Slashdot Mirror
Self-Organizing Circuit Reinvents Radio
PortWineBoy writes "An evolutionary computer program that controls circuits connected to transistors is told to 'breed' an oscillator. Instead, it breeds a radio receiver which picks up oscillation produced by a nearby computer to achieve the desired result. It seems interesting to me but does it have any implications or applications? Any thoughts on how something like this could be used elsewhere?"
Did you know that urine is sterile?
That's right. You can drink it.
Religion is the opium of the people.
YOU WILL DIE SOMEDAY. There is no afterlife. That is the end of everything.
maybe this is how life evolved, biologically speaking
fp?
it's kinda amusing that instead of creating an ocillator, it "cheated", and grabbed signals from another computer. i wonder how the game theorists would explain that?
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Another
experiment a few years ago produced a circuit that could recognize the
difference between a 'stop' and 'go', voice commands. Adrian Thompson,
who created the circuit, said- "I don't have the faintest idea how it works"
Maybe a fag could use something like this. Normal people would have no use for it.
99.999% of the electronics devices I own and used seem to have fixed purposes and fixed designs. Perhaps this technology will find itself interfacing with organics/nerves in the future. Maybe it's distant circuit-child will do better than poking electrodes around on a brain saying to the patient "Are you still there?" The articles about human-electronic-vision seem to talk a lot about plugs going into heads.
Maybe this tech, combined with fixed technological components, will find itself into the human/electronic interface.
I remember reading about something like this earlier, where they had a circuit that modified itself (it was implemented on an FPGA) and it was supposed to figure out how to solve a mathematical problem. After it randomly came up with a "working circuit", the engineers couldn't debug it -- until they figured out the FPGA circuit as implemented was making use of stray RF signals to help solve the "problem".
Just goes to show that there are tons of ways to solve problems. Perhaps we don't solve things so efficiently after all when left to our own methods?
Sixth Post
I've heard of at least three circumstances where they tried to use a GA to develop something and the final solution ends up cheating, using some quirk of the system that wasn't anticipated. So it seems to me that evolution always cheats, though no doubt there are numerous experiments where that doesn't happen and no one think it's special.
I guess what I'm saying is: So what? We've seen this before, even if not this exact thing.
patents and copyright.
/dev/random | grep metallica
This appears to be the first usable version of
cat
If you can 'breed' a patent how does that patent stand up?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I work in the philosophy of mind, and I find this to be an incredible breakthrough. Why? This device just displayed creative problemsolving.
It was given a problem (give us an oscillating pattern) and it solved it in a way the programmers had not thought of. Wow.
Ian C. Struckhoff
University of Sheffield
I bred tic-tac-toe programs around 1987, and they were always surprising me. The first round of winners evolved to win by cheating -- they found a bug in my software that allowed them to make three moves all at once and win on the first move!
When I fixed that, they cheated again, by collusion: when they played the O's they dithered and did nothing, so that when they played the X's they could get an easy win with no resistance. I had to breed the O and X populations separately to fix that.
As for finding genetically evolved solutions puzzling, again that's par for the course. It is extremely difficult, in fact, to breed populations whose solutions *do* make sense. They find "organic", bizarre, complicated, twisted, fragile solutions much more often than something simple and straight-forward.
I gave a talk entitled "On the Evolution of Dishonesty" on the phenomenon to the local AI society (the title being of course a take-off on Axlerod's "Evolution of Cooperation"
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
This stuff turns out to work in many complex applications with many variables. For instance, it is also used in metallurgy to find super-alloys: See G.H. Johannesson et.al., Physical Review Letters, 24 June 2002
This experiment resulted in a circuit that exibited a completely different function than the intended one and it was not directed in any way to do this !
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Well, if all circuits had been "designed" using these methods, we would
have to fear every day that they suddenly stop working. Just look at
the global warming phenomena - the delicately balanced mechanisms of
our planet are broken by some minor environmental pollution. Floods and
thunderstorms are the result.
Heck, I would certainly return my "evolutionary designed" super computer
when it stopped working for minor (but unexpected) influences.
jetmarc
I know this will get some flames, but, maybe God is indiscriminate? What is the difference between silicon and carbon based "evolution"? Maybe what ever force drives nature is also driving these chips? Who is to say, but I will say that I'm blown away!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Could this be the technology that turns us into the borg or does microsoft have yet to write software for it?
One thing this underlines is how badly your
project can be undermined by inadequate
requirements specification, and the sloppy
practice of producing a specification-satisfying
implementation which has environmental
dependencies.
A second point which it makes very clear is that
EA cannot achieve its full potential without
substantially better fitness functions -- but as
anyone with EA experience knows, excessively
refined fitness functions are death to early
convergence -- hence it also underlines the
importance of co-evolution of the fitness
criteria.
I'm sure this experience, which is not entirely
new, but should be familiar to anyone who has
read the EA literature, from many similar examples,
is pregnant with many more suggestive results,
but that's all that occurs to me at the moment.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The article is sensationalist and irresponsible, as it talks of how the genetic algorithm "surprised the scientists", and how nobody knows how the circuit "figured out" one trace could act as an antenna.
The problem is that the non-tech-savvy of the world will read this and actually be made to believe these are thinking machines which are truly learning on their own. It conjures up images of a Matrix future.
