AI, Philosophy

Keith Barry and Hacking the brain

2008-08-08T00:53:00.002+02:00

Cognitive Psychology is always fascinating! Keith Barry is an absolute treat to watch.

Numenta Platform

2007-03-03T08:59:00.000+01:00

Interesting article this one:

Jeff Hawkins and Numenta

It reflects both the skepticism that people now display when they learn about something new in the field of AI and the confidence of someone in his technology.

Jeff Hawkins - I wish you all the best with this one.

Emotional Impulse

2006-01-13T10:02:00.000+01:00

Just wondering on how the brain reacts when posed with an emotional pressure. I sense that it decides on what to do first and blinds every other plausible option out of its courses of action matrix. I guess that is why decisions made based on emotion are generally bad or just not properly thought out enough. What is funnier, is the fact that after you have simmered down or shall I say, cooled down and think it through you come up with amazing things that you should have said or done in the first place. It never strikes us before, does it?! I guess throughout the human evolution the ones that have survived are the ones that have been driven by impulse rather than the ones waiting to pause, think and then act! Picture this, two characters, one Intelligent Human and the other the Impulsive Human in primitive age.

Intelligent Human: Look there is some rustling in the bush!

Impulsive Human: Yup, I am outta here! Running for the tree there!

Intelligent Human (still standing there looking at the bush): Let us take this one step at a time! Now how big can a thing be to cause so much noise! Hmm....Damn! Its a lion! Game over! Intelligent one gets eaten!

Impulsive Human (Peeping from the tree above): Bye Bye Friend! Gosh! I am good!

So as you can see, the impulsive ones survived and hence our nature of acting stupid under any kind of emotional pressure.

Coefficient of reorganization and intelligent systems

2005-11-02T15:08:00.000+01:00

For long now, we have known and acknowledged that human brain is a self organizing map. The speed and depth of the re-organization or shall I say reconfigurability of the mental map slows down with age. That is why, we always say, that kids learn faster than the adults. I was recently pondering on these lines to once again differentiate between the intelligent and the not so gifted individuals. With the mental maps, we hold faiths and beliefs that allow for some rigidity in our behavior. You don't want to be dealing with a person who behaves very differently every time you meet just because he/she is learning do you?! But at the same time the difference in behavior is accepted in case of a child since we attribute it to learning or growing. I believe that as we grow older we inculcate so many faiths and beliefs that it ultimately starts hindering the re-organization of the mental map itself, slows us down, and makes us more reluctant to accept change. Hence I define, in the true spirit of creativity, a term, "coefficient of reorganization". It merely indicates the capacity of an individual to revise his/her beliefs based on exposure to new information. Higher the coefficient more the reconfigurability of the mental map. It appears that intelligent people generally posses higher coefficients of reorganization thus making them more adaptable to change. This is not a rule of thumb though and is completely based on my observations of the world I live in. Nevertheless, I believe this is one of the possible parameters that can be used in defining intelligent systems.

Latent Genius in everybody

2005-04-05T09:57:00.000+02:00

I have been observing this strange phenomenon in humans for quite some time but was not sure if I was getting it right. It has taken me very long to convince myself of the theory that I am about to propound here. I believe that there is a latent genius in everybody. Yes - that includes you. As most of you perhaps know, our brain is based on neural networks or network of cells. I am beginning to realize that the connections are so fuzzy in the brain that it is very very tough for anyone to predict one's capability in anything to any amount of precision. This ties back to my original theory that intelligence is not measurable at all. Coming back to my latent genius thread, I feel that everybody has an unrealized potential in their areas of competence. By areas of competence, I do not mean the area you work in. It could be anything - a software professional's flair for music, a construction worker's flair for painting, etc. This area of competence is in turn dependent on the structural makeup of the brain. The better the brain is geared towards the activity, more the unrealized potential. Notice, that I am constantly referring to this potential as 'unrealized'. This is because I am talking about people who are unaware of this functionality in their brains. People who have realized their potential are either prodigies (who realized this at a very early age) or are proclaimed genius in their fields. It is in this spirit, I appeal to everyone reading this to take time to evaluate their areas of competence within the brain and leverage it to utmost use. Needless to say, I hope you always use it for the good. All the best with the effort.

