What part of "works with existing cars and existing refueling stations" is confusing you hippes?
The part where you act like this seawater-into-fuel tech is fully developed and deployed instead of just a Navy experiment, or like the "existing" auto fleet isn't already changing.
There's only recently been an announcement of a standard plug for electric cars.
And there was only just an announcement that the Navy is experimenting with creating jet fuel from seawater. But you're still arguing that EVs are in the future and using the fleet of today to argue for continuing to use fuels. That doesn't make sense.
Tell you what, you root for seawater-into-fuel processing to grow enough to supply all the hydrocarbon needs of our fleet and I'll root for our fleet to switch to electric and we'll see who wins. Hey maybe we'll get the best of both worlds, and most cars will be electric, and those that aren't will be able to use carbon-neutral artificial gasoline.
on top of a creaking already over-strained electrical grid.
Lol, right. So we don't have the electrical infrastructure for electric vehicles, but we do have it for electrically-generated-liquid-fuel, even though that is going to take a lot more electricity since the conversion of that fuel source into kinetic energy is so much less efficient than an electric motor. That makes tons of sense.
Any thought beyond "ZOMG scary things make me scared!" is Democratic talking points. Wow. Never have I seen such a slam against Republican ways of thinking before, and I don't think you even intended it. I mean I've often thought that using scare words to make people turn off their brains was a common though not uniquely Republican tactic. But I've never had anyone say it in such an absolute and partisan way before./applause
LOL. I don't think you have been paying attention, or have any idea what socialism even is. Most socialist states have been quite stable for the last sixty years. I'm sure you're thinking of the National Socialist Party, but even then you'd have to be pretty retarded to think Nazi Germany was anarchic.
True enough. But then, neither does alcohol. People are capable of interpreting their internal cues pretty far out.
No, you don't seem to understand, I mean it's not something the drug does. Alcohol does make some people violent who weren't already. THC doesn't. Essentially nobody becomes violent after taking it any more than they do after taking Valium. You can't just "interpret" your way out of the fundamental pharmacological effect of a drug.
I've read some of the things that local authorities near the mexican border, prison wardens etc. wrote. It may have become propaganda later, but at the time, they really believed it themselves.
Yeah professionals also believed that the WWI Army intelligence test proved that the Irish and Italians were inherently less intelligent. But because some professionals from the 1920s really believed that "Indian Hemp" made Mexicans violent, that's supposed to support the idea that drugs can have essentially arbitrary effects on people, and that this effect is largely determined by culture. No, it doesn't work that way.
What does work that way is racism, cultural ignorance, and selection bias. Mexicans in prison or caught by border patrol are believed to be violent, and this is blamed on a combination of the drug and them being dirty violent Mexicans, ignoring that you've already picked the subset of them that are likely to be violent. There was a lot of "science" of this nature back then.
This is a classic mistake people do when observing drug use in different cultures, concluding that there must be something different with the drug. It's probably what has given rise to the myths about different effects from tequila, vodka, absinthe, etc.
Except that difference doesn't even exist culturally. When you actually look at it, Mexicans doing tequila shots don't actually respond differently than Russians doing Vodka shots. They all show the same distribution of individual reactions. Those are just cultural stereotypes and biases with little basis in reality, and they have retro-actively informed myths involving alcohol.
The only actual differences in how people of different cultures react to alcohol is actually genetic, and involves genes for alcohol processing and genes for alcoholism. This is why Native Americans are actually more susceptible to alcohol, because they lack certain genes that Old Worlders do. However even then it doesn't radically change the kinds of effect alcohol has, it only changes the degree. And the only impact culture has is in how those alcohol genes were/weren't selected for.
THC will never affect someone like alcohol, or like PCP, or like Meth, or LSD, and the same is true for all other comparisons between those drugs. That's not how drugs work.
They did not reprogram themselves. The team "evolved" them. Note the quotation marks used by the author of the article. They picked the most successful robots by hand, manually reprogrammed them and modified the code to mimic genetic mutations.
Yes they used quotes because GA isn't literal "evolution". It's an algorithm for searching solution spaces inspired by and patterned after evolution. The description they gave in TFA is a bog-standard and perfect description of Genetic Algorithms, and combined with saying "evolved" makes it clear what they're talking about. If you're familiar with AI research, it's obvious this is what they used. Let me break it down for you.
First, the only thing TFA says they programmed by hand was "the goal", which is their scoring system and the "goal" is to get the highest score possible. They don't need to "pick the most successful robots by hand", because they have created a quantitative measure of "best" -- this is called the "fitness function" in GAs, and is essentially the only place where the programmer influences the outcome.
Second, "random changes to their code to mimic biological mutations" should be a huge clue that GAs are what they are using. The whole point of GAs is to mimic biological evolution, and mutations are an important part of that. If they were actually programming them by hand, then random bit flips would be detrimental to getting their desired result. In GAs, it's an essential step of the process.
Third, copying and combining the solutions of the best robots to create the next "generation" is also a standard function of GAs, and it's designed to mimic genetic crossover in sexual reproduction, and like in sexual reproduction is done randomly. It's very very hard to manually take chunks of a Neural Network, slap them together, and get something that does what you want. Outside of the simplest of networks, NN training is always done algorithmically and never by hand, because it's simply too hard to take a complex network and say "Okay I'll connect these two neurons together, change the weighting for this connection to 0.75, and that'll make the robot turn in circles and beep!" It doesn't work that way. So this terminology is again a dead giveaway that they're using GAs.
So let me describe how it works. They have N many robots, and they start with some random neural network. This is the initial "population", and the bits that define their NNs are their "DNA". They play the game, and each robot scores a certain number of points. The top W winners are chosen to be kept for the next generation. The remaining (N-W) robots will consist of the "offspring" -- random crossovers of the DNA bit patterns -- of the top W. Random bits will be flipped to simulate mutations. Then this new generation plays the game, and the process repeats.
