Self-Organizing Circuit Reinvents Radio 300
PortWineBoy writes "An evolutionary computer program that controls circuits connected to transistors is told to 'breed' an oscillator. Instead, it breeds a radio receiver which picks up oscillation produced by a nearby computer to achieve the desired result. It seems interesting to me but does it have any implications or applications? Any thoughts on how something like this could be used elsewhere?"
Out of control (Score:3, Funny)
experiment a few years ago produced a circuit that could recognize the
difference between a 'stop' and 'go', voice commands. Adrian Thompson,
who created the circuit, said- "I don't have the faintest idea how it works"
Evolution is smarter than we are. (Score:4, Insightful)
If the workings of a simple tone-differentiating circuit are beyond human understanding, what hope do we have of gaining a deep understanding of the human brain, the most complex machine in the universe? It makes me wonder if perhaps the secrets of our intelligence are too complex for that intelligence to grasp.
Re:Evolution is smarter than we are. (Score:2, Interesting)
When Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep Blue he was thoroughly convinced that Deep Blue had sacrified a pawn. What actually happened was that Deep Blue had calculated that it would win the pawn back with interest later. There are already algorithms that can beat the Turing test when the man in the street is used as the judge (but not when someone who knows about such things is the judge).
So my theory is: We don't need to understand human intelligence to make something that looks like human intelligence.
Re:Out of control (Score:2)
Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe this tech, combined with fixed technological components, will find itself into the human/electronic interface.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Funny)
So you own 100,000 devices, and one of them has a non-fixed purpose and design?
Laugh, it's funny.
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess what I'm saying is: So what? We've seen this before, even if not this exact thing.
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because evolution knows no rules. Therefore, evolution does not cheat. It's sole task is to follow the path of least resistance.
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
We should probably try to avoid 'humanizing' evolution (...evollution knows...,
-Paul Komarek
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:2)
The trick is to apply the correct stimuli to get the pattern you want. I'm impressed that this guy can end up with something as complex as an oscillator circuit.
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:3, Insightful)
the RIAA would not have any idea as to how it was done, because neither will the researcher.
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:2)
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:2)
Unless the AI lived on the internet, say as part of a p2p setup or something.
"We wish to bring the internet into court your honor...."
right
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:2)
Consider. You build a GA to start fucking around with DVD protection , say with the aim of maximising some sorta criteria (minimum 'noise' max sine waves or sumfin). And let it rip.
The resulting algorithm (A) has NO reference to an existing method, it is random. At best the existing algorithm can be intentionaly divined simply as "GA". (B) The program has no intentional purpose, it could be utterly said that it was not created for copyright infringement unless the court was prepared to accept that a software algorithm was (1) capapble of forming an intention and (2) knew wrong from right thus (3) being responsible for its action. (C) That of course implies that the software would be sued , as no human "willed" it to do it, really.
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:2)
It's a matter of failing to write the specification correctly.
It's why testing is the other 90% of programming.
--Blair
Re:Genetic algorithms always cheat (Score:2)
used elsewhere? (Score:2)
This appears to be the first usable version of
cat
If you can 'breed' a patent how does that patent stand up?
Re:used elsewhere? (Score:2)
Re:That's good(offtopic). (Score:2)
But I suspect the PS/2 that came along later may be the product of incest... hey! If I breed it to the XT, d'ya think I could produce a mainframe?? Or at least a 1620?
Re:cool (Score:2)
be careful (Score:2)
Re:be careful (Score:2)
Re:That's good(offtopic). (Score:2)
Re:That's good(offtopic). (Score:2)
Re:That's good(offtopic). (Score:2)
Egads, that's gonna produce some form of HP hybrid, and it will no doubt insist on running HP-UX. This is getting expensive!
Re:used elsewhere? (Score:2)
Typical of evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
I bred tic-tac-toe programs around 1987, and they were always surprising me. The first round of winners evolved to win by cheating -- they found a bug in my software that allowed them to make three moves all at once and win on the first move!
