Aye I Longwhite: An American-Chinese teenager’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom and beyond Read Online Free Page B

in the rapids because of the power of the water or from catching a rock.  Second, even worse, your oar may get stuck under a rock and fling you out of the raft.  Third, the worst case, your stuck oar could flip the entire raft, risking not just your own safety but everyone else’s wellbeing.”
    I nodded, satisfied with the reasoning.
    “This is kind of like life,” he pontificated, now that he had a keen student.  “When things are calm, you should work hard to get to where you want to go.  But when things get crazy, and trust me they will, fight your natural instinct to work even harder.  Pull in your oars, have faith that you’ve done your best to get there, and ride out the rapids.”  He then tied it back to our Classics class with a quote from Lao Tzu:
    Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow.
    Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.
     
    That’s what I love about Mr. Smith.  He helps me understand the master Lao Tzu’s paradoxical quotes, which totally don’t make any sense in Classics class.
    Since my last Lao Tzu quote worked so well with Chang Lin, I tried again. 
    Anticipate the difficult
    by managing the easy.
     
    Mr. Smith looked at me appraisingly.  “Wise beyond your years, young Jedi.”  I think this compliment would’ve gone over the heads of my classmates, even if they were listening, but it made me feel all warm and squishy inside.
    So, I loved Mr. Smith’s class because I could exercise my shriveling “funny muscle” and because he wrapped life’s lessons in easy to understand stories.  But the best part of his class was that I could use my hands and move around.  All the other classes required us to sit like stones, recite back what the teacher said, accepting the lecture as gospel.  I remembered in the US, if the teacher made a mistake, the class would burst out laughing and the teacher would gamely continue on.  I actually reddened in shame at the thought of this happening in my new school.
    Mr. Smith’s class was different.  We were supposed to use our hands in MakerSpace.  MakerSpaces started out a long time ago as a playground within schools, basically a modernized version of “shop.”  But instead of learning how to drill, lathe and weld, the original MakerSpaces allowed students to play with “3D printers,” which were very new and expensive at the time.  Nowadays, everyone has one at home, and we just call them “printers.”  They make, or “print,” most utilitarian things needed at home.  If you want something beautiful or extremely durable, it’s still better to buy something mass-manufactured or even hand-built, but the printed items were fine for most basic things used on a daily basis.
    Mr. Smith made his MakerSpace focus on AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics.  There were tons of very clever robots out there, but they all approximated human intelligence; they didn’t pass the “Turing test.”  Mr. Smith shared this definition of the Turing test from the net :
    A test devised by the English mathematician  Alan M. Turing   to determine whether or not a computer can be said to think like a human brain.
     
    In an attempt to cut through the philosophical debate about how to define "thinking," Turing devised a subjective test to answer the question, "Can machines think?" and reasoned that if a computer acts, reacts and interacts like a sentient being, then call it sentient.
     
    The test is simple: a human interrogator is isolated and given the task of distinguishing between a human and a computer based on their replies to questions that the interrogator poses. After a series of tests are performed, the interrogator attempts to determine which subject is human and which is an artificial intelligence .
     
    The computer's success at thinking can be quantified by its probability of being misidentified as the human subject.
     
    We set