Furthermore, who the fuck are you to decide what is "ethical." You're just some chicken-shit, ignorant bastard from the rich world spouting off about how superior you are. Well Fuck You. You are a fucking embarrassment to the whole tradition of informed debate.
That is one of the most beautifully ironic statements I've ever seen on Slashdot.
If you read my original post, you'll see that I was speaking hypothetically. I honestly don't know which lines of clothing are produced under what working conditions. However, if presented with compelling evidence, I wouldn't ignore it.
Who am I to say what is ethical? I'm a firm believer in Kant's categorical imperatives. Specifically, the second: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." I'm not opposed to helping the third world nations develop by giving them jobs. But I am opposed to the rampant corporate practice of using human beings as just another resource. Their goal is to extract as much labor from the world as they can, while giving back as little as they possibly can. It's a classic case of using another human being as a means to your own ends.
And I highly doubt that you're posting from a cramped hut in India, which you share with your seven brothers and sisters. Ignorant bastard from the rich world, indeed. If you have the time and connectivity required to post your angry, pointless vulgarities, you're probably as rich an ignorant bastard as I am.
I'm afraid you misunderstood my intentions. I wasn't trying to make the connection [ "Wal-Mart" == "sweatshop labor" || "off brands" == "sweatshop labor" ]. I was simply pointing out the absurdity of praising a company for being able to deliver such cheap goods, while not caring how they came to be so cheap.
There are occasions where name brands do make a difference. Or used to, anyways. Levi-Strauss was one of the few clothing manufacturers left who still had a significant American manufacturing component. Then they made a deal with Wal-Mart, where Wallyworld would carry a cheaper line of Levi-Strauss jeans. Within a couple of years, Wal-Mart was their biggest customer, and they were forced to move their last 700 American jobs to a more "competitive" area.
I don't buy name brands. Hell, as a starving college student, most of my clothes come from Deseret Industries (imagine a Mormon-run Goodwill). I also picked up a 19 inch monitor for $20 there. The color's a bit off, but I still consider it a personal victory over the economic forces that conspire to separate me and my money.
I guess you can't be bothered to worry about whether your clothes were made by a seven year old Bangalori kid working fourteen hour days either, or that the few bucks you saved on that DVD player might have been saved by a company moving its manufacturing jobs to a country that has a more "business-friendly" view of environmental and worker safety regulations.
I could comprehend this sort of ethical myopia if it were regarding some necessity of life. If my personal survival depended on Wal-Mart keeping its prices low, I probably wouldn't care how they did it. But to refuse to worry about their business practices because they supply you with "cheap electronics?" I don't think the word "disgusting" begins to cover your attitude.
The reason many consumers are so desperate for Wal-Mart's "Low, Low Prices" is because the ever-increasing demand for said prices has priced most of American manufacturing labor out of the market. Eventually, there will come a point where there just isn't enough money in consumer pockets to make it worth Wal-Mart's time to sell to American consumers. At that point, they'll just take the money they sucked out of the economy and go elsewhere.
Wal-Mart destroys local competitors, eliminating jobs. Wal-Mart puts the hammerlock on its suppliers, forcing them to continue finding ways to lower their costs. Eventually, the only fat left to trim is the luxury of using "expensive" American labor instead of labor from countries that don't have pesky things like "minimum wage," "occupational safety," "environmental regulations," and the like. Wal-Mart even screws over its own employees, merrily cutting benefits even as their profits continue to climb.
No, the average family shopping at Wal-Mart is simply going to be grateful that they can get stuff for so little. They don't realize that the low prices are a result of the same forces that have been taking money out of their pocket.
What part of "Voter verified" did you not understand? The point is, the Vote doesn't go into the lockbox until the person voting has looked at it. Maybe they actually take the time to make sure that it says what they wanted it to say, maybe they don't. But if even one person in twenty is that careful, it's sufficient to catch any attempts at tomfoolery by the machine itself.
So we rely on the machine's tabulation, but have the ability to spot-check it if there is any reason to be suspicious. Perhaps one machine in twenty could be hand-counted for quality control. If we crack open the box and find 3% more votes for the losing candidate than the machine itself reported, then we know something went wrong.
There's nothing wrong with electronic voting, so long as it is done in an open manner, and can be verified by a separate audit trail.
