english

Human vs. Computer – so we haven’t lost at chess?

Artificial intelligence, english

It came as a shock to many of us when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a 6 game match in 1997. A computer had beaten the best human player in this game that to many is a defining symbol of human intellect. Even though it was “only chess”, it had to be a sign of the inevitable. The machines would soon be taking over man’s role as earth’s ruling race.

But wait a minute. The extremely high profile of the Deep Blue match may have been misleading. In an article at ChessBase, Jeff Sonas explains that the battle is not lost yet. In fact, top chess players have taken on computers 7 times since 1997, all of them ending with a draw. Was it just a stroke of luck for Deep Blue back then?
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Grand Challenge: Journeys in Non-Classical Computation

english, Ideas

The fourth and last review of Wetware related Grand Challenge proposals; we take a look at the ‘Journeys in Non-Classical Computation‘ project. This proposal differs from the rest of them in that it does not propose any direct goals, but rather journeys down some of the less traveled roads of computer science to see where they lead.

The proposal has a range of suggestions but in essence, it encourages computer scientists to take an out-of-the-box approach when seeking solutions for problems in computer science. This includes taking into account a lot of things that Wetware discusses, including: genetic algorithms, biomimickry, DNA computing, nanotechnology, chaos theory, quantum computing, fuzzy logic, cellular automata, parallel processing, artificial immune systems, evolving hardware and emergent properties.
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Listening to the walls

Brain technologies, english

BBC yesterday posted an article about blind people who restore rudimentary vision using a system that turns the input from a head mounted camera into sound. The result has enabled a blind woman to distinguish similar objects, roughly make out obstacles in her environment and detect whether the lights in a room are on or off.

These remarkable results are thanks to a system called vOICe (where the three middle letters stand for “Oh I See”), developed by Dr Peter Meijer, a senior scientist at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands.
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Grand Challenge: Architecture of Brain and Mind

english, Ideas

Third in Wetware’s line of Grand Challenge reviews, we take a look at the ‘Architecture of Brain and Mind project‘ proposal.

This proposal, moderated by Mike Denham, Professor of Neural and Adaptive Systems at the University of Plymouth, draws from a number of similar original Grand Challenge submissions. The proposal is to create a computational architecture of the brain and mind on both neuronal and cognitive levels.
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Grand Challenge: Memories for Life

english, Ideas

The second review of Wetware-related Grand Challenge proposals discusses the Memories for Life project, proposed by Andrew Fitzgibbon with the Robotics Research Group at the University of Oxford and Ehud Reiter lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen.

The Memories for Life project is subtitled “Managing information over a human lifetime”. It addresses people’s need for a unified system to store, manage and access the “ever-increasing amount of information about themselves, including emails, web browsing histories, digital images, and audio recordings” one amasses during the life.
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Grand Challenge: In Vivo In Silico

english, Ideas

First in the series of reviews of the Wetware-related Grand Challenges I promised; a closer look at the project In Vivo In Silico, proposed by Professor Ronan Sleep at the School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich.

“In Vivo” is a Latin term commonly used in biology and medicine to refer to something that occurs within a biological organism, as opposed to “In Vitro”, meaning literally “in glass” e.g. “an egg fertilized In Vitro”. The term “In Silico” is intended to describe the third option for biological observation or experiment. The In Vivo In Silico project aims to simulate the development, cell function, sensory, interaction and overall behavior of organisms accurately enough to allow it to be used in research, adding to and sometimes even replacing the “real thing”.
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Many Grand Challenges Wetware related

english, Ideas

The Human Genome project and the project to create a championship chess playing program are among the projects recognized by the UK Computing Research Committee (UKCRC) as so-called Grand Challenge projects. Inspired mainly by the Human Genome Project “the Committee has noted that the progress of a mature branch of science can occasionally be accelerated by the promotion of a Grand Challenge Project.” To achive a Grand Challenge status, a project must meet a certain criteria, including clear goals, broad participation and commitment of resources by the scientific community and a timescale of completion of around 15 years.

The committee is working to start seven new such projects after receiving research proposals for over 100 possible Grand Challenge projects. Of these seven projects, at least four are highly related to Wetware subjects. This article lists the seven projects. In follow up articles, we will take a closer look at each of those four projects and discuss their possible implications.
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Note to self: Take notes

Brain technologies, english

The single thing in the philosophy of mind that has surprised me the most is the importance of human language in thinking. Its importance in communication is of course quite obvious, but in the inner language we use to “talk to ourselves” its role is more open to dispute. I won’t go too far into the different theories here, but the theories I’ve read range from that it plays no role at all, to the notion that without “inner language”, no planning nor direct recall of experience is possible. We would simply be living in the present, trying to make the most of it based on the general but not specific experience we have accumulated in our lives.

At first I was a little skeptical of the importance of language in thinking, but the more I read and think about it, the more I believe in its central role in human thinking. Words are almost definitely used as references to memories. Try this for an example: Think of a dog. How do you do that without thinking of the word “dog”? Can you imagine? Of course a picture of a dog, hearing a bark or encountering a real live dog would get you there, but in the absence of those it is hard to imagine how you would call a dog to your mind without using the word “dog” as a reference. And what do we do to memorize things? We utter them over and over as if to imprint them thoroughly into our heads.
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Man or a mouse

Emergence, english

Few things amuse me more than pointing out to people how predictable we humans are. Our imprinted view of ourselves as almost not a part of the animal kingdom is of course very arrogant. Our animal-like behavior is however often quite apparent and one of the best examples is in crowd movement. Pictures from malls and crowded streets often eerily resemble ants working mindlessly in their colony.

Nature Science Update reports yesterday on the use of mice to simulate people trying to escape in a panic situation. The research, conducted by Caesar Saloma and colleagues at the University of the Philippines is studying escaping mice to help improve computer models of escape in panic situations.
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Shark Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition

Biomimicry, english

At the Sydney Olympics in 2000, 28 of 33 Olympic Gold Medals were earned in Speedo Fastskin, a swimsuit overall that reduces water’s drag on the swimmer by 3%. The overalls lowered swimming times of professional swimmers by some 7.5%. The suit’s fluid dynamics are based on sharks’ skin, a design that has turned many fish and the occasional Australian surfer into tasty dinner for the shark family (class actually).

The Fastskin is an excellent example of successful biomimicry (see glossary), where someone has studied a good “design” in nature and mimicked it to create something useful, in this case a fabric with desirable qualities. Biomimicry is more common than people might think and affects things we use everyday.
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