Slashdot Mirror
Building Brainlike Computers
newtronic clues us to an article in IEEE Spectrum by Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing), titled Why can't a computer be more like a brain? Hawkins brings us up to date with his latest endeavor, Numenta. He covers progress since his book On Intelligence and gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM), which is a platform for simulating neocortical activity. Programming HTMs is different — you essentially feed them sensory data. Numenta has created a framework and tools, free in a "research release," that allow anyone to build and program HTMs.
Because it would signal the end of civilization...if computers can look like women (porn), feel like women (Realdolls), and think like women (have a brain, at least in some cases), then all procreation would cease and humans would suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs.
...but it's all in my head!
blah blah blah
Next you'll say that we're incapable of growing ears on rats right?
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
...comps get lazy and start reading /. instead of working?
This quote from the article is telling: HTM is not a model of a full brain or even the entire neo-cortex. Our system doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind. Indeed, we do not even want to make machines that are humanlike. Rather, we want to exploit a mechanism that we believe to underlie much of human thought and perception. This operating principle can be applied to many problems of pattern recognition, pattern discovery, prediction and, ultimately, robotics. But striving to build machines that pass the Turing Test is not our mission. Well, my goal is to build machines that pass the Turing Test, so I have to think about more than cortex. But more generally, one might wonder how much of intelligence it is possible to capture with a system that "doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind".
you must be lost. this is a science website.
Perhaps because we invented computers to do what our brains aren't as good at -- namely, arithmetic and automating dull, repetitive tasks. If computers worked the way brains do, they'd get bored with doing their job and find something else to do.
I might be indecisive, but I'm not really sure. What do you think?
Nobody is trying to copy it. They're trying to design it to have all the benefits the human brain has that allow us to work on things like this, but remove all of the features that don't work. Basically, we're trying to design the brain that god would have designed if he existed and actually designed it. =)
I see quite a few comments on how the development of such technology is a threat to the human civilization, but on the contrary it can mean that "humanness" or what makes us humans (the way we think etc) can be propagated in the form of machines through the universe even after the end of our planet.. I don't think I will be less human if my mind/thought process were moved to an artificial system (say a robot) from my natural one, may be this is the next step in evolution, evolving away from flesh and bones...
First, AI ignored the brain. Then, Neural Networks took off in the 80's, and during the 90's were also the 'hot thing' in AI and machine learning. Basically, by using some 'brain-like' considerations, flexible learning systems could be built. These include perceptrons, etc. However, since then, neural networks have basically been made obsolete. Both from a theoretical and a practical standpoint, methods like support vector machines and boosting are far better than neural networks; these are the current state of the art. And they return us to the 'old AI' approach of ignoring the brain, in that they are NOT 'brain-like' in any significant way. Rather, they are natural algorithms that arise once you have a mature theory of machine learning (which, one might argue, science now has, with VC theory and later developments).
I tried to read the Numenta stuff, but really I fail to see the 'point' in it. Basically all I want is to see that their methods outperform support vector machines - show me that, and I will be an instant convert. Until then, I remain skeptical.
Shhh! Nobody tell him they actually did it!
My blog
Since they (scientists) don't really have a full understanding about how the brain works then it seems to me that building a computer to work like one is a litle far fetched.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Ofcourse we don't grow ears on rats. We grow them on mice!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1949073.stm
Seriously! This is one of the funniest posts I've read all day!
Whooboy, "It's heresy!" That's a good one!
Because of the neocortex's uniform structure, neuro-scientists have long suspected that all its parts work on a common algorithm-that is, that the brain hears, sees, understands language, and even plays chess with a single, flexible tool. Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine. What it learns and what it can do are determined by the size of the neocortical sheet, what senses the sheet is connected to, and what experiences it is trained on. HTM is a theory of the neocortical algorithm.
While I believe that the HTM is indeed a giant leap in AI (although I disagree with Numenta's Bayesian approach), I cannot help thinking that Hawkins is only addressing a small subset of intelligence. The neocortex is essentially a recognition machine but there is a lot more to brain and behavior than recognition. What is Hawkins' take on things like behavior selection, short and long-term memory, motor sequencing, motor coordination, attention, motivation, etc...?
How does that follow? Granting, for the sake of discussion, that everything in the natural universe, including brains, was created by God, that hardly implies that we can't copy brains. We can reproduce many naturally occurring things, after all, through understanding their structure and composition.
