Group items tagged

"Kurzweilians"... LOL. Still not sold on embodiment, btw.

The biggest problem with embodiment is that, since the passive walkers (with which it all started), it hasn't delivered anything really interesting...

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.

@Paul: How would embodiment be done RIGHT?

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

It seems to solve the problem of infinite energy density at the singularity in any case. I would love to see a way of experimentally verifying this, although most people seem to believe it is wrong. I read the following quote though by Dirac to Pauli "we all agree your idea is crazy, but the real question is it crazy enough to be correct?"

As far as I can see, this is not untestable per se, rather an explanation to the redshift that is equivalent to accelerating expansion. It is not that the theory is untestable, rather just another way of looking at it. Kind of like that its sometimes convenient to consider light a particle, sometimes a wave. In the same way it could sometime convenient to view the universe as static with increasing mass instead.

Well the premiss "matter getting heavier" may be up to falsification in some way or another. Currently, there is no absolute method to determine mass so it might even be plausible that this is actually the case. I don't think it is related but there is a problem with the 1kg-standards (1 official and 6 copies) where the masses seem to deviate.

Nobody in Europe would invest 13Mio $ (or the equivalent in €) venture capital for this idea, it's just a different mentality. In Europe, VCs start to get interested when the investment risk is significantly lower.

could we just use genetic algorithms to evolve these shapes and layouts? :P

> Not sure if the skycrane is really necessary but it is certainly cool. I think apart from coolness using a skycrane helps keep the rotating knives away from the recipient...

Honest question, are we ever going to see this in practice? I mean besides some niche application somewhere, isn't it fundamentally flawed or do I need to keep my window opened on the 3rd floor without a balcony when I ordered something from DX? Its pretty cool yes, but practical?

Package delivery is indeed more complicated than it may seem at first sight, although solutions are possible for instance by restricting delivery to distribution centers. What we really need of course is some really efficient and robust AI to navigate without any problems in urban areas : ) The hybrid is interesting since it combines the advantage of a Vertical Takeoff and Landing (and hover), and a wing for more efficient forward flight. Challenges lie in the control of the vehicle under any angle and all that this entails also for higher levels of control. Our lab has first used this concept a few years ago for the DARPA UAVforge challenge, and we had two hybrids in our entry last year for the IMAV 2013 (for some shaky images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XgRK7pMoU ).

I always feel like people make too big a deal out of entanglement. In my opinion it is just a combination of a conserved quantity and an initial lack of knowledge. Imagine that I had a machine that always creates one blue and one red ping-pong ball at the same time (|b > and |r > respectively). The machine now puts both balls into identical packages (so I cannot observe them) and one of the packages is sent to Tokio. I did not know which ball was sent to Tokio and which stayed with me - they are in a superposition (|br >+|rb >), meaning that either the blue ball is with me and the red one in Tokio or vice versa - they are entangled. So far no magic has happened. Now I call my friend in Tokio who got the ball: "What color was the ball you received in that package?" He replies: "The ball that I got was blue. Why did you send me ball in the first place?" Now, the fact that he told me makes the superpositon wavefunction collapse (yes, that is what the Copenhagen interpretation would tell us). As a result I know without opening my box that it contains a red ball. But this is really because there is an underlying conservation law and because now I know the other state. I don't see how just looking at the conserved quantity I am in a timeless state outside of the 'universe' - this is just one way of interpreting it. By the way, the wave function for my box with the undetermined ball does not collapse when the other ball is observed by my friend in Tokio. Only when he tells me does the wavefunction collapse - he did not even know that I had a complementary ball. On the other hand if he knew about the way the experiment was conducted then he would have known that I had to have a red ball - the wavefunction collapses as soon as he observed his ball. For him it is determined that my ball must be red. For me however the superposition is intact until he tells me. ;-)

Sorry, Johannes, you just develop a simple hidden-parameters theory and it's experimentally proven that these don't work. Entangeled states are neither the blue nor the red ball they are really bluered (or redblue) till the point the measurement is done.

Hm, to me this looks like a bad joke... The "emergent time" concept used is still the old proposal by Page and Whotters where time emerges from something fundamentally unobservable (the wave function of the Universe). That's as good as claiming that time emerges from God. If I understand correctly, the paper now deals with the situation where a finite system is taken as "Mini-Universe" and the experimentalist in the lab can play "God of the Mini-Universe". This works, of course, but it doesn't really tell us anything about emergent time, does it?

Actually, it has not been proven conclusively that hidden variable theories don' work - although this is the opinion of most physicists these days. But a non-local hidden variable would still be allowed - I don't see why that could not be equivalent to a conserved quantity within the system. As far as the two balls go it is fine to say they are undetermined instead of saying they are in bluered or redblue state - for all intents and purposes it does not affect us (because if it would the wavefunction would have collapsed) so we can't say anything about it in the first place.

Non-local hidden variables may work, but in my opinion they don't add anything to the picture. The (at least to non-physicists) contraintuitive fact that there cannot be a variable that determines ab initio the color of the ball going to Tokio will remain (in your example this may not even be true since the example is too simple...).

will still have to read the actual article but am a bit sceptic if this interpretation really will hold ... what are our fundamental physicists saying about this?

ad "quieting the lizard brain" a friend of mine used to say: "if in doubt, do it!" had to think about that when he talks about the lizard brain getting us scared ...