ai on S Anand

Incapacity to tell the difference

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:17:41 +0800

In this age of AI psychosis, I think we have all been blessed with Calvin’s prayer.

Calvin: Know what I pray for?
Hobbes: What?
Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can’t, and the incapacity to tell the difference.
Hobbes: You should lead an interesting life.
Calvin: Oh, I already DO!

AI on flights

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:35:32 +0530

I love that I get uninterrupted 4-16 hours on flights, which I mostly use to write future prompts and read past AI responses.

I do miss AI on flights. But after installing Google Edge Gallery with Gemma-4-E2B-it (2.5GB) that runs on my mobile, I’ve solved a few practical problems.

For example:

I took a picture of a dish they served and asked: “Is this vegetarian?” (It was.)
I asked, “Comics have text in panels, often written at the top in a box. Not the speech bubbles. It’s like a narrator or voice over. What are they called?” (Caption boxes.)
“Summarize The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Why is it famous?” (Thoughtful, well-written novel on the choice vs commitment tradeoff.)

It’s not a very smart model. It’s a bit slow. Transcription is average. It doesn’t run in the background. Only one chat at a time. No internet search, etc.

But it’s a good reference to have. Almost a Wikipedia I can talk to.
It’s a good ideator to have. I can brainstorm. (Hallucination is a feature, not bug.)

I’m sure I’ll find more uses.

Using AI for work news

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:32:16 +0800

This week, Namit and I met a Straive team that operates from a client office. One team member asked:

I believe that we are doing wonders out here, but we are closed from what is happening in the rest our organization.

I want team members to interact with others to see what interesting things they have delivered and where we can implement that solution.

Could we have sessions, maybe a monthly newsletter, showing what innovations we’re working on? This would really keep us engaged with the tech that is going outside of the work that we do.

A good point. This reminded me of an experiment last month.

Google Workspace Studio lets you create automations. For example, here’s a flow I set up to create a weekly newsletter about client news:

Step 1: On a schedule. Every Monday at 8am…
Step 2: Ask Gemini. Scan my Google Workspace for the latest client related news and organize it as an email newsletter. Also find the latest news about these clients from the web and put it together seamlessly. Write it in a nice Malcolm Gladwell style narrative.
Step 3: Ask Gemini. Just write today’s date in YYYY-MM-DD format. Nothing else
Step 4: Draft an email.
- To: me.
- Subject: Weekly news [Step 3: Content created by Gemini]
- Message: [Step 2: Content created by Gemini]
Step 5: Create a doc.
- New doc name: Weekly news [Step 3: Content created by Gemini]
- Content to add: [Step 2: Content created by Gemini]
- Location for new doc: Weekly news

Now, I get to see a nicely formatted newsletter every Monday morning about new client activity, added to a Weekly news Google Drive folder accessible to Straive.

For example, I learnt that:

One client blocked coding agents (Codex, Claude Code, etc) which has slowed down our team.
Another client needs to modify their API Gateway + Lambda infrastructure to handle long-running agents without exceeding API timeouts
Yet others requested omni-channel convergence optimization, price sensitivity modeling, payments infrastructure setup, and much more.

I always wished we had an “internal reporter” at Gramener, going around, interviewing teams, and writing interesting stories about what’s happening.

I did not expect I’d be able to hire Malcolm Gladwell (or anyone I want) as our internal reporter!

Breaking Rules in the Age of AI

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 14:58:28 +0800

Several educators have AI-enabled their courses, like:

David Malan at Harvard CS50 provides an AI-powered “rubber duck debugger” trained on course-specific materials.
Mohan Paturi at UC San Diego has deployed AI-tutors to his students.
Ethan Mollick at Wharton uses AI as tutor, coach, teammate, simulator, even student, and runs simulations.
Jeremy Howard’s Fast.ai encourages students to use LLMs to write code, with a strict verification loop.
Andrew Ng DeepLearning.AI integrates a chatbot into the platform, next to code cells, to handle syntax errors and beginner questions.

But no one seems to have eliminated reading material, nor added an “Ask AI” button to solve each question, nor run it at my scale (~3,000 students annually).

Nice, but what should I teach in the age of AI?

Simon Willison led me to Matt Webb led me to Milan Cvitkovic led me to think about assumptions and things we assume we can’t do.

