Homework 8

HW8

1.         As discussed in the lectures that followed we mentioned that the movie depicted a worst case scenario. Personally I do not believe it will end up being that bad. The most significant difference I see between the depiction and reality will be the climate  and terrain changes. It could simply be because I do not have a thorough understanding of how Earth’s climate works. I do for-see a major problem occurring that could bring about huge changes in people’s quality of life worldwide. That is energy consumption. Currently people are using more energy day in and day out, however, we do not have a fully renewable energy source that is cheap enough to produce for the masses. If oil tycoons continue to control the energy market, than transportation and daily living expenses will increase until one of two things occurs. The first, people will simply not be able to afford it or blackouts will start occurring.  On the other hand, and more probable…. They will spend some of their money to develop alternate energy sources that will still make people dependent on them, and continue to let society propel forward.

2.           Since I could not come up with anything noteworthy relating to Earth 2100, I decided to write about my recent update to the software. Originally the program took an input of a String[] representing a sentence and converted every piece of the array to a number between 0 and 1. It would then pass it into the neural network / tree structure and output which words were the key parts: type, sub-type, statistic, statistic dimension. Once I finalize this particular method I have developed a second type of method that I think will be more promising. You take the same steps except the input is going to be a float[] of words representing several sentences (maybe 3-4, I don’t know what the right number is)  and the output would be facts consisting of potentially the following key parts: type, subtype, context/verb, dimension. This will allow the program to better deal with anaphora between the sentences. This will result in the users being able to further understand the context from the database of facts.