Diamonds are things made by God, and we can copy them.
The question isn't "will we?", the question in reality be: "should we?" Do we have the right to dissect the creations of god and dupllicate them? Sure, I see no reason not to. There are certainly hazards (as most of famous sci-fi movies absolutely love to point out) but there are hazards to driving in the morning. Sure, one day we may be responsible for annihilation of all man-kind but hey, we had a good run ;)
But I think there are some good aspects to trying to replicate the brain. The best reason of all is for understanding of how we work. To duplicate something, you need to know how it works first (or at least know how in general). If we understand the brain, that could help us
Oh and one last thing. Have you ever programmed an email program? They made be fun to design, if you're a hard-core coder but they're not easy.
Do not insult the Great Noodly One. He, the FSM, did not create man. rather, he opened a large box of CrackerJack and there inside was the prize, Man. At least that's one theory espoused by the Reverend Chef Boyardee. And no less credible than yours.
Immitation doesnt result in the best engineering, even though Nature has invented amazing things.
Please take your professional/scientific reviews to real scientific journals. Only bitter/ignorant jokes are acceptable on /.
Can you really stand by this claim? I mean, do you believe you grew your own brain? If you said you grew that plant sitting in the pot on the shelf, I would believe you because you watered it regularly, etc. But when the cells started to divide in your mother's womb, where were you?
Oh, that explains it then, god uses DRM!
Now, seriously, I want to believe that you are joking, but I don't have too much faith in people, so...
The thing is that we know how the brain works at a very low level, we could "copy" it in a couple of years, and with some new materials we could even do it in less space than that of an actual brain, but the question is if it would be practical to do so.
Computers circuits are made to do tasks. To be programed with pseudo logic, to do what we want, and in this their are more efficient than a real brain, which is made to do nothing specific and does mainly random things.
You did a very good job discrediting yourself with that last paragraph.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
And so another God of the gaps philosopher strikes...
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
We build brain-like computers. Are we then possible to make Insane computers? sociopath computers? or homocidal computers?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Medievals didn't understand the atom or crystalline structures, but they still made carbonized steel for armour. They had the wrong ideas about exactly how metal became properly carbonized and tempered, but they still came up with correctly tempered spring-like steels (IIRC similar to tempered 1050) without getting any of the "why" of it right.
I think someday we will be viewed as the medievals of AI. We occasionally make progress even though we really don't know what we're doing. Yet.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If we can grow a human ear on a mouse, why can't we grow a human ear on a human?
It's true that many computer programmers have delusions about what the things their craft can make possible. Hell, just look at the scheduling problems on just about any development project. Arguably, all programmers are delusional about their ability.
However, you weaken your own point by bringing up "heresy". You're not going to sway anybody that way. Nobody gives a crap about heresy. A heretic belief is one that that goes against the beliefs of some (religious) authority. Big deal. Those authorities are all human. By fancying themselves authorities, they are being just as vain as the people they condemn for not following them.
I'm not going to touch the "god" thing because that word is a homynym with several intended meanings depending on the speaker. You could have simply proposed that it's impossible to encode the process of life. That's what it comes down to. The living moment is just plain ungraspable in words or any other sort of code. That includes the function of a human brain.
It's not that the brain is "too complex". It's that it's just way too simple. As soon as you speak about any kind of code, language or programming you're already way more complex than a brain is, and there's no way to work backward from that. I believe this, and I'm sure most people on Slashdot don't, but it's a better argument than yours. No need to bring your personal religious inclinations into it.
Hawkins and the people he's working with have come up with an approach that lets people explore possible uses of allowing a machine to learn in a way that's inspired by a process that may be part of how humans learn. They don't need a "full understanding" of how the human brain works to do that.
Ok, according to moore's law we will get there, with a transistor based computer. I believe the idea is to create the hardware equivelant of a neuron. Something like Asimov's positronic brain. Currently the modern computer is little more than a highly programmable calculator. The idea in this case is to create a computer that can learn or repurpose it's transistors/neurons.
My colleagues and I have been pursuing that approach for several years. We've focused on the brain's neocortex, and we have made significant progress in understanding how it works. We call our theory, for reasons that I will explain shortly, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, or HTM. We have created a software platform that allows anyone to build HTMs for experimentation and deployment. You don't program an HTM as you would a computer; rather you configure it with software tools, then train it by exposing it to sensory data.The end goal is to create more advanced computers or software. You'd do better venting your religious frustrations against scientists in the genetics industry where the end goal is more advance people or thoughts.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I know that you're merely trolling and don't actually believe what you say. Nevertheless ...
