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Breakthrough In Automatic Handwritten Character Recognition Sans Deep Learning (technologyreview.com)
subh_arya writes: Researchers from NYU, UToronto and MIT have come up with a technique that captures human learning abilities for a large class of simple visual concepts to recognize handwritten characters from World's Alphabet. Their computational model (abstract) represents concepts as simple programs that best explain observed examples under a Bayesian criterion. Unlike recent deep learning approaches that require thousands of examples to train an efficient model, their model can achieve human-level performance with only one example. Additionally, the authors present several "visual Turing tests" probing the model's creative generalization abilities, which in many cases are indistinguishable from human behavior.
i like video games
their model can achieve human-level performance with only one example
Yeah? Well, I've never encountered a human - myself included! - who can read my handwriting, so suck it, you AI mofos!
Maybe they'll also invent a better way to untangle corded phone cables.
You do that by euthanizing old people.
This is much more important than Daesh/ISIS. If you think the US is threatened by these barbarians then they already achieved half their objective, getting into your head and under your skin. The other half of their objective is to get US troops involved into another mid-East quagmire.
You sound like my kids.
1000s of examples to train? Boo hoo. What's that... A few hounded nanosecond?
Fuck me.
I'll never solve the new captchas.
Until we understand what it means to understand, how can we possibly know if we have taught these systems to understand? Even if it responds intelligibly, and what it says makes complete sense, is that the same as understanding? I suppose as Billy C. once said: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is".
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I hope this heralds in some significant improvements to basic OCR. It amazes me that OCR against a printed document still doesn't always yield 100% success. Even worse are OCRs on printed music manuscripts. The recognition and transcription quality is atrocious.
And yet, these guys can recognise handwriting with incredible accuracy.
I keenly await when these algorithms can be expanded to general OCR / document recognition. Even if there need to be specific models for each type of document.
n/t
This is yet another sign that current artificial neural networks are not the path to either understanding or implementing human intelligence, either qualitatively or performance-wise. Previous relevant Slashdot threads: [1] [2] I really don't understand why neural networks are still taught as part of AI courses, rather than say algorithmic courses, since neural networks, at least the way they currently are, have about as much to do with machine intelligence as quicksort.
FTFY. BTW only cretans cannot write cursive.
If only the /. editors would do some minimal investigation... Oh wait, this is still /.
https://github.com/brendenlake/BPL
collecting samples is not always easy.
This is probably the same AC who complains every time a story mentions any developments relating to ISIS that it's not "news for nerds".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Or more: labeling them...
RBMs/autoencoders as unsupervised learning algorithms are normally used for pre-training in semi-supervised learning.
Maybe someone at google has made some breakthroughs in unsupervised learning but AFAIK, most of the deep learning scene still requires hundreds of thousands of labeled sample images.
"... that's definitely a d... or maybe a 6... th?..."
I really don't understand why neural networks are still taught as part of AI courses...
Because they have to teach something.
Since no AI exists (yet), I've always thought this is a stupid subject name!
Someone broke captchas?
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call
I know I shouldn't respond to a troll, but you and congress-critters need to stop having wet dreams over a "draft". Modern warfare by the West is a professional occupation and requires much training. The unprofessional rabble that Iraq and Afghanistan's governments field show just how ineffective untrained meat-sacks are against religious zealots. Even Iranian backed Iraqi militias are pretty much cannon fodder with loud mouths. Ever watch the Kurds fight? They are just a bunch of guys with guns.
The U.S. cut through just about anything the Al Qaeda could field. Where it had problems was in attempting to solve the underlying issues that spawned the problems starting with Muslim 7th century wet dreams. One can see just how removed the current populace's idea of modern warfare is by listening to their mouthpieces in Congress. McCain (who ought to know better but stupidly doesn't) made some remark about how carpet bombing Germany finished off the Nazies. It didn't, Hitler was a more effective weapon against the Nazies by being a dolt. What carpet bombing did do was cause a massive human tragedy which put a big dent in the Marshall plan after the war. Cruz is another moron advocating this.
When asked if the U.S. would carpet bomb ISIS, Gen. Paul Selva (vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) in front of McCain said unequivocally, "The U.S. Military will never carpet bomb." He and the U.S. Military would be brought up on war crimes in EuroLand. But that isn't why he dismissed such a stupid move.
While we can be dismissive of that lot over there, public opinion matters, the general and the U.S. Military knows that the U.S. and the West is in an ideological war with Islam, to treat it as purely kinetic is just mindless. Europe, whatever their faults, did the Christian thing and accepted untold thousands of refugees from Syria but also Afghanistan, and N. Africa. They put the "Christians" in the U.S. to shame. Even Little Jerry Falwell at Liberty U. was counseling his students to arm themselves against the Muslims. I guess Jesus had a secret directive, "Turn the other cheek that I may get a better aim at your ass."
The general and the U.S. Military know damn well that the U.S. needs to work on the underlying problems that carpet bombing will not solve. It would only antagonize the pop., something Russia is conveniently forgetting, and not stopping Russia from doing this by giving Putin a swift kick in the nuts will cause spill over that the West will suffer from for years.
This is just clever way to describe features on the images. They have built a codec for hand-writing. Instead of a binary array you are learning a set of brush-strokes. I bet that if deep learning algorithm is given the decoded brushstrokes as learning material, it will outperform this.
The paper:
https://www.sciencemag.org/con...
A short article and interview with Lake:
http://www.ibtimes.com/say-hel...
