Go over to Blogs Canada and read Carnival of the Canucks #3, which follows the Sun east to west to see who’s blogging what. Lots of great posts. Newfoundland has a photoblogger? I had no idea (there used to be some chick who had a site called ractangle with fun photos, but it’s disappeared).
Note that Jim will updating this post during the day with more and more links.
And get ready for week #4 (click link below).
Den Beste and Jay Currie have a couple of interesting posts on Artificial Intelligence, which happens to be one of my favorite areas of computer science (and the one in which I got my best marks in in university). I do not share Jay’s confidence in genetic programming as (let’s say) a cornerstone for future progress for AI. Like symbolic logic manipulation, neural networks and expert systems, I believe that this will be a dead-end — a useful technique, but not framework for the “solution”.
My belief is that the future of AI will come from work done in Douglas Hofstadter’s Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition group, particularly the work involving “fluid analogies” and “parallel terraced scans”.
Consider vision, which Den Beste presents as a kind of pipeline of recognition, from the simple (individual pixels and their surrounding) to the complex (I’m looking at a picture of Queen Street). This is good and correct (as far as we know), but it’s the back channel that makes it all work. [Warning: all of the following is highly IMHO, though there's reasonable backing for what I'm saying here. This also should not be read as a critism of SDB's post, but an as attempt to build upon it]. Each stage of the pipeline is telling not just the next stages (the higher levels) what to look for, but also the previous stages. Thus, for example, when one stage of the system recognizes the concept of a light pole, it tells the previous stages to “look for more light poles, look for lights on those poles, look for flyers pasted to the light poles”, etc.. In fact, there’s a lot of guessing going on to make this work: a higher level stage of processing might try and “guess” that the light pole is a fishing pole, a sword, a ruler, a candy cane or what have you. It then will look for “supporting evidence” that this is true, by “tuning” the previous stages to look for related information. If the supporting information is not present, the guess will be downgraded in importance and other guesses come into play. Eventually some of the guess will be right (this is all happening very quickly because of parallelism) and a complete and self-consistent “low energy” mental picture will be built up of what is actually being seen.
Think about this: once your brain knows where the street is, it no longer needs to devote much effort into looking for cars in the sky: it knows where the cars should be. You can see that through this mechanism, the hard, massively open-ended problem of vision becomes simpler and simpler as more and more information is learned during the vision process. If there is a car in the sky, say one being carried by a helicopter for some sort of car commercial, your brain is jolted because it just doesn’t fit your previous model of how the world is expected to work.
You have the concrete experience that this model of vision is on the right track. Have you ever seen a picture of something you can’t recognize until your told what it is, and then suddenly everything falls into place? Have you seen the Crone/Young Woman illusion? These are instances of the highest levels of your vision processing system re-tuning the lower levels to recognize something they didn’t originally. Check out Hofstadter’s book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought for more about these concepts.
I also recommend the book “What Computers Still Can’t Do” by Hubert Dreyfus for a skeptic’s look at AI. There’s a great quote in the book that “the first man to climb to the top of a tree didn’t get us any closer to putting a man on the moon.”
I’d like to type “Where can I get a coffee at 5:00 AM in downtown Toronto” into a webpage and get a reasonable answer. Better yet would be “where can I get a coffee right now” and have “downtown Toronto” and “5:00 AM” inferred. Is the Semantic Web and RDF going to help me with this? I’m a skeptic, but prove me wrong kids, prove me wrong. Danny? Anyone?
Strindberg & Helium. Who the hell comes up with this stuff anyway? (thanks Ron).
If you’re interested in hosting a Carnival (next year!), send me a note at greenflash /at/ davidjanes /dot/ com.
Interested in finding out more about the whole Carnival concept? Check out this posting for lots of related goodies.
Rick and Kathy’s Boomer Death Watch. In the tech Circle of Hell, Tim Bray‘s Ongoing and I’m auditing Eric.Weblog for insights.
Make sure you get your favorites over to Jim at Blogs Canada for Tuesday’s Carnival. Yes, I know you haven’t been posting much; the gods know I’ve been idling around the house wishing all the food would just go away (by some other mechanism than me eating it). And sorry to Jim for having mangled his e-mail address and home page earlier this week!
Jim’s made a nifty logo for the Carnival, which you can insert into your blog somewhere if you want. I’ve added a little extra HTML to point to a Carnival only page on this blog.
