Todor Arnaudov's Researches

Всички права запазени! | All Rights Reserved! - сатирично есе относно мъгливи декларации, припомнено от SOPA и ACTA

2012-01-30T20:48:00.001+02:00

That's a satiric article/essay of mine that was first published in the e-zine "Sacred Computer" almost 9 years ago, it's called "All rights reserved" and is about vague and absurd texts related to the copyright, which are stated in books. It's so absurd that if executed de facto it means that no one has the right to *read* the title of the book or to remember a single word from it. It's even worse, as explained in the article... I "reprint" it here reminded by the recent SOPA and ACTA affairs. (Sorry, only the original Bulgarian article is available in full now.)

Това е една моя сатирична статия от сп. "Свещеният сметач", която бях написал вдъхновен от мътността на текстовете на законите за авторско право, и сега си припомних във връзка със SOPA и ACTA("Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement"). Не ме разбирайте погрешно - както знаете, аз съм автор, творя произведения на изкуството от всякакви видове, жанрове и стилове, както и софтуер, и искам да получа възнаграждение за него и да печеля. Но текстът, който е изписан по книгите е абсурден - както ще се убедите по-долу...

Свещеният сметач - списанието на юнаците...

БРОЙ - 22 (април 2003)

Тодор Арнаудов

Всички права запазени!

Приблизително през април-май 2002 г. постоянно бях облъчван от знаци, в които ми се обяснява, че правата върху "произведение на умствената собственост" са притежание на еди-кой си и всъщност ми е забранено да чета, слушам или гледам съответното произведение...

Всички права запазени. Нито една част от тази книга не може да бъде размножавана или предавана под никаква форма или начин, електронен или механичен, включително фотокопиране, записване или чрез каквито и да е системи за съхранение на информация, без предварително писмено разрешение на...

Ужас - всички сме престъпници! Всеки, който някога е възприемал предмет на умствена собственост ("обект на интелектуална" по "на-й-учному"), е нарушил умствената "собственост" на създателя му, защото е съхранил част от творбата, най-малко, в ума си. Нарушил е условието: "под каквато и да е форма за съхранение на информацията".

"Нито една част" означава нито знак от нея... което означава, че всички автори до един са крали един от друг... знаците, с които са изписали книгите си... Не знаци, а думи?...

Всъщност няма сериозен смисъл (само словозаврънкуловски и осмиващ) да питам какво разбират под "част". "Геният" на този, който е измислил горецитираната "прокламация за неприкосновеността на авторските права", препечатвана навсякъде в последно време, е безспорен.

"Нито една част" означава "нито една част", а "част" означава "част" и нищо друго. Ако означава друго, трябва да бъде упоменато, иначе нищо друго не се подразбира. "Хващаме се за думата", защото четем думи, не четем "духове" и щом някаква дума е записана и на нея е наблегнато (нито една част), то вероятно и писателят й се е "хванал" за нея. Ако пък е наблегнал безцелно, т.е. без да съзнава защо е наблегнал, тогава можем спокойно да (си) се под(и)граем с него.

След като не е казано какво е "част", то част означава буква, точка, запетая, шрифт, чертичка от буква, петънце върху книжното тяло, молекула целулоза, въглероден атом, нуклон, електрон - всяка част от книгата, за която може да се предава информация "под каквато и да е форма" - като се премества книгата в пространството се извършва огромен пренос на данни - прехвърлят се не знам си колко атома (информация) от едно място на друго. Не може да се разпространява и чрез "каквито и да е системи за съхраниение на информация", следователно и човешки мозък.

Думи ли? Всеки човек във всекидниевния си живот нарушава "правата", защото използва думите от съответния език, които вече са "патентовани" от прочут писател.

Не думи? Изречения? Защо? Всъщност защо букви? Както по-горе отбелязахме, "част" означава каквато и да е част - буквите са един от най-естествените изрази на въобраз (информация) за човека, защото са вградени в него от много рано; те са знакова уредба, с която непрекъснато си служим. Служим си обаче и с други знакови системи. Разпознаваме частите на изображения преди да образуваме в паметта си азбуки от условни образи. Буквите са съставени от отсечки, дъги, ъгли между отсечки - това също са части, които всеки зрящ човек разпознава много преди да научи азбуката. За да ги познае ги помни под някакъв въоблик (формат), следователно под някаква форма. В дъното на въоблика за запомняне на изчертани знаци е точката - клетка или околност от клетки в ретината на окото, върху която светлината е с различен цвят, отколкото в клетките, извън тази околност, най-вече граничещите с точката; точката е най-простото изображение, което може да се помни, най-простата "част" от произведението, защитено от авторски права.

Добре де... Тези, които измислят цитати като горецитата едва ли се замислят толкова дълбоко, те търсят "духовете на закона"... И тъй като "по-умният отстъпва" - ще им отстъпя още някой ред с техни осмивки и читателски усмивки.

Нека минем към по-горно отвлечение ("ниво на абстракция" по "на-й-учному") - изречения.
Да минем, и какво? И изреченията се повтарят често... Това, което ми се случи преди около година (април 2002) го доказва: прочетох в книга същото, при това, рядко срещано изречение (доколкото не съм имал случай да попадна на него от другаде), което скоро бях чул във филма "Риба меч". Скоро означава, че още "ми държеше влага" и въртях песни от звуковата му ивица.

"...the lack of realism..." Четири поредни звукосъчетания, на които се натъкнах в книгата "Eurographics'85" и са изречени от Джон Траволта в "Риба меч" след около 16 години (сигурно и от много други междувременно, по-рано и след това...) В началото на книжката беше изрично записано, че всички права са запазени... Следователно авторите й могат да осъдят създателите на "Риба меч", понеже са написали книгата си 16 години преди те да направят филма...

Щом и изречение не е достатъчно... Що да стоирим тогава? Колко би трябвало да бъде размера на "непозволеното, дори за запомняне" поле от творбата? Естествено - достатъчно дълго, така че честотата му на повторение да е изключително ниска, да клони, по възможност, към "нищо". Да речем - цяла страница. Ако се срещне цяла страница, например три хиляди знака, която е напълно еднаква с друга, тогава е възможно да има "кражба" на "умствена собственост"?

Но не е сигурно... Колко му е да преразкажеш чуждото със свои думи и да му лепнеш значка: "Aзи си го измислий туй, мои йе!"? Но и колко му е да стигнеш до заключенията, до които е стигнал и някой друг преди теб, ако мислиш в същата насока? "Николко" му е - на мен ми се е случвало много пъти, срещал съм не само, че това, което съм си измислил за "лични нужди", е било измислено "за света" много преди мен; виждал съм "своите" мисли, написани с почти същите изречения. Вероятно се е случвало на всеки да се ужаси от подобни съвпадения.

Достатъчно е обстановката да те напътства така, че да те насочи в търсене на същата крайна цел, каквато може да си е поставил някой друг и я е изпълнил някога преди теб. Истините са си истини. Значителни открития, например, са били извършвани едновременно на няколко места в отрязък от няколко години, месеци, дори дни.

© Тош, 2002-2003 ;-)

въоблик - формат
звукова ивица - sound track/саунд трак, звукът към филм (не е само музика)

Colour Optical Illusions are the Effect of the 3D-Reconstruction and Compensation of the Light Source Coordinates and Light Intensity in an Assumed 2D Projection of a 3D Scene

2012-01-01T08:01:00.000+02:00

1) In the 2D image the pixels of the brown square in the middle on the top side of the cube is actually the same pixel color as the orange square in the side which looks in the shadow part of the cube. Notice the picture below, there's more contrast and the square looks darker.

2.) Squares A and B in the 2D picture have the same absolute shade of gray.

Looks mysterious, there are claims that these are "prewired" bugs. My explanation is pretty straight, and these color illusions are rather a feature than a bug. It seems as a bug only in perverse cases as in the illusions, and only before the reason is understood:

Introduction

Light source coordinates, lights colors and reflections are ambiguous

2D images, and even the "stereo" images from our eyes from the real world are ambiguous regarding the light source and the colors, because the scenes are usually partially observable and because there's only perception of absolute color - "RGB" and luminance (rods and cones ). Besides light also has color and there can be reflections and shadows which can change both luminance and color of the affected areas. Another ambiguous components are the texture, reflectiveness and transparency of the objects, which also alters the low level RGB properties.

"Light sources" are not perceived at the low level input - it is a construct created in order to explain the patterns of differences in luminance and color which are observed. The places with high luminance are seen as "lit", the ones with lower - "shadowed", and the gradients of luminance seem as light following shapes, dispersing, reflecting etc. What is actually "following the shapes of the objects", dispersing, reflecting etc. is the luminance of the "pixels" in the 2D image.

It's similar with transparency, reflectiveness etc. - these are stable correlation observed in many samples, which gave birth of the prediction that given such correlation, the object/that part of the 2D image or reconstructed 3D scene should have a property "transparency" etc.

3D reconstruction from a 2D image is ambiguous

Cognitive hierarchy gets samples of 2D images which are projections of 3D objects. Even more - stereo samples allow it to do its kind of "triangulation" and reconstruct distances so that we perceive depth if we look with both eyes.

It goes even further - if one has grown with two healthy eyes, distance can be measured even if you close one of them. And even more: humans see 3D space in 2D projections on a flat surface (a picture or electronic screen) using only one eye!

That's possible because of the "aggressively" repetitive perception of correlations between the 2D projections on the retina and the perspective changes of the image after controlled and predictable changing the viewing angle or/and object coordinates.

The correlations of the change of luminance and color depending on the light source (changes in contrast, luminance and color) are also observed.

A lot of 2D clues for the 3-rd dimension of the objects and the position and intensity of light are extracted and "fixed" so that future 2D images are perceived as 3D even if having just connected parallel lines and other minute details characteristic for perspective transformation.

I've discussed a little bit on this back in 2004 in my [Teenage] Theory of Universe and Mind, Part 4:
The section starts from the last line at p.30 in this translation.
// The picture there seems not to appear in the document, it's the one below: //

Mind sees 3D space and light source(s) everywhere

The price of the simplicity of 3D-clues and light is that these repetitive correlations cause mind to expect 3D space and light source(s) even in the 2D flat images. Artists use to draw 2D projections of a 3D space, photographs and video does etc, the clues are constantly reinforced.

It seems highest conscious level can hardly inhibit 3D perception/integration on demand and see 2D images as 2D even if there are 3D-clues.

So...

Why the brown square looks orange?

Because the 3D-reconstructed scene seems to display a cube which is lit from the top and the side which is directed towards the screen is in the shadow, there are too much clues suggesting this, so mind believes.

However if the square in the shadow has the same absolute 2D retinal color ("RGB") as the lit square, and it is still in a shadow, then the original unlit color of the shadowed square should have been orange, because orange at this relatively lower luminance turns into the brown - the same like the top square was.

The case with the gray squares and the cylinder on the other picture is similar. The connections and borders added on the right illustration destroy the clues suggesting that these particular squares are part of the 3D scene with the cylinder and the light source behind it, because they don't follow the pattern of light. There are not clues that they are behind the scene either (being partially covered - there are no interrupted lines), so the "Z-buffer" puts them in front of the other elements. Now there is not a light source and a shadow over those squares, and their absolute retinal RGB values are not adjusted differently.

Mystery unveiled... :)

Hypothesis

A quick hypothesis might be that young infants that don't see depth yet may not have this optical illusion.
However I'm not sure about that - I suspect that babies should understand that light sources change color and luminance of the areas they impact long before they have robust 3D-perception, 3D is not needed, so I guess they may have clues of light and shadow interaction and see the optical illusion even before they see 3D.

It will be just a 2D optical illusion, because I suspect brain probably does a partial 2D light-color reconstruction before it goes into 3D. (It would be cool if I could conduct some kind of experiments, but not possible yet.)

2D-projections of 3D scenes are "2D 1/2" or "Quasi 3D" anyway, and that indeed is the reason for the impossible perspective drawings of Escher and other artists.

3D-reconstruction is ambiguous and these drawings suggest that it's done locally, based on local 2D-clues. Globally the picture might be absurd, but mind fails in focusing in on all 3D-clues, so it sees correct perspective in the different elements.

Why can't we correct this illusion consciously?

One reason I'd say is that is not really an illusion.

Another answer is in the recent series I posted about higher-lower level feedback/reflection in the cognitive hierarchies which I think is much weaker/narrower than the feedforward.

Higher level understands some of the "mistakes" and "delusions" (wrong predictions) of the lowers if takes details separately out of their context, but it cannot correct them if they are too many levels below and if there are too many *correct* predictions at the lower levels. The clues suggesting there's no illusion and the predictions *work* are reinforced for too many cases to be dismissed and altered.

In the examples above everything in the low level input suggests that there is no illusion: all other correlations between absolute pixel values confirm that these are pictures of 3D-scenes with their light sources and shadows.

Another explanation might be that high levels lack direct access to the lowest levels - retinal RGB-luminance values.

...

To be continued...

* Thanks to a show on Discovery Channel about optical illusions that made me think about this yesterday and realize this mechanism.

** Happy New Year, wishing 2012 to be more productive in AGI/SIGI.

- Оптични илюзии с цветове - възстановяване на триизмерните координати на източника на светлина в двуизмерна проекция на тримерна сцена.

(C) Todor "Tosh" Arnaudov, 1/1/2012 (except illusion photos)

Beatufiul Researchers - a documentary about Famelab 2010 and the promo clip of the Bulgarian TV show "Beautiful Science" | Красиви учени, или Зад кулисите на Лаборатория за слава/Феймлаб 2010 и Красива наука 2011

2011-12-16T03:38:00.000+02:00

That's my latest artistically shot and edited funny documentary, edited and composited with my own software.

It's still an in-house prototype and I've not being working on it much though - the project was totally frozen for 4+ months since the previous movie in the summer, I added a few new functions lately for this one.
Audio: Bulgarian
Original post and info (Bulgarian)

Embodiment is just coordinate spaces, interactivity and modalities - not a mystery

2011-12-09T00:15:00.000+02:00

"The debate" - should an AGI be embodied or not. I participated in a discussion on sensorimotor hierarchies a few months ago in the AGI list, but I'm lazy to digest it here right now (yet). I'll reword one POV of the essence which I thought of recently, though. "Body" and "embodiment" is actually about:

- Known fixed basic continuous coordinate spaces - that simplifies search and basic operations and sets one of the basic components of the inputs and their initial "labels" - coordinates. The simplest use of this is that mind can recognize where the activity is and relate coordinates of inputs to each other.

- Interactivity - input and output, includes changes of coordinates as smooth as possible in time-space - allows for as general as possible inputs and outputs (actions).

- Modalities - it's about dealing with different types of lowest level (for the system's sensors) input from the environment, with the "physics" - for constructive reasons and more general input. Each system eventually should deal with some kind of lowest level input and output, the most general it is, the more general intelligence would be.

- Inter-modalities - to relate and find models between them.

- Value-free initial inputs - initially sensory inputs and motor outputs don't have meanings, except when related to:

- Basic reward-system - that's in order to keep system integrity in the "physical" world where it exists and to avoid self-destruction.

I'm a Rocker Researcher! Demo - AC/DC's "Rocker" and Todor's Improvisation Cover Solo

2011-12-08T20:45:00.001+02:00

"Rocker" - AC/DC and me Tosh - performed with my new baby (on the right)
Photographer: me.

Abstract Addressing and Discontinuous Addressing Impede Processing in Generalizing Hierarchies

2011-11-29T14:31:00.001+02:00

The article is related to the series of: Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Rationalization and Confusions Caused by High Level Generalizations and the Feedforward-Feedback Imbalance in Brain and Generalization Hierarchies

The lowest level of addressing for human mind are:

- Orientation/position of muscles/bones.
- Coordinates in sensory matrices:
- Visual coordinate on the retina.
- Coordinate of a tactile input on the body.
- Pitch of the sound.
- Particluar tastes or smells.

A bit higher level, but still low:- Spatial coordinates of the body within environment (probably related to hippocampus, "place cells", head orientation cells)

- These are direct inputs to brain.

Selection, combination and generalization of them in space and time forms higher level coordinates/addresses. The patterns/concepts at different levels of abstraction in the cognitive hierarchy have higher level addresses, where higher level addresses and patterns are harder and slower to access and operate and require more context- and attention-switching.

The phenomenon is displayed for example in:

1. Using multiple monitors and looking right-left is generally more convenient than switching between two virtual desktops with a key or worse - menus

Unless you make a visual comparison between the images on the two monitors, then key-switching is more convenient; but for displaying different data, physical coordinates seem better.

2. Having a "to do list" or whatever materials for look up on a paper/notepad next to the monitor/out of the computer is more convenient for mind to switch focus.

Looking aside of the monitor or turning around feels like a "soft context/attention-switch", you don't get as distracted as you would if you have to travel through menus, open an organizer program, check "month, date, priority....". Take for example big paper posters like ones for conferences - you just have to glance it to find what you need. These are different spatial (physical) coordinates of entities as well.

However if the data from different contexts is on the same screen/physical address, that requires an additional abstraction/parameters to mark the different contexts.

3. Chains of intentional high-level operations needed to access abstract addresses impede processing and are more distracting than a single or chain of low level operations such as adjusting muscles/orientation or changing physical location

For example, if you have to open one place, to search there, then find a key to search for another location etc. (either virtual or physical locations).

Intentional actions involve the longest chains of access of different levels of generalizations. If many actions are needed, this implies it takes more time and it's like "crawling" the hierarchy and sweeping the buffers, then it of course will cause slower context-switch back.

4. Orders of patterns associated with flat numbers are easier to remember than if associated with abstract unrelated names

See "Friday, May 2, 2008 What is better for a multi-effects guitar processor's display - numbers or names?" http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-is-better-for-guitar-effects.html

5. Continuity within same coordinate system/address space (related to 4.)

Smoothness allows for simper encoding of the following steps and predictions.

Continues...

Exoskeletons - Berkeley Bionics Human Exoskeleton

2011-11-22T13:09:00.001+02:00

Do you want one of these super suits to carry your stuff? :) I do.

Terms: Self-Improving General Intelligence (SIGI). Self-Improving Generally Intelligent Mind (SIGIM). Самоусъвършенстващ се Разум (СУР). Самоусъвършенстваща се мислеща машина (СУММ).

2011-11-16T10:00:00.000+02:00

IMO "A" in AGI or "AI" is a redundant word, and what's more important in POV are the other terms.

- General Intelligence (GI) - can be applied to humans as well
- Self-Improving General Intelligence (SIGI)
- Self-Improving Generally Intelligent Mind (SIGIM)
- Self-Improving Generally Intelligent Machine (SIGIM)
(SIGI & SIGIM are interchangeable; SIGI & GI can be applied to humans as well)

...
- Универсален разум (УР) или само "разум" - може да се прилага и за хора, и за машини.
- Самоусъвършенстващ се универсален Разум (СУР) - може да се прилага и за хора, и за машини.
- Самоусъвършенстваща се универсална машина (СУМ).
- Самоусъвършенстваща се универсална мислеща машина (СУММ).

Смисълът "универсална" се подразбира, дори и ако "универсална" формално се пропусне.

...

Self-Improving/Самоусъвършенстващ се means in the most general case in POV of B. K an mine:

- Improve precision and/or scope of predictions of future inputs based on past inputs.

For a true SIGI the process of self-improving should be as general as possible and as scalable as possible, keeping the trend for as long as possible, starting from raw intrinsically meaningless sensory input.

There's no "magic" here, unlike some fake AGI researchers assume there should be.

Richard Feynman - a Great Person, Physicist and a Born to be an Actor and Comedian. Talks Worth Listening To. In Memoriam

2011-11-08T16:33:00.000+02:00

I recommend all of his talks for inspiration and fun. He's a hybrid of an ingenious physicist and a very talented actor and comedian - reminds me of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino; it's something about their common New York accent.

Richard Feynman, the Nobel, 'It's a pain in the neck.'

Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Law - Part 7 Seeking New Laws (full version)

Feynman on Scientific Method. (Related closely to General Intelligence principles in AGI)

Richard Feynman - The Distinction of Past and Future.

BTW, a POV to irreversability of mine -- it's because of the bad communication between particles. The smallest particles/details, whatever their nature is, are correlated too much and are harder to be controlled by an external structure than to do what's already "encoded". It's hard to cause an action without causing by-effects which are uncontrollable or undesirable, but also unavoidable - that's related to the "quantum uncertainty".

The smallest particles are what drives causation, and they are supposed to have the smallest equivalents of computing power and memory compared to bigger particles; that's why their "behavior" is the simplest, have the shortest scope and seems "chaotic".

Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 1: Jiggling Atoms

... All of the series ...

Feynman 'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)

Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Law - Part 6 Probability and Uncertainty (full version)

Thanks to Alexander for sharing a link to some of Feynman's talks.

PETMAN - Boston Dynamics' new Stunning Humanoid Robot and AlphaDog

2011-11-02T02:42:00.001+02:00

Wow...

An e-zine Article

News: AGI Forum Opened (Alpha) and Twenkid Research - updated web site (Alpha) | Форум по Универсален изкуствен разум (изкуствен интелект) на Тодор Арнаудов - Тош

2011-10-31T01:07:00.003+02:00

Welcome to the updated web site of "Twenkid Research" (Alpha) and to the AGI Forum of the Independent Scalable AGI Society which opened for participants, but it's "Alpha" as well, need to be filled with some more pinned topics, information and links in the sections - I prepared plenty of them.

http://research.twenkid.com
http://research.twenkid.com/forum

Enjoy

...

Колеги, заповядайте във форум по Универсален изкуствен разум (универсален изкуствен интелект, "силно направление" в ИИ, мислещи машини) на Обществото на независими изследователи, създаден от Тодор Арнаудов - Тош. Включва подфоруми в многобройни свръзани области и подфорум на български език.

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Words: artificial general intelligence, thinking machines, forum, discussion, independent, scalable, AI, UAI

News - To Open - Discussion Forum of the Independent Scalable Artificial General Intelligence Society

2011-10-22T21:09:00.013+03:00

Recently I realized how the conservative culture in Academia has emerged - somebody got pissed off of bullshit in open discussions with no moderation, bad selection and low standard for the participants in the discussions. Unfortunately this shit happens on a regular basis in the AGIRI AGI list. Some people has noticed it, but they have given up to do anything about it.

Sorry! My solution is a moderated forum with higher standards and requirements, starting with invitations to participants.

Technically the forum is already created, but it's still hidden and under-construction/testing. Participants will be invited to join a bit later.
...
Update, 28/10/2011: The forum has opened for participants (Alpha Version) : http://research.twenkid.com/forum/

Regarding the Independent Scalable Artificial General Intelligence Society:

http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2011/04/news-independent-scalable-artificial.html

Rationalization and Confusions Caused by High Level Generalizations and the Feedforward-Feedback Imbalance in Brain and Generalization Hierarchies

2011-10-18T01:51:00.002+03:00

Rationalization and Confusions Caused by High Level Generalizations and the Feedforward-Feedback Imbalance in Brain and Generalization Hierarchies

Continues from Frontal Lobe Activation Patterns in Pessimistic & Optimistic Brains, and in Infant Brain Before and After Understanding of Object Permanence

1. Higher-to-Lower level feedback is less efficient than Lower-To-Higher level feed-forward generalization.

Example: Image/Object Recognition vs Image/Object Rendering, performed by humans.

Every healthy child can recognize human faces, understand emotions and react accordingly, but it's not that easy when intentions are involved - feedback/output to act over environment. Realistic drawing or painting of faces or good acting in a film require time, talent and practice.*

(*I guess I can get the critics that regarding painting/drawing it's just "precision vs scope", some autistic people are great in copying inputs. However drawing by memory and creative drawing of imaginary subjects require both scope and precision and capability to keep consistent mapping between all the levels, from the highest to the lowest.)

2. Generalization out of specifics (rich sensory input) is simpler/more efficient than specification down from generalizations ("decompression")

Generalization is selective lossy compression. Decompression requires reconstruction of the lost data, or requires that data is preserved or the knowledge how to extract it from external memory and incorporate it is kept. Here is the point of "precision vs depth", however I'll emphasize that sometimes a lot of both is needed.

Besides, I suspect depth has more severe limitations than precision for the lower levels. The cognitive hierarchy can add generalization levels at the expense of wider scope of input data and/or lower detail, but these both are problematic - if the scope is extended at the expense of detail (to keep computational complexity under control), then generalization levels will run out shortly, because there won't be meaningful details remaining. On the other hand, if the scope is extended with more modest detail lost, then learning will go computationally out of control.

We don't know where a machine can go in generalization levels with more computing power, but I think brain is very limited.

3. Higher level sensory inputs have less of impact over the cognitive hierarchy, because the feedback is less efficient than feed-forward.

That's the reason why captions "Smoking kills" or "Speeding kills" usually have no effect to make people stop smoking or stop speeding and why first-hand experience - to see with your own eyes, to hear with your own ears and to touch with your own fingers - have more dramatic effect in transmitting any message, than relayed experience of others.

Seeing your friend smoker dying of lung cancer or seeing your friend smashed in his car because he drove drunk - that's a pretty different sensory input - and not only because of your personal involvement with the sufferers.

Text is too abstract and distant - the low level physical representation of text is meaningless, it serves only to encode a higher level representation - that's where the input starts having a meaningful impact to the brain, and the message has to go down in the hierarchy to have actual impact on the behavior.

Another example is acting and film. Film as media demands providing motion pictures and rich sound - the physics of the action at the lowest level possible with a lot of details/high resolution of the input. If there's too much of a dialogue and too much of self-explanations and declarations by the characters, especially of obvious things - then brain is fed with high level generalized input, it can't activate the lower levels from the top-down, and they're idle or "bored". On the other hand if the lowest sensory input is rich, brain can induce up generalizations and engage the entire hierarchy. (Besides the effects of the balance of unpredictability etc., see Schmidhuber's works on Creativity)

4. Rationalization is playing with high-level patterns to explain lower level patterns, which the higher level cannot access, because of the fact that feedback is worse than feedforward, or because lower level patterns are unknown

Higher levels in the cognitive hierarchy are derivatives of the lower levels - the lower levels induce the higher ones, not vice verse. In a sense (a bit simplified), higher level patterns in the cognitive hierarchy are a delayed expressions of the lower level ones. However once a higher level emerges out of the stable regularities in the lower level, it starts to mess with the lower level business - adjusting lower level input, selecting data to keep attention on; adjusting coordinates, resolution, location; and the higher level do in order to maximize its own "success" - match, prediction, reward.

Higher levels usually cannot explain and trace back how they are created, what their lower level patterns are and what are the lower level drives.

Similar situation is with bad philosophy and other fields* where lower level conceptualization, patterns and input are wanted for a conceptual progress, but practitioners deny it and keep blah-blah-ing with concepts which are too high a level, too general, too unrelated to the problem they're trying to solve.

That's also one of the reason for researchers such as Boris Kazachenko and myself to suggest bottom-up approach - it allows for the maximum possible abstraction, while keeping maximum possible resolution and keeping the traces of the abstraction.

*Search the blog with "What's Wrong with Natural Language Processing

5. There are Two Reward Systems which are Messed Up

There's another issue - two reward systems run in parallel in brain. A cognitive and a physical. Cognitive system aims at maximizing predicted match of pure data, while the physical system aims at maximizing desired match - input sensations must match hardwired target sensations loaded with value - food, warmth, water, sex etc. The physical is way more primitive and crude, it relies a lot on the more primitive brain areas and on dopamine and other neurotransmitters/neuromodulators/hormones, while cognitive system is based on finer processing, even though the former participate also. Both systems interact and overlap, the physical system can override the cognitive and make it a slave - for example higher level cognition of drug addicts is a slave of the primitive need to take the drug. Generally these systems are messed up and tangled, so it's hard to trace where starts which in real behavioral record.

6. Rationalization is also explaining physical motivation with cognitive means

Ask somebody why she loves her boyfriend. She's likely to tell you "because he's smart, funny, kind, blah, blah and because he'so soooo blah!", while the real reason is much simpler - the way he makes her feel. That's why she loves him, where "to love" has also more basic meaning than the societal one - it's about quantities of neurotransmitters and about "imprinting" of addiction-cycles of generating such neurotransmitters by physical-cognitive conditioning, inter-association.

It's true that the abstract reasons do play certain role in creating the inter-associations between physical and cognitive sensations - everyone has some preferences and favorites, - however this can be reduced to:
- I love him because he's the type I wanted him to be!
- I love him, because he's my perfect match!
- He's the best match I could find so far...

This is a match between desired and input, which is the type of match of the physical reward system - apparently this selection is driven by the physical system, overriding the cognitive.

That's why I think the abstract reasons of "smart, funny..." are "rationalizations", but rationalization is not strange at all. Everybody would say "yeah, socially acceptable explanations", but that's a cheap answer.

There's one more appropriate reason for rationalization - it's the cognitive system which is asked the question (it's asked in a natural language); the highest levels in the cognitive hierarchy are ruling this area, and yes - the society has taught this higher cognitive system how it should act in such situations etc.

If you ask the question in a lower level language, the answer is different - that's her body language and her behavior when she's with her boyfriend alone, when they're kissing and making love. The answers are also in the amount of oxytocin, dopamine and other chemicals in her brain, the release of which is conditioned with the certain cognitive patterns initially generated by perceiving her beloved one.

In general, for love and attraction it's true by the definition of "emotions" that the physical reward system kicks in. One may be "just a friend" with someone because he's "smart, funny, blah-blah", but even then if one is a human being with a brain in tact (not a sociopath/psychopath), his friendship relations would be messed up with the physical reward systems - emotions, crude emission of certain chemicals and activations of primitive brain areas, which is associated/recorded/conditioned with cognitive patterns, and both are inter-twined.

Purely cognitive "friendship" is business and if it's such, it's not really a friendship.

*Higher/Lower level drives - Passionate feelings demand for "lower" drives, where "lower" in this context has different meaning than lower in the cognitive hierarchy. The meaning here is driven by evolutionary and physically "lower" brain modules, which maps to areas different than the neocortex, archicortex (hippocampus) and thalamus. However physical reward system is not in the same hierarchy as the cognitive system and the levels regarding tracing back, cognitive and physical reward systems are entangled and the physical system can manipulate and "short circuit" all levels of the cognitive hierarchy.

Continues... - On the apparent inconsistency of the goals of a system with cognitive hierarchy and More on rationalization and the confusions of the higher levels in the cognitive hierarchy.

Suggested reading:

Analysis of the meaning of a sentence, based on the knowledge base of an operational thinking machine. Reflections about the meaning and artificial intelligence - T.A. 2004

http://knol.google.com/k/cognitive-focus-generalist-vs-specialist-bias

http://knol.google.com/k/boris-kazachenko/executive-attention/27zxw65mxxlt7/11#

http://knol.google.com/k/intelligence-as-a-cognitive-algorithm

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

Slides on T. Arnaudov's "Teenage Theory of Universe and Mind"

Frontal Lobe Activation Patterns in Pessimistic & Optimistic Brains, and in Infant Brain Before and After Understanding of Object Permanence

2011-10-12T02:19:00.019+03:00

Quotations from

"Brain 'rejects negative thoughts'"

When the news was positive, all people had more activity in the brain's frontal lobes, which are associated with processing errors. With negative information, the most optimistic people had the least activity in the frontal lobes, while the least optimistic had the most.
It suggests the brain is picking and choosing which evidence to listen to.

Interpretation of mine: frontal lobe is supposed to be the highest level of processing, which includes the top of the iceberg of conscious data (reflectively accessible), which allows to see that it's about "errors". Lower levels are also about "errors". However if the errors (mispredictions) are too high at lower level (perceived differs expected), this perceptions may not elevate up, they're "meaningless" at conscious level.

- The most optimistic subjects expect positive data, therefore negative data is misprediction/mistake and it's cut before reaching highest levels.

- The least optimistic ones expect negative data, and such evidence is a match to prediction, so the evidence is processed at the highest level.
I suspect this may imply that the reason for data to be cut is prior to the frontal lobes. It demands expected outcomes, but it's developed to want them from the machinery before it.

This research reminds me Natalie Portman's famous paper (sure, famous for her fans): http://mindhacks.com/2007/06/18/natalie-portman-cognitive-neuroscientist/

More formally:

Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

- Infants who understand object permanence (searching a toy which is covered under a cloth in front of their sight) are measured to have increased activity in their frontal lobe after the toy is covered, while the ones who don't understand the object is still there (and don't search for it) display a decrease in frontal-lobe activity.

This is a crude measure, but I guess:
The highest levels are expecting that the object should be under the cloth, so they are working actively - sending feedback down to the lower ones to find out where the object is and to adjust input so that they get confirmation of that higher level hypothesis.The frontal lobe of infants prior the understanding is less activated, perhaps because it doesn't have predictions to compare with lower level. Lower level processing dominates and the patterns in frontal lobe are too noisy or lacking.

Suggested reading about what I mean with those "levels":
http://knol.google.com/k/cognitive-focus-generalist-vs-specialist-bias
http://knol.google.com/k/boris-kazachenko/executive-attention/27zxw65mxxlt7/11#
http://knol.google.com/k/intelligence-as-a-cognitive-algorithm
http://research.twenkid.com/agi_english/

"Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: "It's very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.

"For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality - in essence all people are 'scientists'."

Good morning, you finally noticed...

To be continued... --> On Rationalization and Confusions Caused by High Level Generalizations and the Feedforward-Feedback Imbalance in Brain and Generalization Hierarchies

Human-Computer Interface Cool Devices - Computer Vision, Projection, Gesture, Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech - Pranav Mistry, IPhone4 and mine

2011-10-05T16:05:00.007+03:00

Impressive, I need something like the Pranav's devices for myself.

Research Assistant

That reminds me of a project of mine called. Well, a secret. :P It was/is supposed to integrate a lot of tools in an intelligent way and to boost your performance, saving you all kinds of labor intensive tasks, and it was supposed to monitor your actions and behavior.

I have thought of developing a part of it as MS thesis in early 2008, such as marking of important paragraphs and pages from a book/paper with a simple gesture while you're reading (draw a line with your finger on the side of the paper), then storing the selected parts as images on the computer. OCR would assist in faster classification and for search, but it was supposed to be not robust and was not critical, even without it that's very useful for collecting excerpts/cites from philosophy books, newspapers and magazines, promotion booklets etc., in order to perform "batch processing later" without switching your attention. It saves time and distractions.

The best would be if you could have a head-mounted camera, but more realistically for the experiment seemed a fixed camera, where the book/paper would be set on the table, the video - recorded on a camera at 640x480x15 or 30 fps, and then processed off-line.

One of the technical issues was the resolution - I got 640x480x30 of crisp video recording on a mobile camera at the time, it had the optical resolution to capture entire regular book pages, but at this resolution the camera has to be close to the paper and properly oriented, also it's not practical to record all of the frames.
(Sure, there's one simple "round-about" - just picture the paragraphs manually, with your finger on the proper line. :X)

It seemed "obviously implementable", these gestures would be quite simple computer vision task, however I didn't started an implementation of the project. My supervisor suggested me it would be too much of an "engineering" project, while for a thesis it'd be better to be more "scientific" and propose some contributions, not that most of my colleagues were very far from being scientific.

I eventually ended up with a thesis on my microformant hybrid Bulgarian text-to-speech synthesizer, I developed the essential part of which for ~ 5 weeks as a first year student. Of course, I added additional projected and proposed functions and ideas for improvements and for a totally different design which is supposed to learn to speak like a baby, but I didn't have the time to implement the improvements - was too busy with my job then.

Text-to-Speech

Indeed Text-to-Speech, without speech-recognition, is useful way to save some time of being stuck on the chair in front of the computer, by reading your texts aloud, I use it myself.

The "baby synthesizer" of mine is not a junked project either, but the best way to implement it is with a robust general AGI system which is to be developed.

Externalism - or on the External Storage and Tools that Extend Human Mind and Brain and are Indispensable for its Development

2011-10-04T17:33:00.009+03:00

Recently I discovered that I've shared believes in this philosophical direction since my teenage works (found how it's called).

One introductory term - "paradoxical universality of brain" - brain is specialized in being universal.

The estimation of brain's enormous computing power and memory are arbitrary/not really practical, because brain power is not comparable to computer power. Computers are in fact more flexible and more "universal" than brain, and the ultimate cognitive system is a brain (generally intelligent agent/core, AGI) + a computer and external memory (neither a brain alone, nor a computer alone).

However, you can use a computer to simulate a brain if you have a precise model and speed, but you can't use a brain to simulate a computer, even if you have precise model - most brains are incapable to simulate on their own even the first mechanical computers (say, those which multiplied), logarithmic rulers and artillery tables with precomputed values, and also the papers to store reliably phone numbers or a line of text.

These external "tools" are in fact extensions of our brain - they are just accessed differently than memory which is internal - the access passes through motion (translation), which in fact is just the lowest level of output that the system produces, it's output of data to the physical reality and translation of data in physical reality. At the lowest level output should be decoded down to the "machine code of Universe", the "language of the particles" (my terms).

That's the same as the memory hierarchy in computers - from the fastest registers, to different levels of caches, RAM, hard disks, Internet to external media which requires to be physically moved in order to get accessible.

Culture starts from the changeable and stable intentionally altered and structured environment which allows artifacts/memory to survive longer than a brain and outside of a brain - that includes the overlapping lives of the different generations allowing language to be transmitted.

A human brain alone, without the external tools, without alterable structured stable environment, without intelligent beings around to teach it stuff and especially to teach it sophisticated language... In this conditions it wouldn't go much further than a chimpanzee's brain in similar conditions.

News: Hot Discussions on the AGI List on sensorimotor hierarchical generalization approaches vs "symbolic", simplicity and compression abuses etc.

2011-09-11T05:39:00.010+03:00

Some good/funny discussions are running in the AGI mailing list.

http://www.agiri.org/email/

Archive: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/%3dnow

I'll probably prepare a digest of the relevant discussions.

News: Coming up - on probabilities, logic, language, developmental psychology, bottom-up pattern discovery and prediction etc.

2011-08-28T17:07:00.006+03:00

I've been involved a lot in working on my artistic career some months ago, but recently I've been turning on the research thread again - joined AGI mail list to notice the community there about the two AGI university courses taught in Plovdiv, and started to spend some time in AGI studies and reflection.

A comment of mine on Narrow AI-niks, in an Ben Goertzel article on "AI Nanny".

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/08/17/does-humanity-need-an-ai-nanny/

Matthew: Ben, I respect the opinion of AGI experts but because I have no programming expertise, I find it hard to ignore the plurality of “narrow” AI experts who believe AGI is not coming for a century of maybe never."

Todor: AGI is not about programming (unlike the AI-niks think) - it's about understanding how mind works. Programming would be the easiest part, once we do understand intelligence.

Plurality is not a strong argument - the majority of a population is supposed to have the minority of intelligence, and people who stick to the mainstream often are not "right", they're just obedient and narrow-viewed, have no own vision, and no guts to do anything radical on their own.

Regarding understanding - the boring narrow AI-niks are not trying to understand intelligence (they don't believe they could), rather they're coding and engineering on problems, which seem intelligent, but are obviously quite solvable and flat, just need some "tinkering" and testing to get done. Such as self-driving cars etc., which is one of the best achievement of the top narrow AI-niks.

Участието на Тош в онлайн реалити шоуто "Програмист търси жена" - Todor's Participation in a Funny Online Reality Show (Interview/Picture Story)

2011-08-04T18:24:00.013+03:00

Гледайте участието ми във веселото Интернет риалити шоу "Програмист търси жена".

Уникалното интервю-фоторазказ с мен, "всестранно развития пънкар", Китаристът и др. излезе в сряда, 27/7.

(...няколко малки фрагментчета...)

(...)

С какво се занимаваш?
- С всичко... Обаче дамите ще ме изкарат самохвалко, ако тръгна да изреждам, затова после ще ти кажа част от нещата, които може би най-много ще ги... развълнуват.

Как така? Не си ли програмист?
- Ти не знаеше ли? Не че не създавам софтуер и че последният ми проект не подмина 30 хиляди реда код на С++, но го правя... По голяма нужда... Трябва ми, за (...)

(........)

Според теб какво търсят жените в един мъж?
- Обикновено – скучни "неправилни" неща; поне според правилните мъже. Да си говорим откровено, това което реално търсят мнозинството жени няма (...)

-- ...вижте цялото интервю... --

My beloved ones by ~toshko on deviant ART

Crushed by ~toshko on deviant ART

Photographer's Love by ~toshko on deviant ART

Думи: риалити, реалити, смях, забавно, интервю, фото, снимки, секси, комедия, медия, медии, любов, секс, връзки, жени, мъже, отношения

Why shorter Stature and Lower camera angle are Unconsciously associated with "Inferiority"? Memories from childhood (Nature or Nurture)

2011-08-03T17:30:00.013+03:00

I think this one is very obvious, I'll share my view on it:

We've felt like this as children, when we've seen the bigger ones and adults from down below and had to bend our necks to look up to see their eyes. Bigger and older ones made us feel inferior, and we really were - back then. (*See also below)

Similarly, we felt superior to the smaller ones, and that's why looking from higher angle feels like being "superior" to the subject on the picture.

Both are for pictures displaying people, particularly faces, and of course - particular emotions on the faces reinforce this feeling. Like low angle and insidious laughing face, or high angle and face blinking with eyes or seeming confused.

I guess the stature stereotype is of the same origin - shorter ones are associated with "smaller one" - children, which is associated to own memories of being weaker and inferior to taller ones. I guess that's why in general short actors are more rarely the protagonists, especially superheros, than taller ones. (Another reason probably is statistics - taller, handsome etc. is more rare ("special") than ordinary).

By the way, it is not "spiritual", "collective unconsciousness", "archetype" etc. like other common phenomenons such as similar myths around the world. It's just similar conditioning, repeating experiences at different locations in similar/repeating circumstances, processed by similar generalization "processors".

* I'm not an expert in dog behavior, but I think this is related to the behavior of dogs. As little ones, they had to bend their necks up to see their mother's eyes, and this physically determined behavior is conditioned as a symbol of displaying inferiority or/and loyalty. Eventually dogs demonstrate similar body language towards their master/leader/provider (partially also for physical reasons - their heads are lower than ours, but not only - dogs try to look you in the eyes and come closer to your head).

More generally, I guess one of the discriminating skills of "social" animals is to be smart enough to understand and recognize those "providers" or "leaders", and to understand and "think" about inferiority and superiority of other agents, as grading expected benefits and dangers coming from them, which ultimately goes toward fight or flight decisions/reactions. This skill allow social animals to behave appropriately to maximize benefits according other agents (whatever benefit is for the particular agents and circumstances).

See Also: (Search: Nurture or Nature)

Punk Researchers - "Love's No Friend of Mine", or "Give it to me!" - Hard Rock - Punk Musical, starring Todor

2011-07-25T05:29:00.003+03:00

Български, с повече инфо.

"Give it to me!", or "Love's no Friend of Mine" - hard rock & punk musical, with music by Todor "Tosh/Twenkid" Arnaudov(*see below) and the great Bulgarian punk band "Kontrol". Starring Tosh and Anya Chuleva, directed by Tosh. *Played, arranged and partially created - parts from a jam session starting from Rainbow's "Love's no Friend" theme, transitions and progressions on guitar, bass and keyboard; rhythm fillings; a "Van Halen"'s cover, Kontrol's song improvised cover solo, some Offsrping's riffs, and film music arrangement of a transition between themes.

Edited and composited with Twenkid FX Studio (prototype).

Teenage Theory of Universe and Mind, Original Works and Slides in English

2011-06-17T02:07:00.012+03:00

Well, I did the essential translation to English of that part of my old "capital works" an year ago, but gave up publishing it back then. In the mean time I prepared/translated a lecture for my second AGI course, which is more "disciplined" in structure than the raw writings.

Todor Arnaudov's [Teenage] Theory of Universe and Mind, 2001-2004

- Original work, Part 3
- Original work, Part 4
- Lecture Slides

In the context of my teenage theory I'd suggest you checking out Valentin Turchin's view in his book "The Phenomenon of Science" (it's online) - especially his theory of hierarchies and Meta-System Transition, and in general, the book is a very good read.

Watch for the MIT Competition - I Squared

2011-05-14T00:09:00.006+03:00

MIT has always been honorable place for AI, but IMHO - only from 50s to 70s.

http://isquared.mit.edu/

They seem from those who don't know or deny the term "AGI" - of course, classical guys, "they created the field".

I am not really impressed yet, European IMCLEVER project with Schmidhuber is way better, a real AGI project and a real competition.

However this is MIT - very rich and very big...

"GAI" stuff - ridiculous ignorant AI articles, unaware of the existence of the AGI community

2011-05-11T23:54:00.001+03:00

Enjoy some funny ignorant "GAI"-stuff (or worse) I reached to by a friend's link:

Unthinking Machines

Solving AI

Minsky, Chomsky...

It seems possible and funny that the AI grandfathers don't even know about their grandsons (see the blog) and their theoretical progress in AGI, and that many of them consider "AI" a retired (retarded) term.

Information Overload and Brain Computing Power are Extremely Exaggerated - Repetitions, Noise, Junk Data and Miscalculations

2011-05-11T02:17:00.003+03:00

For example:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/10/AR2011021004916_2.html?sid=ST2011021100514http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/10/AR2011021004916_2.html?sid=ST2011021100514

I'd question their methodology and claim for pocket calculators as having such a share, but this one is the best:

"But Hilbert offers a humbling comparison. Despite our gargantuan digital growth, the DNA in a single human body still stores far more information - and a single "human brain computes far more calculations - than all the technology on Earth.

Brain computing power in terms of computers and calculations is much less << 1 instruction/sec or a FLOPS of any CPU... Can you please multiply 643.576 * 256.94? With a CPU you can granulate power and do anything at anytime - this is impossible with brain, it has virtual specialized fake "ZILLIFLOPS", from which sometimes it can't get even one FLOP on demand.

DNA information can only be interpreted as commands for building proteins, that can be read by specific mechanisms in specific moments in specific tiny-little locations, it can't be random, but is very dependent on producing particular living cells, and you can't access it as RAM or disk. (Yeah, there is "junk DNA", but it's not random accessible either.)

Digital data and media are different universe...

...

"Overload" is repetitions and lots of noise

A big portion of any kind of "information overload" of our time is caused by mass produced copies of all kinds of media. There are thousands (or tens or hundreds of thousands?) of television programs all around the world, big portion of their transmission is the same. The same "leading world news" from LA to Tokio. The same cinema blockbusters, the same music on the radio stations and on the computers, the same operating system and software on billions of same models CPUs and all kind of digital devices. And new versions are most of the time updates of the old ones etc.

Sure there are local variations, but the information to encode them is supposed to be astronomically less, compared to a dull measure of capacity for storing repetitions. (And there are local repetitions either - national news, circulating through national media, local news - through multiple local media... Students writing projects on the same topics etc.)

Another thing is that 25 GB of a blue-ray disk at 1920x1080 of the same movie won't left much more information in the memory of viewers than a 700 MB CD with noisy and grainy 640x360 video - you'll just feel the first image "more realistic, crisp, clear..." at the moment of perception, or you could notice some wrinkles, texture details or captions which are probably of little importance for the message of the work.

...

There is a lot of unique information, recorded as home/amateur photos and videos, but the big portion of it is duplicating either - 100 photos of the same event from close angles (little difference), tourists photos on the same spots - "me in Paris". And a big portion of the growth in digital data is from cheap cameras with fake bombastic resolutions of 15 Mpix or so, producing noise and blurry images, more to justify the grow in portable memory capacity and to delude buyers than to deliver such quality - if the resolutions didn't grew, users wouldn't need anything more than 1-2 GBs memory cards.

As for "overload" - there might be 1000000 porn sites or videos of the thing you're searching for, you won't check them all. You'd usually stop the search after the first few sites, because they already satisfied your demand, namely because others are the same, regarding your query.

Indeed, web is full of repetitions - web forums and blogs for the same topic, web stores with the same reviews and same goods, media with the same news.

All people around the world have the same interests (such as food/health, sex, celebrities, movies, sport ... ) - classes of interests/topics and are supposed to have similar or the same views on the topics, where the set of possible views is limited, and the "important" for the most users are repeated the most.

Neuroplasticity and Aging Brain - "On Brain" Blog of Michael Merzenich

2011-05-07T00:37:00.007+03:00

Think faster focus better and remember moreRewiring our brain to stay younger...

Some bookmarks/notes:

46 min + -- aging brain, older , noisier ...
46:30 - 47:30 older brain doesn't keep details, relies on abstractions, but the details are what can be remembered.
50:30 - cognitive test, recognize a sound, then a following, aging
20s - 20 times/sec, 80-ies 7 times/sec
6-8 samples syllable --> 2 samples per syllabple //51:00

Dr. Merzenich claims old brain can be "rejuvenated" to some extent and is applying a software system for regular practice. The results from such tests can be improved significantly by practice, e.g. 70-80 year-old can achieve results of people in their 30s.

There are some interesting postings on the early critical period of brain development, aging brain, neuroplasticity, autism and other topics in Dr. Michael Merzenich's blog: http://onthebrain.com/

IMHO articles are a bit chatty, but you can filter out useful information.

Some suggested ones from my browse:

http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=25
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=27
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=43
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=50
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=72
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=98
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=103
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=114
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=126
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=152
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=181
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=239
http://merzenich.positscience.com/?p=248

Cyberdyne HAL - Cybernics, Transhumanism and Exoskeletons and Human Power Augmentation

2011-05-03T16:21:00.004+03:00

Quite funny names... :) http://www.cybernics.tsukuba.ac.jp/
If you speak Danish: http://transhumanisten.dk/2011/03/23/618/

News: Independent Scalable Artificial General Intelligence and Self-Impoving General Intelligence (AGI & SIGI) Tribune & Society - Forum/Magazine/E-zine/"Journal"/Circle

2011-05-01T02:31:00.002+03:00

Well, the idea and the reason for it: Official AGI Journal and Independent AGI E-zine.

Declare it "founded". It doesn't need to be formal etc., it's something that exists and has existed anyway, this blog has been one of the tribunes of this society, but coining a name may assist in locating it and taking it more seriously. Whatever. :)

"Founding members" are Boris Kazachenko, being the ultimate independent researcher in AGI for more than two decades?, and myself - you know me from the blog. The best students attending my AGI courses are also part of this informal circle.

I've just started to publish translations in English of some of the only-in-Bulgarian yet lectures from the courses, starting with:
- Slides on my foundation ideas "[Teenage] Theory of Universe and Mind [Intelligence]" from my youth years, which lead me to recognize the field.
- The lecture on Hutter's and Legg's paper on Machine Intelligence

- Simple presentation about the basic principles of general intelligence.

Oct 2011: Welcome to discuss on the forum of the society:

Forum:http://research.twenkid.com/forum

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

Edit (13/11/2011): Extensions of the name with Self-Improving General Intelligence (SIGI), resp. Independent Scalable AGI and SIGI Society

GAI and GAI Conferences and "AI: A Modern --Sorry-- Post-Mortem Approach"

2011-04-21T13:44:00.014+03:00

Feel welcome: http://epia2011.appia.pt/

Well, congratulations for the topics and for those guys reforming, but the term is ridiculous. It's obviously coined by orthodox scientifical AI-niks, who're reforming, while keeping their scientific roots (means citations, publications in "high-impact journals" etc.).

I'd stick to the terms AGI and UAI, like in Bulgarian I prefer "УИР" (UIR - Universalen Izkustven Razum) which encompasses both, instead of "УИИ" (UII - "Intelekt"). One of the simple practical reasons is that "УИИ" (UII) sounds too close to "хуй" (HUY) ~ it means "D." English word starting with dic*.

Come on!... :)

From the site:

"The importance of Artificial Intelligence in Portugal is visible by the number of PhDs (over 100), the sheer number of researchers ..."

Good... I'm not saying this for the first time, like for example about the "MEXICA" "creative" framework.

Sorry, but what the h* are all these PhDs doing? Hundreds, thousands, 10s of thousands researchers are supposed to be working on "GAI" projects full-time. Thousands of human-months work. Results? Real things?

Real things and progress is actually coming from non-PhDs, such as formally electrical engineer and neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins, or mathematics and physics PhDs, such as M. Hutter, J.Schmidhuber and B. Goertzel.

This is not surprising - as another non-AI-PhD from the AGI community says, AI belongs (mostly) to "tinkerers" (his term). Check out too see more clearly what I mean:
- Whats_wrong_with_NLP_links.htm
- MEXICA: Creativity Disappointment
- B. Kazachenko: Intelligence by definition

This reminds me that recently I found a video lecture by one of the authors of the notorious "classics" in AI: "AI: A Modern Approach", surprisingly mainly on NLP, collocations and stuff, pretending to be new directions in AI or something...

Very smart, funny and high-status guy, obviously, but I have never had patience to give his book a try, I just knew it's "classics", partially because long time ago I started to distinguish myself from "AI", insisting that if all that junk is called "AI", the least thing one could do is to coin a non-polluted term and stay away.

Now I glanced the content of this "classics" and saw I've not mistaken not reading it... Sorry, but I didn't see anything "modern" in a 1000 pages of random high-level non-scaling really classical methods (except a few chapters on agents and machine learning).

Dear respectful high status scientists and directors - give us results, please. Pretentious pedantically written PhD theses and a large number of publications or citations are meaningful status-symbol per se mostly in the pretentious environment of the scientific conferences and non-specialists surrounding where the only mean for the others to recognize how big researcher you are is to count your publications and citations or how high you are in the science status - PhD student, PhD, Post-Doc, .... Check the links above to understand what's wrong with that.

AGI in Prime Time on Bulgarian National Television - "Beautiful Science" Show, First Episode | Универсален изкуствен разум по БНТ - "Красива Наука" #1

2011-04-17T10:48:00.005+03:00

А live shot from the first sessiion on the set on Tuesday, a day before the recording of the first show. This moment was aired in the end of the prime time news on Bulgarian National Television.

A shot from the show Rossen explains how Kevin Warwick connects biological neurons to an artificial cybernetic system.

The letters on the top: (C,B) --> (L, R, m, M) --> (...) mean:
(Coordinate, Brightness) --> (Length of reccurence, compression Ratio, miss, Match) ... Terms from some of the basics in Boris' definition of cognitive algorithm.

There were several spots within the show; one covering Bulgaria based Blue Gene (12 TFLOPS), which when first installed was in Top 100 of TOP500.org and have been the fastest machine between Munich and Moscow. There were a few about the FameLab Science Communication Comptetition, which is happening now for the 5-th year in Bulgaria and is the origin of this show and most of us, the participants who shape the discussions.

If you understand Bulgarian, you can watch the show here, it was aired on Saturday, 16/4.

Beautiful Science, Episode 1
Гледайте "Красива наука", първи епизод

There was a cool promo clip running very often on the BNT, the most promoted new show:

Regarding the AI/AGI part, in brief:

Special guest was Kevin Warwick from The University of Reading, UK. Maybe he doesn't need an introduction, but let's say he calls himself "the first cyborg".

Four young scientists, 3 of them with background in "FameLab".

- Rossen Ugrinov, winner of the first "FameLab" contest in Bulgaria in 2007. He's a biophysicist and is being involved in monitoring clinical testing; his point was about the risks and precautions.

- Nuri Ismail - he's part of the team developing one of the leading OCR software (free-onlince-ocr.com), he was presenting some narrow AI achievements - AI is here since many years, it's not as ambitious as in cinema, but there are many applications we're using. He was second in FameLab 2009.

- Svetlin Penkov - very bright second year student of K. Warwick, studying Robotics in Reading. He talked about some small robo-sumo robots, neuron networks, about the risks regarding brain-implants and "super humans" vs "under-developed humans" with no implants.

- Todor Arnaudov - I was supposed to talk about AGI, Universal AI. I joined the discussion in the end, with a short explanation of Seed AI and self-improving system as a remark to a note that current AI can't ask questions, which one of the other guests made - Lyuben Dilov Jr., a writer, publicist and son of the prominent Bulgarian SF writer.

I explained this is what we aim - to achieve a system that learns like a baby: it's blind and deaf and lack motor coordination, then it begins to recognize of simple objects and sounds; then the face of its "mother", then other faces; then it "crows", say its first words, first basic sentences... And after this, it will start asking questions; reading etc.

Words: Телевизия, Television, AGI, Artificial Intelligence, Brain-computer interface, Изкуствен интелект, универсален изкуствен интелект, универсален изкуствен разум, мислещи машини, cybernetics, cyborgs, Robotics, futurology, Лаборатория за слава, България, София, БНТ, Българска национална телевизия, британски съвет, телевизионно предаване, ток шоу, шоу за наука, Мария Силвестър, Леандър Литов, Любен Дилов - син, Пламенка Боровска, Петя Тетевенска, Мария Чернева, Росен Угринов, Светлин Пенков, Нури Исмаил, Тодор Арнаудов - Тош, Любов Костова, суперкомпютър, Blue Gene, Феймлаб, конкурс, разбираемо, говорене, наука, първи, кръг, комуникация, научна, CERN, ускорител, адронен колайдер, ядрена, физика, теория на разума, зародиш, компресия, предсказване, предвиждане, студио, Сан Стефано, първото, първи, брой, мозък, киборг, кибернетика, мозъчни, импланти, brain implants, bionics, интерфейс, interface, Matrix

IM-CLeVER and iCub - EU Funded Projects - Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Abstraction of Sensory Inputs ...

2011-03-31T01:37:00.006+03:00

Have you seen this cute little baby robot?

I have heard of it, but checking the aims and basic assumptions of the project from the source pushed me - they're in the right direction and aware of the issues, Juergen Schmidhuber is being one of the leaders.

Another signal that I have to discipline my ass, as well... :)

http://www.im-clever.eu/project/project-description

IM-CLeVeR is supported by the European Commission
under the ‘FP7 Cognitive Systems, Interaction,
and Robotics Initiative’, grant no. 231722.

Start: 01/01/2009 (start of scientific work: 01/05/2009)
End: 30/04/2013
Total duration: 52 months

Total EU Funding: 5.899.884 euros
Total Budget (EU Funding + Cofunding): 7.726.783 euros

Another use of iCub:

Mathematical Theory of Intelligence - Second Course in AGI/UAI at Plovdiv University by Todor Arnaudov (Course Program in English)

2011-03-29T01:10:00.019+03:00

Mathematical Theory of Intelligence (AGI/Universal AI)
by Todor Arnaudov
http://research.twenkid.com
http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com

The course was taught to undergraduate students between 1/2011 – 3/2011 at Plovdiv University “Paisii Hilendarski”, Bulgaria, in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics. (Originally in Bulgarian, with a lot of additional sugguested materials in English). This was the second AGI/UAI course after "Artificial General Intelligence/Universal Artificial Intelligence" (originally: "Универсален изкуствен разум") from last year; now putting stronger emphasize on the most advanced lectures on theories of intelligence and the common principles, meta-evoltution and Boris Kazachenko's works, now reviewed more thoroughly in class (as far as my understanding and students interest went).

You may find a lot of materials in English and links in this blog. There's somewhat sorted list by topic done for the students, but it might be partially incomplete, because it's not updated immediately with the blog posts. Students are advised to check out the blog for the topics from the first course, which were omitted in the formal program of the second one, such as other AGI researchers work and directions - there was too little time available in class...
I guess the next more updated course is supposed to go even more deeper into formal models, maybe starting with some real basic AGI agents.

