larry and sergey

martin and i were off to our bioinformatik I class, when we were assaulted by posters screaming at us to go instead to the main building of the ETH to hear larry page and sergey brin of google fame and fortune speak for an hour! not much can be done to turn down such an offer.

the room was so completely chock full that we could only just get through the door, and would have had to walk up a staircase full of people to actually see the stage. we figured we could still hear though, so stayed put. i was then rather nonplused at the group of students who then bustled right past me up the stairs, and was about to launch into some heavy scowling (swiss-style) before i realised that they were in fact da man. wow - i almost abused celebrity billionares.

the talk was not so exciting - basically a geeky, non-polished sales pitch to get computing and engineering students to apply for jobs with google. i'm actually amazed they feel they need to do press-the-flesh type shows, but i suppose it doesn't hurt their celebrityness. the most interesting comment they made was the dream of search engines morphing into artificial intelligence - if you could ask any question (of the web), and get an answer that was correct or at least 'intelligent', you're getting quite close to ai!