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The First Truly Thinking Machines
from the artificial-intelligence-that-works dept
Roland Piquepaille writes "Stephen Thaler is the CEO of Imagination Engines, Inc. (IEI) and has designed and patented a computer program called the Creativity Machine. His idea was simple: introduce noise in a rigid rule-based neural network. This noise disrupts the connections and helps generating new ideas. With his Creativity Machine, he invented such things as the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a long and captivating article on the subject, "The machine that invents." Here is the opening paragraph. "Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches." My blog contains more excerpts about this thinking machine." The article is fascinating. You hear stories all the time about artificial intelligence and neural networks, but this is one of the first cases where it seems like that technology is actually working up to the level that some have predicted. Some of the article almost reads in a way that makes me skeptical. It seems too good to be true.
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Bogus!!!!
The bogosity meter just blew off the scale.
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neural nets catch journos
The 'genius' of the inventor in question is his ability to get the press to regurgitate his daft press releases.
The idea of adding noise to electronic circuits, or computer algorithms, is decades old. It’s called ‘dither’. Every music CD you buy has one bits-worth of noise deliberately added into the mix – it makes things sound better. Sure, if you add in enough noise to a neural network it will start spitting out ‘ad hoc’ results. You can get the same effect just by chopping up bits of paper and rearranging the pieces. That’s how David Bowie wrote most of his song lyrics.
I think it was Aldous Huxley, who, when experimenting with hallucinogens, claimed he’d finally understood the very basis of the cosmos. Because he was doing a ‘scientific’ study, he had just enough wherewithall to write down his distilled wisdom. Next day he looked at the paper and it read . .
“When I stand on my toes I can reach the ceiling “
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No Subject Given
The Post-Dispatch seems to have been taken in by a cheap parlor trick. It sounds this guy never bothered to learn about any of the real AI work that has been in this area.
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The Dada Engine
What makes this any different from http://dev.null.org/dadaengine/ ?
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