I would also like to point out, though I don't think you deserve the knowledge, that 80% of novel readers are women. I read my books mostly in cafes and public spaces where my books connect me to women.
Go outside yourself and try taking your television to a cafe and see how well that works for you.
It's not the same thing at all. You see, you buy books which means that they tend to be far less influnced by consumerism, whereas every second of television is focused on getting you to buy something.
The smartest people I know, don't own televisions (one of which has a Nobel Prize)...in fact my girlfriend who is actually a television producer watches near zero televison (sometimes she's forced to), and I myself don't own one and will never own one. I do enjoy however watching DVDs on my laptop cuddling in bed.
(Summer 2003)...From Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters, subtitled: "Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."
Invited contributors include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, Jack Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself (pdf copy of chapter).
I remmeber going to the university science library when I was 14 to try to find out how to write a program to generate random numbers...found a big yellow book about pseudo-random number generators and thought, no, I want a real random number generator...of course I opened the book and discovered that it is impossible inside a deterministic system...you have to stick an antenna into an external universe...then I thought where the fuck did the universe get noise? Why isn't the universe one big symmetric crystal?
Now I sit here looking at a 2 billion year-old hypernova and no one here can answer this question (There are at least 5 cosmoligists within spitting distance of me right now)...
Got on a plane and went to Chile where I knew they were building the largest optical telescope in the world. I then applied to become a telescope instruments operator... they gave me the job because I had 15 years of software development experience and I spoke fluent English (which is what they use at the observatory)...
Coincidently, my contract is up in June, and I'm not renewing because after six years in South America operating the telescope and writing, it's just time to come back... So, if you're a smart geek, you can have my job. Hell, you don't even have to wait until June as there is a position open now.
I have been afraid of this for quite some time. And as I said in my/. interview of July 2000 I think the answer has always been to serve some ads. Ads like those here on/. would be fine by me and would keep us from losing this valuable project.
My guess is that it would be related to the development of prefrontal cortex...RAM...unhardwired space where the base symbolic connections that are the foundation of language can swim around until they are in the right configuration...
As Richard knows, I completely disagree with this. I think you can approximate anything with symbolic systems... with a huge amount of work, but with genetically evolved neural networks, I think you can go beyond approximation and actually copy intelligence.
Richard and I both have chapter in a forthcoming book about the Turing Test--he says we're chatbots, and I say we're hyperspace.
I believe we can train a neural network to re-create a continuous human semantic-affective hyperspace, where every proposition (Mindpixel) is a point and we know the truth of any particular proposition by interpolating the truth of its hyperspatial neighbors... the same goes for emotion... any feeling you have can be represented spatially with three dimensions--"Pleasure-displeasure" distinguishes the positive-negative affective quality of emotional states, "arousal-nonarousal" refers to a combination of physical activity and mental alertness, and "dominance-submissiveness" is defined in terms of control versus lack of control.
Now, if we can train something to classify unknown propositions in this human hyperspace as a human does, then we can do a brute force search for an artificial thought and the artificial feeling to go with it by just firing billions of random strings at it until it finds a random string that no one has ever seen before, but that has a non-random truth value.
Of course, I may be completely full of shit, but like Richard says, the data is still invaluable--so go enter some mindpixels! Whatever A. I. the future brings, it will have Mindpixels in it.
BTW: I don't think it is a coincidence that human short term memory is about seven chunks (miller) and that the surface area of a hypersphere peaks at 7.25695... do you?
Yes. Which is why you still need something large on the ground like OWL to do the initial target selections... which is ironic because that's the reverse of how the Hubble/VLT work together today.
Today the Hubble acts as a finder scope and the VLT as a spectrometer. The Hubble's small mirror, and the fact that it is in space make it a poor spectrometer for distant or faint objects. The reason for this (other than the small primary) is that after about 20 minutes exposure in space, the CCD becomes saturated with cosmic rays. On the ground, the atmosphere filters the cosmics, allowing for much longer exposures than are possible in space.
The plan I'm working now calls for each of the 1600 OWL primary mirror segments to be financed by different visionary individuals and corporations. I'm bugging all my billionaire friends to each sponsor a segment at about $625,000 per segemnt, it's cheap and useful immortality.
As well, 62,500 people could get together (a city perhaps) and each contribute $10 to sponsor a community segement...
