whank
This was most amusing to my inner 14-year old:
The idea is to be able to make instrumental sounds by typing onomatopoeic words.
Monitor your Linux computer with machine-generated music
Use Perl and FluidSynth to create a real-time musical composition of your system status.
Whistle while you work to run commands on your computer
Use open source software and microphone-enabled laptops to listen for specific tonal sequences and run commands
The primary goal of this work is to convert genome-encoded protein sequences into musical notes in order to hear auditory protein patterns.
Debugging the machine was also done by ear. Circuits were opened and closed by relays -- metal bars attached to springs that were raised by the pulling force of electromagnets. The thousands of relays being slapped into position in various sequences made a deafening racket at times, yet it was not merely random industrial noise. To the trained ear of a programmer, the repeated rhythm from one corner of the machine, signifying a program was frozen in some calculating loop, was as dissonant as listening to a broken record. Later, when the next-generation 701 Defense Calculator arrived, with its mute electronic switches instead of mechanical relays, Backus recalled felling a twinge of panic. "I wondered, 'How are we going to debug this enormous silent monster.'"
-- from p.18 of Go to, by Steve Lohr
I believe that we may be able to create an artificial intelligence long before we understand natural intelligence, and I suspect that the creation process will be one in which we arrange for intelligence to emerge from a complex series of interactions that we do not understand in detail--that is, a process less like engineering a machine and more like baking a cake or growing a garden. We will not engineer an artificial intelligence; rather, we will set up the right conditions under which an intelligence can emerge. The greatest achievement of our technology may well be the creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering--that allow us to create more than we can understand.
Danny Hillis, The Pattern on the Stone
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