Sunday evening was spent at Ben's place, watching the France-Italy finals. Seeing Zidane get sent off for head-butting was certainly entertaining, but more entertaining was having Zhirong try to describe what a female orgasm involved. More entertainment involving Zhirong involved commandeering his MSN account and professing his love to Charisia. Who promptly logged off in sheer terror, understandably.

Dinner with Zhiming, Andy, David and Junx, and spent most of the time discussing artificial intelligence and the ramifications, as well as the possibility of proof of its existence and nature. It was suggested that it is, in principle, impossible to prove that any AI is exactly like a human intelligence. (I don't know if I got the formulation right) It's clearly an extension of Godel's Incompleteness Proof, which I've mentioned in a previous entry. Using the system of human intelligence, can we ever show that X (where X is a system of AI) is a replica of a system of human intelligence? It seems like there is a proof that it cannot. The implications are mind-boggling.

I was thinking about writing a little about the Incompleteness Proof here, or about the Ring of Gyges, but the hour is late, and the witching hour grows nigh. Not that I have any idea what witches do with all that nigh, but I guess it's important. So, dear reader, I will sign off here with Yeat's The Second Coming, from which I draw the url of this very site. Pay especial (this should be a word) to the last two lines. Enjoy.


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats