Five Principles of Developmental Robotics... Matches of Todor Arnaudov's works from 2003-2004 to a 2006/2009 academic paper ... Yet another one :)

This post is regarding the paper: 

Five Basic Principles of Developmental Robotics, 2006,

posted Sep 2, 2008 10:30 AM by Brian Tanner   [ updated Sep 2, 2008 10:48 AM ]
http://prw06.rl-community.org/posters/five-basic-principles-of-developmental-robotics by Alexander Stoytchev, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University

Also in a 2009's IEEE edition, with extensions based on Stoychev's PhD thesis:

" ... Some Basic Principles of Developmental Robotics
Stoytchev, A.
Page(s): 122-130
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAMD.2009.2029989

Abstract: This paper formulates five basic principles of developmental robotics. These principles are formulated based on some of the recurring themes in the developmental learning literature and in the author's own research. The five principles follow logically from the verification principle (postulated by Richard Sutton) which is assumed to be self-evident. This paper also gives an example of how these principles can be applied to the problem of autonomous tool use in robot "

...

Yet another academic paper that I found recently, which is published years after the works of mine and is based on a bunch of other works,  and in the academic eyes those are "new contributions".
Sure, they are novel - in the community to which they are presented and their subculture, and in the specific way they are presented.

Not that I claim plagiarism or something, the case is rather "great minds think alike" ;)), I recommend the paper.

The differences are in the social position and status, background, resources, support - $$$, peers, access to literature and conferences, - and experience needed to made those claims.

Those seem significantly in my favor, as a poor teenager in high school... :)) 
Of course it doesn't sound plausible that an institutionalized researcher, who's well fit into the mainstream system to go read "crank's" works on the Internet - "who are they" - if a paper was not published in a conference or a journal (costs $$$ to go to a conference etc.), it's like it didn't exist. I discovered this back as a freshman... That particular paper is grounded on other papers from the "system", including author's own. Also who's gonna read "crank's" (high-school students') works published in Bulgarian - non-Bulgarians are highly unlikely to have ever known of my existence up to later years.

Well, in this particular case, though, there's a chance that the author of that paper has known about my works anyway, because he's a fellow Bulgarian, and there was a forum where a few of us, "the cranks" and other enthusiasts gathered for a while in 2004 - the forum of the so called "Project Kibertron" for a generally intelligent humanoid robot

Let's get to the point:

Autonmous Mental Development


I found this in the "subculture" called "Autonmous Mental Development (AMD) - or Developmental Robotics (certainly the more popular term). That reminded me of those "split brain" academia, there exist subcultures, groups, which don't know each other good enough and may produce similar results, or results which are of help to the others. For example... Well - later about that. ;P
...

• The Verification Principle (credited Sutton 2001)
• The Principle of Embodiment
• The Principle of Subjectivity
• The Principle of Grounding
• The Principle of Gradual Exploration

Those principles are explicitly stated in one way or another in "points" or claims about how a universal mind/human mind is supposed to work according to my "Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe", with its pique in the works in 2003 - early 2004.

Some translations of a part of my classical works

http://research.twenkid.com/agi_english/

Other not translated:
http://eim.hit.bg/razum
http://www.oocities.org/eimworld/  (Windows-1251)

If I am to state the precise points and matches, I'd write a more formal paper later, but let me give just a few short examples:

For example, the Sutton's "verification principle" and all the rest are obvious for a sensori-motor generalizing self-improving system, one of the explicit statements in my works is the "match", the way "truth" is defined and found.  (I'm "late" to Sutton here, but I haven't heard of him, as that community haven't heard of me.)

From Universe and Mind 3 (2003), Universe and Mind 4 (2004):
...
50. The truth is a match – if the knowledge (or
confidence, belief, persuasion [, desire])
matches something that is perceived somewhere
else later, then the new one is true, compared to
the old one; on the other hand, if the new one is
different, it's “a lie” (false) or it becomes truth
and the old truth turns into full or partial false,
depending on how the new truth is different
from the old one. The more the newly evaluated
for “truth” input piece of knowledge [pattern]
matches a piece of knowledge [pattern] from the
memories of mind, the more it's “truth” and
“actual”, according to mind. Therefore,
determining a “truth” is a determination of
difference between past and wanted present.
(“Wanted” was missing in the Part 3 writing,
added here in Part 4).
[“Truth” in Bulgarian is “Istina” (истина)]
Interestingly, in Serbian “isto” means “same” -
it has morphological association to “same”,
because the statement that a given feature is
“truth” means also that:

TRUTH: The feature [specifics, detail] that is
being evaluated matches the pattern/template - it
is the same as in the pattern, at a given
resolution of perception. (*That's a definition of
mine.)

Stoychev mentions the philosophy school of the logical neopositivists as an origin of the "verification" principle. My opponent and co-author of my 2002 epistolary work "Theory of Universal Predetermination II"* (Universe and Mind, Part 2) - Angel Grancharov - who was a professional philosopher having also University level teaching experience and an author of many books, was "insulting me" for being a "positivist" and explaining me how "flawed" that philosophy is, and that it's not really a philosophy. I didn't know that there's such a school, I heard about that school for the first time in those emails.

The quote above is about the subjectivity, embodiment, grounding and gradual exploration, all in one sentence: "...The more the newly evaluated for “truth” input piece of knowledge [pattern] matches a piece of knowledge [pattern] from the memories of mind, the more it's “truth” and “actual”, according to mind", "at a given resolution of perception".

"Grounding" is related also to the notion of "reality" as the "lowest level of virtual universe", and statements that for any system there's one lowest level, from where generalization starts.

Etc.

...The series will continue with a few explicit marks/comparisons of the matches between my classical works to Jeff Hawkins's "On Intelligence" and the HTM, which are published after mine.

See also: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2012/12/compression-and-beauty-matches-between.html

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AGI Researchers: Unite! Thinking Machines are Coming Really Soon.. Act NOW!

In the late years, and increasingly with time, I fail to see any meaningful conceptual or technological reason for thinking machines not to exist already... I've claimed it before and I claim it again.*

I dare to say that one of the reason why AGI has not been implemented yet are my own distractions and other problems which prevented me to work. The time is ticking away, though, I see crucial breakthroughs next year or in the worst case - in the next few years, and I'm switching to working mode, so look forward to see them...

We must act, unite, incorporate and work hard NOW if we are to be one of the pioneers.

Otherwise - the rich and heavy armored batteries of the rich institutionalized researchers, funded by our taxes, DARPA, and big rich companies will push it and we will stay marginalized and get forgotten, even though we were ahead of them (see my previous post about my hypotheses from 2003 and a 2011 academic work)

Do you know IIT?

