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Google Trains AI To Write Wikipedia Articles (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the next-up dept.

The Register: A team within Google Brain -- the web giant's crack machine-learning research lab -- has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages... to varying degrees of success. As we all know, the internet is a never ending pile of articles, social media posts, memes, joy, hate, and blogs. It's impossible to read and keep up with everything. Using AI to tell pictures of dogs and cats apart is cute and all, but if such computers could condense information down into useful snippets, that would be really be handy. It's not easy, though. A paper, out last month and just accepted for this year's International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in April, describes just how difficult text summarization really is. A few companies have had a crack at it. Salesforce trained a recurrent neural network with reinforcement learning to take information and retell it in a nutshell, and the results weren't bad.

59 comments

  1. Obligatory by darkain · · Score: 5, Funny

    Obligatory XKCD Reference: https://xkcd.com/810/

    1. Re:Obligatory by shanen · · Score: 1

      I think you should have said more to earn the click-through, but he's a sharp cookie (and even answers his email in helpful and constructive ways), so you got my click. But you wouldn't have gotten my mod point, if'n I ever got one to give.

      In his ever insightful way, he implicitly hit on all three of the applications in my initial (and longer) comment on this story.

      --
      Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  2. Turf Wars by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It might be fun to watch the Google Wikipedia AI Bot get into "turf wars" with existing Wikipedia Bots...

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re: Turf Wars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...next they write âoenewsâ stories. I welcome our Google AI overlords.

  3. Yeah, but how about the meta pages by russotto · · Score: 2

    Can this bot win edit wars, get Wikipedia administrators to side with it, drive n00bs off its pages? Without that, it's not very useful on Wikipedia itself.

  4. Can't do causal and counterfactual reasoning by Visarga · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Such models have no common sense yet - can't tell if "the use of the umbrella causes the rain or the other way around". They can't think like us, they just copy text and try to hit all the sub-topics with naturally sounding language based on the source material. It's more similar to Google translator than a human Wikipedia editor.

    1. Re:Can't do causal and counterfactual reasoning by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Sounds perfect for Wikipedia. Research and logic are now allowed, all that matters is finding a reliable source that says something and summarising it. The only real skills required are writing summaries and defending the reliability of your source on the talk page.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:Can't do causal and counterfactual reasoning by sg_oneill · · Score: 1

      Such models have no common sense yet - can't tell if "the use of the umbrella causes the rain or the other way around". They can't think like us, they just copy text and try to hit all the sub-topics with naturally sounding language based on the source material. It's more similar to Google translator than a human Wikipedia editor.

      Hmm. Don't be so sure. There is a certain sense that embodiment, being in a body, is a necessary part of familiar intelligence. Humans are to some extent the way we are because we are lugging a very needy meat machine around, but its also a meat machine that provides us with lots of useful "common sense", that the rain didnt come from the umbrella, for instance. But even without it, its basic induction that because it also rains when there isn't an umbrella, the umbrella isnt the important correlation. And thats something AI should in theory handle trivially.

      The only thing it wont handle so obviously, is the embodiment parts. What it actually means to be human. What the qualia of hunger is, what it feels like to really get unhinged over sexual attraction, the joy of sleep, and the misery of sickness. I mean it could fake it, but its going to struggle with it. Then again, I read stories about AI's being better at reading human emotions than humans, and I guess we're in unknown country with this science.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    3. Re:Can't do causal and counterfactual reasoning by HiThere · · Score: 1

      It's not that direct, and I see no reason that a recurrent network couldn't learn "common sense". (Well, at least as well as people can.) But if you need to include all the information involved in acquiring common sense, then you've radically increased the data requirements, including lots of time-series data sets, etc. The cheap way to do this is probably to embody it in a body with lots of sensors. Now one source of this information would be a fleet of automated cars...

      The problem is that this depends on storage capacities continuing to increase at the same rate they have been, and processor capabilities doing the same. (OTOH, for neural nets you don't need more capable CPUs, as distributed nets work quite well, and solve a lot of the cooling problems.)