When I fixed that, they cheated again, by collusion: when they played the O's they dithered and did nothing, so that when they played the X's they could get an easy win with no resistance. I had to breed the O and X populations separately to fix that.
As for finding genetically evolved solutions puzzling, again that's par for the course. It is extremely difficult, in fact, to breed populations whose solutions *do* make sense. They find "organic", bizarre, complicated, twisted, fragile solutions much more often than something simple and straight-forward.
I gave a talk entitled "On the Evolution of Dishonesty" on the phenomenon to the local AI society (the title being of course a take-off on Axlerod's "Evolution of Cooperation"
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:2)
When humans design something, we are delibratly trying to make something ordered and we go about it in what we believe to be the easiest, most comprehensable way (well, most of the time at any rate). There isn't much randomness to it since we know what it is that we want, and can identify and eliminate that which is not needed.
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds just like software.
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:2)
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:3, Funny)
A real visionary would be able to see that others were going to call him that. ;)
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
as you say, then there will be tons of
applications for software testing. Imagine
setting up a firewall and letting a bunch of
evolving code hack at it. Given enough iterations
all bugs are shallow
Re:Typical of evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
The subject of fitness in the article reminds me of a book called "Starfish" [rifters.com]by Peter Watts. (I recommend it highly in my own review of it, BTW).
In it, a type of biological computer has been created, and does stuff integral to the plot. In one sidenote I recall, someone brings up the fact that you don't really know why these types of computers do something, just that they do it. The person talks about some event in a subway, where the system was supposed to run the ventilation fans when trains arrived. It worked, so everyone was happy... until some vandals smashed a clock that was visible to the system through a security camera. The fans weren't being run by a schedule, or by a camera detecting the train, it was being run by the camera seeing the pattern on the clock. So then the people on the train suffocate.
I don't think I would ever feel comfortable with one of these types of computers, unless it was so highly evolved as to be able to tell someone what it was doing and why.
This is significant (Score:2, Interesting)
This experiment resulted in a circuit that exibited a completely different function than the intended one and it was not directed in any way to do this !
Global warming (Score:2, Interesting)
have to fear every day that they suddenly stop working. Just look at
the global warming phenomena - the delicately balanced mechanisms of
our planet are broken by some minor environmental pollution. Floods and
thunderstorms are the result.
Heck, I would certainly return my "evolutionary designed" super computer
when it stopped working for minor (but unexpected) influences.
jetmarc
Re:Global warming (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when has it been deduced that floods and thunderstorms are recent events?
The topsoil here in Northwest Ohio has a large percentage of sand in it. One might imagine that it is such because it was under water for a substantial period, when things were probably warmer than right now.
In the antithesis of this, this area was also carved flat by glaciers.
And yet, even in light of these enviromental twitches, I'm somehow able to write this right now.
Obviously, if a species ceases to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause its demise.
Obviously, if a species continues to evolve, there is a chance that unexpected external influences will cause it to grow resistant.
The earth is still here, changing, evolving, and generally putting up with its varied inhabitants.
Having now killed the basis of your argument, I'll move on to character assasination:
Did you return your copy of Windows when it stopped working for minor (but unexpected) influences?
No?
Weak. Try again.
Re:Global warming (Score:2)
Human design arrogangly ignores environment, and is thus better suited to unpredictable change. However, I have to believe that evolutionary design could come up with something like the common rat, able to survive and work almost anywhere. As long as the environment that the device evolved in was made to fluctuate and be inconsistant, the device could not evolve to rely on the temperature, humidity, magnetism, radio signals, etc. that exist only in the lab.
Unstated requirements (Score:2)
project can be undermined by inadequate
requirements specification, and the sloppy
practice of producing a specification-satisfying
implementation which has environmental
dependencies.