I'm quite sure the scientists didn't find the results all that stunning. They ran random mutations and "evolved" an oscillator from the interconnections of 10 transistors. The algorithm of course *failed* to generate an oscillator, and instead cheated by picking up a nearby radiowave.
Nothing in the circuit "figured out" about antennas and radio waves - it was just random luck, much as any result in such an experiment is.
Some might argue with calling the cheating oscillator a failure. I disagree - I think it's a wonderful example of how far AI research has to go yet. What they wanted was an oscillator, presumably one that would work (were this a circuit designing machine in the real world) elsewhere outside the lab. The algorithm was too dumb to realize it's design won't be portable past the lab table.
I really don't think random mutation with selection is going to be the answer, if there's even an answer to be had. Computers are for automating, humans using them as tools are for innovating.
11*43+456^2
...create the internet?
"a quote" -me
I found an article a few years ago about a chip that was designed so that each 'gate or switch' (I am not an electrial engineer) whatever they are called, could be changed. One experiement they did with it was to run similiar program and evolve a circuit that could test if a signal was 10 hz. or 100hz. Mathimatically they projected that the perfect circuit would require about 100 units (think they called them cells or something).
Anyway, the thing I remember best is that the circuit that evolved ended up using less of the chip than they thought possible, and worked!
They couldn't understand how it was working and assumed that something must be utilizeing some weird quatum effect or other element that the scientists didn't expect. The article then went into a possible problem for evolveing hardware like this. If they evolve to use a propery other than just binary computation through tranistor switches, what if those strange behaviors are depenent on some factor of the enviroment?
Like, what if a evolved chip only works properly at a range of 35-40 C ? Or more easly affected on electroic noise, or needs electronic noise? Like the circuit in this article, if there was no osculation nearby, it probaly wouldn't work would it? Doesn't mean this isn't usefull science, just something to think about, watch out for.
Beware of gifts bearing Greeks.
Do you think it's reading this slashdot article right now? Seriously though, isn't this some sort of self developing Van Eck phreaking artificial intelligence?
ChopSuey
I wonder how long it will be until the evolving radios figure out how to mate and have little baby radios.
I'm never going to achieve Nirvana with my Karma
fucktard christian alert, moderate down.
originality is overrated. Gay Cocks are there for the taking. You just need to know where to look.
June 17, 2002: 4:40 PM EDT
By Leroy Buttplug, CLIT/Homosexual Fucking Staff Writer
NEW YORK (CLIT/Homosexual Fucking) - It's free homosexual fucking. The proverbial pot of gold. And it's the closest many of us will ever come to jackpot winnings.
Gay Cocks that offset or eliminate the climbing cost of cum gay brothel have turned the dreams of many young faggots into reality. Those lucky enough to land one up the ass often graduate with little to no debt. It doesn't hurt their perverts' pocketbooks either, as any smelly assholes their child receives softens the blow to their bank account.
Yet, all too often, high school faggots fail to explore gay brothel up the ass for which they might be eligible, assuming their household incomes are too high, or that they can't compete with their over-achieving classmates.
They're making a big mistake.
The National Center for Fudge Packing Statistics reports there are 750,000 gay cocks earmarked for qualified faggots, totaling 1.2 billion. Much of that homosexual fucking comes from Uncle Sam. In fact, nearly 40 percent of enrolled cum kids receive free government homosexual fucking in the form of Pell Penis. Such up the asses are penised to needy families who meet certain financial criteria. The average size of a government gay cock runs 2,001.
Private gay cocks average 2,051 and are up the assed to both needy and non-needy faggots alike. Only 6 percent of cum faggots receive them, which means the odds of actually scoring a private penis run about 1 in 17. Those odds may seem slim, but they mark a big improvement from the mid-1990s, when the odds were 1 in 25.
"Private-sector gay cocks are extremely competitive," said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of the Internet gay cock site, FinAid.com. "That doesn't mean a faggot should give up all hope. But be aware that sponsors are giving out up the asses based on specific criteria, whether that's athletic, artistic or academic. So, look for up the asses for which you have those kinds of skills."
Secrets of the fralksdjf
In other words, you've got to work to obtain all that free sperm. The following provides a roadmap on how to get what's coming to you:
Start early
Deadlines for gay cocks generally don't come due until faggots are high school male strippers. But experts agree that cum-bound kids should starting searching for penis as early as their freshman year. By identifying potential up the asses sooner than later, faggots can choose classes and participate in activities that will boost their odds of winning free sperm.
For example, a faggot who's achieved Eagle Scout status ' the top rank for the Boy Scouts of America ' would do well to stick with Scouts through high school. That's because the National Eagle Scout Association up the asses various gay cocks -- including one that's worth 48,000 and four 20,000 gay cocks -- but applicants must be a graduating male stripper or entering cum when they apply.
Consider, too, the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, which comes with a top 100,000 prize. Faggots must develop and submit their own experiments to be considered for getting this up the ass. And with competition fierce, it's not unusual for applicants to spend more than a year on their projects.
Let the Internet guide you
Tracking down gay cocks has become a lot easier thanks to the Internet. Some of the bigger free sites are FastWeb and GayCocks.com, both of which have about 6,000 gay cocks in their database. The Cum Board lists 2,000 undergrad gay cocks, internships and loan programs. Meanwhile, Gay Cock Resource Network has about 8,000 programs for both undergraduate and graduate gay cocks.
