That's a hard AI problem. If you can solve it, I can assure you you'll be famous.
Professor Igor Aleksander has done a great deal of work on the problem of face recognition at Imperial College here in London with alot of success using NNs check his web page:-
Bot: Do you like Hot Grits? Me: No thanks Bot: Do you like Natalie Portman? Me: No! Bot: Not even petrified? Me: No!! Bot: How about Natalie Portman, petrified with hot grits down her pants? Me: Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
Sounds like a good plan for the ultimate dating agency, can you imagine what will happen when kids finish high school and are automatically matched with a partner for life who they're introduced to at the Prom?
in order to ultimately begin to make intelligent asscertians re: what probably will get mod'ed down or up You realise that if you could do that you could use it to play the stock market as its just a giant moderation system except its denominations are dollars rather than Karma.
If an AI could point me at stuff I'd like and don't know about Or you could find things that you didn't know you didn't like so you can fight them, like the next DMCA etc.
A laudable goal, but in order for this to work on that kind of scale you need to establish a standard, and then you need the retailers to participate. This is a classic bootstrapping problem OTOH you could create an AI that would recognise the format inwhich the data comes out and match it to a "Gold Standard", then ask if it got it right or wrong and learn that the column marked $ is the same as a column named Price etc, that would mean even if the retailer changed the HTML the results came back in every day you would be able to keep up with them.
Then, instead of making you do all the work of signing up and purchasing from each store How about an automatic form filler, that learns what your email addy, credit card numbers etc are and when you click on the form filler it does the work for you, and where there are choices, like CC asks you to choose or might make a choice based upon which cards you use most or which are at the limit.
I think a search engine that could use its inputs to figure out what pages are "crap" and what's "good" would have such a profound impact on the web.. I can't imagine a bigger advance One mans "crap" is another mans "good", so there would have to be some relationship to the specific user. You could attack a specific subset of Web pages and learn how to recognise a specific attribute, like does it contain a poem, thats a real tough one and if you managed it, you'd get loads of job interviews, and the poetry you learn on the way would help woo the ladies;)
What about icons that expand or contract depending on how many times you've clicked on them? Or the level of audio output automagically compensates for changes in ambeint noise sampled from the mic?
You could get people to sign up to associate their web pages with an email address and then automagically send them relevent sites to link to, so increasing the opportunity of linking to other sites.
One of the big headaches for the new distributed filesystems like Gnutella is keeping the level of traffic reasonable so the network is not swamped with bad packets, pings etc, and at the same time keeping the distributed connectedness at the best level, auto-optimising the network would be a really cool project and be of tremendous value to everyone whos working on projects like Gnutella and FreeNet.
So now/. have their first hostile witness for the defence, Jim Cullinan of M$, put him on the stand and show M$ are trying to have it both ways, that amount of obvious hypocracy on M$ part will show how utterly shallow and zapid they really are, I doubt the jury hearing the case could never side with them after that, you may have just won the case for/. well done that AC:)
Oh, and IANAL, and my apologies if someone's posted this idea already. I don't have time to read everything, but I just had to get this idea out. I posted the same idea on the first of the threads regarding what/. should do, you have been moded up to 5 and I didnt get a single mod point, I shall now go and be paranoid:)
I see that upper management and the lawyers probably did get together Which would make for an interesting discovery part of any legal battle, I can see the headlines now "Smoking gun email shows more Microsoft monopolisation", time to start a new DOJ case against M$, if they can they prosecute them again while an appeal is happening for the other case.
And maybe, just maybe, Gates and the rest will hop on board the cluetrain next time it stops in Redmond. The cluetrain no longer stops at Redmond after it was deliberately derailed some years ago by a certain Mr. Bill Gates and a hoard of angry lawyers who go by the name Cluetrian Reduction Army Pantomime or CRAP as they are better known.
If someone created a bot that mirrored slashdot, syncing their site with Slashdot periodically through out the day The obvious answer is for them to create their own mirror, preferably set up somewhere else, they've got the money to do it, also I believe someone is actually setting up a service that replicates servers across the globe to avoid sites being DDoSed, its something I would seriously consider if I were them.
Noam Chomsky knows what's up. Just incase anyone is unfamiliar with Chomsky I'd seriously recommend Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media, its a two video set and there is a companion book.
M$ acting as an agent provocateur? It might be helpful if the/. boys looked at all the mail / submissions they got about Kerberos to see where they originated (email, IP addys etc)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that wasnt from the ZenBot??
I wonder how it does with recursive statements like :-
Me: I am thinking about thinking
AliceBot:*puff of white smoke*??
Just like a real human!
That's a hard AI problem. If you can solve it, I can assure you you'll be famous.
