Aha, so there's prior art? Then I guess we won't see them succeed at patenting it, if they try.
I've heard that many an inventor has been foiled by prior art in fantasy movies. I move that we declare fantasy movies illegal, in order to protect intellectual property. Fantasy/scifi movies are like pirating the future!
"It's like giving away sugar, but then saying that anything cooked with it must be given away free too. And that you can never sell the bowl you mix the ingredients in."
But you're not under any obligation to use that brand of sugar. You can continue buying "proprietary" sugar and selling the result, and nobody's going to stop you.
Actually, a metaphor like that is basically fallacious in the first place. The GPL doesn't put any restrictions on buying or selling. You're free to sell GPL software, whether or not you made it, whether or not you modified it, as long as you give the source to any buyer, if they ask. The GPL is about copying and modifying, which don't really apply to physical goods. (You can't copy sugar, to use your example. Whether or not you get it for free, obtaining it means someone else loses it.)
"Legit" software manufacturers don't have to use GPL components either. If they don't want to be required to divulge their source code and allow their customers to share and modify their programs, then they don't have to include GPLed code, and nobody is put out of business.
Now, with the supposed "viralness" of the GPL out of the way: of course companies can go out of business if there's FOSS alternative(s) that are functionally equivalent or superior, because people are less likely to buy something if they can get a better thing for free. But surely nobody would suggest that people should be *required* to charge money for the distribution of software. That would be, for lack of a better word, idiotic. If people are willing to donate their time, effort, and code to FOSS projects, then big business (and small business, admittedly) will have to cope. Maybe they could try innovating.
After reading some of the replies, I must admit one major error I made. As several commenters pointed out, the Turing Test does not say "if and only if" a computer is indistinguishable from a human in conversation. It just says that that's one way of knowing that a computer is intelligent, but not the only way, so that assuming the Turing Test is accurate, a program can still be intelligent without necessarily passing (or without even having the capacity for text-mode conversation). My mistake.
But I still stand by one point I was trying to make about projects like ALICE. To clarify, they seem to be under the misguided notion that they can make an AI program by simulating one product of intelligence, rather than by actually implementing the foundation of real intelligence. Unless I'm mistaken, ALICE does not implement an abstract multi-layer "brain"; it's just a monolithic engine to hold a conversation without really understanding what it's saying. And that's the kind of program that won't ever be self-sustaining enough to be called "intelligent"; it'll rely on separate training to understand new figures of speech, etc. So I just see it as a novelty, not something that will ever result in a particularly useful program, or any advances in the field of computer intelligence.
"The ALICE bot is in no real way associated with artificial intelligence. It is a simple if/then sequence using XML tables. Download the source for yourself."
It's not associated with artificial intelligence? Then why, if I go to the ALICE website, do I see a big banner declaring "ALICE Artificial Intelligence Foundation," and why do they call their language "Artificial Intelligence Markup Language"?
What do you think the ALICE bot really does? PATTERN RECOGNITION. It's a simple abstraction of taking a statement and attempting to provide a legible and coherent response.
"Pattern recognition" is vastly different from blind "pattern matching." Any computer program can easily do "pattern matching" -- that's how Alice works, as you yourself admitted when you mentioned that it's an if-then sequence based on preprogrammed responses. That's nothing much more advanced than regexes.
When a human is born, he or she knows nothing of the outside world, let alone of language or vision, yet can learn to speak and recognize things within a few years, just by the process we call "learning." And whether or not ALICE can "learn," it would not be easy to teach it a language from scratch. So "pattern recognition" is the term I used to refer to human-like intelligence. This has no preprogrammed responses to anything. Maybe ALICE is good at chit-chat, but I think we can also agree that such is the least intelligent form of human communication. Anything more substantial than that can't be based on prefabricated statement/response sequences.
Pattern recognition, in this sense, requires many abilities. It requires the basic ability to observe and store patterns, but most importantly, it requires those patterns to be invariant. (See Dileep George's neuroscience research for an example of what is meant by "invariance.") And of course, it requires the ability to perform inductive reasoning on those stored patterns and on new input in order to infer information. No "chatterbot" program has ever come close to any of these.
The idea is that a computer is intelligent if it can hold a conversation with a human such that it is indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human.
RIDICULOUS.
Have you ever actually tried talking to one of these bots (including ALICE)? It is very easy to know that you're not talking to a human. Exceptionally easy. The Loebner Prize judges consistently grant the bots handicaps, acting as if they're actually being fooled. Obviously they're not, and the AI community just wants people to think that it's more advanced than it really is. Unfortnately, some members of the public *are* fooled by that.
