Hey, travel geeks! We have just installed our Travel AI engine Ingeenee all over the Netherlands — so now you could start planning your road trips with Curiosio in the Netherlands.
You can set options for a round trip, destination, or a one-way trip with starting and finishing points. If there are any points or places you want to visit on the way, add them in. Then, set the number of travelers, dates of the journey, the car you’re using, the total budget, and the theme. The AI will give you multiple trip plans and routes for these options.
The trip plan includes an itinerary, and a map of your route, along with a day-wise breakdown of where you’ll be going and what you’ll be seeing. Each POI is clickable to find more information about it on English Wikipedia or Atlas Obscura or OpenStreetMap. There are easy shortcuts to copy the link to share it with co-travelers, print it out, or export it to Google Maps. Plan your next great Dutch adventure with Curiosio.
This post is a making story of the Curious Netherlands. How we approached it, and how we tested it ourselves before the public release.
It Was Dark
Everything was interrupted because of rashism-terrorism. Ukrainian critical infrastructure was systematically and heavily hit by cruise and ballistic missiles from Fall of 2022 till the Spring of 2023. Rashists tried to cause a nationwide unrecoverable blackout to force Ukrainians to surrender. It was doomed Dark.
In March 2023 we got relatively stable power so we decided to spin off machines to crunch some data to produce something useful for you. Curious Netherlands is the result. Imagine how much more could be done if not the Russian war against our country Ukraine #StandWithUkraine.
The Netherlands was selected as our next country because the Russo-Ukrainian War began in 2014. In July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 from from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down by Buk surface-to-air missile supplied by the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade and launched by Russian-controlled forces from Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine. 298 fatalities, over 200 (over two-thirds) were Dutch.
International Criminal Court
Four of the five principal organs are located at the main United Nations Headquarters on international territory in New York City, while the International Court of Justice aka ICJ is seated in The Hague in the Netherlands. We hope that the current Russian leaders, war criminals, civil criminals, and supporters of the war will be prosecuted by the ICJ, and that Rashism will be banned for centuries like Nazism was banned after the Nuremberg trials. We hope the UN will not repeat the fate of the League of Nations any time soon.
Justice. The ICJ is seated in the Peace Palace. If you are going to visit it there could be a curious road trip from the world order to the local disorder. The Hague was selected for International Law because there was a framework from the former proceedings. Two Hague Peace Conferences took place there 100+ years ago. Probably this rich experience helped Dutch and Belgians to settle and define the border in Baarle. The Dutch Baarle-Nassau contains 22 exclaves of the Belgian Baarle-Hertog :-O Only Cooch Behar could compete which that.
Here is a longer version of this trip starting in Amsterdam — Two Capitals, the World Courts, and the Big International Oddity. You will learn that there is another non-UN intergovernmental court.
Cultural Dutch Trips
Flowers. The Dutch are famous for the flower fields, glass houses, and flower auctions. A big portion of Dutch agricultural exports consists of fresh-cut plants, flowers, and flower bulbs, with the Netherlands exporting two-thirds of the world’s total. Some call their floriculture the world’s first economic bubble aka Tulipmania.
The fields are located between the two capitals — Amsterdam and The Hague. We took a travel story from National Geographic and made it interactive by geo-parsing its points, adding more points, and throwing them all onto the algorithm.
Here is another trip — revealed by Max Verstappen with the steering wheel in his hands — From Port to Zandvoort. Who could imagine the ruthless reigning Formula One champion knows shortcuts thru the flower fields?
Van Gogh. The Netherlands gave us Vincent van Gogh — a post-impressionist painter who became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history [alas only after his tragic death]. There is a web site in beta — Van Gogh Route. It is dedicated to discovery of the places where Vincent lived and worked. We got inspired by its collection, isolated the points to the Dutch only, threw them on the algorithm, and got an interactive trip plan.
There is a longer version of this trip — Van Gogh Big Loop from Amsterdam — which includes the points in Drenthe. Both itineraries are accompanied by van Gogh’s paintings in those places. Some views have changed for now, but some views are still very similar. Go check them out.
