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Mind.Forth is free AI source code for a robot AI Mind in Win32Forth.

Mind-1.1 in JavaScript is the AI Tutorial version of the same robot Mind software for true artificial intelligence.

AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual is the textbook of artificial intelligence describing the Robot Mind-1.1 software of the Mentifex AI project as listed in the Free Software Donation Directory.

Technological Singularity is happening right now.

"Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. THAT is the exploration that awaits you: not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."

"Just somehow bring the Borg into an episode. That'll sell it. Oh wait, they're already doing that.... "

Even if this ep bombs, there's still some potential here. (Note: I'll never forgive Voyager for pussifying the Borg.)


Excuse me? I believe ST:TNG did it first, in "I, Borg" from Season V, the Borg were well on their way to being domesticated.

Voyager had more lame episodes than good ones, but don't blame them for screwing up the Borg.

In primary motor cortex, the hand area is located next to the face area. They are not right next to each other, however. Areas for the other parts of the face lie between. Do their faces move, too? See this picture of the motor homunculus for fun.

The cortical areas for the different senses are significantly further apart. Vision is in the back. Touch runs coronally in the middle. Audition is on the sides. At least, the simplified primary processing follows these patterns.

Sounds similar to work being done by the Arnold group at Caltech. They've apparently (haven't read the article yet) made a NOT gate using directed evolution. They're more interested in developing and applying the directed evolution technique than in biological computers, it seems. Lab website's here. And the lab website's got their own articles available for free in .pdf form. Screw you, Elsevier!

Then, some other people implement a shell and several command line utilities in Emacs Lisp (EShell).

Then some other people implement a Scheme system inside the Linux kernel.

Secret long-term goal: create a self-sufficient Emacs (codename Emax) that boots, thus obtaining the One True OS! :-)

First let's look at the history of the term killer app in The Jargon Dictionary.

Next (w.r.t. "killer app") we look at the artificial Mind-1.1 as the emerging "killer app" par excellance.

Technological Singularity explains in chilling detail why AI [Mind-1.1] is the next killer app.

I mean, why *DO* we still have pagefiles?

You've obviously never done any real computing. There are some computational problems that are still too big to do entirely in RAM, hence pagefiles.

Actually, Beowulf clusters are spot on topic here. Ever wonder why the concept of a Beowulf cluster was such a breakthrough? (Hint: have you ever tried to crunch 100GB of data from a heat transfer problem?) Beowulfs allowed the huge amount of necessary RAM to be farmed out to lots of boxes, driving down costs, among other advantages.

Wasn't that one of Stephen Hawkins theory? That the machines will advance much faster then Humans and become superior, so the Humans need to start enhancing themselves geneticly now so we won't lose?

No matter how we increase our own intelligences genetically, it seems unlikely that we could match machine AI. The question then becomes how to maintain control over the AIs -- ie, how to have them serve us, or at least live alongside us, rather than enslave us.

I'm still waiting for Project Von Neumann to come out. The game idea sounds great.

I was wrong, it's Terminal A. Somebody (of course) has a web page about the fried apple pies.

Jupiter's moon, Io
Uranus, Neptune, and moons
A 'picture' they call a picture of Pluto I'd think the detail would be better with such a detailed survey of the sky.

Jupiter's moon, Io
Uranus, Neptune, and moons
A 'picture' they call a picture of Pluto I'd think the detail would be better with such a detailed survey of the sky.

Jupiter's moon, Io
Uranus, Neptune, and moons
A 'picture' they call a picture of Pluto I'd think the detail would be better with such a detailed survey of the sky.

The idea goes as follows: If a self-aware "real AI" ever existed, one capable of self-understanding and self-modification (called the seed AI), it would be in a much better position to create AI than its original creators. So would begin a chain of self-refinement and the creation of progressively smarter intelligences with decreasing time gaps between stages. Eventually a point is reached, called the singularity: nothing about the future past the singularity can be predicted by humans who live in the pre-singularity world. A common interpretation is that the chain of AIs would become more intelligent without bound, leading to a verticality.

