Premier ouvrage sur l’IA publié en France

En 1971, je travaillais auprès de Pierre Schaeffer [1910-1995] au Service de la Recherche de l’ORTF. Schaeffer m’a donné alors les moyens de faire aux Etats-Unis une série de 5 émissions intitulée Aujourd’hui, les machines et les hommes, réalisée par François Moreuil et diffusée dans le magazine Un certain regard de Jacqueline Adler. C’était la belle époque où Pierre Schaeffer pouvait compter toujours (comme moi-même) sur l’aide de Jean Drucker [1941-2003, père de Marie] à l’ORTF, notre « maison mère ».

En 1976, bien après mon départ de l’ORTF, le professeur Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond m’a permis de publier aux Editions du Seuil le tout premier ouvrage sur l’intelligence artificielle à paraître en langue française. Mon ami Daniel Furjot a rendu correct mon français.

Pendant de nombreuses années, ce livre était pour moi une clé d’ouverture de toutes sortes de portes en France. Aujourd’hui, la discipline de l’IA (intelligence artificielle) a fait beaucoup de progrès, et l’intérêt de mon vieux bouquin n’est bien entendu que purement historique… et (pour moi) sentimental.

L'expression « Machina sapiens » a été utilisée dans la première de mes 5 émissions par Walter Rosenblith [1913-2002], professeur au MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Les agissements nocturnes de Fitzroy sont de la folie

Mais, dans les mots de Shakespeare, cela ne manque pas de méthode. Je parlerais franchement de l'intelligence du type Homo.

Vers la fin de la nuit, à une heure où je suis endormi, Fitzroy entame toujours quelques petites opérations. Il va aller jusqu'au bout de sa chaîne afin de choisir et déplacer certains objets. Des objets précis, pas pris au hasard. Il entre en contact avec des bouts de bois : en réalité, exactement le même genre de bouts de bois que ceux déplacés tous les jours par son maître. Du bois de chauffage pour le poêle.  Ayant constaté que je commence toujours par de petits fragments de sapin pour l'allumage, Fitzroy fait pareil. Sa précision est hallucinante.

 

Cliquez sur la photo pour l'agrandir

Fitzroy est comme un enfant qui tente d'imiter les choses que fait son papa. Le plus étonnant, c'est qu'il réussit très bien. On voit qu'il a dégagé d'abord un fragment de sapin que j'avais découpé effectivement pour l'allumage du poêle. Rien n'est fait de façon aléatoire.

Pour poursuivre logiquement notre vie commune, j'ai signalé verbalement à Fitzroy qu'il faut prendre le morceau de bois d'allumage et l'amener dans la maison. C'était franchement comme si je donnais ces instructions à un être humain.

Notez que mon chien reste attaché pendant toutes ces opérations... sinon il serait capable de courir après un véhicule qui passerait sur le chemin à côté de notre maison.

J'indique clairement enfin, verbalement, que je compte rentrer à l'intérieur de la maison. Fitzroy comprend immédiatement.

Il ne lâche pas un instant le bout de sapin. Nous voilà donc partis ensemble vers la maison.

Notez bien que je ne tire même pas vers la maison, qui se situe à droite de moi, dans l'alignement du museau de Fitzroy. Et nous voilà enfin à l'intérieur de la cuisine. Fitzroy est désormais détaché de la laisse... et il n'a pas encore posé le morceau de sapin.

Pour moi, son maître, cet adorable chien est génial. Il comprend tout. Je tiens à préciser par ailleurs que je lui ai toujours parlé uniquement en langue française... avec une seule exception : le mot "down" (en bas).

Etonnant, non ?

Cliquer ici pour regarder Monsieur Cyclopède. Je pense au matin, il y a longtemps, quand j’avais croisé Pierre Desproges du côté de Chatelet à Paris. Il n’était pas encore très connu, et je suppose qu’il était surpris de tomber sur un étranger qui le reconnaissait. De toute façon, il a accepté tout de suite ma suggestion qu’on prenne ensemble un café au comptoir. Le gag, c’est qu’au moment de payer les cafés, je me suis rendu compte que je n’avais pas un sou en poche. J’étais totalement désorienté, mais Desproges m’a donné l’impression de trouver la situation amusante.

Kirk Douglas has turned 100

#KirkDouglas100th

Issur Danielovitch Demsky, alias Kirk Douglas, was born in New York on 9 December 1916. He is the father of the actor/producer Michael Douglas.

 

My Antipodes blog has turned 10 today.

Click here to see the first post.

Oldies at Sydney University

Click here to see how the famous old Honi Soit weekly newspaper will be preserved online.

This 88-year-old jacaranda tree in the charming quadrangle won’t be there to celebrate the launch of the new database. It died over a month ago, on 29 October 2016, and collapsed onto the sunny green lawn.