      So it's doable. Whether it will be done is another question. It's generally cheaper to use the lowest amount of computing power that's needed to do the job. (Generally. Cellphones are an excellent counterexample, however.)

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
    4. Re:Can't do causal and counterfactual reasoning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The most important wikipedia editor skills are twisting the rules (there's enough of them, many contradicting, that I believe you can use them to back up nearly any position short of Dread Behemoth Original Research), and having friends in high places.

  5. Giant crack machine by robotvoice · · Score: 2

    Great. Just what we need. A trained monkey that summarizes the summarizers.

    According the the article, "The generated sentences are taken from the earlier extraction phase and aren’t built from scratch, which explains why the structure is pretty repetitive and stiff."

    Mohammad Saleh, co-author of the paper and a software engineer in Google AI’s team, told The Register: “The extraction phase is a bottleneck that determines which parts of the input will be fed to the abstraction stage. Ideally, we would like to pass all the input from reference documents. “Designing models and hardware that can support longer input sequences is currently an active area of research that can alleviate these limitations. We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway.

    Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either.

    My faux outrage is entirely synthetic.

    1. Re:Giant crack machine by bursch-X · · Score: 2

      A trained monkey that summarizes the summarizers

      Wikipedia editors summarized.

      Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either.

      And since Google essentially has quite some influence on which sites go there... Here we go — Google's very own reality distortion field.

      --
      There are two rules for success:
      1. Never tell everything you know.
  6. What else did you expect from the EVIL monster? by shanen · · Score: 1

    Insofar as the google understands that knowledge is power, I'm only surprised that they decided to show their hand. Maybe Wikipedia is less naive and less harmless than I thought? The google perceives an actual threat to their Gawd Profit?

    I've actually been considering this branch of technology in terms of specific applications, such as (1) Writing assistance to help people tell their hidden stories (in interesting ways, of course), (2) Email analysis for asymmetric celebrity email systems (as a dual of the spam problem), or (3) Aggregation of EPR (Earned Public Reputation) for such places as Wikipedia (and Slashdot), just to focus on the three that I keep banging my head on. Automatic digesting of knowledge for such purposes as Wikipedia articles is actually a more pragmatic branch with high relevance to the corporate cancers as they seek the elimination of their most serious cost: Paying the salaries of all those pesky human beings. Much better to harvest their knowledge and flush them away.

    I better confess that yes, I do have a personal axe to grind, having been flushed by one of those large cancers. I still think I have some mental capacity to work, and even a desire to do so, but they can always spot my age with one glance at my resume. Won't even give me a chance to underbid the young whippersnappers. If it ain't the question of how well I've kept up with the technologies, then it's the belief the youngsters have fewer bad habits to unlearn plus the life expectation thing...

    Ha ha! Last laugh's on them. The google can't harvest my abundant mistakes to learn anything from them. They were all erased before I turned in my last corporate computer. (Actually, most of my corporate career was fixing OTHER people's mistakes. With my terrible attitude, I was a natural for the work.)

    Almost forgot one more laugh. The problem faced by the corporate cancers is fundamentally unsolvable. There is NO largest profit that will solve their desperate need for the infinitely large profit number. There's only the threat of slumping next quarter.

    --
    Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
  7. The fourth paragraph by raymorris · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Most articles I find on the net follow a pretty consistent pattern, using one of two variations on that pattern:

    How To Foo a Fizz

    Fizz s very popular these days blah blah. First paragraph says nothing useful at all.

    Fizz is good for blah blah. Second paragraph also pointless.

    Sometimes it helps to Foo your Fizz. Some people like to Foo it because blah blah blah.

    You can Foo your Fizz by:
    Clicking the tiny menu at the bottom
    Choose Preferences
    Select "Foo"

    Now your Fizz is Foo and blah blah blah.

    Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.

    Pretty standard pattern. The first two or three paragraphs are pointless. Sometimes they forget to actually tell you how to do it, and ONLY have the fluff. That's really annoying.

    The "human interest" version is similar:

    How to Close a Resume Cover Letter

    Debbie Wood, a mother of two from Englewood, Colorado was driving home in her blue Mustang when she stopped for some fries. After eating them, with ketchup, she got a call saying she was fired. Blah blah blah.

