“The idea of what Artificial Intelligence should be has evolved over the past 50 years — from solving puzzles and playing chess to emulating the abilities of a child: walking, recognizing objects. A recent conference brought together those who invent the future.” NPR broadcast.
Synthetic DNA on the Brink of Yielding New Life Forms
Scientists in Maryland have already built the worlds first entirely handcrafted chromosome — a large looping strand of DNA made from scratch in a laboratory, containing all the instructions a microbe needs to live and reproduce
I was reading an article and the author stated he worked for Numenta, so I checked out their website. To my surprise, they are a company developing some open source ai tools similar to neural networks that they call HTM’s.
“NuPIC implements a hierarchical temporal memory system (HTM) patterned after the human neocortex. We expect NuPIC to be used on problems that, generally speaking, involve identifying patterns in complex data. The ultimate applications likely will include vision systems, robotics, data mining and analysis, and failure analysis and prediction.” [Scraped from website]
I tried out their pictures sample and it showed some simple pattern recognition capabilities. The neat thing about the demo is that you could draw you own picture and see how close it matched the pictures that the HTM was trained on. You could then modify the picture to see if it matched more or less than previously.
The company was strarted by Jeff Hawkins who also cofounded Palm and Handspring. Definitely a company to keep an eye on.
IT Conversations is a non-profit org that interviews people in the technology space and they put the interview in mp3 format on there website. There are some great topics here. I am currently listening to the one titled “Introducing the Singularity: Three Major Schools of Thought” by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
‘Snakebot’ navigates its way round slippery problem - tech - 14 December 2007 - New Scientist Tech
A number of different research groups are developing robots that mimic real snakes. Their shape and simplicity make them ideal for crawling through pipes or exploring narrow or cluttered environments.
“Until recently, a student solving a calculus problem, a physicist modeling a galaxy or a mathematician studying a complex equation had to use powerful computer programs that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. But an open-source tool, called Sage based at the University of Washington won first prize in the scientific software division of Les Trophées du Libre, an international competition for free software.”
Came across this site that has a vast collection of lectures that have been video taped and can be freely viewed. It is like going to a lecture at your nearest university without having to find a parking space. Most of the videos are in the Computer Science category. I found some cool stuff on machine learning.
Dictionary.com: vicissitude
vicissitude \vih-SIS-ih-tood; -tyood\, noun:
1. Regular change or succession from one thing to another; alternation; mutual succession; interchange.
2. Irregular change; revolution; mutation.
3. A change in condition or fortune; an instance of mutability in life or nature (especially successive alternation from one condition to another).
This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty.
– Thomas Macaulay
“ECMAScript 4 (ES4) provides a range of facilities for evolutionary programming evolving a program in stages from a simple script to an ever larger and more reliable software system. The most important facility for evolutionary programming is the gradual type system; also important are namespaces and packages, union types, generic functions, and reflection.” Quote from Article
Blogged here
I ran across this video of a guy who took some clock pieces and using genetic algorithms, evolved them into a clock. Of course, this was only a simulation that run on his computer, but nevertheless it is pretty fascinating and clearly shows the power of the evolutionary process over a long period of time.