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Yesterday afternoon we went to London.
The plan was to go on the London Eye and then go to a RI lecture. It actually worked out, despite all the things conspiring against us, like:
1. Leaving home too late. One parent knew that we were meant to be at the Eye half an hour in advance, the other didn't. Hence we left half an hour later than we really should have.
2. The Circle Line. The Circle Line hates us. Whenever any member of our family attempts to travel using the Circle Line, something goes/is wrong with it. Yesterday, it just plain wasn't working at all, so we had to take an interesting and varied set of trains to get where we wanted to go.
3. The rain. There was lots of this.
Thankfully, the people who run the Eye are French. (No, really. Every single attendant we came across was French.) You can also tell that they are French (apart from the accents) by the fact that, when we turned up ten minutes late instead of half an hour early, they just told us to go ahead and get on anyway. (Probably something to do with the awful weather, too. Still got some quite good photos, but I should be revising now so I won't put them online quite yet.)
The lecture was a bit disappointing though. The guy doing it was plugging his book on 1700s automata, and despite the promises of the programme didn't go into any detail at all about the *current* problems in AI and *current* thinking on the subjects he brought up.
((Hmm, my keyboard's space bar has developed a squeak. I wonder if that has something to do with the pineapple and coconut juice I spilt on it earlier. Or maybe it's the biscuit crumbs.))
I asked a question ('Is it likely that the Turing Test will be passed by more advanced lookup-tables, and is the Hard Vision Problem more likely to require a different approach?') to which the guy basically said 'yes' and didn't go into any more detail.
On the way there we got this really cool underground train with wooden flooring and those little black balls on big springs hanging from the ceiling to hold onto, the ones that are really useless because they just bounce around as much as you... I like those old trains. (Especially when you get seats.)
Anyway, that was London.
The plan was to go on the London Eye and then go to a RI lecture. It actually worked out, despite all the things conspiring against us, like:
1. Leaving home too late. One parent knew that we were meant to be at the Eye half an hour in advance, the other didn't. Hence we left half an hour later than we really should have.
2. The Circle Line. The Circle Line hates us. Whenever any member of our family attempts to travel using the Circle Line, something goes/is wrong with it. Yesterday, it just plain wasn't working at all, so we had to take an interesting and varied set of trains to get where we wanted to go.
3. The rain. There was lots of this.
Thankfully, the people who run the Eye are French. (No, really. Every single attendant we came across was French.) You can also tell that they are French (apart from the accents) by the fact that, when we turned up ten minutes late instead of half an hour early, they just told us to go ahead and get on anyway. (Probably something to do with the awful weather, too. Still got some quite good photos, but I should be revising now so I won't put them online quite yet.)
The lecture was a bit disappointing though. The guy doing it was plugging his book on 1700s automata, and despite the promises of the programme didn't go into any detail at all about the *current* problems in AI and *current* thinking on the subjects he brought up.
((Hmm, my keyboard's space bar has developed a squeak. I wonder if that has something to do with the pineapple and coconut juice I spilt on it earlier. Or maybe it's the biscuit crumbs.))
I asked a question ('Is it likely that the Turing Test will be passed by more advanced lookup-tables, and is the Hard Vision Problem more likely to require a different approach?') to which the guy basically said 'yes' and didn't go into any more detail.
On the way there we got this really cool underground train with wooden flooring and those little black balls on big springs hanging from the ceiling to hold onto, the ones that are really useless because they just bounce around as much as you... I like those old trains. (Especially when you get seats.)
Anyway, that was London.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 03:44 am (UTC)From:I prefer the newest tube trains, that don't feel and sound like they're about to fall apart.
no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 03:54 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 04:09 am (UTC)From:Neil
no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 04:10 am (UTC)From:Neil
no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 04:14 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 04:30 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 07:21 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 07:22 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2002-06-07 10:42 am (UTC)From:Neil