My final year project is finished and handed in. It was inevitably a mad scramble in the last few days before the deadline and an exhausted anti-climax afterward. But now i’ve caught up on my sleep, i’d do it all over again.
Somewhere in those dark hours before dawn I did a bit of comfort shopping, in a few short minutes I spent two hundred quid on Amazon:
1 of: Computational Explorations in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating the Brain [Paperback]
By: James L. McClelland (Foreword), et al
£38.95
1 of: Bayesian Artificial Intelligence [Hardcover]
By: Kevin B. Korb, Ann E. Nicholson
£39.99
1 of: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience S.) [Paperback – 2nd Edition]
By: Mark H. Johnson
£24.99
1 of: Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation, and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems (Computational Neuroscience S.) [Paperback]
By: Chris Eliasmith, Charles H. Anderson
£18.70
1 of: Axiomatic [Paperback]
By: Greg Egan
£5.59
1 of: Imperial Blandings: “Pigs Have Wings”, “Full Moon”, “Service with a Smile” [Paperback]
By: P.G. Wodehouse
£8.39
1 of: The Jeeves Omnibus [Paperback]
By: P.G. Wodehouse, Bob Norrington (Illustrator)
£10.49
1 of: Teranesia [Paperback]
By: Greg Egan
£4.79
1 of: Neural Networks and the Financial Markets: Predicting, Combining and Portfolio Optimisation (Perspectives in Neural Computing S.) [Paperback]
By: Jimmy Shadbolt (Editor), John G. Taylor (Editor)
£52.90 (ouch)
At least that was my original order. Amazon do make it so easy to click this, then that and run up a big bill for more books than you’d be able to carry to the tills in Waterstones. But you don’t get instant gratification. My order was due to be dispatched in 6-8 weeks.
Fiddling round with it I discovered it was being held up by the NN & Markets books, since when they say “Group my items into as few deliveries as possible” they mean “one delivery” (can’t fault their logic). But if I changed the options there’d be £20 p&p to pay.
Since all orders over £19 have few delivery I thought I’d outwit the system by removing the Shadbolt and ordering it seperately. I removed it and expected delivery time when down to 7-10 days. I had outwitted them or so I thought until I tried to reorder it. The price had gone up to £69 pounds PLUS a £1.99 fee because it was hard to find.
Which was too hard to bear, so for the moment at least, the financial markets are safe from my artificial intelligence.