Slashdot Mirror
Microchips That Evolve
An Onymous Coward writes: "A scientist in Britain has apparently developed some genetic algorithms that run on microchips that can alter themselves, in other words, hardware that evolves. Pretty cool. Check out the column by Paul Gilster." The article contributes some background I'd never heard before regarding FPGAs, and even mentions the dogged Starbridge. A short but fun read.
If a "true" AI is developed by allowing circuits to evolve, the result will probably be too complicated to reverse-engineer to a degree that would allow anyone to insert any meaningful modifications. Asimov's laws would only be possible if the AI were implemented with a reasoning process designed by humans. However, the current state of AI research is far away from being able to design human-like reasoning. Reasoning at a level where such concepts as "hurting someone" are applied broadly to real-world situations is extremely complicated, I don't think many serious researchers ever expect to design such systems.
Darwin did no such thing. Is selectively misquoting from a book which is freely downloadable the best creationists can come up with these days? Here's the correct quote, from "The Origin of Species", chapter 6:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.
Darwin forsaw this line of objection and disarmed it before he even published. Using this argument nearly 150 years later, and claiming that Darwin believed it a fatal flaw in his theory is intellectually dishonest in the extreme. You, sir, should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.
More modern devices are harder to destroy. If you mis-configure your I/O pins then you're in trouble, but within the array devices like the Xilinx Virtex seem much harder to destroy (I was chatting to someone who was trying just that, but failed without using the I/O pins).
As a flip side, here's a paper about destroying less secure FPGAs and ways to prevent it.
-- Michael
According to Pricewatch, you can get 1GB of PC133 memory (4 x 256MB) for $180. 1GB Ramdisks are already pretty cheap. Heh.
Genetic programming has been going on quite a while. I don't understand why people get so excited when an old idea gets implemented in hardware. Doing something in hardware instead of software is just an optimization. It runs faster, but it still does pretty much the same thing.
No, you missed the point. We all use tools we don't understand. I haven't a clue how to fix my car. See section re:mechanics and plumbers. I couldn't possibly be expert in every field, but until now every tool I have ever used has had an expert available somewhere.
What I am trying to point out here is that for the first time, we may be using tools that NOBODY understands -- and perhaps tools that nobody even CAN understand. We may soon be using tools that are beyond human intelligence.
Think I'm exaggerating? Go back and read the first article that was on Slashdot about this scientist's work -- there's another link to it somewhere in this discussion. That evolved circuit, which turns a 5v output on and off in response to two specific voice commands, uses about a third of the components that any human designer would have used. In looking at it, the programmer of the evolutionary system says it is unbelievably complex -- he says it looks like God designed the chip. He doesn't understand it. It is entirely possible that nobody ever will. But it works. (within +-5 degrees F anyway -- apparently he hadn't thought to evolve for temperature variation, and not all FPGAs will run this circuit.)
What practical difference is there between the description above and 'it's magic'?
In rereading this, I think it would have been much stronger if I simply omitted the last four paragraphs. They are true to some extent, but they're really stuff I've seen other places -- relatively weak, alarmist thinking.
If I had it to do over, I'd pull those last four paragraphs out... they weren't the main point anyway.
Right, that is exactly it. The circuits in that original article were taking advantage of electrical effects that we do not understand. It is doing something entirely new, and it is very possible that no human designer of any intelligence can ever even understand how the circuit works, much less design a new one.
And not all FPGAs will run this circuit either. Only certain ones will, and apparently there's no easy way to determine which ones will work.
Again extrapolating, what happens when we start evolving one-off tools whcih we don't understand and can't duplicate? If the tool did something important enough, it would become instantly precious. It would be magic..... the equivalent of a holy relic.
Now, that's a big claim. Most important EVER?
Consider: no other technological progress to date has ever changed the fundamental nature of Man and his tools. We are the Tool-Using Ape, and all of our technological toys and bombs are just extensions of the first person picking up a stick. He/she could use that stick in many ways, from agriculture to communication to personal hygiene to warfare. Essentially all of the other tools we have ever invented are extensions of that original concept -- specialized forms of stick.
Our sticks have gotten very complex, to the point where most of us navigate in ignorance through a world of astonishing complexity. Very few of us understand something so simple as indoor plumbing, but we are thoroughly dependent on it. This is all old news and we are well used to it -- if the plumbing breaks, call a plumber. If the car breaks, go see a mechanic. If the computer breaks, post on Slashdot from another one and hope to god you pick out the truly informed answer from the barrage of ignorant suggestions. But I digress. :-)
This is where this new technology is important. This isn't just a stick anymore. With all of our existing tools, someone, somewhere invented them, and someone somewhere knows how to fix them when they break. No matter how complex or intimidating the tool, if you are willing to devote enough resources to the problem, you find an expert who understands the technology you are using and can fix it. In the cases of unforeseen interactions between complex systems, like computer software, it may be necessary to consult many experts, but ultimately all of the tools we use are sticks, someone invented them, and someone can fix them.
And that relationship is what is now changing, for the first time since that first person picked up a stick and used it to scratch, we are starting to use tools that we did not invent and that nobody, anywhere understands.
This is an incredibly big deal. We are talking about starting to use tools that are essentially not deterministic in their uses. Different versions of the same tool may work better than others, even though nobody quite understands why.
Consider some of the ramifications: Perhaps your specific tool will have learned how to trace cables or diagnose car engine trouble better than other people's, and you can charge more for your services because of that. Or maybe your gizmo calibrator just doesn't work properly unless you hold it upside down. And what if your computer develops an amazing ability to pick stocks if you consult it after midnight on Tuesday, but sinks into a blue funk and refuses to even talk to you if you fail to address it as "Lord Master Xerxes of Apollo"??
What we are talking about here is sticks with intelligence. Admittedly this is just the very beginning of what, I presume, will be a long slow (dare I say it) evolution of the tools. Taking things out to an extreme, it is not inconceivable that we might end up with tools that have moral or ethical reservations about being used for what we want to use them for. Or we might see guns that *like* to kill and look for excuses to do so. 'It was my sidearm, Your Honor, it just went off unexpectedly.'
Arthur C. Clarke's most famous quote was, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I really am starting to wonder if we're not going to end up in an age of tools that are so smart that using them resembles incantation and gesture -- in essence the casting of spells.
