Bill Dembski – Freedom, Technology, Education

Only the educated are free — Epictetus

Artificial Intelligence

Breaking ChatGPT: Its Inability to Find Patterns in Numerical Sequences

Here’s a sequence of numbers: 2,4,6,8,10,12,… What’s the next number in the sequence? Obviously 14. That one was simple. But what if we make finding the pattern more difficult? It turns out ChatGPT has serious difficulties with numerical patterns. The…

Bill Dembski
May 27, 2023

Intelligent Design

James Tour Debates David Farina (aka “Professor Dave”)

Yesterday (May 19, 2023), Rice University professor James Tour “debated” (I use that word advisedly) YouTube personality and influencer David Farina (known as “Professor Dave”). The question up for discussion was “Are we clueless about the origin of life?” Tour…

Bill Dembski
May 20, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Breaking Google Bard

I’ve finally started playing around with Google Bard. With self-referential sentences, it seems even more at sea than ChatGPT. Here is an exchange from 5/18/23: Me: Consider the following six sentences: This is the first sentence. Ignore this sentence. Why…

Bill Dembski
May 18, 2023

Intelligent Design

The Design Inference, 2nd Edition, 25th Anniversary Edition

The second edition of The Design Inference will be out in September 2023, exactly 25 years to the month after the first edition appeared in print. Below is the table of contents for the new edition. I was the solo…

Bill Dembski
May 11, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

Getting ChatGPT to Lay Aside Biases

A concern about ChatGPT is that its training data may include a lot of information that is false or biased. As one colleague of mine puts it, “No one is curating the internet.” It might seem, then, that endless duplication…

Bill Dembski
May 10, 2023

Baseball, Sports

The Pitching Wisdom of Fergie Jenkins

Ferguson Jenkins, or “Fergie,” is not just one of baseball’s greats, but one of baseball’s Hall of Fame’s greats. He is the last pitcher to have achieved seven twenty-or-more-win seasons. Fergie’s “dream season” came in 1971, when he had an…

Bill Dembski
May 9, 2023

Artificial Intelligence

How to Break ChatGPT

Over the last several months I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, first version 3 and now version 4. It’s impressive and it can answer many questions accurately (though sometimes it just makes stuff up). One problem it has consistently displayed, and…

Bill Dembski
May 8, 2023

Theology and Religion

The Faces of Miracles

Introduction to The Faces of Miracles

Most books on miracles reach one of three conclusions: Miracles happen. Miracles don’t happen. Miracles can’t happen. This book takes a different tack. Rather than settle the existence or nonexistence of miracles, we ask why we’re talking about miracles in…

Bill Dembski
January 17, 2023

Education

Speed Reading Prospects and Pitfalls —An Interview with Marc Slater

Marc Slater is an entrepreneur, a computer programmer, and the CEO of eReflect, which makes software packages to help students improve their study skills. Marc’s team has developed software to improve students’ vocabulary, spelling, typing, and reading. This interview focuses…

Bill Dembski
September 3, 2022

Intelligent Design

Jason Rosenhouse’s Whoppers: More Guidance on Reading Rosenhouse

1 Background Jason Rosenhouse wrote a book of over 90,000 word for Cambridge University Press, which was released in May 2022 and titled The Failures of Mathematical Anti-Evolutionism. I wrote an 18,000-word review here on this blog that appeared in…

Bill Dembski
August 26, 2022