LAWS@SRI-AI.ARPA (02/17/85)
From: AIList Moderator Kenneth Laws <AIList-REQUEST@SRI-AI.ARPA> AIList Digest Sunday, 17 Feb 1985 Volume 3 : Issue 21 Today's Topics: Applications - Computer Gods & I Ching, Humor - Word Processing & Stacks & Garbage Collection & Hairstyle Generation & AI Positions & Cryptographic Humor & Mathematical/Linguistic Humor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 11 Feb 85 9:18:51 EST From: Pete Bradford (CSD UK) <bradford@AMSAA.ARPA> Subject: Re: Description of Telesophy Project. The idea of a worldwide computer net cannot fail to remind those of you who have read the story, of the SF classic, I think by my compatriot and old friend, Arthur C. Clarke. The story tells of the quest by mankind to establish the ex- istence or otherwise of a God. They built the largest computer the world had ever seen, and asked it whether there was a God. "Insufficient data.", came the reply. So they built an even larger one: "Insufficient data." was still the only answer they got. Finally, somebody came up with the idea that if all the computers in the world were linked together in some way, the resulting `Supercomputer' might be able to do the job. The project was completed, and the burning question was at last put to the machine; "Is there a God?". It was not long before the machine came back with its reply. "Yes, there is a God -- now!". PJB ------------------------------ Date: Mon 11 Feb 85 10:02:59-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Reply-to: AIList-Request@SRI-AI.ARPA Subject: Computer Gods Asimov wrote a similar piece about the "AC Computer", which grew in complexity until the entire "physical embodiment" was moved into hyperspace (to permit convienent internal and external communication throughout the universe, I suppose). Various people asked it how entropy could be reversed and the universe rejuvenated, but there was always insufficient data. After Man and the stars had faded out, and no further data could possibly come in, the computer continued to work on the problem. At last it came up with an answer, and said "Let there be light." ------------------------------ Date: 11 Feb 85 2008 PST From: Brian Harvey <BH@SU-AI.ARPA> Subject: Another Computer Application 11 Feb 85 By ROLLANDA COWLES Reporter for the Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance Newhouse News Service (DISTRIBUTED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE) NEW YORK - You've had your eye on a new car for some time. Should you buy now or wait? [...] ''Try the computer,'' counsels John C. Lee, president of the Manhattan-based Horizon East, which has come up with a computerized version of the ''I Ching,'' the Chinese book of wisdom. [...] The computerized version of the ''I Ching,'' which Horizon East is presenting for the first time in the West, is based on a numero-astrological reinterpretation of the ''I Ching.'' Keyed to one's date of birth - year, month, day and hour - the ''I Ching'' spells out an analysis of one's life and offers near-inexhaustible wisdom and counsel. [...] The computerized ''I Ching'' provides a lifetime analysis and detailed analyses of the past two years and one year into the future. It took eight people 10 months to program the Horizon East computer, which stores approximately 4 million characters pertaining to the ''I Ching'' in its memory. So far, Lee says, the response has been favorable. ''Because the computer handles the information much more efficiently, we are able to offer ... service by mail at a very reasonable cost,'' he says, noting that where personal analyses often cost about $200, the computerized version costs $20. [...] ------------------------------ Date: 06 Feb 85 1850 PST From: Arthur Keller <ARK@SU-AI.ARPA> Subject: Russell Baker on Word Processing [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] [Russel Baker's column last Sunday had some pithy comments about the cognitive effect of our writing tools. Readers who enjoy the excerpt below should look up the full article. -- KIL] OBSERVER: The Processing Process By RUSSELL BAKER c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK - For a long time after going into the writing business, I wrote. It was hard to do. That was before the word processor was invented. Whenever all the writers got together, it was whine, whine, whine. How hard writing was. How they wished they had gone into dry cleaning, stonecutting, anything less toilsome than writing. Then the word processor was invented, and a few pioneers switched from writing to processing words. They came back from the electronic frontier with glowing reports: ''Have seen the future and it works.'' That sort of thing. [...] It is so easy, not to mention so much fun - listen, folks, I have just switched right here at the start of this very paragraph you are reading - right there I switched from the old typewriter (talk about goose-quill pen days!) to my word processor, which is now clicking away so quietly and causing me so little effort that I don't think I'll ever want to stop this sentence because - well, why should you want to stop a sentence when you're really well launched into the thing - the sentence, I mean - and it's so easy just to keep her rolling right along and never stop since, anyhow, once you do stop, you are going to have to start another sentence, right? - which means coming up with another idea. [...] ------------------------------ Date: Fri 8 Feb 85 22:30:12-PST From: Steven Tepper <greep@SU-CSLI.ARPA> Subject: AI Humor [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] I got the new memory for my brain and now I can read the Russell Baker article and JMC's reply without a stack overflow (although response time seems to be slower (I think that's because the garbage collection takes longer (I should have thought of that first (but I didn't (does anyone have a good on-the-fly garbage collection routine (one that will will run on a normal two-hemisphere brain configuration (i.e. doesn't require any non- standard lisp features (such as depending on the Interlisp spaghetti stack (I think I'm going to recode my brain in Common Lisp (if a good implementation becomes available (that's supposed to happen soon (at least according to what I've heard)))))))))))). ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 9 Feb 85 14:02:45 pst From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt@Navajo> Subject: Stacks and Garbage Collection [Forwarded from the Stanford BBoard by Laws@SRI-AI.] Pop. Marvin Minsky organized his public lectures that way. The left parens were silent and the right were omitted. Occasionally he would mutter "Where was I? I seem to have overflowed my stack." It was widely speculated that this was just for show and that Marvin didn't even own a stack. Van Wijngaarden, the man who gave Algol 68 its unique flavor, appears to be the first to propose seriously, somewhere around 1964, that computers should exhibit this sort of behavior and never bother to pop their stack. One might assume that this would save the bother of pushing the return address on the stack when calling another routine, but no. That stack had good stuff on it, or rather in it since you were expected to use it more or less like any other chunk of memory, to within the vagaries of how Algol organized access into the nether reaches of the stack. Return addresses were just parameters naming procedures to call when you had an answer. In the old regime you called such a procedure by popping its address off the stack and jumping to it. In Van Wijngaarden's regime the address stayed on the stack and your current PC was pushed on the stack as part of the ordinary procedure call sequence, not only saving the return address for posterity but contributing another. Van Wijngaarden was thus an early right-to-lifer for return addresses and anything else pushed on the stack. His proposal was in the same spirit as more recent proposals not to bother with garbage collection. Users of Lisp machines who simply reboot as needed rather than endure having the garbage collector turned on should have this man enshrined somewhere on their stack (at each reboot, of course). Other advocates of not garbage collecting include Charles Bennett, at IBM Yorktown Heights, and Ed Fredkin, a colleague and friend of Marvin Minsky who does digital physics at MIT. Their interest in clinging to worn-out information is that by so doing you can always reverse the computation back to exactly where it started. This is not because you want to do this, but because the physicists promise that if you don't throw it away you can get by with far less energy, a sort of physicist's bottle bill. One of the rules appears to be that you have to settle for a nonzero probability that the computation will unpredictably run backwards at some moment. The energy you do consume is expended on adjusting the probability that the computation will proceed forwards more often than backwards; more energy improves the odds and hence the speed of computation. I have heard it whispered that DNA unzips itself on this principle; if it were to unzip in such a way that it could not zip itself right back up again it would fry. I may of course be confusing this with a sermon I heard. Another reason for clinging to old... Pop. [...] -v ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 14 Feb 85 11:23:57 est From: Walter Hamscher <hamscher@mit-htvax> Subject: Graduate Student Lunch TIME: 12 Noon DATE: Friday, Feb 15 PLACE: 8th Floor Playroom HOSTS: Mark Tuttle and Sathya Narayanan REFRESHMENTS: t PLAUSIBLE HAIRSTYLE GENERATION: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF EURISKO, PART I Blackstone Le Mot As AI programs have been reported more widely in the popular media, they have been called upon to perform tasks that have heretofore gone unnoticed by AI researchers. Proper hair care is one of these tasks. In this talk I will discuss the application of EURISKO to developing healthy hair and attractive styling. Remarkably enough, the program itself has modified itself to represent characteristics of the domain, by developing hair in its control structure and a significant bald spot in its documentation. But it looooks maaaahvelous! ------------------------------ Date: Thu 7 Feb 85 08:55:27-PST From: Jay Ferguson <FERGUSON@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> Subject: AI Positions Seems like the most popular of the AI positions today is MISSIONARY! jay ------------------------------ Date: Thu 7 Feb 85 20:51:57-PST From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA> Subject: Cryptographic Humor Gilles Brassard at Stanford mentioned on the bboard an improvement on the one-time pad consisting of enciphering text by taking its exclusive OR with itself. ("We are still working on the decipherment."). ------------------------------ Date: Tue 5 Feb 85 14:33:25-PST From: Tai Jin <G.Jin@SU-SCORE.ARPA> Subject: Mathematical/Linguistic Humor [Forwarded from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] [Does anyone know the source of this? It's been around for a good many years. -- KIL] From net.jokes... To prove once and for all that math can be fun, we present: Wherein it is related how that paragon of womanly virtue, young Polly Nomial (our heroine) is accosted by that notorious villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh horror!!!). Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddendly two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. She tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space. She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, "Was she still convergent?". He decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and dissipative terms that he was bent on no good. "Arcsinh," she gasped. "Ho, ho," he said, "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see your angles have lots of secs." "Oh sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on." "Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary." "I, I," she thought, "perhaps he's not normal but homogeneous." "What order are you?" the brute demanded. "Seventeen," replied Polly. Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on." "Of course not," Polly replied quite properly, "I'm absolutely convergent." "Come, come," said Curly, "let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never," gasped Polly. "Abscissa," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The algorithmic method was now her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly's radius squared itself; Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Kutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity -- to be multiply connected on her first integration! Curly went on operating until he completely satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal. When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was to late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally she went to L'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation. The moral of our sad story is this: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom ... 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