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Kubrick's AI Spawns Distributed Client / Cognition
rlsnow writes "Kubrick's (Spielberg's) upcoming movie AI has a promotional campaign to warm the hearts and blow the minds of puzzle-hungry science-fiction lovers everywhere; more than 3800 of them at last count, in fact. The group's latest accomplishment has been the development of a distributed computing client to brute force one of the more fiendish puzzles. The combined power of this group is pretty incredible -- the emergent phenomena of directed distributed cognition is startling. This may be the closest this many humans have come to developing a (somewhat focused) hive mind,, yet."
I'm one of the moderators for Cloudmakers. Those looking to get involved should definitely start at the Cloudmakers home page.
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<humor>Oh, and buy CM T-shirts too!
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
I'm the admin of www.cloudmakers.org. The article here doesn't really give a very good explanation of why one of the members of Cloudmakers has created the brute force script, so here's a little background...
A couple of weeks ago, the game makers organized "anti-robot rallies" (see http://www.unite-and-resist.org) in LA, Chicago, and New York. One of the puzzles were given at these rallies were jigsaw puzzles (one for each city). LA and New York were able to keep their puzzles until they were completed and we translated the missing pieces into binary (thus hex) code that is seen on the puzzle page linked on slashdot. However, Chicago was not allowed to keep their puzzle and they only completed enough of it to give us one of the 4 digit hex fields. So we have 8 hex digits to figure out. While this is still pretty daunting, there have been no clues to tell help us out. We've successfully brute forced other pages in the game before, so perhaps the game makers _want_ us to do this, even though some people think it's against the "rules" of the game. But we've never been told the rules, so who knows?
I think it's important to say that there's much, much more to this game than this brute force script. Read the Trail and Guide to get up to speed. If you want to try to play the game yourself without spoilers, check out the Journey. And if you're really into it after that, join our mailing lists which are linked on the main page of cloudmakers.org.
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Brian Seitz (praying to the slashdot effect gods)
Hi. I wrote the RUR-14 distributed cracking client. I'd like to dispell some common misconceptions. - the client uses very few CPU cycles. I have it running on a P100, and it only takes about 20% of the CPU. it is very heavy on bandwith usage. on that same P100, the network driver is using ver 60% of the CPU. - this is only a game. - ther WILL be a linux client. either this weekend or monday!! any other questions? join the effort! http://www.perceive.net/
.e.
www.perceive.net
People see the world as they are, not as it is.
Jumping into the middle of things, you might take a look at the latest trailer for the movie. In the credits, certain letters are highlighted, and they spell "Warn her Evan died sinning."
Having read a little on the Cloudmakers site I see that it is related to the puzzle, but I don't know yet if it's already been played or not. Guess I'll read more and catch up.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Then find places that don't have editorial control, like www.metafilter.com. When is slashdot going to "open" their rejected links so we can see that great stuff we're missing?
Answer: Never. Profits before ideologies you know. The reject list could help create a few dozen web-log type sites that would ruin the little monopoly slashdot has on geeks.
I've had over 4300 computers trying to figure out how to get me laid. It's called the "Get Flux Laid Distributed Sex for Flux Project"
So far these systems have only been able to achieve a hand-job after a 5th of Jack Daniels.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
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C: Actually, it's twenty-three, not forty-two.
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M: A smartass, eh?
C: Are you Canadian? Go on.
I don't know what that Canadian comment was all aboot.
Won't take no 3800 people, neither. Jimmy'll track the guy with the answer down, and me and Tony'll brute force it out of him with a lead pipe. You want I should get on this?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Well, here's one for you. I opened up two copies of the AI page and started feeding the responses of the Chatbots into each other. Unfortunately, I hit a loop, so now my fun is over.
It seems that both my Chatbots would rather be driving a car. And whenever I state "I would rather be driving a car." they just mimic that right back to me.
Ah well, it was fun while it lasted.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
How I long for this movie not to be retarded. But frankly, I'm skeptical about the capacity of Hollywood to deliver a story about AI that actually treats the subject with any sensitivity to the field. It's clear from the trailers that the kind of AI we're talking about here is more than that taught in undergrad CS courses and used commonly in games. They're trying to tell a story about an intelligence that at the very least passes the Turing test, and supposedly much more.
Trouble is, the conception of AI taught in CS courses is largely still the 1970's version that resulted in projects like cyc. The metaphor of "brain as computer", or a set of inference rules governing a vast filing cabinet of brute facts. Peruse the work of leading contemporary cognitive scientists however, and you'll see a very different picture of intelligence. For one, there has been a deep shift in emphasis from the view of mind as disembodied thinker, to a view that takes embodiment and real activity in the world to be an indespensible constituent of what we recognize as intelligence. Intelligence isn't just thinking logically and drawing correct conclusions (and in fact humans often don't), but it consists in activity, social interaction, language, tool use, care about one's projects, and a myriad of concrete behaviors. Interestingly, a highly similar sea change occured in philosophy from Descartes' Meditations to Heidegger's Being and Time (1926), where the former is an analysis of the human mind that works by gradually removing everything "external" and material, and the latter begins with and resolutely holds to the self's doings and cares in the world throughout the analysis, even to the point of coining a new term to describe the human self, dasein, "there-being".
I worry then that the trailer suggests that the same kind of AI is responsible for smart houses and a robot capable of all things human.
For a bunch of great links, see: Minds, Machines, and Metaphysics
> So, someone tell me, why do I want to waste cycles promoting someone else's movie???
For the same reason you're posting rhetorical questions to Slashdot.
Presumably, you get some enjoyment out of it.
--Blair
"We are already the hive mind."