Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Who's Neil Parsons?

As I look out my office window I see the less than wonderful view of Telford shopping centre and Asda car park. Of course it has been nice and sunny recently, but in the middle of winter, when it gets dark so early, I could to see in bright lights "DE ENHAMS" and have a little chuckle....

In the early 1980's when I lived in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, my younger sister was training to be a physiotherapist and living in Heaton. One evening, when I went round to her place and we headed out with her mates along Chillingham Road for the Metro to go into town, she suddenly exclaimed "Who is Neil Parsons?" I burst out laughing and her mates looked at each other like we were totally weird. The thing is, they were used to seeing it every day so didn't notice it any more; but there in great big red neon letters on the factory in front of us was the sign "NEI PARSONS". Alas, it doesn't seem to exist any more, but it used to be a subsidiary of Northern Engineering Industries. Working in the application of Artificial Intelligence at the time, I thought that matching her reaction to the sign would be a great version of the Turing Test for machine intelligence.

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