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Today marked my return to university for my final semester of undergraduate education. I'm taking three papers – Concurrent & Distributed Systems, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Discrete Mathematics. I had my first lecture for each of these, but the one that has proved most interesting thus far (to be fair, 'thus far' is a single lecture), is Artificial Intelligence.
In particular, we were discussing a debate in the field of AI – strong AI versus weak AI, or in layman's terms, whether or not a machine can possess true intelligence, a mind. For starters, it is useful to establish exactly what constitutes a mind, a conciousness, or the soul. The concept of a soul is something that is universal across all human cultures – the part of a person that makes them distinct and separate, the part that thinks, that feels. The question is then whether the soul is a simply the manifestation of the physical make up of the brain, or something separate and non physical. In both cases this raises the question of how do you model such a thing with a machine, and can it even be modelled? Although it seems much more feasible if the soul is a result of the physical happenings in the brain, there is still little understanding of how the brain actually works. Also, if the brain is merely a machine, albeit a complex one, then how is it we have the feeling of choice – that given a set of inputs, we not only rationalise, but we also act on impulse, on feeling. The concept of free will does not fit well with the idea that the mind is a machine, mapping inputs to outputs.
A slightly less philosophical point (although only slightly less), is what it means to comprehend something. Sure, given the word 'tree', a picture of a tree, or a description of a tree, a machine may be able to correctly associate it with a tree – but does the machine truly have comprehension of what a tree actually is? It understands all of these symbols as pointing to the same object, but does it understand what a tree is? Another way to put this is to think of it in language – given the word 'horrifying', a machine could learn about its definition, where it is appropriate it should be used, when it does or doesn't make sense. But is knowing about 'horrifying' the same as knowing 'horrifying'? Can a machine know what it is to be horrified? John Searle points out this difference in his thought experiment, the Chinese room. Although I will probably fail at trying to explain this, and you are better reading it elsewhere, it basically says the following: given a question in Chinese, and a 'program' of sorts in the form of a book written in English, an English speaker like you or me could follow this program and produce the correct answer in Chinese. The point made here is this – although given the input, an 'intelligent' output is given, the Chinese characters are still just nonsensical squiggles to the uninformed. We have returned the correct output, without actually comprehending what either the input or the output actually mean. It is in this way we have exhibited what seems to be intelligence, but without actual comprehension.
For me, the idea of strong AI is something that is unachievable, but like many unachievable goals there is much to be gained in the process of trying. I'm looking forward to my first chance to dabble with AI in these coming months.
A while back me and my sister discovered that Linkin Park was coming to play in New Zealand. Being long time fans, my sister had sworn years ago that if they came she HAD to go, even if it was a thousand dollars (her words, not mine). I quite wanted to go as well and saw it as a good excuse to have a holiday.
Being students on a budget, we decided to travel on the cheapest option available - nakedbus.com, $18 from Wellington to Auckland. I had traveled on this bus service previously, and while they aren't really buses, more refitted vans, and you tend to get some interesting characters on the service (both travelers and bus drivers), you can't pass up an $18 trip.
This time however, things didn't turn out quite so well. On dragging myself out of bed at a ridiculous hour, travelling through the pouring rain to get to the bus stop in town, the bus had yet to arrive. So we waited.
And it rained.
And we waited.
And it rained some more.
And we waited some more.
There were six of us unexpecting vagabonds. Me and my sister, the emo couple, the van girl, and the loner. Emo couple moved around a bit, trying to find shelter at a stop that had none. Loner, well, he was lonesome. Van girl, although sitting in her van was the warmest of all of us, offered us no shelter. She was also the most impatient. After about fourty minutes of waiting, she grew tired, and came over to converse with us. After careful investigation, we found the bus companies number - 0900 NAKED. I thought it was quite checky of them to have an 0900 toll number in the first place, and it sounds a bit like a pr0n number, but the number itself wouldn't work. It seemed it no longer existed. Upon discovering this, van girl decided to turn in and find alternate transport, and so her van escorted her away.
We had a little more paitence, but not much. It wasn't long after that loner went on his lonesome way. After waiting over an hour, we too decided to give up. We were soaked, cold, shivering and tired. We decided the best course of action would be to head to the train station and seek alternate transport. Emo couple gave us a strange inquiring look as we left, as if we had some idea why the bus wasn't there, but we headed off to the train station. Along the way though, Teresa thought the information centre might be able to help us. A kind girl there booked us seats on the overnight bus (although at four times the price of our original nakedbus ticket).
I am now sitting in my sister's bedroom, trying to dry out all my clothes which got soaked in my bag from the rain. We have attempted several times to lay a complaint at nakedbus' website, however they seem to elude all forms of contact. Their contact form doesn't seem to want to submit - it requires you to fill in the 'optional' booking reference. However even once we fill it in, it still doesn't work, in either IE or FireFox. It doesn't provide any form of email address, only a postal address, in which they promise to respond within a month or so.
Let's just say i won't be travelling naked again.
I shot Mina. It was fun!