Slashdot Mirror
DARPA's IBM-Led Neural Network Project Seeks To Imitate Brain
An anonymous reader writes "According to an article in the BBC, IBM will lead an ambitious DARPA-funded project in 'cognitive computing.' According to Dharmendra Modha, the lead scientist on the project, '[t]he key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.' The article continues, 'IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain.'"
Upon becoming self-aware, the machine concludes, that its best shot at survival is to keep the host country prosperous and successful...
Any science-fiction authors exploring that turn of events?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is intuited by the stupid humans in their cliche "Dogs have masters, Cats have staff". We work for the cats.
So, trying to model a cat's brain is both too complex for computers (try and herd cats) and too simple (try and herd pointy haired bosses). The contradiction results in the computer overheating and exploding.
and when the researcher gets home, blubbering about the 'sploded computer to his wife, the dog says "LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE!!!! TAKE ME ON WALKIES!!!" and the cat says "Get my fucking dinner, you stupid ass. Maybe I will deign to let you pet me. After I do my rounds. Maybe."
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This sounds identical to the Blue Brain project. This article is a great intro to the project and I hope some competition will help the race wrap up sooner!
"War makes me sad." - Me
Can a universal turing machine limitedly investigate another universal turing machine and detect halts and infinite loops? I can.
We can look at gunk like
10 Print "Hello"
20 goto 10
Yeah, that's a loop. But we can also look at graphs of y = sin(x) and understand why it repeats. I can also detect patterns and iterations that most likely go for infinity, else find a hole where the assumption falls apart. Last I checked, the computer cannot do that. Not yet, at least.
the man in the box?
Sorry, had to go for the obligatory Terminator reference. Seriously, the organic brain is evolved, not designed. That means by definition it must be self contained . Self contained means it has to have a ton of backup, self-repair, and maintance systems. Simulatneously, being organic it competes against other organics, so does not have the same accuracy requirements. Close enough is good enough. As such, I don't see how duplicating an organic brain is useful. We don't need what it does, but do need what it does not have. OK, the ability to approximate is very usefull, but I think a direct attempt at that would work better than the indirect.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Summary of Test 49:
The robot sensors were properly tracking the missile when suddenly it decided it was time to run bats***-crazy all over the room before perching ontop of a cabinet, turning upside down, and apparently following non-existent bugs across the wall with it's cameras.
Test 49 Results:
System performed as expected.
Conclusion:
Test system has now performed perfectly in the last 48 tests, including the four times where it attacked the researchers without warning, and one where it inexplicably ejected dirty oil on the seat of the head researcher."
This unit can now be considered field ready, though there may be some difficulty tracking it if you take into account the system's autonomous nature and desire to remove it's identification badge.
Yeah, Asimov did about 60 years ago.
I'm so glad you're here to correct me where ever I go wrong. What would I do without you oh wise internet grammar guru?
Eat sleep die
Hopefully you'll work on your writing skills before sending the application away. Few universities admit illiterates.
You might be surprised...
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
I see some big issues with this.
You can mimic biology and may end up with a semi-intelligent result. Mimic it well enough, and you may have a fully-intelligent result. But because you don't UNDERSTAND what you built, you can't CHANGE it.
Remember the rules of AI, introduced in Sci-Fi? How would you implement rules like that? You CAN'T implement them if you don't know HOW to implement them. If you don't UNDERSTAND the system that you have built, you can't know how to tweak it!
Furthermore, how would you prevent things like boredom, impatience, selfishness, solipsism, and the many other cognitive ills that would be unsuited to a mechanical servant?
The biggest problem is if people productize the AI before it is understood and suitably 'tweaked'. Then our digital maid might subvert the family, kill the dog, and run away with the neighbor's butler robot, because in its mind, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do!
Simulations are great. Hardware implementations of those experiments are great. Hopefully, in the process, they will learn to understand how the things that they built WORK. But I pray that those doing this work, or looking at it, don't start salivating about ways to make a buck off of it before it is ready to be leveraged. The consequences could be far more dire than just a miscreant maid.
Am I the only one that read DARPA's IBM-Led Neural Network Project Seeks Inmate Brain at first?
Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" covers this (in a manner of speaking) in the final chapter. More precisely, the self-aware robots that control the world's economy do everything they can to simultaneously preserve their positions as advisers to the human race while dispensing the best advice possible for the continued peace and prosperity of humanity.
Do note, however, that in the continued Asimov universe, mankind really didn't explode out into space until he disposed of the "robotic overlords". Those few cultures ['Spacers'] who held on to their robots slowly stagnated and died off.
Asimov's self-aware robots were never the violent, conquering overlords seen in many other sources of fiction (Terminator, Matrix), nor were they really human-equals (Star Wars, Star Trek), but were rather a crutch for mankind that man needed to discard to truly progress.
Also, please note that I am willfully ignoring anything in the Foundation Universe not written by Asimov, as well as Asimov's last book "Foundation and Earth", for reasons that anyone who has read it will clearly understand.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
That's one of the theories about how a brain figures out the senses. Or, to describe it differently, a super-sense or a huge jumble of 'static' that the brain parses and learns at the very beginning of its existence. Are we anywhere near that on the pattern recognition front? This is also dynamic...a brain can pick up a new 'sense' well after birth and incorporate it very well.
What about a network that can take a billion parallel processes and tie that into a network of a billion serial processes in an organized and dynamic way? True self-reflection on each system, oh that's dynamic too.
If the above is done, we have a few small parts of one of the simplest brains emulated.
One of the problems with trying to simulate a brain is that we're using a 'high-level' process to try and simulate something that is much lower level.
A brain's parts are not inherently logical, just like an electron is not. It builds up to make logical components that work in a particular situation. We're starting with pure logic to try to simulate natural world phenomenon, which, if you've studied evolution, is not based on logic but, 'this worked' - the rule set brains formed under is defined by the laws of matter and time, which we still don't know a lot about. Scientists are constantly surprised how biology is utilizing pathways that make no sense if you apply our idea of logic. It can, however, make sense after the fact - because we're able to believe things that we don't think should be (fairly illogical). How can we program, using logic, illogical and poorly understood systems?
You can go as low-level as possible and painfully simulate the particles that make up matter and energy and get accurate enough results. You can also go very high level and painfully simulate the cosmos, and get accurate enough results. We are woefully behind on simulating a brain that is many factors of less complexity than that of a cat and get brain-like behavior. An exact programmatic replica of how brain cells work will help us learn a lot about how cells work but, I think the big picture will be lost in there. We will get the cascades and responses, but I don't think we'll get something that resembles behavior, not for a long time. Mainly because we don't have a big-picture, we have no idea how all this works on a large scale. Someone else mentioned the lack of an over-all theory...we need that well before we start trying to make a software brain.
Sorry, I ramble. I'm very passionate about this stuff, so much so that I dumped a 10-year career and started studying it. ...when I mention logic, I'm mainly talking about computer logic (AND, OR, etc.)