There are lots of variations in the specifics of the algorithm that are possible. You can change the rate of mutation, and the sizes of the bit slices you use for doing crossover. Often times you'll copy the very best solution to the new generation without any mutations to avoid regression in the likely case where all the mutations/crossovers in the new generation are detrimental. But in any case, the key is that just like in real evolution, actual changes are random, but which are kept is based on their "fitness". This naturally and effectively focuses down on a solution. It's so effective, that it would have been crazy for these scientists to actually try to duplicate it by hand.
So the whole point of TFA was that the robots were self-programming and that the behaviors described emerged from that self-programming. If the scientists had actually programmed them manually, for one they wouldn't have used neural networks they'd have used a programming language, for two it would be really pathetic for it to take 100s of attempts to get the robot to not blink when near food, since that's two lines of C. But they obviously did use GAs, which is why having "deceptive" behavior emerge naturally from the GAs helps give us insight into biological communication.
You are right in your observations, but this robot isn't then an AI but an automaton.
You're using the layman sci-fi fan's definition of "AI". From a Computer Science standpoint, this was definitely AI. Your definition of AI doesn't exist. Everything we call an AI is an automaton, but we don't get upset over the fact. We don't try to draw a line between "automatic" behavior and intelligence. Is a cockroach intelligent, or is it just an automaton running a program? Philosophers can't even define "intelligence", much less scientists. So the answer, as far as AI researchers go, is who cares, it demonstrates complex behaviors, we want our AIs to as well, and we're doing a good job of accomplishing that. It's the practical effect that defines AI, not a philosophical aversion to "automatons".
Neural networks seem cool until you realize they are nothing more than glorified automatons. Show me a NN that can self-organize in a generic way and in real time, of course.
There are algorithms for reorganizing the network in real time. I'm sure they won't fit your definition of "generic", which sounds like some kind of "the NN can reason about arbitrary problems and solve" but really we don't have that anywhere. The AIs that come closest to passing the Turing Test can't do anything like that. In many ways they are more automatons than these robots, but again, who cares?
Genetic algorithms make the NN solve a problem. Nothing they couldn't do if they had been applied to any other kind of logic like digital circuits or programming languages. Genetic Algorithms are the heroes here. NNs suck.
It's the flexibility of NNs that make them so powerful. That's why they're so often chosen for this kind of work -- it certainly isn't an accident. An NN is very good at implementing generalized "strategies" for categorization and behavior. You could theoretically get the same behaviors discussed in the article by applying GAs to digital circuits or programming languages, but the search space would be much, much larger and it would take many, many more generations, and there would be much more regression, and the result would likely be much more specific and intolerant of changes in inputs. NNs are very amenable to GAs exactly because they do a good job of allowing the GA to narrow down on the solution in the solution space, while a single flipped bit in a logic circuit/assembly program will often result in wildly different behavior -- it can in NNs too, but they are much more tolerant of changes.
I really don't think you appreciate the power of neural networks.
This "AI" is closer to a protein that "learns" to be harder to eat than to any kind of intelligence.
Or a cockroach that "learns" to avoid the light because throughout the generations, cockroaches that instinctually responded to light by running away survived and the ones that didn't, didn't. The roach doesn't "learn" to avoid light, it happened via evolution. Is a roach "any kind of intelligence", any more than a protein? Who cares? They both can solve problems, and do so in a more general way than the majority of our CS algorithms. It's an AI.
That's kinda a stretch if that's really supposed to be the reference, pretty oblique, don't you think? I mean, I get it, "Obama is burning money" makes some sense, but the actual scene was emphasizing that The Joker didn't care about control and power outside of his ability to create chaos and discord amongst supposedly civilized people. So matching that image with "Socialism", which in it's "evil" form is all about controlling people in the name of social justice, just sounds retarded. It's like having a "BusHitler" poster where he has a little mustache, okay, fine, Bush = teh evil empire... but instead of a Swastika on his sleeve, it's an Anarchy symbol! Yeah! Because, you know, just like Hitler, Bush was all about Anarchy... and... um...
No, I didn't read TFA. I read other articles on the subject. I was not aware that there were to different people involved here (the artist and the hanger(s)).
I'm not sure if you've missed the point again. There were two "artists". One made the fake Time Magazine cover which had Obama's picture on it, only as the Joker. The second, the one who made the posters, removed the Time Magazine parts and added the "Socialism" caption. The guy in the article, the guy who like Dennis Kucinich (though I don't think he even voted) is the first artist. It was the second artist who was accused of being a teabagger, which is an unsupported accusation but at least on the right end of the political spectrum. It was clearly not a Kucinich lover who did that.:P
Here is the quote from the article I read: [artist says "socialist" caption doesn't make sense]
Looks like basically the same article. So... yeah. The original artist thinks the added caption is as dumb as I do, though for slightly different reasons*. Because, as the article you linked says, he wasn't the one who added it to the posters. He didn't have a political agenda, it was Phun With Photoshop for him. Whoever put up the posters clearly had a political agenda, and it was someone who thought Socialism was evil, like the Joker. So... "until a bunch of teabaggers took it and started vandalizing public property with it" should make sense to you by now. It's not "if you disagree with Obama you're a teabagger", it's "if you're a conservative who's scared of Obama and Socialism you're a teabagger" which is an unfair swipe at a group of people but I think it was meant to be.:P
* As far as degree of stupidity goes, Obama=Joker is fine, Obama=Socialism is kinda dumb but whatever, Obama=Joker=Socialism is brain-smashingly stupid. Seriously, use the Obama-as-Che graphic if you want to compare Obama to the Communist boogeyman. That at least makes some fucking sense.
Wait a sec? repelled by a "I found some food light"? Is this a suicide robot?
