alternate universes

So I'm winding down slowly after a few weeks of writing, experiments, more writing and general academic high jinks. Unfortunately, most of the rest of my life had been put on hold while I was writing, so I now need to visit the bureaucratic internals of the Home Office and sort out things.

But enough of the domestic details already. Being somewhat interested in the area, I greeted news of Clusty (a slightly less than intuitive name for a search engine, but existing names aren't intuitive anyway) with moderate interest. Of course, Vivisimo was the underground search engine hit of the year for me; when most other eyes were focused here. Some other search engine links that I visit regularly, OneLook and Lexical Freenet. (By the way, lexfn is down for the moment). And finally, more of a lexical resource, but useful all the same, Web Wordnet.

And finally, something that occured to me while I was writing up: how do intelligent beings resolve paradoxes ? There was a Arthur C. Clarke short story on a remote meterological station which was locked down after being queried with a paradox (can't remember the title). Perhaps more intelligent language understanding engines also need some way of resolving deadlocked reasoning ... or like conventional process deadlocks, do they occur so infrequently as to not justify special cases ? Am I even making sense here ? Never mind.