April fool round up
April 1st, 2009
Google’s April fool today describing the launch of a “global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster” got a good chuckle out of me. It’s a play on Kurzweil’s singularity, and I *love* the idea that the world’s first conscious machine would be, like, rly in2 pandas OMG so cute!
Here’s how they describe their Skynet moment!:
…tonight we’re pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions.
Excellent, but Wikipedia top it with a homepage that double bluffs: after giving the initial impression that it’s normal, I realised the stories were all humorous and therefore, presumably, fictitious. But despite the humour, they’re real stories: there really is a Museum of Bad Art; Lucy in the field with flowers is really a painting. I’ve been trying not snort too loudly all lunch reading the full MOBA article. Hat’s off to Wikipedia for finding the absurd in the real.