Just look how big they are:

http://www.iit.it/en/research/departments/robotics-brain-and-cognitive-sciences.html

http://www.iit.it/en/rbcs-labs/action-and-perception-lab/perceptual-and-motor-bases-of-prediction.html

Italy is really pushing this field. I've marked the "danger" from the EU IM-CLEVER project some time ago, a colleague once told me how clumsy it's it in the real live, 24-blade server? or something, but they got correct research direction.

IIT is another big "danger", I think they are the creators of the iCube robot, they have a huge exhaustive research program and correct general direction which will reach to the goal. And one even stronger reason to "be afraid" if you don't join their army :) - they are apparently equipped with the best technology and have plenty of human power.

There are at least several other very solid and rich institutes, which are touching the "right directions" in the UK and the USA, I'll mark them later (have to re-find the links, but I got "frightened" from their power .. :) )

Thinking Machines Thinkers - Unite!

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Compression and Beauty: matches between a work by Todor Arnaudov from year 2003, and 2010-2011 new acаdеmic contributions... - comments on "Musical Beauty and Information Compression: Complex to the Ear, but Simple to the Mind" - Part I

I wrote this as a letter to the author several days ago, but it's not personal anyway, and what I've published the original reflections of the topics I mention here 10 years ago. I haven't got any answer so far [as of 9/12/2012], not that I am optimistic about getting such by the author, but I will answer with a more solid response.

[I got a response on 17/12, the author has been busy.]

I'm warming up for a new iteration over the topic and already have insights and challenges to pose [writing in progress], on second read, I see the paper has some profoundly confused concepts. In general my view matches Schmidhuber's view for cognitive beauty as compression/compression progress and balance of predictability, but there are some crucial concepts and parameters that need to be specified and are obvious in the case of music. I've shared some general thoughts in discussions on the AGIRI AGI list also. It will be continued more formally and technically in a paper, with some details that I deliberately omitted while writing this email.

(...)

I'm Todor Arnaudov, I'd say a veteran AGI/SIGI* interdisciplinary researcher,  an extreme polymath and universal artist, I do constantly progress my art, knowledge and skills in all kinds of sciences (soft- and hard-), technical fields and arts - both creative and performance, covering all sensori-motor domains. 

I'm writing you regarding your work:  "Musical beauty and information compression: Complex to the ear but simple to the mind?", that I encountered recently and enjoyed reading. I have heard earlier some short mentions of the topic from pop-sci news feeds, perhaps related to your paper (but it might have been about Schmidhuber's, I don't remember), but I've found and read your paper as late as very recently.

First of all, congratulations for presenting those ideas together!

I agree with the many claims and hypotheses, with some comments, which however I may present in a more formal form, regarding for example measurements and deviations, and interpretation of the results in regard to neuroscience and sensori-motor generalizing hierarchies (may view on general intelligence).

I write you, because I happen to have made related, similar or in cases the same hypotheses and speculations regarding general intelligence (all domains) and creativity starting in the early 2000s, mostly between mid-2002 and early 2004, which represented my Theory of intelligence and creativity (originality); it's also metaphysical and digital-physics/philosophy.

My theory is about prediction/compression with increasing range or precision, the balance (too predictable is boring, too unpredictable is "random") and also compression progress (progress of predictions' range and precision) as basic cognitive and aesthetic drives in all domains; the cognitive "uglyness" as cognitive overload and beauty/intelligence as finding simple matches/transformations.

I do also discriminate between cognitive and physical beauty (physical one is actually just pleasure), what you call  "2) stimulating the receiver through historical association" in my view is again related to physical beauty, experienced in the past, and associated with cognitive stimuli, which makes the cognitive stimuli to invoke those physical memories. Both types are often confused due to the mess in the brain reward systems (dopamine-and-other neurotransmitters and the intrinsic cognitive reward or prediction/compression), and people use to call "beautiful" stimuli which are just pleasant, i.e. produce a release of dopamine, oxytocin, endorphines etc.

I also have claimed and held that the science and arts are "the same thing"** beginning from those a decade old works, to me it has been obvious, because I've been always doing both. I don't mean Schmidhuber's "low complexity art", but "high complexity" art, i.e. normal classical art, good old fashioned drawing, artistic photography, writing, music, acting, filmmaking - all kinds of stuff, genres, forms, lengths.

I'll save the more detailed comparison and explanation of my claims and theory of general intelligence and creativity and why my works are not known or acknowledged in the mainstream academic media so far in a dedicated paper (for example, one reason is probably because I was 18-19 years old, they were published in Bulgarian in non-academic media). 

I don't know do you care at all about that, but I'll cite the following short examples of some matches:

...This appreciation "....rests on our ability to discern patterns in the notes and rhythms and use them to make predictions about what will come next. When our anticipations are violated, we experience tension; when the expectation is met, we have a pleasurable sense of release" [4]. ... from

Ball P: Harmonious minds: the hunt for universal music.

New Scientist 2010., 2759: 

I've written a very similar expression [for example] in my 2003 interdisciplinary philosophical-metaphysical-AGI-creativity... work, originally called "Conception of Universal Predetermination, Part 3", originally published in an e-zine called "The Sacred Computer", written in Bulgarian, in the middle 2003. The site had a mirror on Geocities, which is now "frozen" in several copies and can be verified, for example:http://www.oocities.org/eimworld/3/25/pred-3.htm  (in Bulgarian, Windows-1251 encoding, though) 

In English it sounds like that:  (Complete work, translated in English: http://research.twenkid.com/agi_english/Teenage_Theory_of_Universe_and_Mind_3.pdf , in this copy in the email I've done some additional minor stylistic/language corrections of mistakes in the translation, that I spotted now )

[BEGIN]

45. (...)

Why do we like to dance?

Let me try to make a speculation - maybe rough, but I guess – probable.*

Dancing is a rhythmical motion of the body  -

output stream of information to muscles -

which is in some kind of harmony

(synchrony) with an input stream – music.

Changes on the input – hearing – impact the

output – movements. 

Rhythmical means predictable. After you know

the rhythm – time period after which particular

changes in sound would happen (will hear

drums, a guitar; particular tone) – you can

predict the changes [the events] in music, you

can predict the future of the music you are

listening to.

Every muscle [muscular] action is a consequence of an

operation in brain, executed earlier. The output

is in the same time an input, because in order to

flex or to relax a muscle, mind makes particular

neurons in brain to “oscillate” (to send pulses) in

a particular fashion, i.e. the output is also an

input.

The better the synchrony/harmony between

input and output pulses, the more the total

level of the pulses gets amplified and makes

us feel pleasure.  (...)

** The rhythm should be within the mental

capabilities of mind to perceive and discriminate

it, for example we would hardly feel a rhythm of

3000 beats per minute. [250 – 300 is already

really fast]

(...)

And for example this one, it's about images, but my theory is general and the claim goes for any kind of inputs:

64. (...) 

