It looks pretty darn good to me! (I am much more computer geek than photo expert and use my computer mostly for cataloging with LrC than I do for photo editing. Lightroom has enough editing capability for my needs.)

Getting it from Costco probably prohibits you from customizing the configuration. However, if you can customize, I would recommend the following changes (note that none are essential):
1. Use only SSD disk drives, e.g., go to 2 TB SSD and eliminate the rotating drive. Can you configure this computer so that the SSD is the "boot" (startup) drive? That will give you much faster logins.
2. Increase the video card memory to 8 GB
3. Get Windows 10 (Windows 11 was just released, you might not want to be a tester!)

If you want to be able to read/write CD ROMs or DVDs you will need an optical drive, but cheap ones that work through USB are readily available.

Thanks, Hugh

Taken on trip to Frisco in the Outer Banks with my DJI Mini 2. On the left is the Atlantic and on the right is Pamlico Sound. The houses in the forefront are the west edge of Frisco and the houses in the distance make up the town of Hatteras.

The dunes along the left (the lumpy vegetated bumps along the beach) were man made by the WPA during the Depression (in 1933 or so). There are natural dunes in some places of the Outer Banks, the most notable being Jockey's Ridge and the nearby dunes from which the Wright Brothers launched their flights.

The road is NC Highway 12 that runs the length (148 miles) of the Outer Banks and includes several ferry crossings. The town of Hatteras, in the distance, is at the end of Hatteras Island and to continue from there by Ferry to the Island of Ocracoke where NC 12 continues takes about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on conditions and not including the hour (or more) wait for the ferry.

The picture was post processed in Photos.Google by the Google Assistant and suggested as an enhancement.

(Download)

I’ll begin by accepting, for now, your premise, that Logic Theorist (LT) was essentially a search algorithm. It seems to me that your conclusion, that this is not human creativity, may be non sequitur. It is quite possible that search is a large, even major, part of intelligence and creativity. First, there is the statement, purportedly Edison’s, that “invention was 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration”. Similarly, many of the contestants on Shark Tank mention the many product iterations they went through to come up with a final recipe or consumer gadget. Those statements all imply that some form of search is part of the creative process.

Earlier in this thread there were several posts that talked about how some people solve problems while they sleep, waking up to an “aha” moment. This is not a universal phenomenon. There are some geniuses who have reported that kind of thinking, but there are others who have said they don’t have that experience. A very informative discussion of genius creativity (and the role of sleep) can be found in a book “The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field” by Jacques Hadamard published in 1944 ( http://worrydream.com/refs/Hadamard%20-%20The%20psychology%20of%20invention%20in%20the%20mathematical%20field.pdf)

A reasonable hypothesis suggests itself – when we sleep our brain is far less busy processing sensory stimuli. Perhaps this frees it to carry out more extensive searches, leading to the aha moment.

Moving to the larger question, can AI be creative? For example, can AI compose music? Well it has! Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv9W7qrYhbk which plays two short pieces, one composed by Bach the other by an AI program that learned from Bach's compositions how to compose like Bach. It turns out that AI musical composition and performance is already a rich area with lots of interesting results. Ditto for AI creations in other fine arts.

Returning, finally, to the premise that LT was a search algorithm. Since LT employed backtracking, to that extent I would have to agree as backtracking implies trying out different branches in a search tree. However, it most certainly did not try “every possible combination.” That would not have been possible with the computers of the late 1950’s! So there are other aspects to it, including how the branches in the search tree are generated and also the heuristics employed by LT to eliminate many of the “possible combinations”. The heuristics were intentionally modeled by Newell et al to mimic what they thought might be the human problem-solving process, namely, to hypothesize intermediate steps that, if successful, could be incorporated into a proof. For example, let’s say I’m trying to prove assertion A from a set of axioms, X. The proof, if I can find it, might be to generate a sequence of statements, each following from the preceding statement by applying one or more of the axioms in X. So my proof would be in the form of a series of statements B, C, D, E… A, where the starting point B is one of the axioms in X, C is proved by applying one of the axioms in X to B, etc., and the final statement is A, thereby proving A. LT uses this framework by generating a likely intermediate statement, say D, and then looking for, first, a proof that will prove A from D and then, second, looking for a proof that will prove D from B. The two proofs together, then prove A.

By the way, I hope you can find the article you referred to as I would be very interested in reading it.

A little more history. "Deep learning" is a recent relabeling of "neural networks". The term "deep" might have been coined to emphasize that the neural networks being described were much deeper (had many more layers) than previously.

