Conversations about computation writ large, with Michael Littman and Dave Ackley.
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A romp through the field of computer programming, grapling with our history and wondering what should come next. A mix of deeply technical talk, philosophy, art, dark lore, and good takes. Hosted by Ivan Reese, Jimmy Miller, and Lu Wilson.
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Moving Beyond Syntax: Lessons from 20 Years of Blocks Programming in AgentSheets by Alexander Repenning
2:44:27
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Alexander Repenning created AgentSheets, an environment to help kids develop computational thinking skills. It wrapped an unusual computational model with an even more unusual user interface. The result was divisive. It inspired so many other projects, whilst being rejected at every turn and failing to catch on the way Scratch later did. So in 2017…
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Manon Revel: Is Democracy a Comma in History? - 74th Conversation
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Manon Revel (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), an Employee Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, joins Michael and Dave for a conversation about the past, present, and future of democracy, and ways to understand it in both computational and practical terms. [Thumbnail based on image provided courtesy of Manon Revel]…
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If you're anything like Ivan (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by storm. Our stock-in-trade on this show. But you've pro…
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Inventing on Principle Stop Drawing Dead Fish The Future of Programming Yes, all three of them in one episode. Phew! Links $ patreon.com/futureofcoding — Lu and Jimmy recorded an episode about Hest without telling me, and by total coincidence released it on my birthday. Those jerks… make me so happy. Lu's talk at SPLASH 2023: Cellpond: Spatial Prog…
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Dave Ackley's paper Beyond Efficiency is three pages long. With just these three pages, he mounts a compelling argument against the conventional way we engineer software. Instead of inflexibly insisting upon correctness, maybe allow a lil slop? Instead of chasing peak performance with cache and clever tricks, maybe measure many times before you cut…
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Martha White: Sparse is Rich - 73rd Conversation
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56:10
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Martha White, associate professor of Computing Science at University of Alberta (🔗, 🔗) joins Michael and Dave in a conversation about AI, system prediction and control, the power of sparse representations, and many aspects of machine learning from new mathematical theory to the absolutely practical control of a real water treatment plant. [Thumbnai…
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Rich Sutton Brings Reinforcements - 72nd Conversation
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54:48
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Computer scientist Rich Sutton, FRS (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), a quiet giant of machine learning, joins Michael and Dave in a sprawling conversation touching on reinforcement learning, a hopeful view of AI, the importance of ideas, and a host of other topics. [Thumbnail image used courtesy of Rich Sutton]By Dave Ackley
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Myths & Mythconceptions by Mary Shaw
2:58:48
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In the spirit of clearly communicating what you're signing up for, this podcast episode is nearly three hours long, and among other things it contains a discussion of a paper by author Mary Shaw titled Myths & Mythconceptions which takes as an organizing principle a collection of myths that are widely believed by programmers, largely unacknowledged…
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The Living Computation Theory of Everything - 71st Conversation
1:19:33
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Michael interviews Dave about his recent video (YouTube) on a 'theory of everything'. The conversation begins with Michael praising Dave for finally doing some theory, and descends from there.