    Blah blah blah about Debbie.

    Debbie worked at Poor Writing Inc for six years, starting out as an eraser. Blah blah blah.

    Debbie wrote "I'm looking forward to hearing from you" at the end of her cover letter. It worked great.

    Debbie now works at blah blah blah. She enjoys blah at her blah job blah blah blah.

    Share this on Facebook. On Twitter. On Google Plus. MySpace. Yourspace. Farmers only . Black people meet. Stupid people meet.

    Pretty much the entire useful part of the story is the fourth paragraph.

    1. Re:The fourth paragraph by Tablizer · · Score: 1

      I want my foo fizzed too, where do I sign up?

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:The fourth paragraph by mrbester · · Score: 1

      This was about fooing your fizz, not fizzing your foo. Doing the latter results in the unintentional bar side effect and you'll need to baz it back and start again.

      --
      "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
    3. Re:The fourth paragraph by tender-matser · · Score: 1

      I wish they would flag bot-written pages accordingly, so I could filter them out in searches without having to fetch them first.

      I've tried to build an interface where a flag is drawn on a map whereever there's a wikipedia article geolocated there (no matter what language it's in).

      Either with the old wikimedia query interface or SPARQL, there's no way to get rid of the flurry of bot written pages, which are simply the same ridiculously innacurate geonames data, formatted into an article just to bump up the number of non-stub pages, or to prove something (what? that some jerk is able to write a crap-flooding script? great!)

      Consider this. Worthless garbage -- complete with made-up meteo data and a dozen of references. They have no article about the great inventor but have one about a small mountain in the opposite corner of the earth (that I'm probably the only guy that had the curiosity to climb in this decade).

      Of course, I could just filter the worst offenders (eg. the cebuano and southern min wikipedia), but this garbage has started to infect other wikipedias too (eg. the swedish one).

  8. What makes a wiki valuable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is that each page may contain contributions from many sources, with each contributor selecting a topic they find particularly interesting, yet distilling it (one hopes) to a paragraph or two. Or sometimes people correct or amplify contributions made by others. Of course, this is in the "happy" case - occasionally things get bollixed up, with good or bad intentions.

  9. Try it on some famous works by Michael+Woodhams · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is just crying out to be applied to some famous texts to amuse us with what it comes up with.

    The Hunting of the Snark. Fox in Socks. We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Ulysses. 50 Shades of Grey. Titus Andronicus. Sonnet 130. Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. The Magna Carta. Genesis. Terms and Conditions for iTunes.

    --
    Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
    1. Re:Try it on some famous works by Knuckles · · Score: 1

      Personally I am looking forward to a concise rendition of Heidegger's Being and Time.

      --
      "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
    2. Re:Try it on some famous works by puddingebola · · Score: 1

      Jabberwocky also.

    3. Re:Try it on some famous works by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I did this with Microsoft Word's auto-summary feature, about ten years ago now. It was just as hilarious as you'd expect.

      For some reason Microsoft removed that feature from Word 2010. Shame.

  10. ??? RSS Feeds. :P by wolfheart111 · · Score: 1

    And then just spin your article via word AI https://wordai.com/... Oh thats what the penguin was for was for. ::) Grrrr

    --
    [($)]
  11. 4chan party time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I look forward to 4chan figuring out how to poison the database to make every article into a treatise on the correctness of Hitler and the merits of child pornography.

  12. Wikipedia is more about deleting info... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    than saving it. They are anti-information. I gave-up after I created a page for my uncle that had a platinum record and five gold records that was deleted as not being notable.

    1. Re:Wikipedia is more about deleting info... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I hear you, Wikipedia snobs are assholes

  13. exactly - far less than optimal by johnjones · · Score: 1

    most of the information within a wikipedia page is spread around on little visited websites in terrible formatting it actually takes someone who understands or wants to understand "the subject" to actually do a half decent job

    the fact it simply takes the summary of the summarizers basically makes it pointless... go back to you lisp machines "researchers"

    1. Re:exactly - far less than optimal by HiThere · · Score: 1

      It makes this particular pre-alpha version pointless. No argument there. But this particular version doesn't even handle things that could easily be handled, like capitalizing sentences. This is clear evidence that it's a pre-alpha version.