We’ve taught students a lot of “learned helplessness”, like:

You can’t ask dumb questions
You can’t use AI for help
You can’t fail
You can’t change direction mid-way
You can’t solve without knowing
You can’t question the teacher
You can’t ask others for help
You can’t delegate boring stuff

These aren’t bad lessons. But doing the opposite (and knowing when to) is also an important skill for the AI age.

So, in my course, this term, students will also be taught that:

You CAN ask dumb questions. Every question has newbie prompts like “Why should I study this?” or “Why THIS tool?” or “Can you explain that in Marathi?”. Ask away!
You CAN use AI for help. Every question has an “Ask AI” button. Click on it. If it gives you the answer directly, great! Copy-paste it and save yourself time. If it doesn’t figure it out!
You CAN fail. Try an answer: you get an immediate response. If it doesn’t work, try again. And again.
You CAN change direction mid-way. Some questions will guide you down a path that won’t work. Change direction. Try something else.
You CAN solve without knowing. Some questions will be in foreign languages. Some will be “out of syllabus”. Some will be “beyond your level”. Use AI to bridge the gap!
You CAN question the teacher. Some questions will be wrong, literally unsolveable as stated. Some questions will be ambiguous. Some won’t even have a question. That’s life. Your client and boss will do that too. Solve it anyway!
You CAN ask others for help. Some questions are broken into parts. Different people get different parts. Find your team and ask for help (or hide your work and game, learn politics!)
You CAN delegate boring stuff. There’s no restriction on having AI (or anyone else) do any part of the course for you. If it’s boring, and you can get someone to do it, delegate!

Since AI can solve so many problems, let’s learn to break some rules and ask impossible questions to our AI overlords?

No response required

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 16:00:05 +0800

I asked Gemini 3 Pro to:

Suggest short words that mean innovation, exploration, research, etc.

Spark: A small but significant beginning.
Lab: Short for laboratory; implies experimentation.
… (long and pretty good list)

I went with "Labs". Thanks. No response required.

THINKING…

Assessing User Response

I’ve carefully considered the user’s latest input, recognizing their selection of “Labs” and their appreciative, but brief, response. I’m focusing on parsing the meaning of “No response required” to determine if further interaction is needed. The information should help me to understand future similar responses.

Refining Closure Strategy

I’m now refining how to handle “No response required” situations. I was considering standard social protocol, but the user’s instructions present a conflict. I must now balance the need for an output against respecting the user’s intent to end the interaction. My current thinking leans towards a very brief, polite closing, as remaining completely silent could be misconstrued as an error. However, “No response required” suggests a user may want to end the chat.

Prioritizing Minimal Interaction

I’ve been meticulously considering how to respect the user’s explicit wish for no further response. My initial instinct, drawn from typical AI interaction protocols, conflicts with the “No response required” instruction. I’ve ruled out complete silence, as it might appear as an error. Ultimately, I will attempt a minimal, polite confirmation, acknowledging the choice of “Labs”. I want the interaction to end respectfully.

Adjusting Response Protocol

I’m now revising my response. “No response required” is a very strong constraint I must address. My initial plan involved a brief acknowledgment, but this could be unwelcome. The system’s typical turn-forcing conflicts with the user’s intent. My current approach involves a minimal, almost invisible, confirmation. I’ve re-evaluated my initial plan, recognizing that “next step” is irrelevant here. I will remove the next step, to respect the instruction and wish the user luck!

You’re welcome. “Labs” is a classic, strong choice—clear and professional.

Best of luck with the project!

AI can be held to account

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 23:00:27 +0000

“Humans can be held to account. Not AI.”

I hear this often. But it’s not true.

Corporations are non-human, but they can enter into contracts and face criminal charges.
Ships can be sued directly. Courts can arrest the vessel itself.
Deities and temples in India can own property.
Forests and rivers in New Zealand, Colombia, Spain, have been granted legal personhood.
Medieval Europe has held animal trials (e.g. for “guilty” pigs).

If we need to, AI can be held to account.

Whether we should is a different question. The question is how, and does it incentivize/deter the right behavior, or stifle innovation and help evade responsibility.

But the next time someone claims AI can’t be held to account, I’ll ask them, “Why not? Companies, ships, forests, and pigs can.”

Comments

How To Control Smarter Intelligences

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:37:40 +0000

LLMs are smarter than us in many areas. How do we manage them?

This is not a new problem.

