Found it in the attic of a house I purchased. Going to get going on my self hosted COBOL based LLM journey with this puppy.
Yeah that’s the thing, this as a field has been a thing for quite a while. When I was in college 25 years ago we had dedicated AI classes. Only we wrote in LISP. We didn’t ask an AI to write for us. The other way around.
I took an AI class in like 99 or something, same story, we wrote lisp code. I don’t really remember anything approaching AI in the class. But I don’t remeber much from back then.
Though I do remeber getting the highest grade in the class on some test with like a 12. And telling the prof that the test was broken because I was far from the person in the class who knew the most about the material.We did code logic that would modify itself until it reached the goal. It was the whole point, you give the thing a goal, it tries better and better approaches until it reaches the goal.
But damn as much as I always loved coding (starting with BASIC on an Amstrad CPC6128 as a kid when others were busy learning to read), LISP is hard to wrap your head around. Only language I actually gave up.
That sounds familiar, probably what we did too… where did you take the class? And yeah, I disliked lisp. And later in my career I tried clojure, which is a similar way of organizing the code… it was horrible. Fortunately it wasn’t really my job to use it, so I just didn’t.
In France
this as a
fieldgrift has been a fake thing for quite a while.There was no “artificial intelligence” in 1986, just like there is none now.
And there was no “artificial intelligence” in 1955 when the first grifter invented this marketing term to get money. Same grift still happening today.
ai is a field, its just that every time they make something useful it gets absorbed into other fields
also since llms havent gotten absorbed into another field yet that means they arent useful
Yeah! The MultiLayerPerceptron was used for self-drive only that then it all looked like a 8-bit game!
Published 1 year before the second AI winter. This looks like a general-audience book, but most of the things you would find in an ML textbook published in 1986 would still be applicable today. The fundamentals haven’t changed, just some new techniques and more computing power being available. Hinton popularized backprop (which is basically just an application of the chain rule from calculus) on neural networks in the 80s, and that’s still how the errors are propagated during training of the newest LLMs.
Yeah the math is old and basic AF. Supposed “AI” is really simple under the hood. The “power” comes from grifters wasting massive resources and destroying the planet to build compute that almost nobody actually wants. Instead of “artificial intelligence”, it should be called “actual brute forcing”.
Can you look who did that cover art, or the art director
Another poster linked the scan in the Internet Archive, so I can deliver the goods (image format)
Thank you!
I dunno myself but it looks just like Mewtwo’s pokeballs in Mewtwo Strikes Back.
Love the style.
I used to own that book too! I got it at a library book sale I think, back in the late 90s. The illustrations were pretty cool, and it was a pretty good summary of the field in the mid-80s.
I also owned “Secrets of a Super Hacker by The Knightmare”!
I might still have them somewhere in storage.
Part of the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown book series whose commercials you could not miss on television in the 1990s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk
Update: Or maybe not, according to the wikipedia article. The size, shape, and characteristic embossing certainly do evoke the true article. It fooled me!
I thought the same thing! Hoping one day I come across a set of those at a garage sale.
