The pleasure of the blogesphere — until it became crowded with people convinced they could be pro-bloggers, sitting on their tush for the rest of their lives, making tons of money without ever having lived life or done anything — was that it was easy to discover smart, creative individuals. There is something about a blog which lets you know about the person behind it. You can tell if the person is smart, funny, well read, logical, or artistic. You can even tell if the person is good at heart, or a total ass. In some cases you might be able to tell if they are smart.
Extremely blog intuitive, Indie (featured at Should be Famous for his very creative blog Synchronicity of Indeterminacy), was one of my first blog reads and remains on my read list to this day.
I read blogs of many different genres as long as the blogger appears intelligent, but who knew.
Indie recently won an award for Elbot, an internal research and development project at Artificial Solutions to try out new methodologies of natural language processing, and ultimately improve customer systems.
Elbot, via his human counterpart Fred Roberts (Indie), took home the Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. This is an international artificial intelligence contest to find the computer program which can fool the most humans into believing it is just as human as them.
You can see Indie with his medal here in The Reading Chronicle’s, Elbot has the robot gift of the gab.
You may chat with Elbot here. He is not human yet, but his heart is sound even if his “brain” is tired form all the work they’ve had him doing recently.
Meet Elbot.
Congratulations Indie.
Wooden Heart created by Fred Wise, Ben Weisman, Kay Twomey and German bandleader Bert Kaempfert, was based on a German folk song, “Muß i’ denn zum Städtele hinau, performed in the video in English by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers from their Playback box set “Nobody’s Children“.
That’s pretty cool.
It is isn’t it.
So, you CAN get famous blogging! I knew it! Should I start posting about skinny women?
Congrats to old friend, Indie. Great post, old friend Cooper.
A skinny artificially intelligent women?
That’s the coolest thing I’ve seen this week.
Elbot is an interesting creature, if that is what you call artificial intelligence. The video humanizes him in a way.
Congratulations to your friend.
He is kind of cute isn’t he?
I just chatted Elbot up, he suggested you write a phone book instead of a blog, calling blogs, poetry, and prose wasteful. Phone books are another thing all together “of the highest order”.
He also said, ” Politics are nothing more than a multidimensional nonlinear problem of optimization. They should let the robots take over. Things would run with much more precision”.
I think he’s right.
You’re right, his heart isn’t wooden and that question insulted him.
But I did write a phone book.
You’re much too kind about my blog. But I feel very honored that you’ve taken the time to stop by so often in the past, and still do.
The slide show and song is such a thoughtful combination. It’s like the final dot on Elbot’s personality. No one could have done better with that set of photos, in fact it’s the best anyone ever did.
I’m pretty hard to shake.
Not in a stalker like way though. ;)
I think your blog Coop has to be one of my longest read blogs. It’s been going on three years now I think. I just can’t seem to shake it. :)
Must be that nicotine which emanates from the start page.
The bloggosphere is only duplicating what life often does — showing what we thought we wanted to do wasn’t really what we wanted to do. But that’s only appearance wise. It’s sort of like when you end up with a career you were good at and kept because you were good at it and not because you wanted it. I think they made a movie of this called Groundhog’s Day. Maybe I’ll get it right sooner than Bill Murray did. If not, artificial intelligence could work for me.
It was better when I could look at ten blogs and find at least one I liked though. ;)
Zydeco Fish: Thanks! Elbot would say “Of course, cool! My surface temperature is 60°F.”
Doug: It’s only fifteen minutes – but the girls are fun, even if you’re not famous.
Jacob: People are usually disappointed when they find out Elbot isn’t really about artificial intelligence – it’s dialogue simulation. These systems can be very powerful, depending on the methods used to design them, but it’s still a human being who makes the final decision about what is relevant to learn and what isn’t. None of the systems which have competed in the Loebner competition the last years have been purely AI, but I guess it depends how you define it.
Casey: I could never understand Elbot’s reading habits, though I do share his interesting in Dadaist poetry.
Chris: I agree with you. Cooper’s blog is the tops:
Kellypea: I saw Eliza once in high school, ran on an IBM 360 read in with keypunched cards – but I never imagined I’d get into a field liktethis, it just happened. But once I got into it, it turned out to be the perfect niche. I’m very enthusiastic about what I do, and I think that is the key to success in any venture.
Cooper wow for some reason this post and the SBF post leaves me speechless and breathless for two reasons. You capture what the blogosphere was and what it is now so amazingly, and I didn’t know Indie was an IA person–I have the exact opposite mind so get along with them incredibly
Thanks Cooper for reminding me of a blog I do adore and for being Cooper. I was going to ask permission to call you Alice in something, but I prefer Alicia
Thanks Cooper for being you
Like the new avatar.
You just never know what’s behind the blog – kind of interesting in and of itself.
Now I know what I’m going to be for Halloween
I hope it worked well for you.