Recently, my long time friend and colleague Ben Goertzel came to Hong Kong to help advise on the AI project I’m working on. He also happened to bring a “Parrot” quadcopter (warning, this link autoplays a youtube video), which is an awesome wifi controlled toy that has quad rotors. Not much different to a radio-controlled helicopter except it’s much cheaper and also more stable.

There are some vague plans to do autonomous control of these devices using vision processing and voice recognition. Although the actual hardware used maybe different since quadcopter drones have gone hobbyist and you can build your own from scratch.

I will now leave you with two youtube videos of them in action…

Using the Kinect hacked onto a drone to allow it to build a 3d model of the environment and do it’s own path finding:

Other’s have used motion capture to allow tracking of a ball which is then juggled between two quadcopters with trampolines:

Recently, my long time friend and colleague Ben Goertzel came to Hong Kong to help advise on the AI project I'm working on. He also happened to bring a "Parrot" quadcopter (warning, this link autoplays a youtube video), which is an awesome wifi controlled toy that has quad rotors. Not much different to a radio-controlled helicopter except it's much cheaper and also more stable. There are some vague plans to do autonomous control of these devices using vision processing and voice recognition. Although the actual hardware used maybe different since quadcopter drones have gone hobbyist and you can build your own from scratch. I will now leave you with two youtube videos of them in action... Using the Kinect hacked onto a drone to allow it to build a 3d model of the environment and do it's own path finding: Other's have used motion capture to allow tracking of a ball which is then juggled between two quadcopters with trampolines:

The 2nd International Conference on Advanced Intelligence 2010 has just released it’s call for papers, which you can download here: ICAI2010 Call For Papers.

How is “Advanced Intelligence” different from general AI? The release says:

Typical features of Advanced Intelligence include: (1) Close interaction and coordination between Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, (2) Ideas and applications that push the frontiers of both Artificial Intelligence and Natural Intelligence, (3) Large-scale Distributed Intelligence and Web Intelligence

FWIW, I’m not sure I agree with the name, since “advanced” is a relative term, and the field of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is already fragmented enough without adding additional labels. Having said that, I’ve been invited to be an assistant co-chair, so I cordially invite you to submit interesting papers since then they’ll be a greater chance of me getting interesting papers to review

The 2nd International Conference on Advanced Intelligence 2010 has just released it's call for papers, which you can download here: ICAI2010 Call For Papers. How is "Advanced Intelligence" different from general AI? The release says: Typical features of Advanced Intelligence include: (1) Close interaction and coordination between Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence, (2) Ideas and applications that push the frontiers of both Artificial Intelligence and Natural Intelligence, (3) Large-scale Distributed Intelligence and Web Intelligence FWIW, I'm not sure I agree with the name, since "advanced" is a relative term, and the field of AGI (artificial general intelligence) is already fragmented enough without adding additional labels. Having said that, I've been invited to be an assistant co-chair, so I cordially invite you to submit interesting papers since then they'll be a greater chance of me getting interesting papers to review ;-)

• OpenCog is getting get a bit of comment on twitter, which might in part be due to it being linked on Hacker News.
• I’ve started up at Jai Thai Kickboxing, which is just around the corner from where I live so I hope to get 4-5 sessions in a week. After my first session my shins and feet are somewhat bruised, this could indicate that my technique leaves something to be desired. Equally likely however is that my shins just need to harden up!
• I read in the paper that Avatar is the faster movie to reach a billion dollars at the box office. It was very pretty, but it was also only a passable story. I hope that Avatar’s success will show the movie industry that they need to adapt by making cinema an immersive experience so that they are providing people a reason to go to the cinema instead of watching movies at home.
• My life experience keeps expanding and it makes me feel alive. I stand by my assertion that the meaning of life is experience.

OpenCog is getting get a bit of comment on twitter, which might in part be due to it being linked on Hacker News. I've started up at Jai Thai Kickboxing, which is just around the corner from where I live so I hope to get 4-5 sessions in a week. After my first session my shins and feet are somewhat bruised, this could indicate that my technique leaves something to be desired. Equally likely however is that my shins just need to harden up! I read in the paper that Avatar is the faster movie to reach a billion dollars at the box office. It was very pretty, but it was also only a passable story. I hope that Avatar's success will show the movie industry that they need to adapt by making cinema an immersive experience so that they are providing people a reason to go to the cinema instead of watching movies at home. My life experience keeps expanding and it makes me feel alive. I stand by my assertion that the meaning of life is experience.

Kaj Sotala has been making his notes on PLN available on LJ as he reads through the Probabilistic Logic Networks book.

Kaj Sotala has been making his notes on PLN available on LJ as he reads through the Probabilistic Logic Networks book.