The singulaity was first popularized by Vernor Vinge.

I've been doing a lot of reading on the singularity lately, and I've become more and more convinced that it is certain to happen.

More singularity links:
The singularity institute - A nonprofit working to hasten the singularity
Extensive writings by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I've myself written a bit on singularity and AI related topics.

Here's a link to Vernor Vinge's article on the Singularity:


The Singularity

Abstract

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? These questions are investigated. Some possible answers (and some further dangers) are presented.

But you gotta admit that it would be real nice to have a transport protocol that could download an entire CD whithin 10 seconds...:-)

what about toughguy.caltech.edu then?

Actually, my buddy who's a Caltech grad tells me that since their official mascot is the beaver (they're so industrious, you see) the official motto among the students is
"Beaver Fever--Snatch It!"

8.6Mb/s is snatching it, all right. But small consolation for never seeing the real thing, my dear Beavers, small consolation.

Bear in mind that the information in there about our server setup is now obsolete. After this event, I calculated that our Squid servers wouldn't be able to handle the load from anything bigger than about M5.5 in either SF or LA, so now we are served through Akamai Edgesuite.

As for the USGS servers having problems after earthquakes, we've been served through Akamai EdgeSuite since late 2001. So for the most part, our servers have been doing better. We've had a couple of other problems caused by other things, though. I've written reports about a number of these at http://bort.gps.caltech.edu/spikes

As for notification, I have one site that is not served by Akamai [ www.trinet.org] that still uses a Squid server. So I use MRTG to monitor the Squid, and it calls a small Perl script that pages me whenever the traffic on the site increases by more than 10% in one five-minute interval. This always tells me when people have felt an earthquake, sometimes ever before our automatic location systems are able to page us with a location and magnitude.

While silicon tracks (or GaAs or whatever) may be laid down at a similar density, interfacing these silicon wafers does not happen at this high a density. Jerome Pine at CalTech has worked with making "neural wells" , chips with wells that neurons can grow into. Their density is not very high. I don't know what the density of this "artificial hippocampus" is or the number of connections it will make, so I can't literally say that I doubt it's density is high enough.

This is more a proof of concept, and a stepping stone, not anywhere near being able to "replace a hippocampus."

Compare it to replacing your retinal optics and neural circuitry with the Fisher-Price black-and-white video camera which recorded its low resoultion video onto audio cassettes. Imagine hooking up the output of the Fisher-Price camera to the optic nerve and daring to call it a replacement for the eye. Audacious, definitely. An amazing first step, perhaps. Once it works. But a replacement? I think not.

Even if the hypertori topology of the universe is correct it doesn't imply that the universe has any particular curvature, it's still possible that it has positive, negative or flat intrinsic curvature.

You have to remember that the curvature of a torus embeded in 'flat' 3 space is purely an artifact of that embeding and not intrinsic in the topology of the torus. More specifically, there exist mappings from the embeded (intrinsicly curved) surface of the three dimensionally embeded torus to topologically identicle spaces that have everywhere flat intrinsic curvature.

As a thought experiment, consider a cube where the faces are portals to their oposites. Internally, this construct has the topology of a hypertorus but an everywhere flat topology.

For some nice diagrams and comentary that explain curvature (of the important, intrinisic kind) rather well, take a look at this, just skip over any of the math thats beyond your abilities, it's not really needed to understand the concepts.

Good observation. This is exactly what we hope to do for a multi-moon orbiter mission which "jumps" between the planet-sized moons of Jupiter (e.g., the proposed Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter).

Material typiclly doesn't come from elsewhere in the solar system and get stuck in some system's L4 points (like the Earth-Moon L4 or L5 points). The material that is there, if any, would have existed in that location since the formation of the system, i.e., anything near the Earth-Moon L4 or L5 points was there when the Moon formed.

