Just take me out back and shoot me...

I finally caved in this morning and tried ChatGPT. I am long familiar with “AI” in its present state, having directly used Perception, Kohonen, and Probabilistic networks back in the 1990’s for control of “rubber mirrors”, target tracking for missile guidance, etc, etc.

I was holding off because this is not AI, just a recognizer of patterns with an ability to generalize. Komogorov wrote a theorem a while back that a feedback perceptron network with N inputs + feedback can emulate an Nth degree attractor in high dimensional fractal systems. That’s why we could use the rubber mirror to cancel out atmospheric scintillation of star images on the Kitt Peak 4m telescope back in the early 90’s.

At any rate, I saw a video expressing the virtues of ChatGPT for web search, rather than Google search, since it doesn’t offer up tons of extraneous finds based on whomever paid the most to get in front of your eyeballs. And so I tried it, and it does work better.

But, as long as you already know a great deal about some topic, you are prepared for its hallucinations (which I have yet to see), and its tendency to offer up a consensus opinion as authoritative fact. You have to push back and challenge its answers, and that generally provokes an even better response.

So, along the lines of a discussion about Transactional Conventional Hewitt Actors, it offered up the statement at one point about parallel concurrent activation of the same Actor by two different dispatch threads sending two different messages at the same time:

	"You retry only if the actor behavior was concurrently changed, which is rare in practice if messages are processed quickly.” 

I challenged that as an opinion, not fact, since I had the experience of a debug monitor Actor becoming overwhelmed by parallel message collisions in my Ionosphere Watch System:

	 "Your statement "You retry only if the actor behavior was concurrently changed, which is rare in practice if messages are processed quickly." is just a (hopeful) opinion. It could very well happen that collisions in some situations could happen very frequently.”

To which it acknowledged my criticism as valid, and offered an even better answer, mentioning an exponential back-off, like we use in TCP/IP and Transactional Memory systems.

That was an interesting suggestion, but I can probably get by just using a “put the collision message back on the queue for later delivery attempts”, instead of a direct immediate retry with an exponential back-off.

At any rate, I am now willing to concede that ChatGPT may be useful, especially if you are alone in a room staring at 4 walls. But I’m still not willing to consider it true AI. And I haven’t allowed it to write any Lisp for me. Maybe someday...

- DM