I'm preparing to publish slides in English (you can find Bulgarian ones in the course homepage on the top) - especially slides and translation of the old works from my "[Teenage] Theory of Mind/Intelligence and Universe", written between 2001-2004, which years later was how I recognized the "school of thought" I belonged to (see the annotation below).

This course could be taught in English as well, if there's an appropriate demand/place/invitation.

Annotation:
Mathematical Theory of Intelligence
This course is addressed to students who wish to work in the novel interdisciplinary field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI & UAI) which is building the theoretical foundations and research methodology for the future implementation of self-improving human-level intelligent machines - “thinking machines“ (AI was one of the predecessors of this field, but went into solving too specific problems). The course introduces students to the appropriate foundations in futurology and transhumanism, mathematics, algorithms, developmental psychology and neuroscience in order to finally review some of the current theories and principles of general/universal intelligence from the “school of thought” of researchers such as Jeff Hawkins, Marcus Hutter, Juergen Schmidhuber, Todor Arnaudov and Boris Kazachenko.

Course Program: (as of 11/2010)

1. What is Universal Artificial Intelligence (UAI, AGI, „Strong AI“, Seed AI). Technological Singularity and Singularity Institute. Transhumanism. Expected computing power of human brain. Attempts for literal simulation of mammalian brain. "Universality paradox" of the brain. Ethical issues, related to AGI.

2. Methodological faults in narrow AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing), reasons for their limited success and limited potential. Review of the history of approaches in (narrow) AI and its failures and achievements up to nowadays. Concepts from AI that are prospective and still alive in AGI, such as probabilistic algorithms, cognitive architectures, multi-agent systems.

3. Mathematics for UAI/AGI: Complexity and information theory. Probability Theory – statistical (empirical) probability. Turing Machine. Chaos Theory. Systems Theory. Emergent functions and behavior. Universe as a computer – digital physics. Algorithmic Probability. Kolmogorov's Complexity and Minimum Message Length. Occam's Razor.

4. Introduction to Machine Learning. Markov's Chains. Hidden Markov Models (HMM). Bayes Networks. Hierarchical Bayes' Networks and Hierarchical HMM. Principles of the algorithms of Viterbi and Baum-Welch (Expectation-Maximization). Prediction as one of the basis of intelligence.

5. Drives of human behavior - behaviorism. Classical conditioning. Operant Conditioning and reinforcement learning as universal learning method for humans and machines. Why imitation and supervised learning are also required for AGI.

6. Introduction to Developmental Psychology (Child Psychology). Stages in cognitive development according to Piaget, and opposing views. First language acquisition. Nature or Nurture issues and how specific cognitive properties, behavior and functions could emerge from a general system.

7. What is intelligence? Thorough review of Marcus Hutter's and Shane Legg's paper “Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence”. Universal Intelligence of an agent as a capability to predict sequences of actions with maximum cumulative reward. Types of agents in environments of different complexity.

8. Beauty and Creativity as compression ratio progress in the work of Jurgen Schmidhuber.

9. Brain Architecture – functional anatomy of mammalian and human brain. Triune theory - evolution of vertebrate's brain. Neurotransmitters and hormones and their relations to emotions and behavior. Mini-column hypothesis and functional mapping of the neocortex. Attempts for biologically correct simulations of the neocortex such as the BlueBrain project.

10. Evolution in biological, cybernetical and abstract sense: genetic, epigenetic, memetic and its application in design of complex self-organizing systems. Review of Boris Kazachenko's work on meta-evolution as Abstraction of a conserved core from its environment, via mediation of impacts & responses by increasingly differentiated adaptive interface hierarchy. Entropy as equation and increase of order, not increase of chaos.

11. Introduction to the theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. Modeling the function of human neocortex – the Memory-Prediction Framework and the principles of operation of the Hierarchical Temporal Memory.

12. Introduction to the theory of Intelligence by Todor Arnaudov – mind as a hierarchical system of simulators of virtual universes, that predict expected sensory inputs at different levels of abstraction. Hierarchical prediction/causation of maximum expected reward, where correctness of prediction/causation is rewarding. The Universe as a computer and trend in the evolution of Universe (cybernetical evolution). Proposal for guided functional simulation of the evolution of vertebrates' brain, starting by a general cognitive module that is simpler than mini-column.

13. Theoretical Methodology of Boris Kazachenko. Generalists and specialists, generality vs novelty seeking. ADHD and ASD. Attention, concentration, distractions and avoiding them. Induction vs deduction.

14. Introduction to the theory of intelligence by Boris Kazachenko. Cognition: hierarchically selective pattern recognition & projection. Scalable learning as hierarchical pattern discovery by comparison-projection operations over ever greater generality, resolution and scope of inputs. Importance of the universal criterion for incremental self-improvement. Comparisons of greater power and resulting derivatives, and iterative meta-syntax expansion as means to increase resolution and generality. Boris Kazachenko's Prize for ideas.

15. Summary of the principles of general intelligence in the works of Jeff Hawkins, Marcus Hutter, Juergen Schmidhuber, Todor Arnaudov and Boris Kazachenko: incremental [hierarchical] accumulation of complexity, compression, prediction, abstraction/generalization from sensory inputs. Evidences and real-life examples for the reliability of this principles.

16. Practice in introspection and generalization. Expansion of the scope of cases, where cognitive algorithm is applicable.

17. Exam.

Update from 29/11/2011: Comments on the AGI email list of AGIRI:
John G. Rose ... via jeeves.archives.listbox.com to AGI show details Nov 24 (5 days ago) Great course programs covering AGI summary/introduction, I like the selection of topics discussed. You might consider opening these up online via streaming/collaboration in the future… John ...

Ben Goertzel ... via jeeves.archives.listbox.com to AGI, AGI show details Nov 28 (2 days ago)
Tosh
Looks like a great course you're offering!n FYI ... On your page you note that our 2009 AGI summer school didn't cover jeff Hawkins' work... I can't remember if any speaker mentioned hawkins, but, Allan combs gave some great lectures on neuroscience, which covered hierarchical processing in visual cortex among other topics ;) That AGI summer school presented a variety of perspectives, it wasn't just about open cog and my own views ... But it wasn't heavy on perception-centered AGI... Ben ...

Todor Arnaudov's answers: Thanks, John.

There are materials from the course online (on the blog and on the site); most of the lecture slides and details are only in Bulgarian yet, though. As of collaboration - maybe, as long as I manage to create a team, for the moment I prefer keeping the authorship for myself. ...

Thanks Ben! And thanks for the notes. :)

Ben>That AGI summer school presented a variety of perspectives, it wasn't just about open cog and Ben>my own views ... But it wasn't heavy on perception-centered AGI...

All I knew about the summer school was from the brief web page on your site: http://www.goertzel.org/AGI_Summer_School_2009.htm Hawkins wasn't mentioned in the program, and it sounded reasonable not to be, as he seemed from a distant "school of thought" compared to the lecturers' ones - as far as I knew or assumed theirs.

Ben>I can't remember if any speaker mentioned hawkins, but, Allan combs gave some great lectures on Ben>neuroscience, which covered hierarchical processing in visual cortex among other topics ;)

That's nice (I've noticed neuroscience in the program), but anyway I think HTM and the other sensorimotor topics are more general - memory-prediction framework and the other similar models are supposed/aiming to explain virtually all kinds of cognitive processes with an integral paradigm, and vision is just an example/case. In a POV of schools, there's a distinction whether it's suggested that vision is an example of a general framework, or it's one of the sub-architectures/sub-frameworks for an AGI.

Universal Artificial Intelligence by M. Hutter, Neocortical Mini-Columns in Reinforcement Learning Context, Creativity & Virtual Worlds - at AGI 2010

2011-03-24T04:59:00.002+02:00

Selection of recommended talks on AGI 2010 conference:

Marcus Hutter - Universal Artificial Intelligence, AGI 2010

Tutorial on Mini-Column Hypothesis in the Context of Neural Mechanisms of Reinforcement Learning - by Randal A. Koene, AGI 2010

Related to M. Hutter - Jurgen Schmidhuber notices that reinforcement learning needs many steps, many decision points, and marks compression progress as an abstract form of reward for cognitive processes:

Jurgen Schmidhuber-Artificial Scientists Artists Based on the Formal Theory of Creativity, AGI 2010

The following one is mostly to get familiar about the state of the art of Virtual Worlds simulations for AGI - it seems pretty primitive... Taking into account also the demos with reinforcement learning agents in other talks, where the agents play simple games such as Pacman, "Pocman" (partially-observable environment), tic-tac-toe or tank games, or the dogs in Ben Goertzel's demo which learn to carry the object back to their master (coordinates of a bounding rectangle)...

I've been speculating about different virtual world systems for AGI seed AI and other intelligent agents experiments myself, but it was some 6 years ago; wished to start experimenting in formalizing so called my "Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe" and testing it in such worlds, but it was for a short time, and it has left as just ideas because of all the other stuff I had to deal with. However I am back, and certainly there's a lot of work to be done in this field.

Ben Goertzel - Using Virtual Agents and Physical Robots for AGI Research

Some funny closing remarks by Marcus and Ben:

Keywords: neural, mini-column, universal, artificial, intelligence, AGI, UAI, УИР, agents, physics, simulations, reinforcement, learning, AIXI, virtual, worlds, simulators

News: Official AGI Journal and Independent AGI E-zine

2011-03-23T02:39:00.010+02:00

I've been considering founding a sort of independent journal for AGI, where to give some more "formal" shape of works of Boris Kazachenko, myself and other independent researchers, it might be called just "e-zine". [ It was "formally declared" a month later here. ]

It seems there is an official Journal created already http://journal.agi-network.org/ with a solid Editorial Board.

However it got a problem - it's not allowed to submit already published stuff. There are some AGI ideas and suggestions published or shared on-line by independent researchers many years before AGI world conferences have started to be organized (2008), in late 90-ies and the 2000s, such as Boris' ones. They are original, yet probably widely unknown by the official rulers of the field (I don't know for sure, I've noticed just a short on-line dialog between Boris and Ben Goertzel, which has happened some 8 years ago).

Edit: Further, there are a lot of AI-niks who have put on new shoes and have high positions, watching for high "scientific" standards in new publications. Unfortunately in this field being "scientific" often actually means being a very pedantic quoter, and ones who don't have the patience to write half of the paper with citations are not allowed to enter the "high-life" club of being "scientific" - I do emphasize this is about the field of AI, Check out: (heck What's Wrong With NLP [and AI]). AI is not really a science in the sense of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

HyperNEAT in Neural Networks and Ontologies in NLP - Why They Seem Promising?

2011-03-14T19:09:00.006+02:00

1. HyperNEAT

Exerpts from the site (bold - mine):

"In short, HyperNEAT is based on a theory of representation that hypothesizes that a good representation for an artificial neural network should be able to describe its pattern of connectivity compactly.

This kind of description is called an encoding. The encoding in HyperNEAT, called compositional pattern producing networks, is designed to represent patterns with regularities such as symmetry, repetition, and repetition with variation.

(...)

The other unique and important facet of HyperNEAT is that it actually sees the geometry of the problem domain. (...) To put it more technically, HyperNEAT computes the connectivity of its neural networks as a function of their geometry.

(...)

NEAT stands for NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies. It is a method for evolving artificial neural networks with an evolutionary algorithm. NEAT implements the idea that it is most effective to start evolution with small, simple networks and allow them to become increasingly complex over generations. That way, just as organisms in nature increased in complexity since the first cell, so do neural networks in NEAT. This process of continual elaboration allows finding highly sophisticated and complex neural networks."

...

That is:

- Compression/Minimal message length

- Repetition as a clue for patterns (symmetry is repetition as well)
- Incrementing (small scale to big scale)

- Coordinates (topology in connectivy)

2. Ontologies in NLP/Computational Linguistics

Basically this is a semantic network, i.e. relations between concepts. WordNet is a sort of ontology. The issue is that they are often designed by hand. There are statistical methods, as well, but they're missing something I've mentioned many times in the series What's Wrong With NLP.

Why this happens to be useful?

- Because it resembles real cognitive hierarchy - it's "skeleton hierarchy"

Accordingly, they're prone to be too rigid and unable to self-extend.

Proposal for Directed/Guided Evolution of a Cognitive Module/Algorithm by Step-by-Step Modification of a Basic One - from Archicortex to Neocortex

2011-03-09T19:20:00.005+02:00

This is a direction I realized last year during a discussion on Boris' knols and mentioned there, but later I shortened the comment there, because it wasn't the appropriate place for the details

The idea is about designing cognitive algorithm achieving properties that Boris proposes, however grounding it and deriving it on a supposedly simpler and easier to understand cognitive algorithm that has existed before in lower species and was slightly modified by evolution.

Keywords: embryology, comparative neurobiology, embryogenesis, vertebrates brain evolution, cognitive module, cognitive algorithm, evolution, archicortex, neocortex, forebrain, hippocampus, mini-column, columnar organization, generalization, recording, prediction, scaling, differentiation, specialization

Premises

- Embryogenesis is selective segmentation and differentiation

In general, organisms are deveolped by selective segmentation (separation) and differentiation of cells, a sequence of activation of appropriate genes.

- Small quantity of germ cells divide to form bulky tissues/regions - initial complexity is much lower than final and there are interdependencies. Simple mathematical example is fractals .

One reason neocortex may have relatively similar columns all over might be because they might be building block of the cognitive algorithm. However another reason, in another POV is that DNA has just not enough capacity to code complex explicit circuitry to make them all specialized by directed growing. Even if it had the capacity in theory, it's questionable whether biological "technology" would be capable to connect it with the required precision, because organism parts "grow like branches of a tree" ("The Man and The Thinking Machine", T.A. 2001) .

Bottom line: there are "leaves" of the tree, and the complexity of the leaves is limited.

- Evolution steps in phylogeny are supposed to be very small, and genome development is chaotic in mathematical sense - a small difference in the initial state (DNA) may lead to (apparently) vast difference in the final state - fully developed body.

Apparently big differences in structure may be caused by very small and elegant, functionally purposeful changes inside.

- Some of the operations that a mutation may cause could be, besides formation of a new protein: be or result in something like the following:

- Copy a segment (a block) once more, i.e. initiating division once more cycle

- Connect to another segmentation module (especially in brains)

- Amphibian's and Reptilian's forebrain, their most evolved part - archicortex/neopalium - has 3 layers. In comparison, general mammalian and human's most evolved (the external) part - the neocortex has 6 layers*

- Evolution, especially in brain, is mostly building "add-ons" , "patches" and slight modification and then multiplication of components(?)

Triune theory of brain, the new is a layer above, the old is preserved. The new modules are connected back to the old ones and have to coordinate their operation, and new modules receive projection from the previous. I think this implies also, that the higher layer should be "smarter" (more complex/higher capacity memory/processing power) than the lower, allowing more complex behavior/adaptation - otherwise it would just copy the lower layer results.

Amphibian's and reptilian's brains had cortex lacking 6-layer columnar structure of mammals, it's 3-layer (I don't know a lot about its cytoarchitecture yet). I couldn't accept that archicortex lacks some sort of a modular design, somewhat similar to the columns; it makes no sense for the archicortex to have been a random jelly of neurons, because even basic behaviors such as finding lair and running for cover require integration of multimodal information and memory. I don't believe also that mini-columns had appeared from scratch in the higher mammals.

Recently a little support on this speculation appeared; regarding birds, though, a parallel line of evolution:

From: Our brains are more like birds' than we thought: "

"...A new study, however, by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine finds that a comparable region in the brains of chickens concerned with analyzing auditory inputs is constructed similarly to that of mammals.
(...)

But this kind of thinking presented a serious problem for neurobiologists trying to figure out the evolutionary origins of the mammalian cortex, he said. Namely, where did all of that complex circuitry come from and when did it first evolve?

Karten's research supplies the beginnings of an answer: From an ancestor common to both mammals and birds that dates back at least 300 million years.

The new research has contemporary, practical import as well, said Karten. The similarity between mammalian and avian cortices adds support to the utility of birds as suitable animal models in diverse brain studies.

"Studies indicate that the computational microcircuits underlying complex behaviors are common to many vertebrates," Karten said. "This work supports the growing recognition of the stability of circuits during evolution and the role of the genome in producing stable patterns. The question may now shift from the origins of the mammalian cortex to asking about the changes that occur in the final patterning of the cortex during development.

- The function of the Archicortex (hippocampus) in mammals is declarative memory and navigation.

See some of my speculations on: April 24, 2010 - Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...

Hippocampus

- formation of long term memory
- navigation
- head direction cells
- spatial view cells
- place cells

At least several or even all of these can be generalized. Places and navigation go together. Places are long-term memories of static immovable inanimate objects (the agent has not experiences that these entities move).

Navigation, head-direction, spatial-view, place-cells - they all are a set of correlations found between motor and sensory information, and long-term memories, which are invoked by the ongoing motor and sensory patterns.

The static immovable inanimate objects (places) change - they translate/rotate etc. - most rapidly in a correlation with head direction (position) and head movements.
Navigation and spatial view are derived from all.

Boris Kazachenko's comment:

(...) Regarding hippocampus, it controls formation of all declarative (not long-term) memories, not just about places. Declarative means the ones that got transfered high enough into association cortices to be consciously accessible.
My personal guess is that hippocampus facilitates such transfer by associating memories with important locations [mapping] . You'll pay a lot more attention to something that happened in your bedroom then to the same thing that happened on the dark side of the moon. I call it "conditioning by spatial association". (...)

// There's a whole topic about hippocampus functions and its competition with neocortex, for now I plan to put it alone and link to this.

Reptiles don't have association cortices, though, yet pretty impressive behavior of lizzards could be seen, such as this curious iguana looking behind the mirror to see where the other one is, and eventually hitting the mirror - see at 5:33.

My guess about archicortex' contribution is discovery of means to:

- Archicortex maybe records exact memories and correlations between memories/compare for match between sequences of sensory patterns

There should be limitations of the length of sequences, part of it might be caused by size constraints - animals with archicortex only, lacking the higher layers* just have very small brains. (*Cingulate cortex and neocortex for mammals)

I'm not an expert in vertebrate embryology yet, but I guess a simple reason
why fish and reptiles with big body keep very small brains - like 3,6 m white shark with 35 g of brains should be that:

- Germ cells that give birth of brain tissue of fish and reptiles divide less, or/and these species lack some hormonal growing mechanisms that species with bigger brains have

Both are a sort of "scaling issues".

Too small a brain has insufficient cognitive resources. On the other hand, these brains maybe don't scale also, because they wouldn't/didn't work better if they are/were bigger.

- Assuming general intelligence is a capability for ever higher generalization, expressed in a cognitive hierarchy (see J.Hawkins, B. Kazachenko, T. Arnaudov) and mini-column is assumed to be the building block of this process in neocortex, there should be a plausible explanation of why and how this module was formed and why this function gets successful

My functional explanation is the following:

- There already existed templates of circuits for exact recording, but they didn't scale
- The simplest form of generalization is recording at lower resolution than the input, and fuzzy comparison. It's partially inherited by the imprecise biology.
- Updated form of these circuits maybe added more divisions and cascade connections (and this may have started in cingulate cortex or higher reptiles, as well) which allowed for hierarchical scaling. Neocortex is assumed to have 6 layers, archicortex has 3. I'm not an expert in cytoarthitecture, and should check out cingulate cortex, but if there are no inter-stages between 3 and 6, this sounds suspicious for simple doubling somewhere during division and specialization. Or it could be several doubling operations.
- These new cascade connections allow for deeper hierarchy, scaling and multi-stage generalization. (Recording "exactly" alone is "generalization" and lossy, but without hierarchy which is deep enough this cannot go far - just for coping with basic noise.)
- There are mice with less than 1 g of brain which of course are much smarter than sharks (not to mention smart birds); however the advantage in micro-structure (mini-column) doesn't deny that mammalian brain scales in size and there is a correlation between brain size (cognitive reources) and intelligence, even though it's not a straight line. Spindle neurons, connecting directly distant regions in the neocortex are one of my guesses about why pure size might be not enough; another one is the area of the primary cortices, especially somatosensory (elephants, dolphins and whales have bigger brains than humans). See Boris' article about Spindle neurons and generalization: http://knol.google.com/k/cognitive-focus-generalist-vs-specialist-bias

- Neocortex does scale, but it's not surprising that it has constructive limitations as well as archicortex did.

