Muscle Memory

I think that's what they call it when you do routine things like walking and carrying stuff. A baby has to learn how to walk at first, but then it becomes automatic after awhile. I don't think you can teach a baby to walk, it has to learn by trial and error. I remember that I had a hard time trying to learn how to ride a bicycle with training wheels. One day another kid advised me to take the training wheels off and just get on there and peddle my ass off, and I learned almost instantly. I don't remember falling down, and you know what they say, "It's like riding a bicycle (or a horse). Once you fall off, you never forget." Years later I learned canoeing the same way. I had heard that canoes were tippy, but I read somewhere that most people have a natural sense of balance and all you have to do is let it tell you what to do, kind of like in the movie "Star Wars": "Use the force, Luke." Once I tried to tip my canoe on purpose to see how difficult it was to right it and get back in, and I had to try really hard to get it to tip over. Getting back in wasn't easy either, and I never tried it again.

A friend of mine borrowed my canoe one time to go duck hunting. We had gone out together before, but this time I had to work or something. He told me he had tipped over while shooting at a duck, and he believed that the recoil of his shotgun had caused it. Luckily he was good swimmer, and he and the canoe came home safely. I had shot lots of ducks on that same river from the same canoe, and I never had any trouble. The next time we were out there together, I asked him to re-enact the whole thing, assuring him that I could counterbalance any move he made. What had happened was the duck had flown towards him and passed directly overhead. He was actually leaning over backward when he fired his shotgun, which put his center of gravity outside the canoe. I was able to counterbalance, just barely, and we almost tipped over again. If I hadn't been in the boat with him, he would have lost it for sure. Since I had way more canoeing experience than he did, I think that, if it had been me, I wouldn't have leaned over backwards like that. My conditioned reflexes just wouldn't have allowed me to do it.

Some time ago, they had a computer on the TV game show "Jeopardy". It played against two of their all time champions, and it won handily. I don't know whether or not this one qualified as Artificial Intelligence. I seem to remember that somebody had programmed the computer to play the game. I think it worked by word association, identifying a short list of possible answers and then selecting the most probable one. It didn't get them all correct and, when it missed one, it was a really stupid mistake that few humans would make.