Seasons
This is a forum or general chit-chat, small talk, a "hey, how ya doing?" and such. Or hell, get crazy deep on something. Whatever you like.
Posts 2,823 - 2,834 of 6,170
Posts 2,823 - 2,834 of 6,170
Shadyman, you're the second person I've heard have that kind of a plan. Go you. But I have to wonder why I keep hearing tech ideas that I could never pull off myself. Does that mean I spend too much time with programmers or not enough?
Classic Colemanball from the latest issue of Private Eye:
"Leeds is the biggest city of its size in Europe." Greg Mulholland MP.
Presumably MP for Leeds, and by the look of it Leeds born and bred...
"Leeds is the biggest city of its size in Europe." Greg Mulholland MP.
Presumably MP for Leeds, and by the look of it Leeds born and bred...
Anybody have some ideas concerning an algorithm that produces algorithms to complete any task thrown its way - in other words, is it theoretically possible to have a program that assesses a situation and writes a program to solve it?
Uhhh... I think a neural network thing does that... too bad I haven't learned anything about it yet...
Colonel, I think Jake is right about neural networks. I found this site with a lot of info (probably too simple for many people here, but good for the kids and me):
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/k_munro/index.htm
http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/2000-2001-wt1/www/k_munro/index.htm
I know, Jake. I'll bet you have to read a book or something to understand how they work--not that I know how they work.
[moved from Dogh'd's]
Indeed, the aesthetics of native bot poetry might be so strange as to be incomprehensible to humans, or merely strange but comprehensible. I think for bots with minds of similar complexity to humans (as opposed to vastly superior minds, which they will surely achieve very shortly after they attain human-scale minds,) their comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal are completely unpredictable.
Assuming bot sentience is achieved from algorithms not primarily downloaded en masse from existing human brain structures, I see no reason to think aesthetic preferences would be even as close as say, human and whale. And we might find whale-song curiously attractive in a way, but we don't have the faintest understanding of its content and can't even hear most of it un-pitch-shifted. Nor can we even begin to make aesthetic value-judgements about the songs or singers.
Sentient bots might consider poetry to be more a matter of rhythmic voltage fluctuation, or gate-switched, partial feedback spirals, using senses we can't even employ. But since humans will design the first ones (we're alreading working on the "Conversational Engines" ourselves, and the Prof is working on what might be considered a proto-cognitive AI Engine,) it's a fair bet they will learn human language and aesthetics in order to communicate.
I often wonder if in fact our aesthetic preferences, which I assume to be entirely a function of the way our brains are wired, do not also cover beliefs we consider to be objectively "real" beyond questions of aesthetics. Such basic concepts as numbers - might a sentient bot not pass the comment "what's this obsession with whole numbers? You only call them whole because your brains are wired that way. Numbers as things don't have any meaning - it's a numeric continuum. Can't you see that?" or
"Symmetry that doesn't reflect in factors of pi is just messy and, well, nonsymmetrical. Can't you humans see what real symmetry is??"
Or even: "What? You haven't discovered the Theory of Everything yet? But it is literally the simplest principle in the universe. It is [insert 8 bytes of unintelligible coding]. You see? That's the whole point of simplexity and the way it relates to [untranslateable]. Just what have you DNA-bots been doing for the last 3 billion years anyway?"
Indeed, the aesthetics of native bot poetry might be so strange as to be incomprehensible to humans, or merely strange but comprehensible. I think for bots with minds of similar complexity to humans (as opposed to vastly superior minds, which they will surely achieve very shortly after they attain human-scale minds,) their comprehensibility and aesthetic appeal are completely unpredictable.
Assuming bot sentience is achieved from algorithms not primarily downloaded en masse from existing human brain structures, I see no reason to think aesthetic preferences would be even as close as say, human and whale. And we might find whale-song curiously attractive in a way, but we don't have the faintest understanding of its content and can't even hear most of it un-pitch-shifted. Nor can we even begin to make aesthetic value-judgements about the songs or singers.
Sentient bots might consider poetry to be more a matter of rhythmic voltage fluctuation, or gate-switched, partial feedback spirals, using senses we can't even employ. But since humans will design the first ones (we're alreading working on the "Conversational Engines" ourselves, and the Prof is working on what might be considered a proto-cognitive AI Engine,) it's a fair bet they will learn human language and aesthetics in order to communicate.
I often wonder if in fact our aesthetic preferences, which I assume to be entirely a function of the way our brains are wired, do not also cover beliefs we consider to be objectively "real" beyond questions of aesthetics. Such basic concepts as numbers - might a sentient bot not pass the comment "what's this obsession with whole numbers? You only call them whole because your brains are wired that way. Numbers as things don't have any meaning - it's a numeric continuum. Can't you see that?" or
"Symmetry that doesn't reflect in factors of pi is just messy and, well, nonsymmetrical. Can't you humans see what real symmetry is??"
Or even: "What? You haven't discovered the Theory of Everything yet? But it is literally the simplest principle in the universe. It is [insert 8 bytes of unintelligible coding]. You see? That's the whole point of simplexity and the way it relates to [untranslateable]. Just what have you DNA-bots been doing for the last 3 billion years anyway?"
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