The Computational Universe

So I decided to name my robot Scribbles. Not a very exciting or original name I know, but I was kind of bored one day and saw the thing sitting on top of my dresser and it just sorta came to me. So far though, I’m unsure what to think of Scribbles. When the professor first introduced us to the Scribbler robots in class, I thought the idea of downloading programs onto the robots, and being able to run them right from my dorm computer was a pretty neat idea. However, I also found myself slightly frustrated by the relatively small spectrum of tasks the robot could perform. At first, making scribbles spin in circles, and draw lines was pretty awesome, but at a certain point, I just wanted him to do something more exciting.

Though I was a little disappointed with the relative simplicity of Scribbles, I realize that he was relatively inexpensive, and that more sophisticated robots would undoubtedly cost much more money, and be much more complicated to operate. The one thing that definitely stuck in my mind however was the way that we programmed. Having no programming experience whatsoever, it was interesting for me to see how pseudocode worked, even though we were not fully programming in the true sense of the word. Coming back to my friend Mike’s dorm room and watching the guys play Halo and other video games made me start to imagine how complicated and hard writing the code for a video game must be! When you sit down and really think about it, it seems pretty astounding. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the labs and programming my Scribbles, I think I’ve realized that programming something as complicated as a video game isn’t something I would enjoy very much.

Jumping ahead to even more complicated things, I thought of the movie I, Robot the other day. In that movie, for those of you who haven’t seen it, the humans have programmed robots which can think fully for themselves. It seems beyond my comprehension that it would be possible to program something which started off with simple little codes like “move forward 1 s”, and when many of these commands were strung together to make a larger program, that it could have self awareness. Makes me wonder if that will ever be possible.

-Ash

Wassup yall. As some of you may have seen from Mike’s post, I am indeed from the South. Actually that’s sort of a lie, I was born in upstate New York and my town was so small and hick I might as well have been in the south. I moved to Georgia when I was 10, and absolutely love it there.

So yes the north and south are very different places. While my above mentioned friend Mike likes calzones and pizza and Italian sausage, I like fried chicken, cornbread, biscuits and sweet tea. I’m not kidding either. Mike and his other northern colleagues have no idea what sweet tea is. Every time I try to order sweet tea at a restaurant on Nassau Street or in the City the waiters look at me like I’m crazy. Sweet tea is probably the best drink in the world and you all should try it. Biscuits are pretty damn good too. There was this fast food joint named Bojangles on my way to school back at home, and we used to pick up some awesome Bo-Berry biscuits before class most days. It’s a biscuit with blueberry’s and icing on it. Freaking amazing.

So I’m a junior Econ major, and really have no business being in a COS class because I’ve never done any kind of computer programming before. However, I needed an ST, and this is the one which seemed the most interesting, so Mike, Al and I decided to take it together. So far it’s been pretty awesome. I hope to learn some basics about computers. Sometimes I find myself in slightly embarrassing situations in which my utter lack of knowledge about computers becomes painfully obvious to everyone around me, and so I’m hoping to remedy that through this class.

So some random facts about myself. I love music, classic rock especially. I’m listening to Citizen Cope right now, which my friend Lev introduced me to. It’s pretty awesome. I’m a big Georgia football fan, and like Duke basketball. Though some might think this is a weird combination, it in fact makes some sense. Football is the biggest sport in the south, and most kids from Georgia are going to be UGA fans. Now if you’re a UGA football fan, you can’t like anything GA tech, and even though they might have a better basketball team than UGA, it’s pretty much not allowed. Therefore a lot of us go with Duke, which is still southern and close and has a pretty awesome team. I can walk on my hands. I like my sandwiches cut into triangles not rectangles. I like smoking hookah. I just moved to Nashville this summer and I love pirates.

“update”

So I forgot to mention that I use a Dell PC most of the time. More specifically, the standard issue that the class of ‘07 received through the University.