Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Samsung, washing machines for today's computer scientist

So I got my washing machine yesterday. Yay! Clean clothes! Everyone loves clean clothes. I plugged it in, when I turn it on it plays a little song and when it turns off it plays another little song. It has settings galore and pre determined wash cycles. It's pretty cool. But I was reading the manual yesterday (yes I read the manual for everything) and it went on and on about fuzzy logic and the wash cycles. Darrell pointed out that a normal person would not know what that is. I didn't even give it a second thought at first. Fuzzy logic is used alot in artificial intelligence, and its techniques are the basis of Prologue. But to someone who just bought a washing machine who isn't a computer scientist, they'd be just downright confused. Then it dawned on me that it probably was a computer scientist that wrote the manual. It read like something I would write, more the logic behind how to make something work than what it does and the user interface. Like when they make me write user documents at work, I'm so horrible at those. So some other poor computer scientist at Samsung probably got stuck with the same task. But all in all, I like my washing machine, it was obviously made for me.

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