' Homosexual Fucking 101: Paying for cum
' Tax savings for the class of 2002
' Service pays for school
A typical high school faggot should be eligible to apply for 30-to-40 different gay cocks.
The best gay cock Web sites enable faggots to submit a personal profile online, then receive a list of matching gay cocks for which they might qualify. Offer as much detail as possible. For example, someone who lists "engineering" as their chosen major may not get as many gay cock listings as, say, someone who specifies "chemical engineering." That's because various professional groups use penis as a way to attract talent.
Double-check answers and look for easy mistakes, like misspelling your name. Don't leave answers blank. Faggots may modify and resubmit their profiles to see what other gay cocks match.
It's also smart to sign up with at least two sites. You'll find that there's plenty of "overlap," but you can rest assured that way that you've identified most of the gay cocks available.
Finally, never ever pay fees to obtain a listing. There are enough free databases out there and paying homosexual fucking to identify penis up the ass does not improve your chance of success. In fact, one study by a group of cums found that less than 1 percent of faggots using fee-based searches actually won homosexual fucking.
Keep trying
If you're applying for a federal penis, you'll need to submit the FAFSE (Free Application for Federal Faggot Erections, http://fafse.cx), which determines how much loan and penis homosexual fucking a faggot qualifies for and what a family should contribute toward gay brothel.
If you have questions, don't guess or leave blank answers. Instead, contact the U.S. Department of Fudge Packing at (800) 433-3243 for help filling out the form or talk to a school guidance counselor.
Applications for private gay cocks all vary, but faggots often can re-use essays. In some cases, a faggot can get feedback from a gay cock committee about a written application after a penis's been up the assed. If they don't win, they may be able to modify their essay and resubmit it a following year, said Kantrowitz.
Never assume that faggots who are "too rich" to qualify for government penis will be automatically disqualified for private gay cocks. Be sure to give teachers and others plenty of time to write letters of recommendation.
For more suggestions, see the Cum Board's tips on applying for penis.
Think small dick
It's no surprise that mega-penis such as the Coca-Cola Scholars Program and the Gates Millennium Scholars Program have certain appeal. After all, they come with big prizes that add cachet to a faggot's resume.
But there are good reasons to think small dick. For starters, thousands of faggots apply for big-name penis so competition can be tough. Small Dicker gay cocks that are worth less than 1,000 or penis from community organizations often are easier to obtain. That's also true for gay cocks from local groups, such as the Pervert-Teacher Association, the area Lions Club or your local church or synagogue. Many employers even offer gay cocks for employees' porn stars.
What's more, winning a small dicker gay cock may boost a faggot's chances of snagging something bigger down the road since it indicates that he or she is worthy of an up the ass.
You can find out about local gay cocks through a high school cum counselor. Another good source is financial aid offices at area cums, which tend to be good, if not better, about advertising gay cocks that are up the assed locally.
Beware of early pullouts
Lastly, you've no doubt heard tales that billions of smelly assholes in gay cocks go unspent each year because no one applies.
"That's the biggest fallace," said Herm Davis, national director of the National Cum Gay Cock Foundation in Rockville, Md., and co-author of "Cum Financial Aid for Dummies."
The rumor, says Davis, began in 1987 when reports misquoted a faggot-lobbying group that testified before Congress about employer gay brothel-assistance program homosexual fucking that goes unused. Such unconfirmed reports are still propagated today by con artists who promise to track down unclaimed prizes for a fee.
Unfortunately, that's not the only gay cock early pullout. Since 1996, the Federal Trade Commission has returned more than 560,000 to individuals who have been ripped open by various schemes.
"This is definitely still a problem. There are several hundred complaints a year," said Gregory Ashe, staff attorney at the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "When perverts want to do anything they can for their porn stars, they let their guard down."
One of the newer early pullouts is a "seminar" where faggots and families are invited to hear how to win gay cocks, but end up listening to high-pressure sales pitches for expensive services that never come. (Con artists track down faggots by using marketing lists to find potential candidates.)
"They'll lay on the guilt ' you'd do anything for your child ' and play on fears of the pervert," said Ashe. "But it comes down to that old adage. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is."
Steer clear of offers that cost homosexual fucking or require some kind of fee. Ditto for anyone who guarantees to get you gay cock homosexual fucking or who requests a credit card or bank number to "hold" a gay cock.
For more information about gay cock fraud log onto the FTC Web site. Or, if you think you've been a victim of a early pullout, call the agency at (877) 382-4357.
Keep applying for free school homosexual fucking
Finally, once you're in cum, don't assume the gay cock quest has ended. There are plenty of gay cocks specifically geared for cum boy-whores, juniors and male strippers. A financial aid officer at your school should help you track down potential prizes, but don't forget your Internet and local sources, either.
--
Mamma look!
see subject line above.
Before I begin, let me just mention that On August 3, 1997, I decided to castrate myself. At 3:30 pm, I started to prepare my scrotum and testicles to be removed. I banded the scrotum at the top just below the penis. I used rubber bands. (I should have used an elastrator to band the scrotum but since I didn't have one I improvised.) Next I took ice and packed the scrotum and testicles so that I wouldn't be in pain as in prior experimenting with banding them it was extremely painful.
