The Strangest Fortune from a Cookie I Have Ever Received

Note: Because of some blogspam (blam? splog? fake posts? what do you call them?) I’ve been getting lately, I have enabled word verification for comments. This will be slightly inconvenient for you, the poster, but I run the ship around here, not some spam-bot. Ironically, word verification can be said to be a kind of Turing Test, since it aims to have a user prove they are human by doing something software can’t. Say for example, reading a distorted series of letters and numbers in a graphic. So any program that could actually do word verification might be judged to be artificially intelligent, by this standard. Hm. Well, it would certainly have to be a clever program.

And let’s not forget: intelligent programs are not the same thing and self-aware or self-conscious programs. And the intelligence of computer programs can still be quite limited, working well only in certain applications. For example, a program could be very good at identifying faces in crowds on surveillance video and other such visual pattern recognition tasks, but not be able to understand patterns in text. Such a hypothetical program could not read a message where all the letters are simply repeated. Which is where today’s title comes in:

“Ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn..”