This is the flip side of the "opinions on Artificial Intelligence" poster that I showed last week, written by my friend Mark Jennings. This is the side that normally faces out because it means the most to me.
To explain some of the comments:
Copycat is software written by Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell. It uses symbolic AI to explore some aspects of analogies. (Read the Wikipedia article for more information or, better yet, Hofstadter's book
Fluid Concepts And Creative Analogies.)
I'm not sure if Marvin Minsky being a geek is a good thing or bad.
As for Chomsky, I cannot verify if he is anal retentive or a booger eater. But here's a funny story:
Noam Chomsky came to Indiana University in 1993 or 1994 to give two talks, one on politics and the other on linguistics. Mark and I went to both. At the first talk, someone got up to introduce Chomsky, and Chomsky himself sat on a chair on stage with his head resting on a propped-up hand, looking as bored as could be.
Mark leaned over to me and asked, "What do you think he's thinking right now?"
Without missing a beat, I answer: "'Wouldn't a booger taste good right now?'"
It
still makes me laugh. At the time, I feared Mark and I would have to leave because we couldn't stop laughing.
