lmoml

I'd posit that the passing of substantial wealth and capital between generations is one of the chief drivers of social decay. In the long term, it causes an immense amount of power to devolve into the hands of a small group of people who have done nothing to prove that they have the wisdom necessary to wield such power for the benefit of humanity.

OP seemed to be referring to Normans. The whole cow (English) -> beef (French) is a classic linguistic example to cite with regard to them.

Agreed. Roman Republican ethics (2000+ years ago) held as a core value the idea that your legacy is more important than personal gain, and that just because you _can_ do a thing, that does not mean that it is best that you do it. Taking advantage of opportunities for personal gain at a net loss to society is childishly small-minded, and ignores the fact that the best elements of society were built by people doing the exact opposite because they had the wisdom to know that it was a more dignified way to conduct one's self in one's short window of existence.

Back when propaganda was first being developed as a field, particularly between the two World Wars, it was greeted with a great deal of excitement by the powers that be precisely for this reason: It provided a non-physical means of coercing the will of the masses. There is plenty of material from those days about the wonders of propaganda, that it would enable the ruling elite to guide the caprices of the people while avoiding physical conflict (win/win!). It was always a half-baked idea, and the other shoe dropped very quickly (Nazi Germany was very forward thinking in its use of propaganda), but nothing changed.

I doubt that you can remove all social inequality, and it seems throughout history there have always been people who have exerted their wills more in order to accomplish their ends in society. The deep issue that we face is that there is no ingrained morality. Imagine if wealth and power were viewed as a weighty responsibility rather than a privilege--as the holder is responsible for using it to accomplish what they will, the choice of what one does reflects the quality and worth of the person. That's the reality in any case, but imagine if that were universally ingrained as how we, as a society, defined success....

I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of Un Chien Andalou.

You know that scene, right at the very beginning, where an unseen person strops a razor before the famous slicing with it? Four strops are given four shots, alternating angle with side of the razor. The woman's eye is your own. This film with its technique will open up the metaphorical eye of your perception of it, suggesting unknown and even unknowable things.

Now, I won't argue that Dalí or Buñuel did or didn't achieve that. My knowledge of the subject is sparse in comparison to others'. But I would say that the opening scene (by itself) qualifies as one of the most sophisticated, novel and ambitious prologues/invocations humanity has generated. I'd further posit that that knowledge should raise one's priors for suspecting dense meaning in the rest of the work, knowing nothing else.

Edit/Afterword: I'd also argue that Lynch's absurdities and nonsense are not intended to frustrate the viewer, or if so it is only true inasmuch as frustration is a signal to loosen assumptions in terms of what you are watching--to parables and dreams have a deep logic to them, in that they use symbol and association to convey felt perceptions, understandings and beliefs.

I get that the complaint is that at some point people start replicating the form without being motivated by (what one perceives as) artistic genius. But that issue, of an initially straightforward and perspicuous intent generating works of great meaning which are in time stripped of their most attractive aesthetic attributes in culture's great scrapyard, is endogenous to this society of ours. It doesn't make those aesthetic qualities bad, and it certainly doesn't need to poison the value of their source (whether it does or not is up to the beholder). Yet it is understandably easy to grow jaded in a world where aesthetic competency is almost totally uncorrelated from rational/conceptual merit.

I'd consider NNs total overkill for this problem (though not if it were a more general problem of which this was just a test instance). Then I'd make my own hand-wavy assumptions about using any array of sensors (of which CCD, CMOS etc are all sophisticated forms) to first build a map + ideal path without the ball, then once the ball is in place to have a piece of software grab the lowest potential cell in each refresh window (smoothed by a low-weight decaying memory of past potentials) as the location of the ball, the potentials of the neighboring four cells as a heuristic for location within the cell, and adjust tilt accordingly to proceed along path.

edit: One of the points lotyrin touched on that I wanted to amplify is how one side-effect of technology advancing is that, when we must address them as users, small problems will likely get increasingly inefficient solutions because our omnitool is so much more powerful than needed.

If I were doing this today, I'd probably use OpenCV and load a package that manages the de-warping of the camera's image, the grabbing of features from the maze, and the smoothed ball center location. Much like in olden times I'd use that to adjust the angle of the board for this refresh window, then proceed to the next one. In that sense the biggest difference between the modern approach and one in 1982 is how incredibly much has been encapsulated by folks over the last 30+ years. And in another 5 years or so, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find people implementing these simple tasks with NNs because NNs have by then become _so easy_ to throw at any given problem.