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Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience; More Stereotypes Shattered
Topic Started: 29 Dec 2013, 04:59 PM (1,932 Views)
Black Panther
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Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

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PALO ALTO, Calif. — Computers have entered the age when they are able to learn from their own mistakes, a development that is about to turn the digital world on its head.

The first commercial version of the new kind of computer chip is scheduled to be released in 2014. Not only can it automate tasks that now require painstaking programming — for example, moving a robot’s arm smoothly and efficiently — but it can also sidestep and even tolerate errors, potentially making the term “computer crash” obsolete.

The new computing approach, already in use by some large technology companies, is based on the biological nervous system, specifically on how neurons react to stimuli and connect with other neurons to interpret information. It allows computers to absorb new information while carrying out a task, and adjust what they do based on the changing signals.

In coming years, the approach will make possible a new generation of artificial intelligence systems that will perform some functions that humans do with ease: see, speak, listen, navigate, manipulate and control. That can hold enormous consequences for tasks like facial and speech recognition, navigation and planning, which are still in elementary stages and rely heavily on human programming.

Designers say the computing style can clear the way for robots that can safely walk and drive in the physical world, though a thinking or conscious computer, a staple of science fiction, is still far off on the digital horizon.

“We’re moving from engineering computing systems to something that has many of the characteristics of biological computing,” said Larry Smarr, an astrophysicist who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, one of many research centers devoted to developing these new kinds of computer circuits.

Conventional computers are limited by what they have been programmed to do. Computer vision systems, for example, only “recognize” objects that can be identified by the statistics-oriented algorithms programmed into them. An algorithm is like a recipe, a set of step-by-step instructions to perform a calculation.

But last year, Google researchers were able to get a machine-learning algorithm, known as a neural network, to perform an identification task without supervision. The network scanned a database of 10 million images, and in doing so trained itself to recognize cats.

In June, the company said it had used those neural network techniques to develop a new search service to help customers find specific photos more accurately.

The new approach, used in both hardware and software, is being driven by the explosion of scientific knowledge about the brain. Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist who leads Stanford’s Brains in Silicon research program, said that is also its limitation, as scientists are far from fully understanding how brains function.

“We have no clue,” he said. “I’m an engineer, and I build things. There are these highfalutin theories, but give me one that will let me build something.”

Until now, the design of computers was dictated by ideas originated by the mathematician John von Neumann about 65 years ago. Microprocessors perform operations at lightning speed, following instructions programmed using long strings of 1s and 0s. They generally store that information separately in what is known, colloquially, as memory, either in the processor itself, in adjacent storage chips or in higher capacity magnetic disk drives.

The data — for instance, temperatures for a climate model or letters for word processing — are shuttled in and out of the processor’s short-term memory while the computer carries out the programmed action. The result is then moved to its main memory.

The new processors consist of electronic components that can be connected by wires that mimic biological synapses. Because they are based on large groups of neuron-like elements, they are known as neuromorphic processors, a term credited to the California Institute of Technology physicist Carver Mead, who pioneered the concept in the late 1980s.

They are not “programmed.” Rather the connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values and to “spike.” That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, in essence programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.

“Instead of bringing data to computation as we do today, we can now bring computation to data,” said Dharmendra Modha, an I.B.M. computer scientist who leads the company’s cognitive computing research effort. “Sensors become the computer, and it opens up a new way to use computer chips that can be everywhere.”

The new computers, which are still based on silicon chips, will not replace today’s computers, but will augment them, at least for now. Many computer designers see them as coprocessors, meaning they can work in tandem with other circuits that can be embedded in smartphones and in the giant centralized computers that make up the cloud. Modern computers already consist of a variety of coprocessors that perform specialized tasks, like producing graphics on your cellphone and converting visual, audio and other data for your laptop.

One great advantage of the new approach is its ability to tolerate glitches. Traditional computers are precise, but they cannot work around the failure of even a single transistor. With the biological designs, the algorithms are ever changing, allowing the system to continuously adapt and work around failures to complete tasks.

Traditional computers are also remarkably energy inefficient, especially when compared to actual brains, which the new neurons are built to mimic.

I.B.M. announced last year that it had built a supercomputer simulation of the brain that encompassed roughly 10 billion neurons — more than 10 percent of a human brain. It ran about 1,500 times more slowly than an actual brain. Further, it required several megawatts of power, compared with just 20 watts of power used by the biological brain.

Running the program, known as Compass, which attempts to simulate a brain, at the speed of a human brain would require a flow of electricity in a conventional computer that is equivalent to what is needed to power both San Francisco and New York, Dr. Modha said.

I.B.M. and Qualcomm, as well as the Stanford research team, have already designed neuromorphic processors, and Qualcomm has said that it is coming out in 2014 with a commercial version, which is expected to be used largely for further development. Moreover, many universities are now focused on this new style of computing. This fall the National Science Foundation financed the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, a new research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with Harvard and Cornell.

The largest class on campus this fall at Stanford was a graduate level machine-learning course covering both statistical and biological approaches, taught by the computer scientist Andrew Ng. More than 760 students enrolled. “That reflects the zeitgeist,” said Terry Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, who pioneered early biologically inspired algorithms. “Everyone knows there is something big happening, and they’re trying find out what it is.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/science/brainlike-computers-learning-from-experience.html?_r=0
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Count du Monet
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What a load of nonsense!
The next trick of our glorious banks will be to charge us a fee for using net bank!!!
You are no longer customer, you are property!!!

Don't be SAUCY with me Bernaisse
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Kulganis
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Careful there Count, you could end up like these guys...

"A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere."

The New York Times, January 13, 1920.

"To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth—all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances."

