NP: Joe Strummer, Walker

Alright, I gotta kick that introspective bullshit out of the pole position.

Reading this article in Wired about the winner of the unmanned vehicle race in the desert last year, I once again got to thinking that maybe I've gone down the wrong career path. Why? Mostly because of this:

"This is a watershed moment - much more so than Deep Blue versus Kasparov," says Justin Rattner, Intel's R&D director. "Deep Blue was just processing power. It didn't think. Stanley thinks. We've moved away from rule-based thinking in artificial intelligence. The new paradigm is based on probabilities. It's based on statistical analysis of patterns. It is a better reflection of how our minds work."

Stanley -- which is the car that won the race, doesn't intepret "perceived" data as absolute. It essentially gives it a probability, and then looks at the most likely scenario described by the probablities of all the interpretations of the data points. The point being that the key to artificial intelligence isn't building the most expert of systems, that knows exactly how to handle every possible situation.

The other point being that this resonates very strongly for me, and is analogous to a lot of notions I have about brain function and reasoning. And, if I want to totally geek out on my "unifying theory of Coz," it's even analogous to notions I have about drumming, mostly because it describes a more adapative system, where you can respond to new information and new circumstances without completely throwing everything you already know under the bus. Which is how I come up with drum parts for songs in original projects, at the very least.

On some level, I'm still somewhere along a path where I can predict and model behavior, so it's not like I'm all that far away from this kind of stuff, but I get goosebumps sometimes reading about these sorts of developments.