Posts Tagged ‘artificial intelligence’

Cyc Randomness

Posted: 5 April 2009 in Uncategorized
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The Cyc project has been going on for some 15 years. I first heard of it when I took a class on Artificial Intelligence (surprise!). People in the knowledge engineering community that I have had the chance to talk to seem to have the opinion that the Cyc project is good intentioned, and going about it all wrong. After talking to them a bit longer, I discovered that’s what they think about everyone else in the knowledge engineering community.  (And yes, that is a troll for any KE folks reading this.)

No one agrees on anything, and why should they? Their job is basically assigning concrete forms to meanings floating on the emergent sea of flashing neurons that is human consciousness. Easy, right?

The @cyc_ai bot on Twitter spouts random facts from the Cyc knowledge base. It’s kind of cool. It’s also bat-shit crazy. Here are some gems that I have seen.

DataJunkie: Finished my first OS programming assignment. Not bad. Will have to set up SVN or something so my partner and I are not writing separate code

cyc_ai: @DataJunkie Every barricading a car and taking the occupants hostage. has some barrier as a proper subsituation.

DataJunkie: @cyc_ai What???

Indeed.  So I replied.

ealdent:  @DataJunkie @cyc_ai has only spouted random insanity at me. if it ever becomes self-aware, it will be bat-shit crazy

@cyc_ai was compelled to reply.

cyc_ai:  @ealdent Spouting is a type of movement process.

cyc_ai:  @ealdent Every stream has conducting as a sub-event.

Saturday, I tweeted the following:

ealdent: drinking coffee that smells like wet dog but tastes pretty good. might have to wring my dogs out later and save some money.

cyc_ai: @ealdent A vogue is a type of taste.

Thanks, @cyc_ai!

Rat cyborg

Posted: 14 August 2008 in Uncategorized
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Boffins at the University of Reading have created a robot controlled by a biological “brain” consisting of rat neurons.  They began by taking a culture of neurons specially separated from the rest of the fetal brain tissue.  The neurons are placed across a platter of electrodes that simultaneously allow the brain to control parts of a robot and allow the robot to send signals back to the brain.  In this way, the brain begins to operate the robot, moving it around and receiving feedback (electrical jolts) that tell it when it’s hit something.

According to Kevin Warwick, one of the researchers, “It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains. This one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”  Warwick later speculates that much of the difference between rat and human brains lies in the number of neurons and not the neurons themselves.  Picking on that particular statement, since I think it’s a pretty bold claim, you have to wonder about animals like whales and elephants who have one to two times the number of neurons we do.  If he’s right and it’s the number of neurons that makes the difference, we are literally killing sentient beings.  Of course, to the people who are killing blue whales and elephants, that doesn’t matter one bit.

This technology troubles me a bit.  On the one hand, it’s really cool.  Biological computers!  On the other hand, the potential for harm here is just enormous.  On the other other hand, it may pave the way for humans to place their brains in vats and replace their meat sacks with machinery.  On the other other other hand it may mean advanced combat robots that make iron man look like a sissy.  Or maybe not.  The recent round of research that aims to make animals into cyborgs (and often for military purposes) strikes me as a harbinger of a world where the line between artificial and biological life is blurred beyond recognition.  If a cyborg constructed in such a way can feel…

Second Creepy Life

Posted: 12 March 2008 in Uncategorized
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Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic are working on creating characters for Second Life with the reasoning abilities of a four-year-old. They currently have a character named Eddie that can reason about his own beliefs and make choices based on them. This is interesting progress in AI. Children four and under haven’t learnt to build models of other people’s behavior. So in the example in the article, a child is shown Person A placing a teddy bear in a cabinet. Person A leaves and Person B moves the bear from the cabinet to the refrigerator. Person A comes back in and the child is asked to predict where Person A will look for the bear. Because they don’t have this model yet, they will say the refrigerator. Eddie does this at first, but then learns the correct model with an additional iteration of the process.

The problem here is the venue. Second Life is a den of sexual deviants. If it’s not the furries, it’s child molesters. One disturbing phenomenon is people with child avatars who want to be molested. So, is it really wise to put a simulated child character in this world?

Which CS subfield is your strength?

Posted: 12 March 2008 in Uncategorized
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So I was recently asked (and gave a very bad answer to) a question that has been haunting me ever since.  What is the subfield of computer science where I am the strongest?  First of all, in my undergraduate training, I was never really introduced to these ideas of subfields of CS explicitly.  I knew intuitively there was a difference between people working on databases or on operating systems, programming languages or algorithms, but it wasn’t emphasized as a choice I would ever need to make.  This is perhaps because I went to a relatively weak school in CS for my undergrad.  But now that I’m in a rather strong CS school and pursuing a CS-related masters, the question should probably have entered my mind before now.

So when asked, I floundered about for an idea and spluttered out “algorithms” just because it seemed like it was hard to go wrong there.  Well, I’ll leave the details out of this little memoire, but suffice it to say, I was wrong.  A better answer would have been “none.”  Where does natural language processing / computational linguistics fall in the list of subfields?  Is it its own?  Or is it part artificial intelligence, part algorithms, part whatever?  I’ve seen it lumped with AI more closely in the past, but unfortunately AI escaped me as a possible choice when called upon in this high-stress scenario.  Moreover, I haven’t really compartmentalized techniques as belonging to “AI” or “databases.”  Is it useful to do that?  I guess I do sometimes, but when people ask me to make big picture assessments of things I haven’t thought about much, it takes me a while to process it.

I hate interviews.

NESCAI 2008

Posted: 16 February 2008 in Uncategorized
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This conference looks like it might be fun if you’re a student working on some area of AI/machine learning and going to a university in the Northeastern US. NESCAI is the North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence and will be held at Cornell May 2-4, 2008. The deadline for papers is March 7, 2008, so the date is fast approaching. The full CFP is below the fold.

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Perfect Major?

Posted: 18 November 2007 in Uncategorized
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The intertubes are full of quizzes. Magazines like Cosmo have thrived on them for years. “Are you a good lover?” Websites like Tickle pretty much consist of nothing else (and I haven’t bothered beyond the odd quiz someone sends me). Tons of Facebook apps like Flixster (movies) and Harry Potter rely on them heavily. One of my google alerts is for linguistics and I saw some random 14-year-old dude‘s blog post about his perfect major according to this quiz. My results are below the jump.

So of course everyone with sense knows these quizzes are pretty much random. However, they also collect a vast amount of data. What they don’t collect (usually) is actual information about the people who take their quizzes. Imagine if at the end of a quiz there was a question or two about the actual truth of the thing the quiz is predicting. What kind of lover are you? Well just ask! If the result is similar to the quiz results, you can gauge how well your quiz is classifying people. It may not produce scientifically valid results but it does produce results that are better than nothing. (more…)

:-) x 25

Posted: 18 September 2007 in Uncategorized
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A professor in my department (primarily affiliated with the LTI and the CSD, but also the MLD and HCII) invented the smiley 25 years ago on a bboard here at CMU. The fateful message that spawned the smiley is reproduced below [source]:

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             :-)
From: Scott E  Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>
 
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
        
:-)
        
Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use
        
:-(

In honor of the 25th birthday of the smiley, the CS department is holding a TG where Scott will inaugurate an annual Smiley Prize. I’m probably not going to be able to make that, though, on account of other engagements.

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