AI Guy profile picture

AI Guy

Interested in Software and Artificial (and Real) Intelligence

About Me

My personal page .

We decided to chuck it all and live in a tent.
The Fran and Dave Experiment .

I'm HAPPILY married. I'm not interested in mating or dating.


All Blog EntriesElectric Sheep - Coming To You Live... Oops Apocalypse – Georgia On My Conscience The Trouble with Parry (and Eliza) - Why Can't a Computer Talk More Like a Man? Boonies Child (Slight Return) Mmmm-Hmmm - That New Job Smell! And the Luser Is - Pride and Propeller Heads Swamp Thing In Tweed - First Encounter The Devil in the Details: Deliberations in Silicon A Random Walk In Wonderland: Lust, Vice, and Statistics Limbaugh and the Whale: Artificial Stupidity Saves the Day I'm Sorry Dave, I Can't Do That - Eliza, english, and The Good Son Interview with the Witch Doctor - Did I Just Flunk the Turing Test? Laugh Along With NASA Leonard Peikoff and Me Little Things That Kill In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Rant The IDEs of March I have Lisped in my heart... The Story So Far... My Resume (Shameless Plug)


Who Am I? Why Am I Here?

I'm just a friendly country boy from West Virginia. I have the greatest wife in the world, who makes it possible to do the things I love to do. You see, if she didn't handle the day-to-day details of life in the twenty-first century, I wouldn't be free to think about the things I enjoy. I have two quirky dogs, and they are my best buddies. I'm very thankful for my two step-children and my five grandchildren. A smile from a child is worth the world. My family and friends are a true blessing for me and have done more than they'll ever know to share life's good times and help me through bad times. Even in the worst of times, they help me remember that every day is Thanksgiving.

West Virginia has wonderful people, though people from outside often have an unfavorable picture of us. For some, life here can be very hard, but there is a toughness of spirit and a generosity of heart that is inspiring. Sometimes you'll see people from here portrayed as rural hicks with "Mail Pouch" painted on the sides of the barns. That is only part of the picture. There are a lot of intelligent people doing amazing things. And there are the back-woods type people too who are smart and amazing too, and I'm also proud of them. Remember how hard they work the next time you have hot food on your table. It takes dedicated, resourceful people who don't get all the breaks to produce it, and you have them to thank.

I love the scenery and outdoor activities here, and one of the great mysteries is that when I go climbing (which has been a while) or caving, I meet mostly people from Pennsylvania and Maryland, but seldom from West Virginia.

Professionally, I'm a software engineer. I'm passionate about my work, especially Artificial Intelligence. People who get to make computers do interesting things are the luckiest people in the world. (Okay, people who love people are the luckiest, but we run a close second.)

I just finished perhaps the most interesting job assignment I've done to date. I worked for a great company for two years. The project was to build a universal interface to any engineering program whatsoever. I created a schema-based language to describe the grammar of a given engineering application (see blog). Our client, Redstone Arsenal, needed it to optimize rocket designs, but I'd like to see it do more. I don't know the ultimate fate. Even though all my checks are cashed, I don't just do it for the money, so I hope it will be used somewhere.

I'm about to start my next job in Montgomery, West Virginia, writing software for an autonomous boat for the Navy. The software will be adapted from Mars Rover software. This should be a real challenge / learning experience - the upgraded version will have to process noisy scenes in real time.

When my work is not challenging enough, I take up the slack by working on "toy" AI problems at home. I try to see new problems through child-like eyes, and before I read the accepted literature, I like to try to solve the problem myself (which I write about in the blog). Even if the solution is not very good, this method forces me to understand the real issues, rather than just apply "cookbook" methods.

Although I believe that computer programming is an ego-driven endeavor, I'm not here to brag about my accomplishments. I don't claim to be any more smart or talented than you are. Some things I learn quickly and some things come slow and painfully and I just have to be persistent, which probably means I'm a lot like most people. What I'm blessed with is a child-like curiosity that keeps me driven to see what can be done. This is what I like to share.

Besides, I know that if I get boring, you can switch me off ;)

If you are tempted to think that we've gone as far as we can go with computers, remember that the electronic computer is just over 50 years old. The computer age is still in its infancy. The most amazing things are yet to come!

I welcome all feedback; I believe there is plenty we can discover together.

My Interests

  • ComputersAI
  • Graphics
  • Information Theory
  • Writing
  • Photography
  • Aviation (love the Cub!). Wife and I plan on building light sport plane or ultralight and hang-glider
  • Canoing
  • Caving
  • Rock Climbing (reserve the right to chicken out)
  • Outdoors
  • Music Music Theory
  • Guitar
  • Cycling
  • Alternative housing: We are looking into various modes of building: yurts, log homes, geodesic, or possibly some hybrid.
  • Reading
  • Mathematics
  • History
  • Dogs, the quirkier the better. I love teaching them weird tricks: rock climbing (perfectly safe indoor setup), playing piano, guitar, shoulder perching. I think dogs are the finest creatures there are. Don't get me wrong, though; some of my best friends are human
  • Puns, the badder the gooder. In college, I did an AI project to make a computer generate puns. My "punishment": I have been dreaming in puns for over 20 years.
  • Teaching people who are willing to learn.
  • Learning from people who are willing to teach.
  • Teaching myself.
  • Being a good husband, friend, stepfather, grandfather, human. This is the most important thing, but not the topic of my site.

    • I'm not interested in how drunk you were last night, what you look like holding a beer, how sexy you are or your adolescent bad-a** attitude. (I was around in the sixties, and nothing you can say or do can touch that.)

    I'd like to meet:

    I'm not an intellectual snob by any means, however, one of the reasons I set up this page is that I like discussing software specifically, and ideas in general. If you have some original way of looking at something, chances are I'm interested in hearing from you.

