daniel bigham.ca

This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.

Cycling
October 6, 2006

It's been over a year now since our group of four rode our bikes from KW to Ottawa... it brought back fond memories on Wednesday when I biked out to the Breslau Airport for ground school, traversing the same path we took as we started on our journey last year. After completing the 33 kms, I started to get some perspective again on what it would be like to attempt biking across Canada in 30 days... 220 km/day, which would be seven times my Wednesday route. Wow.

2006 Loebner Prize Winner
October 3, 2006

Yesterday I came across the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence. [Website] A bronze medal is awarded each year to the most life-like chatbot. I thought I'd take the 2006 winner for a spin. Her name is Joan. Can she interpret facts about the world and recall them upon request? Let's find out:

Daniel: "I have two sisters."
...
Daniel: "How many sisters do I have?"
Joan: "I have two eyes!"

Can't we do better than this in 2006?

Where is your head?
September 29, 2006

Creating a robot that can converse intelligibly is an idea that science fiction has had a lot of fun with. But writing software that can reliably interpret the English language, and model the processes of human reasoning, is challenging to say the least. A funny human-computer dialog came to mind today... bare with me on this one.

Person: "Hi, my name is George"
Computer: "Hello George"
Person: "George, I have a question for you"
Computer: "What is your question?"
Person: "How tall am I?"

Upon receiving the question, the computer launches into an internal debate about how to answer. Let's listen in on this thoughts:

"Ok, he's asking 'how tall'. That's another way of asking me his height"
"Height is a distance"
"Distance is a relationship between two locations"
"Ok, to calculate the person's height, I'll need to calculate the distance between two locations: The location of his head and the location of his feet"

After thinking for a moment longer, the computer responds:

"Where is your head?"

:)

older >>