Lee De Forest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, in 1957 De Forest Says Space Travel Is Impossible, Lewiston Morning Tribune via Associated Press, February 25, 1957

"What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?"

The Quarterly Review, March, 1825.

"That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced."

Scientific American, January 2, 1909.

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share."

Steve Ballmer, USA Today, April 30, 2007.

"With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself."

Businessweek, August 2, 1968.

"No "scientific bad boy" ever will be able to blow up the world by releasing atomic energy."

Robert Millikan, American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, attributed without citation in "They are saying", Popular Science 116, February 1930, p. 66.
"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear." - Gene Roddenberry

"Balloon animals are a great way to teach children that the things they love dearly, may spontaneously explode" -- Lee Camp
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Count du Monet
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Kulganis
29 Dec 2013, 08:33 PM
Careful there Count, you could end up like these guys...
The problem is all programing is based on a variety of mathematics. The binary code is over 300 years old. There is no mathematics that allows for artificial intelligence, hence no program. A computer has no being.
The next trick of our glorious banks will be to charge us a fee for using net bank!!!
You are no longer customer, you are property!!!

Don't be SAUCY with me Bernaisse
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Kulganis
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Mathematics is the language of nature, if there is no mathematics that could allow for artificial intelligence, then there is no mathematics that allow for actual intelligence, thus the human brain would not function.

Being listerally means exists, a computer certainly exists, so I take it that you mean soul, how do you know that you have a soul and you're not just a bag of mostly water?
Edited by Kulganis, 29 Dec 2013, 08:52 PM.
"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear." - Gene Roddenberry

"Balloon animals are a great way to teach children that the things they love dearly, may spontaneously explode" -- Lee Camp
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joey jojo shabadoo
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Count du Monet
29 Dec 2013, 08:39 PM
The problem is all programing is based on a variety of mathematics. The binary code is over 300 years old. There is no mathematics that allows for artificial intelligence, hence no program. A computer has no being.
are you implying binary code is some how a limitation to artificial integlligence?
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Count du Monet
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Computers run on mathematics. We might assume that biological brains have a pure mathematical basis, but we don't that. The assumption is the cosmos is purely machine, but don't know that.

Being means "presence", more specifically, a "knowing" presence.

We certainly have something we describe as a "soul", whether it is metaphysical is another question.

For Max Stirner an atheist defined as spiritual all those things that are less obviously material. If we look for food, that might be a material aim. But creating a abstract painting might be defined as a spiritual activity, because the ambition is not so immediately material.

Stirner defined much manifestation as a "dynamic", something created by opposites that itself may not be reducible. Nietzsche came to similar conclusions even though it seems he did not study Stirner.

We go back to Hume for warnings about assuming principles in relation to appearance.

Heidegger expanded on these views greatly.

Artificial intelligence has so far remained in the realm of science fiction.



The next trick of our glorious banks will be to charge us a fee for using net bank!!!
You are no longer customer, you are property!!!

Don't be SAUCY with me Bernaisse
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Thatguy
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Count du Monet
29 Dec 2013, 08:39 PM
The problem is all programing is based on a variety of mathematics. The binary code is over 300 years old. There is no mathematics that allows for artificial intelligence, hence no program. A computer has no being.
What ?!!?!!!?
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Kulganis
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You might not assume that biological brains don't have a mathematical basis, I'm not sure what you mean by pure mathematical basis.

Quote:
 
How our brains give rise to our minds is one of the most intriguing questions in all of science. We are now living in a particularly interesting time to consider this question. This is true because, during the last decade, mathematical models about how the brain works have finally succeeded in quantitatively simulating the experimentally recorded dynamics of individual cells in identified brain circuits and the behaviors that these circuits control. The models that have led to these successes incorporate qualitatively new ideas about how the brain is organized to achieve the remarkable flexibility and power of biological intelligence.
http://www.ams.org/notices/200011/fea-grossberg.pdf
Babies don't have a knowing presence, they learn through experience, the knowing comes later as a result of experience.

What I would call a soul is simply the result of chemical balances within the brain, there is no metaphysical, at all.

Artificial Intelligence may have so far remained in science fiction, but that doesn't mean it will never happen. Neural Networks are a major step in the direction of a machine that can learn for itself, we are no longer restricted by binary calculations, the more recent quantum computers are starting to work in 5 state realms.

People once stated, quite matter of factually, that rockets will never leave the earths atmosphere, and now we have hundreds of satellites and probes all whizzing happily through space.

You calling the whole field of artificial intelligence research 'nonsense' is truly total nonsense.
Edited by Kulganis, 29 Dec 2013, 10:53 PM.
"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear." - Gene Roddenberry

"Balloon animals are a great way to teach children that the things they love dearly, may spontaneously explode" -- Lee Camp
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themoops
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Count du Monet
29 Dec 2013, 10:33 PM

For Max Stirner an atheist defined as spiritual all those things that are less obviously material. If we look for food, that might be a material aim. But creating a abstract painting might be defined as a spiritual activity, because the ambition is not so immediately material.
That astronomer bloke used to say every branch of study has something to say to each other. Carl Sagan.

You could take music. Why did the hippy stuff sound so good at the time? Certain sounds convey imagery, and people related to it because they wanted to get off their guts and have sex a lot. To me that's more mathematical than spiritual. They were also lefties, so they liked it because they saw material gain too, and those boomer fuckers got it in spades via the likes of Whitlam.
stinkbug omosessuale


Frank Castle is a liar and a criminal. He will often deliberately take people out of context and use straw man arguments.
Frank finally and unintentionally gives it up and admits he got where he is, primarily via dumb luck!
See here
Property will be 50-70% off by 2016.
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