We’ve been playing Go during lunch at work lately. Mark Lentczner, one of our engineering directors, is a long-time Go enthusiast, runs the Go center in Second Life, and has been teaching us.
So when Jens mentioned iGo for the iPhone, I bought a copy, stayed up late one night this week working on beating the [...]
In a couple of hours’ play, I’ve reached stage 13 of Portal, and it’s that sing-song computer voice, goading you along, that makes it work. Tim Bray’s assessment is dead-on: Dear Marketing Professionals; when you think ‘message control’ several generational cohorts of geeky target demographics are thinking about the Portal voice. Portal may be a [...]
Oh man, I love Half Bakery. A writer could do no worse than to stop in and look for versimilitude-creating widgets. For example: Create a solar-powered artificially intelligent motorised road cone that, through the simplest behaviour model possible ends up grouping around holes in the road.
After I saw “A.I.” last week, the conversation on one of my mailing lists turned to the movie. One member commented that the Mechas represent the Jewish people: always living in the shadow, and the sufferance of the gentiles. That comment made me get out my copy of Marge Piercy’s He, She and It. The [...]
There is an immense, multi-site backstory for Kubrick’s Spielberg’s upcoming film, “A.I.”. How much do they have to do with the plot of the film, we’ll need to wait until this Summer. Several sites are now piecing the story together.
Communal authoring at its purest, DIRK builds a cognitive map of connections: A is related to B because of C.
A symposium considering recent books on AI that suggest the days of organic minds are coming to an end. The session is chaired by Douglas Hofstadter Link
MacLeod, who’s written three novels of hard-economic SF which I’m currently reading, replying to Alexi Panshin’s thesis (see The World Beyond the Hill) that SF has nothing to do now that we’ve gone to the moon. MacLeod says SF’s in the same world as the rest of us: our Gods have been taken from us [...]
Automation cannot currently index the Internet. Human editors are needed, but costly. Indvidual sites have an incentive to index, but no incentive to use a common scheme. An index may be a public good. Link
As featured in Wired News. Try your hand at writing an essay for the system to grade, or plug in a premade sample. Link