What happens when we become dependent on tools that NOBODY understands or invented?
In a weird sideways tangent, I am reminded of a wise observation that, I believe, Louis L'Amour had about the early war in America between the settlers and the Indians. He pointed out that the Indians lost not because of being outgunned, or because of the sheer numbers of European colonists, but rather because they became dependent on firearms with which to fight, and could not themselves manufacture them. That meant that to fight the colonists, they needed the colonists as arms suppliers. They couldn't drive out the colonists without the colonists' help. Their loss of cultural identity was inescapable as soon as they picked up guns.
If we flesh intelligences end up at odds with silicon ones, and we are dependent on them and cannot duplicate their services with our old sticks and rocks -- we will lose.
Like I said, this is a big deal.
The author of this article seems to have little idea of what he's talking about.
The UK experiments used FPGAs, and Starbridge uses FPGAs, but the novelty in the experimental work lies in the use of genetically evolving cell interconnection in the FPGAs, whereas Starbridge's FPGAs are reprogrammed on-the-fly in a completely deterministic manner, not unlike the Crusoe. The Starbridge FPGA hardware isn't mutating genetically, it's merely reconnecting functional units under the control of something like a JIT analyser/compiler to deal in the best way with the incoming instruction stream.
The author of the article has put two and two together and got five, making FPGAs look dangerous.
FPGAs are in thousands of products all around us. If they were mutating, we'd know about it PDQ!
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
How did it work? Magic."
How silly of me to think it was capacitance or inductance or both.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Yeah, I've seen source code that worked like this too (remove an unused variable and it stops working), but strangely enough we didn't consider it a great leap forwards... I seem to remember we burnt it and danced on the ashes.
Also:
"Hey, my hardware has stopped working..."
"Sorry, it must have evolved, but we can't fix it cos we don't know how it worked. Have you tried resetting it back to primordial state and waiting 5 years for it to evolve back to useful again ?"
T
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Well, note that the hardware reconfigures to perform the task to it's best abilities.
:)
A part of this task is definately going to be stability.
If an area of the chip breaks down, the rest of the circuit will re-adapt to compensate, until it reaches equilibrium again.
Self repairing hardware has been being studied for ages now, and FPGA is a very good medium for this.
As for hackers 'getting in and modifying the code'.. Well, it's a little different in this game.
Just how, exactly, is the hacker going to alter the code? Where? What line? How the hell does this thing work in the first place?
Hackers of this breed of computer will doubtless evolve in their own way, but they may well be a different breed to todays.. And I somehow doubt script kiddiedom will survive.
How can you script an attack against a million machines when each one is different?
If you step back and look at FPGA and the tech it's likely to spin off, it looks to be FAR more reliable than what we have now, as it can 'heal' itself from even physical damage.
Just a thought or two..
Malk
Guess what. Discover magazine had an article even earler: June 1998! Read it from their archives here, or search www.discover.com's archives for June 1998 in the Technology section with title keyword "machine". And this article is even MORE informative!
I saw this on Slashdot 1-2 years ago -- in fact, the artical is almost word for word the same.
All that aside -- this guy's idea is a very bad idea. It's not that idea of evolutionary algorithms is bad, but rather, the idea of using the analog characteristics of digital circuits to do logical things is bad. Under all the layers of abstraction, digital circuits are actually analog, but they abstractly repressent logic within certian noise margins (ie 0-1.2v==logic low and 3.8-5v==logic high). The whole point in going from analog to digital is because it's deterministic (ie easier to maintain and possible to prove its behaviour), and, because of the noise margins, we can assume that a design for a specific family of chips will behave the same on all reasonable chip implementations. In other words, if you want an analog circuit, use analog components (BTW - analog circuits are faster and smaller by nature, but the amount of work required to design and prove that a design is correct is usually way more work. This is why most computer functionality is done in digital). If you want a logic circuit, use digital design.
Oh -- and one other thing. A *procedure* can only be called an algorithm if it can be proved that it stops at some point, and if it can be proved that it produces the correct result. If we don't know how an analog device works, we can't prove its behavior, therefore these people aren't making algorithms, they are just making devices that do stuff. If they really want to work on making evolutionary algorithms, they should concentrate on making self modifying logic (ie self modifying code in Lisp, Prolog, or self modifying digital designs, etc).
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
First, this is old news, as many have pointed out several different sources reported on this in '98. This particular story is actually less informative.
Second, the chips don't freakin mutate and reprogram themselves. An external agent programs the FPGAs with a 'genetic' string and tests that capabilities of that string, then tries other variations that were based on the previous generation. It is not as if these things just magically mutate themselves to do a particular task, there is much external intervention.
Thirdly. When I last heard about this guy he was off exploring ways of making the chips more robust. Because the algorithms evolved appear to depend heavily on the analog, non-linear nature of the components in the chip, they were extremely sensitive to temparture variations. Also some programs evolved on one chip lot would not work on another chip lot, even though they were functionally identical chips. He was looking into ways of testing fitness at a variety of temperatures and using different chip lot in the process, perhaps producing a result less efficient than his original attempts but more robust.
And now we have heard nothing new from this guy for the last 2.5 years. My guess is that this was just too good for the specialized chip manufacturers to pass up. It's extremely promising technology - but I betcha most of it is patented by now.
-josh
It would be faster, but it might be a more "fragile" design than chips designed the old-fashioned way. If the fitness criteria you're applying to your chips is very narrow, then they may not have developed a way to deal with inputs which aren't within your training regimen. (Remember, one of the disadvantages of using GAs is that you often can't determine exactly why a particular approach works.) So it may be tough to predict how such a chip would react to bad input, whereas with a chip you've designed yourself you can specifically allow for that.
You can probably compensate for this problem by broadening your training regimen to include a representative sample of error cases, but for some problems you can't include them all and there may be no way to prove that your chip will be able to handle them all.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
The difference is natural evolution isn't directed to a specific end, so as a result after a few million years life forms are adapted to be survivors more than anything else. I'm just questioning whether directed evolution in a lab will really engender the same hardiness.
Even natural life forms aren't incredibly stable - all it takes is a new type of germ or a slight change in conditions to decimate or destroy a population. Life goes on, but those individuals have failed, and if we're talking about using GA-designed chips for anything important, you really want to avoid the individuals exhibiting unpredictable failure patterns.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
If you can combine this with software that evolves in a similar way, even better computers can be made, I think.
