Beetle Bailey.

[swestrup]

There is a Beetle Bailey strip I've been looking for for years, as I would love a digitized copy. I own a bunch of collections of Beetle Bailey strips, but its in none of them. I think I must have come across it at a friends house some time.

In the strip Beetle is hiding in an old barrel in a storage room, to take a nap, and Sarge comes in to work on his 'Robot' project, which essentially involved nailing wooden arms and legs onto random barrels. He ends up jabbing Beetle with a nail, and when the 'barrel' yelps out in surprise, Sarge says something like:

"I've done it! I've hit upon the exact combination of wood and nails, and it came to life!"

I want that strip because it beautifully illustrates the mistaken belief that certain emergent properties like life and intelligence can simply "happen" by throwing enough of the right stuff together. In fact, the chance of a 'big enough' computer system accidentally 'waking up' and becoming intelligent is about the same as the chance of a wooden robot coming to life from the right combination of wood and nails.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

Really? Computers, generally speaking,have I/O facilities in a way that wooden barrels don't. I think this is the critical ingredient. Of course, 'big enough' still needs to be pretty damned big.

But people are finally starting to think of putting general purpose learning algorithms into low system layers, so I think we're finally on the path.