Film Studies Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Film Studies - Essay Example The film Amelie begins with an omniscient narrator detailing the likes and dislikes of Amelie’s parents providing insight into Amelie’s formative childhood that led to her introspective personality. Both parents eschew touching. For example, the father hates his swimming costume sticking to his legs and the mother hates when someone brushes her hand. Although the child-Amelie craves physical affection, her father only touches her once a month with his stethoscope during her check-up. Excited by this contact, Amelie’s heartbeat quickens causing her father to diagnose her with a heart condition that causes her to become home schooled by her neurotic mother. Amelie develops into an extraordinarily imaginative child whose only friend is a suicidal goldfish. Yet, Amelie is not simply a recluse; she shows a spark for something more in her life. She craves tactile pleasure eating raspberries from her fingertips, pulling â€Å"glue skin† from her finger, running h er finger around a wineglass top, or plunging her hand into a sack of beans. She also demonstrates an ability to feel her interconnectedness with society at large as well as a bit of fire for harmless revenge. When a nasty neighbor tricks Amelie into believing that her taking photographs lead to a car accident and other citywide accidents, she innately believes in her ability to connect with others in this unseen, spiritual way. Yet, once she realizes the neighbor’s trick, the cheeky Amelie revenges the avid football fan by unplugging his TV at pivotal match moments. Quite opposite to Amelie’s solitary upbringing, her future love Nino suffered a fate much like Oskar from Let The Right One In as classmates bully both. Of course, Nino’s bullying is slanted towards humor, yet Oskar’s world of isolation is far more detrimental, sad, and violent. Oskar’s divorced mother and father seem completely disconnected from their son. Oskar retreats into an imagi nary world where he is the tough bully threatening and debasing weaker boys. The film opens with the prepubescent Oskar standing shirtless holding a small knife commanding an unseen foe to â€Å"Squeal like a pig† (Lindqvist). Oskar is attempting to reverse the power relationship between himself and the bullies by inventing his own bully identity within the mirror image reflected in his apartment window. Of course, neither Oskar nor Amelie’s identities remain unchanged by their films’ conclusions. Within Amelie’s world, hearing the shocking report of Lady Diana’s death causes Amelie to drop a bottle top that nocks loose a tile revealing a long lost box of a child’s treasures. Frances notes â€Å"Princess Di, often referred to in the film†¦represented for the collective, heart values that lie in the shadow of cultures† (2003). Inspired to find the owner and become an agent of kindness, Amelie enters a manic world where characters drives plot and plot drives characters. Riding the maze-like subway, Amelie locates the owner, who is so touched by this anonymous gift that he vows to reconnect with his daughter to meet his grandson. Just as characters incite change within each other in Amelie’

AI Theory Article Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

AI Theory - Article Example Shannon, August 31, 1955: "We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it"2. Centuries before McCarthy coined the term AI, early traces of AI emergence can be found during the time of the ancient Greek Gods; the myths of golden robots created by a Greek God; Hephaestus3. The attempt to create AI could also be seen in the form of sacred statues worshipped in Egypt4 and Greece5. In medieval times, existence of AI was supported by claims made by alchemists e.g. Paracelsus created artificial beings6. Other examples of AI can be seen from the realistic clockwork imitations of human beings built by people like Yan Shi7, Hero of Alexandria8, Al-Jazari9 and Wolfgang von Kompelen10. AI was also present in famous modern fiction such as Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein and the film Artificial Intelligence:A.I. The modern history of AI includes the birth of computers that were intelligent enough to solve word problems in algebra, proving logical theorems and speaking English. The early 60s saw AI gaining popularity as evidenced by the generous fund provided by the US Department of Defense for AI research. The artificial research however met the doldrums in 1974 with funds on exploratory AI being cut off. The AI research was resuscitated in the early 80s with the commercial success of expert systems that applies knowledge and analytical skills of one or more human experts. By 1985 AI market reached the value of more than a billion dollars11. The AI market again fell into despair with the collapse of the Lisp Machine market in 198712. The highlight of AI success was in the 90s and early 21st century where it was widely used in the technology industry, providing the heavy lifting for logistics, data mining, medical diagnostics and many other areas13. The general theory for AI is mainly based on several characteristics found in normal human being such as deduction, reasoning, problem solving, knowledge representation, planning, motion and manipulation, and perception, amongst others. When solving puzzles, playing board games or make logical deductions a normal human being would go through the process of conscious and step-by-step reasoning14. These traits were successfully imitated through algorithms developed by early AI researchers. Nonetheless, AI researchers have yet to unravel the methods of replicating human traits in solving problems using unconscious reasoning. In order for the machines to solve problems, it needs extensive knowledge about the world e.g. objects, properties, categories and relations between objects15; situations, events, states and time16; causes and effect17. Most knowledge is difficult to be represented due to 3 reasons; default reasoning and the qualification problem, McCarthy [1969]18, unconscious know ledge and the breadth of common sense knowledge. In solving planning problems, the intelligent agent must have the ability of setting objective and achieving it19, thus it needs a way to visualize the future; i.e. having a representation of the state of the world and be able to make predictions about how their actions will change it. The