Sec19 Grp1: Turing + de Botton

(Argh, I legitimately forgot to post last Monday, so I'm combining these two.)

Alfred Turing invented the Turing Test, which basically meant if an artificial intelligence surpassed a certain point and left the viewer unable to ascertain whether it was a machine or human, it passed. Cleverbot is a modern-day example of one that would pass. For most of us, it's impossible to draw the line, though. A certain level of reasoning or linguistic capability is perhaps evidence to us, but even then, computers can respond with bad grammar, lies, nonsensical gibberish, etc, so one wonders whether the creators of such intelligence got their facts straight.

And still, the human counterpart provides other problems, such as varying gullibility. Thus, while things like CB can work most of the time, they can also fail to behave as a human, but even that's too hard to tell.

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Alain de Botton discussed the beauty of architecture. With such a subjective word as "beauty," especially in relation to the word "art," like the Turing Test, results are rather abstract and individualized. Seeing as literature is also an art, albeit not a visual one, I've sifted through many opinions and rules on how to better my craft, most of which are lies. The one I can apply to this situation is: no matter how flowery or "beautiful" a passage is, if it merely works as literary but irrelevant to the plot, strike it out. So all these useless decorations and embellishments placed on buildings are essentially silent ["Hey! Look at me!"]'s.

And then there's the issue of functionality, a green structure versus a, erm... non-green structure. Pollution is ugly, no matter which you pick. (By the way, the video under ]Architecture, wine...] is pretty interesting) So use and usefulness is also important, like church steeples that point to the heavens in a sort of unheard foreshadowing.

Assiduously I will do my job from here on out so you don't have to put your posts in other places.
And no, I didn't realize every paragraph started with A until I wrote this sentence.