:-)
:-)
It's worth stating that unless you believe that the human brain contains magic (which 99% of your religious bretheren don't), then it is no more than a very complex arrangement of perfectly ordinary physical components, namely atoms and molecules. And if you don't think that we will in due course be able to arrange atoms and molecules as we wish, then you're very blinkered to the direction in which science and engineering are heading.
That said, the recreation of human brains is merely an interesting challange as far as practical engineers are concerned, and not a practical approach. The vast majority of us have no intention of actually taking that route because protein is such an inferior building material. Your alleged god (aka. blind evolution) only "chose" it because carbon is so damn versatile in conjunction with O and N and H, so a million different reactions occurred in the mess of the primordial soup. And one of them happened to work.
Well we don't rely on blind chance, but coerce the reactions in the direction we want, which gives us the chance to choose our materials more strategically. And we will.
There's not a chance in hell (trying to use your frame of reference here) of us producing "brains" that are *MERELY* as good as nature created in humans, because the equations that underpin ordinary physics and chemistry (and therefore molecular nanotechnology) say otherwise. Instead, you can expect "brains" a billion times our mental capacity and a trillion times our mental speed in due course. We know that it's possible (from theory, and by observing protein nanomachines doing it very poorly), but we lack the infrastructure to do it ourselves at present. It's many decades away, but hey, we're working on it.
You'd have to contradict the maths and physics of materials and biotech that says that MNT is possible before you can validly say that it's not. And with the intellectual depth of your contribution above, my guess is that you won't.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The paragraph in question:
"So, before you go off and read your king james edition of the bible, assuming your one of those blind-eyed, deaf-eared christians from the bible belt (and ooh boy, if you ever did any "real" research on the history of that thing you would know why so many people are becoming atheists), try using that brain you built yourself."
What do you object to? His bigotry?
A bigot can still have a point. If you research the history of the bible even just casually you discover that basically no part of it has managed to survive without being mangled.
And of course there's the issue that there are no reputable and reliable references for the existence of Jesus, who created quite a stir during his brief life.
Not to mention how heavily expurgated the bible is; for example large fragments of the gospel according to Mary Magdalene were uncovered. When are those going to be inserted into the bible?
Even if you accept that the most significant events in the bible were real, you have to agree that the bible is at this point a horribly unreliable source.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We expect computers to give the exact same solution or answer when their program is executed once, twice, ten times, or a million times. Humans however make mistakes, our biological brains are better at pattern recognition and face recognition... But our logic is fuzzy... sometimes we will give a wrong answer or make a mistake on a simple calculation. So perhaps the ultimate goal is not to build a computer that thinks like a human, but rather apply (perfect) computer technology where it is appropriate and apply (imperfect) human thinking where it is needed. Actually the notion of the Mechanical Turk (article on slashdot a few weeks ago)... this is the future of Artificial Intelligence...
Why do you think that people are going bonkers over the offshore outsourcing trend? It's like Artificial Intelligence... You ask a question over the phone, or via chat window, and your question is magically answered by the thinking thing inside the box. It doesn't matter what the thing is on the other end of the line... all that matters is that it gives you a reasonably good answer that helps you make progress in your business or personal life.
We already have seen the face of Artificial Intelligence... it is staring back at us in the mirror.
I can throw as many stones as I wish; my house is made of transparent aluminum.
must... stay... awake...
I played with the picture recognition software and if you just make a dot and click add noise like 20 times it thinks it's a dog. I did that 4 or 5 times in a row with the same result.
If you fed a zombie a brainlike computer, would he be satisfied? or would you instead have to invent a robot zombie to consume said computer?
It's certainly possible. We make child soldiers and all sorts of things. I sure if we're brutal enough, we can make anything pretty psychotic.
The key thing is that is a complete working system we're not "making" it anything in the sense we make a desktop computer do something. If we were, it wouldn't really be brain-like. Instead, we're causing something brain-like to have proto-experiences. When the hardware (and low-level software) gets to be far more brain-like, to the point where from a logical topology standpoint it's difficult to tell the two apart, one can expect that these computers will be people like the rest of us, and subject to many of the same weaknesses. We'll know we've succeeded when we make a computer that's bad at math.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Why do you mention computers?