As a kid, and even in the first few years of University, I used to have trouble understanding why things needed to be explained in detail. Essays were difficult because I’d take the point I was trying to make and think of it like a logic problem:

This interesting fact and this analysis, thus this is the point.

Except that made for very short essays that were no where near the word limit.

Continue reading →

As a kid, and even in the first few years of University, I used to have trouble understanding why things needed to be explained in detail. Essays were difficult because I'd take the point I was trying to make and think of it like a logic problem: This interesting fact and this analysis, thus this is the point. Except that made for very short essays that were no where near the word limit. Part of that was because I was used to maths, physics, and computer science problems. These fields don't tend to push students to writing supposition about theory, at least not at the University I went to, and it's usually pretty concrete for the level taught to undergraduates. Then midway through my study I switched tracks into Biology and flailed around for a while. They expected you to write more than a paragraph at a time, and form coherent arguments in exams without the benefit of cut-and-paste! The horror. After while I got over my initial shock, and actually got reasonably good at writing (my recent resurgence of posts on this blog is an attempt to practice those skills which are getting rusty from too much code and analysis of experimental results). Even though I managed to get pretty good, I still didn't quite understand. I thought it was a waste of time when I could construct the argument for my 2000 word essay in a paragraph. I got over that though. I saw that one has to also explain their reasoning, because any conclusions about the real world based on science usually contain assumptions. It's important to not only be explicit about these assumptions, but to also explain why these are the assumptions chosen. Even more recently, I've worked on economic attention allocation (ECAN) in OpenCog, which controls the flow of attention within an artificial mind. Why is this necessary? Because the mind's resources are finite - based on the computers available memory and processing ability, and we obviously also have a finite capacity for focussed thought too (well, yes, it's finite because we only have so many neurons, but I'm referring more to the limited number of concepts and relations we can consciously work with at any one time). Much of how the attention allocation works in OpenCog is based on importance diffusion between close concepts, but the concepts also need to be primed with importance in some way. If diffusion was the only process that moved attentional importance, you'd eventually end up with a homogeneous soup where everything was equally important! The way this happens is somewhat complicated in OpenCog, and not immediately relevant to the point, but one thing to note is that external stimulus excites contextually relevant information. What that means is, if OpenCog sees that a cat walked past... then knowledge about cats (they are furry 4 legged felines) and perhaps locomotion/kinematics is stimulated (if the cat keeps walking in that direction it will fall off that balcony and fall due to gravity... okay, so maybe that's more about prediction, but general knowledge about walking would be available in order to be used to make that prediction). By stimulating this knowledge, it's made more important in the systems mind. Beyond the cat example[1] the same goes for reading someone's ideas. If someone just tells you "the sky is green, purple and sparkly" and leaves it at that, you'd probably just think they were taking some particular effective hallucinogenics... especially if you were inside, at a conference about refrigerators (if it was a metereological conference, you might be willing to concede that they were right, because they are an expert in the field and have a reason for believing as such). But if the the refrigerator conference attendee first prefixed their statement with "Y'know, I was just holidaying in Alaska, and I saw the Northern lights, up there... ", then assuming you vaguely knew about auroras changing the colour of the sky, then you'd be able to believe the refrigeration expert. Or at least believe they weren't in the habit of attending refrigeration events under the influence of mind-altering substances. [1] It's okay, the cat didn't actually fall off the balcony.

So I finally got around to setting up an IRC proxy on my server. I do all my OpenCog collaboration via email and IRC, and if I switch off my laptop or go travelling with it, I’ll often miss out on possibly important conversations. I’ve also been wanting to set up automatic uploads of the log to the OpenCog wiki so that others can checked what’s been mention too.

So, enter irssi a console based IRC client which is super configurable and awesome. Of course, because it’s console based and super-configurable, it takes a little bit of learning to understand how to use it properly, but it’s worth it (just like Vim). If you’re on Ubuntu/Debian it’s as easy as:

irssi has a cool plugin called irssi-proxy, which sits in irssi and pretends to be an IRC server. You connect to it with whatever (and however many) IRC client you like, and it’ll route all IRC messages to you… and also messages from any clients connected. So, to the appearance of everyone else, there’s only one ferrouswheel connected 24/7, but locally I might be connecting to and from my proxy with laptop, work computer, phone.

