OK, OK, so I admit it. This is a vanity post. I’ll be writing to you this week (and, it turns out, next week, too) in an unusually personal fashion.
Next week’s column (which was bumped a week for this week’s column) will make more sense. It’s written in a true “drama in real life” fashion. Oh, you needn’t worry. There’s very little real drama in it. But it will hold together in a way the following potpourri of random thoughts won’t.
Don’t mistake me, though. There will be portions of this mishmash very alluring. Some of it may even elicit the thought, “I’m glad someone finally said that.”
And with that, here we go…Continue Reading “‘The Coming Thing…’ Thoughts on Turning 60”
My Life With AI—Part II: The Search For The Holy Grail
I always had a certain curiosity (there’s that word again) with the idea of artificial intelligence. You can’t blame science fiction for this. It was simply the challenge. Artificial intelligence represents the Holy Grail of mathematics. It’s not simply ramming a bunch of formulas through faster and faster processors. It’s going a step beyond. It’s giving the computer a basic set of instructions, then allowing it to begin programming itself by building on top of that foundation.
Naturally, I monitored the subject. This is one reason I knew about the Boston-based investment adviser BatteryMarch, although, technically, it wasn’t artificial intelligence; it was just another example of brute force processing. For the inside dope on AI, I didn’t rely on the Wall Street Journal or even the data processing trade press. No, I paid attention to Continue Reading “My Life With AI—Part II: The Search For The Holy Grail”