What can I say? I think the people who I work with are great. It's funny how this team met in the first place.
Edward and I met through gaming (that's as far as I'll go). After finding out that we actually had a lot in
common, I told him about my SCHEME (a programming language & dialect of LISP) site and about
ThinkQuest. Even though the page was fairly popular at the time,
I thought the content was poor (although many other people thought otherwise). Noticing the great demand
for AI content, I envisioned creating a massive AI repository. Many people out there aren't willing to spend
the time or effort to go out and buy a book on AI, so they usually defer to the world wide web instead.
Unfortunately, much of the content out there today can't compare with the books that are out there (although
there are very many exceptions). Nothing can replace Marvin Minsky's
writings. My brilliant math coach, Mr. O'Roark shared this complaint (after seeing this site he probably wouldn't change his mind hehe). So,
I wanted to prove him wrong.
Well, things were going pretty well with the SCHEME page, until suddenly I got a e-mail from this really
enthusiastic guy, James. If he wouldn't have discovered my page, I don't know where we'd be today. This
guy was like a brilliant graphics and programming guru. Well after a few correspondences via e-mail, Ed and I
felt like this was the guy we had to get, and we did.
Well, everything went pretty smoothly from there on, we spent gobs and gobs of time researching and writing
essays and programs. We hope you enjoy Generation 5.
Thanks toooo..
Mr. O'Roark, who got me even more interested in AI, and was generous enough to lend me around 20-30 books,
I have yet to return that Common Lisp book.. sorry! James, who became nocturnal just for the page-
this guy is so brilliant, and he's a really, really hard worker too! And Edward Kao who spent gobs of time
making 3dtictactoe, with an almost unbeatable AI, who started school early but devoted his time and attention to the page anyway.
By the way, did you ever know that Edward Kao was the US national youth champion in this game called "Go"? (which is
just as popular as chess in Japan and China).
And to Mike Vannevar, that millionnare, dashing, web-designer guy from Texas who gave us expert suggestions.
Can Machines be Conscious?
Most AI researchers, being very supportive of the field they're in believe in machine consciousness.
(You may notice that many of the skeptics of machine intelligence work in other fields, such as Penrose,
accomplished mathematician and physicist and a great machine consciousness skeptic). The impression
that you'll probably get from my essays is that I believe that machines will one day be consciousness-
not so. I would put a big question mark on that thought. Why? I believe the architecture of any present-day program
or machine that we create will most likely fail during any of our attempts to create consciousness.
If we know so little (and in some respects maybe so much- but only superficially) about the architecture our own
brains which allow us to be conscious, how can we be so sure about the possibility of machine consciousness?
Locally, we know very much about the function of neurons, dendrites etc. but how does everything fit together so?
From a materialist standpoint, it is certainly possible that human beings could create an object that contains
the right material that would allow it to be conscious. But do our present machines allow this? It is feasible
that in the future, with further research on cognitive science, and the advancement of nanotechnology this could
certainly be true. Anyway, enough said, if you strongly disagree or agree take your opinions to the
voting poll or messaging board
or submit your own opinion.
Computer Games
I have finally, DECISIVELY DECIDED that computer games are a complete waste of time. Of course, if it
wasn't for them, you wouldn't be seeing this page right now. The best thing to do is to avoid them
if you aren't already addicted. I have just currently refused to play any games at all under any circumstances,
except when friends are over or something. If you are already addicted to Quake2 or Starcraft, I can offer
little advice except to violently bash your head against your CPU shell and hope that either you damage your hard-drive, controller card, CPU fan or motherboard
enough so that you won't be able to play games, or that you hurt your head enough to the extent that you
won't remember playing any games.
SCHEME
Scheme is still my favorite programming language. It is something that you can really appreciate
(same goes with LISP or any other LISP dialect). I hate all the icky too verbose syntax that other
programming languages require. Scheme's architecture allows for concise, code, it doesn't waste your
time. And hey, its great for AI too!
Science Fair
This was a bad experience I had sophomore year, 800 hours went to smoke. I'd rather not make any derogatory statements about a certain judge;
the past is behind us. If you're wondering about how I could have so much free time to create something like
IQATS (Intelligent Question and Answer Test Summarizer), that would be the answer.
Its funny how one random stranger can make you feel so sad, for so long. That guy did it for quite a while. I have not
touched IQATS since.
Math
Ok, I admit, I love math. Mathematics is beautiful. It's funny how mathematics can be so unique and true, and
at the same time be simply a product of our own imaginations. And for some reason all these abstract concepts that we
created over the years describe the laws and behavior of nature.
International Baccalaureate Program
This is the institution that both James and I belong to. It has caused me many sleepless nights.
'Nuff said.
Hmm.. I guess you're tired of my incoherent ramblings. Well, anyway, if you have any comments, or opinions
or flames, send them to hsiung@cs.uchicago.edu.
Well, I did some of the graphics :) I guess I have to be real technical though eh? But why should I be?
Uhh, well for the graphics that I did make, I made it with Adobe Photoshop 4.0 with the Eyecandy Plug-in.
I guess I had a little experience with it before we started ThinkQuest, but certainly not as much as James.
I wrote IQATS in R4RS Scheme of course, it was compiled with MIT Scheme 7.4.2 (err something
like that)- but does it really matter if you can't run MIT Scheme out of its environment? (Well, only with the
Windows 95 or non-UNIX versions that MIT has with those EMACS emulators, I don't know about the UNIX MIT Scheme
compiler though...) I think one thing the world could really need is a MIT Scheme code --> C/C++ code compiler.
By the way, you can get a REALLY good shareware COMMMON LISP compiler at http://www.franz.com.
Hmm, where was I? Oh yea, all the pages were made with wordpad. It is a common misconception that notepad is
the best for HTML authoring in Windows 95/98- not true. It is an empirical fact (derived from our own painful
experiences) that wordpad certainly is better. Since you have idiots like us who can't tell the difference
between uploading files in binary or ascii, you're going to have problems if you save a file that was uploaded
in binary when it should be an ascii files, thus all the carriage returns disappear and you get all your code
on one continuous stream of consciousness line etc. etc. in notepad, so use wordpad :)
