NEW! Paper at EuSpRIG 2008: Spreadsheet Components For All. The presentation I gave, with screen-shots of demos, is at Less Excel, More Components.
NEW! Dr Dobbs Code Talk:
NEW! 50th Anniversary of Artificial Intelligence. Read more in the January 2006 AI Expert Newsletter. For the complete set, please visit my AI Newsletter index page. Amongst these, you will find: two AI Alphabets; the artificial life of Karl Sims; programming the Aibo, World Wide Mind, and Ronald Reagan; why Microsoft was really created; and those disembodied rat neurons that, somewhere in Florida, dream of flying a fighter jet.
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NEW! The Logical Languages Loglan and Lojban |
| НОВЫЙ! DARTS – модель для дистрибутивного анализа Российской Системы Налогов и Трансфертов | NEW! DARTS - a model for the Distributional Analysis of the Russian Tax and Transfer System |
NEW! The Excelsior Dialogues and a few Wharf House quotes.
Fairly new Automatic tester for Prolog; the GRIPS pre-processor for translating functional definitions into Prolog; and Why Use Prolog?
Fairly new "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. ... The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence. ... From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. ... I think it's fair to call this event a singularity. ... It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown." From Vernor Vinge on the Singularity. For more on the Singularity, see here, from a talk I gave on the topic.
Fairly new Poem on the determination of consciousness:
I know that I am conscious, for I can feel me be.
I think my friend is conscious, for he looks much like me.
Perhaps my dog is conscious;
he's soft and biological, a mammal close to me.
But surely Cog's not conscious?
Ten million lines of C++, a neural net, a metal bus,
enclosed in a PC?
That was the topic of Oxford University Artificial Intelligence Society's first talk this term. Here is a program that certainly isn't conscious, but which if extended sufficiently would count as AI - a tiny thing that randomly generates plots for SF stories. Oh, and here are some notes on the Singularity for a talk.
That's one of the programs I use for teaching Prolog. Another is Traveller, a little game where the student programs robot vehicles to buy and sell goods from shops arranged round a board. I also teach AI at Oxford. Not much any more though; it's less popular now. My favoured programming languages include Lisp, Poplog, Haskell and Prolog; here are some introductory programs in Prolog, and here is an introduction to Prolog for mathematicians.
In teaching my students, I like the whole-agent approach, and have built complete agents, in their own microworlds, to illustrate classical AI, and to demonstrate the difference between this and the "nouvelle AI" approaches.
I have also done lots of commercial AI work, including implementing expert systems and Prolog compilers, teaching AI and Prolog, and writing a morphological generator for the Alvey Natural Language Toolkit.
One thing I am currently working on is a big brother of the SF generator - a program that generates news stories and diaries from economic forecasts. Here are some experiments. How does the story-generator work? It's described here.
Why? Because I have also worked on Virtual Economy, a Web-based simulation for teaching economics. As we've been doing for the past six years, we put it up on BBC News Online for Budget Day, together with our JavaScript Budget Budget Calculator. In doing this, I worked with the Institute for Fiscal Studies and am part of the Virtual Worlds Group.
Here's an early article on how we connected the models to the Web, and here is lots of technical information on VE.
I've also implemented the spreadsheet-based economic simulations on the Bristol University Virtual Learning Arcade. This is how we did it.
The inspiration for the spreadsheet work mentioned at the head of this page came from category theory, believe it or not. One of my interests here is in applying sheaf semantics to computing. Another is applying category theory to analogical problem solving and to machine learning. Favourite names here are John Baez, Joseph Goguen, Douglas Hofstadter, William Lawvere, and Saunders Mac Lane.
From time to time, I visit the Department of Informatics and Department of Economics at the University of Minho in Braga in Portugal. This is what Braga looks like. While there, I may take part in Interring the Cat. (I was pleased to find a copy of that article in RAIO-X, the magazine of the University of Minho's maths and computation group, edited by Alberto Simões. Thanks Alberto!)
As well as Portuguese academic rituals, you might like to read about Beating the Bounds, what it is like to be foreign, why object-oriented programming is philosophically defective, e-learning (an interview I did for the Greek X-RAM magazine), unrolling the loop in the primordial soup, how to use the JJTree parser-generator, or economics on the Internet.
Or you could read about Algebraic Web Specification. Why has nobody else taken this up? Other attempts, of a quite different nature, at building tools for authoring interactive Web pages are Web-O-Matic (based on sheaf semantics) and WSM (based on the notion of Web pages as functions in a state-transition network).
Other free software includes a Fortran format interpreter in Java, a module-dependency analyser for Kawa, a pattern-matcher also for Kawa, and my public-domain Prolog library.
I am on the programme committee of the European Spreadsheet Risks Group and am Secretary of the Oxford University Artificial Intelligence Society.
(Photo taken at Vrijdag de 13e , Bar "Take One", Maastricht)
