Chichester Skeptics in the Pub

Join Chichester Skeptics in the Pub at 19.30 on Tuesday 21st January to hear from Dr Allan Tucker on ‘Artificial Intelligence: Should We Fear the Rise of the Machines?’.

Artificial Intelligence has been a staple of popular culture for generations, from promises of a Leisure Age when robots would do all of our work while we lived in luxury to scare stories where robots turn against their owners. Dr Tucker will look at some of the key figures in AI during the last century through to the state-of-the art learning machines that are all around us today. He will also ask whether we will ever really have intelligent machines that are comparable to humans.

Dr Allan Tucker is a reader in computer science at Brunel University London. His research focuses on designing algorithms that can learn models from data to aid the understanding and prediction of important events (such as disease onset from clinical data and ecological changes in environmental data). He collaborates widely and has current projects with NHS Digital, the Zoological Society of London, and Moorfields Eye Hospital.

All are welcome — we look forward to an engaging and informative evening. Entry is £5.

Join Chichester Skeptics in the Pub at 19.30 on Tuesday 18th February to hear from Jason Thompson on ‘One Small Step: Moon Landing Conspiracy Theories’.

In 1969 Neil Armstrong made 'one small step' into the history books, and eleven other men followed in his footsteps. Fifty years later, there are still some who believe the whole affair to be a conspiracy to fool the world into only believing we had been there. What evidence do they claim for this belief, and why should anyone wish to cast doubt on such a momentous achievement? Join us for an investigation into these questions and more.

Jason has been a member of the Ashford Astronomical Society for ten years and a keen amateur astronomer and student of the history of space flight for even longer. He became Chair of the society on the tenth anniversary of his membership. He has given talks to astronomical societies, schools, and other institutions. Outside the society he works in the diagnostics industry, supplying health tests to hospitals and laboratories.

All are welcome — we look forward to an engaging and informative evening. Entry is £5.

Join Chichester Skeptics in the Pub at 19.30 on Tuesday 17th March to hear from Dr. Matt L. Tompkins on ‘Genuine Fake Miracles: The Science of Magic and Illusion’.

Is seeing believing? Is believing seeing? How can we hope to conduct experiments on things that only exist within our minds? This talk will feature a mixture of historical storytelling and magical scientific demonstrations to explore how scientists, past and present, have approached the study of illusion.

Matt will discuss how magic played a weird but fundamental role in the establishment of psychology as a scientific discipline, and how he and other contemporary researchers have been using magic tricks to create new experiments in order to investigate human memory, perception, and reasoning.

Dr. Matt L. Tompkins is a magician and experimental psychologist. He recently completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford, and he is the first member of the Magic Circle to have been admitted on the basis of a scientific publication. His new book ‘The Spectacle of Illusion’ explores the relationships between scientific researchers, magicians, and fraudulent mystics.

All are welcome — we look forward to an engaging and informative evening. Entry is £5.