Friday, June 7, 2013

The initiator, the terminator, the inspector, the navigator, the nominator, and the discriminator...

Why, oh why, can't they use standard notations? More about this later...

4 comments:

  1. I hadn't looked beyond the abstract. You complain about notation. Draw a block diagram, I say. Is there an input by which the "search" could gain information about "where to look"? No! So-called search is intrinsically uninformed. Dembski, Ewert, and Marks will evade the most simple of challenges, and continue to grow a denser and denser thicket of mytho-matics.

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  2. Information can be put in by the inspector and the nominator (or obfuscator ii and obfuscator iv). There are a couple of problems with this paper, the main one is IMO this sentence of page 37:

    "In this way, an arbitrary search S can be represented as a single probability distribution or measure μs on the original search space Ω."

    If we have a search space of two elements and are allowed two guesses, we will find the target. How is this described by a measure on Ω? I assume that Dembski introduced the discriminator (obfuscator v) to make it one, but that's - as you say so aptly - mytho-matics.

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  3. This amounts to shaving off the corners of a square peg, and sticking it into a round hole. In "The Search for a Search," Dembski and Marks faced insuperable problems with base-level algorithms drawing samples of size greater than 1. So they've forced the algorithms to generate singleton samples (after a maximum of m queries). And they have the chutzpah to pretend that they've accommodated genetic algorithms, which are sometimes used to produce diverse populations.

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  4. It is all about smokes and mirrors - so very apt for the 2011 Cornell Conference on Biological Information (perhaps better named the 2011 School of Hotel Administration Gathering on Creationism).

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