Artificial Intelligence and its Limitations

Well, I suppose you had to be there, or - at least - in fairly close proximity, otherwise it would probably have made no sense to you at all. At least, that is if you hadn’t seen one of them before and the way it can totally reconfigure your conception of what it means to be a person with an average interest in a decent portion of fish and chips.

Of course, the early experiments with artificial intelligence had not been all that successful. After all, despite all the millions of years of evolution we still have trouble sorting out natural intelligence, let alone wiring up the artificial type. I mean, there are still people out there who believe in all sorts of nonsense up to and including a belief – despite the evidence to the contrary - that Britain’s Got Talent.

Still anyway, as robots go it did have some sort of rudimentary intelligence, even if that was only limited to going to the shops for its owner. Expecting it to negotiate the tricky business of getting 3 portions of fish and chips and a fresh roe and chips, though, was perhaps – at this stage of development – a step too far, as was – quite probably – arming it with military-grade lasers.

Not to mention giving it a rather sketchy algorithm for detecting queue-jumping in other patrons.

Sending it out after the pubs had just shut was probably a mistake too.

An accident waiting to happen, someone said with all the usual post-event wisdom we’ve come to expect from news media talking-heads.

Although, as someone else with a more literal cast of mind who witnessed the actual event, did say, somewhat more accurately ‘it was an absolute bloody massacre.’

Still when it got back the chips were still nice and warm, and it remembered about the salt and vinegar - so it is too early to write it all off as a total disaster, despite the rather high final casualty count.

Thursday Poem: Empty Stone

Empty Stone

Sweep up the dust of those prayers
whispered up to echo through empty stone.
Dancing like dust, dancing
like angels on the heads of a pin

in the rainbow-flecked sunlight
pouring through stained-glass windows
hiding a real world, outside the empty stone,
where life goes on and time passes.

While, inside the stone tomb,
dust settles on dust and whispers
fade away without ever reaching
any ear that could ever offer a hand

to lead someone away from this
and out into that sunlight where birds
fly free and sing in treetops
not huddle in cages singing songs to no-one.

Annoying the Pandas

Well, not that she’d every given it very much consideration. After all, very few of them do, just so long as they can get their hands on an accordion, very few of them bother to stop to think of the consequences, especially in relation to the pandas.

After all, with pandas being as rare as they are, and their well-known disinclination to get down and dirty with each other leading to a general consensus that their numbers will continue to be limited, the last thing you want is some young know-it-all with a sense of entitlement, and an accordion, coming around and annoying the poor things, especially when there is bamboo to be chewed… and – more likely as not – the female panda already has an headache.

Still, that is not the only instance of wild animal-related musical disquieting going on in the modern world. After all, who amongst us has been so hard of heart as to not reach into our pocket when confronted with one of those adverts for a donkey sanctuary. The only place a donkey cane feel safe from the otherwise ever-present menace of bongos.

Many of us have also selflessly made donations for a bagpipe-free enclosure at the Edinburgh zoo for the zebras and for an anti-xylophone fence to be built across the Serengeti to keep the elephants safe.

No doubt there are many of us too that hope that a world free from lions plagued by clarinets will – one day - no longer be an impossible dream.

Eyes Holding Worlds

I had no stories left to tell her. There were no more secrets of this, or of any other world, I could reveal to her. I had told her all my stories and taught her all I knew.

I’d stayed with her far longer than any of the others. I had travelled many lands, always on the move from my own land, far to the North, where the winters last for such a long time we do not know if the world remembers how to make a summer. Each new year I had moved on: leaving lands I’d come to know, leaving the women I’d come to love, to search for something I still could not name, despite all the stories I told, beside all the wonders of this world I had seen. There was still something out there, beyond me that I wanted, needed to grasp, to take into my hand and learn its secrets.

She, with the dark skin and the long black hair and the eyes that seemed to hold worlds inside them; worlds I could no touch or reach, held me here, here in this strange land where only the distant mountaintops seem to feel the winter. She listened to my stories and asked the questions I knew the answers to, about the world that lay beyond those mountains that brood over her lands like the homes of watchful gods.

She took everything I could offer her, but never asked for more, always satisfied with what I could give her, and so the years passed and we had children that grew, and a life like the others who scrape their living in the shadows of those mountains.

Many times I made plans for leaving, but instead would turn to travel into those countries in her eyes as her practiced elegant fingers retraced familiar routes across the maps of my body.

Each day that passes takes me further from those lands I have not seen, those people I have not met and all the wonders that lie beyond this land, but each night I return from our fields eager only to wander, lost, in the landscapes of her eyes.

Monday Poem: Lying Together

Lying Together

We are here and there is there
and we do not know what to say.
The words are there, between us
tentative, hesitant and unsure.