Well as it says in the previous sentence, this was only after they had learned to not turn on their lights when near food. So they weren't "I found food" lights anymore -- not that they ever really were, they started out flashing randomly but an accumulation of lights suggested that there was a food source. So moving away from a lighted robot isn't necessarily suicidal. On the other hand, just because a robot has its light off when its found food doesn't mean you can't still piggy-back off its food-finding efforts and thus the other strategies may have had some benefit too.
Additionally, the scientists are poking around with the code all the time, the article emphatically mentions it. There is no evolution what-so-ever going on here. Just new options made available by code that is updated by cause of the scientists.
Actually, it is very much "evolution" at least in its Machine Learning form, Genetic Algorithms. The scientists were not deliberately creating specific new behaviors for the robots to choose from, they were allowing the GA to guide the learning process.
The team "evolved" new generations of robots by copying and combining the artificial neural networks of the most successful robots. The scientists also added a few random changes to their code to mimic biological mutations.
Everything described there is a bog-standard part of Genetic Algorithms -- replace "robots" with "solutions" and you have a very basic introductory description of what Genetic Algorithms are. You copy successful robots into the next generation to simulate "survival of the fittest"*, you randomly combine the networks of successful robots to simulate genetic crossover in sexual reproduction, and you make random changes to simulate mutation.
At no point does it suggest that they deliberately added any specific behavior. The only thing it attributes to the scientist's direct actions is "The team programmed small, wheeled robots with the goal of finding food" which just means they made their food-finding point system the basis for the Genetic Algorithm's "Fitness Function". Selecting the particulars of the GA is a deliberate choice, but after that it's all just random changes filtered through the fitness function, just like real-life evolution.
A little common sense helps to cut through the bull-garbage here.
Lol, yeah. What does "common sense" have to do with not knowing what the scientists were actually doing?
Call me when a robot runs over to a black ring emits the "I found food light" duping the rest and then secretly running over to a blue light while the other stooges mill about wondering why some dumb robot said it found food here.
Give it a couple hundred more generations, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that behavior come up. Or other ones that may come as a complete surprise.
* Well and because keeping the current best solutions around helps prevent regression.
Its only *real* value- and the only intended one!- is that it looks like my other meaningless signature squiggles.:)
Ha!
The only real value of my meaningless signature squiggle is that it looks almost, but not entirely, unlike every other meaningless signature squiggle I've ever written.
Seriously. I full expect one day to receive a call from my bank. "Excuse me, Mr. Burke, but the last seven checks we've processed for you have had identical signatures, and we suspect that your checkbook has been stolen."
I think you're right. If the robots had, without reprogramming, efectively turned off their blue lights, then we could talk about "learning".
They reprogrammed themselves between 'generations'.
Or, if the robots could reproduce based on their success on finding food, we could talk about evolution.
Such as choosing which versions of the robot to use in the next 'generation' based on their score in the current generation, and randomly combining parts of those best solutions to create new robots for the next generation, sounds pretty close doesn't it?
The "scientists" changed the code so that the robots didn't blink the light as much when it was around food.
No, they didn't change the code. The Genetic Algorithm they were using changed the code for them. You make it sound like they deliberately made that change to get the behavior they wanted. But they didn't. They just let the GA run and it created the new behavior.
The part about adding random changes, and combining parts of successful robots, is also simply a standard part of Genetic algorithms, and is in fact random and not specifically selected for by the scientists. The scientists would have chosen from a number of mutation/recombination algorithms, but that's the extent of it.
The "scientists" then propagated that ones code to the other robots because it won.
Yes, because that's what you do in a Genetic Algorithm. You take the "best" solutions from one generation, and "propagate" them to the next, in a simulation of actual evolution and "survival of the fittest".
The AI didn't learn anything.
Yes, it did. Genetic Algorithms used to train Neural Networks is a perfectly valid (and successful) form of Machine Learning.
If you mean that an individual instance of the AI didn't re-organize itself to have the new behavior in the middle of a trial run, then no, that didn't happen. On the other hand, many organisms don't change behaviors within a single generation, and it is only over the course of many generations that they "learn" new behaviors for finding food. Which is exactly what happened here.
With the domain of robots, AI, Neural Networks, and Genetic Algorithms, this was learning.
the image seems to have sat their quite happily until a bunch of teabaggers took it and started vandalizing public property with it
Actually, the guy who created the image is a rabid leftist. He dislikes Obama because he's not liberal enough.
Or are you suggesting that a Dennis Kucinich supporter is a "teabagger"?
Dude! The guy who made the original image, and the guy who took that image, removed the Time Magazine parts and slapped the "Socialism" caption on it then hung them up around LA were two different people and the GP was referring to the latter.
You think a Kucinich supporter is going to use the word "Socialism" in a way that equates it to the anarchic socio- and psychopathic evil of The Joker? HUH?!
You must have read TFA somewhat to get the part about him liking Dennis, but seem to have missed every other salient point! Good shootin', Tex!
No, that was just a run-of-the-mill typo, while Bushisms are classically spoken, but you'd say the word essentially the same either way. Bushism would have been something like "Emperorialation".:)
I'd even say it was likely if they continued the experiment for 'no light' to start signaling food, while 'light' signaled poison, and then cycle back.
But it's so simple! Now, a clever robot would flash their light when near the food, because they would know that only a great fool would trust their enemy to guide them to food instead of poison. I am not a great fool, so clearly I should not head toward you when your light is lit. However you would know that I am not a great fool, and would have counted on it, and so clearly I should head toward you when lit...
Ugh. No. The Joker was the instigator of Anarchy, and Anarchy was his goal! It makes no sense to associate someone trying to to take advantage of a situation to create more government power for themselves with Anarchy. Calling either Bush or Obama Anarchists makes no sense. Even if you believe they actually caused 9/11 and the financial crisis, it makes no sense.
