Creative Engineering

Update: Since I first posted this, I have created a new and (in my opinion) better Git cheat sheet. You might want to have a look at that one.

Today I came across Zack Rusin’s Git cheat sheet (just so we’re on the same page: Git is a really good distributed revision control system). I quite like the idea but unfortunately, Zack’s design is fairly useless to me because

• the colors don’t print well on black and white;
• it’s designed for Letter paper. Letter paper doesn’t exist around here. Give me A4.

While trying to change Zack’s file to address these issues, Inkscape kept crashing on me until I finally gave up and just started from scratch (in – don’t tell anyone – OpenOffice.org Draw). This is the result: Git Cheat Sheet (A4 PDF version). Read the full post »

I am always happy to find alternative applications of creativity. Today’s focus is on Acer or, more specifically, on Acer’s so-called Linux notebooks. Shipped exlusively in Europe (as far as I can tell), they attract interest by being cheaper than the version shipped with some version of Windows. Currently, the difference in price weighs in at 47.01 € at Amazon Germany (that’s, very roughly, 10% of the full price).

And, of course, they come with Linux pre-installed. So that’s fine for basic usage, even if it takes a little getting used to for the more Windows- savvy people. Right?

Let’s take a closer look. Acer’s Linux distribution of choice appears to be Linpus Linux (a Fedora fork developed by Linpus Technologies of Taiwan). Their website is down right now (I wonder…), but from what I gather from the rest of the web, Linpus comes in several flavors, among them a desktop edition and a server edition. The desktop edition is based on KDE 3.4 et cetera et cetera, so nothing really surprising there. Even if Linpus is rather unusual, it’s probably decent enough. Right? Right? Well… Guess again. Read the full post »

Okay, so there are problems in knowledge engineering, AGI in particular (to recall, AGI is a machine or program that can demonstrate intelligence on the complexity level of humans). More generally, in every domain of sufficiently complex structure, AI fails, sometimes spectacularly. A well-known example is the board game Go, for which nobody has managed yet to design a computer opponent that can beat players above the level of novice.

Yet humans manage many of these tasks seemingly without any problems. One might be tempted to think that the human brain is the ideal “thinking machine”. In reality, it has a staggering number of bugs which produce incorrect actions or results in a variety of situations. Read the full post »

Given the “right” philosophical attitude about how the world works, the ultimate goals of knowledge engineering, namely obtaining, processing, using and making accessible all kinds of knowledge, can definitely be achieved. This set of bold goals, however, presents researchers with very difficult problems. All attempts that exist today are restricted to small classes of knowledge. Read the full post »

What do life and knowledge engineering have in common? Everything. There, that’s all keywords from the topic. But I guess you’d like a little more detail. Read the full post »