Fugato

I came across an interesting quotation this morning:

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.

— Harry S. Truman, in a speech from the White House, Aug 9, 1945.

Hiroshima, of course, was not a military base, and rather a lot of civilians were killed.

It seems completely pointless to attempt to lie to the nation and the world that Hiroshima was a military base. When politicians lie, they generally lie about something that’s not so easy to disprove. This was an untruth that was hardly going to stay hidden for long. So I find it hard to believe that Truman was lying.

Yet it is even harder to believe that he didn’t know, when he ordered the use of the bomb, what it was that they were going to drop it on. He couldn’t have really believed that Hiroshima was a military base and that this choice of target “avoided, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Especially since the Nagasaki bomb had been dropped, too, by the time he gave this speech. And he couldn’t have ordered these bombings in an off-hand manner, as in “oh, drop’em wherever you want.” Not for the first use of the atomic bomb. No way.

So what the heck was that remark in his speech all about? Was it a lie, or a sign of monumental incompetence? Or something else?

I don’t know. But reportedly he kept on calling Hiroshima and Nagasaki military bases — and for the rest of his life he maintained that he had no regrets and would not hesitate to order the use of the A-bomb again.

I tend to see some sense in Leo Szilard’s victors-write-the-history-books comment:

Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?

The game of twenty questions is an old one. Alice thinks of a thing or a person or a concept, and Bob tries to guess what it is, by asking yes/no questions. If Bob can get it right in 20 questions or less, he wins. Else Alice wins.

You can now play this game versus a computer program that does surprisingly well. I just tried it out. I thought of an anvil, and the program got it right in 19 questions — even though I answered six of those questions differently from how the program thinks they should be answered for an anvil. After correctly guessing my object, here’s what the program said:

You said it is classified as Mineral, I say Other.
Can you make money by selling it? You said Probably, I say No.
Can you lift it? You said Probably, I say No.
Would you find it on a farm? You said Doubtful, I say Yes.
Is it a synthetic material? You said Unknown, I say No.
Is it shiny? You said Maybe, I say No.

It then added this tidbit:

It does not matter if our answers disagree, as over time the game will change its answers to reflect common knowledge. If you feel that the game is in error, the only way to fix it is to play again.

This, of course, is how humans learn too. Getting a computer to learn the same way, with the degree of success demonstrated at 20q.net, seems pretty impressive to me.

I am sooo simple.

This just made me happy: 20 reasons why you shouldn’t post your picture on the internet.