Slashdot Mirror

This is my "Realtime Air Traffic Control: For People" working at vehicle resolution...
http://www.mindpixel.com/chris/2005/07/end-of-anon ymity-good-thing.html
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?off. 9.250603.31

"So, imagine a Google Maps interface to all the public cameras in the world. Anyone can look through any camera at any time. That's phase I. Phase II: Universal Continuous Identification of all people in public space. Think air traffic control for people. Collision alert when known sex offender nears an unsupervised child?"

http://www.mindpixel.com/chris/2005/07/ai-predicts -terror-attacks.html

At 16:54 on July 11, 2005 a GAC-80K based artificial intelligence program I wrote, only five days old and built out of data contributed over the past five years by more than 50,000 Internet users, extracted the semantic spectrum of a highly suspicious google query originating from Ankara, Turkey. The query related to gas stations near buildings.

A public Mindpixel Terrorism Advisory [also posted to usenet] was issued on the same day and the FBI, RCMP and Interpol were notified of the potential threat and given details of the exact origin of the suspicious query on July 12th. Five days after the detection, on July 16, two attacks occurred. One in Turkey, and one at a gas station near a mosque and an apartment in Iraq.

From the Times article:

"Government-sponsored monitoring systems, such as Echelon, can track vast amounts of data but have so far proved of minimal benefit in preventing, or even warning, of attacks. And such systems are vulnerable to manipulation: low-ranking volunteers in terrorist organisations can create background chatter that ties up resources and maintains a threshold of anxiety. There are many tricks of the trade that give terrorists secure digital communication and leave no trace on the host computer."

Which is exactly where I come in. Mindpixel and my semantic spectrum technology can examine vast amounts of traffic and webpages and actually understand the intent of the messages, filtering out completely background chatter.

My GAC-80K based system is the only known automatic system that has actually made a terror prediction that seems to have been accurate. I released GAC-80K to the public for research purposes so that people could prove to themselves the value of the data for extracting meaning from text. All the right people currently have copies and I don't think it will be long before this technology is added to Escelon and Eshelon-like systems worldwide.

From the Times article:

"Government-sponsored monitoring systems, such as Echelon, can track vast amounts of data but have so far proved of minimal benefit in preventing, or even warning, of attacks. And such systems are vulnerable to manipulation: low-ranking volunteers in terrorist organisations can create background chatter that ties up resources and maintains a threshold of anxiety. There are many tricks of the trade that give terrorists secure digital communication and leave no trace on the host computer."

Which is exactly where I come in. Mindpixel and my semantic spectrum technology can examine vast amounts of traffic and webpages and actually understand the intent of the messages, filtering out completely background chatter.

My GAC-80K based system is the only known automatic system that has actually made a terror prediction that seems to have been accurate. I released GAC-80K to the public for research purposes so that people could prove to themselves the value of the data for extracting meaning from text. All the right people currently have copies and I don't think it will be long before this technology is added to Escelon and Eshelon-like systems worldwide.

http://www.mindpixel.com/chris/2005/07/neanderthal -dna-sequence-predictions.html

Neanderthal had slightly larger brain volume than we do. I believe this is because they had an extra neocortical layer. This layer I think functioned normally, however I think that because of the problems of mantaining omniconnectivity between the top layer and the thalamus, that an eight-layer total thalamocortical system of neanderthal would have had slightly less hypersurface area and that as a result they had shorter immediate memory.

If you imagine each neocortical layer and the thalamus as dimensions defined by the possibility of local inhabition, and where between layer inhabition is not possible, [except in the special case of the TRN which is really outside the system and acts as a focus control] you can visualize something like this:

Here are eight points in one dimension:
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8

There are seven steps between 1 and 8.

