Here we go! AI for Mario has arrived. What is still missing is the Italian accent in his robo-voice though. To compensate for that, we have a lot of German accent in the Youtube-video. Make sure to check it out if you always liked the background music from the games. Putting the trolling aside, I honestly like the idea! There is still some way to go, but maybe we will watch and even pay to be able to see twitch-streams of self-ware bots one day?
I wanted to post this one, as plant-inspired robotic design and algorithms are a new kid on the block, and then noticed that some ACT-members may already be aware of this special issue...
"chances are that if 700 passengers are flown annually, up to 10 of them might not survive the flight in the first years of the operations."
most remarkable also the question who is to blame if a dead and burned space tourist corps comes crashing down from the sky into your car.
How sure is the information that a human body would not completely burn / ablate during atmospheric re-entry? I am not aware of any material ground tests in a plasma wind tunnel confirming that human tissue would survive re-entry from LEO.
Since a steak would not even be cooked by dropping it from very high altitudes (http://what-if.xkcd.com/28/) I would doubt that a space tourists body would desintegrate by atmospheric re-entry.
Funny link, however, some things are not clear enough:
1. Ablation rate is unknown
2. What are the entry conditions? The link suggests that the steak is just dropped (no initial velocity).
3. What about the ballistic coefficient?
4. How would the entry body orientation? It would be a quite non-steady state configuration I guess with heavy accelerations.
5. How would vacuum exposure impact on the water in the body/steak and what would be the consequence for ablation behaviour?
6. Does surface chemistry play a role (not ablation, but catalysis)?
My conclusion: the example with the steak is a funny and not so bad exercise, not more.
... "gamification is really a cover for cynically exploiting human psychology for profit"
--> "Why Are Half a Million People Poking This Giant Cube?"
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/curiosity/
I love the linked article provided by Johannes! It expresses very elegantly why I still fail to understand even extremely smart and busy people in my view apparently waiting their time in playing computer games - but I recognise that there is something in games that we apparently need / gives us something we cherish ....
"In fact, half a million players so far have registered to help destroy the 64 billion tiny blocks that compose that one gigantic cube, all working in tandem toward a singular goal: discovering the secret that Curiosity's creator says awaits one lucky player inside. That's right: After millions of man-hours of work, only one player will ever see the center of the cube.
Curiosity is the first release from 22Cans, an independent game studio founded earlier this year by Peter Molyneux, a longtime game designer known for ambitious projects like Populous, Black & White and Fable.
Players can carve important messages (or shameless self-promotion) onto the face of the cube as they whittle it to nothing. Image: Wired
Molyneux is equally famous for his tendency to overpromise and under-deliver on his games.
In 2008, he said that his upcoming game would be "such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired." That game turned out to be Milo & Kate, a Kinect tech demo that went nowhere and was canceled. Following this, Molyneux left Microsoft to go indie and form 22Cans.
Not held back by the past, the Molyneux hype train is going full speed ahead with Curiosity, which the studio grandiosely promises will be merely the first of 22 similar "experiments."
Somehow, it is wildly popular. The biggest challenge facing players of Curiosity isn't how to blast through the 2,000 layers of the cube, but rather successfully connecting to 22Cans' servers. So many players are attempting to log in that the server cannot handle it.
Some players go for utter efficiency, tapping rapidly to rack up combo multipliers and get more
Movember (formerly November) is a moustache growing charity event during November.
This month I am growing a moustache to raise awareness (and funds) for men's health. I will be putting a collection jar on my desk, so any donations of spare change would be very much appreciated!
My 'mospace' can be found here: http://mobro.co/Lukeoc
hijaking of diigo over...
A stochastic computer, designed to help an autonomous vehicle navigate, outperforms a conventional computer by three orders of magnitude, say computer scientists
These guys have applied stochastic computing to the process of pattern recognition. The problem here is to compare an input signal with a reference signal to determine whether they match.
In the real world, of course, input signals are always noisy so a system that can cope with noise has an obvious advantage.
Canals and co use their technique to help an autonomous vehicle navigate its way through a simple environment for which it has an internal map. For this task, it has to measure the distance to the walls around it and work out where it is on the map. It then computes a trajectory taking it to its destination.
Although the idea of stochastic computing has been around for half a century, attempts to exploit have only just begun. Clearly there's much work to be done. And since one line of thought is that the brain might be a stochastic computer, at least in part, there could be exciting times ahead.
