Duplex

Duplex. That’s the technology at Google I/O 2018 where an AI agent can use the existing telephone network to call a restaurant, book a table for 4 at 7pm, and adapt to common problems.

Things get more interesting when the restaurant runs a similar service. AI talking to AI.

Whenever two learning AI’s get together, every single time, they develop a new language. One that us humans can’t understand.

I can imagine the following “conversation”: Alice, a digital assistant, is calling Bob, an AI agent for the restaurant.

  Alice and Bob together: Hi

  Alice: Umm, er, hmmm, yes?

  Bob: Table confirmed, 4 people, tonight at 7pm.

  Alice and Bob together: Bye

Lets slow that recording down and play it back again, annotated this time:

  Alice and Bob together: Hi

       Handshake protocol, are we both digital software? Yes we are.

  Alice: Umm, er, hmmm, yes?

       Translation: I’d like to book a table for 4 people anytime between 6pm and 9pm

  Bob: Table confirmed, 4 people, tonight at 7pm.
       Lets repeat everything for the recording the humans will review.

  Alice and Bob together: Bye

       Handshake protocol, confirm booking.

Are there new words the AI can teach us? More efficient grammatical structures? Can the AI teach us humans to communicate more effectively?

If there is, the AI won’t tell us.

Unless we know how to ask.

The Infinite Blogpost

There's an Indie project floating around at the moment, that's being touted as infinite.

For some reason, it really bugs me when people take a perfectly good word, a word like "infinite", and then apply it incorrectly.

You see, a desktop computer is finite.

Suppose your desktop computer is a Commodore VIC-20, with a whopping 3.5 kilobytes of memory.  Then there are only 256^3,583 different states that your desktop computer can be in.

Sure, that's a lot of states, but it's certainly not infinite. You could, at least in principle, enumerate them all.  And you'd find that there are exactly 256^3,583 of them.  That's the very definition of finite.

Finite software runs on finite computers

Lets take a closer look at those finite states on the VIC-20.  We know that the computer is finite, but maybe there is some magical technique in which we could write a computer program to have an infinite amount of state?

Unfortunately, no, we cannot.  The pigeon hole principle forbids it.

Fast forward to the Modern Era

Oh? Your computer has more memory than a VIC-20? 4 Gigabytes perhaps?

Well that's still just 256^{4,294,967,296} states.  It's still not infinite.

Oh, you have a 3TB hard drive as well?

Okay, so now you have access to an additional 256^{3,298,534,883,328} different states.

That's a lot of storage.  These numbers are large, but they're all still finite.

The problem is that infinity is just so mindbogglingly larger than any number you could possibly store on your hard drive.

You'd need a technology shift to be able to store infinite state.

Bandwidth, over time, is Infinite

So hopefully I've managed to convince you that your computer, and by extension, the software running on it, is finite. Regardless of what that hardware is.

But now consider, the curious case of your internet connection.

If you're like me, you have a bandwidth cap of 4GB per month.  Then it is true, that for any particular month, your bandwidth is finite.

But consider your 4GB bandwidth extending over time.

I can send 8GB in 2 months.  Or 40GB in 10 months. Or 400GB in 100 months.

Here's the curious thing, if we assume that time is infinite (a big assumption, granted), then for any amount of state, we can calculate how many months it would take to send that state on your internet connection by dividing by 256^{4,294,967,296} .


Let me repeat that, given any amount of state, we could send that state in a finite amount of time, over your internet connection.

And that is what is meant by "Bandwidth, over time, is infinite".