Combinitorics and mathematical optimization??

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Dolos
What are some applications of these fields?

Symmetric Chaos
Combinatorics is relevant to encryption.
Mathematical optimization is relevant to anything that benefits from efficiency. Financial markets, military campaigns, logistics, customer service. Optimization matters to almost everything.

Dolos
So, optimization has relevance in global network infrastructure?

Is there a job for global/international product resource accounting? Could this line of work replace money altogether?

Zampanó
Originally posted by Dolos
So, optimization has relevance in global network infrastructure?
For all x, optimization has relevance in x.

Originally posted by Dolos
Is there a job for global/international product resource accounting? Could this line of work replace money altogether?
No. The more glib answer is "trivially", but I'm not sure you'd appreciate the joke.

The phrase "global product resource accounting" is either meaningless, or a very verbose way of saying "who gets what stuff." Very generally, that is one of the three fundamental economic questions:
What to produceHow to produce itWho to produce it for
It turns out that each of these questions can be answered by markets. Free interaction among rationally self-interested agents has proven to be the most effective system for maximizing material production (i.e. wealth) yet devised by humans. While this is technically an optimizing process, it emphatically does not qualify as a "line of work."

Now, money is useful as a method by which transactions are made easier. So money is "global/international product resource accounting" in a very real way. Even if one were to centralize the decision making process, there would still need to be some comparative measure used to compare proposals. A central intelligence (artificial or otherwise) would be weighing the expected utility of each outcome relative to the next-best alternative*. These values are, in essence, what money measures today.


*As you will learn when get to college and take your first economics course, this is called "opportunity cost."

Dolos
Do you think that resources will ever become so easily obtained that opportunity cost will reach zero? Not just in the well-off areas, but everywhere?

Super-geometry is a new field of math that came about from a different area of science, physics. Physics became pure mathematics, this math allows us to work out relationships within super-string theory.

So maybe economics will turn into a new form of math not unlike optimization, maybe that's the start of a moneyless world. What you think?

Dolos
Nevermind.

A world so technologically advanced that anything can be produced for anyone, by any and all remaining corporations. In such an economy, nothing costs more than a fraction of a penny, whilst the only real earnings are made from the combined sales of corporations, not individuals. No more small businesses, everything has been bought by a surplus of giant, collaborative corporations that control all the world's industries. That way practically everything you could possibly desire is purchased by the company you work for. Money held by individuals becomes a superfluous commodity.

So then we're working for free? Well, in such an infrastructure everything is organized by one central intelligence (Strong AI). So we're useless. I just think that it'd be possible for us to become one hive-minded central intelligence through certain innovations in the field of bionics that would allow us to seamlessly transfer the electrical currents running through our synapses into another substrate not long after all of our cells, even our neurons, have become mostly cybernetic.

Lord Lucien
I don't think that spoiled anything.

Zampanó
Originally posted by Dolos
Do you think that resources will ever become so easily obtained that opportunity cost will reach zero? Not just in the well-off areas, but everywhere?
No.

No I do not.



Economics is already very math based. But money is not really the core of economics. Rather, economics is the study of decision making with limited resources. Scarcity is taken as a given for any discussion with an economist. Even if we were talking about a post-singularity society, there would still be scarcity in terms of time, if nothing else. So, like, I think you are having a conversation with words that don't quite fit.

Dolos

jaden101
Internet dick wagging contests in the age of geek.

Gotta love 'em.

Shakyamunison
Originally posted by Lord Lucien
I don't think that spoiled anything.

It spoiled me.

Major_Lexington
had to Google it big grin ipon reading about it my First thought was also encryption but then again most algorithmic equations are related.. optimization is what we strive for..




where is this going?

Shakyamunison
Originally posted by Major_Lexington
...where is this going?

Nowhere!

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