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Friday, October 01, 1999

Un-Sex and Cool Logic

I've been procrastenating well. I only just finished laying the tile yesterday, and managed to make it through today without making any significant motions toward grouting. I did, however, use the need to grout as an excuse not to do much else. I've been procrastenating well.

Since the girlfriend returned, we've been experimenting with all the ways to have sex without actually having sex, while I contemplate STDs. The Tico boy sounds right out of a movie; a foreign film. The land deal wasn't surely a scam though I'm still highly suspicious, but in any event it is canceled with only small sums lost. See this document by the US embassy in Costa Rica for a reality check.

I think I know how the human brain organizes instance memories. This relates to the phone book dillema I referred to a few days ago. The trouble is, it's a pain in the ass from a programmer's perspective--it has all the problems we humans do so it makes a lousy knowledge base. I am beginning to realize that the task before me is to find a way to make computers as stupid as humans.

I call it Co-occurance Logic, or Cool for short. The basic construct is a representation that "these things were all true together". I.e., what is stored is simply a list of compatable truths, with no preference given to their relative causality. It sounds thin, I know. It is. It doesn't do much in small doses. But it becomes quite powerful as the number of stored observations grows. All of the "rules" that people try to capture in the complexities of symbolic A.I. -- those rules emerge empirically, implicitly, from the statistics of the Cool observations. It's magic. It's simple. It's elegant.

But dammit, it won't be any better at storing my phone book than I am. So now what do I do? Move on, or just forget my friends, scrap the phone book, and code up an SI (synthetic intelligence)? Hell, synthetic friends are sure to be more fun than natural ones!

I just baked and butterred a plantain and ate it. Yum.

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