OT: AI (was IA)

["Richard Cooper" <generic@xersedefixion.com>]

> I'm trying to write an IA;

Intel Architecture?
Internet Advertisement?
Iowa?

> Since the way to seems to be hard,

Oh, Artificial Intelligence...

> I'm looking for interested Linux assembly programmers.

Well I'm certainly interested.

However, to my understanding, some of the brightest minds in the world  
have been working on this problem since the invention of the computer, and  
they have yet to come up with much of anything that amounts to more than a  
clever toy.  So I'm not sure how we could do much more than research.

Plus there's 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and that's 50 times  
as many bits of RAM that I have in my system, so I'm not sure my computer  
is up to the task of simulating a catatonic intelligence, let alone a  
healthy one.  Plus I only have a 1 GHz processor, and that comes to about  
0.01 clock cycles per neuron.

Well, maybe you have figured out a way to do it more efficiently than  
nature, and can squeeze something on par with human intelligence into the  
limited computing power of a desktop computer.

By the way, did you know that the human brain runs on only 20 watts of  
power?*

Anyway, what are we going to do if it turns out our artificial  
intelligence wants to kill itself half the time and the rest of the time  
it finds everything to be incredibly irritating and can't manage it's  
money?  What are we going to do if it hears aliens talking to it, aliens  
which can read it's thoughts?  What if it simply can't stop washing it's  
hands?  I suppose the project would be a success if any of that happened,  
but it certainly wouldn't be any fun to debug, and I wouldn't feel right  
just pulling the plug on the poor thing.

Perhaps we could simulate the intelligence of a dust mite or something...   
But then, I don't think dust mites are all that intelligent, though they  
can walk around and get themselves upright when they fall, and they can  
find food to eat, and find mates and perform the necessary tasks to  
reproduce, which is much more than any current attempts at artificial  
intelligence have been able to accomplish.  Except maybe that zoomba  
vacuum cleaner robot, it can find dirt.  Well, actually, I think it just  
runs around randomly until it runs into some.  Hmm...

Well, anyway, good luck to you.

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* Some web sites are saying as much as 100 watts, but at 2000 Calories a  
day, the human body has only 97 watts total.  Assuming the brain uses 20%  
of that, it gets 19 watts of power.  So where I live it costs $1.09 a  
month to run a human brain on electricity, or $5.59 for the whole body.   
It makes food seem so expensive.

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I sure hope there ain't a rule against off topic posts, but then there's  
so much spam on this list I imagine anyone who would really care has  
unsubscribed by now.