Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: unizh.ch

Stories and comments across the archive that link to unizh.ch.

Comments · 54

  1. Re:GET OVER IT!!! by vecna_99 · · Score: 1 · on On Usage of "Hacker vs. Cracker"

    Is that suppoosed to be funny? Most people will find it really f*cking offensive and in very poor taste.

    go smoke some more pot, PC-boy. that was "suppoosed" to be the Jive Generator, an august and venerable standby of geek humor. i suppose someone who still thinks the late '60s in America were the epitome of "cool" might find it offensive, though...

    -steve

  2. Hardware AI by James+Lanfear · · Score: 1 · on Spiritual Robots Symposium
    In the interest of making this thread complete, I would like to point out that computer science doesn't have monopoly on AI-related research. Electrical/computer engineering is contributing as well, in the form of neuromorphic engineering (aka silicon neuroscience and dozen other cute names). Info can be found here and here, as can links to most of the other research sites.

    In a nutshell, neuromorphic engineering involves modelling neural systems in analog hardware, starting with the neurons and moving up, hopefully to whole neurvous systems in the coming decades. The focus is one realism--this is modelling, after all--and replicating the physical properties of neurons as accurately as is possible in silicon VLSI. It is also home to a great deal of work on analog, and mixed analog-digital devices, as well as pure research on neural computation. (In a broad sense a 'computation'.)

    Most relevent to this discussion is that we now have an AI proto-field that is completely different in its approach to the problem (so much so that I don't expect it to turn its attention toward AI, in the proper sense, for several years), far moreso than connectionism. As a happy coincidenece, it also overcomes many of the limitations of classical AI, both technical and ideological, by attacking the problem at the biophysical, instead of psychological, level and doing so in physical, instead of algorithmic, terms.

  3. Music Generator on Linux by fuzzybunny · · Score: 1 · on What Is The State Of MIDI Support Under Linux?
    A while ago, I saw a Brazilian professor and his group visiting an art exhibition here in Switzerland; I believe they were from the University of Campinas. They had a pretty nifty project they displayed called Roboser (Robot Composer), which took movement patterns such as people moving around a room, and turned them into music.

    The guy's desktop was obviously KDE, and when I approached him about it he said that he'd used it because it was free. The Linux box controlled a large array of electronic music equipment, which was pretty impressive in itself.

  4. Other place to look: by briskatron · · Score: 1 · on Researchers Create Artificial Eye Chip

    If this is the kind of thing that gets your interest, try checking out the Institute For Neuroinformatics . In addition to building all of these sorts of vision chips, they also do work with real brain stuff, like anatomy and the like.

    I did programming for them last fall, so I got to know some of the people doing the chip work. Rather than doing it for the reasons presented above (ie, weapons/AI) a lot of this is done in the mindset of pure research. These chips also give us a method to test some of the ideas we have about how brains work. After all, if you can build one, you can understand one.

    In terms of making things like artificial eyes, we would first need to be able to track all of the neurons running from the eye to the rest of the brain, which is still out of the possibilities for the near future.

    Cool stuff, though.