iRobot make an "iRobot Create" robot variant of their Roomba robo-vacuum-cleaner that can do that. As I understand it it's basically the same platform/capabilities as the Roomba except that it has a control interface and doesn't do the vacccum thing. The self-charge capability certainly makes it pretty unique and attractive for an always-on home robot (toy or research or anywhere inbetween).
That may well be the code posters intention, but with no legal backing (i.e. no explicit grant of rights) he could also cause trouble if he chose to. Maybe just for you because he doesn't like your company and finds out about it. You don't want to base your business on the assumed good will of people whose work you are commercially appropriating without asking permission!
Under US law anything inherently copyrightable is automatically copyright protected. No need to declare it as such or take any other action. Posting code on the web no more automatically grants any rights to it than posting a photo or anything else does - the creator retains copyright and can grant or deny rights to use/modify for private/commercial/on-the-moon-only or whatever rights he chooses.
The OP should try contacting the original author and ask what rights anyone else has to use it... is it OK to use it commercially and to modify it (if the need should arise).
You can't be serious?!... but I've a sad feeling that you are.
Having lived the first 25 years of my life in the UK and last 20+ here in the US, I think I know what I'm talking about when I say that you're so far off the mark it's not funny.
I'd think that the reason some Americans would be willing to sell their vote is at least partly because they DON'T get a REAL vote. Unless you live in one of the half dozen swing states, your presidential vote counts for exactly nothing (or worse - it effectively counts for the majority party in your state, regardless of how you actually cast your vote).
America, with it's electoral college system, has probably the least democratic voting system anywhere in the world. Most voters are automatically disenranchised even in the absense of overt corruption.
Indeed. We had a Honeywell Multics system at Bristol University, UK when I was there from '79-'82. The thing was impressively fast (it would compile small FORTRAN programs in no noticble time - type compile command, hit enter, and you got your prompt back), but nonetheless I recall Bristol getting a free HALF A MEGABYTE (a big deal at the time) memory upgrade from Honeywell to address performance issues.
From the Wolfram Research response, Pratt is right on the money. The 2,3 machine is not universal in the sense that is conventionally accepted. Wolfram have just decided to use a much relaxed definition of universality (infinite initial conditions) that the 2,3 machine does meet. Less interesting than the headline claim.
Quoting from the response:
When Minsky posed the question of finding the smallest universal Turing machines in 1967 [1], he restricted the problem to Turing machines with finite initial conditions. Indeed, arbitrary infinite (but non-computable) initial conditions can allow a machine to solve the halting problem and perform other miraculous computations that are seemingly impossible in our physical universe. Clearly, Minsky was justified in forbidding arbitrary infinite initial conditions.
Their defense of the 2,3 machine is that the particular type of infinite initial conditions it requires prevents it from being trivial, but this doesn't change the fact that it doesn't meet Minsky's definition, and it's certainly not going to be the basis for any molecular computers except those running in a different universe with an infinite number of molecules.
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors. All of the sudden, it's survival of the fittest, as non-ethical tribes tended to be killed off, while religious tribes thrived.
No doubt there's an evolutionary component to religion (and all forms of societal meme), but the reason religion (or more specifially gods) were originally invented (a thousand times over, all over the world) was surely as an explanatory cause.
What causes disease, pestilence, good harvests, weather, etc, etc? Without the scientific knowledge to explain these, the cause is attributed to an assumed powerful invisible cause - aka a god. Association and building of causal relationships is fundamental to the brain (it's the most basic thing that let's us predict the environment and why brains evolved) and so it's inevitable that we look for causes for everything... We can't stop doing it.
Dramatic change at nature's pace takes so much longer than a person's lifetime that what you see around us is in essence a frozen snapshot in time. You do see exactly what you'd expect to see with such a frozen snapshot - animals at all stages of speciation from almost diverged but still able to interbreed (lion, tiger) to just diverged and able to disfucntionally interbreed (horse, donkey), to less recently diverged with no ability to interbreed (man, chimpanzee). We also see the much earlier stages of species forming seperate populations (aside from those naturally forced by landmass seperation - e.g. north american vs european bison)that can only lead to divergence of the DNA among the seperate populations (e.g. forest vs plains elephants).
If you want to see something dramatic happening in front of your own eyes, then you need to massively speed up the evolution process, and genetic algorithms (implemented both in software and hardware) show exactly that. Anyone too lazy to write their own simulation to prove that evolution works (if they need to see to believe the logically obvious!) can just Google for simulations - they are many out there showing software critters evolving.