But surely there are nifty ways in which you can intelligently program GAs, customize your selection/rejection/scoring process based on the domain of the problem and hence contribute in the final solution.
Well that's what's so fun about them -- as far as the GA is concerned, optimizing for your scoring process is the problem, and any disconnect between that and the actual problem you're trying to solve can lead to... fun... results.
Like the team using GA-NN to program their robotic dragonfly. Deciding to set a modest goal at first, they told it that it had to get 6" off the table. Which it quickly figured out how to do simply by flexing its wings straight downward, lifting its body a sufficient distance off the table. "Good job, but that's not what I wanted" is probably one of the most often uttered phrases.:)
To use the term "learned" for a consequence of evolution to what seems to me to be a Genetic Algorithm seems mis-leading.
"Learned" is a perfectly good description for altering a neural network to have the "learned" behavior regardless of the method. GA-guided-Neural-Networks means you're going to be using terminology from both areas, but that's just one method of training a network and isn't fundamentally different from the many other methods that are all called "learning". But you wouldn't say about those other methods that they "evolved", while about GA-NN you could say both.
Isn't this to be expected?
It's expected that the GA will find good solutions. Part of what makes them so cool is that the exact nature of that solution isn't always expected. Who was to say whether the machines would learn to turn off the light near food, or to turn on the light when they know they're not near food to lead other robots on a wild goose chase? Or any other local maximum.
Regardless, [the artist who made the original Obama Joker image] Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama "Hope" artist about "socialism" being the wrong caption for the Joker image. "It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," he said. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really... immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?""
Even more so, combining the accusation of Socialism with a depiction of Obama as the Joker makes no fucking sense. The Joker was about chaos and anarchy which is so far away from Socialism that the juxtaposition just strikes me as ludicrous. All it does is make the one who put the poster together look like an ignoramus. I can see the thought train-wreck now: "Lessee... Socialism is evil, and the Joker is evil, so the Joker equals Socialism!" Yeah, I doubt someone that bright even knows what they're accusing the president of. Other than that they're trying to tie him with "evil".
So take a clever image which the artist says wasn't intended as a political message (even though he criticizes Obama), add some moronic twat who thinks it's the perfect political message, and you get something that makes your average political cartoon look intelligent. It'd be like taking those stupid Bushies-In-Drag images, slapping haphazard labels on them like "Immigration Reform" or "Emperialism" and acting like you're a political genius.
It was a neat trick when the trick was invented in 1836, but it's pretty mundane now.
Oh lord, you're so clever. That has nothing to do with the situation, unless you think the students clothes are a Farady Cage. Somehow I rather doubt that they are completely enclosed in conductive mesh.
Reality check: It's a pocket with a liner that blocks radiation in one direction. You can't stop radiation from going "inside" their close without also hindering its transmission to everything behind them.
Or in other words: the neat trick is getting radiation to understand "inside" vs "outside" without a Faraday Cage.
So the water, which is supposed to be the energy source for the turbine, slows the turbine down? That makes no sense whatsoever.
It does if you assume a transformer fault resulting in a short.
The back EMF opposes the EMF generated by the turbine, and wants it to spin in the opposite direction -- the same thing happens in an electric motor, which is why motors like your AC unit draw the most current (and makes your lights dim/circuit breaker flip) the instant it turns on and the back EMF is zero. In a normally operating system, the back EMF is miniscule compared to that created by the generator. If a transformer problem dumped a much larger current opposing the generator, then the water would in fact be resisting that motion. Remove the water, and the turbine will act like an electric motor and will spin in the opposite direction as normal.
This is a terrible thing for our society, and thus I'm going to have to plant DNA evidence to frame you for a horrible murder so your theory of Orwellian law enforcement will be discredited.
Back on topic, if you found some way of giving addicts cocaine or amphetamine blindly, I'm not sure they could even discern them better than wine experts distinguish wines (poorly) or people who claim to distinguish M&M colours (not at all).
You probably could, if you were familiar with how long the effects of those two drugs last. When your hyped-up state went away and you crashed if you didn't get a 'bump' in a few hours, versus lasting for 24 hours or more, the difference would be pretty clear.
Other than that, yes, the effects of the two stimulants are very similar.
What a drug "makes you do" varies greatly over time and locations. One of the original arguments for banning marijuana in the US was that it made its Mexican immigrant users so violent - and it's not impossible that it did, at the time.
To an extent, sure, but no it doesn't fundamentally alter what the drug does. A rapid heartbeat being interpreted in different ways depending on what a rapid heartbeat means in the context makes sense. THC making someone violent makes no sense in any context. It's just not something the drug does. It's like saying that it's "not impossible" that in certain contexts crack soaked in formaldehyde makes you smart. No, it doesn't.
Back when they were saying Marijuanna made minorities violent -- blacks were targeted at least as much as Mexicans, particularly in the New England region -- nobody knew what the hell marijuanna was. It was a made-up propaganda word for the grass that everyone was smoking. But because nobody had heard of "Marijuana" before, "the black people smoke up on the Marijuana and run out to rape and kill white women" seemed plausible. If they'd known that the paper was talking about weed, they never would have believed it.
So... "not impossible"? I guess. Remotely likely? Supported by any evidence? No.
Actually a particular instance of the traveling salesman problem, involving just seven cities, was solved.
Yes, but that's extremely impressive for a brand new method of computation. Most of the time, it's like "we've demonstrated a NAND operation so we're Turing complete!" or rarely "We have a full adder!" This was actual problem solving for a not-completely-trivial algorithm, which was pretty cool.
