MISPWOSO
Created | Updated Oct 24, 2002
The Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious
"Anything that thinks logically can be fooled by something else that thinks at least as logically as it does. The easiest way to fool a completely logical robot is to feed it with the same stimulus sequence over and over again so it gets locked in a loop. This was best demonstrated by the famous Herring Sandwich experiments conducted millennia ago at MISPWOSO (the MaxiMegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious).A robot was programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches. This was actually the most difficult part of the whole experiment. Once the robot had been programmed to believe that it liked herring sandwiches, a herring sandwich was placed in front of it. Where upon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich! I like herring sandwiches.
It would then bend over and scoop up the herring sandwich in its herring sandwich scoop, and then straighten up again. Unfortunately for the robot, it was fashioned in such a way that the action of straightening up caused the herring sandwich to slip straight back off its herring sandwich scoop and fall on to the floor in front of the robot. Whereupon the robot thought to itself, Ah! A herring sandwich...etc., and repeated the same action over and over again. The only thing that prevented the herring sandwich from getting bored with the whole damn business and crawling off in search of other ways of passing the time was that the herring sandwich, being just a bit of dead fish between a couple of slices of bread, was marginally less alert to what was going on than was the robot."Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams.
When I first read this passage of the book i didnt really understand wot Douglas Adams really meant.
Then explanations became to become apparent and I realised that he was talking about Life. Life is full of those little things that take an age to work out, but are really obvious when you finally do work it out.
Have you got any examples of things that have happened to you (maybe not quite as...dramatic as the one above, but still...). Maybe you still havent worked it out.
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