- Classical and Operant conditioning, dopamine and temporal difference learning

It's quite a global feature of entire brain, maybe; but it has to be considered - classical evolving to Operant requires predictive processing.

Conclusion

1. Design a basic cognitive algorithm/module, scalable by biologically-like mechanisms, which allows reaching for, say, reptilian behavior.
2. Tune this basic module, multiply and connect intentionally to form a mechanism that "stacks" on a hierarchy, generalizes and scale the global cognitive capacity.

Interval Training and PACE vs Cardio/Jogging/Aerobics - High Intensity Bursts vs Moderate Intensity Long Runs | Athletics, Health, Fitness

2011-02-17T22:19:00.011+02:00

If you're considering training programs to keep your lungs and heart fit and keep yourself lean, jogging/cardio may seem like a good choice (especially for burning fats), however I suggest you consider also these options: interval training and PACE (which seems related). Saves a lot of time and may earn similar or better results.

It's about short training sessions with high-intensity, until you pant and can't continue, with rests for your pulse to calm down (default is 120 bpm), very popular in track-and-field athletics. For example 8 series of 60 or 100 or 200 m runs at very high pace.

Surprisingly at first sight, you may improve your shape more and reduce fat by such short trainings more than running 1 h a day at 10 km/h. PACE is similar, but less demanding, usually less series and you can do any activity, just it should push your pulse and breathing up to the limit, depending on your physical condition at the moment.

According to the research presented in PACE, long-distance running may damage your heart and induce wreckage in the cardiac muscle-tissue (in general there are more marathon runners dead of a heart-attack, than sprinters). To cope with long runs, your body may adapt by reducing pulmonary capacity and making the heart working more efficiently, reducing its energy consumption and maximum power output, and reducing overall muscle mass.

On the other hand, pushing your muscles, lungs and heart to the limit makes them to adapt by extending their capacity, like stretching does - you should stretch until you feel tension/a bit of hurt, otherwise you won't extend your stretching range. Alike, moderate intensity continuous exercises are supportive.

...

I realized I've got my own practical version of interval training/PACE - some activities I like doing when I could, including high intensity in short durations. I suppose it could explain some phenomenons I've been confused of, such as one two years ago: why on a Silent Disco party I could dance and "jump around" at high intensity for hours in the winter - i.e. no cycling for many months; not practiced any crosses/long runs since a decade?; haven't been on any similar dance session since many months. I was working in an office, sometimes walking (usually at fast pace).

The answer could be just "youth" or "genes", but people around me were also young, even younger than me, and I bet they were going to parties many times more often than me, but they couldn't keep my pace at all. No, I didn't have any alcohol or energy drink - just water.

Finally one of the organizers came to cheer me and he said "could you please stop, it's very nice that you've been dancing so hard, but there's another party tomorrow, we have to leave..."

How could you train your heart and lungs easily (my suggestion):

- Run the stairs (yes: run). Don't use the elevator, unless you're very tired already or you live in a skyscraper.
- Practice cycling. It could be short distances (5-10-15 km), but take some hills, do sprints to get breathless - up to 25-30-35-40 km/h - it will force you to take a rest. Don't ride all the time at 18 km/h.
- Carry your bike through stairs.
- When you dance, do some intensive sessions to get out of breath and to have to rest; then dance again - don't shake slowly all the time.
- On a stepper or a stationary bike - ride to the maximum (after a warm-up) to get tired and breathless - you'll be done in a few series in minutes.
- Rope jumping is also fun if you could practice it, and it could increase your pulse instantly.

You could also:

- Watch your pulse in rest and in the sessions.
- Watch the max rate you achieve (but of course, be careful with this and approach step-by-step) .
- How quickly your pulse can go from rest up to 150/180/X/Max and back down? The faster/wider the dynamics, the better trained is your heart.
- Portable devices to check the capacity of your lungs.

Check these for yourself for more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_training

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training

http://www.pacerevolution.com/ - "PACE - The 12-minute fitness revolution"

The Myth of "Light" Alcohol and Why Social Drinking might be Better than Drinking Alone - Addiction and Confused Conditioning

2011-02-16T16:55:00.003+02:00

Light Alcohol?

The equation is simple, servings seem designed to give you roughly equivalent amount of alcohol. Either 50 ml of whiskey or vodka, 200 ml of wine or 500 ml of beer.

There could be light alcohol beverages only if you take smaller servings for their taste, such as a cup (200 ml) of beer or 100 ml of wine.

Some experienced drinkers even say that the "lighter" alcohol in the list - beer - is the "heavier" - giving you the worst hang-over. Maybe because they rarely take just 500 ml... Most drinkers don't stop with the first doze, of course, and are not satisfied with smaller dozes simply because they are addicted to the effect of the alcohol (so they need enough to trigger the effect), they don't just like the taste of the beverage.

Difference between loner and social drinking regarding addiction

However, what's the difference between social drinking and drinking alone and is there a reason social one to be less dangerous? The explanation put below is simple, my focus is mainly on the process of addiction, namely: in order to get addicted to a substance or a stimulus, brain has to be capable to recognize the cause reliably. What if it's confused, miss-conditioned?

Loner drinkers

- Loner drinkers are more likely depressed, have lower self-esteem, they are already in trouble. (It's not always the case, though) Alcohol gives them a bit of relaxation, triggers some dopamine, they get addicted to this and repeat. Also while drinking for the sake of drinking without being engaged in other activities, mind is focused strongly on this and brain can easily recognize the reason for relaxation and the dopamine produced does reinforce those circuits and the subject gets addicted to alcohol drinking.

Social drinkers

- Social drinkers are more likely easy-going, hanging out with friends or seducing women/men(however this is not strictly true either, they may be also depressed ones, who just go to get drunk in public). However, social interactions during drinking may generate oxytocin and dopamine themselves and brain is confused about what is causing the elevation in the mood - the alcohol or the socialization, and I guess it's less likely to fixate only on one of them. Moreover they both may be wrongly conditioned together and the subject would more likely get addicted to going out with friends/socializing, while drinking, which is generally more healthy than loner drinking (unless you're all alcoholics anyway and get drunk to death together).

However, even just socializing may give you the right doze of relaxation and enjoyment - teenagers love hanging out with friends (and this is often listed as "what you love to do" in social network sites) before they discover the "beauty" of getting drunk, when they build a wrong association between socialization, alcohol, relaxation and enjoyment.

You don't need alcohol to socialize, relax and have fun.

Photography taken by: me, T.A.

Български Хакери (юнаци, съзидателни, MIT Style): Алекс Паталенски, Емил Дочевски, Иво Белчев, Иван Иванов, Георги Боршуков, Тодор Арнаудов и др.

2011-02-09T23:57:00.012+02:00

Предстои да излезе моя статия за българските хакери в едно научно-популярно списание, но както научих това което ще излезе ще е едва 60-70% от написаното и часове интервюта са отрязани; "от горе" имаха съвсем различна тяхна си представа за какво да е статията - аз им предложих и исках за съзидателните и истинските, те си знаят за изтърканата история за един тип грозни български кракери, и особено един от тях, от края на 80-те и началото на 90-те, за които няма да споменавам и за които може да научите всичко с едно търсене в гугъл.

Оставен е малко материал за съзидателните, а това което са отрязали може би ще публикувам по мои си канали.

Тая случка ме кара отново да се замисля за събуждане на сп. "Свещеният сметач".

Всичките ми блогове от спирането му на практика са негово продължение, възстановяването на списанието само би вмъкнало "издаването" на статиите в малко по-"официална" форма.

"Свещеният сметач" беше едно от първите и определено най-авангардното електронно списание в българската мрежа, и пак ще бъде, и не само в българската.

Decline in language-learning skills: lower neuro-plasticity, higher neuro-competition or both?

2011-01-26T18:31:00.006+02:00

A little speculation about neuroplasticity. Decline in language learning skills, starting with adolescence is like a rule of thumb, stated to display decline in neuroplasticity - neurons get less and less capable of creating new connections.

They say brain deteriorates with age, loses weight each year. However, I know very energetic 75 - 80 year-old persons with sharp minds, good reflexes (good car drivers) and having excellent memory.

While language learning difference in fluency for the very early "critical" years is obvious, I suspect for the adulthood there's a factor which is underestimated, I'd call it "neuro-competition", it's supposed to be there in the early age either - initially there are not that much competing patterns.

With time brain has too many existing patterns and there are too many activities and goals which brain have to think about (such as you're unable to concentrate on this for long enough), so it's harder to invest enough resources and to justify that new patterns worth replacing the old ones.

Polyglots

If you learn intentionally and systematically many languages, polyglotism may happen to be not that hard that it seems (at least for basic communication level). Languages are grouped in families, common rules are noticed, there is "transfer of learning" between them and after some time new languages are supposed to come easier.

In much simpler form this happens with programming languages - beginners think it's a big deal to know many languages, but the more you learn, the easier you learn new ones.

A funny polyglot :)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LJi47Kzvv8&feature=fvw

Safe Discotheque Tip and Sound Theory

2011-01-16T09:53:00.007+02:00

These on the picture are headphones on a "Silent Disco" party, unfortunately very rare here. If you're one of those who would like to go to disco to dance and not to get drunk, and you're not fine with the insane loudness in the discos, then there is a solution:

Pick-up ear-protectors, at best big and bulky ones. :)

A very deep resource on Sound and Hearing:
http://www.santafevisions.com/csf/html/lectures/
(College of Santa Fe Auditory Theory Lectures)

Ако и вие сте един от тези, които искат да ходят на дискотека, за да танцуват, а не да се напият и да ги опушат, и мразят безсмислената гръмовност на звука, решението е в:

Предпазителите за уши: предпазители за уши. :)

Похвалете се, ако го пробвате.

Santa Claus does Exist - Grow-Down! Or Why Kids are Smarter than the Adults

2010-12-24T19:12:00.003+02:00

Photographer's January Love by ~toshko on deviant ART

First of all kids love role playing games and they can pretend being a doctor, a mother, a race car driver, a soldier or anything else - because they do have imagination, unlike most of the boring adults.

Santa obviously does exist - it means a man, wearing a funny red coat, usually artificial white beard (you can touch it and pull it down - it really goes down), boots, and usually he poses for a picture around a sack of toys that he gives away to the children who're sitting around him. Santa also appears on funny advertisings... Usually he starts to appear in the winter - it gets cold and your parents tell you to button your jacket, put your little gloves and... Stop eating that icy snow!

Your mummy and the teachers in the kindergarten tell you that you should send him a letter to get the presents you want, and since you cannot write yet (even though you know part of the alphabet or can read), you just tell them and leave to them to send the letter. If you were a good boy or a good girl, Santa will come to your home while you're asleep and will bring the gifts to you.

True!

Santa does actually bring you gifts every Christmas. It doesn't matter whether he's invisible or very fast or he just knows your parents, so they unlock the door when you're asleep so he can come in. Somehow he does his job, and often the presents are just what you want... Of course you know from experience, that if you wish too big presents, he couldn't bring them, because they can't pass through the chimney or the door, or you just can't be such a good child throughout the whole year - after all it's more fun to do crazy stuff all the time than just getting a single present for Christmas, right?!

The force that brings the presents is probably "Santa Claus" and it is only the adults who are concerned how it really happens, while the answer is so simple: - some kind of a magic or something...

All those stories of the adults that Santa lives on the North Pole, his sledge flies pulled by deer is made up by their bad imagination... Adults are always searching for something extraterrestrial or scientific - all that mania about UFO and aliens.

Santa Claus is not an alien. He's not a single one either. There are many Santa Clauses! And not all of them are old like the adults say - some seem even younger than your parents, that's why they have artificial white beard and artificial white hair - in order to make the adults believe, and the adults doesn't even notice it's artificial - they are silly...

Anyway... I think all Santas are absolutely real - you can touch them yourself, can't you?

Grow-down!

Why Mainstream Media Advertises for Free Facebook and Skype vs ICQ/AIM, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk; MySpace, LinkedIn and many others

2010-12-23T16:34:00.016+02:00

Skype stopped working - this was on Bulgarian mainstream media. What a terrible story, millions are crying for the lost of their only connection to the world!

Bulgarian shows of many televisions, including the national state one have their Facebook profiles and Skype accounts, but not others. This is unfair advertisement to technically less educated users and I think that's one of the reason Facebook to mutate that big like a monster at the expense of the other players (besides its convenience and better design, compared to MySpace).

For myself, Skype wasn't top instant messanger, as many past ICQ-system users have noticed, Skype sucked for years, because it lacked offline message sending (still does?). It seemed more resource hungry as well.

Skype was and still is promoted for "free calls and video calls" - but most of the time it's yet another chat-program.

Guys, don't you remember?

Yahoo! got audio and video calls back in 2004 or 2005, MSN did too. Google Talk joined in 2005? or 2006 with audio? - to my records it was smooth at a dial-up-level speeds like about 33-34 Kbps, while Skype sound was interrupting.

There is not only Skype and Facebook - look around! Facebook is "the biggest", partially because users who don't know others existed.

Use "back-up" messengers and you'll be always out of "crises" like that one. Less Skype - more time for something better.

New Kind of Mathematics, discovered in a TV Game | Нова математика, открита в телевизионна игра (Смях)

2010-12-22T05:17:00.009+02:00

What's the sum of all the numbers on the picture?

Телевизия, телевизионни, хазартни, игри, пари, печалби, лотария, смс,гласуване, обаждане, заблуда,Математика, смятане, заблуждаващи, лъжливи, реклами, хубавици, красавици, събиране, изваждане, умножение, деление, tv, game, lucky, hazard, lottery, call, sms, phone

Leopard (Short Film) - Stop Bike Thieves!

2010-12-18T02:51:00.006+02:00

See higher resolution and details at Twenkid Studio's blog.

Part of cutting and most important - the special editing effects: picture in picture and post-production re-framing/cropping (you may not notice it), as well as the animated and static titles are rendered using my custom software Twenkid FX. They couldn't be done without it.

Who's Who in Science and Engineering 2011-2012? I am!

2010-12-02T17:29:00.000+02:00

Yeah - this is a "vanity fair". I guess a good share of the directories are bought by people who're included. Producers probably make a business out of selling diplomas in frames, as well.

So, who cares? They've spotted me somehow, so I'm one of the selected 33545 persons around the world. Cheers!

http://www.marquiswhoswho.com/listees/publications/32-whos-who-in-science-and-engineering-2011-2012

Researcher's Handbook - Research Methods Knowledge Base, Developmental Psychology, Classics in Psychology | Изследователски методи, Псх. на развитието

2010-11-29T23:51:00.014+02:00

Research Methods Knowledge Base - suggested reading for any researcher, especially beginners.

DevPsy.org - various resources and links to other resources on Developmental Psychology and not only.

Classics in the History of Psychology - old texts, some funny such as:

Darwin, Charles. (1877). A biographical sketch of an infant. Mind, 2, 285-294.
Watson, John B. (1907). Studying the mind of animals. The World Today, 12, 421-426. [A rare, early, popular statement of functionalism by the "founder" of behaviourism.]

Well, there are too much.

Generally, if you're searching for the construction of the mind, my suggestion is watching children developing chronologically from the beginning, the more raw data you get - the better. Too much papers may rather waste too much of your time and confuse you. Read abstracts and select wisely which articles to read thoroughly. This will give you wider scope.

Child Development Journal

Психология на развитието, детска психология, бихевиоризъм, изследвания, методология, изследователски, обществеознание, социология, обществени науки, social science, sciences

Twenkid FX Demo - November 2010 | Видеообработка, монтаж, композитинг - ново демо на българската програма за визуални ефекти Twenkid FX

2010-11-23T15:06:00.000+02:00

I wasn't able to work on the system last few weeks, but it's evolving steadily. Yet too early a version for external users.

Produced: Tosh
Directed and Camera operator: Tosh
Starring in video segments: Tosh, Kaloyan and others.
Green Screen camera operator: Vassil Krastev
Editing: Tosh

Последните няколко седмици нямах време да развивам системата, но тя стабилно върви напред. http://fx.twenkid.com

Думи: Twenkid FX, Visual Effects, Twenkid Research, Visual Effects, Editing, Визуални ефекти, Видеообработка, Монтаж, Новини, Compositing, композитинг, български, софтуер, ефекти, компютърни, Chroma Keying, зелен екран, забавен, каданс, ускорен, стабилизация, компенсация, motion compensation, postprocessing, image stabilization, video crop, multi screen, video in video, remove objects from video, removal objects from video, премахване на обекти от видео,

Mathematical Theory of Intelligence - second Course in AGI at Plovdiv University by Todor Arnaudov | Математическа теория на разума - нов курс

2010-11-22T16:45:00.008+02:00

Beginning in January, it will cover part of the topics of the previous one - Artificial General Intelligence as an introduction, will share some new or unshared ideas I've came up lately, and will focus more technically on methodology of bottom-up research and the works of Boris Kazachenko (as far as I understand them). This one still seems to be one of the first, most thorough and most advanced university courses in AGI worldwide. More details - later.

Mathematical Theory of Intelligence

This course is for students who desire to work in the advanced interdisciplinary field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which is building the theoretical foundation and research methodology for the future implementation of self-improving intelligent/thinking machines (AI is one of the predecessors of this science). The course introduces students to the field of AGI and then review the most recent works of the leading researchers and entrepreneurs, especially Boris Kazachenko's theory about cognitive algorithm as scalable pattern discovery and prediction and induction as a method for analysis.

http://research.twenkid.com

Математическа теория на разума

(30 места, за всички)

(записване I етап: 25.11.2010 г. (четвъртък) от 13:00 ч. до 14:00 ч. в каб. 341)

Курсът е предназначен за студенти, които искат да се занимават с авангардната интердисциплинарна наука Универсален изкуствен разум (УИР), която изгражда теоретичната основа и методология на изследване за бъдещата практическа реализация на самоусъвършенстващи се разумни машини (изкуственият интелект (ИИ) е един от предшествениците на тази наука). В началото на курса се въвеждат необходимите основополагащи знания, след което се разглеждат най-актуалните изследвания на водещите учени и предприемачи, особено теорията на Борис Казаченко за познавателния алгоритъм като мащабиращо се откриване на модели отдолу-нагоре, и индукцията и обобщението като методи за анализ на разума.

http://research.twenkid.com

ФМИ, ПУ, избираеми, дисциплини, изкуствен, разум, интелект, мислещи машини, пловдивски, университет, избираема, роботи, Азимов

Phishing fraud in Google Gmail! Beware!

2010-11-21T20:29:00.006+02:00

Don't answer emails like this!
Don't you EVER send any password in an email!

from Gmail
to members.reply@gmail.com
date Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 8:50 AM

subject Your Google Account
hide details 8:50 AM (11 hours ago)

Dear Gmail User,

Due to the congestion in our Gmail servers,there would be removal of all unused Gmail Accounts.You will have to confirm if your E-mail is still active by filling out your login info below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.

Customer ID:
Password:
Region:

Note: This email is only for Account owner.

Thank you for using Gmail !

The Gmail Team

Keywords: Phishing, scum, spam, criminals, crackers, hackers, security, сигурност, фишинг, кракери, имейл, електронна, поща

Рейтингите на университетите са в порочен кръг | University Ratings are Originally Corrupted

2010-11-04T22:39:00.015+02:00

English: No translation yet, but the theme is that it's a vicious circle, there are wrong assumptions and it is the students. Capable candidates make capable graduates. Also "average salary of graduates", if not normalized, is wrong. Payment and finding a job depends on economy of the region and willing or possibilities of the agents to travel to better payed places and job positions, not just of the quality of education or their capabilities. It's geography that is correlated with success of the bigger chunk of students, not the quality of education per se. (Except if you look at the quality in long term as capability of students to create new enterprises to rise local economy etc...)