Of course it didn't "solve the traveling salesman problem" in a general sense -- that would be a feat well, well beyond demonstrating a new method of computation, it would revolutionize mathematics and algorithms. So yeah, I think it was obvious that "solved the traveling salesman problem for seven cities" meant "an instance of...":)
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "works with existing cars and existing refueling stations" is confusing you hippes?
The part where you act like this seawater-into-fuel tech is fully developed and deployed instead of just a Navy experiment, or like the "existing" auto fleet isn't already changing.
There's only recently been an announcement of a standard plug for electric cars.
And there was only just an announcement that the Navy is experimenting with creating jet fuel from seawater. But you're still arguing that EVs are in the future and using the fleet of today to argue for continuing to use fuels. That doesn't make sense.
Tell you what, you root for seawater-into-fuel processing to grow enough to supply all the hydrocarbon needs of our fleet and I'll root for our fleet to switch to electric and we'll see who wins. Hey maybe we'll get the best of both worlds, and most cars will be electric, and those that aren't will be able to use carbon-neutral artificial gasoline.
on top of a creaking already over-strained electrical grid.
Lol, right. So we don't have the electrical infrastructure for electric vehicles, but we do have it for electrically-generated-liquid-fuel, even though that is going to take a lot more electricity since the conversion of that fuel source into kinetic energy is so much less efficient than an electric motor. That makes tons of sense.
Any thought beyond "ZOMG scary things make me scared!" is Democratic talking points. Wow. Never have I seen such a slam against Republican ways of thinking before, and I don't think you even intended it. I mean I've often thought that using scare words to make people turn off their brains was a common though not uniquely Republican tactic. But I've never had anyone say it in such an absolute and partisan way before. /applause
LOL. I don't think you have been paying attention, or have any idea what socialism even is. Most socialist states have been quite stable for the last sixty years. I'm sure you're thinking of the National Socialist Party, but even then you'd have to be pretty retarded to think Nazi Germany was anarchic.
True enough. But then, neither does alcohol. People are capable of interpreting their internal cues pretty far out.
No, you don't seem to understand, I mean it's not something the drug does. Alcohol does make some people violent who weren't already. THC doesn't. Essentially nobody becomes violent after taking it any more than they do after taking Valium. You can't just "interpret" your way out of the fundamental pharmacological effect of a drug.
I've read some of the things that local authorities near the mexican border, prison wardens etc. wrote. It may have become propaganda later, but at the time, they really believed it themselves.
Yeah professionals also believed that the WWI Army intelligence test proved that the Irish and Italians were inherently less intelligent. But because some professionals from the 1920s really believed that "Indian Hemp" made Mexicans violent, that's supposed to support the idea that drugs can have essentially arbitrary effects on people, and that this effect is largely determined by culture. No, it doesn't work that way.
What does work that way is racism, cultural ignorance, and selection bias. Mexicans in prison or caught by border patrol are believed to be violent, and this is blamed on a combination of the drug and them being dirty violent Mexicans, ignoring that you've already picked the subset of them that are likely to be violent. There was a lot of "science" of this nature back then.
This is a classic mistake people do when observing drug use in different cultures, concluding that there must be something different with the drug. It's probably what has given rise to the myths about different effects from tequila, vodka, absinthe, etc.
Except that difference doesn't even exist culturally. When you actually look at it, Mexicans doing tequila shots don't actually respond differently than Russians doing Vodka shots. They all show the same distribution of individual reactions. Those are just cultural stereotypes and biases with little basis in reality, and they have retro-actively informed myths involving alcohol.
The only actual differences in how people of different cultures react to alcohol is actually genetic, and involves genes for alcohol processing and genes for alcoholism. This is why Native Americans are actually more susceptible to alcohol, because they lack certain genes that Old Worlders do. However even then it doesn't radically change the kinds of effect alcohol has, it only changes the degree. And the only impact culture has is in how those alcohol genes were/weren't selected for.
THC will never affect someone like alcohol, or like PCP, or like Meth, or LSD, and the same is true for all other comparisons between those drugs. That's not how drugs work.
They did not reprogram themselves. The team "evolved" them. Note the quotation marks used by the author of the article. They picked the most successful robots by hand, manually reprogrammed them and modified the code to mimic genetic mutations.
Yes they used quotes because GA isn't literal "evolution". It's an algorithm for searching solution spaces inspired by and patterned after evolution. The description they gave in TFA is a bog-standard and perfect description of Genetic Algorithms, and combined with saying "evolved" makes it clear what they're talking about. If you're familiar with AI research, it's obvious this is what they used. Let me break it down for you.
First, the only thing TFA says they programmed by hand was "the goal", which is their scoring system and the "goal" is to get the highest score possible. They don't need to "pick the most successful robots by hand", because they have created a quantitative measure of "best" -- this is called the "fitness function" in GAs, and is essentially the only place where the programmer influences the outcome.
Second, "random changes to their code to mimic biological mutations" should be a huge clue that GAs are what they are using. The whole point of GAs is to mimic biological evolution, and mutations are an important part of that. If they were actually programming them by hand, then random bit flips would be detrimental to getting their desired result. In GAs, it's an essential step of the process.
Third, copying and combining the solutions of the best robots to create the next "generation" is also a standard function of GAs, and it's designed to mimic genetic crossover in sexual reproduction, and like in sexual reproduction is done randomly. It's very very hard to manually take chunks of a Neural Network, slap them together, and get something that does what you want. Outside of the simplest of networks, NN training is always done algorithmically and never by hand, because it's simply too hard to take a complex network and say "Okay I'll connect these two neurons together, change the weighting for this connection to 0.75, and that'll make the robot turn in circles and beep!" It doesn't work that way. So this terminology is again a dead giveaway that they're using GAs.