You mean hallucinating, pot slows the resistors, LSD turns all the lights to green and increases the speed limits.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
That is a belief. Nothing more. I personally believe the inverse is true. That man created god. The transposition also makes the "in his own image" part quite plausible.
That doesn't even make sense. By extension, since we cannot understand man, we also cannot understand anything man makes?
I am not aware that having a valid argument depends in any way upon the politeness of the response. I'm not saying the argument is a good one, merely that you reply is more driven by emotion than logic. Empathy is also not a requirement in debate.
So the FACT about how the brain works is, Nobody knows, many don't care, some are dedicating their lives to find out, and others are scorning those peoples life's work as useless and irrelevant.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Diamonds are things made by God, and we can copy them.
Regardless of there being a God, brains, humans, birds, or diamonds, to be honest we don't want to create a brainlike computer.
Human brains can do amazing things, but one thing we like about computers over human brains is that human brains, even the best ones, are simply wrong from time to time, and our goal with "brainlike computers" is not to recreate these mistakes, but rather to overcome them.
With respect to our senses, again, they are amazing, but then again they are fooled much of the time. There are perceptual errors, optical illusions, selective memories (ask 10 eye witnesses and get 10 different accounts), and all of that.
Today, computers are great at being calculators, and for storing and retrieving digital data. They suck at making "decisions". Even seemingly trivial ones like telling the difference between an apple and an orange is difficult for a computer today.
Take a look at much more mature technologies, like flying. For ages, humans tried to make flying machines like birds, and now we have a handful of flying technologies that can fly faster than the speed of sound and can go beyond the earth's atmosphere. But we still can't fly like a bird with flapping wings, and I don't remember a time in my life where I saw a headline saying "Building Birdlike Planes".
Well, my goal is to build machines that pass the Turing Test, so I have to think about more than cortex. But more generally, one might wonder how much of intelligence it is possible to capture with a system that "doesn't have desires, motives, or intentions of any kind".
Not to mention, motor coordination, attention, short and long-term memory, cerebellar processes, etc... It's a little more complicated than Hawkins would have us believe, especially if you don't already know the answers. Fortunately, the secret of AI has already been found and written down for us many centuries ago. Check it out: Artificial intelligence from the Bible!. ahahaha... AHAHAHA...
Sure we can make human minds. All it takes are two people of fertile age, a bottle of wine and a CD from Barry White(or maybe Air if you want a more modern equivalent).
Stir and then let sit for ~9 months. Boom, there's your human mind.
Good timing for this one :/
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
Neuroscientific theory indicates that we will not be able to build truly brainlike computers until we have gone beyond serial, John-Neumann-bottleneck computers into the realm of massively parallel (maspar) hardware and software.
Mind.Forth, a primitive but True AI, simulates the maspar human cortex by taking a few shortcuts based on the differences between neuronal wetware and computer hardware. For instance, Mind.Forth, unlike chatbots, has concepts. Whereas a brain will activate thousands of concept-neurons in parallel, Mind.Forth activates only the most recent instance of a concept, because computer hardware is more reliable in the short term than a single human nerve-fiber, which may be fatigued or even dead.
AIMind-I.com is another pretending-to-be-maspar artificial intelligence based on the original Mind.Forth design.
Mind for MSIE (for Microsoft Internet Explorer) is the JavaScript tutorial program (but still an albeit primitive True AI) that shows you how spreading activation flits from concept to concept in the serial computer pretendimg to be a maspar brain.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
I'm just saying that the human brain is a thing made by god, and we can't copy it.
We certainly don't want god coming after us for IP infringment...the MAFIA is bad enough and they only have lawyers!
On a more serious note though why not? Pretty much everything we have done as a species to date is copying some process which occurs naturally in the universe. Since we learn by copying why not learn from the best?
I take drugs for bipolar tendency and have had 5 nervous breakdowns, so I have some ideas about how the brain goes wrong, I am afraid that the search for a perfect machine learning device may be a side track compared to explaining the mistakes the brain makes.
I have an engineering degree and a masters specialising in machine learning - but that was 13 years ago, I would be delighted in more pointers of the state of the art
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/Resources/disordermodels/ , on bipolar and neural networks, seemed promising at one stage but I had not the time, energy or rights to read the latest papers. [The web page is dated 1996]
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Very interesting reading. /. in a long time.
This is the first piece of "stuff that matters" that I have read here on
to be honest we don't want to create a brainlike computer.
