10 Sep 2009
Language is beautiful. It is one of the easiest methods of communicating something lengthy. As one may know, images express a thousand words, film may even express more, but both are ineffective when it comes to communicating something fast and immediately to someone (unless you have a polaroid of course).
English, particularly, is much more complex than I thought. As you may already know, I am rather _into _AI. One of the fields of AI is Natural Language Processing which involves speech recognition, syntactic and semantic organisation, separating words into parts of speech, language understanding, and finally speech generation, amongst others.
I genuinely used to believe there were only 8 parts of speech in English: Verbs, Adverbs, Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, Preopsitions, Conjunctions and Interjections. I stand corrected by Wikipedia. There are about 17 different types if we classify them correctly.
The open word classes:
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Interjections
- Nouns
- Verbs (except auxilliary verbs)
According to Wikipedia, “an open class (or open word class) is a word class that accepts the addition of new items, through such processes as compounding, derivation, coining, borrowing, etc.”
The closed word classes:
- Auxiliary verbs
- Clitics
- Coverbs
- Conjunctions
- Determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
- Particles
- Measure words
- Adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
- Preverbs
- Pronouns
- Contractions
- Cardinal numbers
According to Wikipedia, “a closed class (or closed word class) is a word class to which no new items can normally be added, and that usually contains a relatively small number of items.”
Now, I was not aware of such classification, but this for sure must have an impact on language parsers. I am currently starting to write my first Language Parser, and thought I would start out with an SQL dictionary structure. I will be posting my findings in this blog as I get along with this.
01 Sep 2009
Today I read an article about A.I. on NewScientist called “Why AI is a Dangerous Dream”. I thought the article was partially biased. In my perspective the interviewee, a robotics expert named Noel Sharkey has lost faith in AI which can be confirmed by a statement on the article that reads:
“Robotics expert Noel Sharkey used to be a believer in artificial intelligence. So why does he now think that AI is a dangerous myth that could lead to a dystopian future of unintelligent, unfeeling robot carers and soldiers?”
I have dreamed of AI since childhood, creating flooders, scrollers, and chatter bots. I once developed a complete TCP/IP application using the MSNP8 to log on to the MSN Messenger network with a bot that would simulate intelligent talk. I have always been fond of the Turing Test. I even held a small conversation over email once with John McCarthy. I know this does not make me an expert in AI, however, it does make me an AI enthusiast.
There were two segments of the article that really put me off:
“Are machines capable of intelligence? If we are talking intelligence in the animal sense, from the developments to date, I would have to say no. For me AI is a field of outstanding engineering achievements that helps us to model living systems but not replace them. It is the person who designs the algorithms and programs the machine who is intelligent, not the machine itself.”
Anything that can be defined as a physical or logical entity or construct can be emulated. Anything that can be emulated could work equally or even be superior to the original. If a machine can emulate the logical processes of the human brain, then it can be said that the machine is intelligent.
“Are we close to building a machine that can meaningfully be described as sentient? I’m an empirical kind of guy, and there is just no evidence of an artificial toehold in sentience. It is often forgotten that the idea of mind or brain as computational is merely an assumption, not a truth. When I point this out to “believers” in the computational theory of mind, some of their arguments are almost religious.”****
AI is beautiful. It let’s us, as humans, test ourselves to our limit. It allows us to analyze how the human system works, and attempt to imitate our inner construction, our mind. It allows us to try to break the barriers, and build machines that are capable of so much more than us, and so much faster.
I am aware that AI often becomes somewhat of a cult. Sometimes it attracts the same type of people that follow all of Steve Job’s life events, spam online forums and blogs that post articles against the iPhone, and get hard-ons at a keynote. I am aware that AI can be a “believers” dream, but I am also aware that not everyone is like this. Not everyone takes their beliefs to a “religious” level. I am aware that to accomplish goals you have to be down to earth.
For starters there is Strong AI and Weak AI. When you talk about AI, you should generally make a point as to which type of AI you are talking about. AI related to specific tasks, or AI related to the reproduction of general human intelligence. It makes a huge difference to an article about the topic.
I believe in both. The proper coordination of the different Weak AI segments _can _lead to a fully sentient being. And to study one topic, you must be knowledgeable in all surrounding topics.
If the human mind is nothing more than neurons passing on electric signals which can be described as thinking, and thinking is the mechanism that allows us to communicate, and everything we perform in the world is a form of communication, then why shouldn’t a computer be able to be “intelligent”? A computer after all has a heart (PSU), a brain (CPU & HD), a face (LCD), ears (Mic), a mouth (Speakers), eyes (Camera), and can effectively move and communicate through different mechanisms such as robotic limbs, wheels, and other accesories.
Human beings consistently change their thoughts, ideas, knowledge and personality in the same way a computer program could re-compile itself to meet new standards and “personality” as has been described by Matt Knox in this article about his days as an adware author.
“Ivan Bowman spends his days as a programmer at iAnywhere Solutions in Waterloo, Ontario, in much the same way his colleagues do. He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers’ offices, attends meetings and hangs out in the kitchen over coffee. About the only thing he can’t do is drink the coffee - or touch anything, for that matter. It’s not that Bowman doesn’t have hands or a mouth; they’re just in Halifax, Nova Scotia, along with the rest of his body, about 840 miles (1,350km) away.”
So we have also got that point covered. We can interact hundreds of miles away at an office using a coat rack on wheels as described in this article.
I am aware that these are not true applications of AI as a whole. But we have strived in different areas, creating artificial limbs that move like an animal’s paw or a human’s leg or arm. We have created programs that can re-compile themselves to allow different circumstances to occur, or to “evolve” as we would say. We have created robots that can detect surfaces and objects and go around them. We have stuck computers on coat racks with webcams, microphones and speakers to be able to “live” in an office from hundreds of miles away. We have created chatter bots that are close to beating the turing tests. We have achieved a lot in speech understanding and generation in the past years.
This leads me to say that even though we have not achieved a real strong AI system, we are certainly on the path to producing great results, and who knows, maybe in a few years we will have discovered the pathway that will lead us to develop a remarkable electronic clone of us.
I believe alchemists have ever pursued the dream of living forever. But A.I. has given us the dream of creating intelligent copies of us. I believe that this dream will eventually allow us to download our minds into intelligent beings, technically allowing us to live forever. And while we might have not found the philosophers stone, we will have found the elixir of life.
06 Aug 2009
My sister stumbled upon a very interesting website today, and so I would like to share this with my readers (and listeners).
This is a website related to music. In it, you have many videos available which produce sounds, and together, or one by one, create stunning music, in B flat.
I have to say, my utmost respect for those who created this, it is a brilliant experiment, and just stunning that you can play around with music all in one same scale in this way.
Check out the website right here: http://www.inbflat.net/
31 Jul 2009
A few years ago I dreamt of being able to have all this connectivity, lets say, things being published here, automatically-published there, and elsewhere. I knew we were getting there, as I have been configuring my services for the past few months, but I didn’t know we are so advanced.
If I made a rundown or a graph explaining the connectivity between social media sites I currently have, it would grow too large, or the connections would not exactly be easy to draw. * Update: Well I’ve decided to draw it anyway:
For instance: My Youtube is posting to facebook, google reader, twitter and two of my blogs. One of those blogs is lemiffe.com which when receiving a post will alert ping.fm which will then release a post of my new blog post to facebook, twitter, my blog at blogger, myspace, google talk’s status, and quite a few other sites.
Now, the only problem I currently see is the level of redundancy. Sites talked to other sites, which in turn talk to other sites, so whenever these sites provide much more connectivity to other services we might end up in a cyclic-post system in which one service posts to the other which in turn posts back to the first one initiating a never-ending cycle in which the user would have to stop one or the other service manually.
I really believe more insight should be applied, like, verifying the other sites connectivity and checking it will not repost to a site the first site has already posted to. This can be done via pure XML transactions between both sites, I mean, thats what web services are for, right?