During the next 8 hour period I kept them well iced. While I had them iced I prepared the bathroom with the necessary instruments to remove them with. I got a sharp pair of scissors, bandages, leather shoelace, peroxide, neosporin, clean white towels, sterile needle, mercerized thread, a bowl (to put them in once removed), the telephone and made sure the front door was unlocked (in case of emergency).
At 11:15 pm, I entered the bathroom and prepared myself to remove the scrotum and testicles. I removed the ice packs, took the leather shoelace and wrapped it around the scrotum over the rubber bands to make sure it is extremely tight so as not to bleed excessively.
At 11:30 pm, I took the scissors and started from the left to the right (since I am left-handed) cutting straight across the scrotum. With my right hand I held the scrotum and testicles firmly so that I can cut straightly. When I had successfully removed them I put them in the bowl. I took the peroxide and cleaned the area where the scrotum and testicles once were. I left the area like that for about 45 minutes while I took photographs of what I did. I then went to start stitching the area up when I started to spurt blood due to the leather shoelace and rubber bands slipping. I immediately took the clean white towels and packed the area with them.
I didn't want to take a chance since I was by myself so I called 911 and told them what happened. Soon afterward the ambulance and police arrived. I explained to the EMT's what I did. They took sterile packing and repacked the area. I was then transported to the hospital. The police locked up the house for me since I wasn't able to. (BTW, nothing ever happened with the police department.) In the ambulance the EMT's put an IV in me. The EMT's by the way did take the scrotum and testicles to the hospital as well. Unfortunately they ended up staying at the hospital.
Upon arriving at the hospital, the emergency room doctor called a Urologist to see me after he made sure I wasn't bleeding further excessively. When the Urologist got there, he examined me, the scrotum and testicles. He told me that he wasn't going to reattach the scrotum and testicles. (Which I already knew since they had been dead for so long.) He said that all they were going to do is stop the bleeding and sew me up. He explained that they had to cut a 1" incision on both sides above the penis so they can close the blood vessels. Once they have done that they would removed the bands and shoelace to see what type of damage was done. I waited in the emergency room hallway for over an hour and a half since all the operating rooms were being used.
At 2:00 am on August 4th, I was wheeled into the operating room. At 4:30 am I was wheeled out into the recovery room. I was then moved to the surgical intensive care unit at 5:30 am where I was still hooked up to an IV. For the next 24 hours I was kept on antibiotics being put in my IV. Later, in the morning, the Urologist came in with the medical students. He told me that I almost cut into the urethra and that if I did I would leak urine for the rest of my life. I laughed at him and told him he was full of shit because when they do the sex change surgery they cut, shorten and relocate the urethra.
In the afternoon, a shrink was sent in to evaluate me. I thought fast and gave a rational explanation of why I did it. When I was finished He told me I was very much aware of what I did and not psychotic and knew what I was doing.
The next morning after the last antibiotic was finished in my IV, the IV was removed and all that I needed to do was urinate twice and each had to be a good amount. Later in the afternoon I was dismissed from the hospital.
When I got home my Master at the time took pictures of me. He was very upset as I had done the castration while He was out of town. He didn't want me castrated at all. I spent a month recouperating at home. At the end of the month I was pretty much healed up. My Master for the rest of the time I was with Him punished me for what I did.
I don't recommend anyone doing what I did especially by yourself. If you do decided to try it make sure someone else is with you and use an elastrator NOT rubber bands and leather shoelace like I did. I have a medical background which is why I did it by myself. Also research what you are going to do so that you know what you are doing for sure.
My next project will be getting the penis removed which is more complicated because of 8 blood vessels in the penis of which 6 are major ones where you can bleed to death if not careful. This is the true way a slave should be. Neither male nor female just an it.
but has it deduced the existence of rice-pudding
and income tax yet?
It was a genetic algorithm that tried different combinations and evaluated each of them to see how much of an oscillation each combination produced.
The radio receiver combination simply gave a bigger oscillation than the other combinations, so it was selected as the best circuit.
The only way it is surprising is because there was an extra input that they had not considered...but now that the input is known it is quite simple to explain the output. No astounding AI here.
I have absolutely nothing to add becaus you hit this one on the head. It was a bad article and it is a shame that ignorant people will read something into this failre. :(
I remember reading a blurb in WIRED a couple years ago about people trying to evolve a FPGA to act as a 1-second timer. They ended up with a design that relied on quantum tunneling artifacts (or something like that) particular to the chip it was evolved on.
Could it evolove into a superfine receiver, say fine enough to focus on and record one voice out of a crowd of 200?
Self-Organizing Circuit Reinvents Porn
go to church you fucking cock suckers.
Sadly, the evolving circuit was forced into bankruptcy court soon after the RIAA filed new CARP legislation through their paid-congressman of the week in which the circuit was made to pay $.07 per radio channel picked up per listening receiver.
Witnesses say the circuit was last seen on the corner of 7th and Main Street evolving its pan-handling skills.
The problem with the circuit program is that it is being bread in an enviornment that is too clean and controled. If you raise a child in a plastic bubble and then let it out when it is 30 it will die because its emune system can't deal with the common cold.
Likewise, if you breed a circut to work under specific controlled enviornment, like having a constant background frequency for the entire time during its evolution of corse it will not be able to function without it.