So let me describe how it works. They have N many robots, and they start with some random neural network. This is the initial "population", and the bits that define their NNs are their "DNA". They play the game, and each robot scores a certain number of points. The top W winners are chosen to be kept for the next generation. The remaining (N-W) robots will consist of the "offspring" -- random crossovers of the DNA bit patterns -- of the top W. Random bits will be flipped to simulate mutations. Then this new generation plays the game, and the process repeats.
There are lots of variations in the specifics of the algorithm that are possible. You can change the rate of mutation, and the sizes of the bit slices you use for doing crossover. Often times you'll copy the very best solution to the new generation without any mutations to avoid regression in the likely case where all the mutations/crossovers in the new generation are detrimental. But in any case, the key is that just like in real evolution, actual changes are random, but which are kept is based on their "fitness". This naturally and effectively focuses down on a solution. It's so effective, that it would have been crazy for these scientists to actually try to duplicate it by hand.
So the whole point of TFA was that the robots were self-programming and that the behaviors described emerged from that self-programming. If the scientists had actually programmed them manually, for one they wouldn't have used neural networks they'd have used a programming language, for two it would be really pathetic for it to take 100s of attempts to get the robot to not blink when near food, since that's two lines of C. But they obviously did use GAs, which is why having "deceptive" behavior emerge naturally from the GAs helps give us insight into biological communication.
You are right in your observations, but this robot isn't then an AI but an automaton.
You're using the layman sci-fi fan's definition of "AI". From a Computer Science standpoint, this was definitely AI. Your definition of AI doesn't exist. Everything we call an AI is an automaton, but we don't get upset over the fact. We don't try to draw a line between "automatic" behavior and intelligence. Is a cockroach intelligent, or is it just an automaton running a program? Philosophers can't even define "intelligence", much less scientists. So the answer, as far as AI researchers go, is who cares, it demonstrates complex behaviors, we want our AIs to as well, and we're doing a good job of accomplishing that. It's the practical effect that defines AI, not a philosophical aversion to "automatons".
Neural networks seem cool until you realize they are nothing more than glorified automatons. Show me a NN that can self-organize in a generic way and in real time, of course.
There are algorithms for reorganizing the network in real time. I'm sure they won't fit your definition of "generic", which sounds like some kind of "the NN can reason about arbitrary problems and solve" but really we don't have that anywhere. The AIs that come closest to passing the Turing Test can't do anything like that. In many ways they are more automatons than these robots, but again, who cares?
Genetic algorithms make the NN solve a problem. Nothing they couldn't do if they had been applied to any other kind of logic like digital circuits or programming languages. Genetic Algorithms are the heroes here. NNs suck.
It's the flexibility of NNs that make them so powerful. That's why they're so often chosen for this kind of work -- it certainly isn't an accident. An NN is very good at implementing generalized "strategies" for categorization and behavior. You could theoretically get the same behaviors discussed in the article by applying GAs to digital circuits or programming languages, but the search space would be much, much larger and it would take many, many more generations, and there would be much more regression, and the result would likely be much more specific and intolerant of changes in inputs. NNs are very amenable to GAs exactly because they do a good job of allowing the GA to narrow down on the solution in the solution space, while a single flipped bit in a logic circuit/assembly program will often result in wildly different behavior -- it can in NNs too, but they are much more tolerant of changes.
I really don't think you appreciate the power of neural networks.
This "AI" is closer to a protein that "learns" to be harder to eat than to any kind of intelligence.
Or a cockroach that "learns" to avoid the light because throughout the generations, cockroaches that instinctually responded to light by running away survived and the ones that didn't, didn't. The roach doesn't "learn" to avoid light, it happened via evolution. Is a roach "any kind of intelligence", any more than a protein? Who cares? They both can solve problems, and do so in a more general way than the majority of our CS algorithms. It's an AI.
That's kinda a stretch if that's really supposed to be the reference, pretty oblique, don't you think? I mean, I get it, "Obama is burning money" makes some sense, but the actual scene was emphasizing that The Joker didn't care about control and power outside of his ability to create chaos and discord amongst supposedly civilized people. So matching that image with "Socialism", which in it's "evil" form is all about controlling people in the name of social justice, just sounds retarded. It's like having a "BusHitler" poster where he has a little mustache, okay, fine, Bush = teh evil empire... but instead of a Swastika on his sleeve, it's an Anarchy symbol! Yeah! Because, you know, just like Hitler, Bush was all about Anarchy... and... um...
I'm just saying, at least be coherent.
No, I didn't read TFA. I read other articles on the subject. I was not aware that there were to different people involved here (the artist and the hanger(s)).
I'm not sure if you've missed the point again. There were two "artists". One made the fake Time Magazine cover which had Obama's picture on it, only as the Joker. The second, the one who made the posters, removed the Time Magazine parts and added the "Socialism" caption. The guy in the article, the guy who like Dennis Kucinich (though I don't think he even voted) is the first artist. It was the second artist who was accused of being a teabagger, which is an unsupported accusation but at least on the right end of the political spectrum. It was clearly not a Kucinich lover who did that. :P
Here is the quote from the article I read: [artist says "socialist" caption doesn't make sense]
Looks like basically the same article. So... yeah. The original artist thinks the added caption is as dumb as I do, though for slightly different reasons*. Because, as the article you linked says, he wasn't the one who added it to the posters. He didn't have a political agenda, it was Phun With Photoshop for him. Whoever put up the posters clearly had a political agenda, and it was someone who thought Socialism was evil, like the Joker. So... "until a bunch of teabaggers took it and started vandalizing public property with it" should make sense to you by now. It's not "if you disagree with Obama you're a teabagger", it's "if you're a conservative who's scared of Obama and Socialism you're a teabagger" which is an unfair swipe at a group of people but I think it was meant to be. :P
* As far as degree of stupidity goes, Obama=Joker is fine, Obama=Socialism is kinda dumb but whatever, Obama=Joker=Socialism is brain-smashingly stupid. Seriously, use the Obama-as-Che graphic if you want to compare Obama to the Communist boogeyman. That at least makes some fucking sense.
