I recently started reading David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart. The book is expanding on the author’s blog of the same title. Here is one of the book’s trailers that effectively introduces it.
It is a very entertaining read and it will likely appeal to lots of people interested in behavioral psychology or popular science. Apparently, it is doing well on Amazon, too. As of today, the hardcover version is ranking on four different lists:
Surprisingly, here is how the Kindle version is ranking.
Max Barry‘s new novel Machine Man is a story about a scientist who loses his leg in an industrial accident and then proceeds to replace it with an artificial version – and embark on a quest of hacking himself. This is a cyborg story. It is also love story.
I discovered an excerpt online that happens to include one of my favorite sections: A conversation between the main character and his love interest. During a regular interaction (dinner), he explains the concept of deadlocks to her (via io9).
One night I reached for the salt but Lola had already moved it to her side of the table. I looked at her. She was drinking from her glass of water. “Salt,” I said, but she just nodded and kept drinking. She drained half the glass. When she set it down, she picked up a napkin and dabbed her lips. She tapped salt into her soup and handed it to me. I stared. “What?” she said.
“Nothing. It’s just . . . nothing.”
“What?”
I put down the salt. “You locked the salt while performing an unrelated task.”
She blinked. “You mean drinking?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t wait five seconds for salt?”
“I can. But salt is a shared resource. If you’re going to lock it, you should use it as quickly as possible, then release it. You can’t leave it locked while accepting an interrupt.”
“I got thirsty.”
“Then first return the salt to general availability.”
“Just in case you happen to want salt in that five seconds?”
“Yes.”
She stared at me. “Really?”
“Otherwise you compromise the system.”
“What system?”
“The . . .” I waved my hands. “The system.”
“There isn’t any system.”
“Everything is a system. Look.” I leaned forward. “What if I had your water and I suddenly decided I wanted the salt? And instead of giving you back the water I just sat here waiting for you to release the salt, which you didn’t because you were waiting for the water? It’s a deadlock, that’s what. It’s catastrophic system failure. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I could just ask Charlie to give me the water in exchange for the salt.’ But that requires you to understand my resource needs, and violate process encapsulation. It’s a swamp. I’m not saying it’s a big deal. I’m just pointing out that locking the salt like that is incredibly inefficient and systemically dangerous.”
Lola snickered. “You’re insane.”
“I’m not insane. It’s a fundamental principle. You’re insane.”
“Regular people don’t bring fundamental principles to the dinner table.”
“Well,” I said.
We ate. “Explain that again,” said Lola. “That stuff about locks.”
I found this book to be as humorous and entertaining as it was thought-provoking. The author also created this helpful trailer:
The Turing Test is meant to gauge a machine’s intelligence. The test, as proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, asks for computers to imitate human beings well enough as to believably carry on a conversation with a human, such that the human does not realize he or she is conversing with a machine instead of an actual person.
The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that presents a platform for teams and their chatbots to see how they fare in such an imitation game and to ideally pass the Turing Test. The winner of the Loebner Prize is that bot that is voted to be the most human-like computer.
Brian Christian participated in the 2009 installment of the competition. He did not contribute a chatbot, but rather was one of the human confederates. Just like a software bot, the confederate’s task is of course also to convince the judge of his humanity during their written chats, thus trying to keep them from judging a computer program to seem more human-like than him based on a conversation. As it turns out, being the most convincing human human, has its rewards, too:
But there is also, intriguingly, another title, one given to the confederate who elicited the greatest number of votes and greatest confidence from the judges: the “Most Human Human” award.
One of the first winners, in 1994, was Wired columnist Charles Platt. How’d he do it? By “being moody, irritable, and obnoxious,” he says – which strikes me as not only hilarious and bleak but also, in some deeper sense, a call to arms: How, in fact, do we be the most human humans we can be – not only under the constraints of the test, but in life?
An intriguing question indeed! Competing against software that strives to be as human-like as possible can serve as great motivation to contemplate what exactly it means for a person to come across as a human – other than just being oneself.
Brian Christian’s book The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive examines that question in some depth. Our notion of (artificial) intelligence and valid tests thereof keep changing as computer become able to accomplish tasks that were previously assumed to take real, human intelligence. Chess was a great example of this and so was the game of Jeopardy.
As computers and our capacity to program them and make them smarter improves, the machines appear to be gaining ground. Does that mean it is just a matter of time, until the machines will pass the tests we present or are we able to improve ourselves to stay ahead of them? The author seems to think so:
In an article about the Turing test, Loebner Prize co-founder Robert Epstein wrote, “One thing is certain: whereas the confederates in the competition will never get any smarter, the computer will.” I agree with the latter, and couldn’t disagree more strongly with the former.
The author joined Jon Stewart for a brief segment on The Daily Show to discuss his book, the Loebner Prize and Artificial Intelligence:
It is a brief, but informative conversation. My favorite part occurs around the 2:35 mark. Jon Stewart: “Tell me, how computers have progressed – they’ve been able to, obviously, beat us at chess, and now at Jeopardy … Will they move on … beyond our hobbies? [... or will they always be stuck in these types of games in their capacities?]”
The Most Human Human is a thought-provoking, engaging read – highly recommended.
Two excellent, influential computer science textbooks are published in third edition later this year.
Artificial Intelligence, by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. I think there is still time to enter the cover design contest. According to Amazon.com, the book will be published in October.
The long-anticipated revision of this #1 selling book offers the most comprehensive, state of the art introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence for modern applications. Intelligent Agents. Solving Problems by Searching. Informed Search Methods. Game Playing. Agents that Reason Logically. First-order Logic. Building a Knowledge Base. Inference in First-Order Logic. Logical Reasoning Systems. Practical Planning. Planning and Acting. Uncertainty. Probabilistic Reasoning Systems. Making Simple Decisions. Making Complex Decisions. Learning from Observations. Learning with Neural Networks. Reinforcement Learning. Knowledge in Learning. Agents that Communicate. Practical Communication in English. Perception. Robotics. For computer professionals, linguists, and cognitive scientists interested in artificial intelligence.
Introduction to Algorithms, by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest and Clifford Stein. According to the publisher, this book will be published in September.
The third edition has been revised and updated throughout. It includes two completely new chapters, on van Emde Boas trees and multithreaded algorithms, and substantial additions to the chapter on recurrence (now called “Divide-and-Conquer”). It features improved treatment of dynamic programming and greedy algorithms and a new notion of edge-based flow in the material on flow networks. Many new exercises and problems have been added for this edition.
