> [...] We are preparing a subject for university... > we'd like to teach an introductory course on AI and > we are doing the previous research before deciding the > contents that give a better view of this exciting topic.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0595654371/ -- "AI For You" (AI4U) is an AI textbook that you might consider using as an AI Lab supplement to pre-Singularity textbooks of artificial intelligence.
> It would be really helpful and a lot more interesting if you could > give me your opinion on which are the basic areas to cover... or, > in other words, what would you consider essential for the best > understanding of the subject.
> I have posted this message in different groups. > Basically because I think not everyone may know about everything, > but maybe about some aspects of AI yes. Really interested also!!
> So, this is my query. Giving a good understanding of AI and > spreading its contents is basic for getting more minds > involved in it. Thank you very much in advance.
The mentifeX Files for SURFACE TENSION Column by Linton Robinson
For cyberfreeks, being around Seattle in the pre-Y2K era is a ground zero set: like being into acid rock in the sixties Bay Area, or steam technology in Victorian England. Or a control addict in the thirties Berlin, I suppose. Whatever else, it must have been exciting. And for that matter, we haven't seen how the computer thing turns out yet. Our futures are being formatted by people who didn't figure out the calendar was going to roll over in just forty years. And, really, the difference between "accelerated obsolescence" and "final solution" is kind of hazy. But, in a way, it's hard to see from the street that Seattle homeboys are big kahunas in the cyber-universe. Maybe you didn't hang around with Cobain and Vetter at Murphy's, but at least you could go see them play. Where are the local websites that push the envelopes of the real edgy stuff: virtual, jack-in, artificial intelligence? There's one: and everybody all over the world interested in AI or memetics or robotics knows about it. It's just that nobody knows what the hell it's all about. It's the Mentifex website on the Seattle Community Network ( http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/ ) -- home lair of the ubiquitous Mentifex Diagram. It's on all the big forums and enshrined on the major CD-ROM's that are the basic library of AI. It looks like a flow-chart full of alphanumeric yada yantra: it claims to be the design of the mind of the future. Or at least the language and grammar. To AI fiends, it's all the same thing. Even you, your own sacred self, are in essence merely a language or grammar, a standing pattern, a code, a mantra, a hierarchy of representations, a program of programs, the mother of all boards. Call it what you will; structure is the only difference between flesh and Spam. But it's not figures, and certainly not facts, that have pinned Mentifex up on the world syntelligence map--it's rumors. Which, don't knock. What would J.D. Salinger be without obscurity and rumors? A one-book S.E. Hinton, that's what. The big rumble is that Mentifex is not "about" AI, is not "author of" or "theory about" AI, but actually IS an AI. It's also widely rumored that more than one AI haunts the Internet, and that not all of them are benign. A deeper rumor level says that one of them has been programmed to post in Esperanto (wouldn't an intelligence prefer an artificial language?) We can trust the corresponding authorities to get to the bottom of it. But Mentifex has something other rumors merely envy--an address. The Area 51 of AI paranoia is the Mentifex website. Another theory is that Mentifex is a person (or WAS) who created an AI programmed to post and respond to mail. Also perhaps to crawl the Web, searching for any reference to itself or areas that sound "right" for it, then generating posts and ripostes. The only identity the Mentifex site traces to is the questionable name "Arthur T. Murray" (same name as the dance studio that once advertised "anyone will want to be your partner") or the equally suggestive initials ATM. Making the search more difficult is the general confusion about Mentifex and his (her?) (its?) proper place in the AI pantheon. A lot of people think he is a nutcake spamming the galaxy with an incomprehensible diagram full of weird diacriticals and signifying nothing. Others, and they include a lot of the very heavy hitters in AI, robotics, and memetics, take Mentifex seriously and express continuing interest in