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Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us?
An anonymous reader writes "The folks at the Edge have published a short story by George Dyson, Engineer's Dreams. It's a piece that fiction magazines wouldn't publish because it's too technical and technical publications wouldn't print because it's too fictional. It's the story of Google's attempt to map the web turning into something else, something that should interest us. The story contains some interesting observations such as, 'This was the paradox of artificial intelligence: any system simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently; and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.' After you read it, you'll be asking the same question the author does — 'Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?'"
Yes.. it *is* that George Dyson.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/george_dyson.html
Freeman Dyson's son. Both the TED talks he's given are awesome.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Turn in your geek card!
It was Trinity that downloaded the program to fly the helicopter, not Neo.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
This is the best comment I've read on Slashdot in a long time...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
http://givemebackmygoogle.com/
but not in the AI kind of self-discovery and discovery of the world around it way, but in the big brother kind of way.
Google is amassing huge amounts of data on us and mining it discovering patterns of our digital selves (that perhaps don't exist in the real us) and successfully making money off of it too.
This is like a private company collecting all the purchasing information you make on your credit card assigning it a score (aka credit score) and then selling the information to you and your bank, but taken to a much higher extreme.
Google is only just starting to branch into more private aspects of our lives with medical history search etc. There is no telling where all this will end, but we can make guesses.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
There was an article here on slashdot the other day about cuil, and the verdict was: Epic Fail, not even a contender.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
It was Tank that uploaded the program to Trinity to fly the helicopter ...
There. Fixed that for you.
I read it. (sorry, I know it breaks SOP)
It didn't make me ask the same question as the author. Maybe I've read too much cyberpunk in the last year and it has jaded me. Either way, it was an interesting story. Not great, but interesting.
Bearded Dragon
Actually, the "template-based addressing" in the story really can have some profound effects. (My own explanation of how Tierra works here.) Google becoming intelligent probably isn't one of them, but some systems are a lot more 'evolvable' than others.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Google is obsessive about reducing HTML size for fast delivery, and that explains two of your observations.
The JS obfuscation is code reduction - all the variable names are replaced with a single letter and the white space stripped in all of google's JS code to reduce the script length (though no doubt they like the fact that this makes reverse engineering hard too.)
Adding the events after the page loads means you can loop over the array of links returned by document.getElementsByTagName("A"), instead of adding the handler as text to every link.
foo mane padme hum