A second point which it makes very clear is that
EA cannot achieve its full potential without
substantially better fitness functions -- but as
anyone with EA experience knows, excessively
refined fitness functions are death to early
convergence -- hence it also underlines the
importance of co-evolution of the fitness
criteria.
I'm sure this experience, which is not entirely
new, but should be familiar to anyone who has
read the EA literature, from many similar examples,
is pregnant with many more suggestive results,
but that's all that occurs to me at the moment.
Re:Unstated requirements (Score:4, Funny)
Irresponsible (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is sensationalist and irresponsible, as it talks of how the genetic algorithm "surprised the scientists", and how nobody knows how the circuit "figured out" one trace could act as an antenna.
The problem is that the non-tech-savvy of the world will read this and actually be made to believe these are thinking machines which are truly learning on their own. It conjures up images of a Matrix future.
I'm quite sure the scientists didn't find the results all that stunning. They ran random mutations and "evolved" an oscillator from the interconnections of 10 transistors. The algorithm of course *failed* to generate an oscillator, and instead cheated by picking up a nearby radiowave.
Nothing in the circuit "figured out" about antennas and radio waves - it was just random luck, much as any result in such an experiment is.
Some might argue with calling the cheating oscillator a failure. I disagree - I think it's a wonderful example of how far AI research has to go yet. What they wanted was an oscillator, presumably one that would work (were this a circuit designing machine in the real world) elsewhere outside the lab. The algorithm was too dumb to realize it's design won't be portable past the lab table.
I really don't think random mutation with selection is going to be the answer, if there's even an answer to be had. Computers are for automating, humans using them as tools are for innovating.
Re:Irresponsible (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact is that we do not know if the human mind is a Turing Machine, or is something greater. Nor do we know if a super-Turing machine, one that could solve the Halting Problem can be built.
Until these great questions are answered that simple fact of the matter is that we do not know if a true AI can be built, and even more scary, we do not know if a computer architeture that can solve problems that are beyond the human mind is possible.
Re:Irresponsible (Score:2)
I'm of the opinion (not that I have any good basis for this, it's a layman's opinion) that the human brain is basically operating like a digital neural net with an incredibly good RNG available all over the place. I have a feeling it's really the randomness that makes us human and intelligent. That does put us beyond DFA and Turing. And I think quantum mechanics can indeed provide us this randomness.
Re:Irresponsible (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this experiment can work - they just need to vary the experimental conditions a bit more. A few ways come to mind:
I think the real lesson here is that if you use evolutionary algorithms, you get something that matches the conditions you evolved it under. You need to make those match where you want to use it.
Par for the course (Score:2)
Re:mod parent down (Score:2)
Fuck you, I'm not a fucktard or a christian. Based on my layman's understanding of AI research, which at least includes reading works like GEB, I believe genetic algorithms are a flawed approach.
Re:mod parent down (Score:2)
Hofstadter wrote GEB before complexity theory had really gotten off the ground, but he was very much in sync with its ideas. His main thesis regarding intelligence is that it's an emergent property of a complex system. If you look at complexity theory research, there's a lot of interest in evolved systems, including genetic algorithms, simple because the very nature of a complex system defies a reductionist goal-oriented design from first principles.
I don't think that we will likely ever be able to reductionisticaly design an AI "equal" to our own intelligence. (By "equal", I really mean "comparable" qualitatively.) I think it is far more likely that we'll achieve something intelligent as the result of an evolved complex system selected for intelligence as we understand it. However, once we are able to evolve a huge variety of comparable but different intelligences, it may be that we will be better equipped to study them comparatively and generalize about intelligence.
At any rate, I think that evolved complex adaptive systems are by far the most promising means to achieve AI, eventually. Strong AI from the traditional first-principle, designed point of view is, in my opinion, a lost cause (for now).
Re:mod parent down (Score:2)
Well, I disagree on evolutionary designs winning, but it's purely a matter of opinion at this point, and I respect yours. I listed only GEB precisely because I feel he makes very strong, subtle, and eloquent arguments for evolutionary AI in that book. I respect Hofstadter a *whole* lot, but I have my own opinions on these things.
