The Computational Universe

I really enjoyed reading your responses. Clearly this topic touches something deep down in all of us. A couple of final thoughts.

First, are humans machines as Brooks suggests? All of us in CS116 think we are not. One property of a machine is that it is manufactured —you can buy as many identical copies as you can afford. But as we discussed in class, if human cloning ever happens, this picture starts getting really muddled. That is one of the reasons most of us find cloning abhorrent. On the other hand, people have cloned sheep and dogs already, so how far off is human cloning?
Second, I want to raise the problem of the hypothetical bunny rabbits once again. What if there had been two intelligent species on earth? Dolphin lovers, or chimpanzee researchers will argue that there already are. But assume this other specie is so advanced it actually can carry on a conversation with us. We would obviously not need to consider them human or want to date them (at least I can’t imagine dating bunny rabbits). But how would we react to them? Speaking for myself, I can’t be sure.
I fully grant you that the bunny rabbit situation may be too hypothetical. We may be the one and only example of intelligence in the universe for all time.

To sum up, I hope it was useful for you to confront all these possibilities for a few hours or days. Unlike Brooks or Searle, I am not vested or fixed in my views on AI. If I start thinking about it, things get very confusing very fast. (Cardero, Mike, Lily etc., you are not alone.)

Just thought you might be interested in knowing that there are moves afoot to change the nature of the internet so that companies that pay internet providers extra money would get better service. See this NY Times editorial.

Please wait until after today’s lecture before blogging on artificial intelligence!

For today you only need to write a paragraph that you can bring to class and hand in. I would be interested in whether your views change after the discussion.

Sanjeev Arora

When we studied the Rumor Mill problem, we looked at the “social network” amongst the students in the class. Some of you were (correctly) reminded of our earlier discussion of web search.

Here is a recent Business Week article on the uses of social networks. You may also be interested in a course called Networked Life at U. Penn.

Cheers, SA

Vince dug up a good link to a blog that explains the semantic web. Of course, like you I wish the jargon had been clearly explained in the talk.

Loved reading the posts here. I just wanted to caution you that though Turing-Post programs (and computers) “just do some simple operations that we tell them to do” it does not follow that they can not think. We will return to this issue in a future class and the curious should try reading Brook’s book (the later chapters). That said, several of you anticipate several of the issues.

Also, note that the unsolvability of the Halting problem does not show that TMs are more limited than us. We humans certainly cannot solve our own “Halting problem.”

By the way, here is a link to an article about the “multitasking generation.”

I am curious to hear —in Tuesday’s lecture—your views on multitasking. As you might have guessed, this is a computer term and we will discuss it.

Our head TA is the subject of a story in the Princeton Alumni Weekly this week: (click on “features”). Read about how he strikes fear in the hearts of CEOs.

Also, guest lecturer Prof. Perry Cook is in the latest Wired magazine.  in connection with his upcoming Apr 4 concert with his laptop orchestra (PLORK) and renowned tabla virtuouso Zakir Hussain.