rixarn

Interesting! Thanks for sharing :) ATS seems to be a little bit far from Lamport because you do have data types and other stuff, but yeah.. maybe this is as close as you can get.

I agree, you need mathematical insight too you can have that and still code as we do now without sacrificing a way to express solutions that consider things such as cache locality. With what he proposes, that’s simply not possible. There’s a very interesting talk by scott meyers about how important cache locallity is to the point where, in practice, for some problems, big oh analysis breaks because of cache misses. So an algorithm that is faster by those standars gets its ass kicked by a “slower” one just because of cache misses.

I agree with some of the things you say... mostly with the "use the right tool for the right job". In that sense, C might not be the most sensible choice for some things where you can end up with a solution that is twice as slow or more (and it's acceptable) but a lot easier to code and maintain. But if it several orders of magnitude slower? ... I just used C as an example of something that is obvious to reason about when comparing the alternative.

Portability comes with a price. And the more you abstract away from hardware the less you will be able to use it to its full potential. Most of the code written in these times it's not designed around things like cache locality for example and we have code that is 100 times as slow as they should be... even in plain C!

That said, we can agree that right now (more or less) you can reason about cache locality (for example) in "traditional" languages (even in Javascript... to some extent) and keep your distance from bare metal. But you lose the ability to reason about that and other things by using a PL so focused in writing beautiful mathematical expressions. For me, that's a deal breaker.

I'm more with Mike Acton in this respect; the hardware is the platform, not the software. And in that sense... In order to really make good use of your hardware you need to understand your hardware and code accordingly. I doubt you can achieve great performance on a language that focuses entirely on mathematical representations without considering the hardware.

So yeah... you end up with a beautiful mathematical expression ... but runs way slower than an "ugly" equivalent in c code.

I've been working on "brain training" stuff for almost 8 years and just recently (around a year ago) decided to make a startup out of it. I'm a psychologist and software engineer and my cofounder is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist. We've done our own research (and have a published paper), read a lot of the stuff that's out there and have evaluated and kept track of the existing products for years.

First thing that baffles me on most commercial products is the frequency and duration of each training session. Let's think for a minute. On average you have this short sessions that range from 5 to 15 minutes. Even in something as evident as physical activity... how fit can you get by doing 15 minutes of low intensity jogging on average 3 times a week? How fair is to say based on that example that jogging is "worthless"?

That said, most critiques to Brain Fitness are correct.

If I could summarize what we've learned so far:

- Transfer effect (i.e. to gain benefits outside of the activity you're doing) is hard to achieve, it takes a lot of time, has to be a n-back and heavy working memory activity (is the only think I can think of having a chance to do transfer) and it doesn't work all the time. On our own experience probably 20% of the population will never benefit from something like this. Also, transfer is limited to some executive functions, not all of them.

- Training duration and frequency. Think of a physical activity like jogging but instead of doing 15 minutes of low intensity jogging 3 times a week, do 35 high speed jogging 4 times a week for two months. You will get fit.

- Training activity. Most n-back and working memory stuff is boring and hard to do for players. It's difficult to engage on a "game" like that and the dropout rate for users is very high.

Most games out there that are part of the package of games in brain training softwares are based on stuff that has not been proved to have any transfer effect.

Our mobile app will focus mostly on working memory and sustained attention games (fewer but with more complex game dynamics that current ones). And I don't think we will advertise it as a "life changer" or a way to "make you smarter". We just want to build a suite of games for people to be challenged and have fun while doing so.

Physical exercise. I'm not kidding. I recall hearing about a researcher that worked with people age (65+) to see how they could recover and/or improve their cognitive skills. He tried other things (including brain training) before jumping to exercise. Its research lab ended up being a Gym.

Brain training does work for some people; around 20% of the population won't gain anything from it, regardless of what you make em do. And even for those that works it has limited scope on the benefits.

You're right. The amount of "exercises" that have proven to have some degree of transfer are very limited (n-back being the most typical not the only one). It's not only a problem of Lumosity et al, it's a problem on researchers too. There's an alarming amount of papers that are really bad, both methodologically and in terms of the type of tasks and training duration.

No wonder the brain training industry gets bashed every now and then when a new study debunks most of the allegedly benefits. So we have a group of folks that don't understand what they are doing and are publishing bad papers, and another group of folks that read those papers without fully understanding what is going on under the hood and create a "brain training" app. The fine on Lumosity by FTC was fair and expected.

I can accept the idea of prolonging one's life for a meaningful purpose. But, to think that we should aim for "curing dead"?

You talk about death as it is some kind of disease... Dead is part of life everywhere you look and not in the disease sense. There's a cyclic constant in all nature. You have seasons. You have day and night. Even stars that "live" for millions of years wither and "die" at some point. Why do you think we, as humanity, deserve to be the exception to that rule and escape a cyclic order that's been around like... forever?

Also, "life" feeds from "dead", no the other way around. It's not a coincidence that it's this way...