Hasta La Ideas

When people projected that in the future we’d have robots doing our shopping for us, this is probably not what they had in mind. Massachusetts-based programmer Darius Kazemi has created, as a lark, “a bot that randomly buys me crap on Amazon and mails it to me.”

Kazemi coded up the Amazon Random Shopper and gave it its own Amazon account, to which he feeds gift cards (as a basic way to install spending limits). The bot then accesses the Wordnik API (that’s Application Programming Interface, not Academic Performance Index; it means source code that software uses to talk with other software) to pull a random word out of the ether. Next it trawls Amazon and buys the first object that matches both the word and is under budget.

This week his first two objects arrived in the mail. The first was Noam Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics, the popular beach-reading thriller that links Rene Descartes’ Enlightenment-era linguistic theory to the Romanticist ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt. (I hear Michael Bay has snapped up the movie rights, and I smell an action franchise.)

The second object, pictured below, held a bit more mystery:

From the back of the CD cover I could tell it was from Sweden and printed in 1999. But what kind of music? I had no way of knowing, so I popped it in a CD player in my car.

Let me tell you: the tension was palpable. It is not often that I get a CD where I have no idea what’s on it, and can’t even make good inferences from the cover.

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