Is Google the best bet for AI's big frontier - Intelligent Machine? What is AI? Although most attempts to define complex and widely used terms are just exercises in futility. So what is it? AI is the study of how to make computers do things that at the moment, people do better. A lot of AI work has been conducted in the past 30-40 yrs. Yet, however no AI program can match the commonsense reasoning powers of a five yr old. This is due, in part, to the large amount of knowledge required for common sense. Human Intelligence is based on a lot of different skills such as perceptual or linguistic skills. Also the amount of knowledge that a human brain stores and the speed at which it is retrieved is still way ahead than what the machines can do. A human can 'learn' based on various inputs and experiences. Also a human can infer on the knowledge already known. This ability to learn and infer on the huge amount knowledge separates humans from other animals and also machines. So one of the big problems the AI community has been delving on is in areas of storing huge amounts of 'knowledge' and fast retrieval of stored knowledge. Humans are very good at this, although the amount of information we store might not seem to be to large, trust me it is more than what we think it is. So to build a intelligent machine what do I need? Some of the skills are - massive knowledge (data), inference, learning, natural language parsing and ?common sense?. So where do you find the 'massive knowledge'? There isn't one place that hosts this. So where is it? It's the web. The web collectively holds 'knowledge' in multiple forms, at a scale, which no human can. Can we utilize this data? How? The answer is that yes we do utilize this by means of search engines. Search Engines are your index to this 'massive knowledgebase'. The Search Engines enable you to retrieve, relevant data from a huge and distributed store, lightening fast. Over a past few weeks I have been reading many blogs and articles on Google and the impact it's making to the web community. One of the authors suggested that Google is the biggest distributed OS over the web. Yes like this one, many other theories might hold true for Google. But the way I see it, Google is perhaps the best bet for people in AI, to build a 'intelligent' machine since Google has put the first 2 steps forward in through its ability to 'contextually' mine huge data sets very fast. Google is the best hope for 'agent' software. We need to take the next step by creating program's that have basic genetic code and behavior pattern defined. 'Agents' can mine Google and 'learn' and in process grow. Also enable these 'agents' to provide interaction with humans through "gmail" and then sit back and watch the "matrix" weave in. Sounds spicy. Just need to remember � do not name any agent � "Agent Smith"

Gmail Just opened a gmail account. Thanks to blogger.com for it. I have not been this estatic abt opening an email account since I opened one on rocketmail.com in 1996.

Hedge Few days back Infy announced that it crossed $1 Billion in revenue, so did Wipro a few days later. There was good programme on CNBC on the effect of rupee's rise. And the reason why I am writing this is the word "Hedge" caught my fancy. The rupee is rising vis-a-vis the dollar. (I lost roughly 10K rupees due to this in last 7 mnths :(( ) . And companies like Infy hedge against such volatility. So what is currency hedging ? Here are some links 1.ttp://www.efmoody.com/investments/currency.html 2.http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/glossary/glossary.asp?TermID=908 3.http://www.tweedy.com/library_docs/papers/hedging_foreign_stock_currency.html And in this volatile job market I am hedging against changes at my job ;)

Team Rudyard Kipling wrote: For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

Sun and MSFT Deal / Free software Slashdot is talking about the Sun and MSFT deal. Ppl say that its Microsoft's pre-emptive move to cut the other "evil" IBM in the enterprise market. I really dont understand why so much is made out of evil empires (IBM and MSFT). To me any business that becomes big ( $800M and greater) have tendency to be evil. But the good they do is far greater from the evil side of their businesses. No, I am not defending the practices of IBM or a MSFT. Its just that we tend to focus so much on the 'evil' side, we loose sight of the good one. Yes we need to weed out the evil, but we do need to appreciate the good side too. And yea, I am not for free software as much. Free software is good when its for educational purpose or even say individual use. Corporates should not be given free software. It just helps companies make bigger profits and the top management pay cheques fatter. Does giving corporates free software help the individual. No it doesnt! Not at least in the immediate sense. We can argue that benefits of lower costs wouldsometime be passed on to the individual customer. Oh yeah!!!

Another blogger >> Another good friend of mine joins in the blogging world. He runs his vizualization company out of Pune, is Hard Rock freak and drives a 500cc Bullet. We both share the same birthdate ( 19 days after 30th of sept ). He is fun to read and usually posts very well written and opinonated articles.

Thumare Paas kya hai ? This is a good funny take on the famous Amitabh dialouge : An Indian and a Pakistani Cricketer are chatting about the wealth of batting and bowling in their respective countries... The Indian Cricker goes like, 'I have the best batsman in the world in the form of Sachin Tendulkar... He is a Genius... I have Sehwag... The Delhi Bulldozer which will smash oppositions... I have Dravid... Mr Dependable... I have Laxman... Very Very Special... I have Yuvraj... Young Blood... I have Kaif... Excellent Talent... I have Saurav... Gutsy Captain.... I got Irfan and Balaji and Kumble and Harbhajan and Agarkar and Zaheer... We are just too good for you... Thumare Paas kya hai ?????" with a grin... The Pakistani Cricketer replies, "Mere paas Buckner hai!!" :-)