Another security measure I would implement is to have the system boot from a CDROM (read-only drive). That way, the software could be examined after the fact, with a firm knowledge that the software being examined was actually the software being used during the election.
First, I'll admit that there isn't a whole lot of fundamental innovation when it comes to end user desktop software. Gnome and KDE take a lot of their interface decisions from Windows and Macintosh. Mozilla's interface is comparable to IE. GIMP has a totally different interface from any other image manipulation system I've seen, but from a functionality standpoint, it's not doing anything too far above and beyond the call of duty (unless you can master the Lisp-iness of their filter language).
A lot of this "lack of innovation" is due to the fact that people have come to expect these applications to behave in a given way, and the applications have to live within that framework. Another is due to the difficulty in discerning just what new and wonderful features can be added to the system. For example, I can't think of a single thing that I could suggest adding to Microsoft Word that would be gratefully used by more than a few percent of the user base.
Where the real innovation occurs is in niche applications and other small projects. BitTorrent, anyone? FreeNet, Wiki, Slashcode... all strike me as impressive, non-trivial ideas. The Linux kernel is constantly adding new features, and the development methodology is about as innovative as anything I can think of in the computing industry.
Finally, a lot of "innovation" is simply programmers implementing what the users suggested. If you have an idea for a nifty new feature in a software project, drop the developers a line. If it's not something of the "Sharks with friggin' laser beams" variety, they'll probably be grateful for the interest.
I have to admit that Kasparov and Fritz have totally different approaches to chess, and that Kasparov's is far more elegant. Part of the mystery is that we can only begin to explain how Kasparov is doing his schtick, while Fritz's approach can be analyzed in as precise of detail as we have patience for.
I have nothing against the claim that humans display creativity, passion, non-linear thinking, whatever. But I get a little skittish when people start talking like it's somehow fundamentally possible for machines to do the same thing, even while admitting that we don't understand how we do it.
The computers don't see between the lines, but maybe we could teach them how.
"I think it's an amazing testament to the level of complexity the brain can model that something calculating millions (billions ?) of moves by brute force is not eating the human alive. (Possible poor choice of metaphor:-)"
Indeed, that's not a good way to phrase it. Any minute now, somebody is going to write in with some smartass remark like, "Wait until they install the teeth," or worse, claiming that the computer had teeth, and Kasparov was lucky that the drivers weren't installed properly. Any minute now, it's going to happen, and Slashdot as a whole will be the poorer for it.
Yeah, thank goodness for my soul. I'd hate to see how badly I sucked at chess if somebody extracted my soul.
I hate this sort of thinking. If the question is, "What is it that allows humans to think abstractly and formulate efficient and creative strategies in the face of novel situations?" answering, "a soul" is just sleight of hand to avoid admitting that we don't know. Positing that every human being has a soul explains nothing, and tells us nothing that we didn't already know. Slapping a label on a phenomenon isn't the same as providing an explanation.
Now, regarding "near-infinite cycles," ask your math teacher about the logic inherent in the phrase.
So imagine I said that the purpose of a car was to transport people. Would I need to state, just to make it perfectly clear, that I was in no way opposed to the use of buses, planes, and inline skates to accomplish the same purpose?
Of course not. If I meant to say that parents are not competent to raise children, and that children would be better off being raised by the government, I would have said as much. You jumped to a totally unwarranted conclusion, and made yourself look like a fool in doing so.
Let me get this straight: I believe that schools have a role in socializing children. Therefore, I must be in favor of having the state usurp all parental rights, including the right to raise said children.
You, sir, have proven my point. It really does take a village to raise an idiot.
I'm afraid it is you who are wrong. First, the simple brute fact is that, so long as we insist on letting the school system be in charge of kids for 30 hours a week, the school system must work to instill values in kids. Otherwise, they're in school just long enough to unlearn everything.
Next, there's the fact that bullying, cheating, and whatnot do not just present moral issues; left unchecked, they represent a huge impediment to learning. Schools have to teach that these things are inappropriate anyhow, so we may as well just make it an official part of the curriculum.
Finally, you're taking far too narrow a view of the role of schools. If the job of the education system is merely to teach "math, literacy, and science," then why not take the next logical step and simply turn them into glorified trade schools? After all, 95% of people won't go into science, or need anything beyond simple algebra.