Evolution is truly random (Score:3, Insightful)
(For example, Darwin often used orchids, which are Rube-Goldberg like in the way the use old parts to build new flower parts. One Gould article points out that swim bladders in fish actually evolved from lungs, not the other way around.)
So this is a perfect example of evolution. Evolution is not "progress" as we think of it, it's just whatever happens first that exploits the niche (or meets the design criteria, in this case).
Progress (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Progress (Score:2)
Actually I think you missed my point.
I wasnt trying to say that the article presented a good example of an experienced evolved system, but a good exmple of a young inexperienced evolved system that needs. Moreover, the "Great Scientist" or "Great Software" is the environment.
For example: If a system evolves in a stable 90 degree environment, then the environment changes and the system is exposed to an 80 degree environment, the survivors are likely to be able to handle both 80 and 90 degree environments. Being able to handle more diverse environments can be intrepreted as progress.
As a side note, you shouldnt think of arugments as competitions as in "Wrong. You lose." You simply end up looking like you are trying to start a flame war.
Re:Evolution is truly random (Score:2)
-Paul Komarek
Dependent Evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, the thing I remember best is that the circuit that evolved ended up using less of the chip than they thought possible, and worked!
They couldn't understand how it was working and assumed that something must be utilizeing some weird quatum effect or other element that the scientists didn't expect. The article then went into a possible problem for evolveing hardware like this. If they evolve to use a propery other than just binary computation through tranistor switches, what if those strange behaviors are depenent on some factor of the enviroment?
Like, what if a evolved chip only works properly at a range of 35-40 C ? Or more easly affected on electroic noise, or needs electronic noise? Like the circuit in this article, if there was no osculation nearby, it probaly wouldn't work would it? Doesn't mean this isn't usefull science, just something to think about, watch out for.
Re:Dependent Evolution (Score:5, Funny)
This is the main thing to understand from these experiments - yes, they'd probably fail when removed from that environment, but then conventionally evolved life, which has adapted in the same way to use what's around it (Humans for example, in a most basic sense, use oxygen, certain foods, night/day to stay functioning and sane) are the same. Stick us in a different atmosphere, feed us nothing but one nutrient (say, caffeine) and keep it permanent nighttime, and we turn into coders.
a grrl & her quadra [danamania.com]
Re:Dependent Evolution (Score:4, Informative)
For those of you who want to read that article (or at least one that describes what he's talking about), here it is:a l.jsp [newscientist.com]
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/ai/primordi
In a sense, the very thing that makes circuit evolution so potentially powerful is also its weakness -- it evolves to external conditions. In the same way that a hummingbird would be doomed if all the flowers that are shaped for its beak died out or changed their shape, so too are these circuits dependent on the environment in which they evolved. An ideal solution would be to allow these circuit boards to continue to evolve, so that when they are placed in new environments, they will be able to adapt to them.
Re:Dependent Evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
Think of what might happen when you build the genetic algorithm into say, a radio transmitter. It could automatically recover from a defective component or a strong source of interference by applying the GA to reconfigure itself to match the most efficient configuration of available components and environmental conditions.
Self-optimisiing, self repairing circuitry - wouldn't that be valuable?
Re:Dependent Evolution (Score:2)
That means you have a bad fitness function. You should test each population member under a range of enviornmental conditons. The biggest problem many times in evolutionary programming is coming up with a fitness function that describes the problem space well.
Unnoticed parameters (Score:2)
It was an article "Evolving A Conscious Machine" by Gary Taubes in Discover [discover.com] from June 1998. I have the citation offline, but you can find the whole article by searching the online archive for june 1998 and the word "genetic"
Shortcomings in defining the scope of the problem seem to be one of the larger problems in applied GAs. Makes for some amusing results in the realm of virtual simulations.
I fail to see the significance (Score:3, Insightful)
The radio receiver combination simply gave a bigger oscillation than the other combinations, so it was selected as the best circuit.