Australia and her Aborigines still trying to understand each other

#Australie #AustraliaDay #Aborigènes

The long road has been winding its way through a tunnel for many years, and the bright light is not yet visible. The newspaper The Australian recently shocked indigenous people by publishing this cartoon by Bill Leak:

Click cartoon to enlarge

People were hurt by this silly representation of an Aboriginal as a beer-guzzling father who has forgotten the name of his son. Reactions blossomed immediately. Aboriginal fathers spoke with pride of their sons. Everybody agreed that Leak's hurtful depiction of Aboriginals served no useful purpose. The newspaper itself lost readers and money.

Recently, animosity of Aborigines towards white society arose in Fremantle (Western Australia) on the old question of Australia Day festivities next 28 January. Many Aborigines call it "Invasion Day", considering that it marks the moment in history when white Europeans stole their land. The mayor Ecologist of this city near Perth, Brad Pettitt, whose wife is an Australian international netball player, had hoped that next Australia Day would be celebrated solely by citizenship ceremonies, but the federal government vetoed this idea. So, traditional celebrations will be held as usual.

Pair of simple English words that utterly confuse the French

Here's an example of a confusion I found yesterday:

 

Plantu's  presidential candidates both regret their years spent applying the politics of a certain "looser" (meaning a loser):
Hollande for Vals, and Sarko for Fillon.

• The verb “to lose” is extremely simple for an English child. French people are familiar with this verb. They would understand somebody who says he has lost his wallet. They recognize the sound of the word “loser”, pronounced as luzeur. They know that it designates somebody who has lost something, or has a tendency to lose things often. But they often don't know how to spell it correctly. They might even spell it incorrectly as “looser” (as in the above political drawing).

• The adjective “loose” is equally simple in the English-speaking world, because a child soon learns, say, that one of his/her teeth is loose. That child might even discover that he/she can loosen that tooth by wobbling it to and fro. In the unusual case of two teeth that are simultaneously loose, the one that wobbles more might be said to be looser than the other one. And you might have to explain to a French friend that this out-of-the-way comparative form, "looser", is pronounced as lousseur. Indeed, were the child to have three loose teeth, you might ask him/her which of the three is the loosest, pronounced louceste.

If you want to see how complicated the English language can be for a French friend, try to explain the meaning of my last two paragraphs. French people often find it difficult to grasp the distinctions between these two totally different sets of terms. If a French child found that a tooth was loose, he/she would simply say that that it moves.

For the moment, I'm not even sure I can find a common French equivalent for the adjective "loose". Suppose, for example, that I would like to say in understandable French that a certain lady has a screw loose. (Elle est givrée.) I've discovered personally that it's an incredibly difficult task! I'm not even convinced that many French people really understand the precise meaning of the saying "to have a screw loose".

Lost enough already — no more time to lose

François Hollande has barely started his speech revealing that he won’t be seeking a second term in office. Removal people are already carting away his personal furniture and belongings. Click here to appreciate some well-done presidential humor.

Family-history detective work

A few days ago, an unknown person wanted to leave a short comment on one of my family-history articles written in 2009 : “What a great piece of detective work”.  I had almost forgotten that piece of research work, which started with the following photo of my Irish-born great-grandfather Isaac Kennedy [1844-1934] in South Grafton:

In a nutshell, my "detective work" consisted solely of phoning up an uncle in Australia to obtain the name of Isaac's street in South Grafton, and then searching through Google Street View to see if there was a house with a fence of that kind. I soon found the right house:

46 Spring Street, South Grafton

Today, it would be impossible to conduct this research, since all the residents of Spring Street have recently (?) removed their front fences to allow the entry of heavy equipment to raise the houses above flooding.

Click here to access my original article.

Our suddenly-popular president

For a current president, there's no better way of gaining popularity than to announce that you'll be abandoning the job. That leaves the way open to both friends and enemies to say publicly that you were a nice fellow.

I wonder what would happen if he were to suddenly say: "Now that I see that more people admire me, I think I should change my mind and envisage a second term." If ever François Hollande were to adopt this approach, I think he should be careful. I'm not very experienced in the domain of presidential counseling.

I'm pleased to see that Bernard Cazeneuve has accepted the nice task of guiding both the nation and her chief to the end of an era. He's a courageous gentleman. Above all, he has been a faultless head cop, and he'll surely go down in modern French history for that. As for the outgoing president, I'm not convinced that history will store away a good image of his passage.

Ancestry company’s DNA conclusions “mostly total bollocks”

                                            Graham Roumieu for BuzzFeed News

I was pleased to hear the British geneticist Adam Rutherford saying that the conclusions of the BritainsDNA company are “eloquent, but mostly total bollocks”. Click here to read an amusing article in BuzzFeed by Tom Chivers that pulls no punches on this subject.

