Graham Glass, etc.

Amazing Ant Architecture

A colony of Ants exhibits most, if not all, the characteristics of a Mind. Each ant performs a fairly simple duty, but they coordinate in creative ways to accomplish higher-level tasks.

The following video illustrates the kind of architecture that a colony Mind is capable of. Be sure to watch it to the end when the full extend of the Ant nest is revealed.

Brains look Cool

Check out this map of brain internal wiring, creating using MRI scans. The original technical paper is here.

CyberBiology

This video demonstrates some of the movement methods that evolved via Darwin@Home via a process of mutation and selection. Many of the techniques are used by actual animals. I think it's one of the best ways to understand the process of evolution.

Here are some more creatures that evolved in a virtual environment:

Making Minds, Part 4

In the last part of this series I listed some of the ways that a digital mind could be better than a human mind. In this part, I describe some ways to figure out how a Mind works.

There are at least 3 ways to gather clues about how a Mind works:

1. Observe how it works through various experiments. You can perform the experiements on other people or on yourself; one of the benefits of experimenting on yourself is that you can listen/watch some of the internal workings of your mind.

2. Probe a brain and observe its inner workings. Technology for doing this is rapidly evolving, and it's easy to imagine a future scanner that could make a very high-resolution movie of a brain and its activity in realtime. Correlating such movies with the stimuli and responses that caused the brain activity would allow us to gain a lot of knowledge of how the bits and pieces work and interact with each other.

3. Postulate that a Mind is a general concept that is not limited to biological brains but instead is an emergent property of a complex system. For example, the Mind of a country emerges from the interactions between its citizens, geography, infrastructure, history, culture and other countries. Similarly, the Mind of a company emerges from the interactions between its employees, infrastructure, customers, competitors and the marketplace.

I believe that the best way to understand a Mind is to gather clues from all three approaches. Personally, I feel that their relative importance is 20%, 30%, 50% and so that's how I'm dividing up my A/I research time.

The next few parts of this series will list some of the insights from each approach.

White Cell vs. Bacteria

This amazing video shows a white cell hunting and then digesting a bacteria. Cells are far more powerful and complex than most people realize.

Falcon1 Flies!

Falcon1 is the first privately funded rocket to make it into space. It was created by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, and proves that Space exploration is no longer limited to governments.

Making Minds, Part 3

In the last part of this series I listed the main reasons I'd love to try and make a Mind. In this part I list some of the features I'd like a Mind to have.

What kind of features would I like a Mind to have?

How about:

• ability to remember things
• ability to model the environment, including itself
• a values system that assigns goodness/badness to various states
• the ability to be encoded digitally for copying/transmission purposes
• hardware independence so the "brain" can be upgraded
• high resolution self-introspection (so the mind can see exactly how it works)
• ability to communicate internal state (bored, happy, frustrated, etc.)
• ability to allocate internal resources effectively (focus of attention)
• ability to resolve constraints (pattern recognition)
• ability to edit itself
• rigorous deduction/inductive reasoning
• understanding of probabilities
• supports multiple data input streams and output streams (audio, video, etc.)
• plugin architecture to accomodate new I/O streams
• partitioning (ability to focus on several things at the same time)

I'm sure I'll think of more features over the next few weeks that I'll add to this list, but I think it's a good start.

The Human brain has some of these features but is unfortunately lacking in some key areas such as the ability to be copied, hardware independence, rigorous reasoning (in most cases), and understanding of probabilities. The book Kluge goes into plenty of detail about the various weaknesses of the Human brain, and I highly recommend it.

Making Minds, Part 2

Why am I interested in trying to make a Mind?

There are at least 4 reasons:

1. It's a fantastic goal, one that would be immensely satisfying to achieve.
2. Digital lifeforms would be much better suited, both intellectually and physically, for long-term exploration of the universe.
3. Our understanding of conciousness and perception would be greatly increased if we were able to create an AI that exhibited these traits.
4. It would have a huge impact on religion. If you can create an AI from scratch, it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that intelligent life does not require a supernatural component.

The next question is: what kind of features should an ideal Mind have?

Amazing Science Experiment

How to Turn "water" into Balls - video powered by Metacafe

Zooming into Concrete

Check out this video - it slowly zooms in on concrete until it reaches the atoms, while verbally explains what we're seeing.

Zoom into Concrete
by Weird_Weird_Science