Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

… and speaking of Travel, how about Time Tourism?

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Thanks to Glenn (hey dude, where’s your blog to link to!?)  who just pointed me to this fascinating claim by UCONN professor Ronald Mallet suggesting that we’ll probably be traveling in time this century, and that time travel will be verified on the subatomic level within a few years using this clever experiment:

To determine if time loops exist, Mallett is designing a desktop-sized device that will test his time-warping theory. By arranging mirrors, Mallett can make a circulating light beam which should warp surrounding space.

Because some subatomic particles have extremely short lifetimes, Mallett hopes that he will observe these particles to exist for a longer time than expected when placed in the vicinity of the circulating light beam.

A longer lifetime means that the particles must have flowed through a time loop into the future.

…  Mallett – an advocate of the Parallel Universes theory – assures us that time machines will not present any danger.

“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”

The parallel universe stuff is not all that fanciful either, rather it’s consistent with the new but increasingly mainstream thinking in physics called “M Theory” that supports the *possibility* of parallel universes that would be essentially invisible to earch other except perhaps by the influences of gravity.

Yes, it sounds like science fiction but it’s not fiction at all, just speculative rather than hard science.   At least for now.

Blog Tag Game

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climber Search

Aaron Shear tagged me to share five things people don’t know about me. It’s tempting to make up some some impressive stuff (but I won’t lie!) since the other folks are all very interesting, namely Google’s Adam Lasnik, International SEO Consultant and speaker Joseph Morin, Search Engine Watch Forum’s Jessica Bowman, and Scottish SEO/SEM Scott Boyd.

Here are five things from my little world:

1) My lab, Chico the Wonder Dog, has been working hard to nab the top Google spot from a Chihuahua by the same name. I told him NOT to buy any links or I’ll sick Matt Cutts on him.

2) A recent blog post about the Kim Family Search here in Southern Oregon now has over 1000 comments and has spawned a new project that will combine blogs and a database to help facilitate future search and rescue info coordination.

3) For a time I was a good Touchscreen Kiosk guy, working in the 90’s on a US Forest Service/Tourism project that had multimedia kiosks in travel spots all over the state. I now volunteer on the project I designed that replaced that one, with internet connected stations at the state welcome centers and other travel spots.

4) I can talk like a Duck. No, not the stupid way, the good way. I started talking duck so I could tease my sister by swearing at her without my parents understanding the conversation. I still feel guilty about it, but time shall heal this.

5) I have a double major in Botany and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I don’t know why. Therefore, naturally, I do travel internet publishing and blog about most anything that pops into my head.

I’m tagging these five bloggers because they are all very interesting AND educational folks:

Holiday discussion follow ups

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One of my favorite things about the holidays is hearing from people about things they believe/don’t believe/feel strongly about/don’t care about, etc. It’s also fun to follow up online. I think many people who “live” online don’t realize how few people properly use the internet to find even basic information. This is changing, but slowly.

I’ve really been pleased with Wikipedia lately, which I often find to be more than enough information to satisfy my curiousity about even fairly complex topics. It came in very handy on all these topics discussed over the past few days in Minnesota as we geared up for the Turkey overdose:

Splenda is almost certainly very safe while Stevia, an alternative sweetener, is largely untested. So why do some people choose the unknown over the known, taking more risk but thinking they are taking less? They be silly sweeties.

Sunburn through glass is a surprisingly complex topic. In general it seems glass offers little UV-A protection (cancer and skin damage warning) but does protect against a lot of the UV-B which causes the burning. Moral: Avoid exposure with or without glass.

Israel and Palestine Frankly, the more I study this the more confusing it becomes. I was optimistic a few years ago as two-state plans started to blossom, but now think peace of the type we enjoy here in Uncle Sam’s Land may be unattainable. I see these key problem points for at least another generation: 1) Israel: right to exist 2) Palestinians: right to return 3) Borders for Palestine and Israel.

Richard Dawkins and Atheism His style and approach seems odd to me – more combative than strategic if Dawkins’ goal is to do more than *preach* to the atheists in the choir.
I just want to know if the conscious computers that come about around 2020 are going to believe in God or not. I’ll accept their conclusion.

…. later, circa 2020 …

42 ! ?

How Artificial is your Intelligence?

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This is Jabberwacky, winner of the top Artificial Intelligence award.

More artificial intelligence bots are at this AI link, showcasing several programs that are designed to communicate as a human would communicate.

While Jabberwacky makes extensive use of user input to create it’s answers, most of those at the other link are based on A.L.I.C.E., a remarkable chatbot program that often fares well in Turing Test competitions, though no computer has yet to pass the Turing Test which suggests that a skilled judge’s inability to distinguish an artificial intelligence from a human one will be a key milestone in computing. I’d guess this is only a few years away, though computer consciousness appears a more elusive goal with most experts estimating the date of that milestone to be around 2020.

Ian notes the limitations of these ALICE bots in the comments below, and at his blog suggests a Googley alternative that would take Google query info and embed it in a conversational style to pass Turing.

Las Vegas – Bodies… The Exhibition

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The Las Vegas to Minnesota to home trip had two big “educational” highlights. The first was the Tropicana’s Bodies Exhibition in Las Vegas which showcases human bodies preserved using an advanced technique of injection and plastination. A similar exhibit called “Body Worlds” is touring many major cities and I’ve since learned that Body Worlds is actually the first such exhibit, with other copycat (or CopyHuman) exhibitions like the one I saw in Vegas. Nonetheless it was a fantastic exhibit, gazing as you did into dozens of hearts, brains, and bodies of amazingly preserved human cadavers.

The circulation system, injected and illuminated in all it’s full body glory, was the most stunning of the exhibits for me. Like a giant plant the arteries and veins extended throughout the body.

However in terms of intrigue I simply can’t get the little 3 pound brain exhibit out of my head. Or maybe I should say it’s so clear that you really CAN separate the 3 pound brain from the rest of the body. It would not work for long without the bodies supportive mechanisms but it’s reasonable to assert that it’s that little 3 pound organic computing mechanism where we find so much of the stuff that makes it fun to be a human.

Coming as I had from an Internet conference and very computerized sensibilities, it struck me how this little blob held all the answers to science’s elusive and exciting goal of conscious computing, or the creation of an artificial intellect that is aware of it’s own existence.

I’m using my own conscious computing mechanism to suggest that the debate over differences between our own brain and mechanized intelligences will eventually prove to be almost irrelevant to the issue of “consciousness”.

Clearly our organic computing mechanism, the brain, brings a lot more to the table than the current crop of silicon bretheren, but equally clearly the silicon versions have surpassed us in many respects such as mathematical computation, chess, etc, etc. In fact it’s hard to think of highly structured “intellectual” activity where computers can’t outshine humans. I’d predict that this superiority will increasingly move into the realms of arts, literature, and other abstract endeavors.