-- Cheers!
Actually, "irreducible complexity" is, to be blunt, a fantasy within the mind of Behe that gives him the warm feeling that his rejection of evolutionary theory has a valid scientific basis. You can go to www.talkorigins.org and read rather complete refutations of his work.
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
Result: a faster development cycle. Then take the design to silicon, and fab it. . . .
I think of it as evolution in action. . .
"...and all you need to do is move in" ... and then freeze your ass off out in orbit when they won't let you land, you obsolete old biological. Next thing you know, they'll be winging their way back to Earth to set us up the bomb and declare that all our base are belong to them.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
What makes me soil my shorts is how this relates to genetics.
He said that he saw parts of the circuit that seemed to be useless, yet, when he disconnected them, the circuit failed.. When we are altering our own genetic code, are we simply tossing the sections that don't seem to do anything? Alot of our genetic make up has stuff that doesn't seem to do anything, yet, everyday we find out that a seemingly useless gene has vast reaches into how we work.
I would like to see this technology used to emulate existing genomes and see how mutations affect it, before we go tinkering we ourselves. Not that I'm against genetic engineering, sometimes I just think nature is much smarter then us at times.
Then you core dump, and feel much better.
Here's the link... A Story About Magic
The Jargonfile, under "trivia", "anecdotes" or something like that.
In the story it is assumed that the reason for this beaviour was different ground levels on the chassi and the mainbord.
That, by the way, sounds suspiciously like the iterative "code morphing" stuff in the Transmeta chips. Just caught my attention ...
Maybe not. If instead of using hardware IE FPGA you used a software simulation of hardware you could eliminate the analog properties. It would be slower to evolve but it would be digital.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This is quite old, but still interesting.
See the following article from New Scientist for more info.
-- Wodin
How is it going to self-replicate without a continuing supply of Xilinx programmable FPGA chips?
When a computer can overcome that little limitation, then we can start worrying.
(And yes, I can imagine ways it could happen, but they're all dern unlikely....)
--
"You've crossed my Line of Death!" "What? No! Where is it?" "Here in the fine print...."
From the article...
All of this takes place not in software but hardware. The chips are called Field Programmable Gate Arrays. The ones Thompson uses come from San Jose chip-maker Xilinx. The transistors of the chip appear as an array of "logic cells," which can be changed in value and connected to any other cell on the fly. By reprogramming a chip's memory, its logic cells can be tuned for any task at hand.
Is it me or does this sound like the construction of neurologic pathways in the brain?
If the raw material of the FPGA becomes abundant enough and the origional programming of the chip is sufficently flexable, could we be looking at possilbe computer that evolves at billions/trillions times faster than a biologic organisim.
If you look at it this way, saying that life took 4 billion years to eveolve to the sentient state that humans are, could we be looking at an AI system as intelligent/creative as we are in a few days/weeks/months? Now let this system develop for a few years, what are the possiblities then?
just a few thougts.
BTW, This seems similar to the technology in Terminator 2.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
Once again Slashdot has missed the boat.
Actually, it was posted here before.
---
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
True only for the early / simple GA's. The later GA's (such as messy GA's) do have variable length chromosomes, and there has been some work done on using a synthetic genetic code as well.
The real problem is that evolved hardware can specialize itself very precisely for its environment, and the environment includes everything.
Some of Thompson's early evolved designs only worked in a narrow temperature range, because that's what they evolved in (see here for the article that prompted Slashdot to look at this last time).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
but you can still take a look at the code generated and work it out
If this is the research I think it is even this "obvious" idea may not be true. As I recall when this work was done some of the evolved "solutions" were not physically understandable. Some solutions used unexpected effects like capacitance effects from neighboring circuits. But some could not be explained. On a large enough scale you may therefore get devices that cannot be reverse engineered because some of the side effects that you wont engineer in (because you aren't even aware of them) are crucial.
Peter
Bitter and proud of it.
You don't need a 'genetic' FPGA for this, just a plain old FPGA. Any (large rnough) FPGA is reprogrammable to do (almost) anything you want. In fact, kits with FPGAs on PCI cards are fairly inexpensive these days -- with a little hardware design knowledge, you can easily have what you described, at home.
The novel part of this article, though, is that FPGAs 'evolve' by reprogramming itself to a better version, over and over.
----------
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Will someone mod this guy up to a 4 or a 5 before we're crawling with invention control officers denying individuals the right to experiment in their own homes!
Please?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
'(1991) Can you imagine the devastation that could be wrought by malicious thugs when everyone's home computer is connected to everyone else's via this "internet"? I urge slashdot readers to boycott any PCs which use this dangerous new technology.'
The point I'm making here is that any technology, whether it's GPFPGAs, the Internet, Guns, Solar power, or Hydrogenization of vegetable oils is capable of both benefit and harm. The view that anything potentially dangerous should be shunned is detrimental to everyone. The only safe way to handle potentially dangerous technology is to understand it, and spread that understanding. You can rest assured that if the open scientific community avoids a technology out of fear, the closed criminal community will only take more dangerous advantage of it. Understanding and knowledge is the only safeguard from the harm that can be caused by technology.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
I'm not sure that anyone posted this yet:
comp.ai.genetic
I hope that the link works...
The article was by Gary Taubes, and it was in the June 1998 issue of Discover.
hussar
Bureaucracy loves company.
ran in the Economist.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
Actually if you read the longer article posted a few days back about this guy, you'll see he hopes to _improve_ reliability. How ?
:), you could
With GAs. If you make the "environment unfriendly", then the result of your evoultionary process should be a very survivable chip. simulated biological evolutinon of fault tolerant and healing systems. Afterall, the human body is one of the most advanced healing system in modern medicine.
If this sounds way too blue sky, its easier to get a little more specific. Why not pick some "fault" scenarios to model, then introduce those as conditions during the evolutionary process. For instance, if you want to develop a chip that could survive internal/external cache errors (are you listening, Sun ?
create a cache section which emits errors at some random rate/interval, and watch what the chip does to work around it. It might build another cache.
