psyche

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