Abstract artists' pictures, where there are no

pieces of knowledge, except the most primitive

for an image do not contain any meaningful

information [or "information for mind", i.e. data

that have patterns and can be compressed].

(Such most primitive pieces/patterns are e.g. a

point, spot, line, seasow line; polygons which

mind does not associate with known objects;

without 3-rd dimension).

There is meaningful information in images

where mind can recognize and call particular

objects, parts of objects and their

coordinates/relations to each other.

The meaningful idea ("разумна представа") is

described/defined with much less information

[data] than the image from which it was

deduced. [Compression and selection.]

...

E.g. this image has a little knowledge, because it

can be easily defined with a cycle in mind,

where the changes of the bar of the building are

small.

Photographers use to call such pictures "boring"

- they bring a little amount of information,

which is unpredictable using the precedent

information [from the picture or whatever

artifact being analyzed].  [This image is very

highly compressible.]

Well done artistic photograph must be balanced: it

must bring enough information about the subject

on the picture, be clear enough – it should be

easy to understand what's on the picture, - to

have a "complete" idea; also, the picture

shouldn't be overloaded with details which are

distracting attention (are "irritating") and make

our sight to roam around the details, searching

for a meaning in the picture.

Artistic photography is based on abstraction and

emphasizing the essential [information]. It's

like that also in classical visual art, especially in

graphics and caricature.

A person creating any kind of art is displaying

how the image of what he's creating is stored in

his memory and what features of reality are

memorized. For example the earliest children
drawings use just lines - therefore [perhaps]

images are stored as "lines"*; lines bring the

biggest possible [amoung of] information, because they are

abrupt change between the colour of the paper

and the pencil or whatever tool. The youngest

mind remembers [maybe implies: recognizes]

only the very essential parts of the perceived

reality.

Humans don't remember lots of the details in the

images. Maybe that's why pictures with lots of

details are "irritating". Human mind usually

removes the most of the minute details, when it

remembers the image as a description of pieces

of knowledge, in order to make remembering

easier.

[* Lines [curves] are also the easiest to draw, poor motorskills are also involved.]

It's easier to fill memory using a piece of

information [a pattern] to be multiplied with a

gradual change, known from the beginning; and

to be able to predict, by parts of the image, with a

higher probability, what's on other parts of the

image. 

[That's easier, than to hold a bitmap copy.]

Human hardly can remember and perceive too

"plentiful information servings" such as noise:

NOISE: A sequence of characters/symbols,

where every following has equal probability to

appear and the value of the following characters

is fully unpredictable for the one who's trying to

predict it [i.e. the *generator* may actually

*know* all the symbols and they might be

pseudo-random for him, but the *evaluator*

doesn't know them and can't predict them].

Mind works with big amount of redundancy in

information, in order to predict the future inputs

by the past easier and with higher certainty

[Aesthetics is not that simple to define in a few sentences and is subjective. There's "organic/smooth" patterns that seem to make perceptions generally more pleasant than highly compressible high contrast images; also there are high level associations, that pictures bring to us and may make us judge them emotionally etc.; "animate" objects and conflicts like in drama may engage mind to think/predict (interestingness)...]

That parallel part in the original, below the BW picture with the list of words, which I've missed to translate in that edition says:

This picture [of the old house] from the town of Kalofer, ( © Tosh 1994)
occupies just 10% more space on my hard drive* [than the picture of the other building], however it brings much more meaningful information.

One can recognize:
- a grass field
- bushes - branches, leaves
- a tree - stem, branches, leaves
- house - roof with tiles; second floor with a terrace, having a rail; other windows on the second floor (each of them is a "piece of knowledge in the picture)
- pillars
- windows on the first floor
- pavement
- reflections on the pavement
- water covering the pavement [causing the reflections]
- that water implies rain
- children (bottom left)
- a bench (in the middle) built of two supports and a board [actually two benches]

[END]

Discussion:

We can apply the same explicit labeling to the picture of the rectangular building (my high-school), but then it would be very short:

- a sky- a rectangular building- windows (the same type)- several floors- repeating bar of windows, put in perspective, but it looks "flat" because is on the same plane, there are no big perpendicular planes like in the other picture, which looks in 3D

It's more "boring" than the old house, because one bar can be multiplied with application of perspective throughout the picture. In other words, many parts of the image are "linearly dependent", and the compression progress ceases to 0 very quickly - for mind, the compression is much higher than for jpeg, it's too high. 
Now I see that in fact this 10% covers approximately the difference of the pictures' resolutions (the BW pictures is slightly bigger), which emphasizes the differences in "meaningful knowledge".

Well, that all is inspiring me to do another, more elaborate and detailed iteration.

Best Regards, Todor "Tosh" Arnaudov 
*SIGI - Self-Improving General Intelligence, my term for "Seed-AI"

** A T-shirt caption, designed by me, that says "Science = Art + Fun" :)
http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2009/07/blog-post.html

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Nature or Nurture: Socialization, Social Pressure, Reinforcement Learning, Reward Systems: Current Virtual Self - No Intrinsic Integral Self, but an Integral of Infinitesimal Local Selfs - Irrational Intentional Actions Are Impossible- Akrasia is Confused - Hypothesis about Socialization and Eye-Contact as an Oxytocin Source

Аn article, inspired as an answer to a post by Russell Wallace at the AGIRI's AGI List, "Killer Application"

Need to put explicit links to some of the references, if anyone cares: ask, and I'll update it, otherwise I'll add them later.

(C)  Todor "Tosh"Arnaudov , 29/11/2012***
 
Personal AGI Coaches

I agree that one of the early applications of thinking machines will be managing, advising, coaching, suggesting and assisting in all kinds of human activities ("intelligence/mind augmentation"), I myself am working in this direction too, and there are already such applications - Siri etc. are such.

I'd say that the simplest form of such "assistants" and memory augmentations are all kinds of writing, the "to do lists", having a daily-routine, then computer programs, the now obsolete electronic organizers starting from the simple PDAs with alpha-numerical keyboard to put in notes and phone numbers etc.

Working and playing with somebody is better than by yourself, but it depends on the partner also, I don't think it's that simple and straight.

I have experienced personally cases when engineers work better without frequent supervision and intervention (in case of subordinate relations, not peer-to-peer), there's also a business wisdom of delegating responsibilities to the employees in order to make them more confident and more productive, otherwise they would be more dependent and would ask for frequent or immediate feedback, which in some cases is too much of an overhead.

Peer-to-peer interaction can also has negative outcomes to productivity and cause distraction or chatter. So it depends...

...
"Akrasia" as doing something "against own good will" is Confused


As of the "akrasia", I'd partially challenge the concept. IMO the philosophical confusion comes from the lack of physiological knowledge, wrong assumption and overgeneralization. There's no integral self, i.e. the brain is not an integral system.