The link is there but my understanding of our purpose is different than what I understood from the abstract. In any case,the authors are from Palma de Mallorca, Balears, Spain
"somebody" should somehow make them aware of the Ariadna study ... E.g somebody no longer in the team :-)
The problem with embodiment is that it's done wrong. Embodiment needs to be treated like big data. More sensors, more data, more processing. Just putting a computer in a robot with a camera and microphone is not embodiment.
I like how he attacks Moore's Law. It always looks a bit naive to me if people start to (ab)use it to make their point. No strong opinion about embodiment.
Embodiment has some obvious advantages. For example, in the vision domain many hard problems become easy when you have a body with which you can take actions (like looking at an object you don't immediately recognize from a different angle) - a point already made by researchers such as Aloimonos.and Ballard in the end 80s / beginning 90s. However, embodiment goes further than gathering information and "mental" recognition. In this respect, the evolutionary robotics work by for example Beer is interesting, where an agent discriminates between diamonds and circles by avoiding one and catching the other, without there being a clear "moment" in which the recognition takes place. "Recognition" is a behavioral property there, for which embodiment is obviously important. With embodiment the effort for recognizing an object behaviorally can be divided between the brain and the body, resulting in less computation for the brain. Also the article "Behavioural Categorisation: Behaviour makes up for bad vision" is interesting in this respect. In the field of embodied cognitive science, some say that recognition is constituted by the activation of sensorimotor correlations. I wonder to which extent this is true, and if it is valid for extremely simple creatures to more advanced ones, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless.
This being said, if "embodiment" implies having a physical body, then I would argue that it is not a necessary requirement for intelligence. "Situatedness", being able to take (virtual or real) "actions" that influence the "inputs", may be.
@Paul
While I completely agree about the "embodiment done wrong" (or at least "not exactly correct") part, what you say goes exactly against one of the major claims which are connected with the notion of embodiment (google for "representational bottleneck"). The fact is your brain does *not* have resources to deal with big data. The idea therefore is that it is the body what helps to deal with what to a computer scientist appears like "big data". Understanding how this happens is key.
Whether it is the problem of scale or of actually understanding what happens should be quite conclusively shown by the outcomes of the Blue Brain project.
Wouldn't one expect that to produce consciousness (even in a lower form) an approach resembling that of nature would be essential?
All animals grow from a very simple initial state (just a few cells) and have only a very limited number of sensors AND processing units. This would allow for a fairly simple way to create simple neural networks and to start up stable neural excitation patterns. Over time as complexity of the body (sensors, processors, actuators) increases the system should be able to adapt in a continuous manner and increase its degree of self-awareness and consciousness.
On the other hand, building a simulated brain that resembles (parts of) the human one in its final state seems to me like taking a person who is just dead and trying to restart the brain by means of electric shocks.
Actually on a neuronal level all information gets processed. Not all of it makes it into "conscious" processing or attention. Whatever makes it into conscious processing is a highly reduced representation of the data you get. However that doesn't get lost. Basic, low processed data forms the basis of proprioception and reflexes. Every step you take is a macro command your brain issues to the intricate sensory-motor system that puts your legs in motion by actuating every muscle and correcting every step deviation from its desired trajectory using the complicated system of nerve endings and motor commands. Reflexes which were build over the years, as those massive amounts of data slowly get integrated into the nervous system and the the incipient parts of the brain.
But without all those sensors scattered throughout the body, all the little inputs in massive amounts that slowly get filtered through, you would not be able to experience your body, and experience the world. Every concept that you conjure up from your mind is a sort of loose association of your sensorimotor input. How can a robot understand the concept of a strawberry if all it can perceive of it is its shape and color and maybe the sound that it makes as it gets squished? How can you understand the "abstract" notion of strawberry without the incredibly sensible tactile feel, without the act of ripping off the stem, without the motor action of taking it to our mouths, without its texture and taste? When we as humans summon the strawberry thought, all of these concepts and ideas converge (distributed throughout the neurons in our minds) to form this abstract concept formed out of all of these many many correlations. A robot with no touch, no taste, no delicate articulate motions, no "serious" way to interact with and perceive its environment, no massive flow of information from which to chose and and reduce, will never attain human level intelligence.
That's point 1. Point 2 is that mere pattern recogn
All information *that gets processed* gets processed but now we arrived at a tautology. The whole problem is ultimately nobody knows what gets processed (not to mention how). In fact an absolute statement "all information" gets processed is very easy to dismiss because the characteristics of our sensors are such that a lot of information is filtered out already at the input level (e.g. eyes). I'm not saying it's not a valid and even interesting assumption, but it's still just an assumption and the next step is to explore scientifically where it leads you. And until you show its superiority experimentally it's as good as all other alternative assumptions you can make.