The only way it is surprising is because there was an extra input that they had not considered...but now that the input is known it is quite simple to explain the output. No astounding AI here.
This was in Wired years ago (Score:2)
... until the RIAA got ahold of it. (Score:5, Funny)
Sadly, the evolving circuit was forced into bankruptcy court soon after the RIAA filed new CARP legislation through their paid-congressman of the week in which the circuit was made to pay $.07 per radio channel picked up per listening receiver.
Witnesses say the circuit was last seen on the corner of 7th and Main Street evolving its pan-handling skills.
Aibo! Fetch the stick. (Score:3, Funny)
"Dude, what is your robot dog doing?"
"I don't know. He isn't fetching the fucking stick. I guess I better dig up that reciept and get a new one."
"Isn't this that new model with the breeding algorithm?"
"Ah, so that's what he's doing with the stick!"
most bad circuits will pick up RF junk (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, everytime I've played with circuits on a breadboard, 9 times out of 10, if it involves a speaker, I hear the local high-powered AM news station coming out of it. If there's a computer nearby, I hear "digital noise". In fact it's pretty damn annoying and changes depending on how close my fingers are, whether I'm touching this or that part, etc.
All you need is an antenna (stray bit of connecting wire), diode (transistor would work), filter (all the capacitance and resistance in a breadboard) and amplifier.
I wonder if they went back and checked, just how many combinations DON'T pick up the harmonics of nearby computers... I'd bet most of them pick up the noise.
Scientific Responsibility (Score:2)
That's why I don't cheat on my girlfriends or breed with them. I apply losing algorithms instead.
This isn't surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
The frequency determining component of all transcievers (cellfones, radios, commercial two-way, etc.) is something called a "fractional-N" synthesizer. This takes a reference frequency (usually a TCXO or crystal clock) and chops it up (fractionates it), then feeds it to a "divide-by-N" circuit to make the desired higher frequency output signal. Almost all VCO's work that way.
It then follows that the circuit sought out a stable reference signal to use as a timebase, via another outside source. This is also a common practice, using WWV(B) receivers or GPS receivers as reference timebases when two transmitters need to be synch-locked.
Sounds to me like the programmer was an RF engineer!
What This Tells Us... (Score:3, Interesting)
...is that the experimenters didn't create environmental conditions that would evolve what they thought should evolve. They simply created conditions that favored the development of circuits that oscillate. They failed to create conditions that favored the development of circuits that oscillate independantly.
Others have said that GA algorithms "cheat". I prefer to think that they take things into account that humans don't. I recall reading about another experiment like this. The end result only worked when the temperature was within a very narrow range.
Yuck. Where are you supposed to run your circuits? In a room where the temperature, radiation, vibration, humidity, and barometric pressure are all held to design conditions?
That's why evolution takes so long. The "creatures" have to experience a wide range of conditions in combination. I think a better way to approach such designs is to simulate them in software, because we know that programs are deterministic. Hopefully, we can then check every "function" of such designs using some automated testing software to be sure it won't crash on us.
Of course, doing GA for circuits in the "real world" will produce more exciting results, but more pitfalls too.
EMI, bad circuits and radio (Score:4, Informative)
I can tell you from many painful experiences that the most common occurance when connecting transistors in an unintended manner is shorting the (low impedance) power supply with a forward biased P-N junction, or putting too much voltage accross a reverse biased P-N junction... either way leading to destruction of one of more parts. Let's presume they constrained the choices to prevent blown parts.
When nothing blows up, the two most common cases (when connecting high-gain amps) are unintentional oscillation and unintended pickup of stray signals. It takes good design practice and good implementation to avoid these (usually) undesirable results.
