After repeated visits to Denmark Street, I think I’ve remembered that guitar is pretty awesome. In some shop there, I was surprised to see the same leaflet given out at school - marked with the SPS insignia - for a performance by UnoGuitarDuo in the Wathen Hall. They were really good. Awesome. Rock. I’m going to do a Guitar-X course over the summer holidays. 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:
This is a war!
Pax
Lo, Psyche is revised and updated!
There have been many revisions of my “website”, some involving beautiful pages with bloated code brought forth from iWeb and others being hand-coded but bound to certain styles that tired quickly. However, Psyche is now past the “if this gets any worse I’m deleting it” stage. I actually like it now. I’ve made more aesthetic changes and such and am preparing for an overhaul of Science - I hope to trim it and condense the ideas worth keeping into things less obscured by rhetoric and thus more clear, since my primary objective here is propagation, not obfuscation. I also added a neat Glider mutation on the front, teehee!
Other news from my small corner of the web: I re-made the article “Michael_Lewin_(guitarist)” and started “Matthias_Wagner” - with his help - on Wikipedia, and I’m hoping that with the advent of Leopard I can start compulsively editing Apple-related articles once again. I’ve started going to Virgin Active again (lol) and will be fencing again soon - which will be tough as most of my muscles have atrophied. Oh well, these things happen. I was meant to see “Night at the Museum” today but we had some sort of retarded minor gas leak so we had to wait for the guy, became late etc. so I missed it but I’ll see it tomorrow and report back. I want it to be funny, I really do, but I’m afraid it won’t be… urgh. We’ll see.
Of course I must comment on the issue of Saddam Hussein’s execution. Whether the execution was real or not (didn’t see the transition from living to dead, could’ve been a body double etc.), I hope that Amnesty and other people who are in the right in this case don’t let people forget that revenge as “justice” is not sustainable. For the record, neither is the Western lifestyle, but hey, nobody cares, right? Humanity is a cosmic joke.
Pax
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