Potential Project Title: Connecting the dots

(A bot that tries to understand AI)

Medium: Physical print or Digital website

In 1950 Turing said: ‘Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s?

I want to build a web crawler that begins by searching for research paper titles including the words “Nature” and “AI”. The crawler finds the first result and writes/prints that title on a large blank page. The crawler then proceeds to search for another paper including a random keyword from the previous paper’s title + the keyword “AI”. This new title is written at another random location in the page. Like this the crawler builds a chain and keeps writing titles, each one borrowing a word from the previous one. The word “AI” is always added to each search to ensure the papers are about AI.

During this search and writing cycle, the crawler will pause every few minutes or so to see if a word has been repeated more than once. If yes, then it will draw a line connecting those two words. It’ll then resume searching, write titles, and pause again to find connections, and so the process continues.

When looking at the page as a whole/at a glance, I want to illustrate the network created and how it is a demonstration of a bot trying to understand what AI is, what does it entail, how can it be explained by other things familiar to us in nature, etc.

It will look messy, but it is the experience I’m trying to achieve as people see how a bot struggles or takes time to make sense of AI.

It is inspired by trying to have an impact on people by showing them the connection between nature and AI, express the theme of learning by an artificial entity, how it goes about understanding itself and the world around it, etc.