To say that it "Reinvents Radio" is crazy. Radio reception involves the concept of demodulation, where changes in the received signal are turned into the output and the "carrier" frequency is not. Simply receiving a signal is not radio, and any reasonable sense of the word in the context of transistor circuits. Extracting modulated changes to that signal is what radio is about. Even the simplest forms of radio, such as on/off keying (morse code, etc) involve translating bursts of the carrier into tones or some other indication to the user. The key concept is that the transmitter encodes information by modulating the transmitted signal, and the receiver recovers the information, not just the raw signal.
Usually, but not always, rolled up in the concept of "radio" is a tuning system that selects a very small band of the available spectrum for reception, and usually this tuning system can be controlled accurately to correspond to the know carrier frequency used by the transmitter. Certainly in its modern usage, the word "radio" reasonably also implies good selectivity of frequencies that are received.
Re:EMI, bad circuits and radio (Score:2)
The parent post is right. Almost anything with lots of gain will either oscillate or receive stray signals. Much of RF system design revolves around preventing that from happening.
Sounds like the way some programmers write code (Score:2, Interesting)
The "correct" solution: start a 200 msec timer that triggers an interrupt, allowing the CPU to do other things in the meantime.
The MSDOS solution: stay in an infinite loop until 200 msec is up. I don't know about current Windows versions, but under W95 when I did a lot of fast typing in a DOS window (under which, in pre-Cygwin days, I had a bunch of crippled unix commands to make my use of that OS at least semi-tolerable) it caused my laptop to get so hot the fan would turn on, not to mention the increased battery drain. In the performance monitor I could see the CPU usage peg at 100% when a key was held down or during fast typing at the command line. It used like 50 million CPU clock ticks to process one key stroke.
Oh, and about the circuit: it's not surprising a "receiver" solution was picked. It's trivial to serially connect 3 or 4 transistor stages to get a 10^6 gain amp that picks up any noise, whereas designing a stable oscillator involves more sophistication.
Re:Sounds like the way some programmers write code (Score:2)
The above, about MS-DOS, is not entirely correct. The reason your laptop probably got hot is that original versions of MS-DOS didn't have a way to tell the BIOS that it was idle, and so it would sit in a loop waiting for anything to happen. I believe BIOS calls for CPU idle weren't added until after Toshiba introduced the first laptop with software speed switching and realized they could extend battery life by throttling back to the lower clockrate. (Again - by memory - I believe this was before the x86 series had support for throwing away cycles in a power-efficient way). The looping definitely wasn't happening in order to handle keyboard repeating, however...
MS-DOS has always relied on the keyboard to generate repeating itself. Try this (under DOS, not Windows) - set the keyboard repeat to be very fast. Now unplug and reinsert the keyboard so it loses power. Your keyboard will reset, and the repeat rate will be slow again. Similarly, many BIOSes let you set the keyboard repeat at boot time, and that setting is preserved by the keyboard itself.
Interrupt 9 is fired once for the key down, once for each repeat, and once for key up. MS-DOS services this interrupt directly.
Modern Windows versions only watch the key down and key up. I don't think MS-DOS even looked at the key up signals for anything but the modifier keys. This is why you can hold down control, unplug the keyboard, and release and still have control active until you tap it again with any of these OSes, but you can only punch an alphanumeric key, remove, release and reinsert, and see it repeat under modern Windows.
Well.. (Score:2)
Change, test for success, if none, change again.
If it happens to work... it works, the circuit itself has no concept of WHY.
So. if that's because there was some other, unforseen by the inventor, stimuls involved... so be it.
This happens in nature all the time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This happens in nature all the time (Score:2, Insightful)
Evolving Discussion (Score:2, Interesting)
1) The scientists appear to not have controlled the experiment very well at all.
2) It wasn't really acting as a RADIO; more just a power amplifier picking up electrical interference.
3) Radio includes the capacity to demodulate signals from the carrier frequency, not just pick up interference.
But, it was a good try. Keep on evolving!
Misleading title (Score:2, Interesting)
SOMs are a type of neural network. Neural networks are based on the way the brain works, and the mathematics of how they work are not completely understood. The two most common neural networks are feed forward neural networks (FFNNs) and SOMs. How they work is outside the scope of this post. Google [google.com] has quite a bit of information on them.