      All this tells us is that this is another area they're looking into. It give essentially no grounds for judging how well the first release will work.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  14. Will it also ban pages with citations? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It sucks to spend hours to add a page with 3+ citations only have have it deleted as "not notable."

  15. AI to create Wikipedia entries? by kenwd0elq · · Score: 1

    A Google AI could hardly do worse than a large number of Wikipedia entries.

  16. Google Trains by dunkelfalke · · Score: 2

    I didn't realise there is a Google Trains subsidiary. But even so, why does it have an AI and why would this AI edit Wikipedia?

    --
    "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  17. Done before by elgatozorbas · · Score: 1

    This guy was already doing that in 2014?

  18. My neural network is trained to by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My neural network is trained to write a summary of events that transpire in pornographic videos. It provides results that vary in success. You never know what you can do with a leaky ReLU

  19. cool. Google notes instead of Cliff notes. by WindBourne · · Score: 1

    Seriously, if this is done right, it might actually give us 'cliff notes' on businesses, their web sites, ideally, even connect the subsidiaries.
    And perhaps they will show the dots WRT family connections.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  20. Re:SJW AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    SJW SJW

    Funny how once people have put a label on something they no longer feel the need to do any thinking or listening.

  21. Another misleading clickbait headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What they have done is a far cry from 'writing'. In fact, it isn't any different than anything else these algorithms do: however quickly, they parse and compile data. Psst: that's what algorithms have always done. That is not what a brain does, and it is certainly not an 'ability' let alone 'intelligence'. Silly Valley's understanding of human consciousness and intelligence (not to mention mathematics) is so rudimentary, I really don't think we have anything to worry about. Yawn.

  22. female positive articles only? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I hope at least - or else the world may end, dark energy may overwhelm us etc

  23. never use wikipedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    wikipedia is the infected anus of the internet, and google's AI article writing is a testament to that

  24. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MOD THIS MEANINGLESS KARMA WHORING COMMENT DOWN!!!

    Christopher Dale Reimer, aka cdreimer, aka creimer, aka cashews, is a well-known toxic bachelor and serial digital pest!

    Do not allow this tiresome dullard to copy and paste his own Cryptofeces Reimerium back on here to collect karma points!

    We just went through the whole process of getting him contained at -1 like medical waste in a BFI container.

  25. creimer spam alert! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't click on his homepage link! creimer is trying to get you to subscribe automatically to his youtube channel and make money off you!

    CREIMER' SUBMISSIONS UPDATE:
    Note also that creimer is trying to regain karma by getting his submissions published as articles on /. so make sure to go to:
    https://slashdot.org/~cdreimer
    https://slashdot.org/~criss69
    https://slashdot.org/~Anonymou...
    https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
    https://slashdot.org/~ILoveFat...
    https://slashdot.org/~IHateFat...
    https://slashdot.org/~IAteFatC...
    https://slashdot.org/~ITapeFat...
    https://slashdot.org/~IApeFatC...
    https://slashdot.org/~IPrayFat...
    https://slashdot.org/~FatCashe...
    and mod down his submissions as well. The great thing is that you don't even need mod points to mod down a submission, just click on the "minus" icon!

    Yes, believe it or not, creimer owns all the above sock puppet accounts. It is a mystery why Slashdot management tolerates it!

    creimer wrote:

    I don't bother with mod points. I'm doing something much more sinister. It took ten story submissions ? I'll have to double check the number ? to move cdreimer's karma from neutral to excellent without ever being exposed to the capricious mods. Mmmmmwwwwahahahahahahaha!

    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! Creimy is posting more than 2 posts a day. Hurry! mod down otherwise /. will go to hell again!

    Note: you can mod down even if already at -1 to lower karma and to prevent lost /. users to accidentally mod up.

    creimer wrote:

    All you need to do is find a website with a permissive TOS, say, Slashdot, create a Python script to scrape your own comments, sprinkle Amazon affiliate links in various posts, and then re-post past links whenever possible. Won't be long before you start making "coffee money" each month.

