And if they made a feature length one, I think would watch it!
Wednesday 9 October 2024
OK .. There may "just" be a case for AI .. Star Wars: A New Hope (1950s Version)
I cannot describe it .. you just have to watch it! (see link below .. "In a Galaxy Far, Far Away"):
Tuesday 8 October 2024
That's Interesting: An International Warhammer Conference Captured on YouTube
Here it is in all its glory (see link below):
https://www.youtube.com/@warhammerconference
The first video (see below, included so you can get a feel for it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KNs_Gnq1Z8
I have to say that I am fascinated! In know 40K in particular is so old it has its own creed and history within its history. Fascinated to see the dedication and interest this generates!
Tuesday 1 October 2024
Watch out for those Accountability Sinks - The Unaccountability Machine
Ever thought that the world is just too complex and is just mad. You know you just could be right. The Unaccountability Machine might just be able to tell you why (see below, another interesting and insightful Audible read, this time about Economics):
It introduces a interesting character called Stafford Beer and the Cybernetics Movement, co-starring Norbert Wiener, Gordon Pask and John von Neumann. What could go wrong if we follow the (wrong) economists?
Wikipedia:
Not forgetting the terrible tale of the squirrels:
Friday 27 September 2024
Another good free book to read on Wargaming: Dunnigan's "Complete Wargames Handbook" (2000 Edition)
The classic wargames book:
https://www.professionalwargaming.co.uk/Complete-Wargames-Handbook-Dunnigan.pdf
Courtesy of the Connections Professional Wargaming site. Still relevant today. Try looking around their other downloads, it is an interesting mix of resources:
Thursday 26 September 2024
Sunday 22 September 2024
Zante - A Holiday Location with a Bit of Unexpected Local History
Zante is a small island off the Peloponnese of mainland Greece. A pleasant holiday destination, where there was the sweet holiday sun and sea.
The Wikipedia link to the History of Zante gives a rather formal historical description, until teh last lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Zakynthos
During the Nazi occupation of Greece, Mayor Karrer and Bishop Chrysostomos refused Nazi orders to turn in a list of the members of the town's Jewish community for deportation to the death camps. Instead they hid all (or most) of the town's Jewish people in rural villages. According to some sources, all 275 Jews of Zakynthos survived the war;[65][66] however, other sources state that about thirty died of starvation,[67] or state that some elderly Jews, incapable of fleeing the town, "disappeared" in a German SS truck.[68] Statues of the Bishop and the Mayor commemorate their heroism on the site of the town's historic synagogue, destroyed in the earthquake of 1953.[65]
In 1978, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Israel, honoured Bishop Chrysostomos and Mayor Loukas Karrer with the title of "Righteous among the Nations", an honor given to non-Jews who, at personal risk, saved Jews during the Holocaust.[65] After the war, all of the Jews of Zakynthos moved either to Israel or to Athens.[69][70]
Another description: https://chrissieparkerauthor.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/zakynthos-under-world-war-two-occupation/
In short the people of Zante were nothing short of incredible by the way they protected their Jewish community from the Nazi holocaust. Where 80% of all mainland Greek Jews disappeared in the Holocaust, the ones on Zante were protected by absorbing them into rural villages and small towns, blending them into the background.
As the Greeks say as they drink a toast Yamas!
Yamas to the brave people of to Zante!
Tuesday 6 August 2024
An AI Book from "Way, Way" Past (1986) and The Trillion Credit Squadron
What is there to learn from an old book? A book that is little more than an old technology review at that. A book that is a snapshot of the state of the art of Artificial Intelligence in 1986 (or rather a book published in 1986 about the state of the art circa 1984 - the publishing cycle was much longer to get to print then)? Technology was still pre-Internet. A "US based" state of the art, so Europe (where I studied in 1986-1991, BSc and MSc) in effect would have an information lag of two to three years to catch up. It was a time when the US was running scared of the Japanese Fifth Generation Computing initiative and the US Congress acted to mobilises "a whole of" US academic and industry sector response to what was perceived as an existential threat. Does that sound familiar? So familiar as what happened next was an AI Winter (the second) because of the stinging nettles of over inflated hype and unrealistic market expectations. That was a winter I was caught up in as a graduate student, but took it on the chin and just bumbled off into mainstream commercial computing.
The book is fascinating as it illuminates characters and personalities but shows the still unfulfilled dreams of Artificial Intelligence, from the mouths of the original pioneers who were at, or were taught by the delegates of the infamous 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Marvin Minsky's goal of that summer camp being to crack significant fields of AI (which still as to this day remain uncracked) within six weeks .. the craziness and the optimism of it. The field of Artificial Intelligence (although nobody was readily recognising it as a "field" in its own right at the time) was all things to all men, half the delegates did not even like the title.
Marvin Minsky passed away in 2017. Late on in life, when asked of what he thought of today's take on AI, he remarked, "We seemed to be closer to success in the 1970's", which I think is a reflection on how much we have learned, that there is still so much yet to be learned, including many more "unknown unknowns". The book is called "Machinery of the Mind, Inside the new science of artificial intelligence" and I wish I could have somehow read it thirty four years ago (see below, written by George Jonson, who was given the chance to mingle with the AI scientists through means of an Alicia Patterson Foundation journalism fellowship in 1984):
Note: I have literally destroyed the book in act of reading it [sins of my marker pen highlighting and scribbling quick annotations (filling in with hindsight developments to know to have happened next) and there is also the age of the binding - the glue cracking as I turned its pages].
It is a good book, as it tells you as much about the "people" as the "things" they were trying to create and I learned a lot of stuff I had never dreamed of was actually happening, cool stuff. The funny, the bizarre and the quite, quite sad. There were many winners and losers, famous names galore from the annals of AI. There was also a tie into one of my long running science fiction wargaming projects, that of replicating Traveller's "The Trillion Credit Squadron" scenario, with Eurisko and Douglas Lenat's original fleet (Douglas Lenat sadly passed away in 2023). I came across the book because of an oblique reference to Douglas Lenat and TCS.
The book stands for me as snapshot of an optimistic point in time, just before the cusp of the Second AI Winter (tied with the ultimate failure of the Japanese Fifth Generation Computing initiative and the political thawing of the Cold War). It is unbridled optimism, a freeze-pane of potential all the academic aspirational hopes, which had evaporated by 1991 but I still loved reading it.
Footnote: The original book cost $10 in 1986, a princely some forty years ago. I picked it up as a "second hand" book" from an internet shop, that shipped it six thousand miles for less that it's original price. In 1986 I would not have been able to afford the purchase, in 2024 it is less than the price of a coffee and a cake in a high street franchise shop.
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