The idea of Neural Networks goes back to the late 1940's but most early work dates back to the late 1950's. At that time, neural networks were very simple, constrained to a single layer. The idea of multi-layer networks was still in the future. In 1969, Minsky and Papert, two of the best known AI researchers at that time, published a book in which they showed that a neural network could never model certain non-linear relationships, rendering them useless except for the discovery of linear relationships.

Publication of the Minsky-Papert book killed almost all research into the development of neural networks. After all, the experts had deemed it a dead end. (Remember this the next time you encounter somebody who argues, "but the experts say...")

It wasn't until almost 15 years later that several researchers developed a backpropagation algorithm that, most importantly, made multi-layer neural networks possible. Backprop was an algorithm whereby a multi-layer network could learn. Once you have at least two layers in a neural network, it is no longer hamstrung by the linearity constraint (stated by Minsky and Papert) and as a result such neural networks are capable of modeling very complicated relationships.

What we have today, relabeled as "deep learning" is a neural network with many layers.

That is clearly not true. My prior post wrto Logic Theorist (the first AI program created in 1956) mentions that this program came up with a new proof, never before published, for one of the theorems in Principia Mathematica.

A field that saw its first results in the 1950's (Newell, Simon and Shaw - "Logic Theorist"; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist) cannot be thought of as "in its infancy". It may still have a long way to go, but AI has already seen a lot of progress since Newell and Simon's breakthrough.

Logic Theorist was a program that developed proofs of a majority of the theorems in Whitehead & Russel's "Principia Mathematica" including at least one proof considered more elegant than other known proofs. (See the Wikipedia article for more information.)

I have two Roku devices and have never experienced a problem with either. The older one, about 4 years old, is connected to a receiver and from there to the TV all via HDMI. All devices are hidden from sight in my basement and controlled with a Harmony remote and/or with Amazon Alexa.

The newer one is a stick and connects directly to the TV HDMI.

Well, based on my personal experience, you can do both without incident. Listen to your guide. If he says it's ok, then do it. My guide chose the camel ride and it was an unforgettable experience with some nice photos taken by the camel wrangler. Ditto for the kid who took some humorous snaps with my phone that made it look like we were holding up the pyramids during the nightly son et lumiere. Both were done at pre negotiated prices and overseen by our guide.

I was in Egypt 2.5 years ago and a sudden but small sandstorm in Giza wiped out my zoom. So, be prepared with a protective bag.

I don't understand why you need two devices. I have a Roku and one of the choices in the main menu is Amazon Prime.

That was a technical problem.

However, Facebook is in the hot seat from both left and right sides of the aisle. If you compare Facebook (and Twitter, et al) to the telephone company a standout difference is that the phone company does not listen (unless there is a warrant) to what is said. If Facebook could not to see (or simply ignored) what users post, then many of Facebook's troubles would not have materialized. There would have been no censoring or tagging of posts as misleading or incorrect, there would have been no collection of information that makes people feel threatened, there would have been no trend to creating self reinforcing islands of opinion. Of course that would also have required a different business model.

I’ve had several pre and post presidential term contacts. In the late nineties and early naughts I commuted regularly on the Amtrak Metroliner between Philadelphia and D.C. Senators Joe Biden and Arlen Specter were regulars and even though from opposite parties always sat together and appeared to greatly enjoy each other’s company. Specter would board in Phildelphia, and then Biden would join him in Wilmington.

Later, after Bill Clinton was no longer President and shortly after he and Hillary had moved to New York, he boarded the train in DC and went to the car in front of mine. About 30 minutes after the train left DC there was a commotion at the front of the car (I was sitting near the back). Over the next 20 or so minutes, Clinton “worked” the car, stopping at each seat and briefly chatting with each passenger. He appeared to be greatly enjoying himself. About a half hour after he had finished our car, and presumably had done the same in the next car behind, he came back. As he reached the back of my seat his phone rang and he stopped to answer it. I couldn’t help but overhear his end of it, which included “I’m afraid I can’t, Hillary is making me go to a fund raiser that evening.” This was when she was running for Senate from New York.

Also in DC I was having dinner in the Willard, when Benjamin Netanyahu, then prime minister of Israel, walked by our table and briefly stopped to say hello when he saw we recognized him.

Both Clinton and Netanyahu were accompanied by small (two man) security details, but Biden and Specter never had security.

I don’t have a free recommendation, but I get 2 TB on Google for around $100 per year. Or, get Microsoft Office 365 family plan also about $100 per year which includes 6 TB on OneDrive. The latter comes in one TB chunks (6 times). For photography and sharing, I like Google better, but the differences are minor.

So far no one has mentioned ergonomics. I find it physically much easier to take pictures with my camera than with my phone. Whenever I have both with me, I use the camera. When I don't have the camera at hand, then I use the phone.