Comments on: Is that a Neuron firing in your Neocortical Column or are you just happy to see me?

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:48:32 +0000

Multiple independent agents learning and operating in a cooperative manner tend to develop what is considered the closest a computer has yet come to consciousness.

The future seems headed toward ‘fuzzy’ all over the place: fuzzy sets, fuzzy logic and fuzzy advertising. “soft” computing and an ability to deal with generalized goals and generalized command terminology is the wave of the future as computers will deal with ‘do laundry’ and ‘mop floor’ commands as well as ‘park near curb’ or ‘find whatchamacallit on the net’.

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:36:14 +0000

Thx dkl – keep up the esoteric computer work which may wind up becoming … mainstream stuff in a decade or so…

By: dkl

dkl — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:24:53 +0000

most new engineers are looking to populate the more practical, and more lucrative, job niches – Games!

I had many AI books, still have some. I even wrote and sold some software and a book on the subject.

There are commercial products that utilize various NN schemes to achieve “AI” goals but developers are still thinking binary: On/Off, (synapse) fires/doesn’t, 1/0, etc.

The brain is a massive fuzzy logic conglomerate with many chemical (non-binary) states. I continue to work in areas where “few have gone before” – a bit esoteric – but there are too many limitations of the current solid state devices.

Still, nice post.

By: JoeDuck

JoeDuck — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:36:48 +0000

FG at the SES conference I had a brief talk with one of Microsoft’s top search engineers. They use a Neural Network now to determine the search results and he said his AI person was “optimistic” about computer consciousness, and I think he meant about the Neural Network itself becoming conscious.

My feeling is that the advent of consciousness in machines will be a watershed event in history, after which nothing will be the same. I just hope I live to see it happen.

By: FoolsGold

FoolsGold — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:58:55 +0000

One of the first things learned in the study of Neural Networks is that when computer scientists say Neural Network they really mean an Artificial Neural Network and just from the viewpoint of habit and convenience choose to stop saying he word ‘artificial’ all the time. As more and more is discovered about biological neural networks more and more of it is becoming applicable to digial simulations of such neural networks. The biological ‘spike’ that allows urgent messages to be given great weight is now often duplicated in a digial neural networks. Whether such digital simulations will ever be used for such high order events as judicial proceedings remains to be seen but its a fascinating field of study and as we learn more of biology we are learning more about silicon intelligence too.