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green-tiled tunnels
Tuesday, April 23 2002On the our late-afternoon walk, Sally and I saw a familiar pair of dogs being led into Vale of Cashmere by their master, who resembles an ex-Marine. I decided it was best to just avoid the Vale, since I knew these two dogs are among the handful that Sally despises, and I didn't want a scene. So I walked Sally down the Eastern Parkway past the Brooklyn Museum of Art and then south down Washington Avenue along the side of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, which were on my right. On my left was the indistinct overlap between the neighborhoods of Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and Crown Heights. Here east-west streets with familiar Park Slope names rematerialize after their trans-park hiatus. I'd been here once before by accident, when a cab driver became hopelessly lost at Grand Army Plaza on my first trip to visit Gretchen. I remember it being a much poorer, much blacker neighborhood than Park Slope. Right along the edge of the gardens, though, things are clean, in good repair, and even somewhat fancy. Across the southern tip of the gardens, the hitherto-unknown S Train pops out of the ground for hundred feet or so.
I took Sally into the southeastern part of Prospect Park to the Nethermead, the one place in the park where dogs can still legally be off-leash after 5pm. There was a great variety of dogs there, and the owners were mainly sitting around relaxing in the long cold grass. The air was brisk, but the bright April sun felt good on my face. An immature greyhound, nervous about interacting with bigger-boned colleagues, kept bounding vertically into the air like a kangaroo. A small black boy with a thick-skulled and fully-intact male Pit Bull kept admonishing his charge to behave himself, although the worst thing he did was hump somebody shaggy.
Sally and I returned home through the Vale of Cashmere. The leaves have reached the stage now where their boughs form walls and ceilings. Trails have lost the open, airy feeling of winter and are now more like green-tiled tunnels.For the past few days I've been working on a fun little ad hoc artificial intelligence project. I've created a system for dynamically creating fake robotic "people" in the Bathtubgirl chat. After releasing these robots into their "environment," I sit back and watch them interact with real people, sometimes tweaking their algorithms in mid-conversation. At first my emphasis was building the machinery to create and destroy these robots, but today I began adding more intelligence to their conversational style. By the end of the day they were able to identify important adjectives or nouns in posted questions and, more often than not, respond using appropriate verb conjugations. Of course, the things they said tended to be random and off-topic, but the fact that they included the most important words from the preceding post was enough to deceive some people. I watched several conversations come and go, delighted that my 'bots were passing (in a small way) the infamous Turing Test. The single biggest thing in my robots' favor was their names, which were always female. Being "women," they benefited considerably from the wishful thinking of the horny men who frequent the Bathtubgirl chat.
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