It self-organizes and integrates the parts, because they are connected to each other, but this happens at the expense of "bugs" and apparently "irrational" behavior, because brain was not created at once and those integrations and effects were not planned.

Body and repeated sensations of self integrate "self" in the POV of the prefrontal cortex, and of an external observer. However there are many competing subsystems that are patched over each other, the highest level "executive function" is strongly influenced and entangled with older systems, which creates a mess of mechanisms and motivations. The limitation of the body actuators (and of the basal ganglia) reduce the possible physical actions and make the body appear as having an integral personality/mind/soul.

Philosophers who are searching for a global and valid-all-the-time non-contradicting integral "will", "moral", "good will" for all possible cases, face those paradoxes of "doing something against one's better judgment" (as cited in the Wikipedia article).

Integral of Infinitesimal Local Selfs over given Period...

Current Virtual Self - A Snapshot of the Virtual Simulators in the Brain

I've discussed in (see... 2002, 2003, 2004, Analysis of the sense... ) that if you do something intentionally, that means without your hands being pulled with a wire from another explicit causality-control unit (an agent), or without another agent to force you with a loaded gun etc., then that's what your current virtual self/"will" has chosen as the best action given the experience and the possibilities it understands, and given the time-span and rewards that it sees from its own perspective, at this very specific moment of decision/action, computed for a selected time-period etc. That self is virtual and "exists" at the moment of acting, e.g. moving your hand, grasping something etc. In the next moment there might be another virtual self, which has other goals and motivation, which are valid for the next moment, but they might be "inconsistent" with the past or the next, because the underlying model is covered under the skull and in the long history of experience.

An analogy can be an Integral of Infinitesimal Local Selfs, in Calculus terms - a Calculus of Self...

Sometimes, for some cases, in some situations, different virtual current selfs match and are/appear as stable, because the set of possible actions is limited, and because brain has also stable parts and configurations as well (at certain resolution), but the point is that "irrational" and "not-consistent" actions are not really such. I claimed in those papers, and still claim, that "irrational voluntary action" is a nonsense.

If something seems "irrational", that means that the observer hasn't recognized either the correct agent, the correct "rationality" or both, or hasn't done with sufficient resolution in order to predict it right. The concept of "rational" (as "consistent") is confused and primitive.

Due to the mess in human cognitive and physical reward system *, the moral values can change all the time and the "good or bad" - too, especially if it's something "abstract", i.e. not directly linked to feeling of dopamine, oxytocin, etc. which can have very fast effect.

Some philosophers don't get it and treat self as a constant, it's like integrating a constant - it equals 0.
Brain is not abstract and constant, it's more like a complicated function - it has specific needs at specific moments, which are caused by specific sensations stored now or before 10 years in specific circumstances etc. which are associated with specific physical sensations ("gut feelings", projected eventually to the insular cortex**).

Brain constructs generalizations out of those specific experiences, but there's a lot of noise and variations, and also working and short-term memory (recent activities and experiences), the environment of every precise moment and the declarative/autobiographical memory contain many specifics, which can be called internally in a sequence that seems "random" for an external observer, while it may have it's very specific reasons, grounded in experience.

Such an observer, - who is assuming "rationality" wrongly as something that he believes is "good", "best" etc., rather than what's best for the agent's own estimate, - wrongly concludes that if somebody breaks his apparently wrong model, he acts against "his good will". NO, it acts against the WRONG model, following its own will. If an agent does something "against his will", then that's not his will.

"Will" is considered as something abstract and independent from the body, e.g. if "you want to quit smoking, but you don't", therefore "you have a weak will". In fact yes, it is separated from the body as the decisions may be initiated by the PFC, and the statements of will might be just words, while the real non-verbal actions are driven by lower dopamine-shortcuts, such as nicotine addictions.


* We've discussed this on the AGI List, see also below
** See also Demasio's works


Akrasia, as "watching too much TV, realizing that it's a waste of time" or "eating too much and not practising sports, knowing that it causes obesity" - in my opinion there are simple reasons and I don't think the reasons have been much different in the past.

Do the average people 100 years ago used to study Vector Calculus, Maxwell's Equations or did they constructed cathode-ray tubes or radio equipment or did they studied all kinds of sciences in order to make new inventions, instead of just going to the pub, theater, cinema, chatting, flirting, reading newspaper articles about crimes and random news from the world?

The reason why they didn't and why they preferred simpler "social" activities, is that the intellectual activities require cognitive profile and capacities that a small minority of the population have, and the long-term goals are hard for the mind even for the gifted ones. One reason - the relation to present or to the future present is questionable and unclear - as noted in the famous Einstein's quote about people that love chopping woods, because they can see the results right away.

In physiological terms, there are dopamine shortcuts, or we may call them short circuits - humans *are* "wirehead"s - which are making long term activities harder, at the expense of short term ones.

There are easier, simpler and cheaper short-term activities providing the desired "drugs", why shooting for something long-term that's uncertain?


The long term ones have to have some kind of immediate measurable effect in order to keep the interest and compete with the activities which provide feedback immediately. There we are some of the effects of the clumsy AI/NLP and other fields in the academia, where small, incremental and "completely provable immediately right now, with no delay" results must be presented, even if they are globally very vague or meaningless.

It's also an illustration about how bad and weak human brain's executive function is, and how pathetic working memory can be - that's one reason why we need to take notes and pin to-do notes on the wall.


Russel Wallace:>The most powerful weapon against akrasia is social pressure. Our minds
Russel Wallace:>are programmed to act based on encouragement and discouragement from
Russel Wallace:>other people, not to operate autonomously; but the old social
Russel Wallace:>institutions have largely broken down.

Socialization in its local form has simple physiological reasons (see below), besides that we are all made dependent on others' decisions and actions. We are forced to try to satisfy some kind of authority or society's need in one way or another, because otherwise we get punished or deprived of something.

I don't think social pressure is universally constructive, it's often horrible and destructive. That's how many political and religious systems have degenerated into monstrous killing and torturing machines, and the massacres were justified with nonsenses like "to save your soul", "because of God", "for the nation", "for the race and the species" and all sorts of "social" fake abstract concepts. None of this is for society, it starts from satisfying the sick brains of the freaks who led those movements, together with the neurotransmitter-wirehead needs of the masses who follow, sometimes the latter is related to the threat of adrenaline-cortisol-pain-etc. caused by the forces of the sick brain ruling that "society".

The social pressure forced the people to obey, or they obeyed, because they were too much susceptible to be ruled and to obey, even if the commands were insane.

That's also how mediocre artists can get famous, in a milder form of social pressure - they please some big amount of humans, then many other who are not artistically qualified follow just because something was already popular, sometimes in a vicious circle driven largely by low urges and distribution advantages - some "important" ones who tell what's important to the "society".