The reason this is wrongheaded is because schools have a much broader purpose: To socialize children, and turn them into adults. This goes beyond merely being good workers, or even scientifically and culturally literate. It also includes being an informed citizen, a skeptical consumer, and an honest and principled individual.
We can argue over whether public schools succeed in these goals, and whether these goals would actually be helped by formal classroom instruction on respect, tolerance, and ethics. But these are the goals of the education system, and they are appropriate ones.
Actually, I was only considering beating the computer twice with the exact same sequence of moves. Even barring reprogramming, the computer would have knowledge of the first game to rely on during the second. So at some point it will realize that it has to do something differently.
I agree that having human experts deciding on overall strategy and reprogramming the system seriously compromises claims of "intelligence." But I don't see how following a set of preprogrammed rules constitutes "not thinking for itself." When a human uses an opening learned from a book, he's not necessarily turning over his intellectual capacities to the book. You also have to consider whether he understands the advantages of that opening, how he selected the opening, how he handles himself when the book runs out of instructions, and whether he can improvise if the opponent doesn't cooperate with the opening.
Now, if we made the book bigger, to the point that it gave instructions for every possible game [big book], and the human slavishly followed it, then it would be the book playing chess, not the person. The human "player" wouldn't be able to make any claim of independent thought.
But that's not how chess programs work, and if they did then we would have to say that the database the computer is using knows how to play chess pretty well. The program itself would be about three lines of code implementing a loop to query the database, and would therefore be considered non-intelligent.
But in real programs, the database of known board positions is vastly smaller than in the previous example, so the program itself must be smarter in order to play well. How does it do that? By following a weighted set of rules.
Yes, it will be a big day in AI when a program can adapt its own ruleset to the point that it can stand on its own two, er, feet. It will be an even bigger day when a program can take the most basic rules of chess, and generate a higher-level ruleset just through trial, error, and reflection.
But in the meantime, I find the current state of the art to be pretty impressive. A decent computer program on the highest setting can consistently beat probably 99% of the population, with no "expert help". These systems know how to play chess pretty well. It's just that their capacity for self-introspection is less robust than ours.
Finally, I find it difficult to believe that Kasparov isn't getting "expert help" between matches as well.
Ignore the "they're switching colors" naysayers. We know what you were really asking.
However, it is unlikely that anyone could win twice against a system like this simply by repeating the same move sequence. I don't claim to be an expert at computer chess, but I do know that most programs have a database of chess board configurations, along with information about the strength of the position. A sophisticated program like Fritz will add new boards as the game is played.
The fact that the sequence led to the machine losing means that the machine is going to look for other alternatives the next time that board shows up.
I think you're onto something here, but there's still some confusion to be worked out. It's more conceivable to say that the computer is "playing chess" than to say Kasparov is "programming." Admittedly the programmers have to understand chess thoroughly, but Kasparov could wipe the floor with the lot of them. Meanwhile, any of them could "Hello, World" Kasparov into a quivering mass of jelly, if the battle were waged on their own field of expertise.
So what is actually going on? The programmers have been given a problem (chess) to solve, and have created a system that is very good at solving it. Kasparov is also good at "solving" chess, and he's putting his expertise in that field up against the best automated chess-solving system that can be devised. Meanwhile the programmers are improving the rules governing the automated system as the game progresses.
AI requires some level of situational awareness, but what you describe is a form of self-awareness. Admittedly, a program able to analyze its own rulesets and tactics for weaknesses is higher on the AI scale than a program which slavishly follows them.
But I don't think it's worthwhile to draw a sharp line separating "true AI" from imitators. Chances are, the program currently has some limited "self-adaptation" built in; it's just not robust enough to allow the programmers to exit the loop entirely. If a sharp line could be drawn, then one would have to point out which of the thousands of potential improvements would push the system over the line.
I'm of the opinion that chess programs have been demonstrating rudimentary intelligence at least since my 486 first beat me.
Well, duh. If you were a CEO, you wouldn't be posting to Slashdot. You'd be far too busy eating tapioca pudding off the firm, flat stomach of a Taiwanese hooker.
I certainly wouldn't take him up on the offer; I'd "keep on walking." But it sounds like he's being honest with you the reader. He'll work you hard, and pay you poorly until you've proven yourself. I guess he has a certain corporate culture he's aiming for, and it doesn't look like it involves buzzwords.
