Watch him as he goes! It was the usual “wasting time on Wikipedia” path — I started reading about nuclear fission, and then read about Los Alamos, and then read about the supercomputers, one of which ran Plan 9, so I read about Plan 9, and then its GUI, and then the guy who wrote the GUI. And there was an allusion to someone else, Mark V. Shaney. So I read about him.

In a nutshell, it was a script a few of the Plan 9 guys wrote that would process a lengthy body of text and do some statistical analysis, and use that to spit out writing. It was AI, in a sort, but “schizophrenic” is the best way I’ve seen it described. You read it and it’s one of those things where, for a minute, it makes sense, but then it radically shifts topics or draws some sort of completely irrelevant conclusion. Kind of like a lot of people on the Internet, actually.

They had some fun with textbooks. Here‘s an example, in which the code was fed a basic arithmetic textbook:

Why do we count things in groups of five. When people learned how to count many things, they matched them against their fingers. First they counted out enough things to match the fingers of both hands. Then they put these things aside in one quart. A giant-size bottle that will hold four quarts is a three-digit number….

It starts of making good sense, but suddenly they go from counting on your fingers to putting “these things” in a quart, and is pretty incomprehensible from there.

Here’s another really funny one. You read it, and can kind of comprehend it. But the first reply summarizes it well: it suddenly shifts from constipation to understanding the 19th century, with no logical shift. I think that commenter may have been aware of what was going on. The second guy accurately nails what’s going on.

Finnegan’s Wake? This one cracks me up a lot. But you read this, and doesn’t it exactly sum up what’s wrong with Internet forums? The people just seem totally bonkers, and like they’re ranting but not really sure what they’re ranting about. He manages to talk about being good in bed and using the latest version of BSD in the same sentence. The reply is hilarious, because it’s exactly what you’d think if you didn’t know what was going on: that the “guy” posting was on some serious drugs.

This one, though, is my all-time favorite. It starts off as some religious rant, but clearly not a coherent one. But the fifth paragraph is the best paragraph ever written:

When I meet someone on a professional basis, I want them to shave their
arms. While at a conference a few weeks back, I spent an interesting
evening with a grain of salt. I wouldn’t take them seriously!

I’m fairly certain there are AI ‘bots’ out there that do this same thing, maybe in more coherent forms. I want to acquire one. Badly. I’ve always been interested in the ‘bounds’ of nonsense—when something kind of makes sense, you work with it. We “understand” people shaving their arms in professional settings, and we can visualize someone spending an evening with a grain of salt, and I surely wouldn’t take them seriously afterwards. But we’re making ‘sense’ out of sheer nonsense generated by a computer. How far will it go before we think, “This is complete nonsense.”