It might be convenient if there was such a thing as a soul.
Let’s ignore the whole life-after-death thing, any idea of continuity of existence. Even then, it could be convenient if there was some real but ineffable thing which humans could not produce other than through reproduction.
Why?
If cognition is a physical process occurring entirely in [...]
Say that you are buddies with a top computer scientist. He has been working for DARPA on an AI project. He succeeds! True AI! Over the period of a few months of shakedown trials and training of the new AI, you befriend it. This time ends when your buddy announces to DARPA project success, so [...]
Imagine a computer game. Imagine that it had wonderful gameplay, packed with features–say it’s on the par with a big name game like The Sims 2 or Halflife 2. However, you had to interact with it via a text console in a manner reminiscent of the ancient Adventure and Zork games. Would you play it?
What [...]
This is the first draft of my personal statement, which is the only essay I get to write for my graduate application. I’m curious what you think of it.
Your Personal Statement should be a brief but carefully written essay regarding: 1) your reasons you want to do graduate work in this particular field, 2) your [...]
Ok. I turned in the project, an 18-page monstrosity, on time. I managed to rush through the part that my project partner was supposed to do, and skipped. I managed to complete all the analysis and compare/contrast items. I was pretty terse in a lot of places; that was unavoidable.
My project partner contributed three or [...]
Surprisingly, everything seems to have gone basically as planned. There were a few little glitches–I couldn’t cannibalize my old A: drive, because that one didn’t work anyway–but somehow I managed to migrate the DVD drive and the secondary hard drive without incident or loss of data.
Of course, there were minor little adventures on the way, [...]
Where have I been the last few days? Well, I’ve been working on two projects: One for the AI class, and another mostly to get it done.
Over the last three days, I’ve spent (with my project partner) a total of about 55 man-hours working on the AI project. Last night I was dreaming about [...]
I haven’t written in a while because I’ve stopped trying to deal with the computer I currently have. I’ve been leeching off other people, and going to the public ones around campus when necessary, because taking twenty minutes to find a computer that works ends up being faster and less annoying than attempting to keep [...]
C/C++ is a language that hates the programmer, mostly for stupid reasons. It’s not a bad language, really. It’s just not what you might call user-friendly.
I have an AI project due tomorrow. It’s pretty simple: we have to produce something that plays tic-tac-toe in three dimensions on a board four spaces across. So my project [...]
Two sentences I have heard in the last six hours:
“Vaya con diablos, sucka!”
“I feel like such a slacker, because I have microbiology and I’m always walking into the classroom and seeing all my CS friends leaving AI.”
I’ll figure out a post with some content later, after I’ve finished all the current project/crises. And probably a [...]