:-
e r.html
Professor Igor Aleksander has done a great deal of work on the problem of face recognition at Imperial College here in London with alot of success using NNs check his web page
http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/research/neural/aleksand
Oh yeah, lets have an Eliza-ish convo-bot,
Bot: Do you like Hot Grits?
Me: No thanks
Bot: Do you like Natalie Portman?
Me: No!
Bot: Not even petrified?
Me: No!!
Bot: How about Natalie Portman, petrified with hot grits down her pants?
Me: Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
An auto-Napster account maker/changer would be useful for when Lars catches up with you! :)
Sounds like a good plan for the ultimate dating agency, can you imagine what will happen when kids finish high school and are automatically matched with a partner for life who they're introduced to at the Prom?
Why not just a decent AI Quake bot to play against?
in order to ultimately begin to make intelligent asscertians re: what probably will get mod'ed down or up
You realise that if you could do that you could use it to play the stock market as its just a giant moderation system except its denominations are dollars rather than Karma.
If an AI could point me at stuff I'd like and don't know about
Or you could find things that you didn't know you didn't like so you can fight them, like the next DMCA etc.
A laudable goal, but in order for this to work on that kind of scale you need to establish a standard, and then you need the retailers to participate. This is a classic bootstrapping problem
OTOH you could create an AI that would recognise the format inwhich the data comes out and match it to a "Gold Standard", then ask if it got it right or wrong and learn that the column marked $ is the same as a column named Price etc, that would mean even if the retailer changed the HTML the results came back in every day you would be able to keep up with them.
Then, instead of making you do all the work of signing up and purchasing from each store
How about an automatic form filler, that learns what your email addy, credit card numbers etc are and when you click on the form filler it does the work for you, and where there are choices, like CC asks you to choose or might make a choice based upon which cards you use most or which are at the limit.
I think a search engine that could use its inputs to figure out what pages are "crap" and what's "good" would have such a profound impact on the web.. I can't imagine a bigger advance ;)
One mans "crap" is another mans "good", so there would have to be some relationship to the specific user. You could attack a specific subset of Web pages and learn how to recognise a specific attribute, like does it contain a poem, thats a real tough one and if you managed it, you'd get loads of job interviews, and the poetry you learn on the way would help woo the ladies
What about icons that expand or contract depending on how many times you've clicked on them? Or the level of audio output automagically compensates for changes in ambeint noise sampled from the mic?
Create a paperclip that says "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
You could get people to sign up to associate their web pages with an email address and then automagically send them relevent sites to link to, so increasing the opportunity of linking to other sites.
One of the big headaches for the new distributed filesystems like Gnutella is keeping the level of traffic reasonable so the network is not swamped with bad packets, pings etc, and at the same time keeping the distributed connectedness at the best level, auto-optimising the network would be a really cool project and be of tremendous value to everyone whos working on projects like Gnutella and FreeNet.
So now /. have their first hostile witness for the defence, Jim Cullinan of M$, put him on the stand and show M$ are trying to have it both ways, that amount of obvious hypocracy on M$ part will show how utterly shallow and zapid they really are, I doubt the jury hearing the case could never side with them after that, you may have just won the case for /. well done that AC :)
Oh, and IANAL, and my apologies if someone's posted this idea already. I don't have time to read everything, but I just had to get this idea out. /. should do, you have been moded up to 5 and I didnt get a single mod point, I shall now go and be paranoid :)
I posted the same idea on the first of the threads regarding what
I see that upper management and the lawyers probably did get together
Which would make for an interesting discovery part of any legal battle, I can see the headlines now "Smoking gun email shows more Microsoft monopolisation", time to start a new DOJ case against M$, if they can they prosecute them again while an appeal is happening for the other case.
And maybe, just maybe, Gates and the rest will hop on board the cluetrain next time it stops in Redmond.
The cluetrain no longer stops at Redmond after it was deliberately derailed some years ago by a certain Mr. Bill Gates and a hoard of angry lawyers who go by the name Cluetrian Reduction Army Pantomime or CRAP as they are better known.
If someone created a bot that mirrored slashdot, syncing their site with Slashdot periodically through out the day
The obvious answer is for them to create their own mirror, preferably set up somewhere else, they've got the money to do it, also I believe someone is actually setting up a service that replicates servers across the globe to avoid sites being DDoSed, its something I would seriously consider if I were them.
Or just put it on FreeNet :-
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Noam Chomsky knows what's up.
Just incase anyone is unfamiliar with Chomsky I'd seriously recommend Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media, its a two video set and there is a companion book.
M$ acting as an agent provocateur? It might be helpful if the /. boys looked at all the mail / submissions they got about Kerberos to see where they originated (email, IP addys etc)