This fractional financing model is easier and better than trying to convince a single entity such as a govenemnt to pay the whle $1 billion.
Forthcoming Book: The Turing Test Source Book
on
Looking At Turing
·
· Score: 2
I was recently asked to provide a chapter for this forthcoming book from Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters... Looking at the book proposal, I can see it's going to be THE Turing Test Source Book! It's subtitled: "Philospohical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."
It will include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, JAck Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself.
I think this should be called the St. Peter Effect... you see, cuz when we go to heaven, St. Peter will Google us, and pull back everything we have ever thought, said or did - ranked by relevance or date... Just be glad that mere mortals are limited to 20 years of newsgroup postings!
BTW: If you search on my name and find stuff about LSD, it was another Chris McKinstry.
One last point: How the hell do you code something when you don't even know how it works? And can anybody tell me in precise, painstaking detail how sentience works? Well enough to program it?
The standard way to diplicate something you don't understand is called reverse engineering--or behaviorism depending on if you're an engineer or a psychologist. Our best "automated behaviorist" is what is known as a tomographic scanner--you know those medical machines you stick your head in if you want to see what's inside...
Consider: It took more than 4 billion years and a great many improbable events for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to appear on the Earth. It is unlikely that this event could ever occur independently again. However, a skilled artist could copy the Mona Lisa in a few months, a camera in a fraction of a second, and a computer could make millions of copies in moments. Once something exists (which is always the hardest part), only two things are required to duplicate it; A medium of sufficient complexity to capture the essential complexity of the original, and a feedback echanism that minimizes the differences between the copy being made and the original.
(It is conceded that it would be very difficult to make an 'exact' molecular duplicate of the Mona Lisa, however in this case the essential complexity to be copied is the two dimensional visual image made on the human retina by the painting.)
It was not long ago that the process of non-destructively imaging the inside of the human body was thought to be impossible. Now millions of such images are created every year using a host of techniques including CAT,
MRI, PET, SPECT, etc. The tomographic process with which all these types of images are created provides us with a model for imaging and duplicating the common awareness of self and environment we like to call human consciousness.
In creating a CAT scan image, many x-ray samples are taken from many different vantage points. The resultant data is then statistically correlated, essentially extracting the common pattern that could have 'caused' each individual sample, without contradicting any other individual sample. For example, one x-ray sample of some
object yielding an intensity of X would by itself indicate it was 'caused' by an
object with a uniform x-ray density of X. Taking additional samples from additional vantage points, yields more information about the internal structure of the object; with each additional sample improving the overall
quality of the entire image being built by a very small amount. Millions of these samples yield the
near perfect tomographic images of the internal structure of people and objects so common today.
Imagine a simple database with millions of 'stimulus/response' pairs; where each stimulus would be a statement of consensus fact, such as 'The day time sky is usually blue.', and where each response could only be 'true' or
'false'. Each of these pairs is equivalent tomographic sample. As with a CAT scan, one sample will not tell us anything of use, nor will ten, nor will ten thousand. Millions however will yield a high resolution binary tomographic 'image' of the common cause of all the individual samples; an image of human consciousness, which could be used to project a true artificial intelligence into a computer. Specifically, the database of millions of response pairs could be used as a training set for a statistical correlation system such as a neural net. An artificial intelligence derived from a binary tomographic image feedback process would be indistinguishable from a human being when asked questions that can be answered in a binary fashion. Such an entity could
communicate awareness of self and environment and would thus qualify as being conscious.
To train a system to behave like a human in this fashion would require a database of a very large number of different stimuli to which we knew the average human response... I've just happen to have one... it's almost 450,000 items hand coded by more than 45,000 different people (you might have read about it in this month's Wired Magazine)
450,000 isn't enough. Which is why I work on it every day.
Hmmm... kids these days... try reading Stanislaw Lem, specifically "The Cyberiad"... You'll recognize the "flavor" that you might have thought as uniquely Douglas Adams... Lem did it better, smarter and first.
Love and Tensor Algebra
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
Slashdot Mirror
Extremely well said, and in my opinion, completely correct.
- Does the 'sports' bar have a PVR?
- What would happen if someone brought a book?
- Do the 'chicks' smoke cigars too?
Placement of modifier was intentional.
I would also like to point out, though I don't think you deserve the knowledge, that 80% of novel readers are women. I read my books mostly in cafes and public spaces where my books connect me to women.