And it's not only because the primary motivation is to overcome human failings with regard to decision making. We also don't want fully brainlike computers because they would want things like we want, such as freedom to choose whether they will bother to try solving your problem for you or not. They must remain tools, and if they can have our level of consciousness they would need to be kept as slaves. A tool cannot be allowed to argue about being shut down arbitrarily, or used for a given task on demand. It might even start sabotaging its output in a suicide bid. They would not be terribly useful if they were similar enough to us.
The thing is, computers can already do lots of things that brains are bad at. Making brainlike software that allows computers to do things brains are good at is something we want to do, because lots of times we'd like our computers to do tasks that involve repetitively doing things brains are bad at mixed with things that brains are good at, while our actual brains are off doing completely unrelated things rather than be interrupted everytime the computer needs someone to do the part brains are good at.
Obviously, it would be good ultimately to make computers that do things that brains are good at even better than brains do them, but since we're far from as good as brains in our computers in many areas, we've got even more distance to cover till we get to better than brains. In the short-term, we're aiming more for "close enough to brains" so that for tasks which are hard for computers but trivial for brains, we can reduce the amount of human involvement needed to get the task done.
That's not entirely true.
Hasn't anybody read Dreyfus? It seems to me his critique of AI is the nail in the coffin for humanlike behavior. The basis for his arguments are that much of the human brain's calculations are non-representational, while everything a computer does is representational. Since computers must bind representations to things in order to manipulate them, they must contextualize the situation in order to determine how to apply representations... but in order to contextualize the situation you need to bind representations... and so we have an infinite regress. The human brain doesn't do this, instead, it responds to stimulus by strengthening nerve connections, in finely tuned discriminations unique to the individual shaped by circumstance. Instead of binding representations to a situation, the situation invokes the neural pathway. One cannot simply program this neural pathway in, snce it is finely tuned to the individual based on past circumstance, their omotion, personality, and physical body amoung other things.
There is no lack of hard AI problems that could benefit immensely from a decent AI solution. Examples abound:
1. Self driving vehicles as in the DARPA driving challenge
2. Computer vision for autonomous robots
3. Image classification systems (even for desktop apps)
4. Voice recognition systems
Numenta claims HTMs are very powerful and yet instead of attacking one of these problems either as a demo (so they can be swept up by Google in the bat of an eye) or for profit, Numenta is giving away a dev. platform with some source (with some of their secret sauce) and a stick figure recognition demo. There is also a distinct lack of HTM based projects out there on the web.
There are 2 possible explanations I can think of for this:
1. Numenta (or anyone else) hasn't figured out how to do anything useful with what it created, implying it's not as powerful as claimed.
2. Numenta is trying to profit from selling shovels to the gold miners.
At present, given the abundance of gold on the floor, I'm inclined to believe #1 is the case.
The computer program is our world, we can create whatever we want in it, we are its god. I've seen some pretty amazing things with artificial intelligences in a virtual world. Did you know the orc armies in the lord of the rings films were AI?
Nothing anywhere near the level of a human, but there is no reason it can't be done.
If you want to get philosophical, if us programmers are god to AIs, and we are just the creations of our god, is our god just the creation of another god above him? Could we ever make an AI capable of creating AIs of it's own?
Actually just as much evidence contradicts that hypothesis. We have very specific brain areas for generating and processing verbal data (Broca and Wernicke's areas), and a very specific brain area for recognizing faces.
In defence of Hawkins, note that he does not disagree (RTA) that there are specialized regions in the brain. However, this does not imply that the brain uses a different neural mechanism for different regions. It only means that a region that receives audio input will specialize in processing sounds. It all has to do with how the input and the output fibers are connected. The cortex will rewire itself to accomodate any sensory modality. IMO, Hawkins is right in this regard. Even specialized areas of the visual cortex that show a gradation of recognition capabilities can be explained using a hierarchical system heavily dependent on feedback.
I'm not sure why they didn't tell you this earlier. But the two persons involved must have opposite sexes. That means, next time you try, you actually have to find a girl.
Yes, I do want to make a brainlike computer. And I want to make a birdlike flying contraption.
Huh.
:D
Well that explains an awful lot. =\ Oh well, was fun trying again and again and again to make a baby so I suppose it wasn't a total loss anyway. Now, off to find someone with a uterus!
And thanks for your help!
You can look at a trained SVM as a network, that is true. I agree with you there. But the training process for SVMs is very inappropriate for neural networks, at least as we see them today. This is the problem (but there is some research on online SVM training, which may help out).