I only wanted to point out is that "more processing" is not exactly compatible with some of the fundamental assumptions of the embodiment. I recommend Wilson, 2002 as a crash course.
These deal with different things in human intelligence. One is the depth of the intelligence (how much of the bigger picture can you see, how abstract can you form concept and ideas), another is the breadth of the intelligence (how well can you actually generalize, how encompassing those concepts are and what is the level of detail in which you perceive all the information you have) and another is the relevance of the information (this is where the embodiment comes in. What you do is to a purpose, tied into the environment and ultimately linked to survival). As far as I see it, these form the pillars of human intelligence, and of the intelligence of biological beings. They are quite contradictory to each other mainly due to physical constraints (such as for example energy usage, and training time).
"More processing" is not exactly compatible with some aspects of embodiment, but it is important for human level intelligence. Embodiment is necessary for establishing an environmental context of actions, a constraint space if you will, failure of human minds (i.e. schizophrenia) is ultimately a failure of perceived embodiment.
What we do know is that we perform a lot of compression and a lot of integration on a lot of data in an environmental coupling. Imo, take any of these parts out, and you cannot attain human+ intelligence. Vary the quantities and you'll obtain different manifestations of intelligence, from cockroach to cat to google to random quake bot. Increase them all beyond human levels and you're on your way towards the singularity.
Another underestimated source of CO2, are turbulent waters. "The stronger the turbulences at the water's surface, the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The combination of maps and data revealed that, while the CO2 emissions from lakes and reservoirs are lower than assumed, those from rivers and streams are three times as high as previously believed." Alltogether the emitted CO2 equates to roughly one-fifth of the emissions caused by humans. Yet more stuff to model...
This could also be a mechanism to counter human CO2 emission ... the more we emit, the less turbulent rivers and stream, the less CO2 is emitted there ... makes sense?
I guess there is a natural equilibrium there. Once the climate warms up enough for all rivers and streams to evaporate they will not contribute CO2 anymore - which stops their contribution to global warming. So the problem is also the solution (as always).
"The source of inland water CO2 is still not known with certainty and new studies are needed to research the mechanisms controlling CO2 evasion globally." It is another source of CO2 this one, and the turbulence in the rivers is independent of our emissions in CO2 and just facilitates the process of releasing CO2 waters. Dario, if I understood correct you have in mind a finite quantity of CO2 that the atmosphere can accomodate, and to my knowledge this does not happen, so I cannot find a relevant feedback there.
Johannes, H2O is a powerful greenhouse gas :-)
Nasia I think you did not get my point (a joke, really, that Johannes continued) .... by emitting more CO2 we warm up the planet thus drying up rivers and lakes which will, in turn emit less CO2 :) No finite quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is needed to close this loop ...
... as for the H2O it could just go into non turbulent waters rather than staying into the atmosphere ...
Really awkward joke explanation: I got the joke of Johannes, but maybe you did not get mine: by warming up the planet to get rid of the rivers and their problems, the water of the rivers will be accomodated in the atmosphere, therefore, the greenhouse gas of water.
do you have the nature paper also? looks like very nice, meticulous typically german research lasting over 10 years with painstakingly many researchers from all over the world involved .... and while important the total is still only 20% of human emissions ... so a variation in it does not seem to change the overall picture
here is the nature paper :
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v503/n7476/full/nature12760.html
I appreciate Johannes' and Dario's jokes, since climate is the common ground that all of us can have an opinion, taking honours from experiencing weather. But, the same as if I am trying to make jokes for material science, or A.I. I take a high risk of failing(!) :-S Water is a greenhouse gas, rain rather releases latent heat to the environment in order to be formed, Johannes, nice trolling effort ;-)
Between this and the next jokes to come, I would stop to take a look here, provided you have 10 minutes: how/where rain forms
http://www.scribd.com/doc/58033704/Tephigrams-for-Dummies
Nasia, I thought about your statement carefully - and I cannot agree with you. Water is not a greenhouse gas. It is instead a liquid. Also, I can't believe you keep feeding the troll! :-P
But on a more topical note: I think it is an over-simplification to call water a greenhouse gas - water is one of the most important mechanisms in the way Earth handles heat input from the sun. The latent heat that you mention actually cools Earth: solar energy that would otherwise heat Earth's surface is ABSORBED as latent heat by water which consequently evaporates - the same water condenses into rain drops at high altitudes and releases this stored heat. In effect the water cycle is a mechanism of heat transport from low altitude to high altitude where the chance of infrared radiation escaping into space is much higher due to the much thinner layer of atmosphere above (including the smaller abundance of greenhouse gasses). Also, as I know you are well aware, the cloud cover that results from water condensation in the troposphere dramatically increases albedo which has a cooling effect on climate. Furthermore the heat capacity of wet air ("humid heat") is much larger than that of dry air - so any advective heat transfer due to air currents is more efficient in wet air - transporting heat from warm areas to a natural heat sink e.g. polar regions.