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Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler
2:04:35
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The subject of this episode's paper — Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler — is one of those grand ideas that makes you want to go stargazing. To stare out into space and just disassociate from your body and become one with the heavens. Everything — life, space, time, existence — all of it is a joke! A cosmic ribbing delivered by the laws of the …
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Oren Etzioni All Over - 70th Conversation
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Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at University of Washington, (🔗, 🔗, 🔗) joins Michael and Dave in a conversation that ranges all over, from AI hype and language models to alignment and existential risk and ethics and morality to information pollution and cryptog…
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Go To Statement Considered Harmful is a solid classic entry in the X Considered Harmful metafiction genre, authored by renowned computer scientist and idiosyncratic grump, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra. Surprisingly (given the impact it's had) this is a minuscule speck of a paper, lasting only 1-ish pages, and it even digresses several times from the main p…
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Beautiful Messiness with Jonathan Frankle - 69th Conversation
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58:34
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Jonathan Frankle, the new Chief Scientist - Neural Networks at Databricks (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), joins Michael and Dave in a fast conversation about topics ranging from AI risks and fairness to the problems of Computer Science education to the beautiful messiness of modern deep learning. [Thumbnail based on image courtesy of Jonathan Frankle]…
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A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi
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This community is a big tent. We welcome folks from all backgrounds, and all levels of experience with computers. Heck, on our last episode, we celebrated an article written by someone who is, rounding down, a lawyer! A constant question I ponder is: what's the best way to introduce someone to the world of FoC? If someone is a workaday programmer, …
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Interpreting the Rule(s) of Code by Laurence Diver
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The execution of code, by its very nature, creates the conditions of a "strong legalism" in which you must unquestioningly obey laws produced without your say, invisibly, with no chance for appeal. This is a wild idea; today's essay is packed with them. In drawing parallels between law and computing, it gives us a new skepticism about software and …
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Love Hate Writing - 68th Conversation
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Michael and Dave talk about their love and hate relationships with writing, in the context of Dave's foray into publishing "Companionate Caring" and Michael's upcoming MIT Press book "Code to Joy". (This conversation is Part 2 of Where The Hell Have Michael & Dave Been?)By Dave Ackley
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Busy Busy / Let's Blame AI - 67th Conversation
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Michael and Dave catch up on where the hell they've been for the last couple months. (Mostly it's about busy, but Dave wants to blame everything on AI.)By Dave Ackley
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INTERCAL by Donald Woods & James Lyon
1:54:14
1:54:14
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This is a normal episode of a podcast called Future of Coding. We talk about INTERCAL, a real tool for computer programming. [Do I need to say more? Will this sell it? Most people won’t have heard of INTERCAL, but I think the fake out “normal” is enough to draw their attention. Also, I find “computer programming” funny. Not sure why I put that in q…
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Out of the Tar Pit by Ben Moseley & Peter Marks
2:19:46
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Out of the Tar Pit is in the grand pantheon of great papers, beloved the world over, with just so much influence. The resurgence of Functional Programming over the past decade owes its very existence to the Tar Pit’s snarling takedown of mutable state, championed by Hickey & The Cloj-Co. Many a budding computational philosophizer — both of yours tr…
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Michael Levin TAMEs Life - 66th Conversation
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Michael Levin (🔗, 🔗, 🔗) is the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, and Distinguished Professor of Biology and Vannevar Bush Chair, among several other roles. In this episode he talks with Michael and Dave about computing writ very large indeed, with topics ranging from the meaning of life and agency to the problems of comput…
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The Understandable Cynthia Rudin - 65th Conversation
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Cynthia Rudin, the Earl D. McLean, Jr. Professor of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Statistical Science, Mathematics,and Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke University (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), joins Michael and Dave for a fast and feisty conversation about how to make machines we can understand and control, with high-stakes examples lik…
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Jimmy and I have each read this paper a handful of times, and each time our impressions have flip-flopped between "hate it so much" and "damn that's good". There really are two sides to this one. Two reads, both fair, both worth discussing: one of them within "the frame", and one of them outside "the frame". So given that larger-than-normal surface…
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Vukosi Marivate: Deep Learning Africa - 64th Conversation
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Vukosi Marivate, Associate Professor of Computer Science and ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), joins Michael and Dave for a discussion of AI and machine learning research across Africa and around the world, and the challenges of centralization and efficiency versus diversification at the edge, and what each can …
