RIP: Abe Vigoda and Marvin Minsky

[thewayne]

I read about Abe last night, he made it to 94. He is best known for two roles: he appeared in The Godfather, but in my opinion, more importantly as Detective Fish on Barney Miller. There was a running joke: in 1982, People Magazine accidentally published that he had died, so he started appearing on talk shows to show that he was still alive. Later, someone bought the web domain AbeVigoda.com, that basically had a photo of Abe and said 'he's not dead yet'.

Sadly, now he is. He was always fun to watch on talk shows.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/26/464459276/character-actor-abe-vigoda-dies-at-94


Marvin Minsky was a VERY important person in the field of computer science, he was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence research. If I have the story right, he was working with a group of students and assigned them to develop a program that could identify objects in a photograph, thinking it would be easy. They gave up after six months or so.

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/26/464469794/marvin-minsky-who-pioneered-artificial-intelligence-research-dies-at-88


In other news, but in the field of artificial intelligence, a Google program beat a master at the game of Go! They've challenged the current world champion, we'll find out soon if he accepts.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/googles-ai-beats-go-champion-will-now-take-on-best-player-in-the-world/

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Indeed, Minsky easily counts as one of the fathers of modern computing. Even if we don't quite have sci-fi style AIs yet, we're steadily coming closer and closer. Even if the grunt work is performed server-side, Siri does have contextual awareness, and manages naturally phrased queries with aplomb. It won't be all that long before AIs exceed human capabilities - and by then, we'll really want some form of augmentation to be possible, lest we simply find ourselves left behind.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Siri really drives me nuts at times, as does my new car's entertainment system. But one is a case of poor programming decisions, the other is much more complex.

My iPhone has a lot of rock music. If I tell Siri "shuffle rock" she pulls up Rocky Horror's Time Warp. If I say "shuffle rock genre", same thing. I have to say "shuffle genre rock".

I think it's a matter of search result prioritization. I think the priorities should be play list, genre, song title, in that order. Looks like it is song title first, and at that, it's hitting on a partial match.


My car has Bluetooth sync, along with sync cable or audio cable for user-provided devices. I listen to more podcasts than music in my car as my commute is an hour daily up and down the mountain. I'm almost caught up on NPR's Fresh Air podcast, I'm now up to early December. When I get current with that, then I might listen to more music in my commute. I do most of my music listening at work through a BT Oontz speaker that's pretty sweet.