Slowly catching up

I think I'm fighting a cold too, but I'm slowly catching up on email. The New Ties thing was OK -- they spent a lot of time and money realizing that there's no magic mix of learning algorithms that will give them intelligence overnight unless they add some structure in with coding, which is of course the reason behind my PhD title "Intelligence by Design". On the last day, it even turned out they had named one of their data structures after my thesis contribution -- I call my AI method "Behavior Oriented Design" BOD, and they called their new structure a "Behavior Oriented Decision Tree". I was impressed about how they delivered & documented their software though -- since I also have a simulation system (though no full-time programmers!) it is worth seeing how other people do this.

Anyway, what made me think of posting right now is that I just ran into an article about something I'd been expecting for a while. A synthetic biologist is trying to turn greenhouse gases into fuel. I've been thinking those guys were the ones most likely to fix global warming. In a way, even if it works, it's a shame because it removes some of the motivation to maintain original growth forests. But obviously it would be nice if we could either make fuel without burning plants or oil and/or control the greenhouse effect.

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