In two dimensions:
1-2-3-4
5-6-7-8

Now there is much less distance between 1 and 8. This process continues until we get to seven dimensions where it starts to reverse and the points begin again to seperate. At seven dimensions, hypersurface is maximum. It is why PCB boards have no more than seven layers. And I think why IBM's most advaanced NMR quantum computer hit a developmental wall at seven qubits. And it is why I think why your immediate memory is seven digits wide and I think why humans are here and neanderthal is not.

Neanderthal DNA can be compared with the DNA of humans, bats, and cetaceans, all of which have different neocortical lamination counts. I expect something related to the reeler gene will be implicated. Or we may discover a whole new set of lamination controls, all of which I have previously predicted will be sensitive to hypersurface area.

I am. See some of my clients here:

http://www.mindpixel.com/chris/2005/07/some-new-ga c-downloaders-for-july-7.html

Michael Spivey liked the idea of a popular science book called "The Bending of Thought" becuase, well, the effect is accurately described by an analogy with light and gravity.

You see, when you have a map of the average person's mind, market becomes a science...which explains my quick growing client list!

Look at this map:

http://www.mindpixel.com/chris/2005/06/map-of-1000 00-english-words.html

And try to imagine it made not with words, but Mindpixels.

Do you think it would look random? and be of no use whatsover?? Is that what you think??

One of my best friends just bought a tiny little house in downtown Toronto for $377,000. I left Toronto last November and moved to Santiago, Chile and live downtwon where my rent is $260/month, for quite a nice, though small place, in an excellent area.

So, if I spend $100K on the Orion DS-96, that leaves me more than enough for a 250 channel geodesic EEG system which would allow me to compute self-organizing maps of the human mind based on flashing the 1.6 million mindpixels I have collected over the past five years to various volunteers [english teachers], AND still have 56.73 years worth of rent left!

Too bad no bank will loan me $377,000 for a computer and an EEG system and the time to play with it...

Looks like Emiew can nod its head...I'd love to stick GAC into this bot...1.4 million binary human propositions...Emiew would be very entertaining in a quiet Turing Test kind of way...

(Summer 2003)...From Kluwer Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, edited by Robert Epstein and Grace Peters, subtitled: "Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer."

Invited contributors include contributions from Andrew Hodges, Jon Agar, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Stevan Harnad, Kenneth Ford, Douglas Hofstader, John R. Lucas, Roger Penrose, David Rumelhart, Selmer Bringsjord, Ned Block, David Chalmers, The Churchlands, Andy Clark, H. M. Collins, Jack Copeland, Hubert Dreyfus, Jerry Fodor, Robert M. French, Thomas Metzinger, Peter Millican, James Moor, Ariella V. Popple, Zenon Pylyshyn, John Searle, Hugh Loebner, Stuart Shieber, Richard Wallace, Joseph Weizenbaum, Rodney Brooks, Peter Dayan, Brue Edmonds, Anne Foerst, David Harel, Patrick J. Hayes, Mark Humphrys, Douglas Lenat, John McCarthy, Jon Oberlander, Ian Pratt, Willaim J. Rapaport, Murray Shanahan, Aron Sloman, Chris Thornton, Stuart Watt, Blay Whitby, Terry Winograd, Robbie Garner, Jason Hutchens,David Levy, Joseph Weintraub, Thomas Whalen, Veronique Bastin & Dennis Cordier, Kevin L. Copple, Bruce Cooper, Thad Crew, Richard Gibbons, Gerold Lee Gorman, David Hamill, Sandy Johnson & Chris Johnson, Chris S. Johnson, Laurence Matishak, Michael L. Maudin, Peter Neuendorffer, Michale Onofrio & Stephen Hildebran, Luke Pellen, Joseph Strout, Ed T. Toton III, Vladimir Veselov & Eugene Demchenko, George B. Dyson, Neil Gershenfeld, Michael Gross, Raymond Kurzweil, James Martin, Hans Moravec, Charles Platt and of course, myself (pdf copy of chapter).

