we've come a long way...

Fifty years is a long time to build up assumptions...

Constructing instruction tables is usually described as 'programming'. To 'programme a machine to carry out the operation A' means to put the appropriate instruction table into the machine so that it will do A.
-- Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950.

Go read this paper... it's really enlightening, just for historical perspective. This is the one where he introduces the Turing Test -- and he goes on to define, more or less, just what a digital electronic computer is, mentions something very much like the whole "butterfly-wing-flutterings-causing-tsunamis" deal, talks about determinism in the universe, and says all of the words "finite" "state" and "machine" in the same sentence... giving us the Turing Machine just after that -- I'm not entirely sure who his intended audience was, but it's enough to give you goosebumps...

I just want to give him a hug, poor guy. Oh, and Dr. Turing? Happy Coming Out Week...

coupla wins :)

While I still have three tests tomorrow, and perhaps not enough studying has been done for them yet...

Tonight, I have:

- Put up a new content-management doohickey for hackmode -- so now you can go there and answer polls and make comments and submit stories and all sorts of slashdot-y things. See, we had to be more like WCDN and the-room. That, and I wanted to play around with mysql and php and whatnot a bit :)

- Written a min-conflicts solution to n-queens problem... if you're so inclined, click here to take a look. It's very nice, quite fast...

... and I'm saying that doing that counted as studying for the AI test tomorrow. And there's still a lot of probstat to look at. Oy vey.

Ah well. I'm having fun :)