Artificial Man

The continuing consideration of our intellectual successors.

"There seems to be an increasing level of this thing we cannot adequately define but are very capable of testing for various purposes: intelligence. Whether silicon based or human, the general level of intelligence is rising. The difference between our digital offspring and ourselves is one of degree, not direction."

In today's Feature Article, The Artisan and the Artilect, Part 2 Max Goff continues his consideration of intelligence, natural and artificial, and the implicit possibility (or is it an inevitability) that Moore's Law will eventually lead to an artificial intelligence more capable than our own. In this installment, he considers a question of "how do you get there from here?" In other words, was the emergence of natural intelligence strictly an evolutionary process of good luck? And does buying that require a leap of faith? And if that's not plausible, how else do you get there?

Thinking about these issues is important because it's the critical step in creating the so-called "artilect", the superior artificial intelligence: figure out what's so special about the human brain, and then do version 2.0. This premise sets up the forthcoming final installment of the series, considering the clash of wills that can be expected to accompany that effort.

You need to read today's Weblogs very carefully if you're to understand Bruce Tate's story about
Joe, the Amazing Coding Monkey. By way of description, he blurbs "What an amazing couple of weeks. Beyond Java became generally available last week, and my pet monkey learned to code." But there's a lot more to it than that.

In
A Read-only database?, Bernt Johnsen writes:
"A read only database can be a useful thing. This application could be implemented as a small Java application on top of a SQL database. And yes, it's easy to make such an application with Apache Derby."

Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein wonders about the consequences as
Tomcat goes Native:
"The new version of Apache Tomcat will support a library of native code to speend some things up. Is this the end of the PureJava dogma?"

In Projects and
Communities,
developers looking to get involved with the Mobicents VoIP project can now learn the API from the Mobicents Examples 1.0 Beta 1, which offer a Resource Adapter tutorial by Michael Maretzke and a SLEE "wake-up call" example by Francesco Moggia.

Noting that there is currently a Java Sound implementation in J2SE without a JSR spec, the Java Sound JSR Project aims to develop a JSR for sampled and generated sound. The project seeks support from corporations, professionals, and others.

In Also in
Java Today,

"We've all heard about the simplicity and power of the EJB 3.0 specification. And because this has proven to be true, we can't help but think that performance must be rather poor. After all, all that simplicity must come at a price." With this premise in mind, Peter Zadrozny and Raghu R. Kodali took Oracle's EJB 3.0 implementation and assessed its performance at common EJB tasks, such as using the Data Access Object and Session Facade patterns. In The Performance of EJB 3.0, they report that the results are very encouraging

Ever written a speech-driven application? They're few and far between. Aimee Silva blames this on the lack of a standard, well-known architecture: "To create robust voice applications, voice developers have had to be familiar with many languages, techniques, architectures, and processes. Compounding this problem, voice applications are often built using proprietary markup languages." In Creating Voice Applications with Reusable Dialog Components she shows how J2EE, JSP, and Struts developers can build voice apps with VoiceXML and the Reusable Dialog Component (RDC) open source project.