Another thought I came up with is a Centralised User Account Service, which deals with the connectivity between users of different sites. Lets say: Gravatar meets facebook and ping.fm. All the services first verify the users information on the Centralised service, then they verify which permissions the user has applied concerning posting, which pages must the service send the new update, video or blog message to, and negotiate it only with the Centralised site, which will in turn send off the appropriate XML for all other “connected” sites.
It’s just a thought, Security-wise I am not sure where this would lead to as very tight security would have to be placed. Gaining access to the account of a user at the Centralised Site would be, well, Armageddon for that user. So probably a tighter security would have to be placed, with 128 big encription, SSL sockets, MD-6, who knows what else, but it’s just a thought anyway.
30 Jul 2009
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about movies lately. Specifically about their impact on our lives. I’ve had a few talks in the past with different people about their views on movies, and the views are quite contrasting. I am talking not only about the violence in films, or pornography, or offence, but about it’s effects on our own minds, and our society as a whole.
Obviously this is such an extensive topic, and I can not board it completely throughout this blog post, nonetheless, I will try to address some of the issues that I have been thinking about lately.
According to Wikipedia, a Film is considered to be the following:
“Film encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects.
Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important artform, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating — or indoctrinating — citizens.”
Now, we can logically infer that when speaking about movies we are talking about all it’s genres and sub-genres, all it’s different forms including B&W film, speechless, etc.
I can logically deduce that humans create films to express feelings they have, feelings we all have. But have we gone too far? I’m not going as far as to call Film stupid, or not an art, but I think we have to make a clear distinction to what is fake and what is real, and to what is tolerable or bearable and what is simply going over the limit.
By typing Violence in Films in Google I get 224,000,000 results. It is obviously a matter of great concern for the public.
“By the time the average U.S. child starts elementary school he or she will have seen 8,000 murders and 100,00 acts of violence on TV.” - New Scientist, 2007
So how exactly does violence, rape, murder, sex, and verbal offence contribute to violence and indecent acts in our society?
This website cites quite a few facts that have studied concerning this topic. It says: Researchers followed 329 subjects over 15 years. They found that those who as children were exposed to violent TV shows were much more likely to later be convicted of crime. Researchers said that, “Media violence can affect any child from any family,” regardless of social class or parenting.
So we can clearly see it has an effect on our lives. What intrigues me the most is why can’t we, as rational human beings, make a distinction between what clearly is supposed to be an art form, and reality. Why do we let a motion picture inflict damage on the progress of our own lives?
“Because ours is a puritanically-based society and we have problems with depictions of sex, we tend to eroticize violence. For many people this creates an unfortunate, often even unconscious, link between sex and violence.” - from “Sex Research, Censorship, and the Law”
I come to think of this as true up to the extent that all our actions are based on what we learn and what we know, and we as human beings learn by seeing and imitating. Following this trend of thought we can infer that as we see from movies, we tend to act accordingly, by the means of learning and practicing.
Therefore I come to the conclusion that we, as a society, are not ready to create our own art forms, and expression, and really understand and act independently to so. In painting, we often let our minds wander off based on the expression, colours and objects depicted in the artist’s creation. May people have commited murder based on this? Indeed it is possible, just as it was also possible to commit murder after reading “The Catcher in the Rye”, so why not?
We, as a society, must first learn to control our bodies, our minds, and our actions before putting ourselves to the test and searching for a medium for expression, and searching for alternate art forms. After all, there is a lot to be learned about murder. Watching crime films, and different genres of films gives a lot of insight as to how the world works, what we are made of, why we do the things we do. Nonetheless, we must learn to control ourselves before being exposed to such material, as the untrained mind will not only obtain knowledge from the good parts of movies, but also will learn from the bad parts, the inmoral parts, the violent parts, etc.
I think we still have a long way, to really learn to think.
- Edit 23/Oct/2012: Changed ”The Catcher and the Rye” to ”The Catcher in the Rye”, thanks Sophia for noticing this.