We are here and the space
grows wider between us,
no matter how close we lie.

We lie together and we lie
about when we are apart
and not lying alone.

We make promises
about not lying any more,
knowing it is another lie.

It does not matter though,
here and now, because here
and now is all there is, now

and promises can be made here
so easily when there is no past
and there is no future,
just lying here, lying together.

The Secrets of Hats

It involved a hat, after all this time I can’t really remember all the details. We were young, though, and we knew little of the secrets of the universe, the secrets of hats in particular.

When you are young like that, and as involved with yourself and those around you of the same age, you tend not to really notice the rest of the world. It is just there, a background against which the high dramas of your young lives are played out in all their tragic-comic intensity.

And… well… hats are just hats.

Or, at least we thought so.

Some hats are special… we know that now.

After all, no magician is really a magician unless he has the hat to pull things from, no wizard is a wizard without the hat that denotes his status and we all know about witches and their hats.

Natalie’s family invited me on holiday with them. I was surprised; I thought they didn’t like me. After all, what parents ever really likes their daughter’s boyfriend; especially in the teenage years when to them she is still their baby girl?

They had a house down by the coast. There was some entangled family tale of just how they had ended up owning this house that I listened to them telling each other without taking much of it in.

Anyway, this was supposed to be half-holiday, half sorting this house out, getting it ready for some locals to do it up over the following winter, ready for it to be hired out as a summer holiday place from the next summer onward.

So, one day while the rest of the family were out, Natalie and I were exploring the house, stopping every now and then to explore each other in that typical frantic teenage way whenever we could.

Then we were in a gloomy attic, lit only by a dusty skylight and Natalie was naked, motes of dust dancing around her body as she found this hat and put it on, turning to pose for me to admire her….

Then, everything changed.

On the Use of Camouflage Pastry

It was the subtle use of camouflage pastry on their battlefield steak and Kidney pies which allowed the King’s Own Queens regiment to get within 50 yards of the German trenches during one of the decisive battles of WWI.

Up until then, with their camouflaged sauerkraut, the German forces had an inherent battlefield advantage over the allied troops, especially over the French army battlefield baguette, which had a tendency to leave a trail of crumbs that any German spotter plane could follow, enabling it to discover precisely where the French troops were massing for a pre-battle dejeuner. Often too, the number of corks left behind, as well as the piles of empty wine bottles, were very useful clues to any German spies operating behind the French lines, eager to learn more vital tactical details of the French battlefield menus.

As the First World War progressed, the British army became very cunning in their use of cardboard breakfasts and inflatable sausages which they used to fool the enemy as to the true intentions of the Allies. Once, a regiment managed to fool the Germans into calling off an attack by pretending to order several hundred bottles of brown sauce in time for a pre-offensive breakfast, knowing that the Germans would intercept the signal. The Germans knew that brown sauce was a vital component of the British infantry bacon sandwich and therefore calculated they were facing far more enemy troops than they actually were.

Originally, the invention of the tank was seen as a way of quickly getting hot food to the front-line troops. Initially envisaged as a mobile snack van, armoured against enemy fire (and also against a possible explosion of the famously volatile British battlefield gravy), the tank was intended to bring hot food right up to the front line while under fire.

However, because of the limited visibility, and the heavy steam build-up inside the tank as they prepared some fresh custard for the troops, the tanks missed their stopping places on the British trenches and went on to overrun the German positions with the British troops running behind them with their dishes, all eager for some fresh custard on their battlefield apple crumble.

Obviously, for the final push which won WWI, the British battle-ready Cornish Pasties were essential. Unfortunately, the Germans had – at that point in the war – perfected the anti-pasty sniper, capable of blowing the crust off a hot pasty from the relative safety of the German trenches and thus totally demoralising the British troops as they were about to ‘go over the top’ with the pasty. Therefore the British high command eventually realised that some sort of camouflage pastry would be essential. However, for the subterfuge to work, the precise placement of the pasty was all-important when matters of camouflage and deception were involved, so that the camouflage pastry of the pasty blended into its surroundings.

Fortunately, however, the British front-line chefs had run short of flour and other ingredients necessary for making the pastry for the pasties and had resorted to using mud which, luckily, made the Cornish pasties blend in perfectly with their surroundings as the trenches at that time consisted of various defensive arrangements of mud.

Thus were the British able to camouflage their frontline battlefield pasties ready for the final push, after the German army’s severe sausage shortage led to the failure of the Ludendorff Offensive to achieve any of its strategic goals, so then when faced with the overwhelming Allied advantage in battle-ready Cornish pasties the Germans had no choice but to surrender, thus bringing about the end of the First World War.