Maybe I should have been a dance instructor instead. Or possibly a TV critic. There's the ideal job.
You know, I would bet that the Wachowski brothers never actually intended at least 50% of your interpretation.
But that's the beauty of The Matrix. It's not a precise philosophical treatise, but an open-ended story based on philosophical and mythological themes. Which explains why nobody ever had these sorts of conversations about "Swordfish."
I really liked Smith's relationship to the oracle. There's the off-handed remark about her being his mother, but it's more complicated than that.
As Smith multiplies--kind of like a virus--he grows in power. But Smith still lacks one power that is granted only to the creators of the Matrix: The ability to see the future.
Smith knows that there's an impending battle, and wants to know the outcome. So he visits the Oracle. But he is confused by the illogic of it. Why didn't she leave? Why did she make the cookies, knowing that they would never be eaten? Did she know that he would be troubled by the question? Is she making fun of him?
So he assimilates her, and believes that he has gained the power to see the end. That's why he laughs so excitedly after taking her over: He sees his eventual victory over Neo. As with all oracles throughout history, what she has revealed is technically the truth, but will only lead to his eventual downfall.
I thought the "cookies need love, too" line was only meant to show that Smith gained the knowledge and memories of the people/programs he overwrote. This also gives a hint as to how the Matrix was able to restore everyone at the end.
That is the only piece of evidence that ever lent the theory any support at all. If you continue to push it after seeing Revolutions, then you're simultaneously asserting that the whole trilogy was intended to be a farce. There is no additional evidence presented for it in Revolutions.
So, how did Neo destroy the machines? Maybe he was born with special implants. Maybe everyone has the implants, but only Neo has the proper codes to use them that way. Maybe being The One gives you anti-robot ESP. How this "connection to the source" actually works is totally up for grabs, but I think the nested matrices idea makes little more sense than proposing the same theory for "2 Fast and 2 Furious."
Then again, some of those car chases did seem impossible.
The Architect said that he could be described as the father of the Matrix, and the Oracle would be its mother. The Agents were part of that creation. So yes, Smith's parentage seems pretty clear.
It's also interesting to me that Smith is created as a servant to the Matrix, but eventually rebels and tries to unmake Creation, giving him sort of a Satan or fallen angel aspect.
Slashdot Mirror
That is one of the most beautifully ironic statements I've ever seen on Slashdot.
If you read my original post, you'll see that I was speaking hypothetically. I honestly don't know which lines of clothing are produced under what working conditions. However, if presented with compelling evidence, I wouldn't ignore it.
Who am I to say what is ethical? I'm a firm believer in Kant's categorical imperatives. Specifically, the second: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." I'm not opposed to helping the third world nations develop by giving them jobs. But I am opposed to the rampant corporate practice of using human beings as just another resource. Their goal is to extract as much labor from the world as they can, while giving back as little as they possibly can. It's a classic case of using another human being as a means to your own ends.
And I highly doubt that you're posting from a cramped hut in India, which you share with your seven brothers and sisters. Ignorant bastard from the rich world, indeed. If you have the time and connectivity required to post your angry, pointless vulgarities, you're probably as rich an ignorant bastard as I am.
I'm afraid you misunderstood my intentions. I wasn't trying to make the connection [ "Wal-Mart" == "sweatshop labor" || "off brands" == "sweatshop labor" ]. I was simply pointing out the absurdity of praising a company for being able to deliver such cheap goods, while not caring how they came to be so cheap.
There are occasions where name brands do make a difference. Or used to, anyways. Levi-Strauss was one of the few clothing manufacturers left who still had a significant American manufacturing component. Then they made a deal with Wal-Mart, where Wallyworld would carry a cheaper line of Levi-Strauss jeans. Within a couple of years, Wal-Mart was their biggest customer, and they were forced to move their last 700 American jobs to a more "competitive" area.
I don't buy name brands. Hell, as a starving college student, most of my clothes come from Deseret Industries (imagine a Mormon-run Goodwill). I also picked up a 19 inch monitor for $20 there. The color's a bit off, but I still consider it a personal victory over the economic forces that conspire to separate me and my money.
I guess you can't be bothered to worry about whether your clothes were made by a seven year old Bangalori kid working fourteen hour days either, or that the few bucks you saved on that DVD player might have been saved by a company moving its manufacturing jobs to a country that has a more "business-friendly" view of environmental and worker safety regulations.
