Oh I wish....

I can't stop thinking about this creativity machine stuff. I spent 3 more hours so far today scouring the internet for anything I can find on it. I have been reading some of Dr. Thaler's papers, news reports, other people's blogs. Apparently many of these neural networks of his are implemented in excel spreadsheets! I want so badly to be able to play around with this technology and see what I could do with it. I am hoping that I can extract enough information from his papers to perhaps try and emulate some of the things he has accomplished. Am I even allowed to do that since all his work is patented? I don't even know.....patent laws can be so confusing sometimes. I think I am ok to do stuff with it so long as I don't commercialize anything based on his concepts. I wonder if he would be willing to be a guest speaker at one of the meetings for the student chapter of ACM over here. It sucks so bad sometimes when you want to peek under the hood of something but you aren't allowed to or the chance to do so isn't available to you. There are so many open-source computer programs out there that I could look at and learn stuff from, but they are nowhere near as interesting to me as something like this. I don't want to look at the source code for firefox or linux, I want to look at the source files for one of these neural network implementations. Gah...