artificial intelligence?

[Terry Reedy]

"Istvan Albert" <ialbert at mailblocks.com> wrote in message
news:7ZCdnQAI0aeAo8-iU-KYuA at giganews.com...
> Arthur wrote:
> > """
> > Dear Amazon.com Customer,
> >
> > We've noticed that customers who have purchased books by Mark Lutz
often
> > enjoy the books of Sedi 200. So you might like to know that Sedi
200's
> > newest book, Earth's Core and Lower Mantle (Fluid Mechanics of
Astrophysics
> > and Geophysics, V.11),
> >
> > """
> >
> > Sure read my  mind, didn't they?
> >
> > Any theories on how the Amazon.com AI machine got this far off
track?
>
> The way I interpret this is that your tastes are similar to those
> of "Sedi 200". This user's latest purchase was a geophysics books.

> Discovering so called "serendipitous" items, items that cannot
> be related with classical  methods (say content or author) yet
> are very desirable to the consumer is the holy
> grail of personalization. As the example above shows it
> can go totally gaga.

Really.  SEDI is the acronym of the symposium (7th) that this is the
proceedings of.  The Sedi 200 would be the participants listed
collectively as authors.  There are also 5 individual humans listed
(as editors).  Maybe there was some notice about using Python in
geophysic and the symposium book in one journal, so there was a sudden
spat of, say, three people who bought both.  (The SEDI book is $120 so
Mark's book would look cheap by comparison.

Terry J. Reedy