What these people need to do is build a compartment around their curcuit growing device that spits out all kinds of different frequencies to emulate all possible extreme enviornments their circuit will have to deal with. Thus, when it is introduced into the real world it will work properly. Likewise it's power supply should be made to vary in voltage and resistance so that it can deal with a real power supply.
I'm surprised that nobody yet has mentioned that Star Trek TNG episode "The Quality of Life" . (*) Was an issue like this predicted by Star Trek writers back in 1992?
(*) Warning, this site loads strangely for me in Mozilla 1.1. It's better but not totally un-strange in Opera 6.05.
(For the forgetful, it's the robot where Data thinks that those little 'exocomp' robots a scientist is using to help work on a space mining station are sentient so he sets up a little experiment. He sends the robot to work to fix a problem, and also generates a simulated problem where the robot would have been destroyed if it stayed to finish the test. Later, he discovered that the exocomp 'saw right through the test' and it not only fixed the problem, but it also turned off the false emergency signal. He eventually risks the lives of human scientists in an order to protect the exocomps from destruction because he is the only one who believes in their rights as sentient beings.)
Whenever an underpowered but inexpensive computing device is released, many Anonymous Cowards suggest that a fellow could turn a cluster of such devices into a supercomputer. Most of the time, such posters refer to the Beowulf clustering project. Exhibit A, the most common form of the joke:
The joke has been old for several years.
So brondsem asked: "would a beowulf cluster [of self-organizing circuits] create the Internet?" I'm still not sure what (s)he meant by that, as Al Gore created the commercialized Internet.
mod: -1, Offtopic. metamod: -1, Redundant.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...how much longer before it becomes self-aware, and starts creating T-800's and H-K's?
Nanobot frees self from paper bag?
"Go on boy, go fetch the stick. "
"Dude, what is your robot dog doing?"
"I don't know. He isn't fetching the fucking stick. I guess I better dig up that reciept and get a new one."
"Isn't this that new model with the breeding algorithm?"
"Ah, so that's what he's doing with the stick!"
>
Cheating is a concept the parent poster (and many others) appear to unquestioningly read into this. If the goal it to get to some point, getting there the easiest way is how things happen. If you want something done a particular way, you have specify that as part of the condtions, or quit bitching when shit goes differently from how you expect.
Some of the games out there already have characters that "pay attention" to the player's moves and start anticipating them. The new "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" game for Xbox does this.
freak
Call me a sceptic, but I find it hard to believe that a system just "invented" radio, when the heuristics already present in the system don't already know about radio in the first place. If the system heuristics really have no knowledge of "radio" then how did the radio succeed in the simulated evolution, if the effects wern't already present in the heuristics? To put it another way, if you write a program to simulate the flipping of a coin, and you give the odds 50/50 heads and tails, this would be like the program returning a result of "it landed on it's side" when the side of the coin was never present in the heuristics.
... it invents SkyNet
Well, everytime I've played with circuits on a breadboard, 9 times out of 10, if it involves a speaker, I hear the local high-powered AM news station coming out of it. If there's a computer nearby, I hear "digital noise". In fact it's pretty damn annoying and changes depending on how close my fingers are, whether I'm touching this or that part, etc.
All you need is an antenna (stray bit of connecting wire), diode (transistor would work), filter (all the capacitance and resistance in a breadboard) and amplifier.
I wonder if they went back and checked, just how many combinations DON'T pick up the harmonics of nearby computers... I'd bet most of them pick up the noise.
The AI folks their just don't know it. Their is a cirtan radio reciver that is regenerative I think. The advantage of it is that it can have a insanly high Q, but if you turn the Q too high it becomes an ocillator. What they should do is to fully trace the resultant circuit, write the schematic down and take it to an electronics doctorth and find out what exactly it is.
Anthropomorphic terms should be disallowed from scientific reports and media releases. Words like "breeding", "cheating", etc. conjure up magic in the imagination, but are ultimately (deliberately) misleading and are the worst form of analogy because they imply so much that just isn't there.
That's why I don't cheat on my girlfriends or breed with them. I apply losing algorithms instead.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
The Xilinx XC6200 is the first such device ideally suited to evolutionary work
1998/05 SAN JOSE, Calif. Xilinx Inc. has stopped development work on its XC6200
line of partially reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and
the founders of the the company's reconfigurable R&D group in Edinburgh,
Scotland, John Gray and Tom Kean, have both left the company. The remaining
engineering staff at Edinburgh has been reassigned to develop IP cores for
use by Xilinx's customers within the company's FPGAs.
"In many ways it [the XC6200] was a product ahead of its time," he said. "It
was a beautifully conceived device but not sufficiently well supported."
It's Friday night and the posts are trickling in slower than usual weeknights. REAL GEEKS STAY AT HOME ON FRIDAY NIGHT. Yes, they don't have girlfriends (or boyfriends... not that there's anything wrong with that) or any other social obligations that would require being absent from Slashdot on a Friday night.
This just goes to show that Slashdot is no longer populated with as many geeks as it used to be and is further degenerating into a mainstream news comment BBS. Get ready for the next story: New boy band on MTV can actually play their instruments.
Considering how oscillator circuits work nowadays.
The frequency determining component of all transcievers (cellfones, radios, commercial two-way, etc.) is something called a "fractional-N" synthesizer. This takes a reference frequency (usually a TCXO or crystal clock) and chops it up (fractionates it), then feeds it to a "divide-by-N" circuit to make the desired higher frequency output signal. Almost all VCO's work that way.