There’s a reasonably nice guide to getting things set up over here, although I skipped the whole ssh tunnel thing, since I’m connecting over a locally secured wifi and it’s not like I’m discussing topics of national security (at least, not yet! ;-P)

So I finally got around to setting up an IRC proxy on my server. I do all my OpenCog collaboration via email and IRC, and if I switch off my laptop or go travelling with it, I'll often miss out on possibly important conversations. I've also been wanting to set up automatic uploads of the log to the OpenCog wiki so that others can checked what's been mention too. So, enter irssi a console based IRC client which is super configurable and awesome. Of course, because it's console based and super-configurable, it takes a little bit of learning to understand how to use it properly, but it's worth it (just like Vim). If you're on Ubuntu/Debian it's as easy as: sudo apt-get install irssi irssi-scripts irssi has a cool plugin called irssi-proxy, which sits in irssi and pretends to be an IRC server. You connect to it with whatever (and however many) IRC client you like, and it'll route all IRC messages to you... and also messages from any clients connected. So, to the appearance of everyone else, there's only one ferrouswheel connected 24/7, but locally I might be connecting to and from my proxy with laptop, work computer, phone. There's a reasonably nice guide to getting things set up over here, although I skipped the whole ssh tunnel thing, since I'm connecting over a locally secured wifi and it's not like I'm discussing topics of national security (at least, not yet! ;-P)

I’m not a particular regular updater with this particular blog (too many things have been demanding my attention lately), but I thought I’d drop a note to say I’ll be off the radar for a week or so…

I’ll be attending Burning man. I’m immensely looking forward to this as this is the first year in several that’s actually been feasible for me to get there from New Zealand. I’ll be with an Australian theme camp called Straya that a friend of mine put me in contact with, and who’ll also be there.

As well as Burning man, I plan to hang out in Washington D.C with Ben to talk about our work on OpenCog. Then I’ll stay in San Francisco for 5-6 weeks (end of Sep till start of Nov) to attend the Singularity Summit followed by the CogDev Workshop (an OpenCog coding jam, details to be finalised, but likely to be just after the Summit).

If you’ll be at any of these events and want to chat, drop me a line

I'm not a particular regular updater with this particular blog (too many things have been demanding my attention lately), but I thought I'd drop a note to say I'll be off the radar for a week or so... I'll be attending Burning man. I'm immensely looking forward to this as this is the first year in several that's actually been feasible for me to get there from New Zealand. I'll be with an Australian theme camp called Straya that a friend of mine put me in contact with, and who'll also be there. As well as Burning man, I plan to hang out in Washington D.C with Ben to talk about our work on OpenCog. Then I'll stay in San Francisco for 5-6 weeks (end of Sep till start of Nov) to attend the Singularity Summit followed by the CogDev Workshop (an OpenCog coding jam, details to be finalised, but likely to be just after the Summit). If you'll be at any of these events and want to chat, drop me a line :)

This is my hypothesis. The mind is not a object but a process, it takes information from the outside world and transforms it into pattern. That pattern is not the mind, it’s just the way the mind sustains itself from moment to moment. That pattern still exists when you die, albeit temporarily until decay sets in, but we aren’t alive because the mind isn’t receiving any new input.

Now that doesn’t mean a consciousness can’t be revived, the pattern is still there, and if the process can be restarted then I suspect the consciousness would continue as if nothing happen. One moment about to die, the next revived. This is essentially what proponents of cryogenics expect to occur.

Did I just contradict myself, by saying that consciousness can be revived from the pattern, even though I claimed the pattern wasn’t the mind? I don’t believe so. The pattern is the painting, the mind is painter. In humans, the painter is the physiological processes that generate the electrical signals shooting through our body and that update the neuronal structure in our brain.

This is my hypothesis. The mind is not a object but a process, it takes information from the outside world and transforms it into pattern. That pattern is not the mind, it's just the way the mind sustains itself from moment to moment. That pattern still exists when you die, albeit temporarily until decay sets in, but we aren't alive because the mind isn't receiving any new input. Now that doesn't mean a consciousness can't be revived, the pattern is still there, and if the process can be restarted then I suspect the consciousness would continue as if nothing happen. One moment about to die, the next revived. This is essentially what proponents of cryogenics expect to occur. Did I just contradict myself, by saying that consciousness can be revived from the pattern, even though I claimed the pattern wasn't the mind? I don't believe so. The pattern is the painting, the mind is painter. In humans, the painter is the physiological processes that generate the electrical signals shooting through our body and that update the neuronal structure in our brain.

SIAI and OpenCog are recruiting people for Google Summer of Code. GSoC is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.

Want to work on AI/language-processing over the Northern Hemisphere summer? Here are some of the ideas for projects proposed. Applications to Google open on the 24th of March.

SIAI and OpenCog are recruiting people for Google Summer of Code. GSoC is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Want to work on AI/language-processing over the Northern Hemisphere summer? Here are some of the ideas for projects proposed. Applications to Google open on the 24th of March.