<a href="http://blog.davidjanes.com/carnival_of_the_canucks/index.html"><img width=170 height=64 border=0 src="http://www.davidjanes.com/images/carnival.gif"></a>
request = urllib2.Request(url) request.get_method = lambda: 'HEAD'
To my friends and family and anybody else reading this blog, have a very Merry Christmas and best wishes to all this holiday season. Special prayers go to the U.S. cattle farmers whose season has dimmed, somewhat, because of the…
A horrible start to Christmas for the Royal Family. SO MEAN!!!: David Janes – “Serves them right for opening Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve”…
Well, a huge thanks to Joey for raising the bar so high on the Carnival of the Canucks this week. Just surf over to his blog, or check out one of the Bob & Doug Eight Days of Christmas below to find lots of great CanCon reading. Remember: by reading at least 30% Canadian Blog content, you’re keeping valuable Blogging jobs in Canada!
Here’s the upcoming schedule for Carnival of the Canucks:
Joey has posted this week’s Carnival of the Canucks, in two parts: Beer in a Tree and Two Turtlenecks. You don’t get it? Take off, you hoser.
Tell all your friends to go read them, and start thinking about your post-Christmas suggestions for Carnival #3 (Tuesday 30 December 2003) generously hosted by Jim Elve at Blogs Canada.
Update: oh my god, he’s going for all twelve eight days. Further updates coming.
Not shown: 20Gb iPod; Boss BR-8 multitrack recorder; Panasonic MiniDV cam; Nikon Coolpix 995 digital camera. Soon to come: Pringles Can Yagi; “101″ to go on door.
Note: please do not beat me up after school.
I ripped over a hundred CDs today onto my new Dell. I had many of them done before, but I decided to go for an even higher encoding rate (160 kbs). I’ll have another couple of pictures of my home office tomorrow for you, so you can see what kind of nerd I really am.
It appears that a faulty network card was the reason the BlogMatrix box was crashing on a weekly basis. I’ve been working all weekend on the box, adding a new higher speed disk for the MySQL database, converting the OS to Fedora (from Redhat 7.1), and converting the file systems to ext3. That’s probably all goblygook to 95% of you, but hopefully it’ll translate into more speed and less crashing. Fingers crossed. Sorry for the service interruption. We’ll be back up Monday morning latest.
Yes, that is a hammer — we’re a high-tech low-rent outfit. The machine in background has been stripped for parts.
I need a volunteer to host the the Carnival for the 30th of December (and later, if you can’t). Send me a note, it’s not that much work and it’s the last one of the year!
Update: Jim Elve at Blogs Canada will be hosting Carnival of the Canucks #3 (Tuesday, December 30). More on this next week. Don’t forget to submit your entries to Joey for Carnival #2 (Tuesday, December 23: Christmas Special!).
Scott Feschuk is leaving his job his job as television critic for the National Post. There’s no word about what he’s doing next but I’m assuming — fingers crossed — that’s he’s going to continue to write for the Post. He’s one of the four reasons the paper is worth reading, the other three being the blogosphere’s Cosh (bonus mention in the first paragraph of today’s editorial), the under-appreciated Katrina Onstad, and the Friday persona of Elizabeth Nickson (the Saturday persona could generously be described as “hoser”).
A clip:
There hardly seems a point in trying to rein in the self-indulgent musings now, so permit me to thank all of you who routinely perused my television column, as well as those who e-mailed me over the years with flattering remarks, astute observations and intriguing queries along the lines of, “Why did they cancel Diff’rent Strokes? Diff’rent Strokes was a good show!” and “So, what is Rebecca Eckler really like?”
Note the grace in keeping that last question unanswered, as I suspect the answer involves the letters C N T U in some combination or another.
Feschuk has a website featuring archived material and his favored hate mail, but alas, no blog:
Get a new picture for the top of your column. You look like too much of a geek: creepy crooked smile, v-neck that your granny gave you for Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas), glasses from the early 90′s which say “I’m trying to be hip but I’m ten years behind”, and a helmet which says “I couldn’t be bothered to comb my hair today.” You look like the kid who was always picked last. You are often critical of others in your column but you’re the biggest nerd out there.
I’m having a fair amount of computer difficulties, including having my Blogmatrix box crashed, so I’m spending a lot of time with that. On the plus side, my wife’s Dell Inspiron 1100 arrived yesterday and it’s pretty sweet.
Well, lookie here: more rats are coming out of the cellar.
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