Humans and the attention syndrome

2005-01-30T06:57:00.000+01:00

Humans love attention. There is just no doubt about that. When you go to a party, you want everybody to come and talk to you. You want to be the center of attraction. But funny as it may sound, if everybody wants the same thing then we enter the tricky situation of not knowing who makes the first move. That is, who would first go to the other person and initiate a conversation. In my humble analysis, I have understood that people of outgoing nature initiate conversations well (as it is expected of them!) and then once they know that they have set the ball rolling, they go back into a shell. This is when I see others (I personally call them attention feeders) who want to be part of the conversation and thus make an impression on others and start talking around the initiator. This is where things can go out of hand. Why? Because this is where the class of people I dread can monopolize the conversation. They are called "Intellectual Masturbators"!

These are people who are more than willing to demonstrate their knowledge about something or the other irrespective of any need for the same. They love to monologue and expose their intellectual self to the entire world. There are times that I do not mind to be monologued but then this phenomenon clashes with the attention syndrome. Obviously if one person talks all the time, the attention is not being shared by the other attention feeders. Thus throwing them out of the game.

Through this writing, it is my attempt to help all the intellectual "you-know-what"s. I want them to realize that attention is a common pursuit among all other mortals and it is important that they allow it to be shared.

Is Music a Language?

2005-01-07T14:29:00.000+01:00

I love music - Classical, Pop, Jazz, Rap, Reggae. All of them in varying degrees ofcourse. Sometimes it even becomes difficult to decide which genre I want to listen to. Anyways, here I am pondering about Music in general and it struck me today that Music is actually very expressive just like Vocabulary of any Language. You have different styles of music for different occasions. Some tunes sound divine and soft, some sound sad, some sound happy and chirpy while some others can even sound cruel and rude! I could find so much similarity between music and language that I have stopped distinguishing between the two now which as you might have deduced already answers the title of my article.

For example, Music has a vocabulary (in terms of chords) and Language has a vocabulary too. Music has a grammar (tonalities, etc) and Language has it too. Another interesting note about their similarity is that good music and good language leave a better (a.k.a happier) impresssion on the listener than bad music and bad language (although bad music is a very subjective call and varies from person to person).

Now for my final blow! In the spirit of going overboard with my argument I can also conclude that Music happens to be the only universal human language of our planet. I obviously do not mean to imply that music everywhere in the world is the same but music as a phenomenon binds all and can even be used to communicate emotions where other verbal or sign based human languages fail!

Free from Bias - Does it exist?!

2004-11-09T13:50:00.000+01:00

Bias is an intriguing part of human nature. It is very tough for anyone to claim that he/she is free from bias since that is a form of bias too! So I tend to evaluate this phenomenon as a Catch-22 like situation whereby one leads to the other. Another important aspect of bias is that it can never be disassociated with what is commonly now known as 'mindset'. Bias is the foundation on which mindset rests. Without bias there is no mindset and a mindset implies that there is bias.

The dictionary meanings of the two are as follows:

mindset - A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person's responses to and interpretations of situations.

bias - A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment. (source: dictionary.com)

As the dictionary aptly puts it, bias is related to inclination whereas mindset is related to attitude or disposition. Does this then imply that if someone is so called free from bias then he/she is free from mindset also? Sadly this is not true. It is well recognized that analytical thinking is a form of mindset too. It requires practice and tends to become an attitude element of human behavior rather than something that is excercised at will. This clearly implies that all human thoughts are seeded or predetermined in a fashion that we cannot comprehend since you cannot see what is outside the box if you are part of it!

