“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.
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.
“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.