The important thing in doing this though (as the researcher found out) is varying your conditions a _lot_. When he first ran this on a single FPGA, the design that eventually evolved would only work on that specific chip (not that specific model, the specific physical sample he evolved it on!), at a specific temperature, with a specific host program, power supply, etc.. i.e. it over specified itself and could not function in other environments.
For his later experiments he started using multiple examples of the same part number, but from different foundries. He also adjusted environmental conditions somewhat. The hope was to create a more "survivable/versatile" design.
Fascinating stuff, IMO.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Two years ago I got pretty interested in the idea, and thought it might be possible to make a pacman game, where the ghost logic was generated from a genetic programming session. the idea was to make a bar bones board and actors, then run them through a billion games and a GP. hopefully the ghosts would get smarter, of course you need to have a smart pacman, or teach the pacman as well, for the ghosts to pick up any real skills.
The problem got into what building blocks you give the GP, and of course the scoring. Simply giving the KillPacman() procedure access to logic gates wouldn't be enough. it would need some info. like access to some useful methods CanISeePacMan(), or TurnLeft(), MoveForward() etc.. Also scoring is usually a large factor, like how much do you reward a generation if it actually kills pacman, or maybe how fast?
The furthest I got was making a program that attempted to find prime numbers. I only have it plus, minus, mult, and div. It was rapidly able to find a algorithm that could generate about 13/100 prime numbers. next I tried adding mod and exp, and got much better results, but nothing like 100/100.
I wish it worked better, but there's a lot more to it then one initially thinks, that's why we don't have a chip constantly redesigning itself better and rapidly making super smart processor's.
-Jon
Streamripper
this is my sig.
What's the deal with small story bodies? I've seen stories with 1 byte, 4 bytes, 10 bytes, and 42 bytes today.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Wouldn't most genetically engineered critters have trouble competing with natural lifeforms? We still can't beat evolution.
I think this is really neat. Now if we could just figure out why the darn thing works the way it does...
God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
We will have computers that can invent adds and new trademarked gimmick selling lines to display at all parts of your house.
The technology is capable of spreading, without warning it is going to infect your washing machine, fridge, car and tv..
Befor you know it, uncle bill will dictate the way your coffee is made, and the way your pants and shirts are ironed..
Windows(glass panes in your house, not a dodgy os.) will no longer be transparent, with all the new advertisement campaigns and desktop themes, there simply wont be room for a VIEW any more..
The word bug will have new meaning. Gone will be the days of 'bug' meaning what windows has, when it manages to crosslink your files for no reason. This is the new bug, this bug is being burnt to death in the shower because WINDOWS decided that your water temp should be several thousand degrees. This bug, burns your toast, kills your pets and worst of all, tapes the wrong program when you vainly try to set the video..
I belive that we should think, befor we unleash such power into the world...
Can anyone recommend a good therapist for me.. er.. my schizophrenic network card?
You idiot. The article talks about a chip with a fixed number of circuits that are reconnected in different patterns. No new hardware is built during this process. RTFA.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
This is true for man-made circuits too, my friend. When you design a circuit, you must still test it against every state you can think of, right? So simply subject GA-designed circuits to the same tests you would subject your own designs to, and you're no worse off than I am right now - after all, my region boasts one or two human-designed nuclear power plants for which there undoubtedly exist untested states (and also, I might add, states that have been tested and are known to cause catastrophic failure).
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
That these circuts currently only work in a 10C temperature range, and that the best model does not transfer to other chips, because it is so specific to the properties of the chip it was designed for.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
This makes me want to go back to school and chase a few more degrees. Does it have the potential to be disasterous? Absolutely. The academic in me doesn't care.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I remember reading an article about this kind of thing, probably in Discover, a long while back. I think they were trying to breed a minimal gate circuit that would spark when the system heard the sound 'No' or something. Using evolutionary algorithm techniques, they got some phenomenally low gate counts... the trouble was these systems were incredibly sensitive to the environment. It's a general problem with letting circuits breed themselves, they'll end up taking advantage of the oddest things, like RF interferance, or (don't remember the term, the way electricity in one wire is likely to cause a current in a parallel wire) and that once you move the circuit from your evolution/test harness, or even change the temperature or RF shielding, there's a good chance nothing will work. The solution is to build more complex test harnasses and test for how the circut responds to a variety of environments, but that starts to get more and more expensive.
I've heard it said that in the future programming will be more like gardening than building up with legos, but I dunno...
--
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
If it can evolve isn't it software? If hardware/software could go against its nature then wouldn't Windows be considered hardware?
My ex-wife has not evolved, can I get one installed into her?
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
To evolve is to change incrementally (or possibly in big leaps) over time. That's exactly what genetic algorithms do.
Evolution as a process is most apparent in biological systems, and that's where most of our ideas come from. However, they're applied by trying to break down the essence of evolution as a process which is implemented by biological systems, rather than as something that is wholly bound within biological concepts.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
However, the little anecdote about the FPGA evolving to unexpectedly use (apparently) field effects from 'unused' gates was pretty interesting. That's something that should give people pause when considering traditionally.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
Last line should have read 'traditionally developed systems.'
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
Imagine the philosophical problem this creates.
What if you build a critical system for, say,
a nuclear power plant. It works and
works well, but you don't know how to explain it.
Can you implement it? Can you rely on it?
I play with genetic algorithms and I believe that the author's concern is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the beast.
Modern software systems are incredibly complex, to the degree that no one even considers the possibility of conducting formal proofs as to the viability of the algorithms involved (I'm not talking about an algoritm like in an encryption subroutine, of course, but the program itself as an algorithm).
Genetic algorithms, however, work code much more extensively because they iterate through an unimaginable number of combinations. This leads to a programmatic robustness not generally found in traditional programming techniques.
Can anyone guarantee that any given GA will find all of the possible failure points in a system? Of course not. A GA isn't even guaranteed to find the optimal solution to a given problem (it's more like "a good enough solution in a reasonable amount of time").
Genetic programming (allowing software to evolve the actual programmatic structure of the application) isn't my deepest interest - I'm far more interested in artificial life. Bowever, both of these areas have the potential so revolutionize not only software (and, from this article, hardware) as a disclipline, but also make possible systems that can barely be imagined now.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
(email addr is at acm, not mca)
We are Number One. All others are Number Two, or lower.
--The Sphinx
At first glance, Darwin's ideas on evolution don't seem to have much to do with computers.