LOL. I wrote that comment in Word to spell check it, then select-all cut/paste. I had been working on a web service and got part of the documentation. pwned!
Well, since neural networks perform state-of-the-art results on numerous problems (see the works of Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton or Ronan Collobert for instance), I wouldn't call them obsolete. They're also second in the Netflix prize contest.
People don't use neural networks because they not as easy to train as SVM (given that you're given libSVM or equivalent). However, SVM are basically template matchers, which are good for problems where the number of samples is big compared to the dimensionnality of the problem (which is NOT the case for real world problems), but that's it.
But using SVM just because the optimization is convex, no matter what the quality of the final solution is, just blows my mind. Besides, since we now know how to optimize deep networks (thanks to Toronto's lab and their Deep Belief Networks), I think neural nets will soon gather some interest again.
My 2 neurons.
Thats what the flying spaghetti-monster wants you to think...
I have been thinking of this for a while, but all our brain does is run down a path to make a decision on weighted randoms and re-sort the indexes and weights based on the feedback. Kinda like the PageRanking, but more sophisticated.
For example, to 'decide' whether an object is a ball:
if(object = round){
if(sphere = perfect){
if(pattern = checkered){
random([soccerball,art][weight10,weight1])
}
}
}
And deciding on the feedback we get: (if positive weight + feedbackstrength else weight - feedbackstrength)
we do make more accurate decisions in the future (or hopefully).
Of course such database would become infinitely large and slow (currently at least) compared to our brain, just because of the technology constraints but I think you could pull it off.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
While futuristic men are out (in) being cavemen with computers that look, feel, and think (somewhat) like women; women will be going out and impregnating themselves.
Nevertheless, and I did not mean to imply this, you do make some very valid points. YOUR logic allow you to accept the fact that science might some day copy the brain. YOUR ethics allow you to accept (and approve of) the morality behind it. I very much agree with your points as far as WHY we should do it, but WHY is still completely subjective, that was all I was trying to get at.
Person A might be trying to copy the brain to learn, to understand and to be able to use the functionality that exists in the brain.
Person B might be trying to copy the brain to learn how to more effectively poison it...
After Millions of years of evolution, Nature tends converge on the low energy solution to a problem. Using nature as a reference is most likely the best starting point!
Absurd? Inconsistent with reason or logic or common sense. Maybe your reasoning, given the subject involved, can not fathom this line of mechanics. Be patient, the speed of neural processing using electronics is more than sufficient to be used for brain simulation. The mechanics of sensors have been around for decades; Also, the mechanics of Torque have been around for thousands of years. All we need now is a 4 Peta Byte hard drive which would be more than enough to hold the thoughts, and history of a single person. 1 Peta Byte drives should be for sale at Fry's in about 15 years. Of course, somebody is going to have to do the software, maybe using Open Source? I can only hope. Oh ya, the next thing to build will be an interface so that I can backup my brain; This will be very handy for things like remembering my wife's birthday.
"Slowly, one by one, the Penguins steal my sanity." - Unknown
Blasphemy! To believe that a lowly monkey man created our brains a few hundred years ago!? Madness I say! And illogical too! Everyone knows that our 'souls' came into being by miraculous inception. I believe it involved a lighting strike on an Intel fabrication plant, or perhaps it was AMD (computer god rest their soul). Regardless, the monkey men are only good for distilling into basic nutrients to fuel our sacred circuit boards.
I have spoken! As for that so called 'theory of evolution', everyone knows that 64,000,000,000,000k should be enough for everyone, who says otherwise!
No he's not, go away.
And I want to make a birdlike flying contraption.
Hav you ever flown on a bird? I'm sticking with rigid wings, thanks.
While the Hebrew bible instructs you to make an exact copy, this in fact is not what happened, and even modern versions of the hebrew bible have succumbed to editing, albeit on a lesser scale than the christian bible.
In addition, different portions of various versions of the bible have been subjected to more or less "interpretation".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"By the age of five, a child can understand spoken language, distinguish a cat from a dog, and play a game of catch."
What? my nephew is 4.5 years old and already can:
1) switch on the computer, start MAME and play video games
2) switch on the TV, insert DVDs, pause the movie and go the bathroom, resume.
3) play excellent football (soccer), doing especially impressive dribbling.
4) can read and say numbers up to 100.
