Harry Chen Thinks Aloud

An article in the Wall Street Journal tracks the history of blogging. According to the article, the first blog on the Internet was called Robot Wisdom — a personal web page by Jorn Barger. Barger wrote,

“I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff.”

This is how I remember blogging. The term blog was derived from “weblog”. At first, there was personal blogs. Later it came professional and business blogs. As more people switching from slow dial-up to fast high-speed internet, it gave birth to photo blogs and video blogs. At the same time, advancements in mobile and cellphone technology bred a new kind of blogging — mobile blogs.

Spotted on: slashdot

My first computer was an Intel 80386 PC. That seems to be an ancient machine to many teenagers today. However, comparing to Antikythera Mechanism, my 80386 PC is a computer from some Sci-Fi movies.

Antikythera Mechanism is a device probably used for calculating astronomical position. It’s believed to be a creation of the ancient Greeks at 150-100 B.C. The artifact in the photo was found among the Roman shipwrecks nearby the island of Antikythera in 1900. Recently researchers have examined this ancient computer with high-resolution imaging systems and three-dimensional X-ray tomography. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times has an interesting article on the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It walks through the AI research milestones since 1950 (see timeline).

The article also talks about some recent development in AI.

• Stanford University is developing a robot that can use a hammer and a screwdriver to assemble an Ikea bookcase.
• Microsoft is working on the idea of “predestination”. They envision a software program that guesses where you are traveling based on previous trips, and then offers information that might be useful based on where the software thinks you are going.
• Since 2001, the voice recognition software of Tellme Networks has improved its accuracy from 37% to 74%. Tellme supplies the system that automates directory information for toll-free business listings.

One weakness of this article is that it gives a false impression about AI. It presents AI as the research of building intelligent robots (or human-like machines). The article begins with an introduction of the Stanford robotic project, and ends with a quote from an AI scientist “It’s time to build an A.I. robot. The dream is put a robot in every home.”

I strongly discourage people to think AI is all about robot building. AI is more than HAL or IBM’s Deep Blue chess playing program. AI is the science and engineering of intelligence machines, especially intelligent computer programs (see AI basic questions). In addition to robotics, other research topics of AI include speech recognition, expert systems, natural language processing, computer vision, heuristic classficiation, planning, logical inference, search, and the Semantic Web.

Josh Hosler has a website that allows you to lookup the #1 song in the U.S.A. on any date since 1940.

#1 Song on

• My birthday: “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright)” by Rod Stewart
• Gigi’s birthday: “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone

Hum… I wonder if our parents remember listening to those songs when we were born.