What do you think of efforts to "create" AI by collecting huge amounts of information, such as the Mindpixel and Cyc projects?

Don't Gaak know where hes better off?

I think it's amusing that the robot that broke free shares its name (homonym) with the creation at MindPixel (that one's "GAC" and is software).

Perhaps one day we can put GAC in Gaak and gawk at the marvel we have wrought.

Until Cyc is allowed to self-generate rules this will limite Cyc's growth to the abilites of humans to feed it information on fact at a time. This will greatly limit the database's access to less popular or more technical topics and will slow down the process of learning.

I think it'd be cool to teach Cyc to program. "A bubble sort is less efficient than a quicksort."

Perhaps it could fix all Microsoft's bugs, without access to the source!

Oh, btw there's another couple projects similar to Cyc:

OpenMind and MindPixel .

One last point: How the hell do you code something when you don't even know how it works? And can anybody tell me in precise, painstaking detail how sentience works? Well enough to program it?

The standard way to diplicate something you don't understand is called reverse engineering--or behaviorism depending on if you're an engineer or a psychologist. Our best "automated behaviorist" is what is known as a tomographic scanner--you know those medical machines you stick your head in if you want to see what's inside...

Consider: It took more than 4 billion years and a great many improbable events for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa to appear on the Earth. It is unlikely that this event could ever occur independently again. However, a skilled artist could copy the Mona Lisa in a few months, a camera in a fraction of a second, and a computer could make millions of copies in moments. Once something exists (which is always the hardest part), only two things are required to duplicate it; A medium of sufficient complexity to capture the essential complexity of the original, and a feedback echanism that minimizes the differences between the copy being made and the original. (It is conceded that it would be very difficult to make an 'exact' molecular duplicate of the Mona Lisa, however in this case the essential complexity to be copied is the two dimensional visual image made on the human retina by the painting.)

It was not long ago that the process of non-destructively imaging the inside of the human body was thought to be impossible. Now millions of such images are created every year using a host of techniques including CAT, MRI, PET, SPECT, etc. The tomographic process with which all these types of images are created provides us with a model for imaging and duplicating the common awareness of self and environment we like to call human consciousness.

In creating a CAT scan image, many x-ray samples are taken from many different vantage points. The resultant data is then statistically correlated, essentially extracting the common pattern that could have 'caused' each individual sample, without contradicting any other individual sample. For example, one x-ray sample of some object yielding an intensity of X would by itself indicate it was 'caused' by an object with a uniform x-ray density of X. Taking additional samples from additional vantage points, yields more information about the internal structure of the object; with each additional sample improving the overall quality of the entire image being built by a very small amount. Millions of these samples yield the near perfect tomographic images of the internal structure of people and objects so common today.

Imagine a simple database with millions of 'stimulus/response' pairs; where each stimulus would be a statement of consensus fact, such as 'The day time sky is usually blue.', and where each response could only be 'true' or 'false'. Each of these pairs is equivalent tomographic sample. As with a CAT scan, one sample will not tell us anything of use, nor will ten, nor will ten thousand. Millions however will yield a high resolution binary tomographic 'image' of the common cause of all the individual samples; an image of human consciousness, which could be used to project a true artificial intelligence into a computer. Specifically, the database of millions of response pairs could be used as a training set for a statistical correlation system such as a neural net. An artificial intelligence derived from a binary tomographic image feedback process would be indistinguishable from a human being when asked questions that can be answered in a binary fashion. Such an entity could communicate awareness of self and environment and would thus qualify as being conscious.

To train a system to behave like a human in this fashion would require a database of a very large number of different stimuli to which we knew the average human response... I've just happen to have one... it's almost 450,000 items hand coded by more than 45,000 different people (you might have read about it in this month's Wired Magazine)

450,000 isn't enough. Which is why I work on it every day.

I could use help!

Mindpixel Digitial Mind Modeling Project

The basic idea is that the testee evaluates a large corpus of true or false statements, and that the intelligence of the system being tested can be mathematically determined from the resulting score's deviation from chance.

