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And it seems to me that the Bitcoin network meets LeWitt’s description of conceptual art. If nothing else, it conforms to his edict that ‘the basic unit’ of the work ‘be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work’. Boetti’s absurdist bureaucrat has been downsized: a computer…
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What makes a male child become a “boy,” as we understand that concept socially? In her new book, When Boys Become Boys, Judy Y. Chu reports on her two-year study in which she followed a group of boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade. She concluded that most of what we think of as “boy” behavior…
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On June 6, 1984, the computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov launched the side project he’d been working on at Moscow’s Academy of Science of the USSR: a simple video game—an almost ridiculously simple video game—he called Tetris. In short order, his creation would be called “by far, the most addictive game ever.” It would also be…
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As I sipped my old fashioned, I listened to a conversation between several aging literature professors about the “digital humanities,” which, as far as I could tell, was a needlessly jargonized term for computers in libraries and writing on the Internet. The Morbid Fascination With the Death of the Humanities – Benjamin Winterhalter – The…
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Turing Test passed for the first time
Turing Test passed for the first time jkottke: A supercomputer running a program simulating a 13-year-old boy named Eugenehas passed the Turing Test at an event held at London’s Royal Society. The Turing Test is based on 20th century mathematician and code-breaker Turing’s 1950 famous question and answer game, ‘Can Machines Think?’. The experiment investigates whether…