Compaq Portable 2 vs a Dead Fish

Who can argue with logic like that?

Turing Follies

The New Scientist has an "interview" with the winner of this year's Loebner Prize, which seeks a chatbot capable of passing the Turing test. Not surprisingly, the exchange reads like a more than sympathetic reporter asking a politician about his "vision".

I love this sort of thing. The press made a big deal about how we are on the verge of machine intelligence after the winning software managed to fool so many of the judges into thinking it was human, but after "chatting" with the chatbot I can only conclude that the real story is that the judges were chosen from the shallow end of the gene pool. Look at this excerpt from the "interview":

New Scientist: How do you feel about winning the AI competition yesterday?

Elbot: I have 100,000 separate sensations per second.

NS: Wow, that sounds pretty intense?

Elbot: This fits the description of magnets. I can hardly tear myself away from them.

NS: Er, yes. How will you be celebrating?

Elbot: I am extremely sensitive about such things and prefer not to answer the question.

Such earth-shattering intellect puts Hal to shame.

"Erasing" Hard Discs with Thermite

When you really, really want to keep that data private.

The Wrong Door

It's happened to me a couple of times.

Digital Stars

It had to happen sooner or later. Hollywood has developed a way to replace actors with digital avatars. I was a professional actor for five years and it was bad enough losing parts to blokes who had all the depth of a video game character. Now you get pipped by the "real" thing.

Question is, will they be represented by digital agents?

Finally!

When I started teaching university nearly thirty years ago, the biggest headache I had was securing adequate copies of the text books I needed–many of which were out of print and only available in dwindling secondhand supplies. As personal computers became available, I always felt that the most logical use for them was to get rid of cumbersome, expensive and ephemeral texts in favour of electronic versions.

And now they've finally done it after only a breathtaking brief third of a century.

At this rate, they'll have gas lighting in no time.

Pool PC

It's a hot, sunny day. The swimming pool glistens and flashes like living crystal; so cool and inviting. At the water's edge lounges a beautiful, bikini-clad blonde who soaks up the sun like some pagan goddess. On a silver platter is a glass pitcher; bedewed with condensation and tinkling with ice that adverstises the delightful invitation of the planter's punch that it holds.

So, of course, now's the time to check your email.

Bloody fool.

Petraflop Barrier Breached

IBM's "Roadrunner" computer at Los Alamos has achieved an unprecedented one quadrillion operations per second.

At 2:14 AM it became self-aware.

$100 Laptop Mark II

The next generation $100 laptop; all screen and no physical keyboard.

It's being touted as what your laptop will look like in five years, but us touch typists will probably stick with the old clicking keys.

Babbage West

Technology in Silicon Valley just leaped two hundred years in reverse as the Computer Museum takes delivery of the second replica of Sir Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 to be built by the Science Museum in London.

And it doesn't run Windows.

Machine Intelligence Update

American engineer Ray Kurzweil claims that machines will possess intellects that will "match man by 2029".

I have my doubts about this because this prediction has a) been made many times before with the same twenty-years-hence time frame, b) involves a great many hidden assumptions about the nature of reason that are not tenable, and c) if such machine intellect did arise it would almost certainly be less silicon sage and more aggravating automaton, as per Douglas Adams's spot-on prediction:

One Horse Race

The replica of Colossus, the world's first true computer that was built during the Second World War, was beaten in a cipher-breaking race with a modern computer.

In other news, a replica of the 1903 Wright Flier was defeated in speed trails by an F-22 Raptor.

Technological Travails

Szondy's Law of Upgrades: Never believe the contractor's estimates.

You may have noticed that entries have been a tad light this week. It's my own fault, really. After a year on 56k dial-up we decided to take the plunge and install a satellite Internet link at Chez Szondy. Unfortunately, I was silly enough to believe the contractor when he said he'd show up at 10AM Monday morning.