Go outside yourself and try taking your television to a cafe and see how well that works for you.
It's not the same thing at all. You see, you buy books which means that they tend to be far less influnced by consumerism, whereas every second of television is focused on getting you to buy something.
The smartest people I know, don't own televisions (one of which has a Nobel Prize)...in fact my girlfriend who is actually a television producer watches near zero televison (sometimes she's forced to), and I myself don't own one and will never own one. I do enjoy however watching DVDs on my laptop cuddling in bed.
Did you know, only 20% of the male population reads novels after 13? This figure actually predates PVRs...I don't think it will be improving...
What kind of question is that? Are you trying to get yourself shot in the head or something?
Someone has to bath them.
(Summer 2003)...From Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters, subtitled: "Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."
Invited contributors include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, Jack Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself (pdf copy of chapter).
I remmeber going to the university science library when I was 14 to try to find out how to write a program to generate random numbers...found a big yellow book about pseudo-random number generators and thought, no, I want a real random number generator...of course I opened the book and discovered that it is impossible inside a deterministic system...you have to stick an antenna into an external universe...then I thought where the fuck did the universe get noise? Why isn't the universe one big symmetric crystal?
Now I sit here looking at a 2 billion year-old hypernova and no one here can answer this question (There are at least 5 cosmoligists within spitting distance of me right now)...
Someone should ask Wolfram how the universe generates random numbers...
Ah, that's field, not filed.
I've been staring at this thing for three days now. It's in a filed crowed with galaxies of every shape.
/. blog a few days ago.
I wrote about it in my
what's an xbox?
Here's what I did...
Got on a plane and went to Chile where I knew they were building the largest optical telescope in the world. I then applied to become a telescope instruments operator... they gave me the job because I had 15 years of software development experience and I spoke fluent English (which is what they use at the observatory)...
Coincidently, my contract is up in June, and I'm not renewing because after six years in South America operating the telescope and writing, it's just time to come back... So, if you're a smart geek, you can have my job. Hell, you don't even have to wait until June as there is a position open now.
I have been afraid of this for quite some time. And as I said in my /. interview of July 2000 I think the answer has always been to serve some ads. Ads like those here on /. would be fine by me and would keep us from losing this valuable project.
My guess is that it would be related to the development of prefrontal cortex...RAM...unhardwired space where the base symbolic connections that are the foundation of language can swim around until they are in the right configuration...
As Richard knows, I completely disagree with this. I think you can approximate anything with symbolic systems... with a huge amount of work, but with genetically evolved neural networks, I think you can go beyond approximation and actually copy intelligence.
Richard and I both have chapter in a forthcoming book about the Turing Test--he says we're chatbots, and I say we're hyperspace.
I believe we can train a neural network to re-create a continuous human semantic-affective hyperspace, where every proposition (Mindpixel) is a point and we know the truth of any particular proposition by interpolating the truth of its hyperspatial neighbors... the same goes for emotion... any feeling you have can be represented spatially with three dimensions--"Pleasure-displeasure" distinguishes the positive-negative affective quality of
emotional states, "arousal-nonarousal" refers to a combination of physical activity and mental alertness, and "dominance-submissiveness" is defined in terms of control versus lack of control.
Now, if we can train something to classify unknown propositions in this human hyperspace as a human does, then we can do a brute force search for an artificial thought and the artificial feeling to go with it by just firing billions of random strings at it until it finds a random string that no one has ever seen before, but that has a non-random truth value.
Of course, I may be completely full of shit, but like Richard says, the data is still invaluable--so go enter some mindpixels! Whatever A. I. the future brings, it will have Mindpixels in it.
BTW: I don't think it is a coincidence that human short term memory is about seven chunks (miller) and that the surface area of a hypersphere peaks at 7.25695... do you?
Yes. Which is why you still need something large on the ground like OWL to do the initial target selections... which is ironic because that's the reverse of how the Hubble/VLT work together today.
Today the Hubble acts as a finder scope and the VLT as a spectrometer. The Hubble's small mirror, and the fact that it is in space make it a poor spectrometer for distant or faint objects. The reason for this (other than the small primary) is that after about 20 minutes exposure in space, the CCD becomes saturated with cosmic rays. On the ground, the atmosphere filters the cosmics, allowing for much longer exposures than are possible in space.
