sent2null space

A r ecently published article   reveals a truth about the cognitive powers of young human babies relative to their primate equal aged cousins but also revealed another tantalizing truth, that the babies had more developed powers of abstract reasoning than children just a few years older. As I read this I was immediately struck with a possible explanation for this which comes out of what has been theorized about how the brain encodes information in neuronal and other connections and how the current field of artificial intelligence is proceeding apace to try to classify various types of identification and categorization problems using algorithms of various types. Classification First, what is classification ? In the machine learning space classification is the process of gathering and sorting by specific attributes of relatedness any given bit of information along some dimension of salience. Classification algorithms take samples of the given data and attempt to make ...

http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/palm-size-drones-buzz-over-battlefield-131105.htm Fast forward: The year is 2432, Sergeant Dunning Spitz is thirsty, he's been on patrol in this  God forsaken hell hole for 6 weeks now and the heat is the one thing he simply can't take. Africa is hot, a kind of hot you remember like no other but Dunning was still thankful...thankful that most of his reconnaissance was being done by proxy of his swarm. See, Dunning is a field Covert Operations specialist (CoPs), he uses his active camo. gear to appear as little more than a shimmer on the soil to those no closer than 10 yards away and he's got a nearly silent robo carrier upon which he is riding...and riding he must....the terrain in this part of Africa is a twisted mess of wet rocks and roots that would have ones feet feeling like they'd been beaten intentionally after only a few hours. But damn there is that heat, as he takes out his canteen to get a sip of Peltier coole...

I recently watched this video interview of MIT researcher Noam Chomsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kICLG4Zg8s#t=1201 It's an interesting interview but my interest was most piqued when he opines on the progress he feels has not been made with regard to language translation. He claims that the current methods are "brute force" methods. It turns out he's completely wrong about the way that language translation works at least as done by Google using their translate tool. Google does not use brute force to do it's translation...instead it uses an iteration about ideas that are exploding in machine learning. In particular statistical learning approaches. Peter Norvig has written a lot (of words and code) explaining how statistical methods can lead to very elegant solutions to extremely human like learning heuristics that come out of code. As lead researcher at Google his approach is quite clear in the function of their translation algorithm which...

These articles chopping up the so called ethical issues of more autonomous systems are often very silly. Every new technology brings with it new patterns of human behavior around those technologies that probe different aspects of human interaction. It has been so from the invention of fire onward...the question is are the new set of questions worth dealing with compared to the old set that existed prior  the invention of the new technology? In a world of self driving cars, few drunks who drive consistently due to alcoholism will be able to cause the deaths of others on the road...the elimination of that landscape of possibility due to the new technology far out weigh in my view any other issue that is pointed out by those attempting to analyze ethically a world filled with  such vehicles. The same I am sure was asked of the use of electric power during the build up of the nation to bury hot lines in the streets and hover them on pole after pole all over the world. I can...