See: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2012/07/issues-with-like-dislike-voting-in-web.html
Issues with Like-Dislike Voting in Web 2.0 and Social Media, and Various Defects in Social Ranking and Rating Systems - Confused and Vague Design and Measure - Psychology of the Crowds - Corrupted Society Preferences and Suggestions. In Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, TV Networks...

Also that sheep-instinct is why people like us are marginalized, and "society-pleasing" ones who have 1/2 of the IQ and 1/10 of the expertise of people like us are often high in hierarchy and commanding millions and billions of dollars. They please "the society", i.e. what they do is easily explainable in terms that a bigger majority, or a part that is related more closely to financial and other social forces would understand and accept.

In the Planet of the Apes, the banana producers will rule the world

If you do or say or present something that's too complex or requires too much brains, or will produce results too far in the future and if you can't explain it in terms of short-term dopamine, oxytocin, endorphins or something else from the "useful" substances in the audience's brains - you'll look like a mad loser, you will even look "dumb" and "unadaptive".

The ones that produce fast-foods or sweets, or porn and sex-services are encouraged more by the society, because those "beneficial for the society" agents are associated with dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin etc. - the true "universal languages" of humanity, and the dirty true needs of the average humans. In the intellectual ones, it's to a lesser extent, in the average ones - they are slaves of this part of human physiology.

That's the mystical "happiness" which average people are looking for, and that's the "well-being" of society - dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin for all.

The ones who search for a more evolved, cognitive forms of rewards and happiness, are often oppressed by society, which doesn't get it - "find a real job, lazy philosopher!", "go code web sites or accounting software", "go dig-out potatoes", "why don't you pick some stones from the stone-pit?", "if you don't have your hands dirty, that's not work". Etc.. :-D

And...

It's the technology and individualism that are trying to put the social monster (in the totalitarian violent form) to its end. It's not the society, e.g. "the psychology of the crowds". Crowds are monsters.

The person and the technology in the society is pushing society to respect the person, initially the amorphic monster of society/the state/the church/God/the king was supposed to be unquestionable ruler of everything.

Besides, while accepting the social pressure is sometimes reluctant, it's often also the "sheep instinct" for the majority of people - they just don't know what to do themselves and can't choose. That has to do with the Guppy Effect/the Ring Syndrome. We seem to be 99% males here, I suppose everybody has experienced this - if you walk on your own you may seem like a loser and be ignored, but if you walk with or talk to a woman in front of other women, especially if she smiles at you, then the other women will find you attractive and may throw jealous gazes to that other woman... That's a funny illustration of the force of the "social pressure" on women...

..

As of the physiological reasons - e.g. dopamine, oxytocin, endorphines, vasopressine and perhaps a few others shortcuts, another type of "wirehead" and another type of addiction in a more abstract sense - under stress, cortisol is high, it kills the oxytocin, you get anxious and feel bad.

Oxytocin cures it, so you search for social interaction, because you have discovered long-long time ago as a little baby, that when your mother touches and cuddles you*, and when you keep eye-contact with her, you relax and feel good.

I have two hypotheses about how the oxytocin case came to live (need to check some details deeper):

Hypothesis 1.:

1) Brain has some pre-wirings to generate oxytocin (such as cuddling and gentle touching)
2) Eye-contact is not pre-wired and not an inborn source of oxytocin, but brain is conditioned to associate oxytocin to "animate beings", which actually means "interaction" from the very beginning, because:
2'): Eyes are the simplest and the most unquestionable sign of a pattern and correlation (in my definitions, see 2003, 2004, 2010... ) related to "self-moving" objects (temporally matching inputs). Mouth/lips (smile, frown, laugh) should be also related, especially in the foundational semantics of the facial expressions, but I think that eyes are a more obvious and unquestionable correlation for unsupervised learning, and they are more powerful and directed, they can direct the attention to new coordinates, while the mouth can direct only towards itself by it's motion, compared to the static "background".

Eye contact in essence is synchronous motion/reaction of a moving object to some intentional changes, "intentional" changes means predicted changes in the environment (effectively some sensory input) to match with the real input.

That match is the cognitive part of the reward in my model of brain. Dopamine and oxytocin are means for the other type of reward: physical, that is the desired outcome to match the real input. Dopamine and oxytocin are desired, it doesn't matter how they are injected into the brain, and social interactions, hanging out with friends, petting a cat etc. are ways to get that injection.

For example, women apparently are more sensitive or more dependent on oxytocin than men, they have to be in order to get addicted to their children, and the "mother's love is the strongest" namely because they get oxytocin from the interaction with their children.

When both sources of reward - cognitive and oxytocin - are active together, they are associated even stronger.

Hypothesis 2.:

Eye-contact is also pre-wired to induce oxytocin from the beginning - there are evidences that new-borns actually do see from the beginning and they can imitate faces. This must be below the neocortex - I've speculated about the thalamus, but it's just a guess.

The feed-forward part of the facial expressions is hardwired tough, that's obvious, e.g. people can't fake a smile if they're not good actors and don't experience it. See ...

Saturday, May 1, 2010
Thalamic Nuclei - primary causes for Mirror Neurons? |Human Face - Important Aspect of Evolution | Cingulate Cortex | Nature or Nurture
http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2010/05/thalamic-nuclei-primary-causes-for.html

On another hand, face mimicking causes the adults who see it to smile or/and to start playing with their face, so this is a case of interaction and causing predictable changes, or provoking changes in the "animate being". The babies are usually held or cuddled, which induces oxytocin due to the touches - then all kinds of interactions and play are associate that oxytocin with the dopamine, the cognitive rewards of pattern recognition, and the "animate beings", as recognized in the most basic way.

Also, when a baby is in distress, the ones who care for her would probably also be worried/won't smile, that's how a baby can associate it's distressed facial "expressions" (its gut feelings, including facial muscles proprioception) with others' facial expressions. A similar mechanism probably goes for smiling and associating own smile and feelings with the smile of others.

If distressed, the baby would be cuddled or held, which induces oxytocin, which is an antidote to the circulating adrenaline and cortisol. That's how "bonds" are created.

Another form of social "pressure", the adult's reaction and disturbance by a baby's cry. There's a popular claim, that it's "evolutionary encoded" in order the mother to care for the baby. I think that's not necessary - we might have conditioned the spectral profile of our own cries, so it's not social, but self-induced. I claimed this back in this article:  Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2010/04/learned-or-innate-nature-or-nurture.html

...
(It might be encoded, in some of the lower nuclei, but it must be tested, for example if there are experiments with mother's reaction, if she was born deaf and started hearing in sufficiently old age).

Russell Wallace>The solution may lie in another quirk of the human mind: our tendency
Russell Wallace>to anthropomorphize; we instinctively attribute personhood to all
Russell Wallace>sorts of things - including, in some circumstances, computer programs
Russell Wallace>(2).

