As a simple test of various Large Language Models, here is a simple prompt that I submitted to three different systems. Note the intentional lack of details, which was a test to assess each model’s ability to come up with relevant and accurate information.
I changed the prompt slightly for a couple of other models Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude:
“I need the script for a scene for a movie. It is 27 June 1844. A rider (a well known friend of Joseph and Emma) comes to her home to alert her as to what happened. Write the dialogue for this scene.”
Click here for the result from the interaction with Google’s Gemini. Note the interaction with the chatbot to improve the accuracy of the script.
Here is the results of the same interaction with Anthropic’s Claude.ai. I was unable to get a direct link to the script, so I am pasting it here:
[A rider gallops up to the Smith home in Nauvoo and dismounts, rushing to the door and knocking urgently]
Emma Smith: [opening the door] Why, Brother William, what’s the meaning of this?
William Clayton: [catching his breath] Sister Emma…I’m afraid I bear grave news. It’s about your husband.
Emma: [fear crossing her face] Joseph? What’s happened?
William: He and his brothers were arrested this morning by a mob militia in Carthage under the governor’s order. They’ve been charged with treason and riot.
Emma: [gasping] Oh no…no, this cannot be! Treason? For what cause?
William: For his teachings and the gathering of the Saints, I fear. They claim he’s raised an army against the state.
Emma: But that’s an outrage! He’s done nothing but preach divine truth. We must go to him at once.
William: I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Sister. The jail is surrounded by the militia and an armed mob. It’s not safe.
Emma: [anguished] Then what are we to do? We cannot leave him in their hands! You know what they’ve threatened against him before.
William: [gravely] I wish I had better news…All we can do is put our faith in the Lord’s hands now and pray for a miracle.
Emma: [weeping] Oh Joseph…the Lord alone knows what shall become of this…
During a recent discussion with my grandson, Kenneth regarding his upcoming course on Linux, I got to thinking about how my involvment with computers has followed the history of computing. That prompted to me to Google some of the details, which led me to this link this morning on Unix. It was written by Dennis Ritchie, one of the two primary developers of Unix. There I learned that the name Unix was meant by one of the team members, Brian Kernighan, to be a bit of a slam on Multics. That project had turned out to be a failed effort on which they had worked that involved a huge number of players from various companies. Could this have been a perfect of too many cooks spoiling broth?
It is amazing to think about the computer they were trying to get their management at Bell Labs to buy, one they needed in order to develop the new operating system they had come to believe was necessary. It is important to note that Bell Labs’ mission, especially in 1969, had to do with things like satellite abd other new telecommunication technologies, and not in developing computer software. Basically, they worked in the research division of the original and primary telephone company of the United States, Bell Telephone. The company had been founded in 1876 by the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell himself!
Here are a couple of photos of the type of computer they were trying to buy:
You can see those photos and some others at this Web site of the Living Computers Museum+Labs Think about how that computer had maximum memory size of 1,152 kilobytes (Wikipedia article on the PDP-10), a tiny fraction of what is in a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of memory. (That reflection brought me to calculate the size difference between the two. The tiny, credit-card sized RasPi4 4 GB has 3,472 times more memory than the computer pictured above!
Discovering that Web site was great fun in itself. It was founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates. Now I have to convince my wife to go to the museum in Seattle when it reopens after COVID! ?
All of that got me thinking about something else that Ritchie developed. It turns out that one of the first programs they created for the PDP-7, a predecessor of the DEC-10 was the game, Space Travel. The Wikipedia article very closely describes the first computer game I ever played, which was at the Air Force Academy. I can’t remember the exact date for sure, but it that would have been in 1976 or so when I was first assigned there. It could also have been in 1980 when I returned to the Academy from Ohio State. To play the game, it was necessary to load the program using paddle switches like you see below. The user would set up the memory address and contents using the switches and then flip a switch for each memory address!
The photo was used to illustrate a project to create a program on a Raspberry Pi to simulate a DEC PDP/11!
All thate brought back another recollection, that of using the word processor at the Academy, a PDP 11/78, to write and print my PhD dissertation. What great fun (challenge!?!) it was, transferring my files from the Amdahl 470 at Ohio State to the computer at the Academy using 10.5 inch reels of magnetic tape. The Amdahl and the DEC of course ran different operating systems (the former ran IBM’s OS and the latter ran Unix). Numerous gyrations were necessary to get the new system to read my files from the tape and get them ready to turn into the final version.