This brings us to realize that the human thought is better looked at as a fabric rather than a process with a predefined outcome.

Logic Vs Emotion

2004-10-18T13:07:00.000+02:00

If you were given an option to act logically or emotionally to a situation - which one would you choose?

I believe most people would respond logically but in reality people do not care to make the conscious choice of choosing logic over emotion at any time. A stranger in trouble is generally rescued by some other stranger unless the rescuer feels that it may be a risk for him/her also (sometimes actually people go against this rule also and go on to do a selfless act) even though it might not fetch anything for the rescuer. Logically speaking, Why would someone even think of doing something for a stranger? The answer is, it is emotions that make us humans - a living organism that can take rational or even irrational decisions. It is emotions that make us detest any tragic event in any part of the world - be it the school mishap in Beslan, Russia or 9/11 in the US, logic alone would make us act and react like machines and destroy the concept of society by being insensitive to the losses of perfect strangers. This argument by the way is also used against humans sometimes by the AI lobbyists citing that machines are better off in some situations than humans since they can work off real facts instead of doing something stupid under pressure. Being an AI enthusiast myself, I must confess I am biased towards such an argument in favor of the lobbyists but still cannot help wondering what it could be like if AI could achieve something near emotion (something shown in I, Robot movie)? I wonder if something like that is possible at all the reason being I do not think emotions can be represented in terms of logic and hence cannot be represented in the machine. Does this mean that humans would always remain so called "flawed" with emotions compared to any decent robot? I detest using the term flawed myself since humans have the rare ability to get through situations where a robot would not even make an attempt after calculating the probability of it getting through with it. So in my opinion, emotions are what give humans the edge over any advancement we would make on the AI front. You can have the most advanced humanoid robot cleaning your rooms but you certainly cannot dream of having robots replacing humans anytime.

Technology - Mayhem!

2004-09-06T10:22:00.000+02:00

There are not many times that one would debate the very reason for existence of technology and its benefits. But sometimes one cannot help oneself to not debate the current state of the same. Questions like: Why did we want to have technology? Which purpose did it serve? Was it worth it? Is it moving in the right direction? Questions galore, one cannot answer all of them at one go so let me try to cover each one of the aspects one baby step(!) at a time.

Why did we want to have technology?
We wanted to have technology because we wanted to ease our daily chores somehow. We started simple, I do not think we ever intended to make a robot to substitute most of the things we do but we were looking to have one gadget for each task and that's all!

Which purpose did it serve?
Well, It served the purpose of letting us constantly innovate in order to meet our goal number 1 which was to automate. Nevertheless the more we tried to automate we apparently have added more complexity to life too. The Nomad man was one cool existence whereby we only did four things, Sleep, Sex, Hunt and Eat. I cannot fathom one reason why humans ever tried to improve upon that routine! Suddenly he wanted a spear, then slowly he craved for locomotion, and the list goes on.

Was it worth it?
Of course it was worth it! If it was not for technology I would not have a job! On a serious note, I look at the current state of technology with apathy and wonder that we might never be able to break the vicious circle of needs and gadgets. First we wanted music then we wanted a walkman and now we want an Mp3 player with an online link to download new music on the fly! Will it ever end? I have no reason to think it will.

Is it moving in the right direction?
If you look at the current state of technology from a dispassionate point of view (Humans are known to start associating emotions with their gadgets by the way!) then you would realize that we are in a complete state of chaos. There are, at any point in time, millions of gadgets doing rounds in the market serving very little to the real goal number 1 of automation. So the answer to the above question I guess is, it is not. But the vision for its future looks better. With industry heavyweights like Microsoft and Sun wanted to drive the future of automation into integration of all the devices so that automation starts appealing to humans as one logical step instead of multiple wayward steps is a promising notion. Hopefully they will pull it off and we will have more coherence in the advancement someday soon.

Project Management - what can we be doing wrong?!