I wouldn't call it instinctive, but I assume that without it we wouldn't have attributed personhood to the other humans, possibly to us ourselves, too, because to the brain the self is a set of correlated sensations and mental states, the way to distinguish it from the others are some details about the feed-back and causality control (intentionality), and the consistency/stable correlations.

As of the other people - at a distance humans "don't look like humans", their angular dimensions are very small, they "don't seem to have" eyes, a face, hands, etc. They "are not humans", but points, circles, blobs moving, right?

In fact that also means "humans", because "humans" are also "points/circles/blobs moving" - the eyes and the mouth + radial and linear motion of the head, that's the initial visual image of "human" for a baby. There are experiments with babies and fake faces, initially they react like to a real face if they see a cardboard with two circles for eyes, then if it has also a nose and a mouth, and finally - if it's 3D or "real".

Then hands, arms etc. enter the equation, that includes baby's own limbs and body parts, the feedback from touching her's own body parts etc.

Since the beginning we see various humans (small, big, old, young, ...) from various distances, various positions, clothes, etc., various occlusions, various effects of their behavior. The general/essential part for the cognition is not that they are "humans", i.e. their biological substrate, DNA, all the trillions of molecules etc. but the way they appear, interact and correlate.

In order for this to work robustly, it must keep being correct up to the highest generalization and down to the lowest resolution and the fewest details, because as mentioned, it probably has started from two eyes/eye balls, which are: two matching objects, linearly transforming (moving, rotating) synchronously in parallel and reacting to intentional operations of the one who learns about humans.
...

Another case - when somebody speaks behind your back, you only hear it - it might be a record, or synthesized.

The same goes for radio or television, or for text as well - that's only sound or image or text coming from a box, or graphics on a piece of paper, there's no persons there. However it's important what it recalls from your brain, not what it is itself.

Only you yourself are an "unquestionable" person for yourself. The other stimuli which you attribute to animate beings/persons remind of *you yourself* and your own flow of thoughts, sensations, feelings, parameters.

It recalls emotions that you have experienced, thoughts that you have had - in one extent or another.

Human antopomorphize sets of (correlated) stimuli which are similar to his own intentional sensations.

The series continues....

(C)  Todor "Tosh"Arnaudov (Todor Iliev Arnaudov) , Тодор Илиев Арнаудов - Тош 

***
First Published: 29/11/2012
 30/11/2012, - minor grammatical correction;
 2/12 - "complex function" changed to "complicated function" (in order not to confuse with complex numbers)
25-26/5/2023 - a few typos noticed (require -- requires, loose -- lose), while translating to Bulgarian from the book "The Prophets of the Thinking Machine: Artificial General Intelligence and Transhumanism: History, Theory and Pioneers": http://github.com/twenkid

Думи, тагове, tags: Философия, интердисциплинарно, невронауки, неврология, психология, вродени, средата, гени, Интегрално смятане, анализ, социология, психология на тълпата, обществен натиск, общество, личност, съзнание, самосъзнание, интегрално, цялостно, акразия, Сократ, ирационално, рационално, объркано, мозък, човешки, допамин, серотонин, оскитоцин, кортизол, адреналин, невротрансмитер, ...АГИ списък, УИР, Универсален изкуствен разум, изкуствен разум, изкуствен интелект, Decision making, взимане на решение, Reasoning, rationality, агенти, мулти-агентни системи, изкуствен интелект, интелигентност

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News: TILT - Efficient Rectification (Texture-Pixel-Based 3D-Like Perspective and other) by Microsoft Research - and the SIGI-AGI Prototype and Research Accelerator News

I've discussed about the must-be simplicity of 3D-scene-and-light reconstruction, back in the 1/1/2012 article about Optical Illusions, and later on the AGI-List*, and I see it very soon coming en mass.

"TILT" by Microsoft is yet another demonstration of this coming... :X

The RGB-D sensors (such as Kinect and ASUS Xtion) that are getting cheap and popular are also a jump to that direction, they make 3D reconstruction trivial.

In the last two months I've been also directing my mind into visual-vision-images R&D for pracical developments in computer vision, graphics (my Twenkid FX studio video editing/visual effects and general movie production) and on the 3D-texture-light-reconstruction, but I've been slipping and spreading into many other more general branches, for example mathematics, physics, philosophy and even some... music.

I hope I won't be too late, but the true beginning of the implementation of my first SIGI-AGI-prototype is also approaching, I'll show it when it's ready to do impressive job. :P

Some of the system's purposes will be immediately practical and aiming to be useful as a product.

It might be the smart mind behind an old project of mine, I planned to implement a little bit of it back in 2008 as a Master's thesis, but I was too busy and eventually ended up doing something else, i.e. described my 2004's Text-to-speech synthesizer "Glas" and proposed many improvements and an entirely new architecture. That's another project that I wish to improve and make that new architecture. For example that old version is still in use for reading out loud materials for me.

I've called that old advanced project "Research Accelerator" in some old posts, because it's supposed to help general research (all domains), it's also an "Intelligent Operating System".**

A few somewhat related systems/approaches/directions (quite not fully similar, though):

Microsoft's agent - "Personal Assistant"

(see: about 35 minute), and PSearch.

Google's "Google Now"

The research field of "Intelligent Environments" is also related to what my AGI prototype is supposed to deal with, e.g. activity recognition.
See for example: Fine-Grained Kitchen Activity Recognition using RGB-D

Activity Recognition in Pervasive Intell...


* I've talked about some obvious 3D-reconstruction clues even in the 2004's "Universe and Mind 4", and everybody knows them, but they are not consciously accessible to most people.

** Windows 7 has a function for smart prefetch of applications expected to be started by the user soon - "superfetch". My intelligent system is supposed to do, too, but in more general "superfetching sense". In general, that direction of predictive doing of things is obvious and everywhere, prediction is in the core of my theory of intelligence as well and prediction is in the essence of computing in general.

*** AGIRI AGI List

I've spent more efforts that I should in explanations of important concepts on the AGIRI AGI List from time to time, but I feel sorry afterward... :D The extent to which I do is a waste of time, especially since the ones who seem not to get it just doesn't get it, no matter how precise the explanation is. However I believe a lot of the materials are pretty detailed and useful if you're interested in AGI and want to learn.

They deserve a "digest", something I've promised long ago - well, I'll do when I can, some day. If it doesn't happen soon, it may come in the next 5-th part of my old series of big works.

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Nietzsche is a XIX-century Transhumanist... - Философът Фридрих Ницше е трансхуманист от 19-ти век...

Have you thought about that? :)

The concept of Superman (Übermensch), one to whom current humans are like the apes to humans.

Check his work for yourself, right from the beginning: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm

I won't discuss the work as a whole, the "new moral", and Nazi's abuse of the term "Superman".

I care for Nietzsche's "Superman" from a transhumanist point of view: a superman in cognitive and functional sense.