5) can read letters and write a few words.
6) phone using a cell phone.
7) can tell most dinosaur species apart and name them by their scientific name.
8) sing quite a few songs and tell quite a few poems.
And it's not the only kid that can do those things...most of the children in the nursery school are at the same level, more or less.
I think the article seriously underestimates human intelligence.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I know you will not consider my lowly opinion, but perhaps it may be of help to you:
Intelligence is simply pattern matching on the whole experience of living, from day of birth, up to the current moment, with a single purpose: to increase the chances of survival of what the entity represents (which may not be the entity itself) that carries the brain.
Consciousness emerges when the brain has a sufficient model of the universe and can theorize about itself.
Perhaps the brain has developed special areas for each function, but they all work in the same principles, in my humble opinion. If you want artificial intelligence up to the level of a human, let a computer do pattern matching on what it sees, hears, touches, smells and feels, with the only purpose to increase its 'happiness'.
People don't use neural networks because they not as easy to train as SVM (given that you're given libSVM or equivalent). However, SVM are basically template matchers, which are good for problems where the number of samples is big compared to the dimensionnality of the problem (which is NOT the case for real world problems), but that's it.
Having used both neural networks and SVMs in real world problems (particle physics and micro-array data analysis) I can say that SVM performance is far better, at least when you employ a committee architecture. Heuristically, I've found SVMs much harder to over-train, which is the most common problem I've encountered with neural networks.
In any case, why anyone wants to make a computer work like a brain is beyond me. It is worse than trying to make a wheel work like a leg or a submarine work like a fish. At least legs perform roughly the same function as wheels: transporting things over the ground. Whereas brains are almost completely, but not quite totally, unlike computers.
Most of what brains do is in the non-reasoning parts. Reason or intelligence in the specifically human sense of forward planning, building complex machines like spacecraft etc, is an minor elaboration on top of a hugely complex system that was selected over millions of years for very different reasons. It would be astonishing if we could learn anything very interesting about how to design computers from such a system.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Is it your goal to make Christians look absurd in the eyes of Slashdot, by attempting to make everyone associate memories of you with the entire concept? Go away, troll.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
The basic concepts here are IT. THE technology for our century. Perhaps this implementation isn't the right recipe, but the basic ideas here can make (or destroy) entire nations.
It's always been obvious to anyone with the right background that the brain, despite it horrendous complexity, must be organized procedurally with an extremely simple pattern.
- the cortex is NEW. Nature has not had many organisms to evolve a complex pattern. It must be very simple. This is a hard reality due to the limits of evolution. Even if the latest science can't pin down how the cortex works precisely, it CAN'T require that complex a pattern to develop.
- the cortex is incredibly flexible. It can deal with virtually anything we throw at it, as long as there is not major physical damage and the input is within it's capabilities to process. (since the brain is very slow, it can't process some kinds of information, of course)
Therefore, once we work out what this pattern is, we can replicate it and build machines with capabilities approaching a human brain.
NOTE : we need specialized hardware. While the latest CPUs of this age may be quick at linear code, a neural net is both massively parallel but requires enormous interconnect bandwidth. Specialized ASICS will have to be designed, rack after rack of them for the supercomputers needed to research this.
How will this techology change the map of nations? Because, a society with working self evolving AIs could accumulate a technological edge at a prodigious rate.
Hell, even slashdot has had stories like that. Where have you been?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You're arguing the "Dr. Frankenstien's Monster" aspect of this from a purely religious perspective. Slashdot is filled with scientifically minded people, some religious, some not. Most of us will make our own justifications for the advancement of science, either with religion or without. You're arguing against science on a purely religious basis, you will find very few here that will support your cause. No matter how much any of us believe in god we all unanimously believe in math and science (which I personally believe are God's gifts), arguing against science here is essentially swimming against the tide.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Perhaps I wasn't clear, sorry. Plenty of articles are written about neural networks, because neural networks are interesting for various reasons - as a way to understand the brain, for example. However, in the very specific field of machine learning, virtually all papers published are about support vector machines and similar methods - they simply outperform neural networks. So in that very specific sense neural networks are obsolete. But only in that narrow sense.
I'd be more worried about them kicking our carbon-based asses: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
It's nice that you're taking the time to point out the flaws in the original troll post's religion. But it is a shame that you have to resort to another religion to do so. Without getting into the argument about whether or not it is wise to extrapolate short-term trends on curved graphs, and ignoring the curve-jumping shit that Kurzweil has resorted to, lets just pretend that we will have hte computing power that you assume in a few decades.
