When do you hit that return key, and why?

[fictualities]

Here's a weird question: what is it, exactly, that paragraphs do in fiction? I ask because I just came across a theory that strikes me as intuitively right but hard to work out in detail. It appears in a book by Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 (fascinating sixties sci-fi about the power of language, go read), where a character remarks, apropos of

Comments

[darius]

If you don't do anything on your Mac laptop for a few minutes, it goes into a power-saving mode, and eventually goes to sleep. Of course even bacteria do that, so we're not talking about a terribly fancy behavior. Maybe a better example is a chess program: it'll spend more time on some of its moves than others, because they're judged more crucial to the game. (Or more properly, they're the moves where analysis looks most likely to pay off. The opening is pretty crucial, but you want to save time and pull out a book opening.) The ways it could make this judgement range from rules of thumb all the way up to a kind of economy populated by independent programs that buy and sell timeslices from each other -- the market price for a timeslice would reflect the supply and demand for computation at the moment.

do you think a computer with a sufficient degree of complexity to achieve sentience would necessarily be capable of boredom -- of perceiving some time as non-valuable dead time -- or could boredom be designed out of an artificial mind?

To get human-level flexibility you'd have to notice when you're getting stuck in a rut of some kind -- then acting on this perception, it would seem, would amount to boredom, functionally. Marvin Minsky had interesting things to say on the functional roles of emotions, and so on, in The Society of Mind -- my favorite kind of science book, that's written for both his peers and the public. (But his recent The Emotion Machine, er, bored me.)

OTOH I'll bet there's way more room for diversity in ways of thinking than we can imagine. Most obviously, a mind's designer might not want it to break out of certain ruts. (So to speak. *looks askance at Wilt Chamberlain*)