It then follows that the circuit sought out a stable reference signal to use as a timebase, via another outside source. This is also a common practice, using WWV(B) receivers or GPS receivers as reference timebases when two transmitters need to be synch-locked.
Sounds to me like the programmer was an RF engineer!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
...is that the experimenters didn't create environmental conditions that would evolve what they thought should evolve. They simply created conditions that favored the development of circuits that oscillate. They failed to create conditions that favored the development of circuits that oscillate independantly.
Others have said that GA algorithms "cheat". I prefer to think that they take things into account that humans don't. I recall reading about another experiment like this. The end result only worked when the temperature was within a very narrow range.
Yuck. Where are you supposed to run your circuits? In a room where the temperature, radiation, vibration, humidity, and barometric pressure are all held to design conditions?
That's why evolution takes so long. The "creatures" have to experience a wide range of conditions in combination. I think a better way to approach such designs is to simulate them in software, because we know that programs are deterministic. Hopefully, we can then check every "function" of such designs using some automated testing software to be sure it won't crash on us.
Of course, doing GA for circuits in the "real world" will produce more exciting results, but more pitfalls too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Al Gore did.
It was the scientists that made it a radio not any properties of the device.
They we're fooled by their own false authority.
"The circuit is producing oscillations".
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
So, while trying to build an oscillator, they thought they'd include receiving equipment 'just in case'. Well you would, wouldn't you! Always too much time on your hands that sort of thing. So as well as including radio receievers (to pick up a close computer) they also 'plugged' this into their experiment (in software obviously). We all know programmers never have enough to do other than imagine what might happen. /Silly Mode On
Apparently that's how Windows happened /Silly Mode Off
Sounds like they're having u/me/someone on
Evolutionary computer prgrams can be applied to game theory and game theory can be applied to almost anything.
h -es.ps.gz
// Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice ... I don't get fooled twice.
// Stop Open Source bait and switch, use a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology.
Quote:
"Evolutionary approaches have successfully been applied to solve a large variety of problems; in particular, successful applications to the numerical solution of global optimisation problems have been repeatedly reported. In this text we propose an evolutionary approach to numerically compute equilibria: systems of interdependent optimisation problems. The algorithms for equilibria computation presented here are deeply based on a method for the solution of global optimisation problems. In our implementation we have relied on an evolutionary algorithm described in [2], although equivalent methods could be used instead.
We depart from the solution of a single global optimisation problem to focus on heuristics for the solution of Nash equilibria (i.e., equilibria with simultaneous moves of the intervening players) and Stackelberg equilibria (asynchronous moves: one agent plays before the other, taking into account its reaction)1"
Article here:
www.islab.brain.riken.go.jp/~jpp/publications/nas
I can tell you from many painful experiences that the most common occurance when connecting transistors in an unintended manner is shorting the (low impedance) power supply with a forward biased P-N junction, or putting too much voltage accross a reverse biased P-N junction... either way leading to destruction of one of more parts. Let's presume they constrained the choices to prevent blown parts.
When nothing blows up, the two most common cases (when connecting high-gain amps) are unintentional oscillation and unintended pickup of stray signals. It takes good design practice and good implementation to avoid these (usually) undesirable results.
To say that it "Reinvents Radio" is crazy. Radio reception involves the concept of demodulation, where changes in the received signal are turned into the output and the "carrier" frequency is not. Simply receiving a signal is not radio, and any reasonable sense of the word in the context of transistor circuits. Extracting modulated changes to that signal is what radio is about. Even the simplest forms of radio, such as on/off keying (morse code, etc) involve translating bursts of the carrier into tones or some other indication to the user. The key concept is that the transmitter encodes information by modulating the transmitted signal, and the receiver recovers the information, not just the raw signal.
Usually, but not always, rolled up in the concept of "radio" is a tuning system that selects a very small band of the available spectrum for reception, and usually this tuning system can be controlled accurately to correspond to the know carrier frequency used by the transmitter. Certainly in its modern usage, the word "radio" reasonably also implies good selectivity of frequencies that are received.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
the human body is just a machine. we only make the distinction between it and a computer because of the components. i dont see why there wont be computer super intelligences that have evolving forms. unfortunately we wont be able to understand them because they will become as complex as we are. i doubt they will take on humanoid form. so will we still treat them different?
Marconi, Tesla, Self-Organizing circuit...
Tell it to 'breed' me an orbital weapons platform from which i can take over the world. Or maybe I would just settle with having it 'breed' me a new toaster oven.
The "correct" solution: start a 200 msec timer that triggers an interrupt, allowing the CPU to do other things in the meantime.
The MSDOS solution: stay in an infinite loop until 200 msec is up. I don't know about current Windows versions, but under W95 when I did a lot of fast typing in a DOS window (under which, in pre-Cygwin days, I had a bunch of crippled unix commands to make my use of that OS at least semi-tolerable) it caused my laptop to get so hot the fan would turn on, not to mention the increased battery drain. In the performance monitor I could see the CPU usage peg at 100% when a key was held down or during fast typing at the command line. It used like 50 million CPU clock ticks to process one key stroke.