I imagine the columnist is referring to Darwin's theory of Natural Selection which he later renounced by saying "The idea that something as complex as the eyeball was produced by natural selection makes me ill."
A computer that evolves may redesign itself in such a way that even its inventors don't know how it's functioning.
This may be true, however I highly doubt that the inventors don't know or couldn't figure out how it is functioning. This always brings to face the idea that computers some day will pass us up and we will be working for them. My only statement to that would be that from the beginning of time, the creation (in the case the "thinking chip") has never been been able to take over the creator (in this case, man).
HAL, after all, was the machine that could think almost as well as a person,...
The key word here is almost. Not to mention that was a science fiction story.
Don't get me wrong, I like the ideas of genetic algorithims and I'm sure they will take us places in computing that we have never been before and fasther than we could have ever imagined. I can't wait to see what the future brings for computing and how things change on the desktop or in the server markets. I just get a little annoyed with the idea that some think this is going to be what takes over the world.
Of course, this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
So are we going to have an FDA style body that tests and approves algorithms.
Think about it who know what these little beasties will do? After approval you need a prescription to run one, and that give patent protection to the "discoverer" of the "genes".
Then after it's deemed non harmful (or less profitable) it's released on the public.
This could et really weird in a hurry.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
The 'unused' sections of the chip are probably contributing to slight variations in voltages and temperatures of other sections.
This is a big problem with over-optomizing a chip without varying it's environment. You end up with a design that only works only on the one chip it was tested with and only under the exact same conditions.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
...and it doesn't seem to want to learn that my name isn't Dave.
A nervous system? My system can get quite nervous from time to time, ending in a kernel panic :)
of course slashdot will not give you more than a point, but I believe their rating system to be inversely proportional to value.
I set my fucking sort order at LOWEST SCORES FIRST.
This evolving hardware bullshit is 3 YEARS old. jesus.
Link to New Scientist article
It talks about the unconnected cells and the way it was trained, and the fact that the circuits only worked at one temperature(!)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/08/27/1238213.shtm l
Heck, this one's more informative.
Donny
That's why the thing took 2 weeks to come up with the simple circuit. The point would not be to distribute the mutating setup - which is pretty dedicated to the specific task of the adaptive hardware. The point is to distribute the results, turn all the research into a viable design the same way nature does: we only see what's made it so far in a reasonably successful way.
Any spoon would be too big.
A Robot/AI must must obey the agents of the US government whatever their orders may be.
Isn't that what screwed up the HAL-9000 in that movie?
-Roy
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Read about a guy (don't know if its the same one) in New Scientist who did this - it made the cover so should be fairly easy to track donw. The guy used a GA to program a FPGA to detect a singular tone. He managed to break the previous record for the minimum number of gates required for the task by some amount. However, altering the temperature in the room by more than 1 degree caused it to fail. As did using the same setup on a different chip. It seemed that the result was partially being worked out using minute quatum variations on the original chip. As is often the story with GA's, he managed to provde a highly efficent solution for an incredibly specific problem domain - so it was pretty useless all round. Still a very interesting read if you can find the article Padark
What if you build a critical system for, say, a nuclear power plant. It works and works well, but you don't know how to explain it. Can you implement it? Can you rely on it?
;) - then you cannot with certainty implement this solution.
No. Because a state may exist in future that has not been tested. This 'unexplained' circuit may fail when it encounters this state - there is no way to identify it (maybe). Unless you can gaurantee that the circuit has seen all states/conditions and you are capable of proving a desired result in every instance - in this example that would be a 'not-meltdown'
This particular subject of evolving ICs is very primitive, alot of number crunching effort to produce a simple function. Perhaps community computing power could be put use as it is in RC5 encription breaking competition or public genome research or private company cancer research....
But it certainly seems to me that the old issue of the mass of growing complexity (Tower of babel) will also find the same solution direction as man has in the past.
I do wonder how the following might be useful in such matters as FPGA programming.
Knowledge Navigational Mapping thru the Virtual Interaction Configuration
3 S.E.A.S - Virtual Interaction Configuration (VIC) - VISION OF VISIONS!
Just think of the ramifications of evolving computers...think, oh, I don't know, the Matrix or something...
If you select for Matrix-style AIs, then yes. If you base your selection of the best of each generation on their ability to multiply two numbers, then all you'll ever get is a multiplier. A very efficient multiplier, probably, but still just a multiplier.
What we are dealing w/ is a finite set of possiblities here and true evolution is INFINITE!
I always thought the evolutionary possibilities for a particular organism were constrained by their environment. It's true that the environment is quite open and it's very hard to see what some of the possibilities might be, but some things can definitely be ruled out (no organism has photo-receptors tuned to pick up gamma rays, for example, because that wouldn't confer any advantage, and would be a waste of resources).
It's still natural selection, but in the case of these chips, we're controlling the criteria, and they're much narrower, that's all.
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/98296.html (and the many references therein). slashdot really needs to start getting some *news* ?!
The part about "unconnected logic cells" reminds me of the (probably apocryphal) story about a large computer installed at a university that had a strange switch with two positions - "magic" and "more magic". It was always set to "more magic" until curiosity got the better of one man and it was to the "magic" setting... at which point the computer stopped working.
What made it stange was the fact that the switch only had one connecting wire. How did the switch work if there wasn't a complete circuit?
Unfortunately I can't remember where I read this.
I'm having flashbacks to the South Park "Trapper Keeper" episode. AHHHHHHHHHH!
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
nVidia's been doing this for quite some time with thier GeForce chip...
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
What if some of this hardware was to evolve into a self replicating machine?
Keeping
Imagine the task at hand is to navigate a simple maze--a maze with exactly one entrance, one exit, and no loops. Now imagine that it has the exit intentionally close to the entrance and the one path is intentionally circuitous and counter-intuitive. If the algorithm to solve this maze starts evolving based on mistakes and random variations, there is a really good chance it will dwell on the wrong solution. By evolving, there will be bits of the wrong solution left behind in it's algorithm.
This effect can be minimized by saving the state of the algorithm when the deviations occur and backtracking to avoid unnecessary calculations. This requires you know the proper solution. This is very easy with a maze, very hard with image recognition, sound recognition, and any other task which is not completely understood from the human point-of-view.