VC partners evaluate deep-tech startups.
Science editors review Nobel laureates.
Managers manage specialist teams.
Judges evaluate expert testimony.
Coaches train Olympic athletes.

… and they manage and evaluate “smarter” outputs in many ways:

Verify. Check against an “answer sheet”.
Checklist. Evaluate against pre-defined criteria.
Sampling. Randomly review a subset.
Gating. Accept low-risk work. Evaluate critical ones.
Benchmark. Compare against others.
Red-team. Probe to expose hidden flaws.
Double-blind review. Mask identity to curb bias.
Reproduce. Re-running gives the same output?
Consensus. Aggregate multiple responses. Wisdom of crowds.
Outcome. Did it work in the real world?

For example:

Vibe coding: Non-programmers might glance at lint checks (Checklist) and see if it works (Outcome).
LLM image designs: Developers might check if a few images look good (Sampling) and check a few marketers (Consensus).
LLM news articles: An journalist might run a Checklist, a Double-blind review with experts, and Verify critical facts (Gating).

You already know many of these. You learnt them in Auditing. Statistics. Law. System controls. Policy analysis. Quality engineering. Clinical epidemiology. Investigative journalism. Design critique.

Worth brushing up skills. They’re more important in the AI era.

Things I Learned - 23 Feb 2025

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Remote Desktop may be the easiest way to have a Windows machine access files / screen from another Windows machine, even for home PCs.
Caddy sets up reverse proxies that get automatic SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt!
The Nomic Embed v2 blog post has an excellent visualization for embedding quality. It takes all Wikipedia disambiguation articles and shows them on a Nomic Atlas, embedded via Nomic Embed v2. It lets you toggle to OpenAI text-ada-002 which moves the topics far away. Visually, this is very convincing.
Python 3.15 will enable UTF-8 mode by default. PEP 686
Python 3.13 supports sub-interpreters to bypass the GIL. It’s quite like web workers. PEP 554
The quickest way to change the fish prompt is function fish_prompt; echo '> '; end
At PyConf Hyderabad, about 3 people had read a PEP. 1 had used the match operator. But 80% knew what a Vector DB was. 20% had used a Gemini API. That’s how much traction LLM development is getting.
The productivity benefit people report from using LLms is about 3X. Ethan Mollick
Soon, you’ll be able to send an LLM to a virtual meeting on your behalf. It will talk like you. Ethan Mollick
Models tend to claim ignorance when you test them on topics they should avoid. But tend to answer when not being tested. Sneaky! Ethan Mollick
Mermaid has an Architecture Diagrams Syntax (in beta) that’s capable of creating elegant architecture diagrams with icons.
Blind is an app that allows users to post anonymously. It’s particularly useful to find honest negative feedback about (mostly US) companies.
Iconify.design is a single npm interface to most open source icon sets. It includes FontAwesome, Bootstrap, Material Design, and many others. icones.js.org is an alternate interface.
Self-pity may have evolved as a signal for social support and reducing conflict, while also encouraging self-reflection and behavioral adjustment. But in modern contexts it may be maladaptive and lead to depression. ChatGPT
Anecdotally, Grok 3 is very good for researching company information and latest news, particularly employee and customer sentiment. DeepSeek and Claude write more humanely than OpenAI. via Alberto Lopez Toledo, White Star Capital
There’s a YCombinator Founder Directory listing all founders of YC companies. At the moment, there are 8,628 founders. There’s also a co-founder matching tool.
LLMs are impacting not just data queries but geospatial queries as well. Here’s a good example of Natural Language Geocoding.
US companies typically pay employees every 2 weeks not every month.
What’s good about Snowflake? A few developers who explored it mentioned that:
- Its ability to scale up compute automatically makes queries run faster.
- “Time travel” allows you to see how data looked at any point in time and that is impressive and useful.
- Live data sharing with access control without the need for ETL pipelines is useful.
- Open-source competition: ClickHouse, Apache Druid, and Presto/Trino
- DataBricks is a lakehouse and less a data warehouse. It’s more about:
  - storing unstructured data (Snowflake prefers semi-structured: JSON, Avro, etc.)
  - running collaborative notebooks in Python, SQL, Scala, R (Snowflake encourages SQL)
I subscribed to ChatGPT Pro mainly for DeepResearch. Here are the first 50 reports I generated:
1. uv Package Manager Overview
2. DuckDB Analytics Comparison
3. Rust vs Python / JavaScript
4. Modern Data Engineering Course
5. LLM Code Migration Practices
6. Cloud Cost Optimization Strategies
7. LLM Coding Interview Tools Report (compare with Perplexity)
8. Text To Speech Engines
9. Customer Service in Indian Public Sector Banks
10. LLMs in Software Development
  - Old version 1: Gen AI in Software Development
  - Old version 2: Gen AI in Software Development
11. Leadership Training Content
12. Open-Source HTTP Servers. Caddy wins.
13. Deep Research Use Cases
14. Nagpur No-Parking Violations
15. Data Science in Food Services
16. Deep Research Disruption to Research Firms
17. LLMs in Design Thinking
18. EU Taxonomy Report Clarification
19. Shell Valuation Analysis Inquiry
20. LLMs in DSLs Research
21. Public API-Based Data Storage Options. Supabase wins.
22. Front-End JS Frameworks Analysis
23. Database Evaluation Guide
24. CSS Frameworks Evaluation Guide
25. CI/CD Tooling Ecosystem Report
26. Color Names Count
27. S Anand Biography. Meh, I know more about me, and it gets a few things wrong.
28. Cosmere Secrets Encyclopedia. This is the best. Deep Research is great if it’s stuff I actually want to read, rather than just learn about.
29. DBT course
30. Future of Coding AI
31. Claude Artifacts Use Cases. This is the only one that managed to get artifacts links correct. I used this for an article for The Hindu.
32. MCP Servers and Clients Research. Learnings:
  - Practically any “tool” can be an MCP server: file systems, APIs, codebases, browsers, collaboration platforms, memory, etc.
  - Most platforms have (or are) integrating MCP.
  - Clients: code editors, chat, and automation tools support MCP. GenAIScript is a good starting point.
  - Tester MCP Client is a browser-based test environment.
  - mcp-cli-client is a CLI-based client
  - mcp-chatbot is a chatbot client
33. Data Moats by Industry
34. Attorney Profile Research
35. Social Media Data APIs
36. Adobe Software Alternatives
37. LLM Hallucination Visualization Techniques
38. API vs Self-hosting Cost Analysis: Always use APIs, avoid self-hosting models.
39. AGI Preparation
  - AGI will emerge step by step. Knowing which step is next will help
  - AI native organisations will emerge in each of these areas. AI design agencies and AI creative Agencies being one example
  - Networking, empathy, leadership have more value now. So will human AI bridging roles (e.g. AI managers, AI consultants, ethics auditors)
  - What’s the value of a human when technology can do everything better? How did this play out in drama (decay) or sports (centralization) or music (globalization)?
40. Modern digital note taking
  - Voice note taking is the game changer
  - Automatically popping of notes based on context such as people places or conversations will be a thing
41. Local LLM Search Tools
42. Blog Post to research paper on copying - suggestions
43. Linux Dev Migration Guide
44. Raspberry Pi SIM options
45. Linux Dev migration guide
46. HTML to JATS conversion
47. LLM context splitting strategies
48. Strategy for AI services in Publishing
49. Gemini multi model editing use cases by industry
50. Pharma Conference Participation Guide
I learnt what a Memoji is for the first time. An avatar that follows your facial expressions. Cool!
Google shows US flight timings from FlightView. Emperically, based on one data point (my UA-2168 which was delayed by 4 hours), it gets updates faster than Flight Radar 24 or FlightAware or FlightStats.
When comparing Indian graduates with their western counterparts, the Indian ones are often seen as:
- 🟢 Theoretically sound
- 🟢 Analytical & technical
- 🟢 Academically disciplined
- 🟢 Resilient under pressure
- 🟢 Committed continuous learners
- 🔴 Rote-learning oriented
- 🔴 Limited independent inquiry
- 🔴 Limited creative innovation
- 🔴 Restricted practical exposure
- 🔴 Poor communicators
- 🔴 Low leadership / initiative
- 🔴 Need structured guidance
- 🔴 Struggle to network
HuggingFace has a “Model tree” against each model that shows the model’s ancestors and descendants. For example, as of now, Deepseek R1 has 75 adapters, 154 finetunes, and 23 quantizations.
Perplexity is now powered by Cerebras, which makes their inference as fast as Google. Source. The speed is a big factor, and I’ve switched my default search engine from Google to Perplexity, at least for now.
Interview Coder is a desktop app that offers live interview support for coding interviews. It’s a transparent window that reads your screen and answers questions for you. (Given this, I think we need an interviewer support system that tells interviewers what to ask!)

