Archive for June, 2010

Yesterday I played soccer for the first time since 2005, and felt great. Well, actually my game was pretty awful and I was seriously winded the whole match since I haven’t done any sprinting since January 2009′s adventure. Regardless, I am very very happy with how my leg and ankle held up, and I’m already looking forward to playing again. Seb and I were just going to kick a ball around, but then got wrapped into a pick up game, and it was great. The only downside was a ball to the face that bruised the bridge of my nose, but luckily didn’t rebreak it.

I finished watching a sequel season called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Along Complex (2nd GIG) and really loved it. I wrote previously about the first season of this series and pointed out that I enjoyed how it treated issues of technology. In the second season, I realized that what I like the most is the particular issues that the writers brought up about artificial intelligence. Specifically, through the “think tanks” called Tachikomas (pictured) there are numerous discussions among them that I believe are meant to be a weak A.I. trying to decide whether or not it is a strong A.I. or still only a weak A.I. In context, you should read “think tank” in the military denotation as a tank that thinks, and not in the political denotation as a lobbying research “think tank.”  Weak A.I. is the kind that lives in Searle’s Chinese Room and seems like a person but just isn’t. Strong A.I. is a  non-human intelligence that is actually intelligent in the sense that it thinks and is conscious (as humans are), beyond just doing human-like computation with identical output. The Tachikomas were interesting to listen to because of their setup: they are child-like helper robots, synced in memory every night, but allowed to differentiate from each other throughout the day (since they are not always synced). They therefore seem to do and think about different things each day, resulting in a bizarre setup when they confer and each instance of the machine is talking to the different versions of  itself that diverged through experience through the course of the day.

Meanwhile, since I have been saving tutoring money to upgrade my home computer, I have been back in computer hardware research mode. In the process I stumbled upon the following article that demonstrates that professional PC gamers have the physical health of old chain-smokers, but the minds and reaction times of professional athletes. It’s not surprising, but it’s fantastic that someone did the research. Here is a link to the article. Anyway, the only thing I’ve purchased so far is an Antec Nine Hundred Two case that was 50% off, new.