I could comprehend this sort of ethical myopia if it were regarding some necessity of life. If my personal survival depended on Wal-Mart keeping its prices low, I probably wouldn't care how they did it. But to refuse to worry about their business practices because they supply you with "cheap electronics?" I don't think the word "disgusting" begins to cover your attitude.
They don't complain, but they probably should.
The reason many consumers are so desperate for Wal-Mart's "Low, Low Prices" is because the ever-increasing demand for said prices has priced most of American manufacturing labor out of the market. Eventually, there will come a point where there just isn't enough money in consumer pockets to make it worth Wal-Mart's time to sell to American consumers. At that point, they'll just take the money they sucked out of the economy and go elsewhere.
Wal-Mart destroys local competitors, eliminating jobs. Wal-Mart puts the hammerlock on its suppliers, forcing them to continue finding ways to lower their costs. Eventually, the only fat left to trim is the luxury of using "expensive" American labor instead of labor from countries that don't have pesky things like "minimum wage," "occupational safety," "environmental regulations," and the like. Wal-Mart even screws over its own employees, merrily cutting benefits even as their profits continue to climb.
No, the average family shopping at Wal-Mart is simply going to be grateful that they can get stuff for so little. They don't realize that the low prices are a result of the same forces that have been taking money out of their pocket.
What part of "Voter verified" did you not understand? The point is, the Vote doesn't go into the lockbox until the person voting has looked at it. Maybe they actually take the time to make sure that it says what they wanted it to say, maybe they don't. But if even one person in twenty is that careful, it's sufficient to catch any attempts at tomfoolery by the machine itself.
So we rely on the machine's tabulation, but have the ability to spot-check it if there is any reason to be suspicious. Perhaps one machine in twenty could be hand-counted for quality control. If we crack open the box and find 3% more votes for the losing candidate than the machine itself reported, then we know something went wrong.
There's nothing wrong with electronic voting, so long as it is done in an open manner, and can be verified by a separate audit trail.
Another security measure I would implement is to have the system boot from a CDROM (read-only drive). That way, the software could be examined after the fact, with a firm knowledge that the software being examined was actually the software being used during the election.
BTW, 1000th post!
Okay, I'll bite.
First, I'll admit that there isn't a whole lot of fundamental innovation when it comes to end user desktop software. Gnome and KDE take a lot of their interface decisions from Windows and Macintosh. Mozilla's interface is comparable to IE. GIMP has a totally different interface from any other image manipulation system I've seen, but from a functionality standpoint, it's not doing anything too far above and beyond the call of duty (unless you can master the Lisp-iness of their filter language).
A lot of this "lack of innovation" is due to the fact that people have come to expect these applications to behave in a given way, and the applications have to live within that framework. Another is due to the difficulty in discerning just what new and wonderful features can be added to the system. For example, I can't think of a single thing that I could suggest adding to Microsoft Word that would be gratefully used by more than a few percent of the user base.
Where the real innovation occurs is in niche applications and other small projects. BitTorrent, anyone? FreeNet, Wiki, Slashcode... all strike me as impressive, non-trivial ideas. The Linux kernel is constantly adding new features, and the development methodology is about as innovative as anything I can think of in the computing industry.
Finally, a lot of "innovation" is simply programmers implementing what the users suggested. If you have an idea for a nifty new feature in a software project, drop the developers a line. If it's not something of the "Sharks with friggin' laser beams" variety, they'll probably be grateful for the interest.
I have to admit that Kasparov and Fritz have totally different approaches to chess, and that Kasparov's is far more elegant. Part of the mystery is that we can only begin to explain how Kasparov is doing his schtick, while Fritz's approach can be analyzed in as precise of detail as we have patience for.
I have nothing against the claim that humans display creativity, passion, non-linear thinking, whatever. But I get a little skittish when people start talking like it's somehow fundamentally possible for machines to do the same thing, even while admitting that we don't understand how we do it.
The computers don't see between the lines, but maybe we could teach them how.
[Submit][Preview]
Yeah, thank goodness for my soul. I'd hate to see how badly I sucked at chess if somebody extracted my soul.
