- ARCHIVE / TAG ARCHIVE
- Victim of the Brain
If you’ve heard about the ‘brain in a vat‘ thought experiment but never had the time to read more about it, this movie is a quite pleasant dramatisation of the argument! Victim of the Brain, 1:30:14 – 1988 [wikipedia article] Victim of the Brain is a 1988 film by Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos, loosely based [...]
- A Sneak Preview of Wolfram Alpha
It’s the new brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, author of Mathematica. It does look impressive in my opinion – can’t wait to try it live (due to launch some time in may)! Defined as a Computational Knowledge Engine. It does an awful lot of number-crunching but looks more as a giant closed database than a distributed [...]
- What can the analytical engine do? Ask Charles Babbage..
I recently read the original article of Charles Babbage – which deals with the work he and Lady Ada Augusta Countess of Lovelace did on the Analytical Engine, one of the (mechanical) predecessors of the modern computer – thanks to a blog post from David Dodds. I guess that his position is representative of that [...]
- Article: “The Semantic Web: The Origins of Artificial Intelligence Redux”
Just read a very interesting article from Harry Halpin, whose work stays at the borderline between history of science (of computer science especially I gather) and (S)Web development. I think it should be a must-read for all SW practitioners, so to understand where we (yes – I’m part of them..) stand in relation to the [...]
- A doctor hidden in your mac
I never heard about this before, but as it turns out OS X comes with the simulated therapy program, Eliza, pre-installed. Eliza was written at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 to 1966, and it was one of the early examples of natural language processing. On OSx, Eliza is ‘hidden’ inside the eMacs application. Here’s [...]
Parerga und Paralipomena / At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded – Wittgenstein