Considering that Turing's test isn't really a "test" at all -- it's based on a 19th century parlor game where the object was to see whether the gender of a hidden person could be determined based on their answers -- I think McKinstry's idea shows inventiveness and promise.

It's a shame the MindPixel project itself is mathematically unsound. I think that's the reason the MIST isn't talked about more in Turing Test discussions.

Here in Toronto, we never had Webvan, but we've got a great copycat called Grocery Gateway. These guys are unreal - and let me tell you, it has *nothing* to do with delivering groceries.

For example, their delivery windows are only 1 hour wide - so no mint chocolate chip ice cream sitting on your porch. The drivers (what are they paying these guys!?) are customer service freaks - if they think they're going to be even 1 minute late, they call you and let you know. If you go nuts and tell them they suck (not that I ever did), they calmly ask you to please call the customer service number.

Then the real service shines. The customer service reps are the exact opposite of everything you've every experienced. They are nice, polite and best of all, they give you free groceries. In the case above, my whole order was free, because it arrived 2 minutes after the delivery window I selected.

It makes me wonder what the Webvan experience was like. Not enough repeat customers? What did they charge anyway?

Feed the beast.

1. Question asked of GAC 07/01/2001 16:03
2. Registered Login Required [href]
   --------
   I think the answer to: Donating $2.00 via PayPal is a good way to contribute to the mindpixel project is:

   FALSE

I did a report on Artificial Consciousness a few months ago the plan isn't for the corpus to wake up one day and be intelligent, but rather to be able to train a neural network with the knowledge.

Since they didn't plan to do that till 2010, one wonders what exactly they're going test...

The test is known as the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory).Developed as a specialized psychological test for the measurement of psychopathology, the MMPI has been the preferred psychosocial diagnostic instrument among clinicians for the past 50 years.

Originally published in 1940 by Hathaway and McKinley, MMPI has been implemented in many clinical and non-clinical contexts, including medical, educational, medicolegal and organizational settings. A restandardisation and partial revision of the MMPI resulted in the publication of the MMPI-2 in 1989.

GAC (Generic Artificial Consciousness -- pronounced "Jack") is the artificial personality being developed at the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project with the collaboration of nearly 40,000 Internet users from more than 200 countries worldwide.

GAC will be evaluated using the MMPI-2 over the next several months to assess its learning of human consensus experience from the Mindpixel project's large and diverse group of users from many different cultures.

The test will be supervised and interpreted by Dr. Robert Epstein, one of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior.

"Nothing like this has ever been attempted," said Epstein. "We're evaluating thousands of people worldwide as if they were one collective individual."

"We don't know if it is possible to build a normal personality out of millions of little pieces. This experiment will tell us how reasonable the idea is," Epstein added.

In the nearly one year the project has been online, Mindpixel's Internet contributors have made nearly 8 million individual measurements of more than 355,000 individual items of human consensus experience.

The project's organizers hope that they will gain enough information by the time the project's data collection phase is complete (2010) to build a highly accurate statistical model of an average human mind which they hope can be used as a foundation for true artificial consciousness.

One of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior, Robert Epstein received his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University in 1981. He is Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today magazine and University Research Professor at United States International University in San Diego.

He is also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University. He was also the former director of the famed Loebner Prize competition in Artificial Intelligence.

The Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project was launched on July 6, 2000. It is the world's largest Artificial Intelligence effort, with nearly 40,000 contributing members in more than 200 countries.

[Contact: Dr. Robert Epstein, Christopher McKinstry]

02-Jul-2001

@ Mindpixel, this link. You can also "talk" to GAC via this site.

You can see video of the nanocopters on the Cornell site here

Join the Planet's largest AI Effort and get FREE SHARES

Mindpixel - help the Digital Mind Modeling Project.

