BITS STILL AIN'T ATOMS

Dick Pountain/Idealog 251/07 June 2015 13:48

I'd started to write that I'm as fond of gadgets as the next man, but in truth I'm only as fond as the one after the one after him (which is still fairly fond). For example I get enormous pleasure from my recently-acquired Zoom G1on guitar effects pedal, frightening the neighbours with my PhaseFunk twangs. However I've resisted the hottest of today's gadgets, the 3D printer, with relative ease. Partly it's because I have no pressing need for one: being neither a vendor of cornflakes nor a devotee of fantasy games or toy soldiers I just don't need that many small plastic objects. I can see their utility for making spare parts for veteran mechanical devices, but I don't do that either. What deters me more though is the quasi-religious atmosphere that has enveloped 3D printing, as typified by those reverential terms "making" and "maker". People desperately want to bridge the gap between digital representation and real world, between CGI fantasy and life, and they've decided 3D printing is a step on the way, but if so it's a tiny step toward a very short bridge that ends in mid-air.

One problem is precisely that 3D printing tries to turn bits into atoms, but pictures don't contain the internal complexity of reality. Serious applications of 3D printing are, for example, the aerospace industry where components can be printed in sintered metal quicker, more cheaply and of greater geometric complexity than by traditional forging or casting techniques. Even so two things remain true: such parts are typically homogeneous (all the same metal) and made in relatively small quantities since 3D printing is slow - if you need 100,000 of something then 3D print one and make a mold from it for conventional casting. Printing things with internal structure of different materials is becoming possible, but remains topologically constrained to monolithic structures.  

That's the second problem, that 3D printing encourages thinking about objects as monolithic rather than modular. Modularity is a profound property of the world, in which almost every real object is composed from smaller independent units. In my Penguin Dictionary of Computing I said: "modules must be independent so that they can be constructed separately, and more simply than the whole. For instance it is much easier to make a brick than a house, and many different kinds of house can be made from standard bricks, but this would cease to be true if the bricks depended upon one another like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle." The basic module in 3D printing is a one-bit blob firmly attached to the growing object.

I recently watched a YouTube video about a project to 3D print mud houses for developing countries, and it was undeniably fascinating to watch the print head deposit mud (slowly) in complex curves like a wasp building its nest. But it struck me that, given the computing power attached to that printer, it would be faster to design a complex-curved brick mold, print some and then fill them with mud and assemble the houses manually.

The ultimate example of modularity, as I never tire of saying, is the living cell, which has a property that's completely missing from all man-made systems: every single cell contains not only blueprints and stored procedures for building the whole organism, but also the complete mechanism for reproducing itself. This mind-boggling degree of modularity is what permitted evolution to operate, by accidentally modifying the blueprints, and which has lead to the enormous diversity of living beings. No artificial "maker" system can possibly approach this status so long as fabrication remains homogeneous and monolithic, and once you do introduce heterogeneous materials and internal structure you'll start to confront insuperable bandwidth barriers as an exponentially-exploding amount of information must be introduced from outside the system rather than being stored locally. A machine that can make a copy of itself seems to really impress the maker community, but you just end up with a copy of that machine. A machine that copies itself, then makes either an aeroplane, or a bulldozer, or a coffee machine out of those copies is some way further down the road.

I was lead to these thoughts recently while watching Alex Garland's excellent movie Ex Machina. In its marvellous denouement the beautiful robot girl Ava kills her deeply unpleasant maker and escapes into the outside world to start a new, independent life, but first she has to replace her arm, damaged in the final struggle, with a spare one. Being self-repairing at that level of granularity is feeble by biological standards, and as she stood beaming at a busy city intersection it struck me that such spare parts would be in short supply at the local hospital...  

STRICT DISCIPLINARIAN

Dick Pountain/Idealog 250/05 May 2015 11:23

After photography my main antidote to computer-trauma is playing the guitar. Recently I saw Stefan Grossman play live for the first time at London's King's Place, though I've been learning ragtime picking from his books for the last 30 years. He played his acoustic Martin HJ-38 through a simple PA mike, and played it beautifully. Another idol of mine is Bill Frisell, who could hardly be more different in that he employs the whole gamut of electronic effects, on material from free jazz, through bluegrass to surf-rock. Dazzled by his sound I just purchased a Zoom G1on effects pedal from Amazon, and am currently immersed in learning how to deploy its 100 amazing effects.

