[ExI] Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty
...
>> ...eye-patch and green parrot on my shoulder pirate trolling the high
seas, aaarrrrrr ye scurvy dogs!

...

>...One idea comes to mind:  how aware are you of your internal state?

I got lucky on that one.  I have a program that comes with a lot of cheapy
computers these days, Chess Titans.  If I play fast, I am well matched with
Chess Titans on the top level (10.)   If I play at anything close to actual
tournament speeds, I win every game, but if I play fast, it is a good match.
I have had this for a couple years.  I figure if I start to slip mentally, I
will start losing more than winning against Titans on 10.  I may keep this
computer long after it is obsolete, just because it provides a good
benchmark of my current mental skills.

Something I was thinking about when I was fooling with an artificial
intelligence class from Stanford last fall: we could perhaps develop
software which takes text that we wrote at various points in our lives, and
somehow figures out if we are declining or getting smarter.  It could take
into account sentence structure and complexity for instance, but not
spelling, since we now have autocorrect.  

I think we can almost do this now.  I have samples of my own writing dating
back to about 1989 in ASCII format.  Theory: my own writing is less annoying
now than it was 15 yrs ago.  {8^D


>...  If you have some sense of a personality checksum or some means of
determining the distance you have deviated from your baseline self - you
might be able to sense changes caused by experimentation...

Coding is a good way to create a personality checksum.  Last week I rewrote
some code to solve Sudoku puzzles.  I don't know why exactly, but about 8
yrs ago I somehow discovered a faster algorithm than the one I am using now.
I haven't yet remembered how the heck I was doing that back then, but I will
find it again perhaps.  The code this time is waaay more compact than what I
had then, but slower.

Writing code is good for the brain.

Thanks Mike, I see from your comments that you have been reading my posts.
{8-]

spike