The "dead God" and the creation of a new god is the advent of science and technology, the work had apparently been influenced by the then-new evolution theory of Darwin.

The "creation of God" is the "singularity", the ultimate advent of technology and the creation of either cyborgs, DNA-or-whatever enhanced humans, and a self-improving general intelligence/AGI/AI.

Zarathustra seems to crave for fast progress and criticizes the sluggishly developing society and  humanity. I sympathize with him on that point - people are not aware of the unexpected technology that is coming very soon and will make a lot of the current things obsolete and archaic. I've shared some thoughts about the absurd archaism in some human activities, and their end in the form they exist now*, I will explain more in a dedicated work.

Enjoy! :)

---
* Of course, there's a chance that people would reject some of the technologies which will make other technologies absurd and obsolete and would make the people to question their-own superiority etc., I think it's in fact likely to happen so...

However this is so consonant with a "superhuman-human" and a "human-ape" relations. See the movie "The Planet of the Apes" (1968) and put yourself in the human's from the future shoes  - you might be intellectually and technologically superior, but your "enemy" might be yet physically vastly stronger and more aggressive than you, especially if there's a small amount of transhumanists and a huge amount of people who don't understand and don't accept to live together with thinking machines.

 History tells about such events, when barbarian hordes anihilate civilizations and societies which are centuries or a millenium ahead of them. That's one of the unfortunate possibilities if humanity rejects the technologies and the new technological species that will revolutionize their life.
 (I deliberately don't specify what exact things I'm talking about, see in a more elaborate paper.)

By the way, recently I found that case told in a humorous SF short story of the Bulgarian writer Lyuben Dilov. Humanity gets in touch with extraterrestrial civilization, the aliens leave an ambassador on Earth. He notices that human race has a lot of social problems and has undeveloped technologies, so he shares know-how in medecine and in an uncorrupted and fair-minded political system. The humanity rejects both. The new inventions would change the corrupted system and the status-quo and would steal the power from the corrupted politicians - nobody would agree to use it. The only technology humanity accepts are books, which can fit in a bead, so they may collect them. Well, we already have those books... :)

** Thanks to S.  for reminding me about the "Übermensch" concept of Nietzsche, when I've spoken with him about related social aspects of the up-coming transhumanism era, compared to the current state of the affairs.

See also:  Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Discussion on General Intelligence, AGI and Superintelligence Safety and Human Moral | Cognitive Origins of the Concepts of Human Soul and its Immortality | Free Will and How it Originates Cognitively | Animate Being and Soul and the Cognitive Reason for the Believe that "Thinking Machines can't have a Soul and Consciousness" |  Technology  Making us more Humane | The Egoism of Humanity | And more

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Translator: Thomas Common
 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm

3.

....I TEACH YOU THE SUPERMAN. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?

All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?

What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.

Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?

Lo, I teach you the Superman!

The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Superman SHALL BE the meaning of the earth!....



Tags: philosopy, философия, Ницше, супермен, свръхчовек, трансхуманизъм, сингулярност, прогрес, научно-техническа-революция, наука, самоусъвършенстващи се мислещи машини, мислещи машини, универсален изкуствен разум; изкуствен интелект, човешки интелект; ум, напредък; маймуни, човекоподобни, Планетата на маймуните, филм.

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Yale Open University - Open Courses Done Right | Отворени лекции от Йейл - Фундаментална Физика

Remember my post about the quasi-free courses (the trendy ones lately) which were threatening you with legal actions against you?

Open Yale courses seem to be different: http://oyc.yale.edu/

It's Creative Commons, therefore you can use and share for educational purposes the materials - video, sound, transcripts - without being threatened.

I would recommend myself the Fundamental Physics courses, - excellent coverage with an excelent and very funny teacher.

In general, the "novelty" promoted by the major online courses is somewhat false, there were online courses, tutorials, lectures, notes, solutions, help since the time materials and notes could be put "online". As the storage and bandwith allows, more images, more audio, video etc. in ever higher quality is uploaded, nothing "new" and nothing "original"there.

The interaction with the teachers and the grading can be taken as something "new", but it's not, message boards and chat rooms with experts or email lists are the same, competitions (on programming contests etc.).

The formal grading is not equal to a University one, and a teacher cannot really examine or answer personally hundreds or thousands of studtents - it would be an automatic tool, and the questions asked by hundreds or thousands of people on the same subject matter will undoubtely often match, you can do it on your own anyway*, with or without an embodied teacher.

* Yeah, some people would not do anything if there's not an embodied teacher, somebody to push you to work.


Тагове: безплатни, отворени, онлайн, електронно обучение, фундаментална, физика, Йейл, американски, САЩ, математика, CC

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Анимация, озвучаване, актьорска игра: Озвучаване на трейлър на анимационен филм - забавно :))

English: A funny online competition on a video sharing Bulgarian site for writing an original script (if you can, using your worlds) and voice acting over a trailer of an upcoming animated movie.

Обновено: 14/10/2012

Благодаря за подкрепата! :P Не ме избраха да озвучавам герой от филма, но с 32 гласа бях в челото на класирането на публиката, а също и по гледанията (от около 220-230 участници) - 10 м. по положителни гласове - и пише, че печеля комплект блестящи рекламни химикалки!!! :P

Гласуването продължава, и виждам че хората продължават да гласуват за мен, в момента видях че имам 41 гласа (запис на: twenkid гледания: 372гласували: 55харесвания: 41). Започвам да изпреварвам директните си конкуренти. :)

Подкрепете участието ми като сценарист и актьор в един много забавен конкурс на Вбокс7! :)

Озвучаване на трейлър на един анимационен филм, който излиза скоро. :)

Звукът е с лошо качество, но това е някакъв проблем с всички клипове,но дори и така е забавно.

Гледайте, и гласувайте! :P Ако спечеля нещо, ще почерпя!

http://vbox7.com/contests/riseoftheguardians/?page=play&user=twenkid

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News: Mathematics, Rendering, Art, Drawing, Painting, Visual, Generalizing, Music, Analyzing

What's going on lately?


The second SIGI conference was postponed - not enough commitment from the circle.

But I am working on making the conference more interesting when it happens:

I've been into a Mathematical research mode lately, I started it as "Incremental Arithmetic" in an unpublished paper (shared with one person only) in 2011, some insights from 2010-2011 were around that theme. More explicitly on this - when I have beautiful results and demos. :)

Other AGI research/observation/preparations and Neuroscience-my-theory-of-intelligence-matching - it's in parallel with the above.

Drawing, sequential art, visual art/processing, image processing/visual effects/filmmaking software

I've always been a "visual" person (besides all other "persons" living in me), drawing runs in the blood of my family. Drawing/painting - rendering - is useful for focusing on the details of rendering and vision, and it goes from the smallest scale of a pixel to the largest scale of scenes, viewer's position, scene composition, lightning, characters, the world where the illustrated action happens, the story of it, etc. etc... The whole spectrum of generalizing sensorimotor hierarchies. It's cool.