    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    C.D. Reimer is a renowned Slashdot collaborator, as he puts it himself; "Because of the quality of my posts and my article submissions, I'm a highly rated commentator and moderator."

    But does anybody ever wondered what "C.D." stands for? Well, it stands for Creimy Dumpty of course!

    Creimy Dumpty sat on the wall,
    Creimy Dumpty had a great fall.
    All the king's horses
    And all the king's men
    Couldn't put Creimy Dumpty
    Together again.

    Creimy's siblings video and theme song, very realistic, especially the pants, just like Creimy's:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    With "Vice President Pence Vowing US Astronauts Will Return To the Moon", we are sure they will need miracle workers up there, here is what it would look like. Note that Creimy takes care of bringing a lot of food to the moon as depicted below:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Creimy's real pictures:
    Before the sex change:
    https://ibb.co/cc7Ddw
    After the sex change:
    https://ibb.co/gVad65

    Creimy's "enterprise-level" chair, he talks about it all the time on slashdot:

  26. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There you are spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

    You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.

    Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.

    How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????

    The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!

    You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!

    When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!

    Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!

    Bonus:
    Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:

    The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!

    So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!

    Signed:
    Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!

  27. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There you are spamming amazon and youtube affiliate links with yet another fake account, you revenue stream hogging disgusting fat sexist tube of lard, Christopher Dale Reimer!

    You can be sure I will be watching this fake account too. I know this is you because you told me you were working on your freepass 11 file server and you are so dumb that you can't even masquerade yourself properly.

    Now, I told you I was out of meds last week and you didn't even care to contact me you lazy fucker.

    How many times do I have to express the emergency of the situation??????

    The python click script you wrote for my pheromone revenue stream web site suddenly stopped to work!!!!!!

    You fucking incompetent python script writer!!!

    When it works, I get 4000+ clicks a day on my pheromone revenue stream web site but only 5 or 6 without it!!!!

    Now, it seems like you dont care and that you have abandoned me you heartless fucking pig!

    Bonus:
    Here is a story that creimer told me when convincing me what a hard life he had:

    The tree was him and the tree knot was his butt hole!

    So, his uncle packed his fat ass with lard and with his cock! Not that it makes much of a difference but anyway, there it is!

    Signed:
    Ethell, The girl that used to love you and now hates you, burn in hell where you belong you sexist pig!
    nobody$
    nobody$
    nobody$ cat creimerpostcollection
    Here are some posts from creimer's old accounts. I'll start with his love of child brides.

    If all my assets were liquidated, I would still have enough cash to buy a new car and head off to Mexico to find a chica to marry.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    You're aware that are some states in the U.S. that allow underage marriage as young as 14 years old?
    https://slashdot.org/comments....
    As for my comment, I've heard stories of engineers retiring at 50, moving to Mexico and marrying underage girls. Since I work with ex-military, the Philippines is a popular retirement spot for marrying underage girls as well. It's all about getting the most bang for your retirement dollars.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....
    That only works if you retire to Mexico, build a mansion (by local standards), marry an underage sweet thing and bequeath all your possessions to the village.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    You need to be more specific. I wrote 3,000+ comments this year.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    Nah... I just do it to piss off my trolls and make coffee money off of them.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....
    We have different priorities. You want to climb the corporate ladder. I want to own the corporate ladder.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    Your bitch licks your balls. Most people don't brag about practicing bestiality. Is there a reason why you married a dog and not a goat?
    https://slashdot.org/comments....

    My employers don't care about what my Slashdot trolls think. Now go off and lick your balls somewhere else.
    https://slashdot.org/comments....
    iPhone 6s and reduce my monthly bill from $80 to $50. As a phone and a video camera, the iPhone 6s isn't obsolete. As a Sprint customer for 20+ years, Sprint will always offer me a new iPhone if I decide to stop using the 6s as a phone in the next several years.

