Free Republic

What's your favorite ice cream flavor? You might say vanilla or chocolate, and if I asked why, you’d probably say it’s because it tastes good. But why does it taste good, and why do you still want to try other flavors sometimes? Rarely do we ever question the basic decisions we make in our everyday lives, but if we did, we might realize that we can’t pinpoint the exact reasons for our preferences, emotions, and desires at any given moment. There's a similar problem in artificial intelligence: The people who develop AI are increasingly having problems explaining how it works...

Futurism: Your paper argues that the universe might fundamentally be a neural network. How would you explain your reasoning to someone who didn’t know very much about neural networks or physics? Vitaly Vanchurin: There are two ways to answer your question. The first way is to start with a precise model of neural networks and then to study the behavior of the network in the limit of a large number of neurons. What I have shown is that equations of quantum mechanics describe pretty well the behavior of the system near equilibrium and equations of classical mechanics describes pretty well...

Neural networks come to astronomy as a self-adapting algorithm digs through star maps to find rogue fast-moving stars, writes Andrew Masterson. An artificial neural network capable of learning from its own observations is helping astronomers identify a rare type of star that might offer clues to both the formation of the Milky Way and the role of dark matter in governing its motion. In research published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team led by Elena Maria Rossi from Leiden University in the Netherlands detail how the self-adapting algorithm is spotting rogue stars among millions mapped...

In 2010, the best systems got around 25% WER for recorded phone conversations, meaning that a quarter of the words were misrecognized. This is actually pretty good, since people often speak very quickly with lots of background noise and add lots of disfluencies (e.g., “like…uh…yeah…so I…I…ok…right”). By comparison, the WER for Google Voice data, which includes search queries and dictated messages, was 16%. Compared to other areas of artificial intelligence, speech is a mature field, especially since it was commercialized so early by IBM and Dragon Systems. Because of this, by the time 2010 rolled around, even incremental progress had...

A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain. He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said. "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years," he said. "And if we do succeed, we will send...

Florida scientists have grown a brain in a petri dish and taught it to fly a fighter plane. Scientists at the university of Florida taught the 'brain', which was grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a rat embryo, to pilot an F-22 jet simulator. It was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds. TWO RELATED LINKS: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/11/1119_041119_brain_petri_dish.html#main http://www.bme.ufl.edu:16080/research/projects/detailproject.php?RP_id=5

Cyber detective links up crimes 10:45 05 December 04 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Many more crimes might be solved if detectives were able to compare the records for cases with all the files on past crimes. Now an artificial intelligence system has been designed to do precisely that. Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it could look for telltale similarities in crime records and alert detectives when it finds them. Developed by computer scientists Tom Muscarello and Kamal Dahbur at DePaul University in Chicago, the system uses pattern-recognition software to link related crimes that may have taken...

<p>Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.</p>

A biosensor chip that measures electrical activity in living cells promises both new techniques for neuroscience and the ability to develop new drugs by testing them on living neurons. Infineon Technologies (Munich, Germany) and Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Biochemistry (Munich, Germany) have succeeded in connecting a newly developed biosensor chip with living neurons and in reading electrical signals produced by the cells. Introduced at the recent International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco and named Neuro-Chip, this chip promises to allow neurobiological and neurochemical researchers to gain new insights into the biological function of human neurons, nerve tissue,...

I just started reading this book by Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and I'm finding it a little disturbing. It doesn't really tell me anything I don't already know, or that anyone else shouldn't already know; but seeing it in authoritative form (Kurzweil is himself an entrepreneur in the IT field) certainly had a discomfiting effect on me. Basically, the book tells of what to expect in the coming decades. Quoting from the online table of contents, his predictions are summed up as follows (all emphasis mine):2009: "A $1,000 personal computer can perform about a trillion calculations per...