The Prize For the Development of Kimmo Strong Artificial Intelligence

January 9th, 2009

I am introducing a prize for the succesful development of a Kimmo Strong Artificial Intelligence. This prize will go to the individual or individuals or an organization, be it for-profit or not-for-profit, who produce an Artificial Intelligence that satisfy the requirements for an Kimmo Strong Artificial Intelligence:

“When presented with (whatever means possible) Carl Barks’ whole production of Donald Duck comics, the AI can produce an (practically) infinite number of comics which, in no discernible way, differ in style or quality from any selected one of those by Carl Barks.”

Choosing the recipient of the prize is left entirely at the discretion of me (Kimmo Savolainen). The prize money for winning is at the moment of posting 10€, subject to increase in the future.

Posted in AI, KSAI | 2 Comments »

Ideas For Future or Present Time Travellers Who Lack Imagination

January 4th, 2009

It was exactly a year ago that I set my foot in Helsinki. This and the New Year (of which, I wish Happy for my readership) has prompted me to write some words of advice and inspiritation for any future or present time travellers.

Before anything else, a few words on building a time machine. First of all, your time machine will need to accommodate for travelling between parallel universes. If it doesn’t, your enjoyment and options are severely limited. If you have only one universe and you go back in time in it, you have changed it forever (from the moment you entered the past). You can’t go back in to the future and return to the set-up that you left. This is a consequence of the butterfly effect in practice and the further back in time you go, the more the moment you left from, will have changed if you are to return to it.

People make mistakes and this kind of situation is not a favourable one for a time traveller. What you want is the ability to change from parallel universes (of which there are practically an unlimited number of identical ones with this one) to another. This means that you can return to the point in time where you left and have it appear (in any conceivable way) identical to the one you left, regardless of what happened in the past.

Once you’ve built your time machine or modified your existing one to accommodate this feature, we are free to explore the fun stuff you can do with it! There are other things that might be beneficial for a time traveller, such as immortality or the ability to make a back-up of yourself, but I won’t go into them here.

1. Seduce a celebrity

Most celebrities are normal people before they became celebrities. With the knowledge you’ve learned about them during their public career, you can go back in time when they still weren’t famous and seduce them using that information!

2. Obtain unbeforeseen-works from your favourite artist.

Thanks to the butterfly effect, you can go back in time to a suitable moment and make any change in it, really, appearing there is enough of a change. Your favourite artist will live in a different universe than the one where you originated from and will produce works of art that differ from the ones you know. They might show similarities with the one’s you’re familiar with, but it’s practically impossible for them to be exactly the same than in your original universe. Subsequently, this is pretty much what KSAI offers as well.

3. Get rich

Pretty much the standard thing to do. Lottery won’t do it, thanks again to the butterfly effect but buying the right stock would almost definetely work. Locating lost treasures, works or art works as well.

4. Make sure that Babbage gots his act together.

Is going to have gotten? I don’t know, but Steampunky world is too romantic to ignore. Steam-powered mechanical computers? Come on!

5. Live the perfect day/week/month/year over and over again.

This is the Groundhog Day -method. It’s your payday, first vacation-day, your SO is running hot, the weather is beautiful, whatever the circumstances are that make a perfect day, you can rewind and have another go. There won’t be any surprises though, so my take would be to concentrate on satisfying basic needs. The longer the time you spend reliving the higher the possibility of something unexpected happening.

Of course there are plenty of other choices, but these are those that tickle my fancy the most. I didn’t get into the ethics of these situations or time travel in general since it probably makes a boring post, but you are free to engage in that discussion in the comments! If there are any time travellers reading this, it would be nice to get a ‘hi!’ from them. No posers!

Posted in Hedonism, KSAI, Nostalgia | 2 Comments »

On Failure

December 7th, 2008

As a former (and recouperating) failure, I am a fond proponent of failing. Not in the sense that you should aim to fail, but how you respond to it once you do. This Saturday I attended the first Aikido dan-graduation in my life. Dan-graduation is quite different from kyu-graduations. It is more formal, it usually takes place along a seminar, is, of course, more demanding and is judged by three people from the Aikido federation of Finland.

Three out of four applicants for the 2.dan were disqualified. Apparently this was something unheard of. As one of the judges marked, if you don’t get disqualified in a graduation at least once in your life, it’s hard to become a good budokan.

A failure is fruitful way to learn something. I don’t mean to learn a simple proposition, I mean something a bit more fundamental of nature; proper ways to conduct yourself, new ways to think, adjusting your set of values. Failing gives you limits. If you succeed all the time, how would you know what you are doing right or whether is all to up to luck? What if one day you have to change the way you do things for any number of reasons? Now everything that has worked so far just doesn’t, and you have no idea why, you probably don’t even recognize why you are failing all of a sudden. You’re stuck on a single mode of thinking, doing, learning, existing…etc. As Calvin (as impersonating his father) once marked:”Feeling lousy builds character”.

