Whither AI?
I was asked a few weeks ago about why Artificial Intelligence over the past few decades has been such a “failure”, meaning mostly that it isn’t seen to be living up to its great expectations.
James Gaskin at NetworkWorld gives a well-referenced response very similar to the one I gave back then, which went like this:
Essentially, whenever some field of AI achieves a result, the successful work is given a name (intelligent search, [something] recognition, adaptive [something], smart [something], etc.), it leaves the lab, has an impact on industry / research / our lives, and “Artificial Intelligence” remains loosely defined as “the tough cognition problems we haven’t solved yet.”
Mind you, even defined in that way, Marvin Minsky would probably still agree that the creators of AI really need to get a hustle on.
XAML and Obfuscation
I normally don’t cross-link WPF articles unless super-excited because I figure all of us in the WPF-o-sphere are reading each other’s blogs. But I was particularly interested on Rudi Grobler’s recent look into XAML obfuscation because I’ve encountered obfuscation issues from a couple of sides in a recent project, and look forward to hearing further discussion on the topic.
To sum up, XAML obfuscation is a bit of a quagmire. I haven’t found a tool (let alone a build pipeline) that would make it easy to obfuscate production XAML code, which some consulting clients certainly would prefer. I’ll be interested in the results of Rudi’s investigation.
The other side of the coin is that because WPF apps are hard to obfuscate, studying code in order to learn (rather than to “liberate” is also possible.) I have really valued using tools like Reflector to learn good WPF practices from the experts. As I mentioned before, Expression Blend, which is a WPF app itself, has been a real inspiration because the Blend team has solved some really hard problems while building Blend.
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