memory unlocked

[sabotabby]

I sometimes say if I had more charisma and looser morals I'd make an excellent grifter and here's a good example.

When I was 17, I was taking a course in chaos theory and fractals (yeah my school was cooler than yours) and we had to do a project on probability. I decided to build a computer program to simulate whether in fact an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce Hamlet. This was before I had internet access and I didn't know a thing about computer programming, but an older friend had recently dropped out of college to work as a programmer, so I enlisted their help. We designed a program that would take a bunch of words (we tipped the scales a little by using the text of Shakespeare plays and whatever other easily available digital text we could find in 1996) and gave it some basic grammar rules about what a sentence looked like. We then had it spit out sentences. Our favourite, and shortest, was "Congress lied." Eventually, I theorized, you could refine it so that it would spit out something that looked like human writing.

So yes, when I was 17 and dumb as shit I invented ChatGPT. Probably lots of people did. It never occurred to me to monetize it, which is one of the many reasons I'm not a billionaire and neither is that friend.

Comments

[altamira16]

You would probably be hanging with the kids who were hacking on One Million Checkboxes.

[sabotabby]

I wasn't really a computer kid! I was an art kid who liked technology.

[altamira16]

They were technology kids making friends and goofy art.

[yhlee]

Oh yeah, there was a bunch of that in natural language processing research and so on in the 1990s and earlier! My favorite anecdote is Roger Schank's work on machine translation decades back and either his group or some other one translated "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" into Russian via machine and back-translated it as a sanity check and got back "The vodka is strong, but the meat is rotten." :)

ETA: This may be apocryphal, but the story is too funny not to share. :)

[sabotabby]

I hope it's true, but even if it isn't we should perpetuate that story.

[minoanmiss]

bee hee hee

[radiantfracture]

That was my Philosophy of Aesthetics prof's favorite anecdote!

[blogcutter]

Cool project! But would you (or that friend) honestly want to be a billionaire? And as for those who did become billionaires, in many cases the wealth didn't last and they crashed badly afterwards, both financially and psychically.

[sabotabby]

I mean. I would like to not have to do wage labour for sustenance. There are costs that I wouldn't be willing to pay in that regard but being a super genius kid, making a ton of money, and then living off that for the rest of my life doesn't sound like the worst thing from where I'm standing now.

[oracne]

"Congress lied." LOL.

[sabotabby]

30 years later it's still funny.

[smhwpf]

In a parallel universe, you are a tech billionaire.

[sabotabby]

I'd be so good at it and I'd have fancy clothes, not like the tech billionaires in this universe.

[radiantfracture]

Christ you'd be the best tech billionaire

you'd be actually good at it

you'd be an actual cult hero

[sabotabby]

I'd be great at it. I'd have a castle with a moat.

While kids in Sudan were drying of thirst!

[greylock]

I mean I hear your comment in my brain.. So I assume it's a reference.
But the snark is strong in me.

Re: While kids in Sudan were drying of thirst!

[sabotabby]

They can come stay with me. But there'll be proper water, not moat water. The moat will be full of alligators.

Re: While kids in Sudan were dying of thirst!

[greylock]

That's going to require a hefty food budget.
I'm just go for isolation. Probably pit traps.

[greylock]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ml-kNMLvh18

Been a while since this popped into my head.

[sabotabby]

I require full descriptions at this point in my life before I click on YouTube links.

[greylock]

"I'm a Cult Hero" by Cult Heroes, aka The Cure and Robert Smith's mailman,

[sabotabby]

Ah cool.

[greylock]

I'll try and remember you don't click YT videos, but 99% of the time it'll be "relevant" music clips or ancient comedy.

[radiantfracture]

See I liked randomness but never did anything remotely that cool

[sabotabby]

I only conceived it, lol. Someone else did it.

ETA: this is what happens when you go to a school where multiple classes have Monty Python units.

[greylock]

Probably lots of people did. It never occurred to me to monetize it, which is one of the many reasons I'm not a billionaire and neither is that friend.

Since billionaires shouldn't exist, this is a good thing.

I decided to build a computer program to simulate whether in fact an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce Hamlet.

Imagine if you'd left this program running!
How many hours would it haven taken to max out the storage?

I used to be able to do this in my head, but assuming a 1.2Mb floppy, some fuzzy numbers, and assuming no grammar (unless you created Grammarly): 210,000 words.

That's about 20% of the (main) Potterverse.
I assume the first three books.

:P

[sabotabby]

I never tried. Like, the raw computing power didn't exist back then, or at least we didn't have access to it.

[greylock]

There was a time I could have told you the name and processing size of the world's largest supercomputer, and how many TRS-80/IBM clones that was.
Alas, those were many decades ago.

[madamoiselle_sambuca]

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[sabotabby]

:D

[madamoiselle_sambuca]

Some ppl are just that damn lucky I guess.