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Edward Lorenz, Father of Chaos Theory, Dies at 90
An anonymous reader writes "Professor Edward N. Lorenz, who discovered in 1961 that subtle changes in the initial conditions of a weather simulation program could cause very large differences in its results, died of cancer Wednesday at the age of 90. The contributions of the father of chaos theory, who coined the term 'the butterfly effect' and also discovered the Lorenz Attractor, are best summarized by the wording of the Kyoto Prize in 1991 which noted that his discovery of chaos theory 'profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.'"
How come this news gets on ./ so late ??
I know Kurzweil makes similar claims, but I am not merely regurgitating his ideas. The computational power of the brain is massive. In order to have similar computational power in a computer, we will need to wait for many generations of improvements in processors. We will almost certainly need to move away from very powerful cores based on semiconductors timed by a clock towards smaller asynchronous processors. Even with those advancements, there's no way we'll be able to simulate a human brain in real time by 2030. I think the first strong AI will resemble a human brain about as much as the Wright flyer resembled a bird.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The first step in producing an intelligent system is creating something that can constantly take in inputs and react to them in some intelligent way.
People overlook how important Turing's original successes in producing the earlier computers were towards this goal, the fact that he was able to create a machine that was continuously able to react to inputs and respond to them in a much more dynamic way than mechanical systems is a good first step, the fact we even have computers is a major hurdle out the way in producing intelligent systems.
AI suffers in that the more we understand about intelligence the less we actually attribute to intelligence. Intelligence is too often treated as some mystical thing that is unexplainable and just is, but the fact is at the end of the day it does just come down to sets of processes and knowledge - albeit extremely complex ones! The problem is in how do we produce something capable of performing processes on par with a human brain when the human brain is a massively powerful system that we just don't have the technology to create artificially on that scale yet.
Of course there's also the question of defining intelligence in the first place, different people explain intelligence in different ways. Many people even redefine their understanding of intelligence many times in a single day, you may have person x deciding one person is stupid and unintelligent one minute because they failed a simple English exam yet they may decide their dog is intelligent the next because it lifted it's paw for that person when given a command to do so. It is the moving goalposts of what intelligence is that are often why intelligence often gets treated with such contempt as using the above example we may create a robot that could equally lift a robotic paw on being given the same voice command as a real dog, yet when the robot does it it's no longer classed as intelligent. It's hard if not impossible right now to create a system that would be capable of passing the English exam, but you can guarantee as soon as we could it would no longer be seen as an intelligent task due to the very fact that it had been handed on to a machine to perform.
AI isn't impossible by any measure, we just have to have realistic expectations for it and realise when we've create a machine that has actually peformed an intelligent task. There is never going to be a mystical machine that's seen as being an amazing AI robot because it can walk like us, talk like us and act like us simply because by the time we are able to produce such a machine we will understand it well enough that the mysticism has gone and it's just another machine performing some task that we now understand that we can produce machines to perform.
By using the word 'vaporware' you are indicating that you fail to understand basic research. Basic research is about knowledge, and not about products, and serve as a basis for many real day applications, or forms paths to new knowledge. In order for basic research to work, the researcher need to have a goal, a focus point that might be researchable in the far future, to work too. This 'dream' keeps them focussed and interested in an otherwise boring topic.
I don't think many people didn't see the use of Gauss' stuff back then, but try to imagine a world without all that mathematical knowledge.
There were no 'questions raised' about jpg2000 - only the poster's impression that they were not a good idea. Wavelets and their use to image processing on the other hand has gone through a very thorough peer review process, and the comparisons are there for everyone to see in these journals.
And nice job with comparison to creationists - may I point out that it is you (and the original poster) who is challenging accepted wisdom in science and research communities - accepted after a thorough peer-review process that is - without any tangible arguements.