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Comment by wintermutestwin | Hacker News Reader

I am no Tolkien scholar, but my layman's take is that Sauron failed to see the ring because he was so blinded by the lust for power that could only conceive of actions taken by his powerful enemies to claim more power. He (nor Gollum) could not imagine someone willingly giving that power away.

That said, neither author imagined surveillance on the level that we have today with AI "watchers."

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This is pretty much correct. Sauron kept most of his gaze upon Aragorn and Gandalf and their movements, as he would have suspected one of the two of them would most likely be carrying the ring.

As you said, Sauron expected his enemies to act as he acts, and he would never have thought to give the ring to a creature as lowly as a Hobbit.

> he would never have thought to give the ring to a creature as lowly as a Hobbit.

Actually, it is explicitly said (by Gandalf, in Book III, Chapter 5) that Sauron knows the Ring was borne by a hobbit. What Sauron is not clear about is why a hobbit has it or what the Fellowship's destination is. According to Gandalf, he assumes they are going to Minas Tirith, and that once there some more powerful person will take the Ring and use it. In other words, he doesn't expect a hobbit to keep the Ring, much less to be taking it to Mount Doom to be destroyed.

Interesting, I didn't remember that part!

In AI terms, you could think of Frodo as an adversarial example, specifically chosen to exploit a known bias in the watcher’s model.

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