I'm refreshing and upgrading my skills into a more systematic way and I'm aiming to polish my talent. One of the useful reasons is in order to render my graphical/movie stories better... :) The VFX/filmmaking software's one of the many purposes is to improve and speed up the process.

Thanks to http://www.youtube.com/user/thevirtualinstructor for one of his lessons and suggestions,
practiced in these drawings.  

Vector transformations

In another "unpublished paper" from a few months ago, which would turn into a digest one day eventually (it's a "published email discussion), I explained and shared some elegant fundamental AGI operations/generalizations which are based on simple visual 3D transformations.

"Everything" is a bunch of vector transformations and the core of the general intelligence are the simplest representations of those "visual" representations, which are really simple/basic/general.

And "visual" in human terms actually means just:

Something that encompasses features and operations in 1D, 2D, 3D and 4D (video) vector (Euclidian) spaces, and the vectors in these dimensions can be of dimensionality usually of up to 4 or 5, such as: //e.g. (Luma, R,G,B)

1D - luminance
2D - luminance + uniform 1D color space
3D/4D - luminance + splitted/"component" color space

+ Perspective projection, which is a vector transform, it can be represented as a multiplication of matrices - that is - the initial sources of visual data are of higher dimensionality than the stored representation, 3D is projected into 2D (a drawback of the way of sensing)/

Also, of course, there is topology, humans work fine with blended and deformed images - curved spaces, and curves, not simple linear vectors. However the topology is induced from the basic vector spaces, the simplest topological representation is just the adjacency of coordinates in a matrix.

The above may seem obvious, but the goal is namely to make things as explicit as possible.

More on it - later.

The software and music - I don't have enough time for R&D, I'll probably tell more when there are results/pieces which I can show, such as tech demos or new demo records of my music... [Edit+ 2/10/2012:] But the music will probably wait untl I finally develop one software aid for the drums and start playing with it. :)

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Extreme Futurist Festival 2012 in LA, Los Angeles USA - Фестивал на дръзки футуристи 2012 в Лос Анджелис - футурология - бъдеще - визионери

That would be a great place for me, a pity I won't be able to visit it this year... :/ :)

Extreme Futurist Festival 2012 Trailer from H+ Worldwide on Vimeo.

Futurists, transhumanists, artificial, general, intelligence, events, футурология - бъдеще - визионери

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Super Smartasses - The Premiere of the new Graphical novel/series/comics/pictures/production of Todor Arnaudov/Tosh/The Twenkid

Enjoy the first pilot episode of the "new/old" production of Tosh/The Twenkid/Twenkid Studio, written 3 years ago, but first episode completed and presented now:

Super Smartasses
First Episode: Companions (International Version in English)

About "Super Smartasses" and Twenkid FX Studio

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News: Comics - Multi-Platform Story Novels - Animation - Cartoon - Voice Acting - Animatic - Visual Effects Software VFX -- Upcoming Twenkid Studio Satirical Production, featuring the IT, Semiconductor, AI, AGI, Science and Everything also | Скоро - мултиплатформена продукция - комикс, озвучен, аниматик, анимация, разкази, роман, филм

На български

Title: S.S. (see later)

Drawings from the first epidose:
Deliberately not telling what's the story about.

It's an amusing and funny satirical series, having serious/intelligent/dramatically/comically presented messages, with many characters, starting from the high-tech industry and people (semiconductors, hardware, software, automotive, aerospace, electronics, architecture, medicine ... researchers), but also spreading everywhere - sports, media, pop-culture, society, politics, celebrities, film industry, all kinds of absurds, comedy and drama, and all kinds of human relationships. It has some educational elements, too.

AI and AGI will probably also join the stories in one funny way or another in the high-tec part.

It have both action/strongy visual and dramatical/verbal stories.

It's a huge Universe (in my imagination), I plan to create multi-platform stories, e.g. various kinds of media and different points of view to the stories told.

The perfect form would be an interactive full-motion animation with sound and additional materials, textual, pictorial, sound. (Or a computer game.) Animating it as I would like to is too expensive and technologically impossible right now though, so it will start as a comics + text, a highly illustrated novel, graphical novel - whatever.

History

 I wrote and sketched the characters, settings and the plots of about 20 episodes, some with complex plot-twist and development, some simple, as early as 3 years ago, but didn't have the time/resources to start implementing it as good as I wished. I finally started the first episode a few weeks ago. The visual quality of the pilot episode that's coming won't be as good as I wished too yet, but I hope it's fine.

As my in-house VFX software technology improves, and I invest some more time in it to put some of the cool accelerating features in my mind, the episodes will become faster and easier to produce, and the animation will become implementable in a short time (I already have designs of how to do it, but it will take time after I start it up).

Indeed, the first public release of my Twenkid FX Studio software is also planned to finally come...

I don't have time to work on it lately (a long "lately" period), that's the reason it's being delayed from the start even though I've always known what to do. I am willing to make some release in the upcoming few months.

It might not be glamorously shiny for average users in the initial releases, but it will work (it already works for me) and it's implemented with impossibly short amount of human-work-hours*. I'd say - insanely low. It's supposed to have the key features available for users even if not perfect yet, for example those:

- chroma keying
- rotoscope with painting and clone tools
- matte painting
- color corrections
- motion tracking (stabilization/compensation trajectories)
- particle effects (some basic stuff for a start)

Even only this is enough to create pretty cool visuals, and these are not all features already existing or planned even for the first early public release, you'll see them when the release come.

BTW, the matte-painting was a function of the "grand-father" of this software back in 2005, matte-painting is one of my favorite visual effects, it's so simple and yet so powerful. Generally, the principles of all visual effects are trivial and obvious, at least for anyone who has talents in visual arts - drawing, photography etc. However coding all, stitching all together in a common interface, project etc. - that's laborious, even if all you have to do is crystal clear to you.

...
Regarding the graphical quality of the initial draft release of the pilot episode - it's drawn by hand with pencil, some of the pictures with a tablet (Wacom Bamboo), there are some editions and layout with GIMP, but it's mostly pencil. Some pictures are more elaborated, others are very quick sketches. There are too much frames to make all smooth and polished, I have other tasks to do too, waiting for a time-slice...

Such as that software that is being delayed for years, and it will include functions to accelerate the production of the comics, drawing and animation, too.

Generally, producing this is fun, and I believe it will be fun for the viewers, as long as they care for the topics of the stories told. :)

Stay tuned and please - show your love and share the fun, if you liked it. :) Thanks.
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That below is just a small spider-man exercise from January 2012 (assisted by references in a comic book), just to show some skills:

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