The theme I'm driving at here is the relationship between skill, discipline and computer-assistance. There will always of course be neo-Luddites who see the computer as the devil's work that destroys all skills, up against pseudo-modernists who believe that applying a  computer to any banal material will make it into art. Computers are labour-savers: they can be programmed to relieve humans of certain repetitive tasks and thereby reduce their workload. But what happens when that repetitive task is practising to acquire a skill like painting or playing a musical instrument?

The synth is a good example. When I was a kid learning to play the piano took years, via a sequence of staged certificates, but now you can buy a keyboard that lets you play complex chords and sequences after merely perusing the manual. Similarly if you can't sing in tune a not-that-inexpensive Auto-Tune box will fudge that for you. Such innovations have transformed popular music, and broadened access to performing it, over recent decades. Does that make it all rubbish? Not really, it's only around 80% rubbish, like every other artform. The 20% that isn't rubbish is made by people who still insist on discovering all the possibilities and extending their depth, whether that's in jazz, hiphop, r&b, dance or whatever.

Similar conflicts are visible with regard to computer programming itself. I've always maintained that truly *great* programming is an art, structurally not that unlike musical composition, but the vast majority of the world's software can't be produced by great programmers. One of my programming heroes, Prof Tony Hoare, has spent much of his career advocating that programming should become a chartered profession, like accountancy, in the interests of public safety since so much software is now mission-critical. What we got instead is the "coding" movement which encourages absolutely everybody to start writing apps using web-based frameworks: my favourite Guardian headline last month was "Supermodels join drive for women to embrace coding". Of course it's a fine idea to improve everyone's understanding of computers and help them make their own software, but such a populist approach doesn't teach the really difficult disciplines involved in creating safe software: it's more like assembling Ikea furniture, and if that table-leg has an internal flaw your table's going to fall over.

Most important of all though, there's a political-economic aspect to all this. Throughout most of history, up until the last century, spending years acquiring a skill like blacksmithing, barbering, medicine, singing, portrait painting might lead to some sort of a living income, since people without that skill would pay you to perform it for them. Computerised deskilling now threatens that income stream in many different fields. Just to judge from my own friends, the remuneration of graphic designers, illustrators, photographers and animators has taken a terrible battering in recent years, due to digital devices that opened up their field and flooded it with, mostly mediocre, free content. The arguments between some musicians and Spotify revolves around a related issue, not of free content but of the way massively simplified distribution reduces the rates paid.

We end up crashing into a profound contradiction in the utilitarian philosophy that underlies all our rich Western consumer societies, which profess to seek the greatest good for the greatest number: does giving more and more people ever cheaper, even free, artefacts trump the requirement to pay those who produce such artefacts a decent living? I think any sensible solution probably revolves around that word "decent": what exactly constitutes a decent living, and who or what decides it? Those rock stars who rail against Spotify aren't sore because their children are starving, but because of some diminution in what most would regard as plutocratic mega-incomes. Some people will suggest that it's market forces that sort out such problems (and of course that's exactly what Spotify is doing). I've no idea what Stefan Grossman or Bill Frisell earn per annum, but I don't begrudge them a single dollar of it and I doubt that I'm posing much of threat to either of them  (yet).

MENTAL GYMNASTICS

Dick Pountain/Idealog 249/09 April 2015 21:04

Recently the medical profession has discovered that stimulating our brains with difficult puzzles and problems - mental exercise in other words - has a beneficial effect on health.Such exercises can't, as some have suggested, actually cure dementia but there's evidence it may delay its onset. Just a few years ago one of the big electronic vendors advertised its hand-held games console by showing ecstatic grey-beards using it to play Connect Four on the sofa with their grandsprogs. As a senior citizen myself I must feign interest in such matters, but in truth I've never really worried that I'm not getting enough mental exercise, because the sheer cack-handedness that prevails in the IT business supplies all the exercise I can use, for free, every single month.

Take for example the impact of new security measures on the attempt to keep a working website. Plagued by hacks, leaks, LulzSec, Heartbleed, NSA surveillance, every online vendor is tightening security, but they're not all that good at notifying you how. I've had a personal website since 1998, and more recently I've also been running three blogs while maintaining an archive of the works of a dear friend who died a couple of years ago. I've never believed in spending too much money on these ventures, so I hosted my very first attempt at a website on Geocities, and built it using a free copy of NetObjects Fusion from a PC Pro cover disk. Mine was thus one of the 38,000,000 sites orphaned when Yahoo closed Geocities in 2009, so I moved to Google Sites and built a new one from scratch using Google's online tools. Around this time I also shelled out money to buy my own domain name dickpountain.co.uk from the US-based registrar Freeparking.

