are getting into computer games on the iMac in a pretty big way. Everybody (myself included) likes Pop Pop, a new game from Ambrosia in the Breakout family. Alan is able to get through the demo levels by himself, so I've bought him a registration key. Alan is also really enjoying Snood. He's just recently been able to win games at the first difficulty level.

Build tools

I've actually been hacking a bit on my prototype for a build system, but if tromey's is a good design, I'd rather help on that. Perhaps a good way to do that, though, is to make the Rebar prototype good enough to build interesting projects, and offer it as grist for the mill.

Tromey writes about an important question in build tool design: do you make it depend on an existing, but not yet ubiquitous tool or language (such as Python), or do you try to make it bootstrap from more primitive parts? Auto* does an impressive job working on older Unix systems, but is deeply dependent on the Unix shell. I really need a build system that works on other platforms too.

A dependence on Python is pretty reasonable and is one way to solve this, but I have a different idea for Rebar. This question also brings up another: what language underlies the build scripts? If you know that your tool will have a (say) Python dependency, then it's very tempting to just export the languages "eval" capability. In fact, all build tools have some underlying language.

In the case of Rebar, my choice is to roll a new language, tiny and simple of course. What makes it interesting is that it's purely functional, so it can be evaluated in parallel (make -jn), and so that results from one run can be cached for others (like ccache and friends). However, in all cases, the tool must give the same results as if executing the script serially from beginning to end. I feel that this design is potentially a lot more robust than those in which the parallelism and caching is specified explicitly, and that build scripts can be simpler.

As for bootstrapping, I will expect most developers to have the full tool. However, the plan is to have a "light" version written in portable C and released under a very liberal free license (MIT), so that it can be included in source distributions. This version can be much simpler in terms of caching and dependency analysis, so I think it's possible to do in a small number of lines of code. It will also come with scripts to automatically build it on a number of popular systems. If these scripts fail for any reason, then getting the full tool is always an option.

I like this idea, and feel it would be quite a bit harder to pull off if a large, rich language such as Python were embedded. Even so, I'm doing the prototype in Python and am happy with the choice.

More need for trust

Another article on the posting of false metadata to p2p networks in an attempt to poison them, presumably with the intent of selling more CD's and DVD's. Interestingly, at the end it suggests that an impending release of Morpheus will have some kind of authentication built in. That will be interesting.

VoIP

I spend quite a bit of time with other Ghostscript people on the phone. It's a good way to keep in contact, but I'm not happy with shoveling lots of money at the phone company. Calls to Russia, in particular, were radically overcharged (basic WALD is around a dollar a minute). I've tried phone cards, but they're not great either. Call setup takes a long time and isn't 100% reliable. Voice quality isn't all that great either. Finally, even though they're pretty cheap (about 4 cents a minute to Russia), the billing seems to be unreliable. In fact, I now strongly suspect that the card (Original Gold in my case) is just lying about how much time is available.

Of course, phone cards just route voice over IP. So why am I routing voice through a patched up network of analog hardware and IP gateways, when I have high quality audio equipment and good bandwidth here? Sadly, the answer is convenience. So far, my experiments with VoIP have been a pain in the royal ass. Today, I played a bit with SpeakFreely.

Even so, I did succeed in setting up a conversation with Ray Johnston. Voice quality varied, and I had to use two separate computers to get full duplex (anyone know how to sample a microphone input on an Audigy with alsa?). The SpeakFreely client is crude; it doesn't even seem to report packet loss. It also seems to be hardwired for 8kHz sample rates. Since I've got plenty of bandwidth and CPU, what I really want is 22.05 or 44.1, and Vorbis compression to 32kbps or so.

We spend enough time on the phone, though, that it's probably worth perservering. If we come up with a magic recipe, I'll certainly post it.

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