Brooders

Every so often Marvin Minksy’s name comes up in relation to Artificial Intelligence. It’s on my AI todo list, check out his work, buy his book “Society of Mind“, etc.

I stumbled upon a quote from him:

“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.”

This intersects my thoughts about AI. We don’t really know what our brain is doing or how to be able to implement that in worse hardware (e.g. Chips versus Brain).

How things work is often a mystery because it’s hardwired in us somewhere. We don’t really think about the rules of language to use language, we don’t think about which muscles are contracting when we walk, nor do we think about digesting food after we’ve eaten. I guess that’s what makes AI hard to implement, because we think it’s easy because we don’t have any trouble doing things. Yet we don’t know the how or can’t articule it, which means it’s hard to build that into an extremely structured system.

If you check the comments on Abebooks API integration for NeoScholar.net you’ll see a response a few days after I blogged.

NeoScholar is a pet project, it’s not big enough to gain Abebooks attention (or anyone else for the moment).

So I was blown away when their integration person left a comment. I had emailed them before about integration questions, but that was email contact I had initiated.

Here I was mentioning on my blog that I wanted an API feature, and they respond as a comment saying it’s there, and I probably have the older version.

That’s service.

The people at Abebooks obviously care what people say about them and their product. They take is seriously enough to comment on a blog. They obviously check a few of the blog search sites (technorati.com etc) to see what’s going on and what’s being said.

I am impressed.

GURPS Cyberpunk was an RPG I never had in High School.

It was during High School that I was a serious Buletin Board User (BBS), downloading text files on hacking, unix and other stuff that I possibly could. I fit into the wannabe category, but there was a testosterone romance around hacking and hackers. I remember reading about “Operation Sundevil“, downloading this text file at a whopping speed of 120 bytes per second. For me in Australia it was interesting reading about a US Federal Government initiative ,Operation Sundevil, to crack down on illegal computer activities.

At the time, I never understood why Steve Jackson got raided .. until I bought GURPS Cyberpunk recently. The Legion of Doom were the technical consultants for the matrix/cyberspace/hacking side. I think the GURPS matrix stuff is a lot more realistic than the Cyberspace or Shadowrun RPG versions, but why is now obvious.

According to Wikipedia, Legion of Doom

The Legion of Doom (LOD) was an extremely influential hacker group that was active from the 1980s to the 1990s.

LOD was founded by the hacker Lex Luthor, after a rift with his previous group the Knights of Shadow (much as MOD would later be founded after Phiber Optik had a rift with Chris Goggans and LOD, eventually leading to the Great Hacker War and disbanding of both groups).

At different points in the group’s history, LOD was split into LOD and LOD/LOH (Legion of Doom/Legion of Hackers) for the members that were more skilled at hacking than pure phone phreaking.

Anyway .. these kind fo hacker tales are told in The Hacker Crackdown if you want to delve into more details. This was written by Bruce Sterling, who is also a prominent Cyberpunk author. However, Sterling was kind enough to allow people to freely distribute the Hacker Crackdown.

Apparently there was not connection between Operation Sundevil and this raid on Steve Jackson games. This relationship with LOD seems to have attracted the attention of the secret service, claiming the book was a manual for hacking. Perhaps it just reflects the technical and possibly dubious exploration and authorities reactions of the time. I remember reading Phrack, LOD technical journals and a whole lot of other stuff relating to online security during the 1990’s, and even then some of this stuff was old. Looking back on the material I read from the 80’s, the stuff I found during the 90’s I felt the “punk ethos through technology”. But for me, it ended up being like reading a book, that was a true story.