Artificial intelligence as a subject of stories goes back a long way. The Jewish story of the golem, the tin man in The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Pygmalion — they are all tales of artificial people looking for some element of humanity.

This is what a lot of the old stories focussed on. I suppose it was after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that storytellers used artificial creatures as sources of horror. They started to get less tangible too — taking on roles that would previously be taken by malicious gods or spirits. The characters of SkyNet in Terminator and HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey are difficult to pin down. They appear to exist everwhere, controlling the environment through computer networks.

Obviously these stories have moved with the times, as public perceptions of computers have advanced. The robot/woman in Metropolis or from 50s pulp scifi are more closely related to the Mechanical Turk than to the Puppet Master from Ghost in the Machine or the Red Queen from Resident Evil.

The real AI research done these days is (obviously) somewhat behind this curve. There are actually two reasons for this. The first one, of course, is that AI is really goddamn hard. I mean, even turning written sentences into something a computer can understand (called natural language processing) is a huge field fraught with terrible difficulties. The language we use to speak to each other is so filled with ambiguity and relies so much on context and implicit knowledge in the reader. If you haven’t seen any of the films or know any of the stories I’ve mentioned above, would you understand this post?

Even when I’m not discussing dodgy scifi there’s no reason for you to understand everything I say. There’s a classic ambiguous sentence in linguistics and AI which is always trotted out on these occasions:

Time flies like an arrow.

There are at least five different meanings for this sentence. The fact that you’ll initially think “time travels quickly and in a straight line, like an arrow flies” is only because of a huge amount of cultural knowledge that’s really hard to explain to a computer. (If you’re wondering what some of the other interpretations are, here’s Groucho Marx with the first one: “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”.) To bring syntactic ambiguity back into the world of Hollywood, I’d now like to quote that classic exchange from Wayne’s World:

“Can I be frank?”

“Can I still be Garth?”

The second reason why artificial intelligence is not as advanced as it could be is rather ironic: hubris. Considering that the stories of mankind’s creations exceeding our control are meant to teach us humility, it is the same humility that might well have helped AI research along.

In the late 60s and early 70s the great results achieved in AI research were dwarfed by the expectations. It was a classic case of the war being “over by Christmas”. No matter what spectacular insights or advances into computer vision or knowledge representation were made, they were guaranteed to be well beneath the fantastical claims made.

A few damning papers were released, rubbishing particular areas of AI research. Consequently, the whole field received a massive downturn in funding for nearly twenty years. Fortunately a lot of research was continued under other names.

But it seems that the new humility learned from this “AI winter” has reaped some rewards. The principal, I think, is the understanding that artificial intelligence is not limited to “creating artificial humans”. In fact, it’s often said that “AI is whatever we do not understand”. When we understand it, it becomes one of the ordinary tools of computing. This is certainly borne out by the things AI research has given us: mundane things like search engines, spam filters and computer chess programs.

Either way, AI will continue to provide interesting new technologies for us in the real world, and just as importantly provide a means to explore our humanity in art.

It is an impossible task to tell whether a program will run for a very long time, or run forever. If it’s been running for twenty minutes, it may be just about finished. Or it may need twenty years. It may need twenty thousand years.

Or it could just be spinning its wheels in the mud, working furiously on nothing in particular. This could be because of problems outside the program itself — a browser will appear to be doing nothing if you try to access the web when you’ve not got internet access. That is no fault of the program, or its programmer.

But there are infinite loops which a programmer can cause. There are a good number of times where a programmer will start off a series of tasks but not check if the task is finished. This problem has been immortalised on film in Fantasia with poor Mickey Mouse as the inept programmer.

For those lucky poor folk who don’t know the story of the sorceror’s apprentice it goes like this. Mickey is the apprentice to a powerful wizard, and like all apprentices (Karate Kid, Wizard of Earthsea) spends most of his time doing drudge work. He’s tasked with fetching water from the well and — while his master is away — attempts to use magic to save effort.

He programs a broom to come to life and carry in the pails of water while he has a snooze. Alas, Mickey makes a schoolboy error — he sets off an infinite loop. The animated broom has no concept of when to stop and continues to bring water into the house until the floor becomes flooded.

The lesson could well be learned from this but I’m not satisfied. We can take the analogy further (for no good reason). Mickey cannot stop the magic broom so smashes it to pieces with an axe. Each piece jumps into life, grows arms and legs and picks up a bucket for itself.

In computer terms the hapless apprentice spawned dozens of non-terminating programs from his original one. What a mistake! Luckily the system administrator sorceror came back at the right moment to kill all the magic broomsticks.

The sex scene in the Pierce Brosnan/Rene Russo remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is even worse (if such a thing be possible) than the one between Neo and Trinity in one of the Matrix sequels. Seriously: humping on a marble staircase?

I preferred the original, mostly because I don’t like Brosnan.

I have only one thing to say about this film:

What they did say: “Rotate that 75 degrees around the vertical”. Apparently that kind of thing is okay in the movies, when they want to know what happens on the blind side of the room. What they didn’t say was: “Rotate that 90 degree around the horizontal”, when they wanted to see Gene Hackman’s face from the satellite photo.

Cos that would just be silly, right? I enjoyed it though.

Thanks to the stalwart efforts of robhu I got to watch Jesus Camp the other day.

It is, as you might guess, about a kids’ camp run by, and for, evangelical Christians. The kids do the summer camp stuff which they don’t show much of (go-karting, you get the idea) and lots of Pentecostal praising, sermons and lectures.

Just back from seeing Casino Royale and all those folk who plan to see it tomorrow — queenspanky et al — are gonna love it I think.

It was rough, gritty, fast and surprisingly tense. I’ll lay off the spoilers today. Instead I’ll say that I loved the parkour in the opening scenes; and that there were even neat little fractals in the opening sequence graphics (a Mandelbrot set–style club sprouting Koch snowflakes which turn into more clubs). Daniel Craig was head and shoulders above any Bond since Connery.

Take your dinner jacket, take your slinky dress, have a vodka martini: enjoy.

Last week, on the 18th of August, I went to see Clerks 2 at the Film Festival and it was really good. I can’t really remember much about the original. (I’m presuming something happened that’s worth remembering but like I say… I can’t remember. I saw it on a tiny television and we weren’t sure at the time whether it was the TV or the film that was causing it to appear in black and white.)

Never has inter-species erotica been so amusing. (And you gotta admit, it’s pretty amusing to begin with.)

The writer/director/Silent Bob actor Keven Smith was at the screening to answer questions afterwards. Unlike the Serenity screening from the year before there were almost no lame questions or requests to sing the theme song. (For those of you who are interested and were there last year, I know who was responsible for one of those requests, as he’s a friend of my brother. I’m sure we could beat him up for wasting a question.)

Well according to Wikipedia it was actually filmed as a miniseries, but we watched it as a film: Battlestar Galactica (the 2003 version).

It was pretty fun science fiction for those of us mourning the loss of Firefly but it wasn’t groundbreaking. There was a lot of stealing going on, and not all of it with a light touch either.

I saw Superman Returns on Saturday evening and it was really awesome. Great great great. I really like the fact that directors seem less afraid to make long films now. This is obviously only a good thing if the film itself is good, otherwise it’s just an expensive way to get a numb bottom.

But having more of a good film is what I enjoy. It’s nice having a slow build to the first big action sequence rather than something in the first five minutes.