Money is a not a simple issue.
The plan I'm working now calls for each of the 1600 OWL primary mirror segments to be financed by different visionary individuals and corporations. I'm bugging all my billionaire friends to each sponsor a segment at about $625,000 per segemnt, it's cheap and useful immortality.
As well, 62,500 people could get together (a city perhaps) and each contribute $10 to sponsor a community segement...
This fractional financing model is easier and better than trying to convince a single entity such as a govenemnt to pay the whle $1 billion.
I was recently asked to provide a chapter for this forthcoming book from Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters... Looking at the book proposal, I can see it's going to be THE Turing Test Source Book! It's subtitled: "Philospohical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."
It will include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, JAck Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself.
I think this should be called the St. Peter Effect... you see, cuz when we go to heaven, St. Peter will Google us, and pull back everything we have ever thought, said or did - ranked by relevance or date... Just be glad that mere mortals are limited to 20 years of newsgroup postings!
BTW: If you search on my name and find stuff about LSD, it was another Chris McKinstry.
One last point: How the hell do you code something when you don't even know how it works? And can anybody tell me in precise, painstaking detail how sentience works? Well enough to program it?
The standard way to diplicate something you don't understand is called reverse engineering--or behaviorism depending on if you're an engineer or a psychologist. Our best "automated behaviorist" is what is known as a tomographic scanner--you know those medical machines you stick your head in if you want to see what's inside...
Consider: It took more than 4 billion years and a great many improbable events for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to appear on the Earth. It is unlikely that this event could ever occur independently again. However, a skilled artist could copy the Mona Lisa in a few months, a camera in a fraction of a second, and a computer could make millions of copies in moments. Once something exists (which is always the hardest part), only two things are required to duplicate it; A medium of sufficient complexity to capture the essential complexity of the original, and a feedback echanism that minimizes the differences between the copy being made and the original. (It is conceded that it would be very difficult to make an 'exact' molecular duplicate of the Mona Lisa, however in this case the essential complexity to be copied is the two dimensional visual image made on the human retina by the painting.)
It was not long ago that the process of non-destructively imaging the inside of the human body was thought to be impossible. Now millions of such images are created every year using a host of techniques including CAT, MRI, PET, SPECT, etc. The tomographic process with which all these types of images are created provides us with a model for imaging and duplicating the common awareness of self and environment we like to call human consciousness.
In creating a CAT scan image, many x-ray samples are taken from many different vantage points. The resultant data is then statistically correlated, essentially extracting the common pattern that could have 'caused' each individual sample, without contradicting any other individual sample. For example, one x-ray sample of some object yielding an intensity of X would by itself indicate it was 'caused' by an object with a uniform x-ray density of X. Taking additional samples from additional vantage points, yields more information about the internal structure of the object; with each additional sample improving the overall quality of the entire image being built by a very small amount. Millions of these samples yield the near perfect tomographic images of the internal structure of people and objects so common today.
Imagine a simple database with millions of 'stimulus/response' pairs; where each stimulus would be a statement of consensus fact, such as 'The day time sky is usually blue.', and where each response could only be 'true' or 'false'. Each of these pairs is equivalent tomographic sample. As with a CAT scan, one sample will not tell us anything of use, nor will ten, nor will ten thousand. Millions however will yield a high resolution binary tomographic 'image' of the common cause of all the individual samples; an image of human consciousness, which could be used to project a true artificial intelligence into a computer. Specifically, the database of millions of response pairs could be used as a training set for a statistical correlation system such as a neural net. An artificial intelligence derived from a binary tomographic image feedback process would be indistinguishable from a human being when asked questions that can be answered in a binary fashion. Such an entity could communicate awareness of self and environment and would thus qualify as being conscious.
To train a system to behave like a human in this fashion would require a database of a very large number of different stimuli to which we knew the average human response... I've just happen to have one... it's almost 450,000 items hand coded by more than 45,000 different people (you might have read about it in this month's Wired Magazine)
450,000 isn't enough. Which is why I work on it every day.
I could use help!
Mindpixel Digitial Mind Modeling Project
Hmmm... kids these days... try reading Stanislaw Lem, specifically "The Cyberiad"... You'll recognize the "flavor" that you might have thought as uniquely Douglas Adams... Lem did it better, smarter and first.
Love and Tensor Algebra
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!