After reading the first 88 pages of Galatea 2.2 I became very intrigued. Although the technical jargon made it somewhat confusing, the overall concept kept me interested. In this beginning section of the novel, the protagonist Richard Powers (conveniently named after the author) is convinced by his colleagues at the Center to engage in a bet on whether or not Lentz can create a machine that can think as well as a human. Richard sides with Lentz and the two of them embark on their mission to create artificial intelligence. Their pairing is interesting because Lentz is the scientific brains while Richard offers the Literary and more "common" human consciousness.
The first machine they create, Implementation A, "was driving itself batty" by all of its retention. It was learning, but it was too "nostalgic" and couldn't function under the strain of all the knowledge it retained. Although Richard was very attached to this implementation, he and Lentz needed to give up on Imp A and begin with Imp B. This machine is much smarter than its predecessor was, but at this point in the novel not much is known about it.
At the very end of this section, the line "consciousness is deception" struck me. Instead of creating a machine that is intellegent, they are merely deceiving the judges of the bet to believe that the machine is intellegent. They do not plan on making this machine conscious - giving it senses or the ability to think - they are merely making an extremely powerful and acurate "apple-sorter." While this seems like a bit of a cop out to me, I suppose it may be impossible for us to create a machine that is truly intellegent. After all, we do not fully know how our mental capacities function - how could we hope to recreate something we have a hard time understanding? Lentz claims that all humans do is deceive others into believing that they understand, so as long as the machine can do the same it can be considered just as intellegent as humans. While some of me agrees with Lentz, I also believe that there is more to intellegence and consciousness than mere deception.
I also found the rough draft of Dr. Jerz's article "You Are Standing at the Beginning of a Road: Examining Will Crowther's 'Advent' (c 1975)" very interesting. Having played parts of Colossal Cave Adventure just last week, I was able to get much more out of this text than I would have otherwise. Personally, I found the historical information on Crowther the most interesting. Unlike most video games today, where the story takes place in a fictional environment that the writers would most likely never come close to experiencing, Colossal Cave Adventure was created from Crowther's personal caving experiences. The cave itself exists in reality, even if the items and adventures in it do not.
Because I am not used to playing video games, I was very unused to the technique needed to get through this game. I found myself getting frustrated when I could not find the right verbs or phrases, and when I was unsure of how to proceed. I felt slightly enlightened when I read Dr. Jerz's comment that: "the text subtly reinforces the exploratory premise of classic text adventures. Without clumsily announcing something like, 'The west exit looks so intriguing that you can hardly wait to explore it,' the text subtly discourages the player's premature exit. With frequent playing of this game, one would learn the textual clues given by the game and would be able to more easily navigate their way through the adventure. Like Implementaion B, the player learns through the game's reinforcements and proddings.
Posted by JohannaDreyfuss at March 30, 2005 08:30 PM | TrackBack