Заработи система за рейтинги на българските университети: http://rsvu.mon.bg

Според мен колко е способен в работата си един завършил студент, зависи най-вече от това колко е способен студента по принцип, а не от университета, особено днес когато информацията е толкова лесно достъпна.

Университетът може да ти предостави материална база, битови условия, изследователски групи и възможности за изследвания, опита на учени изследователи и преподаватели, които да дават пример и да вдъхновяват; "унито" е и място за срещи с много нови идеи и бъдещи съдружници. Ако студентът не е "качествен" по начало обаче, той нито ще се впечатли от тези възможности, нито "фунията" за знания ще сработи по-добре, поне що се отнася за високи постижения, а не "да си намериш работа по специалността". Трябва да се направят сравнения на студенти на входа и на изхода на различни университети, за да се види какъв е напредъкът, каква е разликата на изхода между хора със съизмерими постижения на тестове за интелигентност и тестове за способност за учене.

Порочен кръг

Според мен класациите са в порочен кръг по начало, защото по-богатите университети с по-добра материална база и/или повече традиции и "диверсификация" на изследователските напраления и/или по-престижни в общественото мнение, сформирано през годините (реклама, стереотипи и пр. които също са в порочен кръг), привличат най-много от най-добрите кандидат-студенти и най-добри инвестиции (на Запад), съответно тези студенти постигат резултати и т.н. Трябва да стане нещо изключително в по-изостаналите университети, да се появят много надарени студенти и учени или извънредно щедри инвеститори, за да се пробие порочният кръг.

Скъпа наука

В изследвания където са нужни много вложения в техника и технологии (know-how), институтите от по-долните дивизии се обречени прогресивно да изостават, особено предвид че си губят най-добрите кадри, които отиват там където могат да работят.

Така например MIT, Stanford, Berkley непрестанно си остават в челото на най-авангардните високотехнологични изследвания и се самозахранват с нови талантливи и гениални студенти, нови инвестиции и нови открития, записани на тяхна сметка.

Средна заплата - зависи от мястото, не от квалификацията

Един от параметрите в българската рейтингова система е среден осигурителен доход: http://rsvu.mon.bg/RSVU/?locale=bg

Това е много заблуждаващо, ако не се отчетата подробностите в кой географски район работи завършилият. В нашата икономически сбъркана държава, където почти всички инвестиции се изливат в София, естествено там се получават до няколко пъти по-високи заплати и има огромно търсене на пазара на труда, освен това там са ръководните центрове на повечето големи фирми. В същото време, това че един програмист в Пловдив получава 2/3, 1/2 или 1/3 от заплатата на програмист в София не доказва, че този в София е получил по-добро образование или е по-способен, някои от колегите ми отиват в София. Разликата в заплатата показва, че работодателите са по-щедри, по-богати, има по-голяма конкуренция и/или недостиг на работна ръка и т.н.

От друга страна, доколкото видях не се отчита от каква възраст човек от университета работи, в моето ФМИ в ПУ способните колеги често работят "по специалността" от 2-ри курс.

По-богат район --> по-висока заплата
НЕ по-висока квалификация --> по-висока заплата

Естествено, че университетите, които се намират на места с по-малко инвестиции и по-бедни райони ще постигат "по-ниска реализация на кадрите" отколкото тези в София, и за да могат да настигнат софийските ще е необходимо завършилите масово да се изнасят там. Всъщност това се случва в известна степен и подпомага утежняването на финансовия дисбаланс между столицата и другите райони.

Предприемачество

Не забелязах да се отчита.

Кариера и образование в Силициевата долина

Христо Божинов е написал интересна статия за това как работи Силициевата долина и отбелязва, че някои от най-добрите студенти не завършват "най-престижни" университети напълно съзнателно, за да имат повече свобода при следването: http://bojinov.org/index_BG.html

Христо има умопомрачителна кариера в ключови фирми от Силициевата долина, завършил е един от най-престижните инженерни институти в света MIT и с него е ставал шампион по програмиране на САЩ, сега е докторант в друг от най-престижните - Stanford.

Те ли са му дали качествата, които има? Не мисля. Той е един от създателите на една култова игра "Висящият замък", когато е на 15 години, всъщност именно заради тази игра го познавам.

Той и талантливи хора като него дават от своя талант, за да могат най-престижните университети да се бият по гърдите колко са велики, като се прибави предимството им в материално-техническата база, голям брой научно-изследователски звена, добри условия за предприемачество (start-up) и преки връзки между най-авангардните изследвания и бизнеса.

Важно е кой университет какви ресурси има за "трансфери", както във футбола, което е в тясна връзка с икономиката на региона, в който са тези университети, защото тази икономика го финансира и осигурява високоплатена работа за завършилите. Разбира се, науката и университетите подпомагат икономиката.

Водещите американски университети имат бюджети от по 10-тина милиарда долара и от край време са имали колосални бюджети и научно-техническо предимство, затова са и много по-напред.

Ключови думи: университети, рейтинг, рейтингова система, СУ, ПУ, ВтУ, Американски университет, MIT, Станфорд, висше, образование, МОН, икономика, бизнес, предприемачи, старт-ъп, студенти, НБУ, рейтингова система за висшите училища

Twenkid FX: New Showreel Demo Coming Soon

2010-10-28T19:16:00.005+03:00

Features are growing

Check Twenkid Studio's Blog

Arthur Schopenhauer - World as Will and Idea (Representation) and Theories of Intellience, Mind, AGI, Artificial General Intelligence

2010-10-17T15:52:00.006+03:00

I first read one of the books of the philosopher Schopenhauer during the period of my Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe*. I noticed it reminded me my concepts, so it seemed meaningful. :)

I think his philosophy is related to the context of AGI, he has even tried to apply neuroscience, as far as first half of XIX century has allowed. There is a free copy of his major book at http://archive.org

A lot of Schopenhauer's essays can be found as well.

In my opinion, he shares some ideas that Boris has developed further.

(Translation - mine, from Bulgarian, some attributes missed)

"...practical person applies his intelligence according to its purpose predetermined by nature - to comprehend the relations between things, partially one to another and partially compared to the will of the individual who cognizes. On the other hand the genius uses his intelligence against its purpose - to understand the objective nature of things. Because of the advanced cognitive capability the genius cognizes to a higher extent the generality in things, rather than the individual, while serving to Will mostly requires cognition of the individual ("specifics")." --- Specialists vs Generalists

"(...) All of the great theoretical discoveries of any kind are achieved because their author directed all of his spiritual power towards one single point, where he links and concentrates the power to extent where this point occupies his entire reality and the rest of the world disappears for him." -- Detachment and Focus

Etc., a lot could be cited. I haven't read all yet, only beginnings and parts - couldn't afford the time lately, but I'll try/

* "Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe" - significant parts of it are available in English already, but not published yet.

Twenkid FX - Compositing Test

2010-09-27T06:11:00.004+03:00

Twenkid FX - Compositing Test at 26 Sep 2010 from Todor Arnaudov on Vimeo.

Sequences were shot for the experimental fantasy short film "The Gift". Edited and composited using Twenkid FX - my custom NLE video editing and compositing/visual effects software. Still it's a prototype, developing quickly and gaining critical mass of complexity.

Shot in Bulgaria and Poland in 2008. Camera and editing: me.

To be continued...

Clocks in the brain - How Consciousness Forms, 40 Hz Thalamus Clock

2010-09-22T23:38:00.006+03:00

Excerpts from a Rober Pollack's book, suggested by a new article discussing Executive Attention, published by the AGI researcher Boris Kazachenko:

The Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science

The key topics include:
- The thalamus as a clock, 40 Hz and 1000 Hz.
- 0.5 sec delay after a stimulus turns into a conscious sensation
- clock's phase synchronizing to external sound stimuli
- incapability of brain to discriminate and feel consciously events shorter than ~1/80th of sec
- even a slight thalamus damage may cause deep coma - circuitry goes out of sync

If you have free time and curiosity, check out the list:
http://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/~amit/books/master-booklist0.html#Brain and Cognition

...and others, such as:

The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

Twenkid FX - Video Editing/Compositing/Visual Effects Progress (News)

2010-09-21T00:46:00.004+03:00

It's not ready for public release, the GUI is rough and yet there are too many experimental features.

Some of the interesting features include:

- Non-Linear Editing - cut and rearrangement of video segments
- Generation of cut and append jobs for VirtualDub based on the editions in Twenkid FX
- Animated titles with Outlines, Zoom, Sweeping and other transition effects
- Chroma key blending tests ("Green Screen")
- Blending full frames (two frames together)
- Matte painting tests (combining videos at selected regions using masks)

- Crop-Paste/Video in video - selection of regions from one video and rendering on the target video, either same size or scaled, keeping the aspect
- Split Screen
- Various Fade-In/Out transitions
- Scroll and Squeeze Screen transitions
- Reverse Playback
- Speed-up/Slow-down
- Insert Images (full-screen)
- Save Still-Frames

...

EPOC - Mind Reading Headset | Brain-Computer Interface Gadget

2010-09-12T07:09:00.010+03:00

Watch the presentation on Ted: A headset that reads your brainwaves

Order: :) http://www.emotiv.com/apps/epoc/299/

Curiously, about a six years ago I was suggested by an AGI researcher I've met then to try to experiment together in EEG-recording and analysis for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). Unfortunately I lacked motivation to deal with the electronics part, but it is possible to make experiments yourself - if not with mind reading, at least with EEG. In general what you need are:

- Electro-magnetic sensors
- High quality low-noise transistors to amplify the signal
- DAC - Digital-To-Analog-Convertor, connected with or part of a:
- Microcontroller or FPGA kit with an interface to a PC - e.g. USB, designed to fetch the data from DAC and send them to the PC.
- Basic interface software to capture the data.
- Machine learning software to find patterns and correlations in data

At a Caffe Scientifique event months ago I met a Bulgarian researcher affiliated to Bulgarian Academy of Science. He was enthusiastic about experimenting on this field and wanted to try from years, but they've failed to allocate enough time and to get funding, so he's been working in other fields, but he sounded as an expert who knows how to develop the software. Wavelets are current methods for frequency analysis. I'm too busy with a stack of higher priority tasks to join them right now if they manage to start to implement a prototype, but certainly it would be fun to play.

Думи: мозъчно-компютърен интерфейс, връзка мозък-компютър, мозъчен интерфейс, , мисъл, контрол с мисълта, ЕЕГ, мозъчни вълни, предаване на мисли, четене на мисли, телепатия, кореалация, научно, кафене, БАН, Стилиян Георгиев, Форум, Демокрит, научни, изследвания, уейвлети.

Интервю със Стилиян Георгиев: http://e-vestnik.bg/3685

News: Stoichko Hristov 4: Respect your enemies! - coming soon, and Twenkid-FX video compositing progressing

2010-08-21T23:52:00.003+03:00

Tosh/Тош/Todor Arnaudov as Stoichko Hristov

I shot the new episode 4 of "Stoichko Hristov" series a week ago at a very beautiful place in North Bulgaria. It's a continuation of the story in episode 2, it's about 10 minutes long, I'm playing 3 roles.

Unfortunately I've not been in my best shape lately, but my custom-made NLE and video compositing software is growing little by little; have done some experiments related to the cruical green screen and compositing/matte painting effects.

Theory of Intelligence, NLE Video Editor and Visual Effects, Acting and Filmmaking, AGI, Intelligent Dictionary

2010-07-17T15:22:00.019+03:00

Some News

Artificial General Intelligence

- I won the first Boris Kazachenko's prize in AGI! Knol

- The time for the new version theory of mind has come. Recently I've been translating in English my Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe" (2001-2004). The new "Twenkid Theory of Mind and Universe" is trying to turn philosophy and ideas into a formal implementable theory and eventually prototypes.

Video Editing/NLE (non-linear editing)/Visual Effects

This project - Twenkid FX - was frozen for 2 months, lately I'm trying to spend a little time on it again - I need the software for my movies. It's still limited, but now has some really practical features such as doing complete NLE editing (cut) and using its interface to generate scripted jobs for VirtualDub, turning it into a non-linear editor.

It's too early to share it for other users, though. Stay tuned for news.

Acting and Filmmaking - Stoichko Hristov and Johny Johnson

Stoichko Hristov 2 - Coaches and Players

Check my Multimedia/Twenkid Studio blog: www.twenkid.blogspot.com

EEVA2010 - You are fired! from Todor Arnaudov on Vimeo.

Smarty - maybe the most Advanced English-Bulgarian dictionary ever made

It was a 2007 prototype, but it's still the most advanced, I think. It's not AGI, but might be "reborn", could be useful tool and an ad-ware.

Boston Dynamics Robots - PETMAN, Little Dog, Big Dog

2010-07-16T23:49:00.005+03:00

Cute beasts, aren't they? :)

And another one of the most advanced prototypes of Big Dog:...

Български: ходещи, роботи, Бостън, голямо, малко, куче, робот

The Course in Universal Artificial Intelligence (Artificial General Intelligence/AGI) in Plovdiv University - Conclusion

2010-07-04T20:00:00.014+03:00

Some of my best students and me

About the Course in Plovdiv University, and the Course Program

I'd like to thank the vice dean of FMI Dr. M. Manev and FMI for accepting this unusual course, and my students for their curiosity, smart comments, agreements and disagreements. Your company was enriching and pushing me to share and think more. Now I'm not that alone in my dreams and interests about mind and intelligence.

I hope to keep discussing with you, feel free to comment in the blog, if you wish join the Facebook group and share materials or ideas you've found.

Another course is being conceived for the winter. If it happens, it would be even more advanced, focused on Boris Kazachenko's and mine most advanced concepts and what I manage to understand and invent up to then. The course may include brainstorms and discussions on solving real generalization, architectural, neuroscientific, implementation etc. problems. Hope to see you again there, eventually!

Trivia

- Ironically, the last class of the advanced and futuristic course was in the oldest lab in University, the only one with CRT monitors left... :)

- The caption in the balloon on the T-shirt says "Science = Art + Fun". I got the blank from a Famelab competition. Closer view.

- If you're interested in tennis: yes, Plovdiv is the native city of Tsvetana Pironkova who beat Venice Williams at Wimbeldon quarter-finals. :)

Teenage Theory of Mind and Universe (Excerpts, Part 1) - Theoretical Induction of Neocortex and Hippocampus using Consciousness; Compression ...

2010-06-24T21:39:00.026+03:00

If you've followed this blog long enough, you've certainly has read about my mysterious theory. :)) It's a collection of writings and ideas on philosophy, mind and universe from my late teenage years (Late 2001 - Early 2004).

For patient Bulgarian speakers the originals are still available here:
Български: http://eim.hit.bg/razum (Съветвам да четете отдолу (най-стари) - нагоре)Откъси от "Тийнейджърската теория на разума и Вселената" - сбирка от статии, разработки, "трактати" от края на 2001-ва до началото на 2004. Можете да видите откъсите по-долу, но новите допълнителни коментари са само към преведената на английски част, ако знаете английски, предлгедайте и тях.

Some of the topics in these excerpts are:

- Discussion on memory and consciousness
- Theoretical induction of neocortical and hippocampal-like modules in mind, based on consciousness. These modules are called respectively "Executive Operating System (EXOS)/Executive Memory" and "Events Operating System (EOS)/Events Memory"
- Compression and Predictability
- Mind as predictor of future inputs, based on the past
- Cognitive hierarchy and abstraction in mind - higher levels work with ever less amount of information, compress
- Art and compressibility (seems related to Schmidhuber's theories about curiosity)
- Find for yourself
- Have added some new comments on the topics.

Enjoy!

Notes: In square brackets [blah-blah] are comments/clarifications added now, some words and concepts are translated with many words/variants.

Man and Thinking Machine (2001)

"....In human [mind], most of the objects (of any kind) are not remembered "photographically", but are told/narrated in brain; only the most specific features of the informational entities are recorded; the input is compressed. Probably only the basic concepts are stored in "photographic", "phonographic" (audio), "text", "stereographical" (spatial) etc. memory. (...)

It's smart the newly arrived input informational entity to be interpreted by the existing concepts, using their labels - links to their meaning, containing only an "address". We, people, call this kind of memorizing "understanding" and "making sense of" ...." - "

"Informational entity" is a portion of input data, that is analyzed/compressed into patterns.

...

Sections from:

Concept about the Universal Predetermination, a.k.a. "Theory of Universe and Mind", Part 3 (2003)

61. The origination of consciousness is the creation of the first advanced/well-developed/robust ("развит") Operating System for Events - EOS (in Slavic terms it was: събитиен вседържец). EOS stores and processes sequential information from the senses and ensures recording and replaying events (happenings) as on a tape or a disk - a record can be selected and it can be "played-back" in the imagination.

The first well-deveoped operating system - EOS - is an OS, capable to keep compatibility with the previous versions, while it's being improved over time.

That means, the newer versions of the "formats" for recording memories are backward-compatible with the older ones, so older still can be read, even though the new versions may have extensions.

For example a person may have memories both as a two-year old and from yesterday - our brain has changed through the years, but it apparently has kept its compatibility with the records as a two-year old.

In memory, the old events/happenings (събития) - inputs to memory/records - are one-dimensional, i.e. all can be recalled in an instant. [Associative memory]

If a person is unable to spot anything particular - written, drawn; marked [to recognize, to spot anything recognizable/interpretable, to find a pattern], it's hard to remember it, because he would be supposed to record it as an image, while human brain is weak in remembering single complex images, not connected into a system.

After a person learns to read (has extended the capabilities of the EOS), when text is seen mind remembers not the image, but the letters, the syllables or even whole words. (Which maybe are represented as addresses in memory.) The capability to remember events/happenings (memories), written as text, is an upgrade/extension of the EOS.

However it's also an upgrade of the Executive OS [EXOS], which is more closely related to the "hardware". [More closely related to hardware means lower levels of control/generality.]

The memory for events is a higher level of memory in mind than the executive/action memory. For instance, executive memory is language - a baby says his or her first words usually when 1 year old. Before reaching to the moment after which he or she has memories kept for life, the baby might be using hundreds of words and even construct simple sentences. These words and grammars are [seem to be] a part of the Executive memory of the EXOS.

The abilities to speak; to coordinate his movements - walking, running, sitting, catching; recognize direction of sound; recognize objects; suppose third dimension data from a 2D image etc. are a part of a lower level of the OS of mind and apparently EXOS reaches to a backward-compatible versions much earlier than the EOS.

The first memories for events [biographical memories] display approximately when the first steady-working version of the EOS was finished, usually around 3 years [sometimes between two and three]. Earlier appearance display earlier brain development and this is an advantage for the further development of mind.

[It's related to the maturation of hippocampus, isn't it?]

EOS is more versatile (universal) than the EXOS, because it allows working with more data formats, which are combinations and extensions of the formats of the EXOS.

EOS is more flexible than the EXOS and allows mind to work with more abstract files ("informational entities"; records; patterns), more distant/abstracted than their form as an input. ["Distant" either as amount of transformations from the input to the record, and in space and time]

EOS allows mind to extract executive information from the memory for events, i.e. mind may interpret (reflect) EOS with much bigger delay in time.

Mind can convert memories for events into executive, in a format appropriate for the EXOS, thus EXOS may do particular actions because of events (happening/story/record) stored in the memory for events.

EOS can be seen, to a greater extent than EXOS as a data storage, which however eventually allows inducing sequences of actions/operations - algorithms [to be fed to Executive OS].

On the other hand, EXOS can be seen to a greater extent than EOS as an algorithmic storage. Executive OS uses Executive memory to execute actions. [Memory should be where patterns are stored, "operating system" is the process of activation of particular patterns.]

EXOS and EOS are interconnected and not independent. Features of any of them are features of the others, from particular points of view.