Cheese & Windmills. The Dutch are famous for cheese and windmills. Some windmills were crunching stuff into powder, other windmills were pumping water because about one-third of the Netherlands is located below sea level. We took all Dutch cheese markets and all towns where distinctive types of cheese are made, we took the concentration of windmills, and threw them all on the algorithm.
You could take any trip you like and change it by time, money, or points to the trip you want. Hit the red [Supertrip] button — it will pre-fill the form. Edit to your liking or requirements, and hit [GET TRIP]. Wait for 100 seconds or less and you will get alternative trip plans what’s possible and doable.
Geeky Dutch Trips
Computer programmers, AI researchers, AI practitioners, and silicon engineers shall like these ideas of techno-pilgrimage. There are tens of holy places in the Netherlands.
Programming. Let’s start with the mainstream programming. The Python programming language was created by the Dutch Guido van Rossum at at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica aka CWI in Amsterdam. Another Dutch Edsger W. Dijkstra created his famous algorithm for the Shortest Path problem there at CWI when it was called the Mathematisch Centrum back then.
Eindhoven and Veldhoven constitute a hub for electronics and silicon technology. Eindhoven is the place of Philips. The same Philips that made light bulbs, radio, TV, cassette recorders, Compact Disks, Blu-ray. The same Philips that did spin off to create ASML, and was the largest founding investor in TSMC in 1985. Today, TSMC is a leading foundry in the semiconductor industry. Today, computer chips are impossible without the photolithography machines by ASML. Go poke around out there.
If this is not enough, you will visit Leiden, and see the pendulum clock mechanism by Huygens — Horologium Oscillatorium. Pendulum clocks remained the world standard for accurate timekeeping for 270 years, until the invention of the quartz clock in 1927. You will visit Delft — the birthplace of microbiology and virology. Sounds good?
Artificial Intelligence. AI is popular nowadays. The brand-new GPT-4 has been released several days ago. So far we benchmarked our Lab prototype modules for future versions against text-davinci-003. We assessed how it could improve Curiosio, especially the next versions. Geo parsing could be improved in v20, storytelling could be improved in v21, and themed requests are possible right now. Currently Curiosio is v19, and v20 aka Supertrips is still in the works.
What is intelligence? How exactly intelligence emerges on top of unintelligent things? How does this phase shift happen? How to measure smarter intelligence, smartness? There is a fundamental book about intelligence written by Douglas Hofstadter in 1979 — Gödel, Escher, Bach.
M.C. Escher was Dutch. We took the places he lived or worked at in the Netherlands and fed them into the algorithm. By the word “algorithm” we mean our AI engine Ingeenee that is pretty much a complex system with emergent smart properties in travel domain. Below is a trip plan.
Travel and think about isomorphism, recursion, paradox, infinity, formal system, outside of the box. What AI implementation has cracked them yet?
Dutch National Parks Trip
“GPT-3 LLM was trained in the Microsoft data center producing 85,000 kg of CO2 equivalents, the same amount produced by a new car driving twice the distance between Earth and the Moon” — The Register
GPT-4 is bigger than GPT-3. Let’s switch our attention to the nature while the climate is still good. There are cool National Parks in the Netherlands.
Nature. Drenthe is a sparsely populated rural area, unlike many other parts of the Netherlands, it has a notable amount of forests and nature. There is an idea to start somewhere there and visit more than a dozen National Parks on a single journey. Groningen is a cool place to start off for a round trip.
There are more interesting Dutch trips, go find them yourself at Curiosio.
Stand With Ukraine
There were air raid alerts during writing of this post. Ruzzians launched Shahed UAVs all over Ukraine, including Western Ukraine. S-300 missiles are falling along the front lines all the night, every day. Their stockpile is measured by thousands, their production lines are up and running…
If you live in the democratic world ask your governments to gift/lend/sell weapons to Ukraine en masse right away! Please! Thank you so much in advance for your support.
Also, during writing of this post, on 17 March 2023, the International Criminal Court judges issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. Here is a video statement of ICC President Judge Piotr Hofmański.