Definitely it's not taught well (if at all), but I think the real gulf between reality and typical knowledge is that:
1) Evolution isn't about individuals - it's about population drift
2) Evolution isn't about getting better at anything - it's about happening to becomm better suited to the environment as the envoronment shifts (hence "punctuated equilibrium")
It doesn't help that 90% of the population are probably too dumb to truly comprehend the truth even if presented with it.
Last time I checked Catholics are Christians and they believe in evolution (from the Pope on down).
Being religious has nothing to do with not believing in evolution - it's more a matter of lack of education about what evolution is and the zillion different proofs of it that exist.
Take for instance those robots you get that can sort a number of objects. Very nice, but if they were truly intelligent you could take a robot tasked with sorting by color and get it to sort by alphabet, ON ITS OWN! Humans can, if you are a sorter at a production line told to sort apples by size, and all of a sudden I replace it with books and tell you to sort by alphabet, you can do it. Tell me of a program that even comes close to this.
No doubt that'll be true until (if) they become intelligent/independent & powerful enough to threaten us, then we'll afford them rights. Commercial robots will initially be unable to escape their designer's programming, but as their artifial minds become closer to our own and computing power expands, I'm sure that we'll see instances of them becoming a bit too creative and independent, and indeed without (effective) limits put on them we may well see a robot uprising one day.
What does it matter what he's doing? He is applying his presumed intelligence to the problem of coming up with artificial life.
No, he really isn't. But to understand that you do need to undertand what he's actually doing.
What part of gene knock-out mutations strikes you as being more intelligent than the random mutations occuring in nature? He's not designing anything - just breaking it in various ways and seeing (without expectations) if it still works, and repeating the process. That's the same as occurs in nature.
The more interesting part of this isn't the (unintelligent) way he's coming up with the DNA for his new species, but rather the fact that he's then going to synthesize it (ignoring the broken bits) from raw chemicals and inject it back into the bacteria. This part of it (synthesizing the DNA) is in a way just a headline grabbing stunt - unless of course you get freaked out by a living species who's DNA has been made to order from lab chemicals.
Hardly - the DNA of this artificial critter has been "designed" in exactly the way nature does it by a bunch of "mutate and test" genetic "knock-out" experiments. This is proof not of the need for an intelligent designer but of the exact opposite - how the mindless processes of nature can come up with a new species.
Maybe you should go read about what Venter is doing, and how he is doing it, before making baseless assertions about it.
I, for one, don't believe scientist's can create true artificial life, I'm not going to discourage them from trying, but life itself is not just "complex chemistry". Without 'life', all the chemicals, elements, cells, etc. are useless. For example, if you have a deceased body, all the necessary elements are there, but without the breathe of 'life', they're... a lifeless mass.
The "life" in a person's body is just a combination of the "life" (complex chemistry!) in each cell, combined with the sum-of-the-parts that different types of cells can do (muscle cells can contract - move, neural cells can integrate inputs and form nerural networks, etc), and the overall way they are call connected per the DNA blueprint. Each cell is only going to maintain it's complex chemical cycles as long as you keep providing it with a source of energy, source of raw materials, keep it hydrated, remove chemical waste products etc (much like a fire whose self-perpetuating processes will "die" without fuel, oxygen, removal of carbon dioxide).
We are most used from movies/etc seeing what happens when you SUDDENLY remove of these vital (literally life giving!) factors such as when someone is shot in the head (brain controls breathing, etc) or heart, or they bleed to death or are strangled (no more oxygen), etc, etc, but it's really more informative to see the way people die more typically in real life. If you're old enough to have seen relatives die than you know what I mean. People don't die very quickly - it's a process rather than an event, and it takes days as components start to die (you can smell "death" on someone days before they are actually dead) and have knock-on effects. It's similar to a pond or river that goes from being healthy to stagnant - a vicious cycle of degradation until in the end the self-sustaining cycles are completely gone.
Life similarly doesn't start with a bang. A fertilized egg is initially nothing more than a cell in the mothers body, and it's only after many cycles of division and cellular specialization that the mass of cells starts to become a system - the creation of a rudimentary brain starting with the stem, a rudimentary heart and circulation system, etc, and it gradually becomes an independent self-sustaining system and we regard it as a life separate from the mother.