EOS is derived from EXOS.

# END-OF-SECTION

A speculation from now:

- Besides biological imperfections, I guess neuroplasticity may decline in order to preserve mind from "self-amnesia".

There are feedbacks between levels of generality, so they're supposed to adjust in parallel, generalizations should be reinforced/re-checked/re-affirmed; but I wonder what's going to happen with biographical memories, stored using hippocampus and "addresses in memory" (connections).

I've read that hippocampus eventually strengthens networks in neocortex, "transfers memory" there. However, if neocortex changes radically at the lowest levels of generality (or any level?), say if brain is exposed to adapt to a totally different world, I guess those connections may turn not just menaningless, but crazy. On the other hand, addition of higher or parallel levels of generality would not hurt the lower ones.

That's why I suspect that too high neuroplasticity in the lowest levels of generality after higher levels and hippocampus are developed may be dangerous and lead to insanity.

Also, brain is too messy to do real self-rewrite as a future thinking machine would be able to. Brain can't start building an improved "clean copy" and it can't isolate portions of itself from the others.

- Prediction of a "neocortex"-like module - Executive Operating System (EXOS) and executive memory (should be the patterns in the levels of generality)

- Prediction of a "hippocampus"-like module - Events Operating System (EOS)

62. The highest parts of the thinking machine [e.g. consciousness] work at the slowest speed and they output the least amount of information. The lower parts of the thinking machine, and of any machine, work at a higher speed, expressed as information flow/transfer rate.

Full control of a unit over another requires the first to contain in its memory a complete model of the controlled one - a complete model of its behavior - and the contol unit must be capable to simulate it [at least] in real time (...).

"Higher" parts of mind have narrower transfer rates than the "lower", that's why higher parts cannot actually have full control of the lower ones.

[Lower amount of information at higher cognitive levels - higher generality, ever reduced resolution/precision]

63. The more complex the unit/device*, i.e. more information is being transferred [between its parts] during its work, the less controllable it becomes, because it gets harder to find another device possessing enough memory and speed; the "devices" [agents might be a better term] with non-incrementing transfer rate (e.g. humans) may control the more complex devices the less, because their speed and memory gets lesser part of the requirements.

[There were other types of complexity used in the writings also, like one similar to minimal message length/algorithmic complexity, but not precisely defined. E.g. the length of a program written in the "machine code of Universe" which are capable to produce the entity whose complexity is measured, with two options - using or not using external sources for complexity. "Virtual universes" also exist, all environments having "laws of physics" and "matter" to evolve following the laws.
E.g. in this definition of complexity, even very simple artifacts created by humans are more complex than humans, because they require operational humans with developed intelligence, and cannot be created using the laws of physics without intelligent agents. ]

I think the "control" parts might have been partially aimed to show consciousness is just a top of an iceberg of mind, and to shut "Chinese Room" mouths and of those believing that computers do "what we tell them how to do". What we consciously and voluntary do is pressing a few buttons, our holy free will is encoded in a few bits per second, while the vast accumulated complexity is doing the rest on its own, including suggesting and allowing "us" to press those buttons.

64. People wish for "richness" of the information they perceive, even though huge amounts of that "informational fortune" where mind lives are wasted.
[I.e. mind compresses, generalizes, doesn't use all data it gets.]

Richer in information a "file" [original - свитък, a piece of information, a message] is an entity/whole [a pattern], where predictability of the content of a piece of the pattern, based on other adjacent or related in particular fashion to the first parts of the pattern is close to the predictability in the Reality, in the First Virtual (Imaginary) Universe.

The mind concept (comprehension, understanding) that mind gets from an image, is the same, written as pieces of knowledge [patterns] and their relations.

Understanding shows what transformations can be done with the patterns, which create the file [input, a piece of input, a message...].

Abstract artists' pictures, where there a re 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 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 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 art photograph must be balanced: to bring enough information about the subject on the picture, to be clear enough - to 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.

Art photography is based on abstraction and emphasizing of the essential [information]. It's like that also in classical visual art, especially in graphics and caricature.

[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)...]

Dogfight

Lonelyness (The Lonely Station Cat) | Photos: Tosh (me)

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 just use lines - therefore [perhaps] images are stored as "lines"; lines bring the most possible 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 slight details, when it remembers the image as a description of pieces of knowledge, in order to make remembering easier.

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 by parts of the image to be able to predict, 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 percept 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.

#

Български (допълнителните коментари обаче са само към частта на английски! предлгедайте я, ако знаете английски)

*** При човека, повечето обекти (от всякакъв вид) не се запомнят
"фотографски", а се "преразказват" в мозъка, записват се най-характерните
особености на информационните обекти, входната информация се компресира.
Във "фотографска", "фонографска", "текстографска","стереографска"
(пространствена) и пр. памет вероятно се съхраняват само основните понятия.
(...) Хитро е новопостъпилият информационен обект да се обясни с наличните
информационни обекти. Просто му се дава етикет, а същността му се описва с
известните понятия, като се използват техните етикети - връзки към
значението им, съдържащи само "адрес". Ние хората наричаме такова запомняне
"разбиране" и "осмисляне". - из Човекът и Мислещата машина, Тодор Арнаудов - Тош, 2001

Из "Схващане за всеобщата предопределеност 3" - Тош, 2003
61. Възникването на съзнанието е създаването на първия развит събитиен вседържец (събитийна операционна система) на човека. Събитийният вседържец запомня и обработва поточна информация от сетивата и осигурява запомнянето и възпроизвеждането на събития като "на лента" или "плоча" - можем да изберем "запис" и да го "прослушаме" във въображението си.

"Първият развит събитиен вседържател" е операционна система, способна при усърършенстването и надграждането си да запазва СЪВМЕСТИМОСТТА с предходните версии. Например форматите за запис на събитийни спомени от "Проявление 1.0" на Развития събитиен вседържец на разума нататък са съвместими един с друг "отгоре надолу" - по-новите версии са съвместими с по-старите, техни разширения.

Например имаме спомени и от двегодишна възраст, и от вчера. Мозъкът ни се е променял през годините, но си е останал съвместим към спомените от двегодишна възраст.

В паметта ни всички събития, когато и да са били въведени в паметта, са разположени едноизмерно и си спомняме за тях мигновено.

Ако не можем да четем и видим нещо написано, е трудно да го запомним, защото трябва да го запомним като цяло изображение, а човешкият мозък е по-слаб в запомнянето на единични - несвързани в система - сложни изображения.

След като се научим да четем (разширим възможностите на Събитийния вседържец), като видим написано слово запомняме не изображението, а буквите, сричките и дори целите думи. (Които може би се представят като адреси в паметта). Способността да си спомняме събития, написани в слово, е надстройка на събитийната операционна система. Същевременно е надстройка и на Изпълнителната, която е в по-пряка връзка с "железарията".

Събитийната памет е по-високо ниво памет в mind, отколкото изпълнителната. Изпълнителна памет е например езикът - детето проговаря, средно, на възраст една година. Преди първите спомени за случки, които оставят за цял живот, то използва стотици думи и построява изречения. Тези думи и граматиките са част от "Изпълнителната памет" на "Изпълняващия вседържец".

Способността да говори; да съгласува движенията си, за да ходи, тича, сяда, хваща; познава посоката на звука; разпознава предмети, предполага за третото измерение от двуизмерни изображения и т.н. са част от по-ниското равнище на Вседържеца на mind - Изпълняващият вседържец (ИВ).
Той стига до получаване на съвместими отгоре надолу версии много по-рано от Събитийния вседържец.

Първите спомени за събития показват приблизително кога е била завършена работеща устойчиво разновидност на Развития събитиен вседържец (РСВ) - обикновено за около 2-3 години след раждането на човека. По-ранното появяване показва по-ранно развитие на мозъка и е предимство за развитието на mind.

Събитийният вседържец е по-универсален от Изпълнителния, защото позволява на mind да работи с по-голям брой формати на данните, които са съчетание и разширение на форматите на Изпълнителния вседържец.

Събитийният вседържец е по-гъвкав от Изпълнителния и позволява на mind да работи с по-отвлечени свитъци (информационни обекти), по-отдалечени от вида им при въвеждането в паметта през чувствениците.

РСВ позволява на mind да извлича изпълнителна информация от събитийната. Т.е. разумът може да тълкува (обмисля) събитийната памет с много голямо закъснение във времето. Разумът може да преобразува събитийната памет в изпълнителна, във формат за Изпълнителния вседържец, който може да извърши определени действия заради събитие, съхранявано в Събитийната памет.

Събитийната памет може да се разглежда, в по-голяма степен от изпълнителната, като хранилище за данни, от които чрез изчисления могат да се извличат последователности от действия - алгоритми.

Изпълнителната памет е, в по-голяма степен от събитийната, хранилище на алгоритми (казбеници), отколкото събитийната; както подсказва името й, за да се извършват действия, се използва Изпълнителната операционна система.

Изпълнителният и Събитийният вседържатели се преплитат и не са независими един от друг. Свойствата на единия са свойства, в определена степен и от определена гледна точка, и свойства на другия. Събитийната операционна система е производна на изпълнителната.

62. Разумът е частта от Мислещата машина, която работи с най-ниска скорост и извежда най-малко информация. По-нисшите части на Мислещата машина, и въобще на всяка машина, работят с по-висока скорост, изразена в информационен поток (въобречие).

Пълна власт на едно устройство над друго изисква управляващото устройство да съдържа в паметта си изцяло паметта на подчиненото, модел на действието му и да може да му подражава с пълна скорост (това са условията за пълноскоростна емулация на една изчислителна машина от друга), за да е способно да ръководи всяка подробност от случващото се на подчиненото.

"По-висшият разум" има по-тясно въобречие от "по-нисшия", затова е обречен да няма пълна власт над него.

63. Колкото по-сложно е устройството, т.е. колкото повече информация се обменя при работата му, толкова е по-неуправляемо, защото е по-трудно да се намери друго устройство с достатъчно обемна памет и бързодействие, в които да се вмести подчиненото; толкова повече устройствата с нерастяща пропускателна способност (напр. човеците) по-слабо го управляват, защото бързодействието и паметта им стават все по-малка част от бързодействието и паметта на устройствата с растяща пропускателна способност, памет и бързодействие.

Най-сложното устройство - цялата Вселена - не може да бъде управлявано от никое друго устройство.

Колкото по-точно устройството знае какво прави - в паметта, достъпна за най-висшите части на управляващата част, е записано с по-голяма точност "какво му е писано" - толкова е по-свободно и същевременно е толкова по-несвободно. По-свободно е, защото прави това, което то "иска", т.е. което е записано в неговата памет; несвободно е обаче според разбирането, че "свобода" означава да не знаеш какво искаш и да не знаеш какво ще поискаш в следващия момент.

64. Човекът милее за "богатство" на възприеманата информация, макар че от цялото "информационно богатство", в което плува човешкия разум, се пилеят огромни "средства".

Информационно по-богат свитък е такава цялост, в която предсказуемостта на съдържанието на откъс от свитъка, въз основа на други, съседни или свързани по определен начин с първите, части от същия свитък се доближава по стойност до предсказуемостта в Действителността, в Първата въображаема вселена.

Разумната представа (съзнанието, разбирането), която получаваме от едно изображение, е същото,описано с късове знание и отношения между тях. Разбирането показва какви преобразователни действия биха могли да се извършат с късовете знания, които се намират в свитъка.

Абстрактните картини, в които не се срещат късове знание, с изключение на най-първичните за изображение (точка, петно, отсечка, начупена линия; многоъгълници, които възприемащият не свързва с познати предмети; без трето измерение), не носят никаква разумна информация.

Разумна информация има в изображения, в които могат да се разпознаят и назоват отделни предмети и части от предмети и взаимното им разположение.

Разумната представа се описва с много по-малко обем информация, отколкото изображението, от което е изведена.
...

Това изображение, например, носи много малко знание, защото лесно може да се опише с цикъл (въртележка) в разума, като промените спрямо цикличното изменение на мотива "ивица от сграда" са малки.
Фотографите наричат такива снимки "скучни" - носещи малко количество непредсказуема, въз основа на предходната, информация.

Добре направената художествена снимка трябва да бъде уравновесена - да носи достатъчно информация за предмета на снимката, да е достатъчно ясна - лесно да се разбира какво е снимано, идеята да бъде "завършена"; не трябва да бъде претрупана с подробности, които отклоняват вниманието ("дразнят") и карат погледа да се лута из изображението, в търсене на смисъла на снимката.

Художествената фотография е свързана с отделяне и наблягане върху същественото. Така е при рисуването, особено при графиката и карикатурата.

Когато човек твори, показва по какъв начин представата за това, което твори, е записана в паметта му и кои особености на действителността се запомнят.

Например малките деца, които правят първите си рисунки, използват черти - следователно в паметта на човека изображенията се записват като черти; чертите носят най-много информация, защото са рязък преход между белия лист и цвета на писалото; най-младият разум запомня само най-съществените части от възприеманата действителност.

Човек не помни много подробности от образите. Може би и затова снимките с много подробности "дразнят".
Човекът обикновено изтрива по-голямата част от дребните подробности, когато запомня изображението като описание на късове знание, за да се опрости запомнянето.

По-лесно е да се запълни паметта с късче информация, която се размножава с постепенна, известна отначалото, промяна; и чрез част от образа да можем да предскажем, с по-голяма вероятност, какво има на друго място от него. Човекът трудно запомня и възприема "обилни информационни порции", каквато е шумът:

ШУМ - последователност от знаци, в която всеки следващ е равно вероятен и стойността на следващите знаци е напълно непредсказуема (за този, който се опитва да предсказва), въз основа на предходните.

Разумът използва голямо излишество на информацията, за да може по-лесно и сигурно да предсказва бъдещите входни данни, използвайки миналите.

Criticism on Novamente Cognitive Architecture, SOAR and Alikes | Критика към архитектурата Новаменте, SOAR... Курс по Универсален изкуствен разум

2010-06-21T01:00:00.009+03:00

"Back to the Future" - an 80's classic movie and a favorite

What's wrong with those cognitive architectures claiming to allow creation of Artificial General Intelligence (true Thinking mahichines)?

Какво не е наред в когнитивни архитектури Новаменте, СОАР и др., и защо създателите им са далеч от универсален изкуствен разум
(истински мислещи машини, или "изкуствен интелект" както е старият лош термин, който повече им подхожда)

In brief, I've been disappointed from the papers on Ben Goertzel's Novamente cognitive architecture (AGIRI's OpenCog seems similar), because they resemble too much SOAR-like cognitive architectures, rely on NLP, even Prolog-like "common-sense" logic.

Check out some:

http://www.novamente.net/file/AAAI04.pdf
http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2009/OpenCogPrime.pdf
http://goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2009/CognitiveSynergy.pdf

I have given up on a Bulgarian one, called DUAL, that uses micro-frames and a hybrid symbolic-connectionnist approach, having several levels of interaction of the entities - micro, macro... It was conceived in late 80-ies, inspired by Minsky's "Society of mind", multi-agent systems, frames, etc... It seems a bit general, but the micro-frames are to be filled manually... Also I don't see any meaningful results, achieved for 20+ years of *work*.

SOAR is "a star", it was created in late 80-ies as well, and while enhanced over time, again I haven't heard of any meaningful application of it (actually any at all), demonstrating AGI. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Architectures like this seem very elaborate at first sight, having fancy block-diagrams: they use to claim having declarative memory, episodic memory, intentional memory, attention, working memory - prides of Cognitive Science - proven experimentally to exist in human mind! They have knowledge-bases (Cyc-style are the best!), problem space, goal-states... I guess these kinds of "knowledge" are supposed to be filled *manually*, somehow like in the NLP semantic dictionary - WordNet.

I like very much the 80-ies style, I somewhat like 70-ies and 60-ies (also 50-ies), but not really the AI-style.

Papers, journals, conferences on "Recent Advances in AI", PhDs... And anything to impress anybody outside the conference rooms?... (Correct me if wrong)

Novamente is supposed to be better than SOAR, they claim to use probabilistic inference, trying to integrate smoothly different kinds of memory - in a really general AGI framework all those "kinds of memory" are supposed to emerge from something more general. Novamente may work to some extent, but to me these high-level concepts, sticked together with "glue", don't look really smooth to evolve and learn well.

However I partially understand guys who try to do something to seem meaningful and to sell it right now, an elaborated architecture with many blocks inside, socially acceptable and "scientifically proven" constructs might be taken more seriously than elegant abstract definitions. But:

A rule of thumb: if an approach was feasible, for 20-some years of *work* it should had lead to a progress. To me so far it seems the same.

In the upcoming years, expecting:

Други ключови думи: Универсален изкуствен разум, Новаменте, когнитивни архитектури, СОАР, високо ниво, правила за извод, изкуствен интелект, Пловдив, ПУ, ФМИ, мислещи машини

Comments on "Chaotic Logic" | Коментар към книгата на Бен Гьорцел "Хаотична логика" - към курса по Универсален изкуствен разум в ПУ

2010-06-19T22:21:00.012+03:00

I've been checking out some of Ben Goertzel's works:

Read it at: http://www.goertzel.org/books/logic/contents.html

Chaotic Logic
Language, Thought and Reality
From the Perspective of Complex Systems Science

Ben Goertzel

Chairman and CTO Intelligenesis Corp.
Paper Version published by Plenum Press, 1994

What I liked:

- "Pattern and Prediction" (Ch. 2)
- "The structure of thought" (Ch. 3) - multilevel control (hierarchical control)
- "Psychology and logic" (Ch.4)
- Coverage of history of AI/logic/linguistics, good knowledge on particular philosophers, linguists etc.
- Different definitions of complexity

E.g. this lines on patterns: (Ch.2):

...Before getting formal, let us first take a quick intuitive tour through the main concepts to be discussed. The natural place to begin is with the concept of pattern. I define a pattern, very simply, as a representation as something simpler
(...)
In general, a pattern is a short-cut -- a way of getting some entity that is in some sense simpler than the entity itself. A little more formally, suppose the process y leads to the entity x. Then y is a pattern in x if the complexity of x exceeds the complexity of y...., B. Goertzel, 1994
Also, "the amount of structure":

...These concepts may be used to measure the total amount of structure in an entity -- a quantity which I call the structural complexity. The definition of this quantity is somewhat technical, but it is not hard to describe the basic idea.

If all the patterns in an entity were totally unrelated to one another (as, perhaps, with this picture of the square next to the circle discussed above), then one could define the structural complexity of an entity as the sum of the complexities of all its patterns.

But the problem is, often all the patterns will not be totally unrelated to each other -- there can be "overlap." Basically, in order to compute the structural complexity of an entity, one begins by lining up all the patterns in the entity: pattern one, pattern two, pattern three, and so on.

Then one starts with the complexity of one of the patterns in the entity, adds on the complexity of whatever part of the second pattern was not already part of the first pattern, then adds on the complexity of whatever part of the third pattern was not already part of the first or second patterns, and so on.... B. Goertzel, 1994...

I think it's in the right direction of compression and prediction.

A discussion on Nietzsche and logic at Ch. 4 :

Nietzsche declared consciousness irrelevant and free will illusory. He proposed that hiddenstructures and processes control virtually everything we feel and do. Although this is a commonplace observation now, at the time it was a radical hypothesis.
Nietszche made the first sustained effort to determine the nature of what we now call "the unconscious mind." The unconscious, he suggested, is made up of nothing more or less than "morphology and the will to power." The study of human feelings and behavior is, in Nietszche's view, the study of the various forms of the will to power.
(...)
... Note how different this is from Mill's shallow psychologism. In the Introduction I quoted Mill's "derivation" of the Law of Excluded Middle (which is equivalent to the law of contradiction, by an application of deMorgan's identities). Mill sought to justify this and other rules of logic by appeal to psychological principles.

In Mill's view, the truth of "A or not-A" follows from the fact that each idea has a "negative idea," and whenever an idea is not present, its negative is. This is a very weak argument. One could make a stronger psychological argument for the falsity of "A and not-A" -- namely, one could argue that the mind cannot simultaneously entertain two contradictory ideas.

