“It was a true solar-plexus blow, and completely knocked out, Perkins staggered back against the instrument-board. His outflung arm pushed the power-lever out to its last notch, throwing full current through the bar, which was pointed straight up as it had been when they made their landing.” My current research in AI, such as it… Continue reading Natural Language Understanding
Phaedon Avouris, winner of the Feynman Prize in 1999, is head of the nanoscale science and technology group At IBM, which has recently reported significant advances in synthesizing transistors from graphene using conventional lithography methods. IBM Demonstrates Graphene Transistor Twice as Fast as Silicon Graphene transistors promise 100GHz speeds Graphene Transistors that Can Work at… Continue reading Graphene transistor roundup
The first AI blog was written by a major, highly respected figure in the field. It consisted, as a blog should, of a series of short essays on various subjects relating to the central topic. It appeared in the mid-80s, just as the ARPAnet was transforming over into the internet. The only little thing I… Continue reading The first AI blog
So far, in making my case that AI is (a) possible and (b) likely in the next decade or two, I’ve focused on techniques which are or easily could be part of a generally intelligent system, and which will clearly be enhanced by the two orders of magnitude increase in processing power we expect from… Continue reading Analogical Quadrature
AI researchers in the 80s ran into a problem: the more their systems knew, the slower they ran. Whereas we know that people who learn more tend to get faster (and better in other ways) at whatever it is they’re doing. The solution, of course, is: Duh. the brain doesn’t work like a von Neumann… Continue reading Associative memories
Bayer (the same company that makes the aspirin) is now beginning to manufacture multi-walled carbon nanotubes in industrial quantities. The pilot plant will produce 200 tons per year, and the market is expected to grow at 25% per year. The MWCNTs are for materials use, meaning mostly fiber-reinforced composites, e.g. airplanes, tennis racquets, arrows, and… Continue reading Baytubes
So we will take it as given, or at least observed in some cases and reasonably likely in general, that AI can, at the current state of the programming art, handle any particular well-specified task, given enough (human) programming effort aimed at that one task. We can be a bit more specific about what “well-specified”… Continue reading Learning and search
The brothers Montgolfier invented the hot air balloon upon the observation that smoke rises, and thus they figured that if they could catch it in a bag, the bag would be pulled upward. Hot air ballooning is quite popular today; people think of balloons as being quaint and pretty and natural, or at least more… Continue reading Steam balloons
We’ve had a fair amount of interest in the Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prizes, mostly from RepRap types. They pointed out that we had a slight incompatibility in the specification of the open source requirements with those of the RepRap community itself. We’ve changed the requirements to allow either BSD or GPL. To make… Continue reading Gada Prize update
At the Foresight congerence special-interest lunch on IQ tests for AI, Monica Anderson suggested a test involving separating text which had had spaces and punctuation removed, back into words. As a somewhat whimsical version of the test, I suggested the Sigil of Scoteia: In case you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s the frontispiece of the novel… Continue reading The Sigil of Scoteia