It so happens that my limited use of Y-chromosomal testing carried out by a US company was highly successful in the sense that it enabled me to prove that my paternal great-grandfather William Skyvington [1868-1959] was a scoundrel, indeed a crazy nincompoop. Click here to visit a page on this so-called Courtenay Affair. I've handled the facts in detail in my book They Sought the Last of Lands, Gamone Press (Choranche), which can be purchased through Amazon. Published in 2014, its number is ISBN 978-2-919427-02-4.

My personal Y-chromosome data is displayed publicly on the ysearch website. Curiously, apart from the Courtenay Affair, I’ve never obtained the slightest match with a so-called “genetic cousin”. This seems to suggest that we Skyvington folk are rather rare birds.

Mind-stuff

As a young man encountering mathematics, science and philosophy at the University of Sydney, I was fascinated by a book by Arthur Eddington [1882-1944] : The Nature of the Physical World.

In this breath-taking book, published in 1928, Eddington introduced the concept of mind-stuff.

The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds.... The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it.... It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness.... Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature.... It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.

Thanks to Eddington, I acquired my fundamental awareness of science-based philosophy at the age of 15. Apart from my later passion for quantum theory, biology and computer science, my thinking has not changed greatly since then. These days, I find it more and more difficult to communicate meaningfully and profoundly with people who are not on this wavelength.

More Leonard Cohen... for eternity

                                                                       DIEGO TUSON/AFP

Click here for Suzanne,
Bird on the Wire and
Hallelujah

WARNING: If you don't read French, then so much the better...
because the text in Le Monde contains some utter nonsense. Ignore it!

Damages of death

The following blog post is dedicated to friends who have suffered—recently or less recently—from the death of loved ones. Unfortunately I'm aware of an unavoidable problem in my reasoning. The basic idea that our human brains were never designed to handle philosophical and/or scientific thinking is best understood by those who've read a science book such as The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins. If you've never encountered such a book, then my elementary reasoning might fail to convince you.

It is pointless to think of a deceased individual as “damaged”. He/she has simply disappeared. My use of the word “damages” refers to those who are left behind: relatives and friends of the deceased. Often they will have called upon subterfuges to weaken the blow of the death of their loved one. But this “solution” might not work successfully in the immediate future, if ever. In the past, religions provided the best subterfuges. But, with the disappearance of profound religiosity in society, this subterfuge is losing its force, if not totally disappearing.

To bear the unbearable, I know of only one powerful subterfuge, which has been dominating my personal existence for several years. I adopted it when I became totally atheistic. That was after my encountering, above all, the writings of Richard Dawkins. My subterfuge is quite simple. It consists of admitting that we humans are indeed terribly weak creatures. Our brains were created long ago, at a time when the only ambitions of primitive Homo sapiens were to survive and procreate. This involved tasks such as hunting for food, combating many enemies (including other humans), and recovering from sickness. But the cerebral mechanisms of that archaic creature were hardly designed to grasp challenges that would finally culminate in logic, reason, philosophy and science. The highest level we’ve ever attained consists of realizing in a fuzzy fashion that we’ll never move close to anything like a greater understanding of our existence. So, the best conclusion is to give up searching. Our quest is doomed, and all attempts to pursue this quest will inevitably hurt us. We must simply learn to abandon all such desires.

In The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, people for centuries have shunned the terrible inscription at the entrance into Hall:

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix

My personal reaction is totally the opposite. We must indeed abandon all hope for, in doing so, we free ourselves of the pain of trying to understand things that we were simply never built to understand! Consequently, instead of descending into sadness, we can spend the rest of our existence doing only the things we were designed to do, and thinking things that we are capable of thinking.

There is a corollary to my formula for happiness. The consequences of following the river Styx to Hell are not only abominable; they’re also clearly absurd, and therefore impossible. I don’t know where the Homo sapiens invention is located in the panoply of possible creations, but I have the impression that it’s not too far up the ladder. Today, we’ve almost attained a point of implosion… which makes me feel that the end is near. Up until now, the animal world seemed to have advanced in several splurges, none of which ever got anywhere near lasting for a lengthy period. Dinosaurs were probably the greatest happening on Earth… but they were wiped out long before they might have started (?) to to build science laboratories and write books. And it’s most likely that Homo sapiens will do little better than the poor old dinosaurs. So, I can’t possibly imagine how or why the processes of Nature might get involved in building creatures that end up constructing real-life creations of the kind of medieval rubbish described by Dante. If they had the skills to tackle creations of that kind, they would surely be far more interested in building spaceships…

There is another corollary to my formula for happiness. I might describe it as “mind-boggling”… but that would be wrong, because this corollary is so simple and obvious that it doesn’t boggle my little mind in any sense whatsoever. Here’s my second corollary: Everything that makes up the universe as we imagine it (fuzzily) today has been here forever, and will continue to exist forever. Not only is it difficult to imagine that what we call “time” (an invention of Homo sapiens) might have a beginning and an end; it’s totally absurd. So, we should abandon such silly ideas, in the same way that we abandon Dante’s “hope”. That leaves us with the bare necessities of a Good Life freed from archaic rubbish of the kind that fascinated earlier specimens of our race… and faced solely with the pursuit of human happiness and goodness.