When you’ve failed in a <insert a set of circumstances here>, by all means gripe about it, get pissed, blame it on the judges, vow revenge (in your mind) and then get over it. You can always try again, and nothing, NOTHING, you’ve done so far has been wasted.

So kids, fail early, fail often, blame everybody and everything else, then blame yourself (because you’re the real cause), take heed and learn about it. Then shrug it off and continue your life. Am I making myself clear? Bueller?

Posted in Concepts | 3 Comments »

Time to Change

November 23rd, 2008

Not too long ago, I attended a cinematic event. Now that I can actually afford them I’ve grown to dislike them more and more. My biggest gripe are the advertisements. I’ve payed dear money for the priviledge and then they see it fit to show me probably the finest concentration of tripe known to man. Some of the ads are obviously mean’t for radio. Thats multimedia for you.

In that sea of meaninglessness something caught my attention as I was hoping to see Tropic Thunder instead. It was an ad for some jewelry which was apparently an improved version. Thus it had “2.0″ added to its brand name.

Internet, I’ve known since my Blog began in it’s present form that the name was already a tired joke and that there would be a time when even Stephen Colbert would announce that it’s done. At that moment, in that movie theatre, when that deep voice claimed the reason for naming that jewelry something + “2.0″ it was clear to me that now was that time. It’s time to get back to basics.

Ladies and Gentlemen, får jag presentera… Kimmo’s Blog (classic)!

Posted in Current Matters, This Blog, personal | 2 Comments »

On Greeting

November 22nd, 2008

I have a vague feeling of déjà vu that I’ve written this post already, but the subject bears repeating.

I’m working with a few preconditions of human nature with one of them being that humans like to see that they have some kind of effect on and in the world that they live in. This explains the subtle enjoyment one gets from cracking the ice of small ponds on a cold morning or why some people build models or any of the huge number of human endeavours that exhibit this idea.

Being social creatures that we are, we also like to see that we have an effect on other humans. We like to be acknowledged by them and recognized by them. I honestly think that you could drive anyone mad by just everybody not paying any attention to him/her or engaging in any interaction with them apart from the smallest possible amount. For example, if you tried to talk to people at work, they wouldn’t respond with anything meaningful, just grunts or shrugs. No matter what you said. Any questions at the supermarket would be met with I-don’t-know’s and I-guesses.

It is exactly because of this need for recognition that makes people greet each other. It is the assumption that if I acknowledge you, you will acknowledge me in turn. It is because of this fundamental link with basic human needs and traits that makes greeting an activity in need of as little as possible of reasons. Greeting should be acceptable in any situation. You should never have to explain why you greeted someone.

For any number of reasons, listed in this post or otherwise, I genuinely think that the world would be a bit better place if people greeted each other more often.

Posted in Concepts, Inquiry, Social | 2 Comments »

I’m Officially Certified!

November 14th, 2008

Certified ScrumMaster that is. I took a two-day course, led by Jens Østergaard and James O. Coplien, both outstanding lectureres. It wasn’t an impediment that the subject matter hit my local repository of human experience and values with good matches. Which means to say that I agreed on the explicit and implicit values and preconditions within Scrum.

It is kind of ironic but I recognize that the characteristics of Scrum that speak the most sense to me probably make it also incredibly difficult to wield in practice. For example, in Scrum, no-one and I mean no-one, can come and tell the development Team what they should be doing. The Team selects and co-ordinates itself, what it is going to do. But the Team itself is not responsible for the process and results, the ScrumMaster is. The ScrumMaster owns the process, i.e. is responsible that everything is running smoothly, including doing any- and everything to remove obstacles from the Team.

If there’s anyone wondering what’s the point of majoring in Philosophy in the Real World(tm), acquiring and assimilating different ways of thinking is probably a lot easier. I feel that I have at least one new one in my toolbox now.

Posted in Beginnings, Current Matters, personal | No Comments »

Ninja Skill: Acquired!

November 11th, 2008

I went bouldering for the first time in my life. This is the practice of climbing (in this case) walls with artificial holds, arranged to put up problems of most physical in nature. Since the climbs are only up to 5 metres tall, theres no safet equipment involved apart from common sense and cushions. To my surprise it’s not my arms that were the most to suffer but my hands. The skin in my hands and fingertips feels quite tender at the moment.

There’s always the problem of how much abuse are you going to subject yourself to when you are trying something physically demanding the first time. I think I did well. I expect to find myself a bit difficult to fist my hands in the morning and probably also my wrists will feel tense but probably nothing too bad to avoid me from operating a mouse.

