This statement is false: Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet.
The internet was around long before he became Vice President. Many of the pieces were around from the 1970s. Either way you phrase it, it is still wrong.
Now that they have a big contract with the government this is no longer a young inspiring company that will lead us to space, but just another Boeing or Lockheed with less employees.
I don't mean this in an idealistic way, but a pessimitic way. There will be nothing adventuristic left in this company once the bureacracy sets in.
I think the point of the test is to explore the question of what does it mean to "act of its own volition." If you can have a free conversation with something and after everything is done, you can't tell if it is a machine or a person, then either both have volition, or neither do.
How do you know a human "acts of its own volition?" You can't possibly prove that, but it is an assumption that would be hard to attack. If you take the fact that humans act on their own volition, yet you can't tell the difference between a human and a machine, then you must accept the conclusion that the machine is also acting on its own volition. That is the point of the Turing Test.
That being said, the Turing Test is entirely unfair to the computer. Not only must the AI be advanced enough to give decent responses, it must also lie when asked questions like "Are you a machine?", "How do you feel?", "What's your favorite color?", etc. The computer would also have to have a large database of the world to answer questions like "What do you think of Iraq?" without giving itself away by stupid answers like "What do you want me to think about Iraq?"
I think the test is sufficient, but not necessary. It is easily conceivable to build a "thinking" machine that couldn't pass the Turing Test.
I thought Cray was trying to convince the world that Clusters were not as good as true supercomputers, but this looks like a glorified cluster. In looking under the hood it appears to be just a collection of 2-way SMP Opterons with a superfast proprietary network backbone.
I thought this article explained the point very well, and I have the exact same problem he has. At work I have RedHat and Suse machines running on dual processor Athlons and Opterons. They work just fine and these machines are the best machines I've ever worked on, including the SGI workstations we used to use.
But at home all I have is a weak AMD-K6 running at 350Mhz with 160M memory running Win98. I've been having so many problems with spyware and viruses that I decided to switch to Linux, after convincing my wife that everything would be ok. Well, after installing various versions of RedHat I never could get something to run on that machine at an acceptable speed, so I gave up and went back to win98.
So I think the article is exactly right. I thought Linux was supposed to be faster and more streamlined than windows. I thought it would be able to run on older machines, but it couldn't.
Meanwhile, all the comments I just read on slashdot seem to prove the point even more. The article is getting torn apart by comments that big programs are to be expected for all the features, and that if you don't like it, you can go back to your teletypes.
The point is that Windows is providing satisfactory features on these older machines. I don't need it to solve the worlds problems, I just need a web browser, emailer, and occasional word processing. Win98 or even XP can do that just fine on my machine, give or take the viruses and junk, but there doesn't appear to be a linux distro that can do that.
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This statement is false: Al Gore took the initiative in creating the Internet.
The internet was around long before he became Vice President. Many of the pieces were around from the 1970s. Either way you phrase it, it is still wrong.
Now that they have a big contract with the government this is no longer a young inspiring company that will lead us to space, but just another Boeing or Lockheed with less employees.
I don't mean this in an idealistic way, but a pessimitic way. There will be nothing adventuristic left in this company once the bureacracy sets in.
I think the point of the test is to explore the question of what does it mean to "act of its own volition." If you can have a free conversation with something and after everything is done, you can't tell if it is a machine or a person, then either both have volition, or neither do.
How do you know a human "acts of its own volition?" You can't possibly prove that, but it is an assumption that would be hard to attack. If you take the fact that humans act on their own volition, yet you can't tell the difference between a human and a machine, then you must accept the conclusion that the machine is also acting on its own volition. That is the point of the Turing Test.
That being said, the Turing Test is entirely unfair to the computer. Not only must the AI be advanced enough to give decent responses, it must also lie when asked questions like "Are you a machine?", "How do you feel?", "What's your favorite color?", etc. The computer would also have to have a large database of the world to answer questions like "What do you think of Iraq?" without giving itself away by stupid answers like "What do you want me to think about Iraq?"
I think the test is sufficient, but not necessary. It is easily conceivable to build a "thinking" machine that couldn't pass the Turing Test.
I thought Cray was trying to convince the world that Clusters were not as good as true supercomputers, but this looks like a glorified cluster. In looking under the hood it appears to be just a collection of 2-way SMP Opterons with a superfast proprietary network backbone.
And it's running Linux, if that matters to you
I thought this article explained the point very well, and I have the exact same problem he has. At work I have RedHat and Suse machines running on dual processor Athlons and Opterons. They work just fine and these machines are the best machines I've ever worked on, including the SGI workstations we used to use.
But at home all I have is a weak AMD-K6 running at 350Mhz with 160M memory running Win98. I've been having so many problems with spyware and viruses that I decided to switch to Linux, after convincing my wife that everything would be ok. Well, after installing various versions of RedHat I never could get something to run on that machine at an acceptable speed, so I gave up and went back to win98.
So I think the article is exactly right. I thought Linux was supposed to be faster and more streamlined than windows. I thought it would be able to run on older machines, but it couldn't.
Meanwhile, all the comments I just read on slashdot seem to prove the point even more. The article is getting torn apart by comments that big programs are to be expected for all the features, and that if you don't like it, you can go back to your teletypes.
The point is that Windows is providing satisfactory features on these older machines. I don't need it to solve the worlds problems, I just need a web browser, emailer, and occasional word processing. Win98 or even XP can do that just fine on my machine, give or take the viruses and junk, but there doesn't appear to be a linux distro that can do that.