I have been receiving letters from a dear friend by the name of Ophiuchus. He has been researching some curious anomalies in the Unicode Standard. While I cannot vouch for all he has written, I thought it worth presenting his discoveries to you. My friend, I bring you a curiosity! I have been engaged in…
Continue reading →How to Hypnotise an Artificial Intelligence
by | | Read ~490 times.Last week I attended a talk by Dr Irina Higgins from Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind. It was a fascinating look at how their AI works, and how it is trained. If you've ever played a video game online, it is likely you've been training an Artificial Intelligence agent without realising it.Ethical? — Terence Eden (@edent)…
Continue reading →Tales of the Algorithm: The Transparent Man
by | | 2 comments | Read ~468 times.Scene: An airport. A few years from now. "I'm sorry sir, we can't let you on the flight until you visit the rest-room." I'll admit that it caught me off-guard. Surely the woman at the airline gate was joking? "Sir, two of the plane's toilets are out-of-order. At this time we're requesting all passengers void…
Continue reading →We can marry you off, wholesale.
by | | Read ~1,206 times.Last week I was on the In The Abstract podcast. I came up with a curious idea. If I were Tom Scott, I'd turn this into a performance piece - instead, here's a short and entirely fictional story. Facebook knew you were in love a long time before you did. It noticed you scrolling back…
Continue reading →Writing A "Choose Your Own Adventure" Story On Twitter
by | | 11 comments | Read ~13,640 times.
I've spent the last few days writing a Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) game on Twitter. This blog post briefly discusses how I did it - and what pitfalls I discovered when creating it. But, first, if you want to play.... You should probably be asleep. I've created a "Choose You Own Adventure" on Twitter.…
Continue reading →They Read Minds, Don’t They?
by | | 2 comments | Read ~225 times.The horror of the quantified audience The cinema is on the deserted outskirts of Pinewood Studios. It's a wet and windy day — not unusual for England in late summer — and I'm here to take a look at the future of audience test screenings. My friend, Ross, has asked me to take a test drive of his company's…
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