According to a press release (13 March 2002), researchers at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island have demonstrated direct, real-time brain control of the movement of the cursor in a computer display. Their report appears in the March 14 issue of Nature.
Read more for details and links to additional coverage of the intriguing research.
from the Automated-engineering dept.
According to a press release (22 January 2002), a new method promises to change how companies create materials — using artificial intelligence and a technique that simultaneously tests thousands of formulations — dramatically speeding up the discovery process. The system, which combines hardware and software, was developed by Jochen Lauterbach, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
According to the press release, Lauterbach has developed an automated system that uses combinatorial chemistry, in which equipment systematically creates and tests thousands of chemical samples at the same time using thousands of tiny plastic beads coated with different catalysts. All of the beads, each bearing its own individual catalyst, are tested simultaneously. The system then uses infrared sensor technology to quickly screen each sample to evaluate its performance. A small percentage of the catalysts created are effective. Information is collected from both the best catalysts and the failed catalysts and fed into software that employs hybrid neural networks and genetic algorithms to mimics the logical and intuitive thought processes of chemists. Even though the majority of the catalysts created are not effective, the software uses the wealth of information gained from those failures to come up with entirely new catalysts.
from the unnerving-thoughts dept.
Senior Associate Brad Templeton, also chairman of Electronic Frontier Foundation, has been thinking about AI through uploading: "However, the uploading scenario presents a rather disturbing conclusion. The first super-beings may not be based on humans at all, but instead may be apes. In the course of modern science, it is always the case that we experiment with animals first, years before we attempt anything on people. It's the ethical way, and in many cases the only legal way. As such, as we develop the technology to scan or convert an existing brain into an artificial form, we'll try this first on animals. We'll start with lower ones, and then work up to our closest relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo…Indeed, the software of this chimp brain might be made available for free distribution. An "open source" ape, for all to experiment on." He makes a plausible case; worth reading.
from the basic-motivations dept.
An article in Technology Research News ("Software agents evolve purpose", by Kimberly Patch, 2 January 2002) describes work by researchers from the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Science have shown that purposeful behavior can emerge naturally in a software simulation that has simple software beings, or agents, evolving over many generations. The researchers described these evolved behaviors as purposeful motivation. The researchers say the simulation showed that a system that uses motivations to control simple reflexes can emerge in an evolutionary process. Having motivation was an advantage likely to be passed on to subsequent generations of the agents, said Mikhail Burtsev, one of the researchers. "The population of agents with motivations had obvious selective advantages compared with the population of agents without motivations," he said.
The researchers began with a small population of simple, identical neural-net based agents that could move, eat (gain energy from the environment), and mate with other agents to reproduce. The agent population as a whole had one goal — survival. This goal required individuals to push toward two basic subgoals — to replenish energy, and to reproduce, said Burtsev. The agents evolved to seek out [food] and other agents. "The most important thing here is that we didn't force agents to follow these needs. The needs were prescribed explicitly by [the] environment, and only agents that had these two needs could successfully undergo selection pressure," said Burtsev.
The article also contains comments from another artificial life researcher, who expressed some skepticism at the interpretation that the agents had evolved motivated behavior; rather, he said, it may simply be the result of the neural net having better access to information about the environment and acting on it more effectively.
The Russian researchersí technical paper ("A Life Model of Evolutionary Emergence of Purposeful Adaptive Behavior") is available online at the Lawrence National Laboratory archive, as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file.
According to a press release (19 December 2001), researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center have performed the world's most complicated quantum-computer calculation to date. They used a container full of billions of custom-designed molecules to create a seven-qubit quantum computer that solved a simple version of the numerical factoring problem at the heart of many of today's data-security cryptographic systems. Reporting their work in the 20 December 2001 issue of Nature, the team says they have provided the first demonstration of "Shor's Algorithm" — a method developed in 1994 by AT&T scientist Peter Shor for using a quantum computer to find a number's factors. Today, factoring a large number is so difficult for conventional computers — yet so simple to verify — that it is used by many cryptographic methods to protect data.
The simplest meaningful instance of Shor's Algorithm is finding the factors of the number 15, which requires a seven-qubit quantum computer. IBM chemists designed and made a new molecule that has seven nuclear spins — the nuclei of five fluorine and two carbon atoms — which can interact with each other as qubits, be programmed by radio frequency pulses and be detected by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments similar to those commonly used in hospitals and chemistry labs. The IBM scientists controlled a vial of a billion billion (1018) of these molecules so they executed Shor's algorithm and correctly identified 3 and 5 as the factors of 15. "Although the answer may appear to be trivial, the unprecedented control required over the seven spins during the calculation made this the most complex quantum computation performed to date," a member of the research team said.
Additional coverage of the research can be found in the New York Times and an article from the San Francisco Chronicle reprinted on the Small Times website.
from the computational-neuroscience dept.
According to a press release (17 December 2001) researchers funded by the Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) are working to reverse engineer certain brain functions in order to produce a machine or system that might mimic some of the brainís capabilities. They announce they have been able to simulate mammalian brain function using biologically realistic, highly detailed computer models of individual brain neurons and their assemblies. From this research they are learning how the architecture and physiological properties of cells in the brain (the primary visual cortex) integrate visual cues for target recognition.
ìRight now weíre building a cellular-level model of a small piece of visual cortex,î says Dr. Leif Finkel, head of the University of Pennsylvaniaís Neuroengineering Research Lab. ìItís a very detailed computer simulation which reflects with some accuracy at least the basic operations of real neurons.î His colleague, Kwabena Boahen, is building VLSI computer chips that reproduce cortical wiring and many of the properties of the cells. ìHe has a chip that accurately models the retina and produces output spikes that closely match real retinae. We hope someday that these can be used as retinal implants.î
Nick Bostrom writes "I have a new paper, setting forth what I call the 'Simulation Argument'. It's located at http://www.simulation-argument.com
ABSTRACT. This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the transhumanist dogma that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."
from the Light-switch dept.
In a press release (19 November 2001), researchers at the University of Toronto in Canada report they have developed an optical switch that behaves like a transistor. The researchers speculate that such a switch may provide the means to create quantum computers based on optical information processing techniques.
from the Not-quite-Hari-Seldon dept.
A press release from the New Scientist magazine (27 October 2001) reports researchers at Harvard and Ohio State Universities have developed what they term a "conflict barometer" gives a week-by-week measure of the scale of civil unrest. The system is based on a computer program that analyses several thousand news stories from Reuters daily, which classifies events into about 200 categories. These are then used to calculate the proportions of events involving civil protests, repressive government actions and outbreaks of violence. These three factors are fed into an equation to give a nation's "conflict carrying capacity" or CCC. The researchers reported their results in The Journal of Conflict Resolution.
According to a press release on 10 September 2001, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Department of Defense, is funding a five-year project that will establish a Quantum Architecture Research Center between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California campuses at UC Davis and UC Berkeley. The project will examine possible methods to build a super fast computer that uses the properties of quantum physics. Primary researchers include computer scientists Fred Chong of the University of California, Davis, Isaac Chuang at MIT and John Kubiatowicz at UC Berkeley. Additonal details can be found on the project website, hosted at MIT.
