Oct 09, 2003 11:33 AM
4895 Views
(Updated Mar 25, 2004 02:11 PM)
I'll be damned. There is no other way to put it. This called for a full monty..ashes to ashes and dust to dust included.
I had been scaling the authors section of Mouthshut.com when lo & behold whom do I spot, (at this moment imaginary lightning and thunder is clasped) none other than Mr. Nils J Nilson himself.
This gentleman here had given me sleepless nights not to long ago. Incidentally his much famed book 'Artificial Intelligence' was part and parcel of our under - grad computer science course.
Before I go any further let me lay the groundwork.
Itwas my second last semester, the last being nothing but actual industrial training and project work...piece of cake. So being the last semester which mattered, I knew I had to be extra cautious. One wrong move and chances of the whole year down the 'recycle bin' could very much be the stark reality. MOst of the subjects had me practicing somnambulism in them. No sweat. Except for one or two I knew I could sleep walk through the rest and still manage a decent score.
Two weeks before the exam me and another fellow sit down to swap notes, trade stories and in general have a good time. Just like when coupla mates get together. Only in our case the theme or the agenda of get-together was Artificial Intelligence. We opened the first chapter. Hmmm...nothing much here. Only theory, stuff to learn and then afterwards dutifully unlearn. We flip to the second chapter.
Fairly small chapters, most of them. Now here is where the fun begins,cynically speaking. This was from where all the hocus-pocus began. On the face of it, it did not have much to offer. Atleast not from what we were able to discern. This is what the author had to say. Take a robot. It is in a room with certain obstacles and an algorithm has to be devised for it to comfortable move around without bumping into anything. Throw in some fancy words like genetic environment and collateral mutantism, draw some free flowing diagrams and there you have, a crawling slimy arachanoid called Artificial Intelligence. (The running joke was that since natural intelligence seemed to be in short supple, hence all the trouble to mug up the artificial one.)
Rest of the chapters were of similar tone, only more arcane. This may sound very hard to beleive but the fact was the chapters had no as such relevance to the questions given in the end. You could have brow-beaten your head to eternity and still not have any clue as to what those questions meant.(meaning in relevance to what was given in the chapters). The scene was so bad that had the questions been upside down the reader would have still thought ''jeez why do I feel breezy between my ears''. A classic example of SNAFU. (a WW-2 slang which stood for, Situation Normal All Fcuked Up)
My own personal opinion about this book, it is nothing short of a re-packaged, re-barcoded born again obtruse mathematico presipico book. Moral being if you look at it from mathematical perspective then it's not so difficult.
So we did what anybody in our situation would have done. We got hold of the answer key, royally ignored what the author had to say in his chapters and prayed to the almighty that even if the paper was completely application based atleast passing marks value questions should be from book-end.
Not wanting to go any further from here, folks my humble advice to you all is that even if somebody gifts you this book, beat hell for leather and catch the next ship out of town. Somebody really hates you in this city.
one good thing in the book:
Every chapter begins with a wonderful quote. And the best thing is not everyquote is by another english don. My fav. quote was quoted by an american NFL player. Here is what he had to say,'' When the game is on and you receive a pass, then is not the time to think. It is the time to react. The time to think is when you were practising.''
A very general quote you may say, but why I do I like it. It successfully became my motto for all the competitive exams that I was going to sit for. With only few seconds to answer each question I find this quote very apt.
Trivia:
Most famous AI application : Deep Blue.
Other equally cool AI applied applications: AIBO, ASIMO
AIBO: AI-BOT (as in Artificial Intelligence Robot)
ASIMO: Advance Step in Mobility (something to this effect). By Honda, Japan.