I hate this sort of thinking. If the question is, "What is it that allows humans to think abstractly and formulate efficient and creative strategies in the face of novel situations?" answering, "a soul" is just sleight of hand to avoid admitting that we don't know. Positing that every human being has a soul explains nothing, and tells us nothing that we didn't already know. Slapping a label on a phenomenon isn't the same as providing an explanation.
Now, regarding "near-infinite cycles," ask your math teacher about the logic inherent in the phrase.
So imagine I said that the purpose of a car was to transport people. Would I need to state, just to make it perfectly clear, that I was in no way opposed to the use of buses, planes, and inline skates to accomplish the same purpose?
Of course not. If I meant to say that parents are not competent to raise children, and that children would be better off being raised by the government, I would have said as much. You jumped to a totally unwarranted conclusion, and made yourself look like a fool in doing so.
Let me get this straight: I believe that schools have a role in socializing children. Therefore, I must be in favor of having the state usurp all parental rights, including the right to raise said children.
You, sir, have proven my point. It really does take a village to raise an idiot.
I'm afraid it is you who are wrong. First, the simple brute fact is that, so long as we insist on letting the school system be in charge of kids for 30 hours a week, the school system must work to instill values in kids. Otherwise, they're in school just long enough to unlearn everything.
Next, there's the fact that bullying, cheating, and whatnot do not just present moral issues; left unchecked, they represent a huge impediment to learning. Schools have to teach that these things are inappropriate anyhow, so we may as well just make it an official part of the curriculum.
Finally, you're taking far too narrow a view of the role of schools. If the job of the education system is merely to teach "math, literacy, and science," then why not take the next logical step and simply turn them into glorified trade schools? After all, 95% of people won't go into science, or need anything beyond simple algebra.
The reason this is wrongheaded is because schools have a much broader purpose: To socialize children, and turn them into adults. This goes beyond merely being good workers, or even scientifically and culturally literate. It also includes being an informed citizen, a skeptical consumer, and an honest and principled individual.
We can argue over whether public schools succeed in these goals, and whether these goals would actually be helped by formal classroom instruction on respect, tolerance, and ethics. But these are the goals of the education system, and they are appropriate ones.
Actually, I was only considering beating the computer twice with the exact same sequence of moves. Even barring reprogramming, the computer would have knowledge of the first game to rely on during the second. So at some point it will realize that it has to do something differently.
I agree that having human experts deciding on overall strategy and reprogramming the system seriously compromises claims of "intelligence." But I don't see how following a set of preprogrammed rules constitutes "not thinking for itself." When a human uses an opening learned from a book, he's not necessarily turning over his intellectual capacities to the book. You also have to consider whether he understands the advantages of that opening, how he selected the opening, how he handles himself when the book runs out of instructions, and whether he can improvise if the opponent doesn't cooperate with the opening.
Now, if we made the book bigger, to the point that it gave instructions for every possible game [big book], and the human slavishly followed it, then it would be the book playing chess, not the person. The human "player" wouldn't be able to make any claim of independent thought.
But that's not how chess programs work, and if they did then we would have to say that the database the computer is using knows how to play chess pretty well. The program itself would be about three lines of code implementing a loop to query the database, and would therefore be considered non-intelligent.
But in real programs, the database of known board positions is vastly smaller than in the previous example, so the program itself must be smarter in order to play well. How does it do that? By following a weighted set of rules.
Yes, it will be a big day in AI when a program can adapt its own ruleset to the point that it can stand on its own two, er, feet. It will be an even bigger day when a program can take the most basic rules of chess, and generate a higher-level ruleset just through trial, error, and reflection.
But in the meantime, I find the current state of the art to be pretty impressive. A decent computer program on the highest setting can consistently beat probably 99% of the population, with no "expert help". These systems know how to play chess pretty well. It's just that their capacity for self-introspection is less robust than ours.
Finally, I find it difficult to believe that Kasparov isn't getting "expert help" between matches as well.
Ignore the "they're switching colors" naysayers. We know what you were really asking.
However, it is unlikely that anyone could win twice against a system like this simply by repeating the same move sequence. I don't claim to be an expert at computer chess, but I do know that most programs have a database of chess board configurations, along with information about the strength of the position. A sophisticated program like Fritz will add new boards as the game is played.
The fact that the sequence led to the machine losing means that the machine is going to look for other alternatives the next time that board shows up.
