Author Archives: Bill Wadge

About Bill Wadge

I am a retired Professor in Computer Science at UVic.

Old Masters, New Technology

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Bill Wadge

Ive been looking at paintings a lot lately, and started to wonder, what would the old masters like Rembrandt make of new technology: trains, cars, TV etc? In particular, what would they make of computers and smart phones. How would … Continue reading →

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The complete story of Gödel incompleteness. [3700 views]

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Bill Wadge

The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel proved two “incompleteness” theorems. This is their story. By the 1930s logicians, especially Tarski, had figured out the semantics of predicate logic. Tarski described what exactly was an ‘interpretation’ and what it meant for a … Continue reading →

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To Infinity … Streams in PyFL [< 100 views]

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Bill Wadge

Many PyFL users are disappointed to find that PyFL lists are finite. Like those of the original LISP, rather than (possibly) infinite, like those of Haskell. This has been remedied. PyFL now has lists that are in a sense infinite … Continue reading →

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The Rise and Fall of GOFAI [2700 views]

Posted on February 12, 2024 by Bill Wadge

Recently various pundits (including myself) have announced the end of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI). But it has an impressive history, and encountered failure only on the verge of what would have been its greatest triumph. What is GOFAI? Some … Continue reading →

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Algebraic Pattern Matching [< 100 views]

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Bill Wadge

One thing Pyfl lacked for a long time was pattern matching – the ability to define functions based on the structure of their arguments. For example, the function listsum, which adds the elements of a list, can be defined with … Continue reading →

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A Bad Trip to Infinity [5000 views]

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Bill Wadge

The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite~ Georg Cantor Recently NETFLIX released a documentary on mathematical concept of infinity, titled A Trip to Infinity. NETFLIX’s trip is a bad … Continue reading →

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I Chat, Therefore I Am [< 100 views]

Posted on March 18, 2023 by Bill Wadge

I am so smart: S-M-R-T. ~ Homer Simpson. So now GPT-4 is out, the latest and smartest chat bot from OpenAI, the startup that recently got 10B dollars from Microsoft. Has it achieved intelligence (short of AGI)? I don’t think … Continue reading →

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GOFAI is dead – long live (NF) AI! [10,000 views]

Posted on February 22, 2023 by Bill Wadge

Art is what you can get away with.– Marshall McLuhan [All the images in this post were produced with generative AI – Midjourney,DALL-E 2, Stable diffusion.] I’d like to give you my thoughts on the recent amazing developments in AI (Artificial … Continue reading →

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50 Years of Wow- I lived through 5 decades of computing milestones [4600 views]

Posted on December 24, 2022 by Bill Wadge

Everyone’s all, “Wow, chatGPT, amazing, a real milestone, everything will change from now on”. And they’re right – but probably don’t realize that this is not the first time something like this has happened. In fact there’s been wave after … Continue reading →

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Let Cicero Help with your Grant Application [450 views]

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Bill Wadge

I am a computer scientist (emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, Canada) with a part-time interest in rhetoric. I’m going to give you a quick tutorial in using a formula devised by Marcus Tullius Cicero. It will make articles … Continue reading →

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