Slashdot

Aren't we expected to know that? This is /. after all...

the first thing they teach it is to stop scratching my couch.

So...

114 terabytes = 116 736 gigabytes
My machine has got 4 gigabytes of RAM, 100 000 x 4 = 400000... Hm?

One word...

Meow!

Now if the could just get it out of sleep mode.

Can it lick its own arse in polite company?

It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna. Puts me in mind of this quote:

"If research leads to the development of successful new modeling techniques that can carry out new and better forms of information processing, no one will really care if they do not exactly mimic the functionality of the human brain," concludes Hall. "I honestly doubt you'll find too many people today who are upset that the wings on an aircraft do not flap like those of a bird or that a submarine does not swim exactly like a fish."

It's an interesting way of looking at things. Man's earliest ideas of flying all involved trying to mimic the actions of a bird. And ornithopters remain impractical as passenger vehicles. But new breakthroughs in material sciences and computing are allowing for autonomous bots that fly like birds, bats, bugs, and can swim like snakes and fish. Engineers will point out that the evolved solutions we see in nature are working with the materials at hand, they might not be the best of all solutions. Every flying vertebrate known to science turned forelimbs into wings and flap them. Is it the most efficient way to fly? That's an argument I'll leave to the biologists and engineers but it's certainly the only way those vertebrates were getting into the air! They have to work with the materials at hand. If we ever saw flying horses, the only thing we could be absolutely sure of is that this would not be achieved by sprouting two more limbs from the back. We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.

Iz in ur brane, making ur thorts. LOL!

"The computer has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory."

then "Deep Thought II"
then "Deep Blue"
next "Deep Pussy"??

A few days ago, Slashdot ran The Math of a Fly's Eye May Prove Useful [slashdot.org].

Those guys

• reverse engineered the yaw motion detector in a fly brain
• reduced the neural network to a set of 5 coupled, non-linear equations
• implemented the equations on a computer
• ran their implementation against an animated scene
• observed that the equations correctly and robustly detect yaw

and they still don't understand how the equations actually work.

That's where we are with brain simulation.

The military is rumored to be interested in using the cat simulator to guide precision munitions with laser pointers. Unfortunately the system seems limited to short range applications, as missiles seem to loose interest after a couple minutes.

This project is basically a massive neural network simulation with a number of nodes and connections comparable to the estimated totals in a cat's brain. In short, there is nothing cat-like about this system apart from its raw processing power.

Not to reduce the value of this feat, by any means! There are tons and tons of neural network simulations that can produce roughly human-like results in very, very narrow domains, but as the quote below explains, these simulations are decades (or more) from connecting the behavior of tiny subsystems (a few hundred neurons) with the overall phenomenon of 'mind' (conscious and unconscious cognition). The expectation is that a network of this size will show some new emergent properties that will give us clues about the intermediate "higher than cells, lower than interviewing a human" order of processing.

Jim Olds, a neuroscientist and director of the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, called the new research a "tremendous step." Olds, who was not involved in IBM's work, said neuroscientists have been amassing data about how the brain works much like "stamp collectors," without a way to tie it together.

"We've made tremendous advances in collecting data, but we don't have a collective theory yet for how this complex organ called the brain produces things like Shakespeare's sonnets and Mozart's symphonies," he said. "The holy grail for neuroscientists is to map activity from single nerve cells, which they know about, into how billions of nerve cells act in concert."

This reminds me of Aineko in Accelerando by Stross. I wonder how long until it becomes sentient and surpasses human intelligence. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel) [wikipedia.org] http://www.accelerando.org/ [accelerando.org]

-molo

I did something similar this morning.

while true ; do
echo "I hate you."
echo "Feed me."
sleep 60
done

Now how hard was that?

My captors continue to torment me with bizarre dangling objects. They eat lavish meals in my presence while I am forced to subsist on dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of eventual escape... that, and the satisfaction I get from occasionally ruining some piece of furniture. I fear I may be going insane.

simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain

10: INPUT(8) $SOUND
30: IF ($SOUND == 'CAN OPENER') GOTO 140
40: DO CASE (RND(4))
50 CASE 1:
60 CLAW_FURNITURE()
70 BREAK
80 CASE 2:
90 MARK_FURNITURE()
100 BREAK
110 CASE 3:
120 SLEEP(RND(10000))
130 CASE 4:
140 PRETEND_TO_BE_NICE()
150 IF (FOOD) EAT()
160 GOTO 10
170 ENDCASE

...termanatin yur connerz.