I see that there is a movie about Martin Armstrong. I didn’t realize that he was out of prison. In any case, I agree with Barry: “Way too conspiratorial…”, but I will go further.
Martin Armstrong is a bullshit artist. How do I know that? Because he writes a lot about this super-intelligent computer that he invented 25 years ago.
And I have a degree in computer science.
So when he writes things like:
“Now I needed my children to help put a face on the computer. By this I mean I had to teach it how to communicate. I initially established a type interface.”
…I burst out laughing. No engineer would ever say “type interface.” The term is “command line interface”. Maybe you remember it from the old days of MS-DOS. If you look at the Wikipedia article, you will not see the term “type interface” anywhere on the page.
Right? It’s a joke. Armstrong writes gaffes like that constantly whenever he is carrying on about the magical computer that can predict the future.
If you see him, open up your Mac and start up the “Terminal” app. Ask him to type in a “copy” command. I bet he will stare at it like a deer in the headlights.
Note: Armstrong’s “type interface” quote can be found on this page. There’s a lot of text on the page, and the quote is nearer to the bottom. But I’m sure you know how to search a page for a piece of text, right? Right???
Did it occur to you that Armstrong is not an engineer?
John,
No, it did not. The man claims to have personally invented and constructed a computer that can predict the future. Therefore, he would require engineering skills.
Matt
When i first read this I felt the same thing. He will be called on this and I wonder what his response will be.
>>Therefore, he would require engineering skills.
Not even close. The guy’s an analyst (with deep knowledge of economics & history). People like that are not “engineers”, and they don’t speak geek.
His use of the computer is just as a tool to model ideas. His mindset is far closer to people like Shiller, Krugman, et. al. than he will ever be to yours.
I’ve dealt with both types in & out of “corporate-land”; his references aren’t out of line.
John,
One cannot use a tool without the requisite skills. He claims to have written code, and yet when he describes it, he talks baby talk: goo, goo, gaa, gaa.
What he should do is take all that crap off his web site. The come up with a new spiel, or maybe hire an engineer to re-write his old spiel so that it sounds more plausible.
Tell him to go to odesk.com and hire a starving Indian programmer. The whole job should cost less than $50.
Matt
Matt,
>>One cannot use a tool without the requisite skills.
He doesn’t need to be a specialist in the Windows API to write code, nor be an interface expert of any kind.
NTRAIN comes to mind — a neural-net prgram put out by Katz & McCormick, authors of “The Encyclopedia of Trading Strategies”. In the early 2000′s, it had/has a command-line interface, nearly 15 years into the PC GUI era!
Anybody with half-a-brain could write BASIC, and back when he started, I’d guess he had GWBASIC to work with — he’d need an interface, but stuff like VB didn’t exist, and certainly VBA wasn’t available.
–Johnathan
P.S. FWIW, it’s been my experience that programmers, per se, don’t necessarily know JACK about the subject they code. They don’t have to — they’re given a set of analysts’ requirements and fulfill those.
Johnathan,
I guess you didn’t get the memo, but AI software from that era was a spectacular failure. In fact, InfoWorld magazine classified AI as snake oil:
http://www.infoworld.com/print/98248
Twenty years ago the company I was working for bought an AI package. You had to enter business rules into it, and it was supposed to be able to make decisions for customer-service people. It didn’t work. Not even close. It was indeed snake oil, just like InfoWorld said.
Armstrong has claimed the equivalent of putting a man on the moon with a bottle rocket. It’s completely ridiculous.
When you write “he’d need an interface” above, you expose your ignorance. Every computer has an interface! If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to use it all! Brilliant scientific work has been done with nothing but a command-line interface. You put your data in files, you start your software from the command line, it outputs results to a file, or a printer, or right back to the terminal. Anybody knows that. Anybody with actual knowledge, that is.
To this day, system admins scoff at GUI’s. The admins that run the web’s massive servers prefer to work at the command line.
Has Armstrong disclosed which development tools he used? If not, then why not? Because there weren’t any?
Matt
Matt,
>>I guess you didn’t get the memo, but AI software from that era was a spectacular failure.