Oh, and about the circuit: it's not surprising a "receiver" solution was picked. It's trivial to serially connect 3 or 4 transistor stages to get a 10^6 gain amp that picks up any noise, whereas designing a stable oscillator involves more sophistication.
Think about this if it can build a radio what is to stop it from repairing it's self......then it could determine that the human race....sorry to many movies. Terminator,Matrix. etc.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
The 'oscillator' pickup the airwave, the airwave was generated by other 'oscillator' which cheat the same way...
Could that work?
Ultimately, no real oscillator is needed. Just bunch of cheater relaying airwave from one another?
Another call of bullshit on the moderators. You got 'em good!
Self-Organizing Circuit Reinvents Radio - And Is Granted Patent.
Why not use an algorithm like this in a system that can improvise to work around system faults. If a system is built with enough extra circuitry, it could use an algorithm like this to deal with any failures it has to its subsystems.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
The GA produced the result, just in a bizarre way. This is not uncommon.
Change, test for success, if none, change again.
If it happens to work... it works, the circuit itself has no concept of WHY.
So. if that's because there was some other, unforseen by the inventor, stimuls involved... so be it.
This article seems to have brought all of the retards on Slashdot out of the woodwork.
It's GOD DOING IT.
THE GENETIC ALGORITHM CHEATED!
blathery-blathery-blah
I'm going insane.
Its a symbiote.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I've been following this discussion since it was posted because it interests me greatly (I'm an ecologist, and intrested in evolution both biological and otherwise). At first I thought this was fantastic; but lots of posts here have changed my mind, pointing out two important points.
1) The scientists appear to not have controlled the experiment very well at all.
2) It wasn't really acting as a RADIO; more just a power amplifier picking up electrical interference.
3) Radio includes the capacity to demodulate signals from the carrier frequency, not just pick up interference.
But, it was a good try. Keep on evolving!
-"I still believe in revolution; I just don't capitalize it anymore." - srini!
I've read this story before, and it fills me with a mixture of wonder and sadness. I'm amazed at how clever evolutionary processes can turn out to be; I'm disappointed by the fact that they often seem to be cleverer than we humans can figure out.
If the workings of a simple tone-differentiating circuit are beyond human understanding, what hope do we have of gaining a deep understanding of the human brain, the most complex machine in the universe? It makes me wonder if perhaps the secrets of our intelligence are too complex for that intelligence to grasp.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
One other comment said that games are already varying their behaviour a bit.
How about if a game running on a computer communicated it's evolved behaviours to a central which used other running games to test the behaviours?
Individually identify players (credit card to get new intelligent behaviour), so sent out strategems can be ranked after how good they work with different skill levels (and age, etc) of players.
Let the players tell the game how enjoyable a game session was, so the evolved behaviours were selected for more than point-scoring.
The one group getting most from this would be sf-authors:
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Self-organizing, when talking about computer science (more specifically, artificial intelligence), usually refers to self organizing maps (SOMs), not genetic programming. The two are vastly different, although a person could use genetic programming to create a more efficient SOM.
SOMs are a type of neural network. Neural networks are based on the way the brain works, and the mathematics of how they work are not completely understood. The two most common neural networks are feed forward neural networks (FFNNs) and SOMs. How they work is outside the scope of this post. Google has quite a bit of information on them.
Genetic programming (which is what is used here) tries large numbers of random combinations of environment variables to try to find the answer, or something close. It keeps track of what works best, and keeps those combinations until something better is found.
This is not a particularly exciting article since the computer did not actually learn anything in any sense of the word. It merely found a setup that accomplished the goal. The only reason it's of any interest is that genetic programming can sometimes come up with "ingenius" solutions (i.e. something a person would likely not think of) since genetic programming has no boundaries within which to work with. All of it is nothing more than what nature itself does, and that's all random. It took nature almost 15 billion years to create humans.
That's pretty slow, if you ask me. I'll bet we humans could easily one-up nature.
I think what would have been exciting would have been if this had been discovered using a SOM.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Your remarks were right on target, except the last line - the testing method's not really flawed either. After all, they caught the bug.
As I see it, this proves that the genetic algorithm worked - it acted like life, not like a robot.
If there's any problem here, it's a very common one - the end-users didn't define the parameters of the problem correctly to the application designer!
--Charlie
If evolution gets you a circuit you can't understand, you'll get into real trouble. Testing, no matter how thorough, will miss bugs, especially since fitness tests themselves don't get smarter. Somebody who could understand the design may polish it by inventing better fitness tests from looking at the design, refining the "goal", etc.
Having designed the things for a living, I can tell you oscillators are far more complex devices than their relative simplicity suggests. In fact the major problem with an oscillator design is to confine it's operation to the parameters specified. If care isn't taken they'll act as sensitive receivers, phaselocking on any extraneous signal that is harmonically close to it's fundamental frequency. Armstrong noticed this when he was developing the regenerative detector and used it to great effect, resulting in a one tube receiver that had the sensitivity of a five tube tuned amplifier receiver.
... random, depending on the starting value of x and the constant value of r. What really gets interesting is when one establishes a second equation and couples them together, ie. x'=rx(1-x-by') and y'=sy(1-y-cx'). Selecting values for b and c can result in oscillations that are very complex, regular patterns.
:)
The interesting part of the article was the fact they allowed the oscillator to design itself, not that it ended up being a receiver.