The problem is in the Turing Test itself. It assumes that the measure of intelligence is humanoid conversational ability. I strongly disagree with that. Conversation ability is no measure of intelligence. Just for an example, I am exceptionally intelligent (statistically), but I am a poor conversationalist. Casual small-talk has always bewildered me. If I entered myself into the Loebner contest, they might think I'm a bot. Hell, ALICE might accuse me of being a bot.
Anyone who's taken an IQ test will recall that every last question has something to do with pattern recognition. You'll also recall that you were not asked to respond to any conversational questions. That's because invariant pattern recognition abilities (in a loose sense -- this also includes memory/learning and inductive reasoning) are the true mark of intelligence, and this is nearly undisputed. If they really want to test how intelligent a program is, they need to test its patern recognition ability.
Take this program -- http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/ -- for example. It's gone largely unnoticed, yet it is concrete proof of a huge breakthrough in computer intelligence. This is a little Matlab demo of a very abstract multi-layer intelligence algorithm. In this particular implementation, it is taught a set of small images. Then you can play "Pictionary" with it, drawing shapes and have it recognize them. You may say that this is unremarkable, that shape-recognition is a trivial algorithmic matter unrelated to intelligence. But the author noticed that he could draw shapes "incorrectly" -- like, the little duck picture, except with its head missing, or alphabetical symbols rotated or flipped -- and the program still recognized them. (It failed a few times, but in situations where the shape is so mangled that I would have probably failed too. How's that for a Turing test?) And this program's genius lies in not what it does, but how it does it. All of its functionality is completely abstract. It is a pattern recognizer, not a bitmap-tracer, and there are no hard-coded routines for checking if the image is flipped, rotated, etc.
This is what Palm/Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins (also the founder of new neuroscience startup Numenta, http://www.numenta.com/) calls "Real Intelligence," to distinguish it from the failed Artificial Intelligence effort. He feels that the right way to make computers intelligent is not to have them outwardly imitate human behavior, but to internally function the way the mind really works. Anyone interested should check out his book, On Intelligence http://www.onintelligence.org/. You'll wonder why you ever believed the AI hype.
Artificial Intelligence is a sham, by its very nature. Real Intelligence will be the way of the future.
It's pretty easy to generate a random file. That's not anything innovative on their part.
dd if=/dev/urandom of=[filename here] count=[number of random 512-byte blocks]
In any case, although one-time pads are truly unbreakable, they're not very useful. In order for a recipient of data to read it, they must also receive a big pad file at least as large as the actual data. And there has to be a program to combine them, which can't be itself encrypted, so it could be detected by virus scanners as usual.
You're probably thinking of the National Enquirer, an American tabloid devoted mainly to celebrity gossip. This is The Inquirer, a European technology magazine.
P2P clients, when they search for files, receive alleged hashes from where? The peers that claim to have them. And since most of these protocols have been reverse-engineered by now, I suspect that this program just combines a random-data generator with a multi-network untrustworthy P2P client. It'll sit on a network and respond to searches, report the expected filename, filesize, and hash (whatever algorithm is used), and wait for people to bite.
There is no technological way of verifying that the other peer is telling the truth (or at least there won't be unless the whole world implements some sort of Orwellian "Trusted Computing" requirement), aside from downloading the whole file and verifying it against the expected hash. No hash algorithms need be broken. I mean, once the whole file is downloaded, what does it matter to them whether the hash really matches? Why would even an idiot keep a downloaded file just because the program says it's verified and the size matches, if he can clearly see that the file doesn't work?
Pokey and his pals can now enjoy fun and learning with wireless UNTERNET!!!!
(Authentic Pokey all-caps type omitted because of the lame lameness filter. Apologies for any lack of fun happy this may have caused.)
Also read "On Intelligence"
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
An excellent complementary reading would be On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, Handspring, and most recently, Numenta. It specifically explores the workings of intelligence and memory. (Don't let the rather uninspired title deter you. It was actually a very fascinating read, and very easy to understand -- full of metaphors and examples.)
I haven't read "Mapping the Mind," but it sounds like an equally good read.
Great, a new device to help people be even lazier. Is it really so hard to push a few fucking buttons?
What's next -- people will be too lazy to talk, so they'll want something that lets them blink Morse code? Come on, using a normal remote control is not hard.
(Disclaimer: Aside from news, Simpsons, and Jon Stewart, I watch no TV. Maybe for hard-core teevee usars, pushing buttons does get tiring. But just remember that you're better off than when people had to actually stand up and walk to the TV to change the channel.)