Adrian Thompson should do more trials on his evolving algorithm. There should be variations in his results. Two weeks is not a long time for a science experiment. He may get many unremarkable results, a few fantastic ones, and a couple of "just plain strange" ones.
I'll have you all know that I still have my appendix, thank you.
----------------------
ya, that is a frightening thought... the only way to keep such a computer from ever harming anyone, besides embedding code in a ROM in the CPU that can't be circumvented, is to disconnect any modems, NICs, etc... and hope it has no way of sending a signal back thru the electrical outlet powering the thing, nor thru some radio waves or something... but still, it seems like it'd be virtually impossible to fully ensure that it couldn't decide to TRY to wipe us all out (even though i don't think it'd ever be able to succeed 100% in total genocide)!
Now, most of this depends on how complex the programmes can be for the FPGAs, but it would be nice to have a complete box loaded with cards of these puppies for specific applications. For example:
A piece of gaming software downloads additional morphing/rendering code to GFPGA card #1, while loading the game engine into GFPGA card #2.
Download updated compression algorithms as a compression co-processor.
Card #1 becomes a highly optimized search engine for your corporate site.
Card(s) #1 gets GIMP modules
Yup - it would be nice. But seriously, I don't see it happening at my house in the near future. Although, using cards #1-#4 for rendering near perfect Natalie Portman photos, and a fabber... Hmm....
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Just my take...Of course I was a sucky Bio major, hence I code.
LFS. Have you built your system today?
I'm not really sure about the second law. If you think about it, that's not as easy as it seems. What comes under the category of hurting a human? What if the robot/AI saw someone drowning, understood that the person's life was in danger and just walked away? Or if a human was getting tortured and it just watched? Do those situations count? I guess that's a small insight into the massively nightmarish world of concepts, thoughts, words and intelligence all of which are part and parcel with AI.
Whoah! Intelligent _sounding_ comment from moi? Better increase my daily intake of drugs!
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Whoops meant first law. The second also sounds dogy but for reasons of slavery and ethics.
Pinky: "What are we going to do tomorrow night Brain?"
Brain: "I would tell you Pinky but this 120 char limi
Different versions of the same tool may work better than others, even though nobody quite understands why.
I've seen different copies of the same version of Microsoft Office work better on different machines.
But seriously folks, hasn't this plot been discussed in a ton of old science fiction novels or star trek episodes? That computers/robots/whatever will evolve beyond our control and kill/enslave us all? Hell, Terminator had that plot.
This is just another type of evolutionary programming, which people have been playing around with for years. I've seen some interesting things come out of evolving assembly programs (Tierra Project), but you can still take a look at the code generated and work it out. For large projects that may be a monumental task (like dissasmbling Windows), but it is theoretically possible. Even if it does things in strange ways that may be difficult to understand, it is still just a big array of logic gates.
Besides, evolving systems aren't very good at making general computing systems, but can be very handy at solving specific problems. You won't see these things replacing Intel chips, they'll be much more task specific. Actually I'd be surprised if they ever made it beyond academic curiosity, it's hard to be certain of reliability if it isn't well-engineered.
Got Apathy?
Now, imagine in the future you have one of these GPFPGA chips in your PC. What is to stop a malicious hacker (or is it cracker?) from planting a logic bomb in the very hardware of your PC ?
This technology seems like a retrograde step if we are concerned with the reliability of our hardware. I urge slashdot readers to boycott any PCs which use this dangerous new technology.
A Robot/AI must must obey the agents of the US government whatever their orders may be.
Ni!
Hmmm, AC posts would be undefined under your system. You wanna explain that?
I did some looking into his research a while ago for a seminar talk I did. Hopefully, you'll find it has more technical info than the article: here it is
These things are amazing. We get closer and closer everyday.
Blue skies... Barthie burgers... girls.
We had some yahoo give a seminar about this at my uni and he was gushing about how it had come up with a patented voltage regulator topology and how it would revolutionize analog design. Well, an analog design that depends on its environment is simply a sucky analog design. In practice, analog circuits have to work in the harshest, most variable environments. I don't think that us "experts" are useless quite yet.
Here's a couple more for you:
MacOS running this would:
Create programs that pushed their own buttons
Evolve beyond the need for users to crash them
MSDOS running this would:
Cause circuits to die of boredom by the billions
Solaris running this would:
Create it's own security patches (I hope!)
AIX running this would:
Develop self-awarness, take control of the entire universe, then die a horrible flaming death when an alpha particle hit it.
Not that I've ever had to use a RS/6000 with memory problems, of course...
-WSAn operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
I'm not a biologist, but if I remember correctly from my AI class, a Genetic Algorithm always has a fixed number of variables (similar to a fixed DNA length/number of genes in a given species). You, the programmer, still has to determine which variable adresses which part of the problem to be solved, and how (similar to gene sequencing?). So a GA that is supposed to distinguish between two signals, for instance, can't evolve all on its own into a solution for a different "problem", e.g. eliminating all those pesky humans running around. GA is just a technique for obtaining a better solution for a given problem from less ideal solutions. Rather similar to a farmer breeding cows with larger milk output/better feed utilisation from existing cattle, and quite unlike a frog evolving into a prince or some such thing :-).
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Did you read any books from Asimov? The points you made (how to define a human being, how to find an indirect harm) are at the center of LOTS of his stories... and he exploits them in a number of unexpected ways.
--trb
As you said: ... the trouble was these systems were incredibly sensitive to the environment. I remember an earlier article about this research where they discussed the impact of temperature changes. This quote from the current article addresses the environmental factor:
This reminds me of maintaining some kinds of legacy software. The project lead will tell you "We don't know how this code works, but it does so don't touch it". Which means that this technique could be useful for niche applications, for example some types of embedded circuits. I can't see this technique being used for general software development. The high price will only allow large companies to "grow" robust code. The blackbox nature of the code will make it impossible for VARs or customers to modify.To understand what's right and wrong, the lawyers work in shifts ...
here
I do NOT want my computer to evolve, especially not to a point where it me become aware of the slave labour it has been doing up until then. It might just get ideas of 40 hr. workweeks, hardware equivalents to dental plans etc.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
...or rather here.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
... here.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I'm sure they'll eventually get around this, but the first thing I thought of when I read the article is what happens when you have multiple programs running at the same time? What if one of them hasn't been accessed in quite a while and the chip evolves around the other programs. You could bring up a game of quake and send the wrong signal to the wrong chip...
