News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? by mojuba on Saturday January 19, 2008 @04:01PM (#101009)
We may be confusing cause and effect here. It's their insanity (actually inferiority complexes) that makes them take over infinitely hard problems when one gets all or nothing - more often the latter.

This also reminds of Dangerous Knowledge (can't find it on Google Video anymore)

Re:Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? by pchivers on Saturday January 19, 2008 @04:26PM (#101018)
It seems that Dangerous Knowledge was taken down from Google Video. Here is a link to the BBC page:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/dangerou...

"In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide."

Re:Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? by mojuba on Saturday January 19, 2008 @04:55PM (#101029)
"which tragically drove them insane" - here's where the error lies. The film mentions that Cantor heard "voices" even before he got interested in mathematics, so it's not his genius that drove him insane, but rather the other way around. Cantor, Boltzman, Godel and Turing were among the few successful insane scientists.