One more aside, I did most of the original writing on the dissertation using an acoustic modem running at 300 baud to connect my terminal to the computers at Ohio State and later at the Academy. It was fun to swap out the old acoustic modem and switch to one that ran at 1,200 baud! I still have that terminal, which could do upper case only. To get lower case in my documents I had to create software that enabled me to mark up my text in way that a program would convert everything to lower case except the characters I had flagged with my markup scheme.
Anyway, the excursion into the history of Unix got me thinking about C and my goal from long ago to learn it as a new programming language for me . It is funny to realize that I am back at that point now with the tinkering around I have done with Arduino microcontrollers and compatibles. Ritchie was also one of the two co-authors of THE original textbook on C and Kernighan is the other. I still have a copy of that book that I bought it at the Ohio State Bookstore when I was there working on my PhD and which I am giving to my grandson. Here is Wikipedia article on the history of the development of the C language.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently announced the Raspberry Pi 4. The little, single-board computer has been an incredible development from the beginning, but the newest edition has now crossed what I believe to be an important threshold. For starters, the Raspberry Pi 4 now runs at 1.5 gigahertz instead of 1.4. This is nothing to sniff at, but other feature improvements such as more memory, the USB upgrade, and faster Ethernet are even more significant.
The new Raspberry Pi 4 and key new features
For example, the maximum memory available on previous versions was 1 GB, but 1 GB, 2 GB, and 4 GB configurations will be available. The Raspi 4 maintains the same form factor and its layout is quite similar, with four USB ports still available. Two of those are USB 3.0, thus increasing data input and output by a factor of 10. That improvement, along with the full-speed gigabit network connection, turns the little unit into a more than adequate core of a network-attached storage (NAS) system.
The graphics processor not only supports 4K output, it can drive two monitors through its two mini-HDMI ports. It supports one 4K monitor at 60 frames per second (FPS) and two and two at 40 FPS.
The basic price point of $35 still applies, but increased memory size will understandably increase the price to $55 for the 4 GB version.
This absolutely confirms a conclusion I came to years ago: Communications media have been about increasing fidelity and access from the dawn of time! Just so you know, fidelity has to do with video and audio resolution that enables the medium of communication to reflect reality, and access is about getting what I want, when and where I want it!
A couple of excerpts:
Each original frame has a resolution of 10328 x 7760 and weighs in at around 80MB per frame.
One of the standard tools with Timelapse is the motion controlled slider, but with this footage you can make HD pans, tilts and zooms that mean you almost don’t need a slider!
The visual fidelity is incredible and blows me away! This is especially true when I think about the software and hardware it takes to deal with that number of pixels.
I have been a fan of Bill Gates for many years now, every since I met and chatted with him on a couple of occasions in 1986 and 1987 at the First Microsoft International Conference on CD-ROM. Work I did at a company that friends and I started, as well as some of my writing from 20 years ago wound up with Microsoft’s lawyers bringing me to New York to be deposed by in one of the large anti-trust court cases that opponents brought against the company.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet Project has published Digital Life 2025, which summarizes the opinions of experts: “Experts predict the Internet will become ‘like electricity’ — less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people’s lives for good and ill.” Jason Hiner of ZDNet has summarized the report in his piece on ZDNET entitled, “The Internet tsunami: 8 big insights on what it disrupts next | ZDNet.”
Hiner writes somewhat humorously, “The remarks that Pew highlighted from these experts include a little navel-gazing, fear-mongering, and overly-optimistic blather. But, the interesting insights far outweigh the drivel.” I have further simplified his summaries of each trend in these eight brief statements.
The distinction between being online and offline will disappear.
We will better understand the consequences of our personal actual and our interactions with others.
The way we see the world will be informed by multiple views of what is happening around us.
Society will be able to better deal with bad actors, i.e. those that do not conform to its standards.
The relationship between the individual and the state as well as how states relate to other will change.
The same forces that disrupt how people work will also improve how their work gets done.
More powerful tools and
The structures that determine how society organizes itself will change drastically