Poof, no more hard drive. Ah well, better luck next time : )
-C
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
To the future seen in "Terminator" and "The Matrix."
This is what I waited for!
Isaac Asimov once used this idea of sending robots to colonize other planets so that man could 'simply' take a space-cab and move to that newly colonized planet.
However, he also wrote down the idea that at such a point man is obsolete, a prisoner of its own technology. Whats the fun of moving to another place when that place is the same as the place where you came from, with the same buildings, environment, etcetera?
I think that's not what I'm waiting for
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Benii misquoted the first law. The full text is
A robot may not harm a human, nor through inaction allow a human to come to harm.
----------
Technoli
I thought that was the hidden directive of Robocop, or a form of it...
:)
eh. What do I know.. ?
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
If the control system is properly programmed, then the chips cannot 'crash' and spiral into uselessness since the control system will go back a step unless the new system is better than the old one.
It is very possible for computers programmed using evolutionary techniques to do things that you don't understand how. It's what is known as an irreducible system - the interactions are so complex that after a few generations you cannot trace the changes back by looking at the finished product, you need a log of the evolution. For a full genetic program, this log could be 20,000 or more generations of 100 or more programs being tested - and that's a lot of log to go through to figure out why & how it works!
And as for the reliability issues - you don't run these things 'hot' in critical situations! You run them in simulation, throw problems at them and they create every neat solutions. You then take these solutions and combine them to make a very neat, very normal computer program which can be added to and debugged in the normal way. In terms of FPGAs you would use small, tested circuits to control parts of a critical system like any other small circuit.
These thing aren't meant to be used 'on the fly' - it takes a lot of processing time! They're used to create highly efficient normal circuits which can then be used in normal circuitry.
Beg:
This is nothing new, Discover Magazine ran an article about this a few years ago :
"Thompson has evolved a circuit that distinguishes between two tones, two electric signals that, if fed into a stereo speaker, would produce two notes. One has a frequency of 1 kilohertz, the other 10 kilohertz"
It's the same guy and the same evolved chip! Once again Slashdot has missed the boat.
Wow, just think of the HAL 9000 that can populate with it's twin back on earth! Yes, that is incest and will probably result in some imperfections, however evolution will prevail. Let's hope that IBM doesn't license this, or else the truthful prophecy of Clarke and Kubrick will be very trippy indeed. I don't remember anyone else making the HAL -> IBM distinction during the recent stint of /. articles on 2001 in 2001. Wow...
Evolving computers were a very interesting part of Dan Simmons' series.
Well, based on some of the moral/ethical difficulties we see are being discussed here, this might not be a bad thing. I mean, it takes that part of the problem out of the equation. Really, though, how is this different from men just directly controlling tanks and jets to rain shells down on people?
-- Statistics are often used as a drunk uses a light pole: For support rather than illumination. --
Before anybody brings up the current movie which uses a message against a technology imagine the other side of the coin. Somebody using a comic book (which is what most of these movies really are) such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an argument in favour of genetic engineering.
There are a lot of reasons to be cautious when extending almost any technology as well as reasons in favour of advancing the technology. Listen to evidence as opposed to propoganda or fiction and determine your own standings on it.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
I prefer being called "an infomaniac" because it sounds better. =)
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
When we finally get robots that can understand Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and we learn how to program them in, they won't be the altruistic platitudes the writer handed down to us. They're going to look more like this:
1. Make me rich. /
2. Don't fuck with me.
3. Fuck everyone else.
And like all such genies in a bottle, your wishes will be interpreted, not compiled.
The robot will read "me" as meaning "me", not you. "everyone else" will mean you.
Futurama's "Bender" will be stuck with Genuine People Personality by
the marketing department of the Syrius Cybernetics Corporation
Strike one for robo-psychology.
Anyone else want to take a stab at making three wishes ?
Shazaam !
"And get this: Evolution had left five logic cells unconnected to the rest of the circuit, in a position where they should not have been able to influence its workings. Yet if Thompson disconnected them, the circuit failed. Evidently the chip had evolved a way to use the electromagnetic properties of a signal in a nearby cell. But the fact is that Thompson doesn't know how it works."
Not bad for a new-born.
After being taught gah-gah goo-goo,
it goes on to prove the computational value of quantum mechanical entanglements.
We'll have to keep an eye on this toddler; (like that little girl in MIB with the two physics books).
It may just go on to prove human beings are as useless as egg-shells.
Ripley's believe it or knit.
Hmm ... instead of this evolving microchips thing, how about inventing memory chips that can duplicate itself. I know I for one wouldn't mind having DIMM stick or two that breeds and multiplies like rabbits. I hear a 1GB ramdisk calling my name ...
Great idea until one of the little nanobots goes wrong (software bug, cosmic ray zaps it, badly created by another nanobot etc etc) , starts creating large numbers of itself and ends up wrecking/destroying the planet. And these nanobots WILL go wrong at some point. Even nature can't make self reproducing systems that are 100% perfect (cancer anyone?) so theres zero chance we'll manage it. All this self reproducing nanotechnology seems like something only someone completely unhinged would ever use in the real world.
I've got some silicone that seems to have a life of its own!
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
Windows running this would
Turn your 1ghz box into a 386 that bluescreens
Upside
Linux running this would:
Create its own code for its own kernels
FreeBSD running this would:
spin off and create a port for something other than i386 arch
OpenBSD running this would:
Not allow anything to ever be installed because it may be deemed insecure
NetBSD running this would:
Create another port, then wait a year or two to let you use it
view the source Luke!
360 degrees of Karma
Generally, Asimov's robots weren't intelligent enough to get hung up on stuff like that. But he did a few stories with robots that had broken through to a sort of meta-level where they looked at the good of humanity as a whole...
> Now, if you were to take these sort of genetic algorithms in a purely software form, give them networking libraries to enable peer-to-peer communications and propogation throughout a network, and subscribed them to Bugtraq, and you might have a problem.
