Artificial Intelligence Anonymous

This is my attempt at providing a brief introduction to another subject I know nothing about. Much to my dismay, I never took AI. Ignorance hasn't stopped me from blogging on topics before (see my Lojban, income inequality, lottery and capitalist ideology pages) and it surely isn't going to stop me now.

1. Artificial intelligence anonymous, part one.


2. Artificial intelligence anonymous, part two.

What is artificial intelligence?

Pope John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence for the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. The idea behind AI is that every learning process available to thinking, drinking, smoking and fucking humans can be described so accurately that a machine may also exhibit the same learning behaviour. It is thus artificial because it is a machine doing what humans tend to do (minus the drinking and fucking, although I do wonder where computer viruses come from). Or more precisely, it does what humans are supposed to do, namely learn.



John McCarthy. In the land of hobbits, he is a dwarf. The John McCarthy homepage is simple yet efficient and oh so wholesome.

There are as many definitions for artificial intelligence as there are artificial intelligence researchers, which is great because ultimately there can be no true AI until machines exhibit a general intelligence factor. Regardless, I find the quick and dirty definition of John McCarthy as valid, meaningful and descriptive so I'll go with that.

Why artificial intelligence?

Because whenever humans get a mathematical problem with decimal points, we tend to look like cowboys. Not the Brokeback Mountain kind of cowboys, but the gunslinger cowboys who reach for the hip and try to be the quickest on the calculator draw.



Qbo, an open source hardware project with AI listed at Harkopen. Notice the uncanny resemblance to John McCarthy.

Since the abolition of slavery humans have been looking for new slaves. Computers solve this intricate masochist/sado-masochist equation in an ethical manner. The idea behind artificial intelligence is to relieve humans of mundane, repetitive thinking tasks so we can focus on more important aspects of humanity. Like drinking, smoking and fucking.

How to remove toolbars

Toolbars really annoy the manure out of me. It is simply poor interface design to have some junk from your previous page hover over your next page. Upon navigating to a new page, the user expectancy is to see a new page, not clutter from the old page.

Why toolbars are bad

Jakob Nielsen is the guru of user interface design. He offers some heuristics to guide interface design, which make the peasant user experience much more pleasant. You may cast an eye on that list and see for yourself how many heuristics are ignored because some social networking Mafia wants to spam your browser. Tsk, tsk, social networking sites. David Bowie is very disappointed in you.

How to make toolbars go away

Yet one of the most useful heuristics I've learnt from real-life is that there are two ways to solve a problem: the political way and the technical way. The political way to make toolbars go away is to grovel and beg the social networking Mafia until they make the toolbar disappear. The technical way is just to remove the toolbar.

Removing the toolbar on Facebook

I'm on a few social networking sites. The same basic method seems to work for all of them, but since the whole world and the kitchen sink seem to be on Facebook, I'll only include the procedure to remove the toolbar on that site:

• Step 0: Install Greasemonkey.
  Greasemonkey good! Greasemonkey works on Firefox. If you are using Internet Explorer, good luck with your porn viruses and your vi4g0rag0ra spam.


• Step 1: Install this simple script.
  All you need to do is to click on the URL. Greasemonkey will give you a pop-up window and ask you if you want to install the script. You might want to click on install.
  
  Get the script here:
  http://herzbot.netii.net/my_dir/javascripts/facebooktoolbarblocker.user.js. The link may not work due to Blogger's security. Just copy the URL and paste it into a browser window.

Remove the tool and keep the bar, I always say. Except when I'm saying something else like jam out with your clam out, or get your yah-yah's out or something.

From now on, Facebook's annoying toolbar will no longer haunt your external links. Unfortunately, they still malform the URL sometimes. Bloody useless bunch.