Crazy But Able

My main man Joel wrote a post yesterday about Lego Programming, the myth that you can make programming as easy as snapping together Legos:
Frequently, the mainstream media, reporting on computer programming tools, gets the story horribly wrong.
What happens is that some kind of vendor of programming technologies has come up with some product they are […]

Ah yes, it’s time for the Pathological Programmer. The PP has found a fun new way of creating an infinite loop. And with new ways of creating infinite loops come new ways of recursion!
C# has a language feature called “indexers”. You know about array indexers right? You have an array of […]

Check out the pictures accompanying the article. No mention of the uncanny valley though.
It occured to me while reading this article that different cultures will make androids which act like an average person of that culture. So not only do roboticists have to worry about the uncanny valley, but they have […]

Larry Osterman has an interesting post on whether or not developers should learn crypto:
I’m all for developers learning about crypto. But developers also need to understand that it’s all well and good for them to understand crypto, as long as they don’t ever actually attempt to IMPLEMENT crypto.
Because if they do attempt […]

Last time we looked at symbolic logic and how it can be used for knowledge representation. Now we’re going to look at some problems with using symbolic logic for representing knowledge in a hypothetical AI program.
The first problem with symbolic logic is that nobody can agree on what symbols to use. […]

Other folks musing on expert systems reasoned like this. Expert systems have problems, deep problems, because they encode all of the knowledge in the system right up front! It’s easy to seem intelligent when someone has given you all of your intelligence. What we need are computers that can see problems and […]

One of the first real successes of the AI community was in the field of expert systems. The idea goes like this: what if we could distill all of the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of an expert in a field and put all of that concentrated knowledge into a computer program? Then […]

I’m going to write a series of posts on artificial intelligence. I don’t know how many posts there will be, I’m just going to keep writing about it until I’m done. I have many thoughts and opinions on the subject, as I’ve been thinking about it off and on for about 14 years […]

I had a particularly perverse and evil thought today while dealing with strings in C#.
A string is a first-class object in C#. This means we can do things like
char[] foo = “This is my string, which is an object”.ToCharArray();
In true object oriented fashion, we can string properties together as well. So let’s say […]

Of course, if you don’t love programming, you won’t think so.
Ever wonder how you could script your windows box to do whatever you want? Sure, you could install Perl, but what if you want to do something windows specific, like get a list of devices which aren’t working right in Device Manager?
Enter the Scriptomatic.
The […]