From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 21:33:42 MDT
[rhinoceros]
I am still not so sure that we are going to have spirothetes in the forseeable future. I did take a look at the Imagination Engines site. Well, that "corporation" seems to be a one man show run by a guy called Dr. Stephen Thaler (some other names are mentioned as "familiar with IEI technologies"). He doesn't seem to have so high claims:
http://www.imagination-engines.com/gunn.htm
Gunn Control: The Emerging Intelligence and Its Critical Look at Us
Stephen Thaler, Imagination Engines, Inc.
<snip>
Supremely abhorrent to Gunn’s arguments is the recently elucidated fact that such Creativity Machines generate concepts at tempos which quantitatively agree with those measured in a multitude of human test subjects (Thaler, S.L., 1996). For both silicon and meat machines (humans) this ‘prosody’ or rhythm of thought is identical, regardless of topic or the details of artificial or biological network construction. Imagine that. The supremely sublime musical quality of human cognition and speech is duplicated by a virtual machine run by chaos! Thus any connectionist simulation (or better, any connectionist hardware implementation) generating human speech will not have a dry, mechanical intonation, as popularized by Hollywood, but the supposedly ineffable flare and color of lively human narrative. Sorry, Susan. A simulation has captured something sacred.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
If we accept that proper measurements have been done and put aside the part about "a virtual machine run by chaos", it seems that his best claim is that the machines can do as well as humans do in a specialized field.
But things get weird when he roams in the realms of philosphy:
http://www.imagination-engines.com/devolution/devo.htm
The Fragmentation of the Universe and the Devolution of Consciousness
1996, Stephen L. Thaler, Imagination Engines, Inc.
Abstract: Contrary to the popular notion that consciousness is the result of a noble evolutionary process, I speculate that this rather ill-defined concept and phenomenon may be the result of the fragmentation of an otherwise completely connected and totally ‘feeling’ universe. As various regions of this universe topologically pinch-off from the whole, connection-sparse boundaries form over which sporadic and impoverished information exchange takes place. Supplied with only scanty clues about the state of the external world, abundant internal chaos drives these small parallel processing islands into multiple ‘interpretations’ of the environment in a process we identify with perception. With further division of these regions by insulating partitions, the resulting subregions activate to lend multiple interpretation to the random activations of others in a manner reminiscent of internal imagery. The spontaneous invention of significance by this weakly coupled assembly of simple computational units to its own o
verall collective behavior is what we have grown to recognize as biological consciousness. We thereby come to view human cortical activity as a highly degraded approximation to the original and prototypical cosmic connectivity.
<snip>
If chance mishaps occur within any such cluster, so that it attempts to preserve its overall topological boundary with the universe at large, then such a colony will become resistant to recombination and reabsorption with the cosmic background. In pursuing this tendency toward self-preservation, emergent features may include the recruitment of subclusters into organs for interaction and manipulation of its immediate environment, limbs for locomotion, and internal organs for its internal management and reproduction. That is, sparing the usual Darwinistic discourse, the inorganic clusters will evolve into the more complex systems that our parents told us were ‘alive’ and ‘organic.’
In surviving the encroachment of the environment, those biological organisms that can enrich their internal connections will endow themselves with the ability to anticipate external activity and hence threats to their existence (i.e., preservation of their boundaries). To achieve this end, the raw connectionistic forces present within the primordial universe may undergo a reshuffling from the various forces at a distance into an electrochemical system. One result we know as the primate species homo sapiens, within which roughly 100 billion cortical neurons and their approximately 100 trillion interconnections form a model of the external universe.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]If I have ever seen a... well, never mind.
To demonstrate the creativity of his patented neural networks, the author often refers to art:
<snip>
For more subjective problems, as in musical composition (Thaler, 1994), we may expose the first net or "imagination engine" to sundry examples of accepted melodies. As the random perturbations infiltrate the net, new candidate melodies emerge, generally obeying the constraints dictating what statistically constitutes culturally accepted music. The second patrolling network or "alert associative center," trained by exposure to the likes and dislikes of a panel of musical aficionados, may now filter out only the most appealing songs from the conceptual stream, either playing them in real time, or storing them for later retrieval.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
or, in the first article:
<snip>
Gunn likewise reveals her unfamiliarity with modern day AI by not realizing that ‘analogic’ computing has arrived and matured. To use one of the above ‘sublime’ examples, a network may view examples of both paintings and the consensus response of humans to them. The net self-organizes to associate a given pattern of pigment with the most likely opinion about that pattern. In fact, using a network one may associate anything with anything else, allowing us to conceivable play the "Star Spangled Banner" to a network and having it respond in real time with "Innagodadavida." (We will return to this important neural network feature.)
<snip>
By gradually ‘detraining’ a network by adding perturbations or noise to each of these traces, we gradually soften the underlying rules behind that knowledge domain. We thereby progress from the known, to slight variations on the known, to the absurd as we turn up the noise within the network. In the transition region, we find an abundance of useful notions. (Had we initiated our search with the absurd, we would be inundated with the combinatorial explosion Gunn speaks of.)
It’s also ironic that Gunn should bring up the topic of poetry. One of the first projects assigned to a Creativity Machine was the closely related task of generating new song lyrics. Therefore, after being exposed to about a dozen Christmas carols it synthesized the following very profound and rational phrase:
"All men go to good earth."
Here there is no pretense other than a value judgment on the merit of mud. There is more self-consistency to this statement than any cultural model of near-death experience I have ever read or heard of. People die, they don’t move, and they don’t think, all in spite of anecdotal accounts from damaged cognitive merchandise with limited, culturally-supported analogies.
<snip>
[rhinoceros]
I guess a professional art critic could derive such amazing ideas from any sentence. However, these tasks do not require anything more than specialized machines. I don't doubt that a machine could learn to creatively imitate a current art form. What is missing is art as a form of social consciousness and expression at a given time and place, which is still left to humans, as well as the memetic evolution of art, not randomly, but in response to social evolution.
If we are talking about intelligent machines, what kind of social interactions and conflicts could lead to the developement of their own art by means of the random perturbations described here. Well... their best chance would be if they did not need neither art nor diversity.
And something funny from their "Media Coverage" page.
http://www.imagination-engines.com/corporate.htm#IEI%20MEDIA%20COVERAGE
There are 15 entries to various magazines and Web sites from 1993 to 2002, containing only 5 links. I tried them all, and found
3 broken links
1 working link to a personal Web page, and
1 link to New Scientist 1996, which leads to an article about marijuana!
http://marijuana.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/ai/creativity.html
After editing the URL to
http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/ai/creativity.html
I found an interesting article about AI and neural networks. But it is still funny. Did they use perturbations for their site?
I still think spirothetes are a possibility deserving serious discussion, although I don't believe they are going to appear any time soon. If anything, this discussion may help us understand human behavior better. In this respect, Michelle's response was excelent. But this is enough for today.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25533>
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