Regarding the killer asteroids, you're totally right about deflecting them with small forces. There will be a conference next year, Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids, where people will propose technical plans associated with defending Earth from approaching near Earth objects (comets and asteroids). The threat will be approached from three warning levels: short-term (less than ten years warning); medium-term (ten to 30 years warning); and long-term (more than 30 years warning). The more time we have to deflect it, the smaller the force needs to be.

Although I guess I am in some sense a "rocket scientist," I think the truly cool aspect of the work is the light that it sheds on the mechanisms of "interplanetary cross-fertilization." This understanding contributes to fields such as astrobiology, for example, where comet impact rates are key for determining the delivery of water to the Earth and impact ejecta exchange rates are important for investigating the transportation of microbes between Mars and Earth.

By the way, the fastest that a piece of impact ejecta has been able to get between Earth and Mars in any simulation is 10,000 years. This would be a piece of debris which, due to nonlinear effects, repeately encountered Mars and Earth with just the right geometry that it made the trip in the fastest time. The average transit time for bits of debries is a few million years.

Thanks for enjoying the article. I'm the grad student who did much of the work that the paper speaks of; a friend let me know that slashdot was discussing it, which is cool. There seem to be a lot of questions. People have to remember that the level of the article is "Popular Science"-esque, which always involves some glossing over important mathematical concepts.

We have some papers at my website here.

Quaoar apparently is a Native american force of creation. Link here. Ceres is a god of grains and stuff, if i remembere right ( Dunno roman or greek). Varuna is the (asian) Indian god of the sea and water.
So do these gods count?
And looks like quaoar is smaller than pluto.But it will be a planet since pluto is being demoted to an asteroid since it was named after a cartoon dog.

Hey man, I don't make the news, I just report it.

Perhaps a little googling would have enlightened you as to what exactly an MTBF is. It's not quite as simple as it sounds:

(Thus spoketh the web page:)

It is generally accepted among reliability specialists (and you, therefore, must not question it) that a thing's failure rate isn't constant, but generally goes through three phases over a thing's lifetime. In the first phase the failure rate is relatively high, but decreases over time -- this is called the "infant mortality" phase (sensitive guys these reliability specialists). In the second phase the failure rate is low and essentially constant -- this is (imaginatively) called the "constant failure rate" phase. In the third phase the failure rate begins increasing again, often quite rapidly, -- this is called the "wearout" phase. The reliability specialists noticed that when plotted as a function of time the failure rate resembled a familiar bathroom appliance -- but they called it a "bathtub" curve anyway. The units of failure rate are failures per unit of "thing-time"; e.g. failures per machine-hour or failures per system-year.

What, you may ask, does all this have to do with MTBF? MTBF is the inverse of the failure rate in the constant failure rate phase. Nothing more and nothing less. The units of MTBF are (or, should be) units of "thing-time" pre failure; e.g. machine-hours per failure or system-years per failure but the "thing" part and the "per failure" part are almost always omitted to enhance the mystique and confusion and to make MTBF appear to have the units of "time" which it doesn't. We will bow to the convention of speaking of MTBF in hours or years -- but we all know what we really mean.

What does MTBF have to do with lifetime? Nothing at all! It is not at all unusual for things to have MTBF's which significantly exceed their lifetime as defined by wearout -- in fact, you know many such things. A "thirty-something" American (well within his constant failure rate phase) has a failure (death) rate of about 1.1 deaths per 1000 person-years and, therefore, has an MTBF of 900 years (of course its really 900 person-years per death). Even the best ones, however, wear out long before that.

