psyche

On the train, I read the most recent Wired. It was particularly interesting. They’re focussing in on the important consequences of our vast storage capacity and the global network becoming what it ought to be. It hasn’t directly affected everyone yet, but the cloud is looming on the horizon. Grid/cloud computing should be very interesting indeed.

I was amused, however, when I read this:

Moreover, the number of hyperlinks in the World Wide Web is approaching that of synapses in the human brain.

I think something similar was in Serial Experiments Lain. As Mr Smith has my copy, maybe he should WATCH LAIN to confirm it (hint, hWATCH LAIN!!int)…

This guy doesn’t seem to like the idea of emergent properties, but he seems balanced.

The Cambridge thing yesterday was good. The course looks good. The colleges look good. The people were good. The research was good.

I talked to one guy - soon-to-be-Dr Jean Martina (blog, CL site) - who seemed to have an up-and-running automated theorem prover (+ until yesterday I didn’t know that the sum of consecutive odd numbers was always a perfect square…). My dad asked him if it had implications for machine intelligence and he smiled and said no. I thought that could be a cop-out so asked if he could use automatic genetic programming to make a computer come up with theorems and tests them and maybe come up with new mathematical resutls. Again, he smiled and said no… Later he mentioned his wife, also doing a PhD, was using software to model the human brain at the cellular level and then look for emergent properties. Like intelligence. He seemed like a cool guy and I was pretty happy that there was SOME theory being explored!

I nearly met someone I’d spoken to from the Computer Lab’s IRC channel (Malte Schwarzkopf). I didn’t realise it was him until later, but he was busy explaining his state diagram tool to an American girl anyway so I didn’t get a chance to see what it was all about. I would have, actually - I was seeking out theoretical core research, which is why seeing that theorem prover was so good.

The talk by Neil Dodgson was entertaining and informative (and for bonus points he repeatedly mocked Mirosoft - brave, as we were in the William Gates Building and M$FT seemed to fund lots of research etc.). I felt a little uncomfortable when he called computers “stupid” - I hope he never has to deal with HAL 9000.

At the end, there were questions (”I have a Scottish accent, will I be okay?”, “Is IB okay?”, “Can you interview me by phone bcause I’m overseas?” etc.). I asked what kind of theoretical research went on (apart from proving programming languages correct, which he’d mentioned). He smirked a little so I thought he was going to incite nerd-mocking and mentioned concurrency (from one of his slides). He then said “good question” and said something I can’t remember and then transferred it to his assistant guy (I’m not doing assistant guy any favours, he was helpful and smart but I just don’t know his name or position), who mentioned compilers. Later I asked if there were any College quirks we should know about. He said no.

His assistant guy finally mentioned the 2minutechallenge and then we were free.

We saw a bunch of colleges and I decided I wanted to be in the town centre because otherwise I’d be (more) disturbed by the potential peace and quiet [also consider Churchill's EXTREME DISTANCE (15 MINS BUS OH MY GOD) from town centre... although it was close to CL].

I met up with Elliot there and we ran into Will who knew lots about Queens’ so took us around there and explained everything. As a result of that and later bus issues (…) I didn’t manage to see Trinity Hall but I think as long as I go central, it’ll be fine.

BTW in this issue of New Scientist, there’s an article about Abdus Salam by Jim Al-Khalili. My grandparents hung out with Salam in that dingy house *shudder* and I’m reading Al-Khalili’s Quantum. It’s good. Connected!

Pax