  28. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    creimer says he is going to post one comic con video every day in April but creimer lied to be a comic con affiliate and maybe win a t-shirt; By May, creimer will already have moved to his next get rich quick scheme!

    Proof: He always lies! He also said that he would publish books in January but he has moved to the comic con/youtube get rich quick scheme instead!

  29. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "I'm down to one copy-and-paste fetish troll looking for attention."

    Have you considered that if you stop paying attention, I might go away?

    " Let's starve it out."

    There's this perception that there's an "us". Most people know there's no "us".

    " DO NOT FEED!"

    Print that and put it on your fridge, Trigglypuff.

  30. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Chris' case is getting worse, he spends all day replying to himself as AC on /.

    The tests we ran on Chris have shown that Chris has the intelligence of an ameba:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    So, technically, he is able to conceive some kind of agenda but it will be silly or impossible to follow on a human scale.

    For example, Chris had an agenda to post anything he felt like on Slashdot which did not work well because it was based on his false beliefs that he had an infinite number of karma points as he wrote here several times.

    Several people here explained to Chris that karma maxed out at some level like 50 or so but Chris kept on insisting that his python script had confirmed that he had millions of karma points!

    Oh well, as I wrote before: "It isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody."

    For the valuable /. users that might already have read the following, please note that there is an important update.

    IMPORTANT UPDATE:
    Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education has invested money to buy Chris a new chair:
    http://www.keynamics.com/image...

    Information about Christopher Dale Reimer and autistic people:

    Autistic people have obsessions about things normal people don't care. For example, one of our autistic patient went haywire when he realized that there was a penny missing in his pocket change.

    To calm him down, one of our educator pretended to have found it on the floor and gave a penny to him.

    The autistic patient condition went even worse because he realized it wasn't the same penny!

    Chris has an obsession with budgeting every penny. He doesn't understand that most people do not budget to the penny and have a flexible amount they allow for miscellaneous items.

    I am Nancy Guerrero and I am Director of Special Education for the Santa Clara County Office of Education. We use Chris' (a.k.a. creimer,cdreimer) picture in our document because he is the hardest case we have ever had to handle:
    http://www.sccoe.org/depts/stu...

    Our artists were inspired by the low carb diet that Christopher follows scrupulously for the small lunch box and by the picture linked below for the rest. I am sure that you will notice the similarities such as the bump on the side of his chest and more:
    https://ibb.co/gVad65

    Please be easy on Christopher although, I am aware that some of our staff handling Chris post joke comments here and obvoiusly, the Santa Clara County Office of Education disapprove that behavior vehemently:
    http://ibb.co/mRVSaG

    But it isn't Chris' fault if he is the way he is. We do the best we can do with him and he is partially integrated into society. We try to cure his abnormal need for attention but he is kind of stubborn and won't listen to anybody.

    Thank You dear users,
    ---
    Nancy Guerrero
    Director
    Special Education
    Santa Clara County Office of Education

  31. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thanks Nancy,

    Your posts are always enlightening and right on topic! Keep up the good work over there at Special Education!

    Also, I have noted that Chris uses child psychology to convince his so called trolls to give up by pretending they just give him free publicity. That's adoring! ;-)

    ---
    Silvia Bunge
    Psychology Department
    University of California, Berkeley

  32. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    creimer confuses his Slashdot signature with an advertisement animated gif.

    --
    Balena!

  33. Hasbara by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Does this mean that all of those nonsensical "hasbara holocaust" propaganda articles will be over-written with some truthful, factual articles and give some credibility back to Wikipedia?

  34. Re:Meh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You don't understand. The dude could win a t-shirt! That would cost like $6 at a Walmart!

    Not only that, but it has geek cred! He doesn't actually have anybody that would be impressed by an nerd expo shirt, but like maybe if he waddled down the street he would get a quick flash of recognition from some other nerdy guy?

    It's shit like that which makes it all worthwhile.

  35. It's Cuil all over again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfdEdE96En0

  36. Stop worrying about AIs... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The AI book that everyone should get is available for pre-order. "Artificial Intelligence For Dummies" by John Paul Mueller and Luca Massaron.