psyche

Check out this interview with Rand Miller. Myst is great. The Millers are great.

Great.

Pax

Psyche 2.3 is uploading now. Roll on (X)HTML5

Pax

So, YouTube has made it to the Apple TV! I was just thinking that it might never happen. This may boost the Apple TV’s value in the eyes of a disapproving public.

Pax

I need to redo some of Pysche as this article has won me over. I’m also very interested in XML now; as my previous thoughts have indicated, I believe that the possibility of extreme data-mining from the web is one worth pursuing and the powerful markup of XML could facilitate an AI’s ability to comprehend human- (or program-) created data. I might just try something out. I have loads of exams next week.

Loads.

Pax

Ironically, having expressed semi-jocular fears about waking up at 13:00 today, I woke up at 13:08. This was pretty bad, but I still almost revised and made a podcast with Will. It was fairly disastrous because of bad connection and my own stupidity, but Will’s leet post-production will surely remedy this. I’m considering actually buying a Wii, but I don’t know if I can be bothered. I found my phone (it turned up under a bookshelf) so its alarm will go off at 05:20 tomorrow and I will jump out of bed as per usual school routine!

Pax

I’d better start revising soon; we’re on half term and I don’t know when my next exam is. I could easily find out but I don’t want to. Instead many other projects have distracted me: I spent some of today playing chess against my brother and sister, which was interesting and almost fun. However, most of the day was spent doing things like trying to revive a half-dead asparagus plant and thinking about tidying my room. I’ll clean up and start working tomorrow, I think. As I recently agreed with Will, Web 2.0 sites are very aesthetically pleasing and good for procrastination (my cited example was flickr).

I’m also pondering actually doing something; I want to make a small, simple mechanism of laughable complexity that will still make me extremely satisfied: it’ll be some arrangement of a push-to-break switch that’ll effect the automatic activation and deactivation of the store cupboard light - I know, such daring! Such wit!

Watched an episode of House today - the one about naphthalene (it does have that extra “h” in there) poisoning. It was good but I doubt anything could dislodge Hustle from my Thursday-TV-brain-drain session.

Time to sleep, lest I wake up at 13:00 tomorrow. That would be bad and, as Cyrus puts it, waking up late makes one “feel like a wasteman for the rest of the day.” He’s right.

Pax

Probably one of the best things I’ve ever seen: http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/05/23/lol-i-r-jaws/

Pax

Information and communication are the keys! Information handling is impressively developed, but communication techniques fall short: programming languages and markup formats like HTML are living (well…) proof of this, although more dynamic systems like XML are a step in the right direction. Imagine a web browser that isn’t simply an interpreter (something that shows you a picture of what the web developer had in mind) but is instead a sort of personalised display (not unlike an RSS aggregator) that could digest information and display it to your specifications. Perhaps legacy “art” browsers would remain, allowing the information to be presented as it is now. The “art” browsers would be to the new aggregators as ornately decorated manuscripts are to modern minimalist books in terms of appearance. Perhaps there would be a level of “digestion” that would be user-controlled (i.e. the user could move a slider to tell the browser how much it should re-sequence the data that are presented to it, changing it from its “intended” form to a more useful, categorised form. Maybe in time, “form” would be forgotten, no tags would be required and computers would read websites like we read books - understand them, not simply interpret them (like we would, say, read out a passage in another language which we vaguely know how to pronounce but not understand - I remember wasted days in my youth during which I would phonetically read out passages from the Qur’an to some old teacher, never knowing what I was actually saying).

Linguistic awareness of some kind is highly important. An AI doesn’t need to think very hard; it simply has to use basic algorithms to process data as its predecessors are no doubt doing as I type and furthermore use more complex algorithms to make its other algorithms more efficient, complex and useful. The data must be digested. We must teach the machine. The greatest processing power, in this era of pre-quantum computing, is us. We teach the web and it in turn teaches us. We tag, sort, prune, remove and add information. There are many people involved. A significant chunk of everyone is involved. Soon we will be replaced by programs (at least in terms of information sorting if not even adding) but until we are, we must endeavour to power this interesting sociological experiment that is, in my opinion, one of humankind’s greatest achievements (the other main one in my mind being the internet…).

I was previously asking myself whether I should pursue maths, physics or computer science but now I have a feeling it’ll be all three in copious amounts in the friendly package that is quantum computing.

I don’t know why I feel this compulsion to make computers think. It would be a magnificent system, a being created manually (so to speak) by a large group of other beings.

It would make my fucking day.

In chess, Elliot and I are making good progress with the middle- and endgame but our openings, although now familiar and underpinned by good intention, are still highly random and in need of consolidation. Over the summer I think my routine will comprise proper formal practice the following:

• Chess
• Fencing
• Maths
• Guitar
• Tetris
• Reading (mostly on informatics, quantum mechanics, electronics and programming)

This is a war!

Pax

It was enjoyable I suppose. It was very fucking long.

Pax

I think I’ve noted some more of my own major malfunctions. Firstly, I notice that most people are either so good at one particular thing and enjoy it so much that they know that that’s what they want to spend their life doing or of the other group which comprises those so good at so many things that they have a hard time making up their minds (and the really lucky ones are very good at everything but amazing at or particularly enjoy one particular thing and so have no trouble). I, alas, am simply mediocre. I can’t decide between computer science, maths and physics. Oh well.

Other people. The ones with friends you don’t know, secret girlfriends, interesting ambitions, good hearts. Everyone is like this, right? Not me. What you see is what you get. My time has come and gone. I stumbled and took faltering steps and tripped and messed up and pulled myself along the ground until I was out of the spotlight.

Know that I tried!

Pax