Of course there are also climate heating effects of water like the absorption of IR radiation. But I stand by my statement (as defended in the above) that rain cools the atmosphere.
Oh and also some nice reading material on the complexities related to climate feedback due to sea surface temperature: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006%3C2049%3ALSEOTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2
I enjoy trolling conversations when there is a gain for both sides at the end :-) .
I had to check upon some of the facts in order to explain my self properly. The IPCC report states the greenhouse gases here, and water vapour is included:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-2-1.html
Honestly, I read only the abstract of the article you posted, which is a very interesting hypothesis on the mechanism of regulating sea surface temperature, but it is very localized to the tropics (vivid convection, storms) a region of which I have very little expertise, and is difficult to study because it has non-hydrostatic dynamics. The only thing I can comment there is that the authors define constant relative humidity for the bottom layer, supplied by the oceanic surface, which limits the implementation of the concept on other earth regions.
Also, we may confuse during the conversation the greenhouse gas with the Radiative Forcing of each greenhouse gas: I see your point of the latent heat trapped in the water vapour, and I agree, but the effect of the water is that it traps even as latent heat an amount of LR that would otherwise escape back to space. That is the greenhouse gas identity
and an image to see the absorption bands in the atmosphere and how important the water is, without vain authority-based arguments that miss the explanation in the end:
http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://www.solarchords.com/uploaded/82/87-33833-450015_44absorbspec.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.solarchords.com/agw-science/4/greenhouse--1-radiation/33784/&h=468&w=458&sz=28&tbnid=x2NtfKh5OPM7lM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=96&zoom=1&usg=__KldteWbV19nVPbbsC4jsOgzCK6E=&docid=cMRZ9f22jbtYPM&sa=X&ei=SwynUq2TMqiS0QXVq4C4Aw&ved=0CDkQ9QEwAw
The main reasons: (1) awareness, people know that a variety of consumer cars exist (2) negative incentives that push people away from gasoline powered cars, eg fuel taxes (3) positive incentives, exemption from road tax, purchase tax and free parking (all temporary) and (4) extensive recharging infrastructure. Other countries have some/all of these elements, but Norway has pushes mostly and the result is that the nissan leaf was the best sold car in September and October, beating all other cars.
If there's anyone who could afford such things, it is Norway...
According to http://xkcd.com/980/, Oljefondet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway) is currently worth nearly as much as US has spent on wars. I mean, all of them together...
One of the biggest problems in Norway is what to do with this money without damaging the economy in the long run :-)
Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow.
?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?
funny - tried just yesterday the one built in on mavericks: sending one email took three times as long at least as typing it
And now my speech PowerPoint
Funny, trade trust yesterday they're built in speech recognition in Mavericks sending one e-mail to at least three times a talk as long as typing it. Well this was actually quite okay and relatively fast cheers nice evening
"I thought I would give it a try on my android sexy seems to work pretty well and I'm speaking more less at normal speed"
Actually I was speaking as fast as I could because it was for the google search input - if you make a pause it will think you finished your input and start the query. Also you might notice that Android thinks it is "android sexy" - this was meant to be "on my Android. THIS seems to work...". Still it is not too bad - maybe in a year or two they have it working. Of course it might also be that I just use the word "sexy" randomly... :-\
The problem is that we don't yet understand how speech in humans actually works. As long as we merely build either inference or statistical language models we'll never get perfect speech recognition. A lot of recognition in humans has a predictive/expectational basis to it that stems from our understanding of higher lvl concepts and context awareness. Sadly I suspect that as long as machines remain unembodied in their perceptual abilities their ability to either properly recognize sounds/speech or objects and other features will never reach perfection.
It's designed to give the Air Force its first full-time, space-based surveillance of satellites and debris in Earth's orbit. It monitors them for possible collisions.
"At a symposium at the Dutch Spinoza-instituut on 8 December, 2009, string theorist Erik Verlinde introduced a theory that derives Newton's classical mechanics. In his theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings. He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscropic reality. A relativistic extension of his argument leads directly to Einstein's equations."