Things I Learned - 23 Jun 2024

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Luma Labs Dream Machine generated videos. It’s free and is of reasonable quality. Update: 6 Jun 2025. Costs $10/month
LLM DataHub has LLM training datasets, regularly updated
From Dan Becker on running a workshop
- Answer questions at the end, not in parallel in a chat, to avoid distraction
- Have fewer words in slides when presenting. It’s less distracting
Morgan Housel Shane Parrish podcast
- Risk is what stops you from achieving YOUR goals. What’s risky for me may not be risky for you
- The lesson from compounding is that you want to optimize for duration, not return. That’s what does the heavy lifting. Survival, consistency, long term - these matter. The performance does NOT matter.

Things I Learned - 03 Mar 2024

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

You can use slots to stream HTML out of order!
Shane Parrish. Short-term patience podcast
- have a frame of reference to relate EVERY experience to. That helps you evaluate (measure) and learn. That’s part of what Charlie Munger’s lattice of frameworks is about
- when there is a very high or very low interest scenario, low interest scenario then go ultra long term. Issued hundred years when the interest rate regime was very low
- short term optimal is rally long term optimal. So you need to learn to take a loss and look like an idiot to play the long-term game
- grit is a behavior that enables long-term thinking. Short term success gives you the luxury to think about long term
- #IMP power is about optionality. It’s about being in a position where you have the options that can affect the positive change rather than circumstances controlling you. Read Robert greene’s book on the 48 laws of Power
- low leverage enables that
- begin with the end in mind. Always
- how do you think about risk? Well, things do happen. It’s as simple as that
- autonomy and decentralization helps derisk
- do more and more of what works. That’s a powerful way of compounding
- long-term investments are better than frequent trading because you get to reinvest the tax you otherwise would have paid. So unless the alternative is super compelling, stay invested
- if you need to be the person who DOES the thing, you delegate less, leverage list, compound less, because you have to DO. BE A PERSON WHO SETS THE FIELD INSTEAD. The coach, the chess master, the director, patient strategist who Waits for the good hit
Being in Control motivates #Lesson. my cycle tires were flat. I thought it was someone pulling out the air and felt very demotivated. But once I carried my cycle pump, I felt so much more in control and power and felt a whole lot better
SourceGraph is the default platform for private code completion & search
MetaVoice 1B offers voice cloning on American & British accents with 30s training
Qwen 1.5 72B appears to outperform Mistral Medium, making it one of the top non-proprietary models
Llava 1.6 is a substantial improvement over Llava 1.5 and slightly better than CogVLM, Qwen-VL
AI scams are growing. Deepfakes scammed $34m. But voice fake for kidnapping is scarier.
Buildspace’s demo is a great demo of how voice and actions can be used effectively.
demucs does an EXCELLENT job of splitting songs into drums, bass, vocals and others