Convicted hackers should be *more* desireable from a corporate perspective as they have documentation substantiating their knowledge and are better able to "think like the enemy." They could probably be hired for a lower salary as they would not have the same expectations of somebody who has not recently been in prison.

MindPixel -- help build the world's largest neural network and get free stock!

In order to create a good general-knowledge database such as Everything2 or Mindpixel, a ton of common-sense knowledge has to be entered in. Think of antipatents as being a "common sense for engineers" database.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

(anyone know the URL?)

Give this URL a try: http://www.mindpixel.com

It's the obvious choice. It wants you to register, though, and as we all know, registration is the first step towards confiscation. No thank you. ;-)

It's the obvious choice. It wants you to register, though, and as we all know, registration is the first step towards confiscation. No thank you. ;-)

I've got an advanced digital version of the magic 8 ball working called GAC. Give it a try. It really thinks it's human. You can ask it things like:

• Drinking too much alcohol can make baked beans come out of your nose
• Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Frank Ryan, who threw three touchdowns in the 1964 NFL championship game, designed the computerized voting system used in the House of Representatives.
• Does the fact that you can understand the following- youcanunserstandthissentenceevenwithoutthespaces- come first from learning the word patterns of normal English that you did as a child?
• did microsoft create linux?
• The letter underneath the letter t on a qwerty keyboard is g
• anything you can think of, GAC will answer just like a person.
• UNIX is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, Windows is a shell, and DOS is a boot partition virus.
• Is it true that In 1984, President Reagan joked during a voice test for a paid political radio address that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes"?
• Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
• "Is 88 a number?" is the kind of question asked by an imaginationless, soleless moron?

I am working on bringing back all of the F2K personae, but this time, they will be real.

i built a small mercury mirror telescope in 1984 as a high school science project - only 12 inches. well, actually, it didn't have a secondary so it wasn't really a telescope. i decided even with the glycerin i added to coat the mercury when i spun it up, that it was just too dangerous to being fooling with.

my last thoughts on the project were that maybe i could spin it into shape, then freeze it solid by cooling of the mirror pan with liquid nitrogen. as long as it was frozen, it would be much safer and i could point it just like any telescope.

does anyone know if there is any literature on freezing ltm's? maybe they would be too heavy for earth, but imagine sending a telesscope in a bottle into orbit, where cooling is easy...

Help Create True Artificial Consciousness: Join the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project and get Free Shares in the Venture!

i'm a long time computer geek. i moved down here to chile to live on a beach, write, paint and invent artificial consciousness.

i have started a project to put a free and very sturdy web kiosk in a small fishing village up the cost from the city of antofagasta where i live.

i think that it will make a big difference for the villagers to join the world community; to be able to sell their products as directly as possible and cut out as many middle men as possible

if anyone is interested in this project, you can come down to south america (on your own coin) and stay will me for a month or two while we build and test a prototype. just let me know.

i'm a long time computer geek. i moved down here to chile to live on a beach, write, paint and invent artificial consciousness.

i have started a project to put a free and very sturdy web kiosk in a small fishing village up the cost from the city of antofagasta where i live.

i think that it will make a big difference for the villagers to join the world community; to be able to sell their products as directly as possible and cut out as many middle men as possible

if anyone is interested in this project, you can come down to south america (on your own coin) and stay will me for a month or two while we build and test a prototype. just let me know.

i'm a long time computer geek. i moved down here to chile to live on a beach, write, paint and invent artificial consciousness.

i have started a project to put a free and very sturdy web kiosk in a small fishing village up the cost from the city of antofagasta where i live.

i think that it will make a big difference for the villagers to join the world community; to be able to sell their products as directly as possible and cut out as many middle men as possible

if anyone is interested in this project, you can come down to south america (on your own coin) and stay will me for a month or two while we build and test a prototype. just let me know.