Haha, a company misunderstanding a request for technical documentation... it reminded me of this exchange from Computer Stupidities:
Hello, Commodore customer service. May I help you?
Yes, I'm trying to find the file format for Deluxe Music Construction Set.
You want to format a disk? Lemme see... (paper rustles)
No. I'm looking for documentation on the file format for DMCS.
Oh, yes. I've got documentation here. (paper rustles) Ok, to format a disk, first you--
No, no...I'm looking for the file format for--
You want to format a file? I umm... (paper rustles again)
NO... I DO NOT WANT TO FORMAT A FILE!
Ok, well, to format a disk, you--
NO! I don't want to format a disk. I'm a programmer. I'm trying to find some documentation on--
We have documentation.
Yes, I understand. But I'm looking for specific documentation on software that I bought through Commodore. I'm looking for documentation on the file format for Deluxe Music Construction Set--
(paper rustles) You want to format a file?
No, I -- Is there someone else there I can talk to?
If I'm not mistaken, dsginter's point was not that we should create a new email system whose sole feature was backward-incompatibility, but that we should implement a new electronic mail infrastructure which is actually resistant to spam.
Numerous possibilities exist -- there's one I thought of, which, a few months after I posted it on my blog, Microsoft tried to patent, interestingly. It was that "Caller ID For Email" thing (which they've decided not to pursue, if I remember correctly). Now, I'm partial to Internet Mail 2000, a proposal for a system whose distinguishing feature is requiring that messages be stored on the sender's mail server -- this prevents spam not only by requiring spammers to use up space on their own servers if they wish to continue with their evildoings, but also by making a vaild return address a technological requirement, making spam laws more enforceable.
If this were to be implemented as Email 2.0, it would not be a waste of time to switch to it. The current electronic mail infrastructure was designed at a time when the only people using this Internet were academic institutes, researchers, and the US Government -- to put it simply, a friendlier Internet. You wouldn't expect the US Government or MIT or Tim Berners-Lee to send out unsolicited promotional/commercial email. But now that it's open to the public, less trust must be placed in random individuals.
"Dark side" mention vs. HTML predating XML -- probably both.
XML is not older than HTML. HTML was an application of SGML, but XML was only devised as an SGML replacement about 7 years after the first HTML applications appeared.
I wouldn't say XML is "simpler" than SGML. SGML is much easier for human read/writability. XML's syntax is much stricter (requiring a single root element, all attributes quoted, all tags closed, etc.), so it's easier to parse.
Come on, mods, a "troll"? That wasn't a troll, it was the truth!
I agree that it's too wordy and hard to parse, and I definitely don't think it's human-friendly. (Only if one's been immersed in it for a while does it become easily readable.)
I also dislike the XML data model at all. I strongly prefer the RDF data model (not to be confused with the bad XML serialization of RDF), basically a set of subject-predicate-object triples. It's a much more natural data model: things have properties, and they do actions. It's as simple as that. XML's inherently tree-like structure is much more awkward for real-world and purely electronic data alike.
Personally, my favorite structuring language is Notation 3 (a very readable extended RDF serialization).
Slashdot Mirror
But then, my mom washed it, and it exploded.
Wait a second, there are Microsofties on Slashdot? WTF? :-)
Programs have been doing this for a long time; I find it unsurprising that robots can also do it.
Aha, so there's prior art? Then I guess we won't see them succeed at patenting it, if they try.
I've heard that many an inventor has been foiled by prior art in fantasy movies. I move that we declare fantasy movies illegal, in order to protect intellectual property. Fantasy/scifi movies are like pirating the future!
"It's like giving away sugar, but then saying that anything cooked with it must be given away free too. And that you can never sell the bowl you mix the ingredients in."
But you're not under any obligation to use that brand of sugar. You can continue buying "proprietary" sugar and selling the result, and nobody's going to stop you.
Actually, a metaphor like that is basically fallacious in the first place. The GPL doesn't put any restrictions on buying or selling. You're free to sell GPL software, whether or not you made it, whether or not you modified it, as long as you give the source to any buyer, if they ask. The GPL is about copying and modifying, which don't really apply to physical goods. (You can't copy sugar, to use your example. Whether or not you get it for free, obtaining it means someone else loses it.)
"Legit" software manufacturers don't have to use GPL components either. If they don't want to be required to divulge their source code and allow their customers to share and modify their programs, then they don't have to include GPLed code, and nobody is put out of business.