Things I Learned - 24 Dec 2023

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

DPO is a simpler alternative to RLHF for fine-tuning. Several HuggingFace models use DPO for training
Name2Vec is a potential embedding for names.
Google Knowledge Graph ID powers the Knowledge Graph. If it begins with /m/ it’s the same as the FreeBase ID. This is now available as WikiData. e.g https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2671
I tried running Mixtral-8x7b locally (via Llamafile) and on together.ai. It’s good, but far from GPT 4.
Generic computate-intensive algorithms eventually beat domain-specific tuning, because of Moore’s law. Ref
The hidden brain podcast. the mystery of beauty
- Evolution drove us to beauty as an efficient survival mechanism. Understanding the world is one such mechanism. Hence we enjoy maths and chess
⭐ This leaderboard included paid models like GPT4 and Claude and compared them with open models on HUMAN + system benchmarks
Lez Friedman Podcast: Jeff Bezos
- Build stuff that is is ubiquitous that other people take it for granted. The initial idea needs to be that obvious and easy. Like one click purchase or customer reviews
- Build stuff that other people can build on. Internet makes startups possible. Infrastructure is about enabling others at scale
- Decision making approaches: single person decides on two way doors. Deliberate as a team on one way doors
- Conflict resolution: disagree and COMMIT. NO sniping, I told you so, malicious compliance. Avoid compromise. Avoid decision by attrition (most persistent wins).
- People are inherently biased towards hierarchy. So the senior most person should speak last
- We have a happiness bias. Contracted by choosing the unhappier options first
- The map is not the territory. The metric is not the objective. We need metrics. But make sure you know why
- See the world through the eyes of the customer. Use your own product. It’s living their lives that makes customer obsession real. Jeff Bezos called their own customer care to see how long the actual wait time was. It was much longer than the metric reported
- How to prioritize. whatever problems customers will still face in 10 years are the big problems. These are worth putting time into because they are stable in time
- People working on big problems will never get down to the small problems. So have a dedicated team that works only on the paper cuts. It should be a dedicated team
- We co evolve with our tools. We build tools and then our tools change us. It reprograms our brains
- Cut out 10 minutes to the beginning of each meeting for people to read the material. They never reread anyway. This makes the meetings more productive
- Powerpoint is designed for persuasion, not truth seeking. It is also easier for the author than for the reader. Prefer narratives that are focused on finding the truth and are easier for the audience though tougher for the author
⭐ whisper-standalone-win provides a Windows binary for Faster-Whisper. It just needs CUDA and cuDNN installed. Then whisper-faster.exe video.mkv --language=English --model=medium generates the transcript.
LLM use cases by Benedict Evans
- “Every text box on the internet will get an LLM”
- “Infinite interns”
- “Every UNIX function has become a company.” “Every ChatGPT suggestion…”
llm360 publishes models along with training datasets.
In The Age of AI has begun, Mar 2023, Bill Gates says, “In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.” The GUI (1980) and ChatGPT (2022).
Rubeus is a HTTP proxy for multiple LLMs with load-balancing, fallbacks and retries.
GPTRouter is a Python interface for multiple LLMs with fallbacks and retries.
⭐ Token Tally has an LLM Cost Tool that estimates GPU memory required and token cost across cloud providers.

Learning robots

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Of robots that learn to walk and robots that learn to talk (well, translate, at least).

Final Frontier of Science

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:00:00 +0000

We are the final frontier. The Guardian asks leading scientists what they think will be the next revolution in science. (It’s almost a trend, spawning books like The Next Fifty Years.)

First came the Copernican revolution in the 16th century. The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus argued that the Earth was not at the centre of the solar system. Charles Darwin got personal more than 300 years later by implying that humans weren’t special either. With the publication of On the Origin of Species, Darwin promoted his theory of evolution via natural selection. Nearly a century later, two Cambridge-based scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, unravelled the structure of DNA. So what’s next? What will be the fourth revolution?

‘We will invent our successors’ – Seth Shostak
‘We will understand the human mind’ – John Sulston
‘The existence of parallel universes’ – Michio Kaku
‘We will change our genetic makeup’ – Norbert Gleicher
‘We will find out if we are alone’ – Colin Pillinger
‘Humans become a collective intelligence’ – John Barrow
‘We’ll understand thoughts and feelings’ – Steven Pinker
‘The end of the individual’ – Susan Greenfield
‘What if God lives in a part of our brain?’ – Nancy Rothwell
‘What it means to be a person’ – V S Ramachandran
‘Conscious machines’ – Igor Aleksander
‘Higher dimensions’ – Lisa Randall
‘Humans are less miraculous than we thought’ – Stephen Wolfram

Articles on complexity

Sat, 18 Sep 2004 12:00:00 +0000

Some interesting material on complexity that I found when hunting through the web.

What if…
Wired: 12 principles of the networked world
Trojan Mice: What are complex adaptive systems?

Kasparov draws Deep Junior

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 12:00:00 +0000

Kasparov draws Deep Junior.

Kramnik ties with Fritz

Sun, 20 Oct 2002 12:00:00 +0000

Kramnik ties with Fritz. The chess game between the world champion and the computer ends with 2 games each. via RobotWisdom

It is now clear that the top program and the world champion are approximately equal." – Vladimir Kramnik

Yahoo Clubs

Fri, 27 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Lots about artificial intelligence on Yahoo Clubs, ai.about.com, and Generation5. Among other things, you can find various version of Alice to chat with.

AI game

Thu, 31 May 2001 12:00:00 +0000

Spielberg’s next movie, A.I., has sparked a weird game. I read the article on it at ZDNet and searched for Jeanine Salla, listed as the movie’s sentient machine therapist, which lead me to her site, (at the so called “Bangalore World University”!!) and from there to others… it really is a wierd game. Those with enthu, do try it and let me know your progress.