This example points out one other important characteristic of MTBF -- it is an ensemble characteristic which applies to populations (i.e. "lots") of things; not a sample characteristic which applies to one specific thing. In the good old days when failure rates were relatively high (and, therefore, MTBF relatively low) this characteristic of MTBF was a curiosity which created lively (?) debate at conventions of reliability specialists (them) but otherwise didn't unduly bother right-thinking people (us). Things, however, have changed. For many systems of interest today the required failure rates are so low that the MTBF substantially exceeds the lifetime (obviously nature had this right a long time ago). In these cases MTBF's are not only "not necessarily" sample characteristics, but are "necessarily not" sample characteristics. In the terms of the reliability cognoscenti, failure processes are not ergodic (i.e. you can't blithely trade population statistics for time statistics). The key implication of this essential characteristic of MTBF is that it can only be determined from populations and it should only be applied to populations.

MTBF is, therefore an excellent characteristic for determining how many spare hard drives are needed to support 1000 PC's, but a poor characteristic for guiding you on when you should change your hard drive to avoid a crash.

(An excerpt from this page.)

-Sokie

In my Mozilla preferences (Appearance / Colors), I have chosen to use my own colors and background insted of the colors and background specified by the page because I like reading my pages with black text on a white background.

When I went to see the pictures in the gallery (for example at http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/ph otos/pp01.htm), I was at first rather perplexed because I saw no picture. Just a blank page. But viewing the HTML source explained everything. The picture is as the background in a table, one cell high and one cell wide! WTF? Lousy webdesign by <meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 3.0">.

"I couldn't help it. It just popped in there!" - Ray

This explanation is obviously handwaving-- the symmetry is perfect (or close to it) over scales of millions of molecules.

I've been arguing since 1980 or so that an ice crystal in freefall is not at absolute zero (obviously) so it must have internal vibrations. This is basically 'noise', but as it echoes thru the ice, it stops looking random and becomes symmetrical, like Chladni patterns on a vibrating plate or drumhead. (Or like the radiating circles from a drip of water into a circular pool, reconverging at an opposite point.) Because these symmetries are present from the first stage of growth, they maintain symmetrical growth.

I don't think the 104.5 degree angle between the hydrogens in water molecules is close enough to 120 to deliver perfect hexagonality-- it's probably due to the geometry of echoes in any disk, because hexagons can be inscribed in circles. (The spinning of the seed probably contributes to the flatness-- growing favors the outside edge of the bulge, otherwise it might be more spherical.)

er.... did anyone notice that this snowflake has a serial number in the middle (hub) of it?

Beautiful snowflake image

In other news, David Bowie is suing for patent infringement, claiming he IS stardust...

You CANNOT fit a 100 foot dish to a satellite and orbit it around Mars or Jupiter, etc, to pick up signals from further out and relay them to earth. Its simply not possible.

Not necessarily. Check out a proposed Neptune Explorer mission here. It would use an inflatable lens of 25 meters or so to focus both light and microwaves, to provide energy and communications to the probe.

Yes, yes, the inflatant will gradually escape, but once you have your space elevator and nuclear powered engines, you'll be able to call "Culligan's Volatiles Service (We Deliver)" and have your tanks topped off periodically.

The singularity, as any google search would reveal, is a predicted event in which AI surpases human intelligence. Since that AI will be smarter than us, it will create an even smarter AI even faster, and within the matter of days it is said we will be as cockroaches to them as cockroaches are to us (atleast, intellectually).

The key point of the singularity is that it is impossible to predict what will happen afterwards. I highly recommend reading the paper.

The idea was thought up, or at least the term was coined by vernor Vinge in his paper.

How far must the Hurst exponent deviate from 1/2 for you to consider something non-random? You need to be able to answer this to claim the ability to test for randomness.

Also: Consider a random walk generated by a step of a size generated by a pseudo-random number generator. This will appear to be made of independent incremental steps of a set variance. Thus the Hurst exponent will be indistinguishable from 1/2. However, this is an entirely deterministic system. So the Hurst exponent can be tricked, and my original observation that the determination of randomness is dependent on your model holds.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for introducing me to Hurst Exponents. I found a couple of interesting sites (here and ) because of this discussion. Quack!