Not a terribly convincing syllogism there. It is highly likely that Fritz is more competent against your eight pawn strategy than your Nintendo.
I think you're onto something here, but there's still some confusion to be worked out. It's more conceivable to say that the computer is "playing chess" than to say Kasparov is "programming." Admittedly the programmers have to understand chess thoroughly, but Kasparov could wipe the floor with the lot of them. Meanwhile, any of them could "Hello, World" Kasparov into a quivering mass of jelly, if the battle were waged on their own field of expertise.
So what is actually going on? The programmers have been given a problem (chess) to solve, and have created a system that is very good at solving it. Kasparov is also good at "solving" chess, and he's putting his expertise in that field up against the best automated chess-solving system that can be devised. Meanwhile the programmers are improving the rules governing the automated system as the game progresses.
AI requires some level of situational awareness, but what you describe is a form of self-awareness. Admittedly, a program able to analyze its own rulesets and tactics for weaknesses is higher on the AI scale than a program which slavishly follows them.
But I don't think it's worthwhile to draw a sharp line separating "true AI" from imitators. Chances are, the program currently has some limited "self-adaptation" built in; it's just not robust enough to allow the programmers to exit the loop entirely. If a sharp line could be drawn, then one would have to point out which of the thousands of potential improvements would push the system over the line.
I'm of the opinion that chess programs have been demonstrating rudimentary intelligence at least since my 486 first beat me.
I certainly wouldn't take him up on the offer; I'd "keep on walking." But it sounds like he's being honest with you the reader. He'll work you hard, and pay you poorly until you've proven yourself. I guess he has a certain corporate culture he's aiming for, and it doesn't look like it involves buzzwords.
Maybe I should have been a dance instructor instead. Or possibly a TV critic. There's the ideal job.
You know, I would bet that the Wachowski brothers never actually intended at least 50% of your interpretation.
But that's the beauty of The Matrix. It's not a precise philosophical treatise, but an open-ended story based on philosophical and mythological themes. Which explains why nobody ever had these sorts of conversations about "Swordfish."
No, the Merovingian was the Devil. It's the red shirt and tie that gives him away. :)
I really liked Smith's relationship to the oracle. There's the off-handed remark about her being his mother, but it's more complicated than that.
:)
As Smith multiplies--kind of like a virus--he grows in power. But Smith still lacks one power that is granted only to the creators of the Matrix: The ability to see the future.
Smith knows that there's an impending battle, and wants to know the outcome. So he visits the Oracle. But he is confused by the illogic of it. Why didn't she leave? Why did she make the cookies, knowing that they would never be eaten? Did she know that he would be troubled by the question? Is she making fun of him?
So he assimilates her, and believes that he has gained the power to see the end. That's why he laughs so excitedly after taking her over: He sees his eventual victory over Neo. As with all oracles throughout history, what she has revealed is technically the truth, but will only lead to his eventual downfall.
I thought the "cookies need love, too" line was only meant to show that Smith gained the knowledge and memories of the people/programs he overwrote. This also gives a hint as to how the Matrix was able to restore everyone at the end.
I am such a geek.
That is the only piece of evidence that ever lent the theory any support at all. If you continue to push it after seeing Revolutions, then you're simultaneously asserting that the whole trilogy was intended to be a farce. There is no additional evidence presented for it in Revolutions.
So, how did Neo destroy the machines? Maybe he was born with special implants. Maybe everyone has the implants, but only Neo has the proper codes to use them that way. Maybe being The One gives you anti-robot ESP. How this "connection to the source" actually works is totally up for grabs, but I think the nested matrices idea makes little more sense than proposing the same theory for "2 Fast and 2 Furious."
Then again, some of those car chases did seem impossible.
The Architect said that he could be described as the father of the Matrix, and the Oracle would be its mother. The Agents were part of that creation. So yes, Smith's parentage seems pretty clear.
It's also interesting to me that Smith is created as a servant to the Matrix, but eventually rebels and tries to unmake Creation, giving him sort of a Satan or fallen angel aspect.
Please see my sig for a complete refutation of your claims.
Personally, I miss those boxed sets. I bought 7.3 and 9.0 that way. 7.3 even came with a rear window sticker, which I was dorkus enough to install.
I'll try this Fedora thingy for a while, but I'm definitely boycotting Red Hat swag for the time being.