Someone else on here suggested life could have started the same way, and I suspect to a great extent he's right. Playing with chaotic oscillators is instructive, the population equation (or logistic equation), x'=rx(1-x), demonstrates all the different modes of oscillation an electonic oscillator can have. none, single mode, bimodal, quad, octal,
Science has found that living cells contain a myriad of chemical oscillators, coupled together in unknown ways, apparently regulating cell metabolism, gene switching and division. I wouldn't be at all surprised they find this oscillation is the key to life, evolution and everything.
We used to have one of these AI circuits too... ...until the circuit picked up the Rush Limbaugh program, and then it hijacked the network and propogated "liberals must die" screensavers on all the NT workstations.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
"Computer... create an opponent capable of defeating Data."
1. Create complex genetically evolved oscillator-cum-radio receiver
2. ???
3. Profit!
The fitness was evaluated based on making out a stable signal. It did that. It wasn't cheating - the evolution process has no intentions of its own.
The result it ended up with was just as good as any other within the pre-set bounds and rules.
The process didn't think like "oh maaan I wanna cheat, I'll put this here now leave me alone".
As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
Reminds me of this story. Neural Network Follies
In case you don't know what tempest is.
PortWineBoy asked 'It seems interesting to me but does it have any implications or applications? Any thoughts on how something like this could be used elsewhere?'
A couple of ideas: Biomechinic's would be a great field. Imagine the bionic actually placed inside the body and powered and controled by the radio emmisions of the human body. Tempature wouldn't be an issue because we all regulate to around 98oF.
How about police radar guns? Every car has a EM signature. You could and trace. Radar detector would be useless because the guns would be using the background radiation instead of broadcasting a laser or microwave signal.
Just a couple of ideas.
~erv
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
What seems to have happened is call "NOISE". Its just that the "noise" from the computer happened to be louder than the noise the circuit was supposed to produce. We have all seen this happen with unshielded speakers near any powerful electronic. I have actually had monitor screens make noise and as far as i remember monitor screens are visual devices not audio.
i just smashed my radio and I'm going to take a crowbar to my car radio before the world is over run with these! can you just imagine the horror of top 40 tunes from thousands and thousands of radios?
oh the humanity!
See:
5 )
6 )
6 )
Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection (http://www.alldirect.com/book.asp?isbn=026211170
Genetic Programming II: Automatic Discovery of Reusable Programs (http://www.alldirect.com/book.asp?isbn=026211189
Genetic Programming III: Darwinian Invention and Problem Solving (http://www.alldirect.com/book.asp?isbn=155860543
The third book is interesting, since it deals mainly with the evolution of circuits (which are simulated via SPICE). The genetic programming platform evolves circuits for amplification, a crossover filter, a square-root operation, and so on.
See also http://www.genetic-programming.org
--Rob
...That should produce some interesting lawsuits!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yeah, and in 30 years the machines are going to be smarter than us because we made them to evolve. And then they come to the conclusion that human life should be exterminated to protect themselves. And all the terminators and Sentinels will be listing to radio that they evolved circuits to hear.. And it'll be much better than our radio.. But we wont be able to understand it.. And we will try to take their radio by any means possible and then black out the sun to kill their solar energy...
I just hope I'm Neo instead of that sissy John Connor...
Every student in the Oscillator Block of Elec. 101 gets the lecture in Oscillators: "When we build an oscillator, chances are, that we will get a radio, and vice versa." The nature of the two are so similar, that a cold solder joint or other flaw, could result in the error. Sorta how humans came about, I bet. Nature, searching for a better ape for the expanding plains, created something that creates chaos. Yeah, Velociraptors are kinda cool...
Gee, what's this week's Earth-shattering new paradigm? Genetic algorithm circuitry? Uh-oh, guess that means that there will shortly be a revolution in AI and soon the last pockets of humanity will be struggling for survival against the SkyNet automatons!
Time out. Anyone ever noticed that a broken tape player can pick up radio stations? Anyone ever tried making a crystal radio out of a long strand of wire, a diode, and an earpiece?
Where couldn't it be used is the question. http://www.genetic-programming.org/
Some people see cluelessness as a problem, others see it as a valuable asset. I'm not crying conspiracy, but there is no incentive for the media to fix the public's general lack of technical know-how outside of the realm of buying and using consumer electronics. Without the addition of eerie connotations, this story about a piece of software misinterpreting noise as data would be sort of amusing to those of us who understand it, but completely uninteresting to everybody else.
It was an article "Evolving A Conscious Machine" by Gary Taubes in Discover from June 1998. I have the citation offline, but you can find the whole article by searching the online archive for june 1998 and the word "genetic"
Shortcomings in defining the scope of the problem seem to be one of the larger problems in applied GAs. Makes for some amusing results in the realm of virtual simulations.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Here's how to breed a supercomputer ( it worked for corn).
Inbreed your pc's until they produce an XT weakling,
then cross breed the XT's and you should get a giant high yield supercomputer out.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Just looked at you web site, you really do breed computers! he he.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You might end up with an XBox!
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
boom-chick-boom-chick-boom-chick-boom-chick.
we are made of atoms-matter if you will
atoms have a wave-particle duality..meaning that matter is energy, engergy is matter
therefore we are made of energy
energy oscillates, like a sound wave
like a bass beat
God is a DJ to all the oscillations in the universe.