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Meta jokes
First, a brief digression to a recent family experience. My wife and 4-year old daughter were looking through a children’s magazine. They came to a page of jokes. My wife read a few of them. Sample joke: “Q: What did the lamb do for her birthday party? A: She had a sheep-over.” My wife and…
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The Ontological Proof
I’ve always felt that the ontological proof of the existence of God was one of the more compelling and interesting arguments about God. The proof, which was originally composed by Saint Anselm, amounts to a simple syllogism: 1) God is, by definition, the most perfect entity. 2) Something which exists is more perfect than something…
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The Suburbs
I grew up in a small city next to a large city, and I have always lived in cities. My grandparents lived in small town (3000 people), and we often spent summers with them when I was a child. My parents now live in a rural area, in a town that has no traffic lights…
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Quantum Mechanics
The theory of quantum mechanics poses a well-known problem: at the atomic level, particles must be described as waveforms, but at the macroscopic level, they must be described as particles. The well-known double-slit experiment shows that if we, at the macroscopic level, remain ignorant of the location of the particle, it acts as a wave.…
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AI as Search
Artificial Intelligence has always been concerned with search. One of the earliest AI programs, Newell and Simon’s so-called General Problem Solver from 1960, can now be seen as a straightforward hill-climbing search program. We might now say that most of the intelligence shown by the program was in the information setup and description. But then,…