As for Venter's pending announcement (article said expected in next few weeks), certainly it's not real until it has been done and verified, but I would not expect any surprises. The DNA has already been verified as viable - it was designed / pared down as a result of genetic "knock-out" experiments, with the continued viability of the cell being the proof, so we know that the DNA he wants to use works, and the introduction of new DNA into a cell is also nothing new... In fact I think most people involved in the field see it more as hype than an experiment who's outcome is in any doubt, since it's not really that much of a step forward - but nonethless dramatic enough to make the headlines.
Not quite sure what you mean by that... Would you accept that anything that has all the attributes of life is alive, or are you only going to accept it as alive if it occured in nature? Do you consider a lab-made Polio virus assembled from raw chemicals as any different from a nature made Polio virus (both are chemically identical)?
Here we have Venter synthesizing the DNA of his new species Mycoplasma laboratorium, and people are complaining that he didn't make the cell that he's putting this synthesized and custom designed DNA into(he's conducted many gene knock-out experiments to decide which genes he needs and which he doesn't). Eventually someone will create an artificial cell (just more chemistry) to put it into, and at that point any rational person would have to accept that a living thing had been totally made from raw chemicals (vs Venter's current creation only partly lab made), and that's what I mean by it not being anything fundamental. Life is just complex chemistry.
Just to head off any complaints of "well, DNA is easy, cells are hard", or "DNA is just chemistry, but cells contain magic", let's note that Venter's synthetic critter will be reproducing like a normal cell - i.e. his synthetic (just a bunch of chemicals) DNA will be controlling the creation of more of those magic cells. The second generation cells will be, if not man-made, made by something man-made.
Sure it's just an assembly job, but in your original post you were claiming that it had been made from living parts (whatever that might mean), whereas in fact the assembly of this virus was from synthesized components (raw chemicals). The mail order gene sequences are synthesized:
Slashdot Mirror
iRobot make an "iRobot Create" robot variant of their Roomba robo-vacuum-cleaner that can do that. As I understand it it's basically the same platform/capabilities as the Roomba except that it has a control interface and doesn't do the vacccum thing. The self-charge capability certainly makes it pretty unique and attractive for an always-on home robot (toy or research or anywhere inbetween).
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=289
$350 would sustain a family in sub-Saharan Africa for 3 years...
Not if they chose to blow it all at once on a Pleo.
That may well be the code posters intention, but with no legal backing (i.e. no explicit grant of rights) he could also cause trouble if he chose to. Maybe just for you because he doesn't like your company and finds out about it. You don't want to base your business on the assumed good will of people whose work you are commercially appropriating without asking permission!
You are 100% wrong.
Under US law anything inherently copyrightable is automatically copyright protected. No need to declare it as such or take any other action. Posting code on the web no more automatically grants any rights to it than posting a photo or anything else does - the creator retains copyright and can grant or deny rights to use/modify for private/commercial/on-the-moon-only or whatever rights he chooses.
The OP should try contacting the original author and ask what rights anyone else has to use it... is it OK to use it commercially and to modify it (if the need should arise).
Americans have a LOT more choice than europeans.
... but I've a sad feeling that you are.
You can't be serious?!
Having lived the first 25 years of my life in the UK and last 20+ here in the US, I think I know what I'm talking about when I say that you're so far off the mark it's not funny.
o get a real vote like the americans
I'd think that the reason some Americans would be willing to sell their vote is at least partly because they DON'T get a REAL vote. Unless you live in one of the half dozen swing states, your presidential vote counts for exactly nothing (or worse - it effectively counts for the majority party in your state, regardless of how you actually cast your vote).
America, with it's electoral college system, has probably the least democratic voting system anywhere in the world. Most voters are automatically disenranchised even in the absense of overt corruption.
MULTICS era machines did not have many Mb
Indeed. We had a Honeywell Multics system at Bristol University, UK when I was there from '79-'82. The thing was impressively fast (it would compile small FORTRAN programs in no noticble time - type compile command, hit enter, and you got your prompt back), but nonetheless I recall Bristol getting a free HALF A MEGABYTE (a big deal at the time) memory upgrade from Honeywell to address performance issues.
Not exactly a TV show, but it was linked from the NBC site, and doesn't suck - videos of Jay Leno's car collection :
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/video/index.shtml
Gotta be nice to be a multi-millionaire!