Now, with the supposed "viralness" of the GPL out of the way: of course companies can go out of business if there's FOSS alternative(s) that are functionally equivalent or superior, because people are less likely to buy something if they can get a better thing for free. But surely nobody would suggest that people should be *required* to charge money for the distribution of software. That would be, for lack of a better word, idiotic. If people are willing to donate their time, effort, and code to FOSS projects, then big business (and small business, admittedly) will have to cope. Maybe they could try innovating.
Calm down. Tiger still includes cron, so it's perfectly backwards-compatible. You never need to touch launchd, if you don't want to.
But I still stand by one point I was trying to make about projects like ALICE. To clarify, they seem to be under the misguided notion that they can make an AI program by simulating one product of intelligence, rather than by actually implementing the foundation of real intelligence. Unless I'm mistaken, ALICE does not implement an abstract multi-layer "brain"; it's just a monolithic engine to hold a conversation without really understanding what it's saying. And that's the kind of program that won't ever be self-sustaining enough to be called "intelligent"; it'll rely on separate training to understand new figures of speech, etc. So I just see it as a novelty, not something that will ever result in a particularly useful program, or any advances in the field of computer intelligence.
It's not associated with artificial intelligence? Then why, if I go to the ALICE website, do I see a big banner declaring "ALICE Artificial Intelligence Foundation," and why do they call their language "Artificial Intelligence Markup Language"?
"Pattern recognition" is vastly different from blind "pattern matching." Any computer program can easily do "pattern matching" -- that's how Alice works, as you yourself admitted when you mentioned that it's an if-then sequence based on preprogrammed responses. That's nothing much more advanced than regexes.
When a human is born, he or she knows nothing of the outside world, let alone of language or vision, yet can learn to speak and recognize things within a few years, just by the process we call "learning." And whether or not ALICE can "learn," it would not be easy to teach it a language from scratch. So "pattern recognition" is the term I used to refer to human-like intelligence. This has no preprogrammed responses to anything. Maybe ALICE is good at chit-chat, but I think we can also agree that such is the least intelligent form of human communication. Anything more substantial than that can't be based on prefabricated statement/response sequences.
Pattern recognition, in this sense, requires many abilities. It requires the basic ability to observe and store patterns, but most importantly, it requires those patterns to be invariant. (See Dileep George's neuroscience research for an example of what is meant by "invariance.") And of course, it requires the ability to perform inductive reasoning on those stored patterns and on new input in order to infer information. No "chatterbot" program has ever come close to any of these.
The idea is that a computer is intelligent if it can hold a conversation with a human such that it is indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human.
RIDICULOUS.
Have you ever actually tried talking to one of these bots (including ALICE)? It is very easy to know that you're not talking to a human. Exceptionally easy. The Loebner Prize judges consistently grant the bots handicaps, acting as if they're actually being fooled. Obviously they're not, and the AI community just wants people to think that it's more advanced than it really is. Unfortnately, some members of the public *are* fooled by that.
The problem is in the Turing Test itself. It assumes that the measure of intelligence is humanoid conversational ability. I strongly disagree with that. Conversation ability is no measure of intelligence. Just for an example, I am exceptionally intelligent (statistically), but I am a poor conversationalist. Casual small-talk has always bewildered me. If I entered myself into the Loebner contest, they might think I'm a bot. Hell, ALICE might accuse me of being a bot.
Anyone who's taken an IQ test will recall that every last question has something to do with pattern recognition. You'll also recall that you were not asked to respond to any conversational questions. That's because invariant pattern recognition abilities (in a loose sense -- this also includes memory/learning and inductive reasoning) are the true mark of intelligence, and this is nearly undisputed. If they really want to test how intelligent a program is, they need to test its patern recognition ability.
Take this program -- http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/ -- for example. It's gone largely unnoticed, yet it is concrete proof of a huge breakthrough in computer intelligence. This is a little Matlab demo of a very abstract multi-layer intelligence algorithm. In this particular implementation, it is taught a set of small images. Then you can play "Pictionary" with it, drawing shapes and have it recognize them. You may say that this is unremarkable, that shape-recognition is a trivial algorithmic matter unrelated to intelligence. But the author noticed that he could draw shapes "incorrectly" -- like, the little duck picture, except with its head missing, or alphabetical symbols rotated or flipped -- and the program still recognized them. (It failed a few times, but in situations where the shape is so mangled that I would have probably failed too. How's that for a Turing test?) And this program's genius lies in not what it does, but how it does it. All of its functionality is completely abstract. It is a pattern recognizer, not a bitmap-tracer, and there are no hard-coded routines for checking if the image is flipped, rotated, etc.