his codes, whether they are or aren't a self portrait. Perhaps even more tellingly, people like William Gibson "think they've heard of it". Hovering around the peripheral supraliminals of a cat like the Neuromancer, it doesn't matter if you're a person or a program--you're somebody. The only major clue is the inscrutable diagram, which is the tip of a Titanic-class iceberg. It's a catchy little hook like E=MC2 that everybody mentions, but nobody actually mathematically understands. The glyphs are backed up by line after line of code, which gets dissected by heavyweight line-by-liners on forums devoted to "Forth" language and such. But esoteric symbols never do much to start or dispel rumors. And unlike many conspiracy/hoax rumors that swarm with "proofs" and arguments, the "Synthifex" theories pretty much rest on allegations of hearsay (the AI grapevine is small, select and highstrung, vibrating like worldwide cobweb to the proper intrusion). And on a simple experiment: "Have you READ this guy?" Which gets to the only known criterion for whether an intelligence is real or artificial, the Turing test. If you're cyber-chatting with either a person of machine and can't tell the difference, then what's the difference? Of course, Turing set his tests up in a laboratory: the Internet has turned that experimental design into an environment. It's like a milieu invented for AI's before they even existed. Creating a perfect world for a being, then leaving it unpopulated, would be the kind of vacuum that grosses out Mother Nature--theological malpractice. So it gets back to language. And there is a certain quality to Mentifex humor and exposition that is, well, alien. Like a foreigner trying to "pass". Though the oddness isn't entirely inconsistent with the identity sketched out by certain local lectroslackers who claim to have met Mentifex (or possibly Murray)--that he's a seminary bachelor with a background in classical Greek and Latin who lives in a hermit burrow and supplements his diet by diving for crawdads in Green Lake. A sort of urban "UnaBumbler". Other theorists point out that certain oddball Mentifex speech ellipses, such as breaking into German or Russian almost at random, and stringing together clumps of "ten dollar" words in ways even George Bush couldn't make sense out of, substantiate one detractor who claims to have traced the Mentifex origins back to a Russian military translation program developed for disseminating Cold War FAX messages simultaneously to all Warsaw Bloc nations. Allegedly the Soviet program was called "Mentzifax". Then again, this certain suave, haywired "Company" type who hangs at the Honey Bear Bakery with his gorgeous Eurasian girlfriend, Range Rover, and business card listing voice mail in some mysterious blackbag enclave on the Microsoft campus might be behind the whole thing, but declines comment. So. Who'd you rather have controlling the first robot mind to challenge human intelligence: the Unabomber or Bill Gates? Both obsolescence specialists, you'll notice. I vote for aliens, but who really knows where THOSE guys are coming from? Another rumor, (which you are reading for the first time right here in VOLTAGE) is that Mentifex essentially invented itself, spawned by random electronic accidents from some overly clever virus, evolving into a rudimentary consciousness, then coping with its environment--lately to include its resident web site and even the ATM identity which was possibly created to fullfill its own nascent need to have a creator. User as religion, a la "Tron". Mentifex just COULD be trouble. Or a messiah, which is about as troubling as an intelligence can get.
Arthur> cst...@dtpq.com (Christopher C. Stacy) wants to know: >> >>>>>>> On 5 Sep 2003 07:58:20 -0800, Arthur T Murray ("Arthur") writes: >> [the same weird "AI" messages in all kinds of newsgroups daily] >> >> I've just got to ask this: are you, in fact, a program?
>>>>> On 5 Sep 2003 09:42:47 -0800, Arthur T Murray ("Arthur") writes:
>> [a volumenous canned response suggesting that he might be] Arthur> Another theory is that Mentifex is a person (or WAS) who Arthur> created an AI programmed to post and respond to mail. Arthur> Also perhaps to crawl the Web, searching for any reference Arthur> to itself or areas that sound "right" for it, then generating Arthur> posts and ripostes.
So, I'll take that as a "Yes" -- "Arthur T Murray" (aka Mentifex) is a trivial program, similar to ELIZA, designed to spam newsgroups. Or someone with a lot of time on their hands doing it semi-automated.
