🚀 go-pugleaf

It is to Nancy Reagan's undying credit that she starred in the ca.
1947 movie "Donovan's Brain," which has inspired legions of AI-ers.

A week ago on Sun.7.Mar.1999 I had my first ever "face" meeting
with one of the comp.ai.philosophy netgods who happens to live
in the same Seattle WA USA region as v.t.y. Mentifex@scn.org.

No, I did not have to leave my vat and be outfitted with a body
for the treff.  On my own steam I walked into Seattle's Best Coffee
and started asking various males if they were [netgod name withheld].
Compunction forced me to approach one monstrously weird character,
but luckily from his armchair near the door our AI philosopher
spoke up and identified himself before I had accosted all present.

From 3:00 p.m. until 7:00 we discussed the state of comp.ai and
would fain have remained but they threw us out at closing time.
So each of us risked becoming a brain in a vat by crossing the
street to continue our discussion over a meal of tandoori chicken.

The AI netgod said that AI is "too big" a problem for any one
person's efforts (calmly I let such a provocation pass) and that
therefore we all need to continue chipping away at the problem
en masse in comp.ai.philosophy and the related newsgroups.

His netgodliness increased my level of anxiety about finishing
http://www.scn.org/~mentifex/ PDAI -- The Mindmaker Project
before I am astrally harvested or hydrologically envatted.

From graduate school at U Cal Berkeley I was drafted into the
U.S. Army and found out that I had an abnormally large hat size,
which means that I 1) am a fathead; 2) need a large vat; 3) am
proud of attending Berkeley when a crazed Harvard man was there.
But this Ted never took the other Ted's math class; I was in
classics and I attended a seance of the Stanford robot makers.

Anyway, back to the vat.  Just as each node added to a network
increases the overall value of the network (i.e., Internet),
likewise every clarification that I write for the PDAI project
makes it more palatable as a body of work in the event of envatment
and of my consequent inability to work on proving the netgod wrong.

He said, "Mentifex, nobody in comp.ai wants you to succeed --
your posts are too subjective."  Touche', j'etais, mais j'accuse:
The General Staff of AI is incompetent at bringing about AI.

http://www.cyou.com/~apf/ The Amateur Programmers' Forum is a
more fertile ground for creating AI than the typical CS Dept.
As we said back in the 1960's, "If you're not part of the solution,
you are part of the problem."  Let the amateurs have a go at AI,
and then those who can't can teach it.

  /^^^^^^^^^^^\ Mind-grid Arrays{ } in Robot PDAI /^^^^^^^^^^^\
 /visual memory\                   _________     /  auditory   \
|      /--------|---------\       / LANG-UK \   |   memory      |
|      |  recog-|nition   |       \_________/---|-------------\ |
|   ___|___     |         | flush-vector|       |   ________  | |
|  /image  \    |     ____V_        ____V__     |  /        \ | |
| / percept \   |    /psi{ }\------/ uk{ } \----|-/ ear{ }   \| |
| \ engrams /---|---/concepts\----/ lexicon \---|-\ phonemes /  |
|  \_______/    |   \________/    \_________/   |  \________/   |