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AIList Digest Volume 3 Issue 021
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
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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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End of AIList Digest
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