2004-07-28T09:32:00.000+02:00

Sometimes I wonder if anybody ever has understood what project management is all about! As long as we do forward scheduling with a deadline in mind and execute tasks sequentially we should logically be getting there on time but that seldom happens! Is there any reason for us to believe that project scheduling ever works. Yes it does, but only in cases where the resources are only machines, humans are either too complicated or too stupid to stick to a schedule and when they do try to do that, they act like dumb machines! So we probably need to start considering backward scheduling with human behavior in mind rather than forward scheduling treating humans as machines.

On Human Relationships

2004-07-06T10:11:00.000+02:00

It is pretty amazing when you come to think of the very nature of humans when it comes to relationships. Human Relationships, in my humble opinion is very different than any other animal relationships on our planet earth. The tendency of the human to get into a relationship seems to have evolved from the time humans were nomads. The habit of recognizing and forming bonds with other humans/animals has come a long way in the human civilization. Although our relationships are complex they can still be divided into two basic forms: The ones that we choose to have and the other that we do not. The ones that we choose to have are the ones that we enjoy being in, they are primarily based on love and dependencies rather than just dependency. I would cite marital relation as one relation that most of the humans actually view as a wanted or chosen relationship. The relationship between the parent and the child is debatable though. As per my modern world observations, Parent/Child relationships are chosen from the parent side and dependency driven from the child's side. No matter how you might want to argue, relationships are generally viewed differently (in some cases more than the others) by both the parties involved. A workplace relationship also falls under the category of not by choice relationships. What is intriguing though is that only humans have shown this tendency to form explicit long term relationships. All other animals even if they form societies do not (seem to) form long term relationships that are as interwoven as ours. So what bearing does a relationship have over human existence? Does it serve any other purpose apart from making our lives complicated?

This is something that requires more pragmatic analysis than one might imagine. As many I have observed might argue that relationships are the very basic element that drives the human collaboration and hence the progress made by the race, history, reveals a very different concept. There have been no wars observed until now among any other living creature on earth apart from humans. If humans lacked the ability to form relationships they would never have any attachments/emotions in their lives thus averting the very need to enforce their superiority or just make their point! Yes, there are good sides to relationships too, the joy of one can be best expressed by a couple in love or by two people who collaborated at work to achieve greatness in their field yet it cannot debase the argument about the value a relationship adds versus the misery it can cause, either for you or for me or worse still for all of us.

AI : Why are we not getting there?!

2004-07-01T10:24:00.000+02:00

I have often wondered why AI could never cross the barriers of sci-fi and become a reality when it sounds so logical. Why could we never realize anything that AI promised when the scientists first proposed the concept? The crux of the problem lies in the very definition of the concept itself. If intelligence were to be definable and a process could be established for achieving the same then why would we ever have a mediocre person in the world. Isn't it very obvious that there is no practical all encompassing definition of intelligence yet??!! Why do we even try to analyze intelligence as an entity as compared to it being an attribute. Is intelligence related to the development of the brain? Is it related to pure exposure and the whims and fancies of hebbian learning?! If it was, then how and why do we distinguish between two regular students of the same class? It is plain simple that intelligence cannot be algorithimized. It is at best describable in terms of patterns of thoughts through the brain whereby a better quality of intelligence optimizes the result better. How could a thought pattern be defined then? Why can't two thought patterns be similar? They could be similar only when the guiding principle of genetics of the organism is similar. Now coming back to the primordial question - why have we not been able to realize AI? Because we never tried to understand how the brain works in conjunction with the genetic code of the organism. We always tried to generalize the behavior of the brain and tried to mathematicalize based on assumptions of what a complex system like it could function like. Another approach tried was of trying to understand how the brain learns logic and trying to package it in a generic form as a form of intelligence. The answer to true AI does not lie in generalization but in the realization of the fact that genetic variance and control applied to the evolution of the each unique system such as an artificial brain is one of the most logical approaches to closing the gap between the artificial and the real masterpiece of nature - the brain!