The Wikipedia article about the technological singularity attributes the seminal idea to Irving John Good (b. 1916), a renowned statistician who taught at Virginia Tech:

Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs ( Read more... )

In my previous post on the technological singularity, I alluded to Ray Kurzweil's "argument from hardware".

The essence of the argument goes as follows: When Moore's Law gets us up to a number of switching elements that is comparable to the number of synapses in the human brain (about 1014 for between 1010 and 1011 neurons), a sea change in ( Read more... )

Those of you who attend conferences in artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks may recall the perennial futurist talks by such notables as Karl Pribram (who's presented technical papers at IJCNN many times, including in 1996) and David Stork, well-known "optimistic" futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Thaler - and also the ( Read more... )

As I advise my students, I often find myself reviewing "nifty tools" and time-saving tricks of the trade with them.

Examples of these include:

• Citation Indices and Bibliographic Services: Google Scholar, CiteSeer, DBLP
• Search tricks: Googling for authors by name, doing a breadth-first search of a citation index, using synonymy, using Google ( Read more... )

Even the kind of malware that is evil enough to tamper with Spybot Search and Destroy and Lavasoft AdAware can be eradicated with the right registry hacking, most of the time. I just spent an hour researching and removing something called InetGet2, which autoinstalled via some pop-up or else came bundled with SideStep ( Read more... )

I have some questions for all you tronkies:

• How many of you have ever written code for someone as a present?
• If you have, how did you find out what they wanted?
• Did you also give them a maintenance agreement of some kind? (This part is not a joke; I'd really like to know if anyone's done this before.)

The reason I ask is that I'd like to get ( Read more... )

I was going to call this "An Immodest Proposal" or "A Proper Rant", but as you well know, I'm too much of a pragmatist not to get straight down to brass tacks on this subject.

I've been thinking - not just this morning, nor only this past week, but really this whole semester - about what we need to get some foundations of mathematics and ( Read more... )

The irony is that Perl itself is a subset of UNIX features condensed into a quick-and-dirty scripting language. In a literary light, if UNIX is the Great Novel, Perl is the Cliffs Notes.
    - Thomas Scoville, "The Elements of Style: UNIX as Literature"

Care to discuss?

ETA, 20:30 CST: Also, any advice on Wikination and bootable CD burnination?

- ( Read more... )