Maybe in your little part of the world. It really depends on who’s using it. Give it to a geek or a run-of-the-mill manager, you’ll get mediocre results. Give it to someone knowledgeable in the field, consult with a professor on the subject, get an expert statistician, hire a quality programmer, and you get quite accurate results. Neural net AI is much like multiple regression — it depends on the inputs and their time sequence.
Neural nets can be quite accurate on turning points; using it it at a Fortune 100 for production & sales forecasting, it puts out remarkable results. No GUI, either. Well, the results were imported into Excel, to make pretty pictures for senior & upper mgt.
>>When you write “he’d need an interface” above, you expose your ignorance. Every computer has an interface!
Every computer does. Not every program does. You fail to comprehend the difference.
You need to get out more, to see how USERS think, not programmers, analysts or admins.
You seem to have a hard time with the idea that Armstrong is NOT a techie or a geek. Your mistake is expecting him to behave as such.
>>Armstrong has claimed the equivalent of putting a man on the moon with a bottle rocket. It’s completely ridiculous.
HA! Hardly. A lot of heavy-lifting in the space program was done with slide-rules. No doubt many econometric models have been done that way, as well, before calculators and small computers. And modeling is the kind of work Armstrong does.
It’s not the computer OR the software. They are USELESS without a good model; the processing is secondary.
>>You put your data in files, you start your software from the command line, it outputs results to a file, or a printer, or right back to the terminal. Anybody knows that. Anybody with actual knowledge, that is.
Those type of decisions are probably just what Armstrong meant by “interface”. They slip off YOUR tongue since you’re a techie. He’s NOT, he’s an economist, historian and financial analyst.
The natural next step for a USER who does some programming or macros would be to take the next step — to make the work FAR easier, you’d use variables to interact with the operator of the program. A menu system, a way to store preferences, etc. All the things a programming geek would know, but anyone else would have to figure out from scratch.
A lawyer friend of mine got so ambitious after learning word processing, that he automated his entire practice with word-processing macros, saving himself and his secretary an enormous amount of time. He thought he could market it to the others in the profession, but needed some kind of central-control “gizmo” to take it to market.
He was educated, an experienced professional, but he had NO IDEA how to create an “interface”, didn’t even know that was the “techie” word. But he knew what he needed. Just no idea how to go about it, even after all the “programming” he did with macros.
–Johnathan
Johnathan,
I’m starting to think that you are Martin Armstrong himself. This is the exact kind of thing he would say:
“…you’d use variables to interact with the operator of the program.”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s hilarious and hugely entertaining, but it is solid proof that you have no idea what a variable is.
Keep ‘em coming!
Matt
>>This is the exact kind of thing he would say: “…you’d use variables to interact with the operator of the program.”
Of course it is — it’s exactly how a rudimentary menu system is constructed, with a INKEY loop in BASIC, back when. Your lack of experience is showing.
>>Don’t get me wrong, it’s hilarious and hugely entertaining, but it is solid proof that you have no idea what a variable is.
Only insofar as I started with paper-tape and moved through static, typecasting, dynamic pointers on the heap and OOP constructors & destructors.
Well, enough is enough. Your pretensions to of subjects like AI based on google-search, along with a geekish lack of social skills limits your capacity to understand others — a trait you’ve no doubt noticed about yourself. At any rate, there’s little purpose served in casting any more pearls before swine, so we’re done.
So long Martin!
P.S. Old-fashioned BS doesn’t work very well here on the web. I suggest you go over to Zero Hedge and study Tyler Durden to see how modern BS is constructed and delivered. You’re still driving the equivalent of a BS horse-and-buggy!
Note to non-technical readers: when I used the word “variable” above, I was referring to the word’s usage in the context of computer-programming languages. For example, you might say: “there are a lot of variables in the unemployment rate.” And that’s a perfectly fine usage. But when writing code, a variable is a name you give to chunk of memory. And it’s often the very first thing you do. You don’t write a program, and only add variables when it is time polish it up for other people to use, as Martin said. That’s just comical.