Saturday, December 20, 2003
107199029190908535:: 11:04 PM

Over a year ago my friend Ian asked to use my music for a film project. I said sure and pretty much forgot about it. Last week he sends a mail saying it got honorable mention in a film festival in L.A. It strange for me to see my name in the credits and not even know what song he used.

Thursday, December 04, 2003
107053478054070425:: 2:46 AM

Once again I have been remiss in my blogging. Plenty of interesting things have happened though. A couple weeks ago Kasparov played his latest in his series of matches against the top chess computers. This time he battled Deep Fritz (which was running on a 4-proc server machine) to a draw after 4 games. The match was interesting for several reasons. First off, the machine which drew the world champion was no specialized multi-million dollar supercomputer (a la deep blue). Granted it was a powerful machine, but it is a machine which can be bought commercially for around 30k. Another interesting aspect of this match is the way that the wins were won. Game 2 demonstrated the fallibility of the human mind (a simple blunder by Kasparov after a difficult but equal fight), while game 3 demonstrated the fallibility of the machine mind (the inability to see far enough to understand the underlying nature of a locked position). It is only appropriate that the match ended in a draw.

In game 3, even casual players could understand the hopelessness of Fritz's position 10 or 15 moves before Fritz did. In fact the machine believed it was slightly ahead until 3 moves before its resignation. This poses an important question: Was the failure in game 3 just another bug to work out, or does it point to a more fundamental difference in the respective 'intelligences' of the competitors?

Since the start of the microprocessor revolution, we have formed the computer in our image and less intentionally we have begun to see our brains as a special class of computer. However, this is not a new phenomenon. When we first made very accurate clocks and mechanical assemblies, philosophers saw the human being as a specialized mechanical system, and interpreted the whole universe as following God's orderly clockwork. As quantum theory rose to the fore, so did the existentialists. Both relied on a world of uncertain outcomes and hazy principles. Our concept of our world and ourselves is ever evolving and now more than ever it is driven by the technology we create and the science that we discover.

Perhaps neurobiologists will soon discover the system of chemical reactions and neural connections that define consciousness. Or perhaps it will be the machines that will ultimately simulate it, or the gene hackers who will build from the ground up using biobits. No matter how it goes down, we'll soon find ourselves having to redefine what exactly we are. We change with our world as we create it. And although we haven't changed biologically (yet), our minds have created valuable systems of thought which have greatly improved our survival fitness. So we have two worlds, our slow-changing hardware (our bodies), and our very fast changing software (our minds). Via media, a billion minds can change in a generation, a million can change in a weekend.

For now, this ability to adapt our very identities to situation continues to separate us from the machines that we create. Perhaps we can teach them this, or maybe it is deeper still.