An advance is announced. It is advertised as a breakthrough. It works impressively in some specific examples. It is then applied to more general examples. Unexpected difficulties pop up. The performance is not bad, but only incrementally better than that of previous solutions. Researchers move on to a different paradigm, until the next hype.
This has become one of the best memes ever to sort the kind of people who just snort and move on in the rush to stop thinking from those of use who perceive Clinton's comical perch as resting upon a legitimate labyrinth of linguistic complexity.
The same impatient mind is at some point informed that the Chinese language has no tense system as we know it from most European languages. "How does that even work?" these people ponder for a few tense milliseconds, before it gets filed under "Stonehenge" and/or epicanthic enigmas.
It's not nearly so enigmatic as all that. Even in English with formal tense markers, we navigate our tense boundaries with incredible subtlety. When precisely does the present become the past? Entire SF novels have been authored to address this theme, not to mention a parallel, button-down literature bereft of "oodles".
It's only in a game of persecutorial small minds (Kenneth Starr you are) when one compels one's counterparts to answer questions in the bullshit Booleoverse that our customary subtleties run around with their flies open.
"Yes or no? Is there a sexual relationship between you and the celebrity intern in the blue dress?"
If you're not living in the bullshit Booleoverse, the conversation goes like this:
Q: Is there a sexual relationship between you and the celebrity intern in the blue dress?
A: Not presently.
There, that's the kind of outrageous subtlety those clever Chinamen (and Chinawomen) employ all farming day with their "tenseless" language.
"Oodles" is actually the worse problem, because the chinaman/women (if only there was a language which didn't compel gender) who studies ESL diligently all through their schooling might very well not know the word. These same people adore "cleverer" and wish the entire damn English language would be half so consistent. One man's euphony is another man's cognitive burden.
What Clinton should have answered: "It depends on what kind of fatuous asshole is asking the question." But that might have come across in a negative way. In trying to choose the lesser evil, Clinton ends up painting himself into a comical corner, reminding me of how Ainsley Haynes once tried to relieve her burbling bladder in the Oval Office coat closet.
In a rational world, the whole thing should have been framed as a debate about the precise location of the tumour on Clinton's moral spinal cord (the tumour itself was never in doubt). Was his disorderly conduct confined to regions below the belt only, or did it extend to his Presidential Seal and signing authority on the wrong and unacceptable end of the Nixon--JFK misbehaviour spectrum?
The Republicans, determined to howl equally loudly either way, were trying to assert that his "lack of judgement" in wiener deportment made him unfit for leadership (which would come [name that tense] as a shock to half the great men of history).
The spectacle's circular logic boiled down to this:
"If the man can't figure out that the Puritan sentiment in American will allow us to hound him over this incident to the four corners of the earth assuming the anti-intellectual posture of fatuous assholes (which hardly anyone outside of France will call into question), he's not presidential material in the first place; cogito argal sum we should bust his balls for the good of America by any means necessary."
Many frame the issue as one of lying in office, which I suppose it was. However, by that standard one would have to rate ballot manipulation in Florida to gain office as a RICO version of the same offense.
To further buffer the bullshit, Christians apparently have a special door for the purpose of turning "is" into "was": accepting Jesus Christ as the one true saviour. "I was a sinner, but now am saved."
Now in the mind of Kenneth Starr and his like-minded brethren, BC sure as hell wasn't loudly beating
I read your comment about congress-critters having "wet dreams over a draft" and assumed you'd be talking about Democrats, but, oddly, you seem to think Republicans want a draft. The only bills introduced in the last decade-plus to reinstate the draft were sponsored by Democrats (Charlie Rangel seem to bring one up every once in a while). Left leaning policy wonks have brought up the idea, and Dana Milbank famously wrote an op-ed promoting a new draft.
Now, some of this is basically an attempt to highlight alleged hypocrisy or to "spread the pain" outside of the perceived "only poor folk join the military" viewpoint of many on the left. Leaving aside that volunteering for the military isn't particularly clustered around poverty (it is clustered around a history of family members in the military), this is pretty cynical fear-mongering that's not much better than what the Republicans do. And to the extent that it's sincerely held belief (e.g., Jim McDermott, (D) WA, who honestly believes in a draft), it's a pretty daft one that generally revolves around social engineering (forming a "more engaged" populace through compulsory service).
Honestly, neither party is all that coherent when it comes to foreign relations and the military. Both sides are happy to bomb brown people all over the world and both want to do it on the cheap. It's a choice between feckless and reckless.
You are probably right :-)
You are being overly simplistic. Some parts of an AI will use elegant heuristics to solve certain classes of problems. Others use other a tangled mass of spaghetti, where no efficient approach has been discovered. And there will be LOTS of different tools. Think of most of an AI as being analogous to a code library. That's still overly simplistic, but it addresses this point. There will be specialized pieces that are optimized to handle certain classes of problem. There will be other places where you need to cobble together something that will work.
One thing that makes the above paragraph overly simplistic is that there is no one central "main" routine. I've become rather convinced that consciousness is the result of the serialization necessary for coded memory retrieval, and that language is a very late and minor routine developed from that purpose. The underlying thought processes are incredibly parallel, so most of it is pruned away in the building of indexes...though when you retrieve the referenced memories (NOT original, and mutable whenever accessed) you are able to retrieve many of the parallel threads, and occasionally even ones that are not sensation based. (Language memories are generally either memories of motion of the vocal cords or of the auditory sensation, and thus qualify as sensation based.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.