The Robots of Dawn
A millennium into the future two advances have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. Isaac Asimov's Robot novels chronicle the unlikely partnership between a New York City detective and a humanoid robot who must learn to work together. Detective Elijah Baley is called to the Spacer world Aurora to solve a bizarre case of roboticide. The prime suspect is a gifted roboticist who had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to commit the crime. There's only one catch: Baley and his positronic partner, R. Daneel Olivaw, must prove the man innocent. For in a case of political intrigue and love between woman and robot gone tragically wrong, there's more at stake than simple justice. This time Baley's career, his life, and Earth's right to pioneer the Galaxy lie in the delicate balance.
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What Hacker News says
- Sci-fi seems to mean 'anything that looks vaguely technical in a story'.
SF, especially, hard SF, has always tackled grown up questions.
Here are a few I have recently re-read:
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, Engines Of Light by Ken McLeod, 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke, Robots of Dawn, etc. by Isaac Asimov.
- Isaac Asimov is a must read for people who love Sci-Fi. Some of his books I loved: The Robot Series (The Caves of Steel, The Robots of Dawn etc.), The Foundation Series, Nemesis, the list goes on ...
- Total hoax.
There are so many holes in this I don't know where to begin. A humanoid robot with a measurable IQ of 130 would require awareness of self and environment. Programming it for servitude would be tricky, to say the least. Also, why do so many people expect any strong AI to resemble human intelligence?
Give Philip K Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" a whirl if you're interested in the implications. Isaac Asimov also spent a lot of time writing about robotic intelligence. Hit up Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and Robots of Dawn if this floats your boat.
The article called it "a simple database search returning ranked results based on the number of backlinks." Therein lies the rub. Larry Page came up with the idea of backlink counting, inspired I think by how in scholarly writing a measure of importance is the number of other scholarly writings that cite it. He first called it BackRub, then later renamed it to PageRank.> Is the Google example oversimplified, > or is my history wrong? > It's reduced here to a "simple database search" > but I thought some of Google's novel search technology > was there from the get-goOf course there were other pieces of evidence in their secret sauce, and they are ever tweaking it. But I would say that backlinks made the biggest difference. In those days Hotbot and AltaVista returned a cacophony of results based on word matches in the body of the page itself. Google I believe was the first search engine that went by the text in the links of other websites pointing to it. One of Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's professors tells the story of being introduced to their prototype, searching for "Stanford," and for the first time the top result was actually stanford.edu.
A few times people exploited this. For example, someone got a bunch of their friends to link to George Bush with the link labeled "miserable failure," so that when you googled "miserable failure," the top result was George Bush. This is called google bombing.
Another part of their algorithm that proved how far off course most people, including me, thought that the Web should be organized was laid out in Sergey Brin's research pager, "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web." While everybody, including me, thought that the way to bring order to the chaos of the Web would be to somehow persuade more and more people to write better web pages (semantic HTML, microformats, etc.) Sergey Brin just took what he was given. As an example he talks about finding author-title pairs on the Web. He starts with a seed list of, say, five author-title pairs:
and just combing the web for patterns between the elements of each pair. Instead of pristine microformats and "proper" HTML, he takes what he gets:Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn David Brin, Startide Rising James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science Charles Dickens, Great Expectations William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
and other patterns.<LI><B>title</B> by author ( <i>title</i> by author ( author || title (He uses these patterns to find more pairs, which he uses to find more patterns, and so on (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/421/1/1999-65.pdf).
