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Mechanical Man

Posted by editor on December 6, 2005 at 8:42 AM PST


What does thought feel like?

Max Goff's ambitious artificial intelligence series concludes today, in our Feature Article, The Artisan and the Artilect, Part 3. Having considered questions of teleology (purpose and direction) and epistemology (assumptions and world view), he turns his attention to consciousness. What is it? How does it come about? How would it be replicated?

The question of consciousness leads to one of will: the consciosus application of one's abilities. If this can genuinely be duplicated, then all bets are off:

We are at the threshold of what may be an epoch-magnitude change, ushered in by work in the maturing field of artificial intelligence. Classic approaches to AI have yielded interesting results, sometimes even reaching a human-competitive level (see Genetic Programming IV: Routine Human-Competitive Machine Intelligence). But the stated intentions of producing GPHC machines by more than one serious effort marks the beginning of a new era. The mind race is on.

At the outset, I framed this discussion of AI based on books by two very different authors, both of whom are making contributions to the field, and both of whom have stated goals of one day producing GPHC machines. The characterization of one as an artisan and the other as an artilect was a literary device and nothing more. In truth, Hawkins is just as much a reductionist as de Garis. And while the de Garis tome may to some smell of bad science fiction, it at least qualifies as art by some definition. So the roles might just as easily have been reversed.

There's much to learn, as today's Weblogs offer a set of tutorials and introductions. Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo offers an
Introduction to using Java Persistence API in a web application in Java EE environment:
"Example of a very simple web application using Java Persistence API in Java EE environment is shown here. I will also discuss how how to package such an application in a portable way. We will do all these without using any kind of IDE so that we don't miss the details that often happen while using a super smart IDE."

In Variations of JPasswordField, Scott Violet writes:
"we've been gathering input from customers on various features they would like to see us implement. At such a meeting one customer requested a variation of JPasswordField. I figured it would be interesting to blog on how you could modify JPasswordField to vary the level of feedback it gives you. I'll cover various pieces of Swing's text architecture in implementing one variation, as well as a demo."

David Herron asks
What time is it?
"What I have here for today's blog entry is the underlying Java code which does the minimalist functionality I need. That is, given a set of time zones, print a table showing the current time in each. The first thing to see is that the Date class doesn't have the required functionality. You can make a Date object and it gives you the current time, or you can initialize it for some other time. But, how do you know the time in some other timezone? Further its getYear and other methods are deprecated in favor of the Calendar class anyway."

Did you notice our new favorites icon in your address bar or your bookmarks/favorites? Thanks to Sarah Kim for nice work in a small space.

In Also in
Java Today,
the smallthought.com blog What If... rhapsodizes over a surprising choice of dream languages: "People are often surprised when I tell them which language I choose to work in. But where else [can] I find one as expressive as Ruby, with a VM as sophisticated as Hotspot, an IDE as good as Eclipse or better, and a community with 20 years of experience at using those three pieces as an integrated whole? Frankly, I couldn't make any other choice with a straight face." Read on to find which language is being described and how it relates to Java.

While we'd prefer you host your project on java.net, we couldn't resist noting the recent milestone: Java Surpasses C++ on SourceForge. "Last week, Java became the dominant language on the SourceForge site for the first time, surpassing C++ in the number of projects on the repository of open-source projects site. As of last Thursday, Java surpassed C++ with 16,738 projects versus 16,731 for C++. Officials at Sun Microsystems Inc., the creator and steward of the Java platform, called the achievement 'a clear sign of vibrant growth' and participation in the Java developer community."

In Projects and
Communities,
the Java WS & XML Community is featuring the ZDNet blog entry Dana Gardner on New SOA Component Models, which offers pointed crticism of the proposed SCA and SDO standards: "As usual, this exercise is not about peeling the layers back from an onion -- only to find more layers. It's actually adding more layers to the onion in order to hide the lower layers, which are too complex, as you know."

The Sun Grid Community Wiki offers a place for community members "to share content and collaborate on the development of new resources for our community." It has been seeded with a vast collection of links, including existing community projects, FAQ's, recommended tools and frameworks, Sun Grid documentation and webinars, related organizations and companies, and a quick bullet-point list of what a Sun Grid job looks like.

In today's Forums, sivakumart has a clever JavaOne 2006 suggestion
Re: Grab Bag: Other Ideas for JavaOne:
"Would it be possible to open/expose the J1 schedule as a web-service (in addition to the regualar interface made available)? Then we could have people whip up scheduling tools as they seem fit. This is a developer event after all."

tackline discusses overloading and confusion in
Re: Overloading impact:
"A big advantage Java has over C++ is that the common library is established and well used. Put together with the lack of 'latent typing', the foundations are secure. If java.util.Set does not to define + to copy the left hand side and addAll to the right hand side, it is highly unlikely to start meaning that with anyone else's implementation. Hopefully java[x].* bods realise + for String concatenation was a mistake. So if you want to know what + does, it's addition (except for String)."

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What does thought feel like?

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