Message begins:

Hey Chris --

I remember you posting about the Mindpixel project several years back on the comp.ai.* hierarchy, before it was called the Mindpixel project, back when you were first attempting to build the Corpus.

(For those of you just jumping in here, I'll quote from Chris' website:

MindPixel, MindPixel, I guess I should define a MindPixel...

A MindPixel is a kernel sentence of consensus fact, such as:

- The sky is usually blue:TRUE
- It is difficult to swim with ski pants on:TRUE
- Water is a dry powder:FALSE
- Mars is the first word is this sentence:TRUE

MindPixels are always binary and are answered by most people in the same way when instructed 'Respond as you think most human beings would respond'.

I call these MindPixels because it is my strong opinion that with a very large number of MindPixels, we can create a high dimensional image of consciousness. Where each kernel sentence is one pixel in that image.

The brilliant part (IMHO) of what Chris has described is his method of determining whether or not a system is, in fact, conscious, called the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test, or MIST. Where the Turing Test is completely subjective, the MIST is objective. It uses a series of binary (yes/no) questions to establish a threshhold for human-level cognition. With it, any system can be tested and rated based on its deviation from chance (50%).

So, as I remember you were flamed pretty hard at the time by the comp.ai.* yokels. Not that THAT means anything; they hate EVERYONE. But there were a few trenchant critiques there that I don't remember you answering adequately.

The big one that sticks out in my mind is the following: For your corpus, there seems to be some small problem regarding certain types of binary questions. For instance, those questions which depend having more data about the situation to provide the correct answer (i.e. "Is P-e4 a good move?") or can meaningfully be answered either way ("Are human beings often blue?"). Your response was that ambiguous questions like these will be eliminated from the Corpus, but some might say that you are solving the problem of intelligence by eliminating the intelligent questions. Can your Corpus function as successful training data and create a system approximating our own level of cognition when it encapsulates such a narrow slice of human intelligence?

(My own idea was that the MIST needed to be expanded from a binary to a quaternary model so that it could reflect the knowledge that some questions can be answered both ways, and some questions simply don't make sense. Call it the "yes/no/both/huh" variant.)

Also, I seem to recall some criticism based on information theory grounds; the idea that even with billions of these buggers, you still won't have enough to do anything meaningful with.

Care to update us? I found your work fascinating the last time, and am glad to see you continuing it.

Original Comment:

This has nothing to do with telescopes. But, I was reading about your Mind Pixel project and had a question: How will GAC deal with ethical questions? For instance, what if you have a mind pixel like the following:

Stealing from another person is usually wrong:TRUE

And then what if you ask GAC a question like this: "Is it wrong for a hungry man to steal bread to feed his family?" What answer do you expect GAC to give? And more importantly, (because either answer could be right depending on which moral camp you hail from) will GAC choose answers to other ethical questions that are consistant with the answer he gives for that question?

wish

PS- moderators, read the article and the ones it links to
---

One of the very first things I downloaded from the web in 1994 was this mpeg file of Karl Simms' evolved swimming fish. It was a hell of a download at 10mb over 14.4Kbps, but it was worth it! I am certain this is a hardware version of Simms software project (he did it on one of those giant Thinking Machines Hypercubes that the Defense Department loves so much)

The video shocked me and changed my life. It's a wonderful video to show people that don't believe in evolution. After seeing this, you really have no IGNORE hard to remain IGNORant of the power of evolution.

I can't seem to find a copy of the paper behind this video, but it is equally shocking. Try to find it yourself, it is definately worth reading.

"Artificial Evolution for Computer Graphics", Karl Simms, Computer Graphics, Volume 25:319-328, Number 4, August 1991, SIGGRAPH'91.

I remember at the time thinking it would be great if the simulated hardware in Simms' simulation (how many Simms would a Simms Sim sim if a Simms Sim could sim?) could actually be constructed... you could evolve a robot in a machine, and only actually build it after it was perfected.

Looks like that is exactly what going to happen