Diffcult for me to fully understand / believe in the holographic principle at macroscopical scales ... potentially it looks though as a revolutionary idea.....
never heard about it...
seems interesting. At first sight it seems that it is based on fundamental principle that could lead to a new phenomenology, so that could be tested.
Perhaps Luzi knows more about this ?
Did we ever work on this concept ?
The paper is quite long and I don't have the time right now to read it in detail. Just a few comments:
* We (ACT) definitely never did anything in this direction? But: is there a new phenomenology? I'm not sure, if the aim is just to get Einstein's theory as emergent theory, then GR should not change (or only change in extreme conditions.)
* Emergent gravity is not new, also Erik admits that. The claim to have found a solution appears quite frequently, but most proposals actually are not emergent at all. At least, I have the impression that Erik is aware of the relevant steps to be performed.
* It's very difficult to judge from a short glance at the paper, up to which point the claims are serious and where it just starts to be advertisments. Section 6 is pretty much a collection of self-praise.
* Most importantly: I don't understand how exactly space and time should be emergent. I think it's not new to observe that space is related to special canonical variables in thermodynamics. If anybody can see anything "emergent" in the first paragraphs of section 3, then please explain me. For me, this is not emergent space, but space introduced with a "sledge hammer." Time anyway seems to be a precondition, else there is nothing like energy and nothing like dynamics.
* Finally, holography appears to be a precondition, to my knowledge no proof exists that normal (non-supersymmetric, non-stringy, non-whatever) GR has a holographic dual.
Update: meanwhile I understood roughly what this should be about. It's well known that BH physics follow the laws of theormodynamics, suggesting the existence of underlying microstates. But if this is true, shouldn't the gravitational force then be emergent from these microstates in the same way as any theromdynamical effect is emergent from the behavior of its constituents (e.g. a gas)? If this can be prooven, then indeed gravity is emergent. Problem: one has to proof that *any* configuration in GR may be interpreted as thermodynamical, not just BHs. That's probably where holography comes into the play. To me this smells pretty much like N=4 SYM vs. QCD. The former is not QCD, but can be solved, so all stringy people study just that one and claim to learn something about QCD. Here, we look at holographic models, GR is not holographic, but who cares... Engineering problems...
I was a bit fast to say it could be tested... apparently we don't even know a theory that is holographic, perhaps a string theory (see http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9409089v2). So very far from any test...
Leo, do you mean you liked my comment on your question more than Pacome's? Well, the ACT has to evolve and fledge, so no bullshitting anymore, but serious and calculating answers... :-)
Sorry Pacome, nothing against you!! I just LOVE this Diigo because it gives me the opportunity for a happy revival of my ACT mood.
the first negative index metamaterial to operate at visible frequencies
By engineering a metamaterial with such properties, we are opening the door to such unusual -- but potentially useful -- phenomena as superlensing (high-resolution imaging past the diffraction limit), invisibility cloaking, and the synthesis of materials index-matched to air, for potential enhancement of light collection in solar cells
I forwarded the link to my experimental colleagues and here is the comment from Sergei (the master himself:)
"this is what Igor has been doing - an array of plasmonic nanocables. This basically works as a wire-medium slab. All their epsilon and mu are rubbish."
* If Sergei is as strict as in this comment, then it IS rubbish. He's not one of the notorious complainer (as e.g. myself.)
* Please DO NOT FORWARD this to anybody else, Sergei's comment is NOT FOR PUBLIC USE!
UPDATE: I had a short chat with Sergei and Pekka, Sergei noticed that there is an increasing number of papers on metamaterials, especially in Nature and Science, which are simply wrong, this one being an example.
* The idea is based on a very well known effect of wired media. What appears to be interesting about this paper is that they manage to make an optical analogue with aparently low losses. This could be interesting.
* The whole interpretation as NIM, "wrong" refraction etc. is total nonsense.
For those sceptics about the use of neuroscience: A 20min talk (by a computer scientist!) about brain science and its use to build intelligent technology
I do not think his intention is to sell anything... Just to make people (from a non neuroscience background) aware that brain science will have an impact on technology. Also: I am a firm believer in that "prediction"defines intelligence, as he states, and that making machines that behave in such a way is the way to go :) (the talk is from 2003 btw :p)
Crowsourcing Awareness:
"To augment the use of these space technologies, virtual communities of group intelligence - called "Crowdsourcing" - can aide in emergency planning and post-disaster coordination."