Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial package. The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a set of generalized graphics routines, and artificial intelligence interface, but not the slightest mention of anything financial. When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant. "Don't be so impatient," he said, "I'll put the financial stuff in eventually." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God. | |
An interpretation _I satisfies a sentence in the table language if and only if each entry in the table designates the value of the function designated by the function constant in the upper-left corner applied to the objects designated by the corresponding row and column labels. -- Genesereth & Nilsson, "Logical foundations of Artificial Intelligence" | |
It was kinda like stuffing the wrong card in a computer, when you're stickin' those artificial stimulants in your arm. -- Dion, noted computer scientist | |
Long ago, in a finite state far away, there lived a JOVIAL character named Jack. Jack and his relations were poor. Often their hash table was bare. One day Jack's parent said to him, "Our matrices are sparse. You must go to the market to exchange our RAM for some BASICs." She compiled a linked list of items to retrieve and passed it to him. So Jack set out. But as he was walking along a Hamilton path, he met the traveling salesman. "Whither dost thy flow chart take thou?" prompted the salesman in high-level language. "I'm going to the market to exchange this RAM for some chips and Apples," commented Jack. "I have a much better algorithm. You needn't join a queue there; I will swap your RAM for these magic kernels now." Jack made the trade, then backtracked to his house. But when he told his busy-waiting parent of the deal, she became so angry she started thrashing. "Don't you even have any artificial intelligence? All these kernels together hardly make up one byte," and she popped them out the window... -- Mark Isaak, "Jack and the Beanstack" | |
***** Special AI Seminar (abstract) It has been widely recognized that AI programs require expert knowledge in order to perform well in complex domains. But knowledge alone is not sufficient for some applications; wisdom is needed as well. Accordingly, we have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence which we call "wisdom engineering". As a test of our ideas, we have written IMMANUEL, a wisdom based system for the task domain of western philosophical thought. IMMANUEL was supplied initially with 200 wisdom units which contained wisdom about such elementary concepts as mind, matter, being, nothingness, and so forth. IMMANUEL was then allowed to run freely, guided by the heuristic rules contained in its heterarchically organized meta wisdom base. IMMANUEL succeeded in rediscovering most of the important philosophical ideas developed in western culture over the course of the last 25 centuries, including those underlying Plato's theory of government, Kant's metaphysics, Nietzsche's theory of value, and Husserl's phenomenology. In this seminar, we will describe IMMANUEL's achievements and internal architecture. We will also briefly discuss our recent efforts to apply wisdom engineering to oil exploration. | |
THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #2: RENE Named after the famous French philosopher and mathematician Rene DesCartes, RENE is a language used for artificial intelligence. The language is being developed at the Chicago Center of Machine Politics and Programming under a grant from the Jane Byrne Victory Fund. A spokesman described the language as "Just as great as dis [sic] city of ours." The center is very pleased with progress to date. They say they have almost succeeded in getting a VAX to think. However, sources inside the organization say that each time the machine fails to think it ceases to exist. | |
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. - Thomas Jefferson | |
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid" -- the artificial person, from _Aliens_ | |
COBOL: An exercise in Artificial Inelegance. | |
pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department. | |
Q: How did you get into artificial intelligence? A: Seemed logical -- I didn't have any real intelligence. | |
In Minnesota they ask why all football fields in Iowa have artificial turf. It's so the cheerleaders won't graze during the game. | |
Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as artificial flowers have to flowers. -- David Parnas | |
"Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised. "We're back in the universe again..." An unusually long pause followed, "...but I don't know which part. We seem to have changed our position in space." A spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the starfield surrounding the ship. "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us," ZORAC announced after a short pause. "The designs are not familiar, but they are obviously the products of intelligence. Implications: we have been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown, and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown. Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious." -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star" | |
Most people have a furious itch to talk about themselves and are restrained only by the disinclination of others to listen. Reserve is an artificial quality that is developed in most of us as the result of innumerable rebuffs. -- W.S. Maugham | |
Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who's willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location. Notice I say "shop for," as opposed to "obtain." This is the major drawback of home centers: they are always out of everything except artificial Christmas trees. The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every object -- every board, washer, nail and screw -- in the entire store ... Let's say a piece in your toilet tank breaks, so you remove the broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if he has a replacement. The employee, who has never is his life even seen the inside of a toilet tank, will peer at the broken part in very much the same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at an electronic calculator, and then say, "We're expecting a shipment of these sometime around the middle of next week." -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw" | |
for ARTIFICIAL FLAVORING!! |