Wait a sec? repelled by a "I found some food light"? Is this a suicide robot?
Well as it says in the previous sentence, this was only after they had learned to not turn on their lights when near food. So they weren't "I found food" lights anymore -- not that they ever really were, they started out flashing randomly but an accumulation of lights suggested that there was a food source. So moving away from a lighted robot isn't necessarily suicidal. On the other hand, just because a robot has its light off when its found food doesn't mean you can't still piggy-back off its food-finding efforts and thus the other strategies may have had some benefit too.
Additionally, the scientists are poking around with the code all the time, the article emphatically mentions it. There is no evolution what-so-ever going on here. Just new options made available by code that is updated by cause of the scientists.
Actually, it is very much "evolution" at least in its Machine Learning form, Genetic Algorithms. The scientists were not deliberately creating specific new behaviors for the robots to choose from, they were allowing the GA to guide the learning process.
Everything described there is a bog-standard part of Genetic Algorithms -- replace "robots" with "solutions" and you have a very basic introductory description of what Genetic Algorithms are. You copy successful robots into the next generation to simulate "survival of the fittest"*, you randomly combine the networks of successful robots to simulate genetic crossover in sexual reproduction, and you make random changes to simulate mutation.
At no point does it suggest that they deliberately added any specific behavior. The only thing it attributes to the scientist's direct actions is "The team programmed small, wheeled robots with the goal of finding food" which just means they made their food-finding point system the basis for the Genetic Algorithm's "Fitness Function". Selecting the particulars of the GA is a deliberate choice, but after that it's all just random changes filtered through the fitness function, just like real-life evolution.
A little common sense helps to cut through the bull-garbage here.
Lol, yeah. What does "common sense" have to do with not knowing what the scientists were actually doing?
Call me when a robot runs over to a black ring emits the "I found food light" duping the rest and then secretly running over to a blue light while the other stooges mill about wondering why some dumb robot said it found food here.
Give it a couple hundred more generations, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that behavior come up. Or other ones that may come as a complete surprise.
* Well and because keeping the current best solutions around helps prevent regression.
Its only *real* value- and the only intended one!- is that it looks like my other meaningless signature squiggles. :)
Ha!
The only real value of my meaningless signature squiggle is that it looks almost, but not entirely, unlike every other meaningless signature squiggle I've ever written.
Seriously. I full expect one day to receive a call from my bank. "Excuse me, Mr. Burke, but the last seven checks we've processed for you have had identical signatures, and we suspect that your checkbook has been stolen."
I think you're right. If the robots had, without reprogramming, efectively turned off their blue lights, then we could talk about "learning".
They reprogrammed themselves between 'generations'.
Or, if the robots could reproduce based on their success on finding food, we could talk about evolution.
Such as choosing which versions of the robot to use in the next 'generation' based on their score in the current generation, and randomly combining parts of those best solutions to create new robots for the next generation, sounds pretty close doesn't it?
The "scientists" changed the code so that the robots didn't blink the light as much when it was around food.
No, they didn't change the code. The Genetic Algorithm they were using changed the code for them. You make it sound like they deliberately made that change to get the behavior they wanted. But they didn't. They just let the GA run and it created the new behavior.
The part about adding random changes, and combining parts of successful robots, is also simply a standard part of Genetic algorithms, and is in fact random and not specifically selected for by the scientists. The scientists would have chosen from a number of mutation/recombination algorithms, but that's the extent of it.
The "scientists" then propagated that ones code to the other robots because it won.
Yes, because that's what you do in a Genetic Algorithm. You take the "best" solutions from one generation, and "propagate" them to the next, in a simulation of actual evolution and "survival of the fittest".
The AI didn't learn anything.
Yes, it did. Genetic Algorithms used to train Neural Networks is a perfectly valid (and successful) form of Machine Learning.
If you mean that an individual instance of the AI didn't re-organize itself to have the new behavior in the middle of a trial run, then no, that didn't happen. On the other hand, many organisms don't change behaviors within a single generation, and it is only over the course of many generations that they "learn" new behaviors for finding food. Which is exactly what happened here.
With the domain of robots, AI, Neural Networks, and Genetic Algorithms, this was learning.
Actually, the guy who created the image is a rabid leftist. He dislikes Obama because he's not liberal enough.
Or are you suggesting that a Dennis Kucinich supporter is a "teabagger"?
Dude! The guy who made the original image, and the guy who took that image, removed the Time Magazine parts and slapped the "Socialism" caption on it then hung them up around LA were two different people and the GP was referring to the latter.
You think a Kucinich supporter is going to use the word "Socialism" in a way that equates it to the anarchic socio- and psychopathic evil of The Joker? HUH?!
You must have read TFA somewhat to get the part about him liking Dennis, but seem to have missed every other salient point! Good shootin', Tex!
No, that was just a run-of-the-mill typo, while Bushisms are classically spoken, but you'd say the word essentially the same either way. Bushism would have been something like "Emperorialation". :)
I'd even say it was likely if they continued the experiment for 'no light' to start signaling food, while 'light' signaled poison, and then cycle back.
But it's so simple! Now, a clever robot would flash their light when near the food, because they would know that only a great fool would trust their enemy to guide them to food instead of poison. I am not a great fool, so clearly I should not head toward you when your light is lit. However you would know that I am not a great fool, and would have counted on it, and so clearly I should head toward you when lit...
Well yeah that was exactly my point. Obviously they have no idea what Socialism means, outside of being some kind of synonym for evil to them.
Ugh. No. The Joker was the instigator of Anarchy, and Anarchy was his goal! It makes no sense to associate someone trying to to take advantage of a situation to create more government power for themselves with Anarchy. Calling either Bush or Obama Anarchists makes no sense. Even if you believe they actually caused 9/11 and the financial crisis, it makes no sense.