This is what Palm/Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins (also the founder of new neuroscience startup Numenta, http://www.numenta.com/) calls "Real Intelligence," to distinguish it from the failed Artificial Intelligence effort. He feels that the right way to make computers intelligent is not to have them outwardly imitate human behavior, but to internally function the way the mind really works. Anyone interested should check out his book, On Intelligence http://www.onintelligence.org/. You'll wonder why you ever believed the AI hype.
Artificial Intelligence is a sham, by its very nature. Real Intelligence will be the way of the future.
I'm not much of a paraskavedekatriaphobe, but if the probability of it missing doesn't improve, I'm becoming superstitious.
You're probably thinking of the National Enquirer, an American tabloid devoted mainly to celebrity gossip. This is The Inquirer, a European technology magazine.
P2P clients, when they search for files, receive alleged hashes from where? The peers that claim to have them. And since most of these protocols have been reverse-engineered by now, I suspect that this program just combines a random-data generator with a multi-network untrustworthy P2P client. It'll sit on a network and respond to searches, report the expected filename, filesize, and hash (whatever algorithm is used), and wait for people to bite.
There is no technological way of verifying that the other peer is telling the truth (or at least there won't be unless the whole world implements some sort of Orwellian "Trusted Computing" requirement), aside from downloading the whole file and verifying it against the expected hash. No hash algorithms need be broken. I mean, once the whole file is downloaded, what does it matter to them whether the hash really matches? Why would even an idiot keep a downloaded file just because the program says it's verified and the size matches, if he can clearly see that the file doesn't work?
(Authentic Pokey all-caps type omitted because of the lame lameness filter. Apologies for any lack of fun happy this may have caused.)
An excellent complementary reading would be On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm, Handspring, and most recently, Numenta. It specifically explores the workings of intelligence and memory. (Don't let the rather uninspired title deter you. It was actually a very fascinating read, and very easy to understand -- full of metaphors and examples.)
I haven't read "Mapping the Mind," but it sounds like an equally good read.
In Soviet Russia, nobody gets perpendicular. Perpendicular hard drive gets YOU!
What's next -- people will be too lazy to talk, so they'll want something that lets them blink Morse code? Come on, using a normal remote control is not hard.
(Disclaimer: Aside from news, Simpsons, and Jon Stewart, I watch no TV. Maybe for hard-core teevee usars, pushing buttons does get tiring. But just remember that you're better off than when people had to actually stand up and walk to the TV to change the channel.)
All over the world, we Rasterbate obscene images.
Need I say more?
If I'm not mistaken, dsginter's point was not that we should create a new email system whose sole feature was backward-incompatibility, but that we should implement a new electronic mail infrastructure which is actually resistant to spam.
Numerous possibilities exist -- there's one I thought of, which, a few months after I posted it on my blog, Microsoft tried to patent, interestingly. It was that "Caller ID For Email" thing (which they've decided not to pursue, if I remember correctly). Now, I'm partial to Internet Mail 2000, a proposal for a system whose distinguishing feature is requiring that messages be stored on the sender's mail server -- this prevents spam not only by requiring spammers to use up space on their own servers if they wish to continue with their evildoings, but also by making a vaild return address a technological requirement, making spam laws more enforceable.
If this were to be implemented as Email 2.0, it would not be a waste of time to switch to it. The current electronic mail infrastructure was designed at a time when the only people using this Internet were academic institutes, researchers, and the US Government -- to put it simply, a friendlier Internet. You wouldn't expect the US Government or MIT or Tim Berners-Lee to send out unsolicited promotional/commercial email. But now that it's open to the public, less trust must be placed in random individuals.
<#person>
:firstName "Tom";
:lastName "Jones".
I agree that it's too wordy and hard to parse, and I definitely don't think it's human-friendly. (Only if one's been immersed in it for a while does it become easily readable.)
I also dislike the XML data model at all. I strongly prefer the RDF data model (not to be confused with the bad XML serialization of RDF), basically a set of subject-predicate-object triples. It's a much more natural data model: things have properties, and they do actions. It's as simple as that. XML's inherently tree-like structure is much more awkward for real-world and purely electronic data alike.
Personally, my favorite structuring language is Notation 3 (a very readable extended RDF serialization).
A Beowulf cluster of computer grids.
Idiom "the pot calling the kettle black" + Bill Gates comparing Open Source to Communism.