Really, just don't get more hardcore than that....
Particularly since he's a software guy and only does electronics for a hobby!
It is happening.... I didn't have IMAP a few days ago when it was mentioned on slashdot, but today I just got it.
Quoting from the response:
Their defense of the 2,3 machine is that the particular type of infinite initial conditions it requires prevents it from being trivial, but this doesn't change the fact that it doesn't meet Minsky's definition, and it's certainly not going to be the basis for any molecular computers except those running in a different universe with an infinite number of molecules.
Societies may have "invented" the notion of religion because religion led to ethics, which led to less killing of their neighbors. All of the sudden, it's survival of the fittest, as non-ethical tribes tended to be killed off, while religious tribes thrived.
No doubt there's an evolutionary component to religion (and all forms of societal meme), but the reason religion (or more specifially gods) were originally invented (a thousand times over, all over the world) was surely as an explanatory cause.
What causes disease, pestilence, good harvests, weather, etc, etc? Without the scientific knowledge to explain these, the cause is attributed to an assumed powerful invisible cause - aka a god. Association and building of causal relationships is fundamental to the brain (it's the most basic thing that let's us predict the environment and why brains evolved) and so it's inevitable that we look for causes for everything... We can't stop doing it.
Dramatic change at nature's pace takes so much longer than a person's lifetime that what you see around us is in essence a frozen snapshot in time. You do see exactly what you'd expect to see with such a frozen snapshot - animals at all stages of speciation from almost diverged but still able to interbreed (lion, tiger) to just diverged and able to disfucntionally interbreed (horse, donkey), to less recently diverged with no ability to interbreed (man, chimpanzee). We also see the much earlier stages of species forming seperate populations (aside from those naturally forced by landmass seperation - e.g. north american vs european bison)that can only lead to divergence of the DNA among the seperate populations (e.g. forest vs plains elephants).
If you want to see something dramatic happening in front of your own eyes, then you need to massively speed up the evolution process, and genetic algorithms (implemented both in software and hardware) show exactly that. Anyone too lazy to write their own simulation to prove that evolution works (if they need to see to believe the logically obvious!) can just Google for simulations - they are many out there showing software critters evolving.
Definitely it's not taught well (if at all), but I think the real gulf between reality and typical knowledge is that:
1) Evolution isn't about individuals - it's about population drift
2) Evolution isn't about getting better at anything - it's about happening to becomm better suited to the environment as the envoronment shifts (hence "punctuated equilibrium")
It doesn't help that 90% of the population are probably too dumb to truly comprehend the truth even if presented with it.
Last time I checked Catholics are Christians and they believe in evolution (from the Pope on down).
Being religious has nothing to do with not believing in evolution - it's more a matter of lack of education about what evolution is and the zillion different proofs of it that exist.
Take for instance those robots you get that can sort a number of objects. Very nice, but if they were truly intelligent you could take a robot tasked with sorting by color and get it to sort by alphabet, ON ITS OWN! Humans can, if you are a sorter at a production line told to sort apples by size, and all of a sudden I replace it with books and tell you to sort by alphabet, you can do it. Tell me of a program that even comes close to this.
Soar.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/soar/home
Read Allen Newell's "Unified Theories of Cognition".
No doubt that'll be true until (if) they become intelligent/independent & powerful enough to threaten us, then we'll afford them rights. Commercial robots will initially be unable to escape their designer's programming, but as their artifial minds become closer to our own and computing power expands, I'm sure that we'll see instances of them becoming a bit too creative and independent, and indeed without (effective) limits put on them we may well see a robot uprising one day.
Or does that demo video seem rather goatse-esque?
I thought it was even funnier that he wrote a bot to spam his own website!
What does it matter what he's doing? He is applying his presumed intelligence to the problem of coming up with artificial life.
No, he really isn't. But to understand that you do need to undertand what he's actually doing.
What part of gene knock-out mutations strikes you as being more intelligent than the random mutations occuring in nature? He's not designing anything - just breaking it in various ways and seeing (without expectations) if it still works, and repeating the process. That's the same as occurs in nature.
The more interesting part of this isn't the (unintelligent) way he's coming up with the DNA for his new species, but rather the fact that he's then going to synthesize it (ignoring the broken bits) from raw chemicals and inject it back into the bacteria. This part of it (synthesizing the DNA) is in a way just a headline grabbing stunt - unless of course you get freaked out by a living species who's DNA has been made to order from lab chemicals.
