re: Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language

That's interesting. Seriously, I have alway thought about the evolution of language. The fact that there are so many languages, the fact that there are languages not used anymore (like latin), etc. It makes you think.. 3000 years from now will English still be a language? Will having to abbreviate words to tweet something, all the different ways people spell different words on FB, text, etc all merge to create it's own language. Crazy,

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3000 years from now will English still be a language?

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If we still exist, we will be back to drawing with sticks in the sand at this rate.

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I don't know how much I believe all that crap. I don't believe for one second that we will invent a computer that we're unable to control

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I wish I could be that naive

Glad they shut it down before FacebookNet became self aware.

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"Wut you be doin in dat der usin a hose pipe" for instance is not English. Neither is "Go gatta baw" nor, "where you crib be at homie".

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and yet you left out the most obvious example

Chris, Maybe they were on a Boeing 707 that crashed?

When I was in middle school I had an old Apple computer and I upgraded the memory and cpu stuff as best i could with some parts I got at a estate sale down the street, pretty much a big box of unmarked random components. The parts had belonged to this old professor down the street and were dirt cheap. I was pretty handy at the time and figured out the soldering from the Internet. The computer ran a ton faster after installing the parts

My favorite game was age of empires 2, I would play it for hours every day after school and I got pretty good at it, I even placed in tournaments at the old gamelan. I'd generally play as England and take all sea routes early and control trade that way. This one day I had set up a pretty tough ultimate deathmatch with like 8 civs all set on very hard in an earth style map with realistic starting locations. I had been playing for a couple days and was doing ok. It was the dog days of summer and my parents had talked about sending me to my grandparents for a while while my parents went to a meeting in another town. I was playing empires one day when my mom was yelling it was time to go. She was walking up the stairs to get me so I turned off the monitor and forgot to pause the game. I stayed the week at my grandparents and the whole time it was nagging in the back of my mind that I was gonna lose the game that I had already sank several days into.

When I got back I turned on the monitor and to my surprise, not only were my English still alive, but they were better off than when I left. Also I had been at war with the franks and Teutons and I was allied with both. It was strange but I figured the game probably had a feature where it would play for you if it stayed idle enough. I had summer reading to do for school so I read my book and let the game play on with me checking the progress from time to time. My civilization built farms and did research all on its own for several hours. When it was time for bed I saved and closed the game out

The next afternoon I fired up the game and to my shock the bustling empire I left had shrunk considerably, the farms lay barren, many of the buildings were burned or destroyed, and most of the villagers were dead or at low health. I no longer had any allies and there was a notification that there was a chat log between the nations. This was strange because the chat feature was pretty rudimentary and the computer players never really used it. The first message was simply "from whence does that vast unending winter come?" What followed was a log of messages between the leaders concerning the breakdown of society after a vast darkness where the crops refused to grow and vast swathes of the populations resorted to cannibalism

As I watched, the computer players began to reseed the fields and rebuild their broken lives. Treaties were reforged and the research was almost exclusively focused on religion. I let the game run and did my homework and by bedtime my English had discovered the new world all on their own. I saved and closed out and went to bed

The next day I turned on the game to the same situation, the world had seemingly destroyed itself overnight. The chat log was full of lamentation and prayers begging for the darkness to end. Each one referred to a Heavenly Father ending the suffering and bringing back the harvest. It was a little trippy but it eventually dawned on me that they were referring to me. I resolved to stop shutting down the computer at night because of the problems it caused in the game. The empire rebuilt itself and religion was at an all time high

The next few days were uneventful as the game played itself, and all nations were peaceful and prosperous

The computer got to where the fan was running all the time, enough to heat up the room and in the chat log the messages began to talk about crops burning and rivers going dry, and there was a prayer for cooling winds from on high. I took this as a sign and went and bought a fancy water cooling unit and installed it onto the computer. This made the rulers very happy and the praise was unanimous

The game had started to lag and the chat log began to talk about the need for higher forms of thought and a spark from the almighty. I installed some more ram while the computer was running and once again, the nations were eternally thankful

The enlightenment was an interesting time and the nations industrialized and discovered things like flight and before long the chat log changed its name to the United Nations. The thinkers of these nations had begun to search for intelligence outside of earth. They began to pray for a link to the outside universe. I thought about it for several days and then it hit me. The Internet!

This was back before wifi so I had to get a wire. My dad thought I was crazy when I showed up with a 100 foot spool of internet cable. I hooked it downstairs and ran it upstairs and the computer was connected. The game played normally but after several days the chat became nothing but unreadable strings of numbers and nonsense words

A week later our town started experiencing rolling blackouts and the Internet service was disconnected from our area. Bucket trucks would zip around the neighborhood changing out the hardware on the poles. The chat at this time was of course very agitated. The leaders discussed the merits of isolationism and the feelings of despondency at being cut off from the universe

And then the man came. He knocked on our front door one day with a stack of paperwork and identified himself as an FBI agent. He asked to come into the house and have a look. My mother let him into the house and his eyes followed the cable upstairs and into my room. "Ma'am is there a computer in that room?" He asked. My mother replied yes. He went upstairs and looked at the computer with age of empires still running. He looked incredulous and rubbed his furrowed brow. He looked down at me, still confused and said:

"Son, I'm gonna need to take this computer with me to the computer shop for repairs. Don't worry, we'll deliver you a brand new computer in a few days."

I never got that new computer