It Knows...

That's what I said to myself while working on my project tonight.

Work was really slow today, so I had some time to scrutinize the probability algorithm for my part-of-speech disambiguator. Basically, the tool I'm working on now is meant to correctly identify the part-of-speech for each word in a given phrase. When I got home and tinkered with the code a bit, I was astonished with how well it worked. The program is now analyzing all possible combinations, and reports the instance it determines is most likely to occur, based on general usage statistics.

When I realized it was doing what I hoped it would do, and the statistical formula was working properly, I was pleasantly surprised. Later on, I will combine this with other methods of semantic analysis in an attempt to determine the specifc meaning of each word in a sentence. But for now, I'm cleaning up the code a bit, and improving the performance by eliminating unnecessary steps. The algorithm is working... but its slow, with an efficiency on the order of O(4^n)! Once I speed it up and get it into a presentable format, I will make it available to download and try out.

Not exactly what you would call a 'Eureka!' moment, but I was pleased nonetheless.

Pink Slip for NASCAR Drivers?

C|Net News reports a Carnegie Mellon Robotic Vehicle successfully completed a 200 mile, seven hour drive, completely autonomously.

Although the course was merely 131 laps around a 1.5 mile racetrack, the duration of this event represents a significant milestone in the development of driverless vehicles. The next step will be the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The Carnegie Mellon team led all participants in last year's contest, completeing 7.3 miles of the 142 mile course before getting stuck.

Ethics & Artificial Intelligence

Right now I'm listening to a very interesting radio talk show about the IBM 'Blue Brain' Project and the ethics of creating a conscious machine.

You can listen to the RealAudio stream here.

Fighters without Fighter Pilots

Popular Science has an in-depth article about the possible future of air combat.

It discusses the development of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (including the X-45 Stingray), their roles in future conflict, and some of the internal politics related to the project.

Let the Buyer Beware!

I came across an interesting news story today that made me think. Basically, some store in Canada accidentally sold a few copies of the new Harry Potter book more than a week before the official release date. Yawn. But what's interesting is that the book's distributor won a court injunction "barring the buyers of 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince' from disclosing the plot." Additionally, the court ordered all copies be returned to the distributor.

This means that some poor Canadian child could have walked into his local bookstore and purchased a book he'd been waiting years for, but because the corporation behind the book decided it had been accidently sold a bit too early, a court of law decreed it must be returned and the little hoser has to keep his mouth shut about the storyline. I didn't know Canadian law granted merchants the right to refuse a transaction after the fact, or could restrict the freedom of speech to preserve marketing hype.

Could this be another step towards The Right to Read?

My First Mac

So I finally broke down and bought the Mac mini I'd been eyeing for several months now. I originally planned on buying it as soon as I returned from my trip to Mississippi, but hesitated because of the WWDC-announced migration to Intel CPUs. But since I was eager to set up my 'Media Center Mac' I decided to go ahead and get the damn thing.

I drove up to the Apple Store in the Christiana Mall because I don't like waiting for shipping and the store has a nice military discount. To get the most out of the mini as a media center computer I elected to go with the so-called 'ultimate' package. Basically that's the mini with all the options: faster CPU, more RAM, bigger hard drive, SuperDrive, Bluetooth, Airport, yada yada...

Mac mini 'Ultimate'
1.42GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card

After the discount, that came out to $795 (no sales tax in Delaware). I added an Apple Wireless Keyboard & Mouse set for about $100 more. They were also offering $100 off any printer with the purchase of a Mac, so I picked up the HP PSC 1610 All-in-One ($29 after rebate).

So far, I'm really happy with it. As I expected from Apple, it was very easy to set it up out of the box. The only difficulty I came across was getting it to look right on my Samsung 32'' DynaFlat HDTV. I had to buy a DVI cable from Best Buy on the way home ($49), but I had a hell of a time getting the settings right. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that this model HDTV is not 16:9 widescreen, but I finally got it working on 720 x 480.

Connecting it to my home network was a breeze. I transferred all of my music and photos over from my laptop into iTunes and iPhoto. I've used iTunes for Windows before and I've always liked it. iPhoto, however, feels a bit clunky to me. It won't let me organize my photos the way I want to, but maybe I'm just not familar enough with the program yet or OS X doesn't like my hierarchical way of thinking.

Since then I've been going download-crazy, grabbing tons of cool videos from GrouchyMedia.com and QuickTime movie trailers. Video plackback quality is excellent on the HDTV- exactly what I was hoping for.

I haven't used a Macintosh regularly since before Windows 95, and I have to say I am as impressed with OS X Tiger as I thought I would be. Finder is so fast its scary. Safari is ok, and its growing on me, but I might just have to try out Firefox for Mac. The interface is simple yet beautiful, but I'm going to have to get used to only having the one mouse button. All in all, OS X lives up to my expectations and I'm eager to tinker around with it.

All in all, the Mac mini has integrated nicely into my home theatre. I wanted to be able to watch videos, browse photos, play music and surf the web on my TV while sitting on my couch with a wireless keyboard and mouse, and the Mac mini does all these things very well. Not a bad little setup for less than $1000.

Now I just have to figure out how to watch TV and use the Mac at the same time...

Natural Language Processing in the Global War on Terrorism

I came across a NY Times article recently discussing software used by the CIA to scour the web for terrorist messages.

The company behind the sofware, Attensity Corporation, has developed tools which can take the near-infinite masses of unstructed data on the Internet, and turn it into meaningful information. They've developed algorithms that can parse sentences, extracting the subject, object, verb, etc. enabling the computer to process the plain text and take contextually relevant actions.

This type of software, teaching a computer to read and extract read information from text, is exactly the sort of project I have in mind. I guess all those grammar lessons spent diagramming sentences in elementary school were actually important.