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MindForth

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

FAQ on this software's author.

From the Arthur T. Murray/Mentifex FAQ:

  1 Introduction


    1.1 What is the purpose of this FAQ?


   For nearly twenty years now, Arthur T. Murray has been posting
   messages to Usenet and the World Wide Web. Every so often, someone new
   stumbles upon his writings and posts a message asking what it's all
   about. This document is designed to answer these queries and to
   provide some background information on Murray for those who are
   interested.


   This FAQ is a public document available in several different formats,
   including PDF, HTML, and plain text. All versions are available for
   download at the following URL: [http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex](/http-www-nothingisreal-com-mentifex)


    1.2 Who is Arthur T. Murray and who or what is "Mentifex"?


   Arthur T. Murray, a.k.a. Mentifex, is a notorious kook who makes heavy
   use of the Internet to promote his theory of artificial intelligence
   (AI). His writing is characterized by illeism, name-dropping, frequent
   use of foreign expressions, crude ASCII diagrams, and what has been
   termed "obfuscatory technobabble".


   Murray is the author of software which he claims has produced an
   "artificial mind" and has "solved AI". He has also produced a
   vanity-published book which he touts as a textbook for teaching AI.


    1.3 What are Arthur T. Murray's AI credentials?


   None of which to speak.


   Murray claims to have received a Bachelor's degree in Greek and Latin
   from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1968 [24]. He has no
   formal training in computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience,
   linguistics, nor any other field of study even tangentially related to
   AI or cognition. He works as a night auditor at a small Seattle hotel
   [3, p. 25] and is not affiliated with any university or recognized
   research institution; he therefore styles himself an "independent
   scholar". Murray claims that his knowledge of AI comes from reading
   science fiction novels [39].


    1.4 What does Arthur T. Murray do?


   Murray is notorious for posting thousands of messages to Usenet
   promoting his AI software, book, websites, and theory. Most of these
   messages are massively cross-posted to off-topic newsgroups. Murray
   takes the mere mention of anything vaguely AI-related as an invitation
   to post a follow-up directing readers to his own work (e. g., [45]).
   He claims that people are "crying out" for repetition of his message
   [46].


   Murray also heavily promotes himself on public forums on the web.
   Message boards, private guestbooks, and collaborative encyclopedias
   are all considered fair game for the showcasing of Murray's ideas.
   Murray terms this activity "meme insertion"; most everyone else
   considers it to be spamming.


   Before he had regular access to the Internet, Murray used the US
   postal system to spread his ideas by mass-mailing prominent AI
   researchers, computing authors, and sometimes even entire university
   departments. He boasts that he mailed seven thousand letters in 1989
   alone [14].


   Murray has also been known to cause disruptions in person. In one
   notable example, he picketed the 2001 International Joint Conference
   on Artificial Intelligence [34, 35].