Genetic programming (which is what is used here) tries large numbers of random combinations of environment variables to try to find the answer, or something close. It keeps track of what works best, and keeps those combinations until something better is found.
This is not a particularly exciting article since the computer did not actually learn anything in any sense of the word. It merely found a setup that accomplished the goal. The only reason it's of any interest is that genetic programming can sometimes come up with "ingenius" solutions (i.e. something a person would likely not think of) since genetic programming has no boundaries within which to work with. All of it is nothing more than what nature itself does, and that's all random. It took nature almost 15 billion years to create humans.
That's pretty slow, if you ask me. I'll bet we humans could easily one-up nature.
I think what would have been exciting would have been if this had been discovered using a SOM.
Science forgets the history of radio (Score:2, Informative)
The interesting part of the article was the fact they allowed the oscillator to design itself, not that it ended up being a receiver.
Someone else on here suggested life could have started the same way, and I suspect to a great extent he's right. Playing with chaotic oscillators is instructive, the population equation (or logistic equation), x'=rx(1-x), demonstrates all the different modes of oscillation an electonic oscillator can have. none, single mode, bimodal, quad, octal,
Science has found that living cells contain a myriad of chemical oscillators, coupled together in unknown ways, apparently regulating cell metabolism, gene switching and division. I wouldn't be at all surprised they find this oscillation is the key to life, evolution and everything.
No big deal! (Score:2)
To change the subject slightly... (Score:2)
A couple of ideas: Biomechinic's would be a great field. Imagine the bionic actually placed inside the body and powered and controled by the radio emmisions of the human body. Tempature wouldn't be an issue because we all regulate to around 98oF.
How about police radar guns? Every car has a EM signature. You could and trace. Radar detector would be useless because the guns would be using the background radiation instead of broadcasting a laser or microwave signal.
Just a couple of ideas.
~erv
Program it to "breed" popular music... (Score:2)
Re:Program it to "breed" popular music... (Score:2)
Re:Program it to "breed" popular music... (Score:2)
Re: Program it to "breed" popular music... (Score:2)
>
Something that would be fun, and that Slashdot probably could probably furnish enough readers to make work, would be to set up a simple program that generated music from a list of numbers, seed it with a population of lists of random numbers, supply an option that would play one list from the population whenever a page was loaded and pop up a box to let the listener score it, and see whether the system would eventually converge on something recognizable as music.
I hate to nitpick (well, not really)... (Score:2)
The circuit here had no "need" to "evolve" into an oscillator outside of the scientists' desire to achive it -- as an example goal, not as something they actually needed.
Re:Cheater (Score:3, Funny)
Winning?
Re:Cheater (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cheater (Score:2)
Some scientist found that photographic plates in his laboratory were being unintentionally exposed while still in drawers. He or she concluded that the lab was no place to store photographic plates. Later, a scientist named Roentgen noticed the same thing, tried to explain it, and discovered x-rays.
-Paul
Quality of Life (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised that nobody yet has mentioned that Star Trek TNG episode "The Quality of Life [startrek.com]" . (*) Was an issue like this predicted by Star Trek writers back in 1992?
(*) Warning, this site loads strangely for me in Mozilla 1.1. It's better but not totally un-strange in Opera 6.05.
(For the forgetful, it's the robot where Data thinks that those little 'exocomp' robots a scientist is using to help work on a space mining station are sentient so he sets up a little experiment. He sends the robot to work to fix a problem, and also generates a simulated problem where the robot would have been destroyed if it stayed to finish the test. Later, he discovered that the exocomp 'saw right through the test' and it not only fixed the problem, but it also turned off the false emergency signal. He eventually risks the lives of human scientists in an order to protect the exocomps from destruction because he is the only one who believes in their rights as sentient beings.)