My low budget set-up has worked perfectly satisfactorily, without hiccup, for the last six years, that is until January of this year when I suddenly found that www.dickpountain.co.uk no longer accessed my site. To be more exact, it said it had accessed it but no pages actually appeared. I checked that the site was working via its direct Google Sites address of https://sites.google.com/site/dickpountainspages/ and it was, so perhaps redirection from my domain had stopped working properly? To check that, I went to log into my account at Freeparking's UK site, only to find that entering my credentials merely evoked the message "A secure connection cannot be established because this site uses an unsupported protocol. Error code: ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH?"

Locked out of my account I couldn't reach Freeparking support, so I mailed RWC columnist Paul Ockenden who immediately asked whether I was using Chrome. Yes I was. Did I know that nowadays it disables SSL3 by default? No I didn't, thank you Paul. With SSL3 enabled I managed to get into my account, only to find nothing had changed: it was still set to redirect dickpountain.co.uk to that Google address. About then I received another email from Paul saying a source view on http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/ shows the frameset there but not visible: Google was suddenly refusing to display pages in an external frameset, problem not with Freeparking.

An evening plodding through the forums revealed that Google too has upped security, and now you have to verify ownership of your site (even one that's been running for six years already). Their help page explaining verification offers four different methods: add a meta tag to your home page to prove you have access to the source files; add the Google Analytics code you use to track your site; upload an HTML file to your server; or verify via your domain name provider by adding a new DNS record. None of the first three worked because my site was built in Google's own tools, which strip out any added meta tags and won't allow uploading raw HTML. I needed to make a trek into into the belly of the beast, into Mordor, into... DNS. Now DNS scares me the way the phone company scared Lenny Bruce ("mess with it and you'll wind up using two dixie cups and a string"). Log into Freeparking site, go to ominously-named "Original DNS Manager Interface (advanced users)" and edit a CNAME record to point, as instructed by Google Help to ghs.google.com. Nothing happens. Try again, five times, before it finally sticks. Half an hour later www.dickpountain.co.uk works again!

You might expect me to be annoyed by such a nerve-wracking and unnecessary experience, but you must be kidding, I was jubilant. I still have it! The buggers didn't grind me down! It's like climbing Everest while checkmating Kasparov! Macho computing, bring it on,  mental whoops and high-fives. It did wear off after a couple of days, but I still smirk a little every time I log onto my site now...

SYNCING FEELING

Dick Pountain/Idealog 248 /05 March 2015 15:29

Astute readers may have noticed that I'm deeply interested in (a nicer way of saying obsessed by) note-taking. This is no coincidence, because all my main occupations - editing the Real World section, writing this column, writing and reviewing books - involve reading the work of others and gathering together important points. Anything that reduces the amount of re-typing required is a bit like the difference between weeding a field of beans using a tea-spoon and using a tractor. Just few years ago my desk groaned under thick hard-back books that bristled like porcupines with small yellow Post-It notes to mark those pages I needed quotes from, or had pencilled margin notes on.

Making notes on a tablet that could sync with my laptop removed the need for those yellow flags, but still left me the job of re-typing the quotes into my own text. (Over the years I'd tried several of those pen-like or roller-like handheld scanners, but none was effective enough to be worth the hassle). No, the logical final step is for the source material I'm reading to be online too, but it's taken until now to arrive there. For the very first time I'm reviewing a book in its Kindle rather than paper edition, which means I can search its full text for relevant phrases and cut-and-paste all the resulting notes and quotes. In theory that is, because it turns out not be quite so simple.

Amazon's Kindle reader software certainly enables you to place bookmarks, highlight passages and make notes, but none of these functions is without its quirks, and the way they work varies between versions. I like to use an actual hardware Kindle when outdoors because it's light, readable in sunlight and has great battery life. Indoors I prefer to read and note-take on my Android tablet, but I write the actual review on my Windows laptop, and all these platforms run different versions of the reader.

First quirk is that the granularity of Kindle bookmarks is too broad, working only to whole page boundaries. When I view Notes & Marks the short extract presented is only the top few lines of that *page*, though my interest might lie further down. Highlights are more useful because then the extract is from the start of the highlighted area, not the whole page. I can attach a note to any single word on a page, but in Notes & Marks only its text appears, so I end up with a cryptic list like "yes", "no", "good", "really?" with no idea what each refers to until I click it and go to that page, which becomes dizzying after a while. The best compromise is to highlight a sentence or paragraph and then attach a note to its first word.

