http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628945.700-storytelling-software-learns-how-to-tell-a-good-tale.html

It is a good article for general reading, and I am quite comfortable with it. It was based on last year’s crop of tech reports of I had uploaded to arXiv. Since then, the Xapagy work had been more focused on representation of tricky sentences and story segments, like “If Clinton was the Titanic, the iceberg would have sunk” and the like.

No, I still don’t have synthetic autobiographies of sufficient size to start doing really interesting stuff – like creating whole stories from scratch. But slowly, slowly, it is getting to the point that one can translate almost anything to Xapi.

Scientific Commons believes it to be:

  The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web
  Larry Page, Sergey Brin, R. Motwani, and T. Winograd.

Note the way the Google founders have first names, while the other authors are restricted to initials. Then, here is the way the same paper appears on Google Scholar (3508 citations):

  The pagerank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web
  L Page, S Brin, R Motwani...

Let me not dwell onto the wisdom of citing three authors in a four author paper, and replacing the fourth one with ….  Of course, it is a bit better than another accepted typographic convention where the citation would be: L. Page et al. As in American universities the general convention is that the supervising professor’s name will be the last one, this approach will guarantee that his name will be always missing.

Now let us see the BibTeX entry generated by Google Scholar:

@article{page1998pagerank,
  title={{The pagerank citation ranking: Bringing order to the web}},
  author={Page, L. and Brin, S. and Motwani, R. and Winograd, T.},
  year={1998},
  publisher={Technical report, Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project, 1998}
}

So, Google Scholar is quite sure that the capitalization is correct the way it is, that is, with “pagerank” all lowercase, and the Bringing in uppercase, so it decides to protect the complete title capitalization with double brackets. It also believes it to be a journal article. The word “technical report” in the publisher field does not, apparently, raises the suspicion of the parser, neither the lack of the journal, volume, number or page fields.

Let us now move to the Stanford publication server at ilpubs.stanford.edu. This one generates a rather generous bibtex entry:

@techreport{ilprints422,
          number = {1999-66},
           month = {November},
          author = {Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin and Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd},
            note = {Previous number = SIDL-WP-1999-0120},
           title = {The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web.},
            type = {Technical Report},
       publisher = {Stanford InfoLab},
            year = {1999},
     institution = {Stanford InfoLab},
             url = {http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/},
        abstract = {The importance of a Web page is an inherently
            subjective matter, which depends on the readers interests,
            knowledge and attitudes. But there is still much that can
            be said objectively about the relative importance of Web
            pages. This paper describes PageRank, a mathod for rating
            Web pages objectively and mechanically, effectively measuring
            the human interest and attention devoted to them. We compare
            PageRank to an idealized random Web surfer. We show how to
            efficiently compute PageRank for large numbers of pages. And, we
            show how to apply PageRank to search and to user navigation.}
}

Now, we can finally figure out the first names of all the authors, and we learn the fact that the year is 1999, not 1998, which might or might not be correct. Also Larry is now Lawrence, which shows how much more serious this entry is compared to the others. Terry, however, remains Terry.

The only thing this entry gets wrong is the title: although it correctly capitalizes PageRank, it forgets to protect the capital letters, which will make LaTeX  cite it in all lowercase: “pagerank”. Ok, there is also an extra period at the end of the title.

To my mind, the correct title line would be like this:

title = {The {P}age{R}ank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web},

but that is only me.

Three thousand citations and the largest amount of money ever generated by an algorithm, and we still don’t know how to cite the paper exactly.

Next week, Antony and cleopatra, by Google Scholar (search for “antony and cleopatra”, and look at the first link).

So what remained? Here are the most solid institutions of Sillicon Valley.

Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst-Haus, Inc

and

The Milk Pail Market

Sic transit gloria mundi  — good thing we can always fall back on cheeses and sausages.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Q: What was the time of the day?

A: It was brillig.

Q: What were the toves doing?

A: They were gyring and gimbling.

Q: Were the borogoves slithy?

A: I don’t know. They were certainly mimsy.

Take this, Cyc.

As it happens, every time we try to implement a three dimensional interface, we fail in a most miserable way. At the same time, our user interfaces have standardized on the overlapping windows, menus, buttons approach – and this will not change in the foreseeable future.

Idea for science fiction authors: we are a simulation on somebody’s computer. Our attempts to build computers are just an incremental attempt to simulate the computer on which we ourselves are simulated. The fact that we are converging towards a windowing system only shows that our underlying OS is also windowing based. We are simulated in a future version of Windows! Bugs introduced today might be still present in the future version. Apocalyptic scenarios involving time travel and applying patches to operating systems in the future which simulate their own past ensues.

For the film version, this idea can be developed with appropriate amount of romantic complications, car chases, expensive computer graphics etc.

The phone

In all its antiquated, yellowed glory, with the label that calls are charged at the AT&T operator assisted rates + 50%. Operator assisted rates: I did not know that this still existed in 2009. I wonder how much revenue all these phones deployed in hotels across US are bringing in to AT&T and the hotels  (let’s say: maybe they catch an innocent person once a while, but only once in a lifetime).

And the hotels benefit by providing the perception that they are voracious profiteers going after the gullible.

The minibar

Filled in with all those goodies, in ridiculously small packages which have to be done on special order. Some of them even have their own branded peanuts, for $6 a pack. Everything about 10 times retail prices. I wonder how much revenue all these minibars deployed in hotels across US are bringing to the hotels (let’s say: maybe they catch an innocent person once a while, but only once in a lifetime).

