Yantrakaal

Abstract : Information, or rather information technology, is the basis of the digital economy that we live in but is there something more fundamental to information that goes beyond the thousands of  digital computers that we come in touch with in our daily lives? This article explores how information could be the basis of the material world itself, which in turn is merely a simulation generated by the proces sing of information. To do so we note that in social media and in Massively Multiuser Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) users live in a world that is not what it seems to be.  This leads to the question whether the world that we see around us is really real, or as described in Sankar’s Vedanta and the movie Matrix, is a simulation. This simulation hypothesis is explored further on the basis of Brian Whitworths paper on the feasibility of the world  being an illusion. Finally we demonstrate how this illusory world can be created purely on the basis of information thr...

That "information is power" is a statement that is often made both figuratively and loosely, but can it be literally true? Is it possible to find links between information and the stuff that they refer to in physics text books? Obviously the information that you read in the newspaper cannot be easily related to the power that causes a light bulb to glow. To simplify both sides of the equivalence, or analogy, and see if we can find a real link between the two, we begin with .... ( read on )

 

We are all familiar with carbon intelligence - the natural human intelligence that has given us everything from the fire and the wheel,  through the Ved, Upanishad, the Mahabharat, the Laws of Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Thermodynamics all the way through to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Near the end of this journey we have run into silicon intelligence or the artificial intelligence that is demonstrated by machine learning and neural networks that has given us autonomous vehicles and software that learns to play very realistic games. But somewhere along the line these two forms of intelligence -- carbon and silicon -- are coming together to create what sci-fi has been talking about for many years : the cyborg -- part human and part machine. Where are we on this technology? Is it still science fiction? or is fiction becoming a fact. I explore this idea in this lecture that I delivered to the incoming  (July 2020) batch of  Data Science students at the Praxis Business ...

Managing a business enterprise is impossible if the manager is not at ease with dealing with data. While soft skills and EQ are important, when push comes to shove it is data on the table that really matters. Data driven decisions are the backbone of any efficient enterprise. It is said that data is the new oil because of its intrinsic value. This is why the most powerful companies on the planet, like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon owe their immense clout  to the huge amount of data that they have accumulated about people and their behaviour. Gathering, storing, managing these multi-terabytes (or more) of data is loosely referred to as Big Data. But using this data to draw inferences about the past and more importantly making predictions about the future is Data Science. Managers in the past were not unaware of or indifferent to the importance of data. Many of them have been using spreadsheets like Excel to assist them in their daily work. However the volume of data in th...

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In an earlier post, we had introduced the idea of D I G I T A L I C S Here is a video that explains it further