Next quirk: notes, highlights and bookmarks should sync automatically between Kindle, tablet and desktop readers, but notes made on my tablet weren't showing up on the laptop. This matters because I can only cut and paste highlighted quotes from the laptop version, as  Kindle and tablet versions have no copy function. Solving this required a stiff yomp through the forums, where sure enough I found an answer - you have to manually sync by hitting that little curly-arrows icon. Still didn't work. More forums and the real answer. You have to hit *not* the sync icon inside the book in question, but the one on the home screen with all books closed. Doh! But it does work.

The last quirk is that you can't run multiple instances of Kindle reader on the same device. It so happens I have another book on my Kindle that's relevant to this review and I'd like to quote from it: have to go out into the library, open other book, find quote, cut-and-paste (but  on laptop version only). It would be nice to keep two books open in two instances of Kindle reader on same machine. I really shouldn't grouse too much though, because merely being able to search, make notes and cut-and-paste them has hugely reduced the amount of tedious re-typing involved in the reviewing process, and I also need to remember that Amazon is obliged by copyright and fair-usage to restrict some of these functions (a copyright notice gets placed on every quote I paste, which I delete).

Nevertheless I do believe that Amazon is missing a trick here, and that just making a few fairly minor tweaks would establish a really effective collaborative network for students and researchers to share notes and quotes, which wouldn't need to carry advertising since the product has already been paid for. That would of course grant Amazon the sort of dominance that the US courts have already refused to Google, but let's not go there...
 

SLEEPY HOLO?

Dick Pountain/  /08 February 2015 12:20/ Idealog237

With the TV news full of crashing airliners, beheadings and artillery bombardments it's hardly surprising that a lot of people wish to escape into a virtual reality that's under their own control, which is becoming ever more possible thanks to recent technology. As Paul Ockenden explained in a recent column, the miniaturised components required for smartphones are precisely those whose lack has been holding back virtual reality for the last couple of decades: displays, graphics processors, high-bandwidth comms and batteries. The embarassing withdrawal of Google's Glass project (no-one wanted to be a glasshole) suggests that gaming remains the principal application for this technology and Microsoft's HoloLens goggles, announced at the Windows 10 launch, merely confirm that Redmond is thinking the same way.

The HoloLens employs unprecedented amounts of mobile GPU power to mix 3D holographic images into your normal field of view, creating an augmented, rather than virtual, reality effect: you see what's really there combined seamlessly with whatever someone wants to insert. It's an exciting development with many implications for future UI design, but it might create some unprecedented problems too, and that's because we already live in a naturally augmented reality. You might think that everything you're seeing right this second is what's "really" there, but in fact much of the peripheral stuff outside your central zone of attention is a semi-static reconstruction of what was there a few seconds ago: like yesterday's TV sets, your eyes lack sufficient bandwidth to live stream HD across their whole field of view. That's because poor old Evolution had no access to silicon, gallium arsenide or metallic conductors and had to make do with warm salty water.

But that's the least of it, because *everything* you see is actually a reconstruction and none of it is directly "live". Your visual cortex reads data from the rods and cones of your retinas, filters this data for light, shade, edges and other features and uses these to identify separate objects. The objects it finds get inserted into a constantly-updated model of the world stored in your brain, and that model is what you're seeing as "really" there, not the raw sense data. Everything is already a reconstruction, which is why we're occasionally prone to see things that aren't there, to hallucinations and optical illusions. (If you're interested, all this stuff is brilliantly explained in Chris Frith's "Making Up The Mind", Blackwell 2007 ).

There's even more. These objects that get accepted into the world model aren't neutral, but like all your memories get a tag indicating your emotional state, in the strict biochemical sense of hormone and neurotransmitter levels, when they were added. This world map in your brain is value-ridden, full of nicer and nastier places and things. You maintain a similar brain model of your own body and its functions, and the US neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes the mystery of consciousness will one day be solved in the way these twin mappings get superimposed and differentially analysed in the brain. (We're still a long, long way from such a solution and the hard road toward it might conceivably just stop, or worse still become a Möbius strip that circles for ever).