And the hotels benefit by providing the perception that they are voracious profiteers going after the gullible.

WiFi

There was one hotel where the wireless internet was charged at $15 / day with no possibility of longer term subscription. This is a lot more expensive than the one charged for in-flight WiFi. For a family with one child, that would have been $45 / day for our respective laptops. $540 for a 12 day vacation. For internet. How many people take this? Ok, some desperate people, very occasionally. I wonder how much profit… you know the rest.

And the hotels benefit by providing the perception … you know the rest.

Ok, here is a counter-example. We have been at a hotel in Lisbon, Portugal (As Janelas Verdes). Four stars, I think, relatively expensive for Lisbon standards. But then we asked for some milk, and they brought us a full one quart pitcher, and they charged 2 euro. Which is kinda the price they paid in the store for it.

Now: they could have brought us a minibar size 1/2 cup can, and charged 8 euro. Which wouldn’t have added to their revenue at all, as we would have not taken it.

But maybe some hotels operators think that they owe it to themselves to push these high margin services, which don’t bring money.

Now, two issues:

• Apparently the OpenOffice background processor can not figure out that a word like r1 is probably not a regular lexical word subject to capitalization. ‘Cause English words do come with numbers in them. But this is the least problem.
• It seems that the OpenOffice system does not have a minimal model of the user. It only knows about the document (BTW, Microsoft Word is just like that). Well, if you are automatically doing things to the documents, like these programs do, then you probably see document editing, where you are trying to help the user achieve what it wants. If that is what you really want, then probably the first rule is: “If you have done a change, and the user had gone back and reverted that change right away, then probably the user wants it like that, so do not change it back again“. What this means, though,  is that you need a user model as well as a document model, and in this case, the document model is overridden by the user model. Now, by the way, implementing this particular thing would be an afternoon’s work, if somebody wants to do it right – eg. after I have fixed the first R1 –> r1, the system might guess that I don’t want it to mess with r2 in the next cell.

Now, I know that the OpenOffice guys have limited resources, but Microsoft???

When asked in an exit survey whether they thought that the delivery mode improved on the instruction (yes / somewhat / limited) and whether they could understand the ventriloquist (yes / somewhat / limited), many of them sneaked out through alternative exits.

The ones who showed up for the next lecture had a real interest in puppetry. The ones interested in Aristotle went somewhere else.

Consciousness: the instantaneous state of the mind, including qualia (internal and external perceptions), and reflections. We assume that these are encoded in neural firing patterns, but we shouldn’t forget about the nerve input from various body parts and sensors, as well as the brain configuration and neurotransmitter levels which make a certain firing pattern possible.

Qualia: the part of the conscious state dealing with an external perception. I assume that qualia has fuzzy borders, and the remainder of the conscious state can be, to some level part of it.

Reflections: any part of the consciousness which does not deal with direct perception. It can deal with: past qualia, past reflections, future plans, it can try to envision qualia or perceptions which it had not encountered yet etc.

Why does qualia appear mysterious: because we are not able to reproduce it completely. A reflection about a past qualia can not bring the complete qualia in mind (for obvious reasons). Examples of obvious reasons: we would need to reproduce the external sensory inputs, the neurotransmitter levels, etc.

Why does consciousness appear mysterious: because we are not able to reproduce it completely.

Another issue her is that when we say that we want to “understand” qualia / consciousness, we do not really mean that we want to reproduce a past qualia / conscious state. In fact, reproduction, with some level of approximation, is possible. Eg. I can experience the qualia of eating an apple when hungry. It is harder to reproduce the experience of seeing the Grand Canyon might be difficult to reproduce the second time, as the reflections about past visits will be part of the conscious state.

So the statement that qualia and consciousness are mysterious are simply the (correct) fact that reflections about a qualia are not the brain state as the original qualia. There is the practical obstacle of the fixed wiring of the human brain: for instance, neural patterns in the first level of sensory data processing levels (eg primary visual cortex) are part of the visual qualia, and probably cannot be “borrowed” for a reflection.

I think that the only kind of being who can successfully reflect on its own consciousness is one which (a) has a dynamically reconfigurable brain and (b) has an exponentially expanding brain which at any given moment of time contains its complete previous conscious state as a reflection in the new conscious state.

Now, we can try to visualize for ourselves this creature with the exploding brain, and decide whether we want to be like him/her.

What Nagel is arguing is that there is no way for me, a human, to know what is it like to be a bat, because we cannot recreate the experiences of a bat. We have a different brain and body structure, we do not have a wing, we do not have a sonar, and so on.

I think that he is right, but he is missing the real gap.

What about trying to understand what is it like to be Britney Spears? I don’t have her gender, age, experiences. One might claim that structurally I am closer to Britney than to a bat, so maybe my understanding of how it is to be her might be “closer” (provided I can create a distance measure on such a thing).

But now an easy one (for me). What was it like to be me, this morning? The facts are there: the sun was shining, and I was having a headache. My perceptions of the external world and the internal world created something which Nagel would call “experience”. Right now, the headache is gone and it is nighttime. I can describe my feelings this morning, verbally, but I can not trick my mind to feel a headache or my eyes to see sunlight.

I do not know how it was to be me this morning. The gap between the actual moment of experience, and the attempt to reproduce it later is much larger, than the gap between my experiences, Britney’s experiences, or the bat’s.

PS: Of course, I know what it is for me to finish writing this blog entry. But wait… it is gone.