    As strange as it may sound, I love being proven wrong. Much of what I write is speculative, and the point is not so much to be right as to be a catalyst. I'll argue over interesting things, but it does not mean I'm arguing with you. It's all in fun to me.

    Music:

    Dawn of time to 1973.

    Great music can come from many genres, but I don't care about that so much; music should have passion, intelligence, wit. It should be able to express the gamut of human emotions or experiences. I would rather music be terrible than uninteresting. There was a lot of terrible music in the 1970s, and we should be so lucky today.

    I love to play the blues on guitar, but I'm not that good. I've heard people say I am, but I think that's because you can get away with a lot if you call it blues, and if you make a mistake, you can repeat it with some small variation. Not only does it make it seem like you meant to do it, but if it's a horrible mistake, you end up looking like a genius, which doesn't happen in my case every day, believe me. I like to play other things on the guitar, but it's harder to hide ham hands. Make a joyful noise, as they say.

    The music of the 1960s is great - very original - the sonic equivalent of a Dali painting. I was just a kid then, but it did something for me. And I never grew up.

    There is a lot of great classical work out there. To me, a good symphony by Beethoven has many of the qualities of early 1970s Black Sabbath.

    Movies:

    I love Film Noir and its stylistic starkness and minimalism. The use of language is creative, and funny in its own way.

    I like movies that can manage to be original, which leaves out the cookie-cutter dreck that forms the bulk of Hollywood's output. Intelligent dialog does not consist of spraying obscenities like a fire hose. Explosions and cars flying through the air are no substitute for a good story

    Here's a trick I use if I want to find a good movie: Go to the movie rental store, and look for something who's cast consist of people you've never heard of. Now, you might draw a real turkey, but the unintentional humor is probably better than what they market as comedy. If you keep at it, though, you'll find some real gems.

    Television:

    CSI Las Vegas, Sopranos, Discovery, NASA, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Southpark (heaven help me), The Sarah Silverman Program, Reno 911, Dog Bites Man, Dragnet (from 1960s), and yes, I like the corny laugh-track sitcoms of the 50s and 60s.

    Books:

    Godel, Escher Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Anything by Hofstadter.

    Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson. I just finished it, and it's teeming with great ideas. Even where I don't agree, it is food for thought.

    The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. Not only very interesting reading on the colonization of Mars, but good insights about Earth (my home planet).

    Works of Richard Feynman - a truly remarkable thinker, and a very funny practical joker. Very eclectic individual who played bongos and helped design the atom bomb.

    Works of Ayn Rand, chiefly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

    Heroes:

  • Scientists, explorers, original thinkers. (Excluding Columbus; he took people away in chains from an island, so he gets a big, fat raspberry).
  • See books

    • My Blog

    C++: Its Tautologically Delicious

    C++ is a great software engineering language because C++ gives you the software engineering tools you need to manage the bugs you'll encounter in C++ in the course of your C++ code's breaking because ...
    Posted by AI Guy on Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:47:00 PST

    Forces of Good and Evil - Finding Your Way

    If you live in West Virginia and are like a lot of fellow mountaineers, after work you'll drive some winding miles over mountainous highways, avoiding the bad roads in rainy weather, and after finding...
    Posted by AI Guy on Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:18:00 PST

    Tales from the Backside: Obsession and Punishment

    It started from a casual remark made by his room-mate just before spring break. It was a joking challenge; it wasn't supposed to mean anything, but the young man couldn't let it go. He did the things ...
    Posted by AI Guy on Mon, 28 May 2007 12:45:00 PST

    2000: A Train Oddesy and Other Perplexities

    "First, do no harm" begins the Hippocratic oath, at least they said that on Scrubs. I think that's a good rule for any profession (or life). I do think about the consequences of my work. After years i...
    Posted by AI Guy on Sun, 27 May 2007 09:13:00 PST

    Survivor West Virginia: The Experiment Begins

    *** Take a look at The Fran and Dave Experiment ***I've made mention of the fact that my housing situation is far from settled, and that I've resorted to camping. In my heart of hearts, I could say I...
    Posted by AI Guy on Sat, 26 May 2007 10:12:00 PST

    Curiouser and Curiouser  Growing Up Silicon

    Sometimes when I contemplate the more subtle AI  tasks, I think that somewhere, some time, there will be a program that is a genius at some complex task that just sits there and asks itself "Why ...
    Posted by AI Guy on Thu, 17 May 2007 05:02:00 PST

    Electric Sheep - Coming To You Live...

    We interrupt this program to take you live to a press conference of the North American Republic Association of Artificial Intelligence. Speaking is Dr. Gufenov, their controversial chief research scie...
    Posted by AI Guy on Fri, 11 May 2007 06:43:00 PST

    Oops Apocalypse  Georgia On My Conscience

    It was a bleak mid-winter evening in the Spring of my youth, nearly thirty years ago when, quite by accident, I brought the world crashing down around me. I had not aspired to set the world on fire ...
    Posted by AI Guy on Thu, 10 May 2007 06:38:00 PST

    The Trouble with Parry (and Eliza) - Why Can't a Computer Talk More Like a Man?

    I've written a couple times about human language as a medium of interaction between humans and machines. There was Eliza which uses what you could consider cheap parlor tricks to fool the unsuspecting...
    Posted by AI Guy on Mon, 07 May 2007 04:26:00 PST

    Boonies Child (Slight Return)

    I have been on a George Orwell kick lately. I don't know how long it will last. He seems to have a penchant for poverty, debauchery, squalor, socialism, and down-and-outness, all of which I tend to fi...
    Posted by AI Guy on Thu, 03 May 2007 10:42:00 PST