If you wanted a model for our existence, and you were prepared to accept a fictional one, I would highly recommend the Sermon on the Mount, which is surely some of the finest literature ever written.

Xmas gift for me

Here’s an excellent suggestion. Since this French issue of Blake & Mortimer volume 24 is a comic book, I’m sure my momentarily degraded eyesight wouldn’t be a problem.

Some observers claim that the hero of this tale is an archaic writer named Shakespeare. That can’t be true, of course, because we all know he didn’t even exist.

Google software improves its own translation process

                                                                           [photo Manuel Burgos/Getty]

Click here to read a New Scientist article about an improved approach to automatic translation... invented spontaneously by the AI system itself [artificial intelligence] that had been handling this activity. That’s a fascinating idea. An AI designs its own approach enabling it to do a better job.

Website names don't attract visitors

People imagine that it's a good idea to give a new website a name that's likely to attract visitors. In fact, search engines don't gravitate towards such-and-such a website because of its name. They do so because of complex algorithms that remain trade secrets.

In the old world, before the Internet,  the founders of a new company usually adopted a name for subtle reasons. That's to say, they didn't simply choose a name at random. Let's look at a few examples.

• A celebrated case of a name with no obvious meaning whatsoever is Kodak. It came to be associated onomatopoeically with the sound "click clack" made by the shutter of an old camera. But that wasn't the reason for choosing that name.

• In France, the communications agency named Australia has never had anything whatsoever to do with my land of birth. That kind of situation is quite rare.

• Talking about Australia, a celebrated hat-manufacturer chose a delightful name for his product: Akubra. As far as I know, this name has no known meaning whatsoever.

• In the Internet world, the name Facebook was chosen because the founder was thinking of yearly school albums. But the company's present preoccupations extend well beyond that small world.

• The celebrated IBM name was chosen back in the old days when it designated "International Business Machines".

• The well-known IKEA name has its origins in the Nazi era. The store was created in 1943 by a Swedish Nazi sympathizer, Ingvar Kamprad. The last two letters stand for the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd, and the town where the farm was located, Agunnaryd.

• What about Google? I was persuaded that it was a pure nonsense word. Not at all. It's a mathematical term that designates a very big number : 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

• And Amazon? Founder Jeff Bezos wanted a word that started with an "a", so that it would appear at the top.  Besides, since the river of that name was the longest in the world, he hoped that his new company would also become one of the biggest.

• The term Skype was surely nonsensical. Not at all. It once meant "Sky-peer-to-peer".

In other words, it's quite difficult to find a successful name that means strictly nothing at all.

Well, here's an item of personal news. I intend to keep Antipodes for what it is: an essentially English-language blog of my personal jottings. On the other hand, I'm thinking of starting a new blog for French-language jottings of a similar kind. You'll see it shortly. I promise you that its crazy name has absolutely no meaning whatsoever!

Base jumps can go wrong

Tineke Bot sent me a photo of land at Châtelus, taken from their house in Choranche.

                                                                         [photo by Tineke Bot]

Click the photo to enlarge it slightly.

A base jumper had taken off from the cliff above Rochemuse : Tineke's property, located behind the photographer. He was blown onto the top of a tree in Châtelus. A rescue helicopter arrived on the spot. It was a complicated and risky affair, and it took many people several hours. The fellow's life was at stake, as he could have slipped to his death at any instant. Happily, the base-jumper finally managed to get down safely out of the tree by his own means. All's well that ends well.

Plantu says goodbye

What exactly is that white object that the president is waving?

Is it a handkerchief... or maybe some kind of female garment?

The barrister's past-tense words are hard to understand:

"You know, he was a good fellow."
Good for whom?

Sewage power to handle drinkable water

A city in Denmark will be the first place in the world to use domestic wastewater and sewage to handle their system of drinkable water. Now, don’t get me wrong. Danes are not going to be asked to consume technologically-improved shit! The dirty muck is to be used solely to create electrical energy to drive the machinery that pumps pure crystalline-clear water into Danish homes in the city of Marselisborg.

Energy generator (photo from Aarhus Water)

Comparable approaches to electricity generation could be imagined to drive desalinization factories. The principal source of power and energy is, not human sewage, but rather... human imagination.