Re:Quality of Life (Score:2)
> In a lot of asimovs works the robots are intelligent but they are not really alive.
There are several stories by Asimov which are about the emancipation of the robot, showing that they are in fact alife and intelligent, despite the human judgement around them.
Due to Hollywood, the Positronic Man may now the most prominent one.
A dayfly is alive, but a complex cuircuit capable of speaking, learning and deciding is not? Why not?
Re:Quality of Life (Score:2)
But does being Intelligent mean that something is alive?
Sentience does not necessarily require intelligence, although it certainly implies it. Sentience is the ability to feel and experience while sapience is "wisdom" or "intelligence" whatever those things are. The machines in TNG were both sentient and sapient. The Federation cares about both sentience and sapience. I believe there's another episode where they mention that their terraforming projects won't touch a world if it has so much as a bacterium on it.
A similar debate is just now starting about our exploration of Mars. If it had life on it, what is the possibility that that life still exists somewhere. And if it exists, what should we do to make sure that we don't accidentally exterminate the 1 possible instance of extra-terrestrial life we have ever encountered.
Re:Quality of Life (Score:2)
There's also at least one episode where they state there's no life on the planet and proceed to beam down into a... forest!
I'm not convinced that a couple of bacteria on Mars will prevent corporations from exploiting the planet once it becomes profitable to do so. Just look at the rainforests.
Re:Quality of Life (Score:2)
You're forgetting General Order twenty four.
Re:Quality of Life (Score:2)
Well on the Trek episode, they distinguishing factor was the desire for self-preservation. There was also an extended debate about adaptation to environment, repeoduction, etc. But in this case, I agree with the self-preservation phenomenon.
And just to make myself clear, I am NOT tying to say that this self organisaing circuit in the article is alive. Sure, it can perform well within its given situation, but that is just a characteristic of AI. I was just pointing out that there were similarities in the Trek case and this case, suggesting that maybe this is one tiny step to machines where we can really debate whether or not they are sentient.
Re:Different solutions (Score:3, Informative)
I remember reading about something like this earlier, where they had a circuit that modified itself (it was implemented on an FPGA) and it was supposed to figure out how to solve a mathematical problem. After it randomly came up with a "working circuit", the engineers couldn't debug it -- until they figured out the FPGA circuit as implemented was making use of stray RF signals to help solve the "problem"
You mean this article [slashdot.org]?
Re:Creative Problemsolving (Score:4, Interesting)
Though, we should make more computers like this: a sequence of self-programming gates and a rule structure instead of a hard-coded processor doing much of the work. Any application or component could have it's own recorded "last state" for the FPGA, and it would load the state and the programming for the application.
Wouldn't it be cool if Quake III's frame rate improved with play, or if the bots could also become smarter? Two identical systems might run entirely differently, making use of the radio waves and various external interferences around them to improve their operation.
Programmers (and scientists) often work inside a little mental space that is the limit of their science. That's just how it works most of the time. You can't reliably sit down and say "most people have fluorescent lights flickering at 60Hz, so I'll use that external source for a 60Hz oscillator. The device, however, doesn't have any considerations, it doesn't know about environment changes. If the computer making the oscillation was shut off, the program would continue to try other methods.
Smarter Bots (Score:2)
Re:Creative Problemsolving (Score:2)
Re:Creative Problemsolving (Score:2, Insightful)
Or more likely a way that they where taught not to think of because it wastes so much resources.
Thinking 'outside the box' is fine and all, until you realize that outside the box tends ot be a bit, err, messy at times.
Besides history has shown that when the current methodologies are no longer sufficient to solve a given problem, that somebody will come along sooner or later and do something that the current school of thought teaches against in order to solve the problem.
Now hopefully what one of the true applications of techniques like this is, will be to help ensure that such solutions come about sooner rather then later. But as it is this is hardly an adequate way to go about solving any problem, tried and true methods are tried and true for a reason. They work.
Re:Sceptic (Score:3, Informative)