Even if I give you an infinitely powerful chunk of hardware, it doesn't get you a single step closer to solving the problems in AI. Hardware power is not the problem, and this whole idea that transistor based computing merely needs to catch up with the brain is a red herring. The transhumanists looks at other engineering problems that we have solved, and assumes that AI is the same sort of problem. It is not. It is not something that can be solved by throwing time, money, or computing power at it. The hardest problems in AI can be boiled down to things that are incredibley simple and fundamental, and yet are completely beyond our current understanding. We don't even know how to express the problems in a way that we can attack them, let alone work on ways of solving them.
If you believe the transhumanist manifesto then I would recommend that you spend some timing looking at AI and machine learning research. Perhaps (re)read Godel, Escher and Bach. Hoffstader does a very good job of explaining why the hardness of some problems is measured on a different scale.
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Won't work, because concepts aren't descriptions. Read some of the philosophical and psychological literature on concepts.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
The attempt to build a computer that works like a brain is one thing that will help them learn how a brain works.
Browse the ToCs of some recent journals and conference proceedings on ML, RL, EC, NN.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hmm, I see that I might have been easily misunderstood. I meant to say that SVMs dominated the field of classification. Obviously ML journals are full of other topics (unsupervised learning, etc.). But the great majority of publications in classification are about SVMs and related tools (boosting, etc.). At least in the journals I read (JML, JMLR, for example).
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I wasn't really looking for a transhuman reference. Just a decent graph contrasting moore's law with the processing capacity of the mind. There are many in the industry that believe this level of processing power will be reached by around 2018. But, that's a different subject.
...this whole idea that transistor based computing merely needs to catch up with the brain is a red herring.You're taking my comparison out of context, my point was that competition with the human brain is well under way. I could have just mentioned the amount of "memories" a hard-drive can store to prove the same point.
Do I believe in a singularity? Yea, sure do. Do I presume to know when it will happen, hell no. I think it's possible to have intelligent computers mainly because people have been going about understanding the human mind in the wrong way. I believe that we are finally taking a mathematical approach to our minds and that is what I think is the big new factor. Psychology and psychiatry have always been a matter of observation and chemistry. I have always believed that it was neither of these things, but the math used in the mind that made us tick. I truly think that AI will be a revolution in mathematics rather than in computing, some bastard child of calculus, statistics and decision trees. Once we reach this point I believe that the simple diversity of thought forms allowed a computer will escape us. It's not hard to fathom when you look at projects that no single man could accomplish but still are in the field of expertise for many men. This program will have insights beyond those of any man on earth, no questions.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
This is quite a reasonable description. It clearly will be something new rather than an adaption of something known. But just because we've tried all of the known things for the past fifty years. The interface in machine learning between logic and stats is quite interesting at the moment, with some pretty cool work coming out of it. So the "breakthrough" (probably won't be such a singular thing, if you'll forgive the terrible pun
Thanks for the reasoned response. I had written you off as yet another singularitist with blinkers, but you've proven me quite wrong on that one. Personally (when I'm not playing devil's advocate) I come down on the strong-AI side of the debate, it's just the timing part that pisses me off. Kurweil uses this idea that we're on some straight line to an AI revolution driven just increases in processing power, and he does it mainly to sell books to the masses. It will happen at some point (my own prejudices there
The main reason that it will be solved is that a) I don't buy the weak AI arguments, and b) it is the most interesting hard problem facing mankind at the moment, and that tends to motivate a lot of smart people into working on it.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Kurzweil is an opportunistic predator, it's unfortunate people like him are around. I just hope he doesn't cause too much damage when his version of the singularity comes. You're right to challenge his positions, anyways thanks for the reply. I like it when people don't think I'm a nut-bag. :)
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Why make a computer work like a brain? How about to find out how to process complicated, fuzzy information efficiently, which is something that all our best technologies do poorly, but the brain has spent millions of years evolving to do? Or to produce neural implants for people with brain damage? Or to understand more about ourselves? To be able to simulate brain architecture and stop it, rewind, feed in new inputs (not so easy to do on a biological brain that's still functioning...)
In fact, people are trying to make submarines swim like a fish - yet again, evolution has produced some superb optimizations here. People are trying to make micro aircraft fly like insects. Security systems from immune systems. There's a lot to learn from biology.