My code and myself

It’s often an open debate when two or more computer scientists sit around… whether programming is essential and should be compulsory for computing students. When say programming I’m consciously thinking of languages, such as, Java, C or C++. For me, I think it should be made compulsory for computing students and maybe an elective for others (especially for BIS students); I think they struggle most often with programming; this could be as a result of their background. They seldom do programming in their early days, as students. Programming is fundamental in the life of a computer scientist (professional or student). But the agonising thing is that most computing student of nowadays, do not believe so. This could be because most industries hardly request the service of a structured programmer, what maybe in demand are script writers, coding in programs like Perl, TCL, or VisualBasic. OOP such as Java and C++ may not be in high demand as the use to, put it this way, as they should.

I used to program in Java few years ago, but I left it for TCL, but now am back to Java… I’ve to use Java in demonstrating part of my PhD work. In fact I should be doing some C++ programming as I write. Programming seems unavoidable in the life of a computer scientist, its always about my code and myself!

Reasoning out uncertainty and doubt

Reasoning out uncertainty and doubt in evidence that appear to be, consistent, diversified and maybe contradictory

Because most real life events/situations possess some degree of uncertainty or/and doubt there’s every need to reason out these uncertainties in the faces of compelling evidences gathered. I’ve always thought there should be a way to reason out this… especially for events that are independent in occurence. So I went down the route of ‘fuzzy sets’ and fuzzy logic, but although fuzzy sets are excellent for what the do most, which is … giving a level of membership to events, say, how hot? It’s not very hot, or it's extremely hot; but I thought, although you could express the degree of hottest as a membership function, this still has not eliminated the doubts you still have in the result. Again, I tried ‘Rough sets’ which is similar in concept to fuzzy sets but quite different in application. Finally, found what I was looking for - in Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence, which is use to reason out uncertainty, allocate beliefs/support, then compute doubts and plausibility that help demonstrate the quality in the evidence provided. Again, without requiring either a good model of the system or knowing fore probabilities in hand ('a prior') like Bayesian Networks, Bayesian Probability Model(Bayes Model).

"Impossible Minds"

Impossible minds the work of a smart genus or just a wanderer trying to explain concepts beyond time?

On Wednesday 2nd August, I left for the University aiming to complete setting up my testbed machine, in the MDC server room. My testbed machine will be use to carryout my research work. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything meaningful with my time, because the cabling infrastructure at the Lab was either disconnected or disabled, and am not authorised to handle the cabling as a student, plus am not very familiar with the closet. I called for assistance but the Tech who should have helped was on day-off. At of frustration and not knowing what to do to use my time meaningfully, I wandered off to the library. In the library I was looking for books in other areas not related to my discipline or maybe not closely related, I should say. So I went to the Machine Intelligence shelf. As I was checking on books to read - (I didn’t use the library catalogue), so don’t blame me, sometime ad-hoc scenery is much better! – I picked a text with a fascinating caption – “IMPOSSIBLE MINDS, My neurons, My Consciousness” by Igor Aleksander.

“Impossible Minds” was published in 1996, so not relatively a new book, especially for people in this research area, pretty sure, they are aware of it… But for me, it’s fascinating and interesting. My take on this book, is similar to my frustration and the awaken consciousness to do something useful with my time, when my attempt to complete setting up the testbed machine couldn’t go ahead.

Igor in his book tries to associate machines a human characteristic – ‘human consciousness’, although, he has tried hard to assert his observation by subtly philosophically abstracting conscious attributes to machine behaviour, his “magnus” will still remain a mysterious object if it can exhibit conscience in any form or manner!

I have not finished reading the book, but I think it makes an interesting read, I strongly recommend it.