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Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur
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This is Jimmy’s favourite paper! Here’s a copy someone posted on HitBug. Is it as good as the original? Likely not! Ivan also enjoyed this Theory Building business immensely; don’t be fooled by the liberal use of the “blonk” censor-tone to cover the galleon-hold of swearwords he let slip, those mostly pertain to the Ryle. For the next episode, we’r…
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Before the time-travelling talks, the programmable rooms, the ladders and rocket launchers, we had the first real Bret Victor essay: Magic Ink. It set the stage for Bret's later explorations, breaking down the very idea of "software" into a few key pieces and interrogating them with his distinct focus, then clearly demoing a way we could all just d…
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Andrew Davison's grand SLAM - 63rd Conversation
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Andrew Davison is Professor of Robot Vision (🔗) at Imperial College London, and leads the Dyson Robotics Laboratory (🔗). Andrew invented the SLAM algorithm for robot mapping and navigation, and as this fast conversation makes clear, Dave and Michael are both big fans. [Thumbnail based on image courtesy of Andrew Davison]…
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Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
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Following our previous episode on Richard P. Gabriel's Incommensurability paper, we're back for round two with an analysis of what we've dubbed the Worse is Better family of thought products: The Rise of Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel Worse is Better is Worse by Nickieben Bourbaki Is Worse Really Better? by Richard P. Gabriel Next episode, w…
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Reclusive New York Times best-selling author John Twelve Hawks (🔗, 🔗 , 🔗) joins Michael and Dave to discuss problems of the world today and possibilities of the world tomorrow -- including AI risks, technological centralization, machines acting like people and people acting like machines, sex drives for sexbots, and the question of unintended conse…
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Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel
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Today we're discussing the so-called "incommensurability" paper: The Structure of a Programming Language Revolution by Richard P. Gabriel. In the pre-show, Jimmy demands that Ivan come right out and explain himself, and so he does, to a certain extent at least. In the post-show, Jimmy draws such a thick line between programming and philosophy that …
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Peter Norvig: AI Then And Now - 61st Conversation
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50:53
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Peter Norvig 🔗, who literally (co)wrote the book 🔗 on Artificial Intelligence in the 1990s, talks with Michael and Dave about how the field has changed over the years, AI fairness and ethics, what is a symbol, and much more. [Cover image based on "Peter Norvig in 2019 at the Interval" 🔗 , licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by Christopher Michel (Cmichel67 🔗 on …
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Minds, Brains, & Morals with Oriel FeldmanHall - 60th Conversation
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53:37
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Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University assistant professor and director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab (🔗, 🔗), joins Michael and Dave in a wide-ranging discussion starting with what reinforcement learning does and doesn't mean -- and she turns the tables to ask what computer scientists do and don't get wrong about mind and brain and lear…
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Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay & Adele Goldberg
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2:45:03
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There once was a podcast episode. It was about a very special kind of book: the Dynabook. The podcast didn't know whether to be silly, or serious. Jimmy offered some thoughtful reflections, and Ivan stung him on the nose. Sponsored by Replit.com, who want to give you some reasons not to join Replit, and Theatre.js, who want to make beautiful tools …
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Agency IoT Loyalty - 59th Conversation
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Michael and Dave tackle the big questions and settle two of them: Is Agency A Zero Sum Game? Why Do (Internet of) Things Suck? How Can We Turn Computation Away From Centralization? [Image of ancient Philips Hue Controller operating without internet access, used by permission of Dave the owner]By Dave Ackley
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Augmenting Human Intellect by Doug Engelbart
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symbol-manipulation.com collaboration.com thought-experiments.org behaviorism.com theatre.js system.org evolution.ca pithy.com replit.com summary.co.uk cringe.net futureofcoding.org programming.com Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/futureofcoding See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…
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James Tompkin Does Visual Computing Research - 58th Conversation
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James Tompkin 🔗, assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University 🔗, joins Michael and Dave to talk about visual computing research writ large, with topics ranging from the relevance of traditional computer graphics in the era of machine learning, to differentiable rendering and neural radiance fields, to DALL-E 2 and remixing Hitchcock'…
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Ellie Pavlick: As Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Language - 57th Conversation
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52:02
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Ellie Pavlick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University (🔗) and Research Scientist at Google AI (🔗), joins Michael and Dave in a quick discussion of the remarkable new large AI language models. Topics range from what is and isn't known about the models, and by them, to if or how scared should we be of them, to what 'traditional' …
