Darwin’s theory of evolution, reinterpreted after the discovery of genes, states that successful genes survive and propagate across generations of living beings. Success is measured by the frequency of genes per generation which is a reflection of how well these genes adapt to – or are selected by - the...
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Super Turing machines and oracles: the making of a artificial mind
A major theoretical - as well as philosophical - problem in Artificial Intelligence is incomputability. Although there are many formal definitions of the concept of incomputability, it really boils down to this: there are many things that the human mind does which cannot be expressed in an algorithmic fashion. The most...
The woman who remembered everything
Human memory is different from computer memory in many important ways. Computers store information in specific locations. While there are ways of storing meta-data with each piece of information, computer memory is very limited when it comes to context. For example, the stored image of your boyfriend may be given...
The Zen of machine intelligence
A recent paper in Science reports an interesting experiment carried out at Princeton using fish and exploring the dynamics of crowd intelligence. Researchers used golden shiners, a strongly schooling fish. They trained a large number of groups to swim toward a blue target, while smaller groups were trained to follow their natural...
Victorian scientific romance and robot apocalypse
The 1800s must have been a great time to live. They mark the beginning of many things we take for granted today; most notably democracy, technological and scientific innovation, globalization and international trade. The British Empire was at its height, people started moving with steamships and trains across continents, and...
Pandora: the first android
Hesiod recounts in Theogony how Zeus became angry with Prometheus for giving the gift of fire to humans, that he decided to take revenge upon the humans by creating the first woman. Here’s a retelling of the story by using some more familiar terms. Zeus commanded Hephaestus, the god-engineer, to make the...
Androids, robots and autism
Isaac Asimov and Philip Dick in novels about robots and androids often explored what it means to be human. In doing so they have noted that Artificial Intelligence is mostly about thinking and being conscious of thinking. But what about feeling? How about emotions? Can androids “feel” like humans, forge...
Are we zombies?
What is the difference between thinking and appearing to be thinking? How can one tell them apart? An interesting answer comes from philosophy of mind in the shape and form of zombies. A philosophical zombie (or “p-zombie”) is a hypothetical being indistinguishable from a human but without conscious experience, or “qualia”. When pinched, a p-zombie...
Unfriendly AI: tales from the battlefield
Isaac Asimov, confronted with the problem of imagining future intelligent machines with potentially destructive capabilities, suggested his famous three laws of robotics. The first law forbids a robot from harming a human; the second compels it to obey human commands unless they conflict with the first law; the third demands...
Measuring the IQ of intelligent machines
How can we know if intelligent machines are getting smarter? The simple answer is by measuring their IQ. Nevertheless there are some obvious, and perhaps some less obvious, problems with such an approach. The most obvious hindrance is the plethora of AI approaches and methodologies that technologists follow in building...