Tuesday, March 27, 2007

A B argument

An AB argument is a conversation between two people PD and VK which proceeds as shown below:

VK : A
PD : B
VK : A
PD : B
VK : A
PD : B

.. ad infinitum (or till one of them gives up)

If VK is replaced by AM, PD always looses the AB argument. The essence of the conversation is that VK claims A is true while PD claims B is true where B<==> ~A (or !A) and both of them want the other to believe that what they believe is true is the truth. Do not take this construct lightly for its triviality, this has been proved to be a useful model for explaining adamant people.

Recently I had to perform a technical survey, all the scientists were people who have achieved a significant amount of discovery (some of them Nobel laureates) and all the papers I read were either in Nature or in Science. And the argument goes like this:

RM: S4 linker moves 20 angstrom
RH: S4 linker does not move 20 angstrom
RM: See results from XYZ experiment, S4 linker moves 20 angstrom
RH: See results from XYZ (the same XYZ as above) experiment, the S4 linker does not move 20 angstrom

They continue this way for every other aspect of the problem. There are around 5-10 aspects to the problem and each of them results in atleast 10-20 Science or Nature papers.

The end of the AB argument as told above comes only when t --> infinity or one of them gives up. The giving up has been observed within 30 minutes with probability 1 when the mode of conversation is speaking in front of each other. But we believe that it is really difficult to observe the giving up phenomena when the mode of communication is writing up 1 page papers in Science or Nature. Thus a more evolved type of argument is needed to to settle the issue.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am sorry.. but I dont have the patience to go through such NERDY blogs!

Philip Carey said...

Doesn't matter, you don't even have the courtesy to mention your name :-)