Saturday, October 27, 2007

Man Is Nilpotent

For my first entry, I'd rather choose to explain why "man is nilpotent" - don't blame me if you find it stupid - I just got crazy when Blogger kept on saying that the blog addresses that I wanted were unavailable. Well, here is the funda - a square matrix M is said to be nilpotent if there exists a finite positive integer n such that Mn equals the zero matrix. So, the expression reflects the finite time that Man has, to spend on Earth.

4 comments:

Krishnaraj said...

A 100% pure scifi geek's fart... :)

John Sekar said...

A couple of issues with your definition:

a) How do you justify man being a square matrix? Maybe defining him as a vector of attributes would be better.

b) Your definition suggests that n is a discrete positive integer and as n-->inf, you relate that to time. However, time is best defined as a continuous variable.

Muhahahaha... Guess who's geekier?

Raga said...

Ah, I agree that my comparison is good. I accept your issues, and I am sure one can think of some more. As I have said, I came up with this title for the blog out of frustration and at that time, I felt that man being a square matrix and time approximated as discrete was good enough.

Nevertheless, let me try to justify the issues you have raised:

a) Man can be approximated to be a directed graph as follows - the vertices of the digraph are the various states he can be in (for example, happy, sad, excited, etc.) Of course, the meanings of these emotions depends on the person who is being represented. There will exist an edge from node u to node v if there is some action (either his own action or an environmental change) that can cause that change. The weight of an edge would be the sum of the likelihoods of all such actions causing the state change. Now, the weighted adjacency matrix of this graph is a square matrix, is it not?

b) In reality, there is always a limit on the precision of time - how accurately we can measure it, in spite of the fact that it is continuous. Well, if one can measure time to an accuracy of, say for example, k seconds, then think of the discrete scale to be calibrated in units of k seconds. As technology advances, k would become smaller and smaller, and the scale would become finer and finer - remaining discrete.

Well, I myself am able to immediately think of more issues with my arguments above, but I leave them to you, if you care :)

Raga said...

Please correct "my comparison is good" in the previous comment to "my comparison is not good".