But surely there are nifty ways in which you can intelligently program GAs, customize your selection/rejection/scoring process based on the domain of the problem and hence contribute in the final solution.
Well that's what's so fun about them -- as far as the GA is concerned, optimizing for your scoring process is the problem, and any disconnect between that and the actual problem you're trying to solve can lead to... fun... results.
Like the team using GA-NN to program their robotic dragonfly. Deciding to set a modest goal at first, they told it that it had to get 6" off the table. Which it quickly figured out how to do simply by flexing its wings straight downward, lifting its body a sufficient distance off the table. "Good job, but that's not what I wanted" is probably one of the most often uttered phrases. :)
To use the term "learned" for a consequence of evolution to what seems to me to be a Genetic Algorithm seems mis-leading.
"Learned" is a perfectly good description for altering a neural network to have the "learned" behavior regardless of the method. GA-guided-Neural-Networks means you're going to be using terminology from both areas, but that's just one method of training a network and isn't fundamentally different from the many other methods that are all called "learning". But you wouldn't say about those other methods that they "evolved", while about GA-NN you could say both.
Isn't this to be expected?
It's expected that the GA will find good solutions. Part of what makes them so cool is that the exact nature of that solution isn't always expected. Who was to say whether the machines would learn to turn off the light near food, or to turn on the light when they know they're not near food to lead other robots on a wild goose chase? Or any other local maximum.
From TFA:
Even more so, combining the accusation of Socialism with a depiction of Obama as the Joker makes no fucking sense. The Joker was about chaos and anarchy which is so far away from Socialism that the juxtaposition just strikes me as ludicrous. All it does is make the one who put the poster together look like an ignoramus. I can see the thought train-wreck now: "Lessee... Socialism is evil, and the Joker is evil, so the Joker equals Socialism!" Yeah, I doubt someone that bright even knows what they're accusing the president of. Other than that they're trying to tie him with "evil".
So take a clever image which the artist says wasn't intended as a political message (even though he criticizes Obama), add some moronic twat who thinks it's the perfect political message, and you get something that makes your average political cartoon look intelligent. It'd be like taking those stupid Bushies-In-Drag images, slapping haphazard labels on them like "Immigration Reform" or "Emperialism" and acting like you're a political genius.
It was a neat trick when the trick was invented in 1836, but it's pretty mundane now.
Oh lord, you're so clever. That has nothing to do with the situation, unless you think the students clothes are a Farady Cage. Somehow I rather doubt that they are completely enclosed in conductive mesh.
Reality check: It's a pocket with a liner that blocks radiation in one direction. You can't stop radiation from going "inside" their close without also hindering its transmission to everything behind them.
Or in other words: the neat trick is getting radiation to understand "inside" vs "outside" without a Faraday Cage.
So the water, which is supposed to be the energy source for the turbine, slows the turbine down? That makes no sense whatsoever.
It does if you assume a transformer fault resulting in a short.
The back EMF opposes the EMF generated by the turbine, and wants it to spin in the opposite direction -- the same thing happens in an electric motor, which is why motors like your AC unit draw the most current (and makes your lights dim/circuit breaker flip) the instant it turns on and the back EMF is zero. In a normally operating system, the back EMF is miniscule compared to that created by the generator. If a transformer problem dumped a much larger current opposing the generator, then the water would in fact be resisting that motion. Remove the water, and the turbine will act like an electric motor and will spin in the opposite direction as normal.
This is a terrible thing for our society, and thus I'm going to have to plant DNA evidence to frame you for a horrible murder so your theory of Orwellian law enforcement will be discredited.
Back on topic, if you found some way of giving addicts cocaine or amphetamine blindly, I'm not sure they could even discern them better than wine experts distinguish wines (poorly) or people who claim to distinguish M&M colours (not at all).
You probably could, if you were familiar with how long the effects of those two drugs last. When your hyped-up state went away and you crashed if you didn't get a 'bump' in a few hours, versus lasting for 24 hours or more, the difference would be pretty clear.
Other than that, yes, the effects of the two stimulants are very similar.
What a drug "makes you do" varies greatly over time and locations. One of the original arguments for banning marijuana in the US was that it made its Mexican immigrant users so violent - and it's not impossible that it did, at the time.
To an extent, sure, but no it doesn't fundamentally alter what the drug does. A rapid heartbeat being interpreted in different ways depending on what a rapid heartbeat means in the context makes sense. THC making someone violent makes no sense in any context. It's just not something the drug does. It's like saying that it's "not impossible" that in certain contexts crack soaked in formaldehyde makes you smart. No, it doesn't.
Back when they were saying Marijuanna made minorities violent -- blacks were targeted at least as much as Mexicans, particularly in the New England region -- nobody knew what the hell marijuanna was. It was a made-up propaganda word for the grass that everyone was smoking. But because nobody had heard of "Marijuana" before, "the black people smoke up on the Marijuana and run out to rape and kill white women" seemed plausible. If they'd known that the paper was talking about weed, they never would have believed it.
So... "not impossible"? I guess. Remotely likely? Supported by any evidence? No.
Actually a particular instance of the traveling salesman problem, involving just seven cities, was solved.
Yes, but that's extremely impressive for a brand new method of computation. Most of the time, it's like "we've demonstrated a NAND operation so we're Turing complete!" or rarely "We have a full adder!" This was actual problem solving for a not-completely-trivial algorithm, which was pretty cool.
Of course it didn't "solve the traveling salesman problem" in a general sense -- that would be a feat well, well beyond demonstrating a new method of computation, it would revolutionize mathematics and algorithms. So yeah, I think it was obvious that "solved the traveling salesman problem for seven cities" meant "an instance of..." :)