G.Depardieu and B.Charles (as Asterix and Obelix) are Against

Just released isicad.ru No.104 of March, 2013 has a cover page presenting Mr.G.Depardieu and Mr. B.Charles who both seem to have  some troubles with a recent tax policy in France. The headline below says: “Asterix and Obelix are Against”. 

As for Mr. Charles, it is about his recent interview to Le Monde also retold and commented at isicad.ru.

My editorial of March is entitled "CAD and Artificial Intelligence".

After giving a link to a regular isicad monthly overview "Global CAD will Grow ThroughRussia", I present a COFES update: nine persons from Russia go to Arizona; 33 participants from of outside of Russia have by today registered for COFES Russia 2013 scheduled for the end of May.  

The main topic related to AI was inspired by a speculative paper "Industrial Artificial Intelligence Has Been Built in Russia" recently submitted to isicad.ru and rejected by our editorial board. Based on my long experience of working in internationally recognized Soviet and Russian AI research institutions, I explained the difference between interpretation of "computer intelligence" by common people and comparatively modest achievements in expert systems, automatic understanding of natural language, speech and image recognition and so on. By the way, note that in Russian language "intelligence" is something far beyond logical inference, reasoning and such things, it is something which is expected to be able to feel, to have intuition - i.e. in Russia, the words "artificial intelligence" are commonly understood strongly anthropomorphic...  

I can hardly translate my almost belletristic Russian text... Well, one remark I made is that as science and technology will probably be developing more and more intelligent systems, we cannot exclude that average level of the mankind intelligence will continue to be falling down; and in the long run, the Turing test may become meaningless...       

John McCarthy, the father of LISP, has spent much time in Novosibirsk...

Two days ago died John McCarthy. Wikipedia: "He was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and was the inventor of the Lisp programming language".

John had a close cooperation (I'd say - friendship) with the Informatics Department (later - Novosibirsk Institute of Informatics Systems - ISI). I believe that it was also due to John's influence that an AI lab has been organized at ISI - where I was working for a long time, made my PhD thesis, and much more... My University mate developed in Novosibirsk one of the first ever and best implementations of LISP: John McCarthy who spent much time in Novosibirsk has himself written a lot of tests for this implementation. The ISI archive contains many old photos, here is one of them: John McCarthy (41) - at a celebration of 10 years of Informatics Department:

Instritute of Informatics Systems