abrax3141

Joined 13 years ago

Karma
2,601
Submissions
616
Member since
Sep 12
Hi. I'm Jeff Shrager. I mainly hack Lisp, but have dabbled in pretty much everything. I’ve been both a classic and modern AI hacker, but these days I’m hacking atmospheric chemistry. I was also an Adjunct Professor in the Symbolic Systems program at Stanford for over 20 years. DM me @ JShrager at gMail.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 11 days ago
Comment · 16 days ago
Both you and @FrankWilhoit were probably using a version of E12 (Shrager73BASIC). Because it was so simple (200 lines of BASIC), and was published in Creative Computing in 1977, that particular root led to uncountable knock offs. (And it’s not at all surprising that many included swearing!)
Comment · 1 month ago
Mia Golec, Emily Davis (both of CMU), and I have been spelunking in Simon and Newell's archives at CMU and came upon a remarkable complete listing of Simon's "heuristic coder" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321186.321192) [in the paper he calls it a "heuristic compiler", but the listing uses the term "coder"]. I've only just begun studying this fascinating find, which I intend to try to run on one of our IPL interpreters!
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
I was an (adjunct) prof at Stanford for over 20 years. I taught the top level interaction analysis course - basically cognitive science applied to human interaction with complex systems, including AI based system. As soon as I saw students turning in AI papers and projects, I knew all of upper education as we know it was fucked. I retired. Education is fucked, but learning isn’t! This will be a golden age where you can learn anything you want to. If you don’t want to learn anything, you’ll be a meatbot working for those who do. Many people may be happy in that role. I know someone who is extremely happy working at as a barista. He was also happy having gone to college for a useless degree. He’s happy he did that. He tells me the things he’s learning on his own every week from AI tutors. Quantum Mechanics. People will find a way to make their way, mostly. Education as currently organized is fucked. Teachers should be there to help students learn what they want to learn (at least after elementary school, which is still important and won’t be disintermediated). Like flight instructors. People who want to learn to fly learn most of it on their own, and the flight instructor is there to help (and keep you safe at least at first, until you solo). People seek out flight instructors, and will continue to do so (at least until airplanes fly themselves - but that’s a different discussion). Teachers will become tutors. And I dare say that teachers will like it better than their current role of having to force-feed 2/3rds of a class who doesn’t want to learn. Instead they’ll enjoy helping the few students who actually care to fly to fly.
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Yes. All of those were written in IPL well before Lisp. There were a dozen IPL-V implementations across almost every common computer of tat time. (Of course, there weren’t that many common computers! :-)

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