Synchronist

Introduction

Hello Wikipedia world! I've already started the articles listed below, and now I've gotten around to starting my user page.

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My Overture to the AI Community

One of the most most speculative and fascinating works of English literature is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, whose opening I edit on behalf of my intended audience – the community of AI researchers – as follows:

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
The Conference doors are opened wide,
My talk must soon begin;
The guests are met, the dias set:
May'st hear the restless din.'

He holds him with his skinny hand,
'There was a ship,' quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Conference-Star stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.

In Coleridge's original poem, the Mariner goes on to tell a quite incoherent tale of ontological desperation; but given that he “has been around the block a few times”, there perhaps emerges for its readers a certain wisdom.

My own readers will have realized by this point that I am going to cast myself in the role of the “grey-beard loon”, and attempt to insert myself into the dialogue regarding AI, and, in particular, deep learning; but I, too, “have been around the block a few times” – and so there may again emerge a certain wisdom:

A young high school student decides in 1964 upon a career in computer science – though the discipline hardly exists at the time; in the grip of the zeitgeist, he recognizes that artificial intelligence is the golden apple of this discipline, and, unencumbered by scholarship, intuits that an elegant, multi-leveled approach must be responsible for the “entire edifice of language, thought, and knowledge” – and he so gives birth to the “Smith conjecture” (not to be confused with the famous Smith conjecture of geometric topology).

The broad horizons of university life intervene. Discovering the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the prose of James Joyce, he turns in a blank Honors Calculus final and graduates as an English Lit major; but, during these same undergraduate years, he has also concieved of a system with a pen-like element, which, scanned along the lines of a book, will audibly spit out the phonemic equivalents of the characters encountered – and thus enbable the blind to read.

(AI professionals will here, of course, recognize a seminal, and at that point, still unsolved, problem – robust optical character recognition.)

The promise of this device nonetheless lures him away from a fellowship in English Literature at Vanderbilt University to the near-by Perceptual Alternatives Laboratory of the University of Louisville, to which he has been invited to perform independent research related to his invention; and there, not only will the computer claim its predestined place in his life – he becomes a prodigy in assembly language programming on the DEC PDP-9, an 18-bit machine with an instruction set identical to that of the PDP-7, and on which, and at precisely the same time, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are experimenting with C and Unix; there also, under the shadow of the American Printing House for the Blind, he enjoys an association with the leading lights of that community.

But there is also inserted into the fabric of his life at this time a most curious thread: home on vacation, his father throws at him a newspaper in which is recounted the success of one Raymond Kurzweil – a young (and, in fact, precisely his own age) graduate of MIT, who has brought flat-bed optical character recognition and computerized speech synthesis to such a degree of development that, when combined, a much-celebrated reading device for the blind is the result – though of perhaps no more practical consequence than his own still-born invention.

In short, the emerging microprocessor now transforms the entire landscape – the once mighty Digital Equipment Corporation of Massachusetts ultimately to be swallowed by a Houston manufacturer of personal computers; but it is an environment in which our newly-minted “computer guru” – many of whom, like himself, are from the humanities – can thrive; and so we re-discover him as the architect of the BLAST data communications protocol, which becomes pretty darn popular during the 1980s – and, as part of which episode, he is exposed to every major computing platform and computing initiative of the era.

But our hero is now – finally – homeward bound. Succumbing to the same gravitational field in which his parents have been captured – his mother a Manhattan-trained commercial artist, his father a civil engineer turned designer of imaginative residences – he himself becomes an artist of the visual type, albeit a kinetic sculptor, and with his own patented and microprocessor-based “programmable armature” as his platform ( http://www.space-machines.com ).

And – not incidentally – he also becomes a contributor to the literature of techno art ( http://www.on-verge.org/reviews/from-search-engines-to-saxophones-its-the-machine-stupid/ ; http://www.caldaria.org/2013/06/battlestar-galactica-by-g-w-smith.html ; http://www.caldaria.org/2013/09/lin-emery-by-philip-palmedo-review-by.html ; http://www.caldaria.org/2014/02/the-beat-goes-on-review-by-g-w-smith.html ; http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/4/3/75; and http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/LEON_a_01222#.WIisTtTyvMo ).

Such has been my interminable excursion; but the sympathetic AI researcher will recognize therein several areas of exposure relevant to his or her own craft: to digital technology, of course; to literature, the ultimate example of natural language; to the image, as understood by an artist; and, perhaps most important, to human blindness, which – like all such radical narrowings of experimental conditions – must yield a wealth of information.

I have therefore been inspired to write an article linking deep learning to the visual arts; and in prepartion for having it published, I hope to obtain the feedback of the professional AI community as to technical errors. (Here is a blind link to said article: http://www.space-machines.com/Art%20and%20Artificial%20Intelligence.pdf ).

What does this have to do Wikipedia? Only this: if the article is published, I intend to attach it as a reference to the Wikipedia article on Deep Learning; so speak now – or forever hold your peace. Synchronist (talk) 06:23, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Done!

Done! Please check out the additions to the "Criticism and comment" section of Deep Learning and the article referenced therein! Synchronist (talk) 23:47, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

And also now referenced in the new "Emphasis on emotional and aesthetic intelligence" section of the Turning test! Synchronist (talk) 04:31, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Teilhard de Chardin

Having managed to bring the perspective of the humanities to a few strategic articles wherein some shelf space in the "supermarket of ideas" had been left for them -- i.e., I claim no particular credit -- my hope now is to help renew interest in the work of Teilhard de Chardin, who, one senses, had the big heart and great soul of an Alan Turning; but I will need the help of a certain "Conference Star". I have set a trap for him in an obvious place -- and let us now see if its steel jaws can close around that foot which leaves such huge prints.

And here I am reminded of a joke which takes a great facility in English to appreciate:

A dog with a bandaged foot walks into a saloon. What does he say to the bartender?

"I'm lookin' for the man who shot my paw!" Synchronist (talk) 05:03, 28 April 2015 (UTC)