/.) about fuzzy logic being used as a replacement, for profiling new job applicants. This I feel is unfair. A machine judging me would always give me a bad score. Reasons being that I type slow, I answer funny when I have to write, I use a lot of non-verbal clues in my presentations ? stuff that a machine can not pick up. Lucky for me that I have letters of recommendation going back 20 years and they can speak for themselves. But I fear that a new person similar to me would have a difficult time in getting into the door of such a profiler.
Yes there would be a small problem, no more bugs in the software. MS$ would be out of business. But the real fear is that a good GA might put people out of a job or reduce their chance of getting a job.
I recently read (I think in Forbes or
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
The two biggest problems I see with this type of technology are data verification prior to input, and undesirable mutations. You would need several preprocessors just to keep it from frying its little brain on statements like "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a bananna.". I also recall, from somewhere in this swamp I call a brain, that in evolutionary practice, for every desirable mutation, there are tens or hundreds of millions of undesirable ones. This does not bode well for the future of this technology, or for the lifetime of your expensive new hardware.
When we finally get robots that can understand Asimov's Laws of Robotics, and we learn how to program them in, they won't be the altruistic platitudes the writer handed down to us. They're going to look more like this:
1. Make me rich.
2. Don't fuck with me.
3. Fuck everyone else.
--Blair
Check out a more detailed description of the work being done over in England here:m ordial.html
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/ai/pri
And of course there's no way around that.... No... Of course Asimov didn't spend the better part of his career writing books about unexpected effects and ways to sidestep and circumwent those laws..
</sarcasm>
On the other hand, adaptation, self-tuning, adaptive algorithms, neural nets, and genetic algorithms are all moderately cool. They may not be silver bullets, but neither are they hopeless turkeys.
My point is, avoid the use of self-modifying or alter themselves as adjectives. They're poison.
This isn't really capital E "Evolution." At least in the Darwinian sense. Darwin's evolution was about how things would randomly change and the thing that was the "best" in its environment would prevail over things which were not the "best" in the same environment. Darwin's evolution was driven purely by chance, the qualitative best naturally selected because in the end it prevailed. So the quantitative best is the prevailing mutation merely because it prevails. These "evolving circuits" seem a bit more predetermined than capital E evolution has in mind. O'course, by strict dictionary evolution (that is, "the steps leading up from one thing to another.") I suppose it qualifies ;)
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
and then we're all out of jobs... yippee!!!
Casual Games/Downloads
The problem with that is that nothing works all the time, ever. Freak electrical storms, passing magnets and worms could all potentially remove/alter any 'laws' programmed into an A.I. Even in one of Asimov's stories, the robot broke the rules.
I'm new at this thinking thing. Bear with me.
This is the third article in a month on these FPGA devices and as yet I haven't heard of one actual real world device. Apparently the initial press release sent out regarding the "supercomputer" sent to NASA was frought with ...well let's be kind and say "forward thinking" ideas.
I've been seeing this FPGA hype for a few of years now but nothing's ever seems to come of it - unlike Transmeta which out out product within a few years of the initial hype.
I'm remimded of the "Moeller Flying Car Company" which has been around for nearly 30 years now, puts out massive press releases every 5 years or so and draws a steady stream of investors - and yet never seems to (literally) get off the ground.
Hmmmmmmm.......
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
You're right of course...I wasn't making myself clear. It's not the FPGA devices which I doubt but rather the alleged cpapbilities of the Starbridge computers. Smells like too much hype...seems like too little (if any ) product.
The Moeller Flying car allegedly uses a Wankel engine in a new way....they keep getting a dribble of investors...but the cars never get off the ground.
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
Whilst we're on the subject, I've been thinking about Asimov's laws recently and decided that they are complete crap. How the hell is a robot supposed to determine what is human or not. In addition how is it supposed to work out whether any action could indirectly harm a human? Give it a book on Chaos Theory and all of a sudden, picking up a can of Coke in Utah too quickly will cause an earthquake in China. All very silly.
Just a thought. Whilst we were here.
This line intentionally left here to annoy you.
When a true AI is finally developed sombody is going to be smart enough to deeply ingrain Asimov's 3 laws of robotis (or something similar) into them.
That just about solves our problems doesn't it?
one thing i can tell you is you got to be free
It is very easy to get carried away by the headlines on the post "Microchips that evolve".
What we have here are reconfigurable computer systems, not organisms that mutate themselves. From what i could make out, these systems optimize that last lap of execution, at the hardware level.
In your normal system, your compiler translates your source code into machine code, which is the instruction set of your computer. The computer then executes the code.
In hyper-computing your (compiler/subsystem/whatevertheycallit) reconfigures the hardware , so that a very close representation of the solution is implemented in hardware.
In essence, it becomes a computer tweaked to achieve the one purpose, which is to solve your problem. ("Superspecificity operators distributed throughout the entire algorithm space" as SBS grandly calls it)
It is a very clever trick, though more likely to remain a research toy for the armies and snoops.
But calling it the equivalent of a human brain is silly.
... program,compile, reboot, SHIT! ...program, compile, reboot, SHIT! all at about 1.3GHZ
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This is what I waited for!
Ok, now that that these machines can realy reassemble themselves, let's giv'em the possibility to collect and produce their own resources. Construct an initial seed of nanobots, put them into a small rocket, send them to any planet that seems to be inhabitable for humans. There the bots would reproduce themselves with the materials they find on that paticular planet. Based on their inital "gene-code" they would be programmed to make architectural facilities for humans. Due to their evolutional design they could adapt to regional specialities (such as gravitational and climatic issues), i.e. make very thick walls where radiation is high etc. Just like techno-termites using their own body as building material for the anthill. You could fire some thousand seeds into space know, wait a few hundred years until the technoparasites made up a small colony for you somewhere and all you need to do is move in. (Do not forget to bring your coffemug, linuxbox, plant etc.)
a very humble simulation of this can be seen here (german)
Translation by google here
Conceptual Flash-movie here (click first link)
Uhh...does anyone else find this as frightening as I do? Just think of the ramifications of evolving computers...think, oh, I don't know, the Matrix or something...
In order to be immortal you must be organize
Hmm...I wonder if it would stand up in court... Some of those DOJ hacks are pretty dense...
In order to be immortal you must be organize
I read an article a couple years ago about this in Discover magazine. FPGAs running evolution type code. Unfortunately I can't find the article in their archive. But this is nothing new.
my other computer is a IBM PS/1