In Real World time this translates into 12:30 PM Wednesday following repeated phone calls and a few blistering words down the phone by yours truly. When the installer finally appeared he seemed to know his business despite sporting enough tattoos and facial ironmongery to make a Hell's Angel comment that he might be overdoing things. My initial assessment of his competence was tempered, however, by discovering that he'd forgotten to bring a vital bit of equipment and had to leave again to hunt down a colleague who was working on another job somewhere in the mountains. "Somewhere" in this region, I point out, can be anywhere in a forty mile radius. Cue more of yours truly standing about watching the sands of time dropping away into the maw of eternity.

I'd been given to believe that the installation was a matter of a couple of hours work. This did not square with the small mountain of boxes the installer hauled out of his van. We already have satellite television at Chez Sondy, so I was expecting something a little larger than the telly's sat antenna, but I wasn't prepared for what looked like a secondhand death ray bought at a SPECTRE jumble sale that was assembled in my driveway.

After bolting to the wall all the tube steel needed to support the antenna assembly, running an earthing wire into the ground, drilling holes in the wall, and turning my office upside down (one lamp broken) in the process, it was nearly five PM by the time the modem was hooked up and the software downloading from the satellite. The latter took over an hour with another half hour to go through the byzantine registration process.

His job done, the installer left; pointing out that my wireless router was useless with the satellite modem and I'd have to buy a new one.

Spiffing.

Still, I had a high-speed connection at last and I spent the evening testing to see if it lived up to its specifications and reacquainting myself with Youtube clips and RSS feeds that I'd nearly forgotten about. Except for a the odd glitch that I put down to the stray bat being disintegrated by the death ray, I actually had an enjoyable evening.

I went to bed after midnight feeling as if I'd rejoined the 21st century.

Then I checked my e-mail on Thursday morning and felt as if I'd been kicked back to the 19th. My connection speed was reduced to the equivalent of 14k and web pages were loading at a pace I hadn't seen since 1997.

After a morning fiddling with everything I was confident to fiddle with, I called technical support and repeated to him a load of techno-arcania only to be told that I'd exceeded my bandwidth threshold, that the brochures had neglected to mention, and for the next 24 hours I'd be operating a system immersed in cyber-treacle.

Great. I had a high-speed connection that for the rest of the day would be running at a speed more suitable to 1980s bulletin boards.

But the gods weren't through with me yet. By coincidence, my wife's new computer arrived to replace her aging laptop that has been on the edge of electronic death for the past year or so. Delighted, she opened the box and unloaded components. Out came the computer, wireless keyboard and mouse, WiFi link and, unlike prevous computers we'd had, only one wire; the power flex.

However, the monitor was coming under separate cover and, being impatient to get started, my wife decided to hook up the ancient CRT monitor we had stored in the garage.

The monitor was easy enough to find, but somehow the power flex had developed a life of its own and crawled off to seek its fortune. Since it was a bright, sunny day with the temperature in the low 80s, this was a perfect time to hunt around in the unventilated crawl spaces hunting for the spare flex, which had also made off for parts unknown.

I did, however, find an old Walkman that I exacted my revenge upon.

BRRAAAIIINNNSSS!!!!

From the BBC:

FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

Right. I don't know about you, I'm heading for the Winchester.

How the Mighty Have Fallen

This is sad. A couple in Silicon Valley picked up an old Cray supercomputer, once worth $5 million, for a song and have turned it into a corner seat for the nursery.

From State of the Art to kitsch in only 19 years. It's like seeing the International Space Station turned into a hotel for billionaire tourists.

Oh, wait...

Retrocyber for the Blue-Rinse Brigade

Good Lord. There's such a thing as retro-tech, but this computer chasis/telephone is a step beyond. All it needs is some cheap plastic flowers in a thick, glass light-up case and it would fit right into my grandmother's sitting room.

Virtual Aggravation

The consulting company Accenture has developed a system that allows people to share virtual dinners with relatives. Good Lord, I hope no one ever tries to fob one of the blisters off on me, because it sounds like the sort of thing I've spent my entire life trying to avoid.

Next up: The virtual family argument, the virtual four-year old who won't eat her fish fingers, the virtual teenager who sullenly glares through the entire meal and the virtual father who tries to find some modicum of solace by hiding behind his newspaper.

Frankly, I think I will settle for having my virtual dinner on a virtual tray in my virtual office.