Neuroscientists aren't the only people who understand this stuff. Painters, sculptors and movie makers, at least the good ones, know very perfectly well how visual representations and emotions are connected: some spaces like dungeons are just creepy, some faces are admirable, others irritating. A horror movie - let's say Sleepy Hollow, to validate the weak pun in my column title - is already a primitive form of augmented reality. Most of what appears on the screen depicts real stuff like trees, sky, people, furniture, buildings and only a few parts are unnatural CGI creations, but since all are only two-dimensional the brain has no trouble distinguishing them from "real" objects. That will longer be the case with the new holographic 3D augmented reality systems.

The cruder kinds of early VR system I used to write about years ago - those ones where you staggered around in circles wearing a coal-scuttle on your head - suffered noticeable problems with motion-sickness, because the entirely artificial and laggardly background scenery violated the physics of people's inner world models and upset their inner-ear balance. It seems likely that augmented reality systems of the calibre of HoloLens may escape such problems, being utterly physically convincing because their backdrop is reality itself. But what completely unknown disorders might AR provoke? Could AR objects stray out of the perceptual model into memory and become permanent residents of the psyche, like ghosts that people will in effect be haunted by? Will we see epidemics of PLSD (Post-Ludic Stress Disorder)? And as for AR porn, the potential for embarassing encounters doesn't bear thinking about...

TRIX WITH PIX

Dick Pountain/Idealog 246/06 January 2015 14:05

My major digital pastime has for several years now been photography rather than programming: reading my profile reminds me I joined Flickr eight years ago and have now posted 1500+ pictures there (www.flickr.com/photos/dick_pountain/). The digital imaging market has been through a technical revolution during those years, and now faces what tech gurus love to call "disruption" thanks to the mobile phone. A whole generation now prefers their mobile to a proper camera, and phones' performance has improved extraordinarily by incorporating sensors and image processors from real camera manufacturers like Sony. Camera makers are striking back with gorgeous-looking retro designs that recall the golden age of the Leica, fitted with huge sensors, fixed "prime" lens and astounding image quality - and premium £1000+ prices aimed at separating "real photographers" from selfie-snappers.

As for me I've resisted both these trends. I started out posting mostly travel pics, street photos and landscapes, over-sharpening and saturation-boosting them to match the approved Flickr aesthetic, but in recent years I've become more and more interested in post-processing photos to make them more like paintings (abstract or otherwise). There are plenty of software tools available nowadays to spice up photos - some like Google's Nik Collection of plug-in filters for Photoshop and Light Room are very good indeed - but I'm less interested in buffing up my pics than in dismantling and reconstructing them completely. And my chosen tool is therefore, er, Photoshop Elements version 5. This ancient version lacks all the smart cut-out and similar features of later versions, and many abilities of full Photoshop, but it has all I want which is basically layers, blend modes and a handful of filters.

My modus operandi is as eccentric as my choice of platform. I perform long sequences of operations on each picture, duplicating and saving layers, tinting, filtering and blending them in different modes, but rather than write down this sequence so I can repeat it I deliberately do *not* do that. I merely watch the continually changing image until I like it well enough to stop. I can never repeat exactly that effect again, which I've convinced myself makes it "art" rather than mere processing, just as an oil painting can never be exactly repeated. Doing this so many times has given me a fairly deep grasp of how pictures are made up, about manipulating different levels of detail and tonality. One of my favourite filters is High Pass, which can separate out different levels of detail so that you can enhance or remove just that level. Another favourite trick is mixing some percentage of an outrageously processed image back into the original to temper the effect and make it more subtle.

In view of all my coal-face experience of the internal makeup of digital pictures, I was interested to hear about a joint project by GCHQ and the National Crime Agency (NCA), announced in December 2014 by PM Cameron, to deploy new recognition algorithms for identifying online pictures of child abuse, to aid in their prosecution. The press release said these algorithms are "hash based": that is, they process the bitstream of a digital picture to reduce it to a single number that becomes a "fingerprint" of that picture. Such fingerprinting is essential for evidence to be acceptable legally: it's necessary to prove that a picture confiscated from some offender is the same as one obtained from someone else, and obviously filenames are of no use as they're only loosely attached properties that can be easily changed.

The US website Federal Evidence Review suggests an algorithm called SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm version 1) is in use for this purpose, but it appears to me that algorithm is designed for use on texts, gun serial numbers and other alphanumeric data sets, and I can hardly believe it would generate useable hashes from bitmapped images whose contrast, saturation, sharpness and so on may have been altered - either deliberately during enhancement, or merely by accident through repeated sloppy copying of JPEGs. Pictures that are perceptually similar might have bitstreams quite different enough to change the hash.

