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Turing's original imitation game paper, which I'd never read until the other week, gets very strange indeed towards the end, but this may just be a product of my post-corporal-punishment schooling.

He says, after proposing a genetic algorithm (is this the first appearance in the literature?), of 'unemotional' methods of communication:

If these are available it is possible to teach a machine by punishments and rewards to obey orders given in some language, e.g., a symbolic language. These orders are to be transmitted through the "unemotional" channels. The use of this language will diminish greatly the number of punishments and rewards required.

There is a well-established field of machine learning. What could machine punishment look like?

posted at: 14:20 | path: /imitationgame | permanent link to this entry

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Some years ago, when reading Les particules élémentaires (Houellebecq-not-Sarkozy 1998), I couldn't work out why its science fiction half seemed so familiar.

I have only just remembered. It reminds me of the sort of model A Simple Model of the Evolution of Simple Models of Evolution (Shalizi and Tozier 1999) talks about..

posted at: 13:33 | path: /hexagone | permanent link to this entry

I wonder whether essay plagiarism makes people put trap statements in their books, just as cartographers put trap streets on their maps to catch out the AA.

John Sutherland, who I assume has read Proust, says:

Consider next another famous first sentence: "Call me Ishmael." Like the redolent madeleine that opens A la Recherche du temps perdu,

and admittedly it seems to be the sub who wrote

From Proust's madeleines to Du Maurier's Manderley, first lines set the reader on track

but the celebrated wee cakes don't appear for pages and pages.

Assuming that TEXTE INTEGRAL on the back of my FF 10,- copy of Du côté de chez Swann means what I think it does, and that paragraphs of cake haven't been excised from the beginning, Proust's enormous novel begins on p. 13 with

Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.

We don't see the gâteaux courts et dodus until p. 55.

posted at: 13:01 | path: /hexagone | permanent link to this entry

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"Incentives to coordination" it said, talking about something in commerce. Of course I misread it at first, thinking that the main incentives are easy-to-use coordinating conjunctions with no IP attached to them.

If the word for "and" was a hundred syllables long and you had to pay T S Eliot's estate every time you used it you'd be forced to use parataxis. And that's probably not safe for women late at night.

posted at: 21:55 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

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The word "blogs", of course, goes back to 1990, which was a year before HTTP came along. If you had access to cron and ftp, I expect blogging was much easier than it is today.

"Rate [...] 'Flugblogs' as the name of a new computer company" sets Robert French as a rather hard Turing Test question.

An even more challenging one later on is "Rate dry leaves as hiding places."

posted at: 20:42 | path: /imitationgame | permanent link to this entry

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DNA tests to decide if JonBenet murder suspect is fantasist says The Guardian. I see genetics has made tremendous progress since I went home on Friday. I wonder what the GO terms are for being a fantasist?

Up until this point, the GO has had a very shallow representation of processes pertaining to the nervous system

said the GO consortium this week.

posted at: 18:56 | path: /maunderings | permanent link to this entry

The speaker on today's Desert Island Discs, which I heard by mistake, said he had been planning his choice of records since he was twelve.

I'd be embarrassed to be asked on to Desert Island Discs. Do you think you can upgrade to Private Passions if you ask nicely? I'd much rather have Michael Berkeley being sniffy about my limited musical horizons than Sue Lawley about my politics.

posted at: 16:28 | path: /N | permanent link to this entry