Now I’ll just have to get to know the lingo involved.

Posted in Current Matters, personal | 5 Comments »

Complete Peanuts

November 9th, 2008

Every now and then, some things happen that make you take note and remember when you have one of those why-does-everything-always-not-go-well -moments. Fantagraphics books are printing all the Peanuts comics in the existence. They have been for a few years actually, but only last year those books started to appear in Finnish. The pace is two books per year, with each book containing two years of comics. Even at this pace it will take 10 years to reprint them all. This pace is much more moderate in Finnish though, one book last year and so far, one book this year. Impatient as I am, I have opted to collect the originals.

I have been a friend of the Peanuts for a long time. At some point I noticed that the pocket books they were printing here in Finland didn’t contain all of the strips, not to mention none of the Sundays either. The existence of which I didn’t come to learn until much later.

Therefore I find it a priviledge to get to read all of the strips in order, to get to see Snoopys transformation from a yipping dog to an “internationally renowned hockey-player” and “the first beagle on the moon”. Not to mention how ‘the bird’ turns into ‘Woodstock’ and how Lucy cultivates her bitchness and how the whole universe of Peanuts builds up. I also enjoy reading about Charles M. Schultz himself.

There’s far too little of Complete anything in the universe. Especially in comics. The works of Carl Barks are re-printed in dozens of different packages and when they do reprint the whole of it, the print is limited. But as I implied at first, I feel I am lucky to exist in the same universe as the Complete Peanuts.

Posted in Nostalgia, personal | 2 Comments »

Friday Night Ramblings

October 31st, 2008

It has been far too long since I’ve rambled in my blog, which is a shame. This is a shame from the point of view of the Dinosaur media who consider Blogs the primary media for rambling. It is not the same thing to be accusing the, if I pick a random Finnish media, Helsingin sanomat for rambling, even if their editorials bare no names and are mostly collections of sentences of the form:”Every intelligent person knows that…” and “It is a well-known fact” etc.

It is not the same thing, I want to stress this well-known fact.

Blogs are a slimy medium. They resonate and interact with each other, making it, at one side, a highly un-predictable concoction and on the other side a highly-predictable entity. It is very difficult to say what will become famous for example. On the other hand, there’s the Streisand effect. There are well-known examples of this in the Finnish blogosphere. It is no suprise that something like this puzzles those who were brought up in a totally different system of conveying ideas for people.

Because the blogs form a system so big and complex, it is impossible to understand and crasp its workings. Even a well-read blog reader can only skim a small amount of everything that gets written. It is exactly this that makes it also easy to trivialize and also to rationalize the apparent unimportance of blogs. How can you understand the impact of something that you can at any given moment see only a fraction of a fraction? Why would blogs make a difference when only a handful of them get any decent amount of readership? Because theres thousands of them, millions of them, linking to each other and any and all resources you can attach a wire to, piling, adding up, slowly and continuosly re-organizing itself and most of all, being read by much more people than write them.

This is only relating to the nature of the medium. I haven’t even touched the quality of writing…

Posted in Comparison, Concepts, Social | 2 Comments »

Saving the God-Damn Planet

October 25th, 2008

Just over a week ago some kind soul relieved me from the pain of owning a bicyclelamp. Forgetting the effect this incident have had on my attitude toward my fellow creatures, I have been involved with the process of choosing what kind of light-inducing solution will I mount to my bicycle from now on.

I have considered a hub-dynamo, which would provide light whenever I’m in motion, without having to worry about changing batteries or the lamp getting stolen. Stealing would have to include the whole front wheel in that case. Only thing that I’ve wondered is that why there aren’t any LED -based solution with hub-dynamos? Ok, not a bad solution, a bit expensive (including not just the lamp and dynamo but the wheel as well), but probably well-worth its prize in the future.

Petzl is somewhat legendary spelunker and famous for head-mounted lamps carrying his name. One sly sales-man introduced me to this choice, making the case for a model that has a retractable string allowing an easy mounting to almost everywhere, from your wrist, to your head and bicycles handlebar as well. It requires batteries though, but three small batteries would last for 120 hours, that would probably be enough for one winter. Expensive, but a quality product.

Yet, my solution was one which has 3 leds and get this, gets it’s charge from a fucking crank! Thats right, no batteries, 1 minute of cranking produces, supposedly, 40 minutes of light. The whole thing costed me 10€ and I’m left wondering whats wrong with this choice. It seems too good to be true. Will the built-in battery explode if its over-charged? Will it’s capacity wain in a year? What?

Internets, this is a mission for you. Dig up any and all bad sides this solution might have and report it here. You have time only up till eternity or the heat-death of the universe to complete this task. Your time begins now.

Posted in Comparison, Inquiry, personal | No Comments »

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