Here are the slides [pdf] from the Oct 2002 NSF review. Lots of pictures, graphs, technical details, etc. for anyone interested. In a nutshell they are aiming to measure strain on the order of 10^-21 over the frequency range of 100Hz - 1kHz. Using two facilities separated by 3000km allows them to search for correlated events and weed out localized noise. IANAP.

More slides here.

LIGO home page.

HTH.

Here are the slides [pdf] from the Oct 2002 NSF review. Lots of pictures, graphs, technical details, etc. for anyone interested. In a nutshell they are aiming to measure strain on the order of 10^-21 over the frequency range of 100Hz - 1kHz. Using two facilities separated by 3000km allows them to search for correlated events and weed out localized noise. IANAP.

More slides here.

LIGO home page.

HTH.

Here are the slides [pdf] from the Oct 2002 NSF review. Lots of pictures, graphs, technical details, etc. for anyone interested. In a nutshell they are aiming to measure strain on the order of 10^-21 over the frequency range of 100Hz - 1kHz. Using two facilities separated by 3000km allows them to search for correlated events and weed out localized noise. IANAP.

More slides here.

LIGO home page.

HTH.

Observing this fantastically tiny effect is equivalent to detecting the motion of Saturn if it were to move closer to the sun by the diameter of a single hydrogen atom

so it's not the diameter of a proton but the diameter of a hydrogen atom. A lot better, but well, still pretty small.

2)here toward the bottom of the page you can LOG IN to their system and view all the logs. the password and login is blatantly displayed on the site. we should all email the site admin to have this changed.

3) I hope they figured it out for 300 million dollars, but wouldn't changes in gravity wave stretch / compress the tubes AND CAUSE REDSHIFT / BLUESHIFT in the lasers therefore cancelling out the effect?

2)here toward the bottom of the page you can LOG IN to their system and view all the logs. the password and login is blatantly displayed on the site. we should all email the site admin to have this changed.

3) I hope they figured it out for 300 million dollars, but wouldn't changes in gravity wave stretch / compress the tubes AND CAUSE REDSHIFT / BLUESHIFT in the lasers therefore cancelling out the effect?

2)here toward the bottom of the page you can LOG IN to their system and view all the logs. the password and login is blatantly displayed on the site. we should all email the site admin to have this changed.

3) I hope they figured it out for 300 million dollars, but wouldn't changes in gravity wave stretch / compress the tubes AND CAUSE REDSHIFT / BLUESHIFT in the lasers therefore cancelling out the effect?

Especially, large prime numbers. That'd be the obvious mathematical breakthrough.

AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual is just such a "deadtree" (i.e., paper) manual for a specific version (Mind-1.1) of an artificial Mind that exists as readily available free AI source code on the Web, and which has future prospects of evolving further towards a Technological Singularity.

The Free Software Donation Directory (FSDD) has a Mentifex entry that shows how a printed manual for open-source AI code may take the place of shareware fees in supporting an ambitious GOFAI (good old-fashioned artificial intelligence) project.

Mentifex (contribute by buying AI book is an example of how the donate-by-buying-the-manual meme propagates across the Web from the FSDD.

Book Publishing By Web Page is a resource on how to create a manual first by launching and lengthening Web pages, that you eventually convert into a finished, published book.

It didn't fail because they killed Data.

I think a more interesting question is can a species evolve from being an animal, driven by instinct, to a civilised being living in harmony with it's environment and each other fast enough to not destroy itself?

That is the more interesting question, and it's one I think about several times a day (yes, really), but I still think about sex 10 times more often. :-)

And no, humans are no where near that point yet.

Don't be so sure. The Technological Singularity is only a few decades away. Evolution is exponential, and we're currently on the sharp knee of that curve after having been in the flatlands for millenia.

--

If you enjoyed Glen Cook's Black Company series, give Steven Brust a spin, you won't regret it.
Fan Site

A couple classics:

John Steakley, Armor. Felix!!
Hugh Cook, Wizard War. Sadly, the rest of the series...well, sucks.