I'd guess that content analysis, not merely hashing the bits, will be needed to prove the identity of two versions of any bitmapped image. Face recognition is well advanced nowadays (recent compact cameras can even distinguish smiles) and so is dissection of bitmaps into separate objects in Photoshop. It would remain challenging to create a unique hash from the collection of persons, furniture and stuff isolated from each picture, and oddly enough it's in fine art rather than criminology that the required expertise is most advanced. Iconclass is a hierarchical notation developed by Dutch painting scholars for cataloguing unique configurations of picture elements, and what's needed is something similar for far less salubrious subject matter.  

THE EMOTION GAME

Dick Pountain/Idealog 245/05 December 2014 11:02

In Viewpoints last month Nicole Kobie fairly skewered ("Good at PCs? It doesn't mean you're bad with people") Hollywood's sloppy assumption that Alan Turing must have been autistic because he was a mathematical genius who didn't like girls. I almost didn't go to see "The Imitation Game" for a different reason - the sensational trailer that seemed to be trying to recruit Turing into the James Bond franchise - but I forced myself and was pleasantly surprised that although it took some liberties with the facts, it did grippingly convey the significance of Bletchley Park to the war effort. The movie's major "economy with the truth" lay in excluding GPO engineer Tommy Flowers, who actually built the kit and wrestled with those wiring looms that Turing was portrayed as doing alone. (It also lumped together two generations of hardware, the "Bombes" and Colossus, and barely even attempted to explain Turing's seminal paper on computable numbers, but those I excuse as they'd have hugely slowed the pace).

The film doesn't mention Asperger Syndrome - just as well since it was unknown in Turing's lifetime, and we now have to call it autistic spectrum disorder anyway - but as Nicole pointed out Cumberbatch's depiction of Turing was clearly based on modern notions about the stunting of emotional expression and social interaction that comprise that disorder. The plot depends heavily upon Turing overcoming the dislike his coldness provokes in the other team members, assisted of course by the token emotionally-literate woman played by Keira Knightley, and the tragic ending shows Turing being chemically castrated by injections of female hormone. And that combination of emotions with hormones set me off to read between the lines of The Imitation Game's script to a deeper meaning which the writer may or may not have intended.

The film is named after a test of machine intelligence that Turing invented, in which the machine must try to imitate human conversation sufficiently well to fool another human being, on the assumption that language is the highest attribute of human reason. However recent research in Affective Neuroscience has revealed the astonishing extent to which reason and emotion are totally entangled in the human mind. The weakness of the whole AI project, of which Turing was a pioneer, lies in failing to recognise this, in its continuing attachment to 18th-century notions of rationalism. Those parts of our brain that manipulate language and symbols are far from being in ultimate control, and are more like our mind's display than its CPU. I am, therefore I think, some of the time. US neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has uncovered a collection of separate emotional operating systems in the brain's limbic system, each employing a different set of neurotransmitters and hormones. These monitor and modulate all our sensory inputs and behaviour, the most familiar examples being sexual arousal (testosterone and others), fight/flight (adrenaline) and maternal bonding (oxytocin), but there are at least four more and counting. What's more it's now clear that motivation itself is under the control of the dopamine reward system: we can't do *anything* without it, and its failure leads to Parkinsonism and worse. Now add to this the findings of Antonio Damasio, who claims all our memories get tagged with the emotional state that prevailed at the time they were recorded, and that our reasoning abilities employ these tags as weightings when making all decisions.

These lines of study suggest two things: firstly all rationalist AI is doomed to fail because the meaning of human discourse is permeated through and through with emotion (if you think about it, that's why we had to invent computer languages, to exclude such content); and secondly AI-based robots will never become wholly convincing until they mimic not only our symbolic reasoning system but also our hormonally-based emotional systems. Sci-fi authors have known this for ever hence their invention of biological androids like those in Bladerunner, with real bodies that mean they have something at stake - avoiding death, finding dinner and a mate (a bit like the IT Crowd). Steven Hawking's recent grim warnings about AI dooming our species should be tempered by these considerations: however "smart" machines get at calculating, manipulating and moving, their actual *goals* still have to be set by humans, and it's those humans we need to worry about.

So as well as a great deal of pleasure from its serious treatment of Turing, the two big lessons I took away from The Imitation Game were these:  machines will never be truly intelligent until they can feel as well as think (which would depend as much on advances in biology as solid-state physics and software engineering); and it would be nice if they were to start planning an "Imitation Game 2: The Tommy Flowers Story".