Amidst Madness

At first, he looked at her with an utter lack of curiosity. It wasn't his fault, it was never his fault, curiosity had forsaken him, purely out of spite, when he stopped needing it. As one would know, our feelings are quite needy of being needed. However, the very moment he could see behind her eyes, he felt what he was not used to. He could tell who he was looking at, but he could not recall who it was, looking at him. Now you would think he was perturbed but he was not. It was not his style. Yet, curiosity was back, right where it used to be. He gave it a warm cushion to sit on, where it sat in that annoying illuminated void inside his head, still hopeful, but he was cruel as ever. He too sat there quietly, and it had to leave again, disappointed but not surprised. 

Mirasan chuckled: 'So, this is the bodhi tree?' It wasn't really a question but he answered anyway. 'No, I don't believe so. I would have known if it could bestow any wisdom'. 

'Sit down, and see for your self.' His expression was always deadpan, though he never meant it. She laughed, 'I didn't think you would still have a sense of humor'.

'Ah! my dear, life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.', he said with the tiniest of twinkles in his eyes. 'Don't you miss being him?', she asked him teasingly. 'If I could, I would miss them all but I am here, and cannot be anywhere and anymore'. He hesitated just for the briefest time, 'but in that time, at that place, I was so obsessed with telling the world, all the truths of this world that I believed I knew, and that I was quite fond of myself.' The twinkle was there again.

While he sat there under the peepal, with every breath that was ever taken caressing his skin. His ears fondly hearing every laughter, every cry and every sigh that was ever uttered. His eyes, gazing into the universe laying bare all around him with all of its energies heaving slowly all of its fragments in those silent little circles. He knew nothing for there was only nothing to know. He smiled, a bit inwardly, as he would, and in that moment of moments in his heart of hearts, he felt content. It was right then when it came. It didn’t thunder, the earth didn’t shake, he himself didn’t tremble but he should have, at least.

It doesn’t. So far, all that is sold in the name of AI has very little to with intelligence and mostly to do with non-linear approximations over increasingly humongous data spaces. It doesn’t know, it never does. It is always the sum of all fundamentals without any attempt to understand even one of them.

So here is an idea, let it understand just one. What if it can tell from two images containing one 2D shape each, just the fact, if they are the same or different. Just that. Regardless of the rotation, translation and/or scale.

Seems simple enough, can be done through procedural shapes with a minimally sized network that is made to learn just these transformations and nothing else. Afterwards, it should be able to tell at least as well as we can, for any unseen shape. 

Or maybe it can be broken down further... and then brought up together where it not only determines if it is the same shape but also explain why is it so.