Hardly - the DNA of this artificial critter has been "designed" in exactly the way nature does it by a bunch of "mutate and test" genetic "knock-out" experiments. This is proof not of the need for an intelligent designer but of the exact opposite - how the mindless processes of nature can come up with a new species.
Maybe you should go read about what Venter is doing, and how he is doing it, before making baseless assertions about it.
I, for one, don't believe scientist's can create true artificial life, I'm not going to discourage them from trying, but life itself is not just "complex chemistry".
Without 'life', all the chemicals, elements, cells, etc. are useless. For example, if you have a deceased body, all the necessary elements are there, but without the breathe of 'life', they're... a lifeless mass.
The "life" in a person's body is just a combination of the "life" (complex chemistry!) in each cell, combined with the sum-of-the-parts that different types of cells can do (muscle cells can contract - move, neural cells can integrate inputs and form nerural networks, etc), and the overall way they are call connected per the DNA blueprint. Each cell is only going to maintain it's complex chemical cycles as long as you keep providing it with a source of energy, source of raw materials, keep it hydrated, remove chemical waste products etc (much like a fire whose self-perpetuating processes will "die" without fuel, oxygen, removal of carbon dioxide).
We are most used from movies/etc seeing what happens when you SUDDENLY remove of these vital (literally life giving!) factors such as when someone is shot in the head (brain controls breathing, etc) or heart, or they bleed to death or are strangled (no more oxygen), etc, etc, but it's really more informative to see the way people die more typically in real life. If you're old enough to have seen relatives die than you know what I mean. People don't die very quickly - it's a process rather than an event, and it takes days as components start to die (you can smell "death" on someone days before they are actually dead) and have knock-on effects. It's similar to a pond or river that goes from being healthy to stagnant - a vicious cycle of degradation until in the end the self-sustaining cycles are completely gone.
Life similarly doesn't start with a bang. A fertilized egg is initially nothing more than a cell in the mothers body, and it's only after many cycles of division and cellular specialization that the mass of cells starts to become a system - the creation of a rudimentary brain starting with the stem, a rudimentary heart and circulation system, etc, and it gradually becomes an independent self-sustaining system and we regard it as a life separate from the mother.
As for Venter's pending announcement (article said expected in next few weeks), certainly it's not real until it has been done and verified, but I would not expect any surprises. The DNA has already been verified as viable - it was designed / pared down as a result of genetic "knock-out" experiments, with the continued viability of the cell being the proof, so we know that the DNA he wants to use works, and the introduction of new DNA into a cell is also nothing new... In fact I think most people involved in the field see it more as hype than an experiment who's outcome is in any doubt, since it's not really that much of a step forward - but nonethless dramatic enough to make the headlines.
Not quite sure what you mean by that... Would you accept that anything that has all the attributes of life is alive, or are you only going to accept it as alive if it occured in nature? Do you consider a lab-made Polio virus assembled from raw chemicals as any different from a nature made Polio virus (both are chemically identical)?
Here we have Venter synthesizing the DNA of his new species Mycoplasma laboratorium, and people are complaining that he didn't make the cell that he's putting this synthesized and custom designed DNA into(he's conducted many gene knock-out experiments to decide which genes he needs and which he doesn't). Eventually someone will create an artificial cell (just more chemistry) to put it into, and at that point any rational person would have to accept that a living thing had been totally made from raw chemicals (vs Venter's current creation only partly lab made), and that's what I mean by it not being anything fundamental. Life is just complex chemistry.
Just to head off any complaints of "well, DNA is easy, cells are hard", or "DNA is just chemistry, but cells contain magic", let's note that Venter's synthetic critter will be reproducing like a normal cell - i.e. his synthetic (just a bunch of chemicals) DNA will be controlling the creation of more of those magic cells. The second generation cells will be, if not man-made, made by something man-made.
Sure it's just an assembly job, but in your original post you were claiming that it had been made from living parts (whatever that might mean), whereas in fact the assembly of this virus was from synthesized components (raw chemicals). The mail order gene sequences are synthesized:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/technology/techspecial/12gene.html?ref=techspecial
They used provided gene sequences. These gene sequences were almost certainly obtained from other viruses.
Not at all - these mail-order gene sequence shops are synthesizing them:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/technology/techspecial/12gene.html?ref=techspecial