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Man-Computer Symbiosis by J.C.R. Licklider
2:23:23
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Jimmy Miller joins the show as co-host. Together, we embark on a new series of episodes covering the most influential and interesting papers in the history of our field. Some of these papers led directly to where we are today, and their influence cannot be overstated. Others were overlooked or unloved in their day, and we revive them out of curiosi…
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Andrew Critch (🔗), a mathematician, AI researcher, organizer and activist (cofounder 🔗, researcher 🔗, cofounder 🔗), joins Michael and Dave for a fast-moving fifty minutes about existential risks (and opportunities) of AI and other technologies, the limits of intelligence, and the importance of structure at all scales and having a good spirit.…
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What is the Self Image? - 55th Conversation
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Dave tries to explain why he thinks the best way to understand people and other living things is via computation and programming languages, via codebases and code transmissions. Michael tries to help Dave sound slightly sane. [Image based on still frame from "We Are Coders"]By Dave Ackley
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Bad Ideas and Dangerous Thoughts with Fiery Cushman - 54th Conversation
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53:26
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Fiery Cushman @fierycushman, professor of psychology at Harvard University 🔗, joins Michael and Dave in a wonderful conversation about morality seen both cognitively and computationally, with topics ranging from trolley problems and fake guns to the wisdom of the ancestors and the hubris of science to what makes moral thinking special. [Title image…
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Today's guest is Ella Hoeppner, who first came onto the radar of our community back in the fall when she released a web-based visual Clojure editor called Vlojure, with a captivating introduction video. I was immediately interested in the project because of the visual style on display — source code represented as nested circles; an earthy brown ins…
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Neil Lawrence All Over the Map - 53rd Conversation
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Neil Lawrence (home, @lawrennd), the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, joins Michael and Dave for a rollicking hour discussing everything from cybernetics to machine learning, from oil rigs to New Jersey shopping malls, from inconsistent scientific reviewing to gods and robots and much more. Talking Machines pod…
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Carla Brodley: From Machine Learning to Inclusive Computing - 52nd Conversation
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48:18
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Carla Brodley, professor and Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University (link), talks to Michael and Dave about applying Machine Learning to real problems from computer security to medicine, and how to move the needle for diversity, equity, access, and belonging in Computer Science education. [Title image courtesy of Carla Brodley]…
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Scott Anderson: End-user Programming in VR
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Scott Anderson has spent the better part of a decade working on end-user programming features for VR and the metaverse. He's worked on playful creation tools in the indie game Luna, scripting for Oculus Home and Horizon Worlds at Facebook, and a bunch of concepts for novel programming interfaces in virtual reality. Talking to Scott felt a little bi…
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Karen Levy Keeps On Trucking - 51st Conversation
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Karen Levy, assistant professor in Information Science at Cornell University, joins Michael and Dave in a conversation ranging from AI, law, and smart contracts to CB radio, Road Dog Trucking, and Santa's narcs.By Dave Ackley
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Anita Nikolich: From Three Letter Agency to AI Security - 50th Conversation
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Anita Nikolich, Director of Research and Technology Innovation at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences (webpage), joins Michael and Dave in a conversation ranging over decades and disciplines, from computer network security and the DEFCON hacker conferences to creating games for teaching about mis- and dis-information. [Title i…
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More than Games with Michael Bowling - 49th Conversation
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Michael Bowling, professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta, talks with Michael and Dave about robots playing robots at soccer, and how a computer program beat professional poker players at heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em, and what it all means. [Image courtesy of Michael Bowling]By Dave Ackley
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The name Replit will be familiar to regular listeners of our show. The backstory and ambitions behind the project, however, I bet will be news to you. Amjad Masad, the founder and first programmer of Replit, is interviewed by Steve Krouse in this episode from the vault — recorded back in 2019, released for the first time today. Amjad shares the sto…
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Toby Schachman: Cuttle, Apparatus, and Recursive Drawing
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In this episode, I'll be talking to Toby Schachman, who many of you are surely familiar with thanks to an incredible string of projects he's released over the past decade, including Recursive Drawing back in 2012, Apparatus in 2015, and most recently Cuttle which opened to the public this past week. All of these projects superficially appear to be …
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The Embodied George Konidaris - 48th Conversation
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Michael and Dave talk to George Konidaris, assistant professor and director of the Intelligent Robot Lab at Brown University, about building generally intelligent robots, or anyway trying, and the importance of both embodiment and abstraction in artificial intelligence. [Title image courtesy of George Konidaris]…
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