But Nietzsche's point is that even this more plausible argument is false. As we all know from personal experience, the human mind can entertain two contradictory ideas at once. We may try to avoid this state of mind, but it has a habit of coming up over and over again: "I love her/ I don't love her", "I want to study for this test/ I want to listen to the radio instead".

The rule of non-contradiction is not, as Mill would have it, correct because it reflects the laws of mental process -- it is, rather, something cleverly conceived by human minds, in order to provide for more effective functioning in certain circumstances.

...One rather simplistic and stilted way of phrasing Nietszche's view of the world is as follows: intelligence is impossible without a priori assumptions and rough approximation algorithms, so each intelligent system (each culture, each species) settles on those assumptions and approximations that appear serve its goals best, and accepts them as "true" for the sake of getting on with life. Logic is simply one of these approximations, based on the false assumption of equality of different entities, and many auxiliary assumptions as well.... B. Goertzel, 1994

Disliked:

What I generally didn't like is too high a level speaking, too much typical syntax-semantics-symbols Linguistics, Psychology, NLP and philosophy; couldn't see "good physics" thus couldn't really sustain reading all in details.

I suggest : What's wrong with NLP... series: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/search?q=What%27s+wrong+with+NLP

A curious fact is that a Bulgarian humanoid robot project Kibertron mentions "Chaotic logic computer" in their brief explanation of their "theory of natural intellect", don't know is it related to the book. Unfortunately the company claims they need 5 million Euro to make this "natural intellect" working, together with the robot.

A general advice on reading

Use your time wise, don't read thoroughly too much. Try to understand when reading more in a topic would be worthless. A very little essence would last in your mind and would make real sense, the rest and most might be just time passed without memories and without work done.

The talk on "saturation of learning" will be continued.

How Brain Works. Minicolumn Hypothesis. Consciousness. Neurotransmitters and Drugs. Human Evolution. Transhumanism and Other Materials.

2010-06-15T00:13:00.015+03:00

Как работи мозъкът. Хипотезата за миниколоните в неокортекса като градивен елемент на разума. Съзнание. Еволюция на човека. Трансхуманизъм. Класическо кондициониране и други интересни материали.

Some cited from Boris Kazachenko's knols, pointed by himself or commenters, some suggested by me, browsing around.

На български, бърз курс за работата на мозъка и допълнителни връки в моята лекция от курса по Универсален изкуствен разум (Brain Architecture):

http://research.twenkid.com/agi/Brain_Architecture_22_4_2010.pdf
The brain from top to bottom - comprehensive, well-structured and well explained in short linked articles - check it out!

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/index_i.html

Как работят наркотиците, как наркотиците въздействат на невротрансмитерите и невроните в мозъка (анимирано)
How drugs work, how drugs affect neurons (animated):
How drugs affect neurotransmitters:

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_03/i_03_m/i_03_m_par/i_03_m_par_alcool.html#drogues

The minicolumn hypothesis in neuroscience:

http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/125/5/935

See also, though: Confusing cortical columns, Pasko Rakic* :

http://www.pnas.org/content/105/34/12099.full

Функционални различия между лявото и дясното полукълбо на мозъка:
Left and Right hemisphere functional differences of the brain:

The Split Brain - Revisited, By Michael S. Gazzaniga
About 35 years ago in Scientific American, I wrote about dramatic new studies of the brain.

http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~phils4/splitbrain.pdf

ASD (Autistic spectrum disorder) as a Developmental Disorder - A Suggested Neurological Underpinning

http://a-shade-of-grey.blogspot.com/2007/06/asd-as-developmental-disorder-suggested.html
Partially enhanced thalamocortical functional connectivity in autism

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6SYR-4KBVWWG-6&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=15fe0f3f8ff41c1068ee8fe1ac0a4fd0

Teenage Brain: A work in progress (Fact Sheet)

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/teenage-brain-a-work-in-progress-fact-sheet/index.shtml
Competing for Consciousness: A Darwinian Mechanism at an Appropriate Level of Explanation, By William H. Calvin

http://williamcalvin.com/1990s/1998JConscStudies.htm
Human neurophysiology: a student text By Oliver Holmes

http://books.google.com/books?id=ql4VAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA197&lpg=PA197&dq=neocortex+myelination+age+sequence&source=bl&ots=csg_LPPfSY&sig=ruo4Acyh2GZBrVDvC-I5daA-xyU&hl=en&ei=LGESSoTIPJiu8QSH7aSQBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8#v=onepage&q=neocortex%20myelination%20age%20sequence&f=false

Other materials

Accelerating Future: Transhumanism, AI, nanotechnology, the Singularity, and extinction risk:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/category/ai/
Leonid Perlovsky's works, Dynamic Logic, Knowledge Instinct, Neural modeling fields

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Perlovskyhttp://www.leonid-perlovsky.com/research.htm#tki
Classical Conditioning experiment with a baby, taught to be afraid of rats, eventually any furry objects. Displays also stimulus generalization. Immoral, but interesting:
Little Albert experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
Human Evolution:
http://www.evolution-of-man.info/
Obstetrical Dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_Dilemma

--> bigger the brain/head of proto-human baby
--> harder birth and dependent on help from others (obstetrician)
--> shorter the pregnancy in order the baby to get ouf of the mother's pelvis
--> more immature newborn baby
--> more underdeveloped brain of the baby (20-25% fully developed, vs 45-50% in chimps)
--> baby is more dependent on mother's care for a longer time
--> mother is dependent on others' carе
--> family, division of labour, society

"Акушерската дилема" в еволюцията на човека

--> по-голям мозък/глава на бебетата на еволюционните предци на човека
--> по-тежки раждания и зависимост от чужда помощ (акушерки)
--> по-кратка бременност, за да може бебето да се промуши през тазобедрената става на майка си
--> по-недоразвито новородено
--> по-недоразвит мозък (20-25% напълно развит при човека, докато 45-50% при шимпанзетата)
--> бебето е по-зависимо от грижите на майка си за по-дълъг период
--> майката е по-зависима от грижите на другите
--> семейство, разделение на труда, общество
Brain development and the female pelvis

http://www.evolution-of-man.info/pelvis.htm

Enjoy!

Любовта и страха, или защо е хубаво да обичаш - окситоцин и кортизол | Love and Fear, or Why Love is Good for us - Oxytocin vs Cortisol

2010-06-11T22:17:00.012+03:00

Crushed, 2006 by Tosh

A very nice article on love, oxytocin and cortisol. English speakers may read it there: Love and Fear by Gary Wilson and Marnia Robinson.

Любовта и страха

Гари Уилсън и Марния Робинсън

Превод: Тодор Арнаудов

Различни духовни учения твърдят, че има само две основни чувства: любов и страх. Изглежда, че това определено е вярно поне за тялото. Всички бозайници, включително човека, имат две противопоставящи си хормонални отговори на стимули. Застрашаващите стимули причиняват увеличение на хормоните на стреса: адреналин и кортизол. От друга страна, успокояващите и насърчаващите стимули причиняват увеличение на нивото на окситоцин.

Сблъсък с внезапна заплаха отключва отговорът "бягай или се защитавай" (fight-or-flight), който е свързан с адреналина. Адреналинът ускорява пулса и вдишванията, задейства мускулите и съдейства за свръх-будност, готовност за реакция. Дълготраен стрес (от няколко минути до дни и седмици) увеличава друг стресов хормон: кортизол. Кортизолътсъщо ни прави свръх бдителни, но еволюционната му функция е съвсем различна от временното "надрусване" с адреналин, предназначено да ни помогне да избегнем опасност.

Стресът, с който са се сблъсквали нашите ловуващи и събиращи еволюционни, предшественици е бил основно физически, не емоционален - най-основните типове вероятно са били глад, дълги преходи и тежки наранявания. Ако се наложи, кортизолът започва да разрушава не-жизненоважни органи и тъкани, за да задържа нивото на кръвната захар и да изхранва жизненоважните органи. Когато нивото на кортизола стои високо, започват да се смилат костите, мускулите и ставите, за да се извлекат техните хранителни съставки. В крайна сметка се получава повишено ниво на мазнини и захари в кръвта, което е свързано с много заболявания. Друг страничен ефект е чувството за глад; търсим по-висококалорични храни.

Най-големите дълготрайни стресиращи фактори днес обаче са емоционални и умствени, не физически. Всъщност ние сме "нов" научен експеримент. Сблъскваме се с нови форми на опасността да останеш без работа, натиска от участието в тътреща се колона от автомобили в задръстване; медиите които бълват новини всяващи страх; сътресенията в любовните ни отношения и т.н. Въпреки че това не са физически заплахи, тялото ни има само един автоматичен отговор на тях и той е: кортизол. Кортизолът има много тежък ефект върху тялото и всички тези емоционални заплахи непряко се првръщат във физически.

За щастие, притежаваме вграден механизъм за борба със стреса, който образува основите на другия начин да отговаряме на стимули. В този механизъм основна роля има друг хормон, наречен окситоцин. Освен функцията му да поражда емоционални връзки, при раждане и за отделяне на кърма, както беше открито неотдавна окситоцинът неутрализира действието на кортизола. Това е с начин за постигане на по-добро здраве чрез напълно естествени средства.

Страх - Кортизол

- Агресивност, възбуда, тревожност, притесненост.
- Задейства механизми на пристрастяване.
- Намалява половото влечение.
- Свързан е с депресията.
- Може да е токсичен за мозъчните клетки.
- Разрушава мускули, кости и стави.
- Потиска имунната система.
- Увеличава блката.
- Стяга артериите, повишава риска от сърдечно-съдови заболявания и високо кръвно налягане
- Наднормено тегло, диабет, остеопороза.

Любов - Окситоцин

- Анти-стресов хормон.
- Чувство на спокойствие и съпричастност.
- Увеличено любопитство.
- Намалява ненаситните желания и пристрастявания (към наркотици, сладко).
- Увеличава сексуалната възприемчивост.
- Положителни чувства.
- Улеснява ученето.
- Поправя, лекува и възстановява тялото.
- Ускорява зарастването на рани.
- Намалява усещането на болка.
- Намалява кръвното налягане и намалява риска от сърдечно-съдови заболявания.

Както се вижда, почти всички отрицателни страни от продължителен стрес върху тялото и ума са свързани с повишено ниво на кортизол. Това включва: хронична тревожност и тъга/депресия, емоционална свръх-реакция, негативизъм, наддаване на тегло, сърдечни болести, високо кръвно и отслабена имунна система.

От друга страна чрез неутрализирането на кортизола, окситоцинът може да облекчи тези състояния и някои други (виж по-долу списък с последни открития). Многобройни дейности могат да произведат окситоцин: медитация, йога, физически упражнения, масаж, грижа за животно, включване в група, литургии и т.н.

Един от най-важните начини за намаляване на стреса и увеличаване на нивото на окситоцин обаче е в интимните ни отношения. В "Любов и оцеляване", д-р Дийн Орниш посочва, че любовта и интимността са толкова мощни определители на здравето ни, че ако можеше да се произвеждат под формата на лекарства, докторите които не ги предписваха на болни пациенти щяха да бъдат обвинявани в лекарска небрежност...

Между другото, човек може да се запита защо просто не взимаме хапчета окситоцин за да увеличим нивото му? За съжаление, окситоцинът не може да премине границата кръв-мозък, освен под формата на спрей за носа. Дългата употреба на окситоцин по този начин обаче може да причини амнезия, халюцинации и неравновесие на електролити и хормони. За да получим само ползите от окситоцина, трябва или да произвеждаме окситоцин по естествен път в мозъка или да го инжектираме с голяма презизност в точно определена малка област от мозъка, чрез специално оборудване...

Прякорът на окситоцина е “хормон на връзките" и "хормон на гушкането". Мозъкът произвежда окситоцин по естествен път, когато обичаме, сме обичани, грижим се един за друг, себеотрицавайки се за другите, или когато се докосваме с любов. Окситоцинът не е в основата на похотта или изгарящото сексуално желание, въпреки че е свързан със сексуалността.

(...)

Окситоцинът съвпада с Любовта - не можем да се влюбим без него.

Кортизолът съвпада със страха...

Тези два разлини хормона пораждат противоположни емоции, също както чувствата любов и страх отключват производството на тези хормони. С други думи, химичните вещества в мозъка и поведението са взаимносвързани и с известна доза осъзнаване и решителност, можем съзнателно да насочваме поведението си към поддържане на съвършен хормонален баланс.

Между другото окситоцинът е изключително особен невротрансмитер: колкото повече произвеждаме, толкова по-силно тялото и умът ни реагират на него. При стимулация с окситоцин, по нервните клетки израстват повече рецептори, правейки ги по-чувствителни за ефектите му. Става все по-лесно да обичаш...

Окситоцинът е неврхохимичната основа на поговорката "Колкото повече даваш, толкова повече ще получиш".

Любовта ражда любов и страхът ражда повече страх.

Последни открития, показващи силата на окситоцина:

- Окситоцинът намалява страха. Увеличените нива на окситоцинъ потискат реакцията на мозъка от тип "бягай или се бий". (Huber, 2005)- Окситоцинът ускорява оздравяването. Наранени хамстери оздравяват два пъти по-бързо, когато живеят заедно с брат или сестра, отколкото ако са оставени в изолация (DeVries, 2004).

- Окситоцинът противодейства на апетита за сладко. (Billings, 2006). - Окситоцинът намалява антисоциалното поведение. Поставянето на инжекция окситоцин нормализира социалното поведение на животни с шизофрения. (Lee, 2005)

- Окситоцинът насърчава здравословно социално поведение. Инжектирането на окситоцин намалява симптомите на аутизъм.. (Hollander, 2003)

- Окситоцинът намалява пристрастяването. Когато учени го инжектирали на гризачи, пристрастени към кокаин, морфин или хероин, плъховете се установяват на по-ниски дози дрога или са показали по-слаби симптоми на абстиненция (withdrawal). (Kovacs, 1998)

- Окситоцинът успокоява. Плъх, инжектиран с окситоцин има успокояващо действие въцяла клетка пълна с разтревожени плъхове. (Agren, 2002)

- Нивата на окситоцин са по-високи и при мъжете, и при жените, които са споделили за повече подкрепа от страна на своите партньори. (Grewen, 2005)

- Изглежда, че окситоцинът е главната причина защо SSRI’s намаляват симптомите на депресия - може би защото високите нива на кортизол са главните виновници за депресията и тревожността (Uvnas-Moberg, 1999)

- Окситоцинът увеличава сексуалната възприемчивост и противодейства на импотентността, което обяснява защо този друг начин за правене на любов продължава да носи удоволствие. (Pedersen, C.A., 2002), (Arletti, 1997)

- Окситоцинът противодейства на ефекта на кортизола - хормонът на стреса. Повишените нива на окситоцин в мозъка намаляват нивата на кортизол в кръвта. (Legros, 2003)

- Окситоцинът може да увеличи продължителността на живота. Дружбата и общуването могат да увеличат продължителността на живота - дори за ХИВ-позитивни (Young, 2004). Също така, окситоцинът може да обясни защо сред различните видове примати, тези които се грижат за малките си, живеят значително по-дълго, без значение от пола им. (Cal Tech, -1998)

Rejuvenation Talk by Aubrey de Grey at Singularity Summit 2009 | Лекция за бъдещето на технологиите за подмладяване

2010-05-24T23:11:00.004+03:00

Aubrey de Grey at Singularity Summit 2009 -- The Singularity and the Methuselarity: Similarities and Differences from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

Keywords: singularity, methuselarity, rejuvenation, longevity, gerontology, подмладяване, стареене, Обри, дьо, де, Грей, Сингулярност, Singulaity

Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals (Paper about Creativity and Brain)

2010-05-24T21:51:00.004+03:00

An interesting paper about the correlation between creativity ("thinking outside the box") and the density of dopamine receptors in thalamus and cortex.

Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals

The NLP Researchers cannot understand language. Computers could. Speech recognition plateau, or What's wrong with Natural Language Processing? Part 3

2010-05-23T01:18:00.015+03:00

Thanks to my friend O.G.I, for sharing the link below, about the plateau in Speech Recognition software.

Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition

If you check this out (specialized NLP training is not needed to see)

What's wrong with Natural Language Processing? Part 2. Static, Specific, High-level, Not-evolving...

And this simple generalisation: Language is a hierarchical redirection/abstraction/generalization/compression of sequences of [multi-modal] sensory inputs and motor outputs, and records and predictions for both. (me)

You'll get what causes the plateau - why NLP, parsing, speech recognition or whatever would stay at their dead-end forever if it doesn't change radically.

I especially enjoy this one:

"...To some, these developments are no surprise. In 1986, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores audaciously concluded that “computers cannot understand language.” In their book, Understanding Computers and Cognition, the authors argued from biology and philosophy rather than producing a proof like Einstein’s demonstration that nothing can travel faster than light...."

So silly. The same goes for any similar sentence of retired AI-niks, because they're actually saying this:

Computers cannot understand language [or think], because computers do exactly what they, those retired AI researchers, program them to do. Besides, machines lack free-will, also you know - Goedel incompleteness, quantum-mechanical blah-blah-blah etc.

However, this implies that computers just execute their programmers' instructions, therefore it is not the computers who cannot understand language, it is their incapable programmers.

It is the Programmers and old-fashioned AI-niks doing NLP who cannot understand language, not the computers.

NLP programs are playing with words in dictionaries, while mind is playing with multi-modal pre-processed raw sensory inputs. An AGI is needed to make speech recognition correct, this is what should be worked on.

"...So not everyone agreed. Bill Gates described it as “a complete horseshit book” shortly after it appeared, but acknowledged that “it has to be read,” a wise amendment given the balance of evidence from the last quarter century."

Hmmm, Bill is cool! :)

http://www.sadanduseless.com/2010/05/steve-jobs-vs-bill-gates/

Юрген Шмидхубер - красотата, любопитството, машината на Гьодел. Курс по Универсален изкуствен разум, Други учени и насоки за изследванe.(Част 2 от ..)

2010-05-22T17:47:00.007+03:00

Юрген Шмидхубер е един от водещите учени в УИР, твърди че неговата амбиция е да създаде съвършения учен - машината на Гьодел, която решава всякакви задачи. Занимава се с рекурентни невронни мрежи, т.нар. LSTM - Long Short Term Memory, които имат някои от възможностите на HTM като предсказване и йерархичност. Пише за универсални алгоритми за самообучение; за красотата и изкуството и връзката им с принципите на универсалния разум, подобно на това което си говорихме в седмата седмица, но в математически издържана форма. Може би ще поговорим още малко за красотата, интересността и любопиството в осмата (на 28-ми май).

В сайта на Ю. Шмидхубер: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ може да откриете много материал за четене, препоръчвам ви да гледате презентацията му на Singularity Summit 2009. Освен интересна, е много забавна и смешна. :)

Алгоритмични принцип на любопитството, интересността и красотата (на английски)

Jürgen Schmidhuber at Singularity Summit 2009 - Compression Progress: The Algorithmic Principle Behind Curiosity and Creativity from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.

Keywords: Jurgen, Juergen, Schmidhuber, Creativity, Beauty, AGI, UAI,

Курс по Универсален изкуствен разум, Други учени и насоки за изследванe. (Част 1 от ...)

2010-05-18T01:20:00.000+03:00

Здравейте, колеги,

Записах малко допълнителни материали за по-любознателните от вас, за пропуснатите часове. До края на курса или след него може да има още.

Видеолекциите от мен тук са около 24 - 25 минути.

Ключови думи: Хуго Де Гарис, Маркус Хутер, Шмидхубер, Йордан Янков, СФЕРА, Кибертрон, Лятно училище по УИР в Зямен (Xiamen), Бен Гьорцел, FPGA, УИР, AGI

1.avi
6:05 Хуго де Гарис, Хутер, Де Гарис, Лятно училище в Зямен 1, AGIRI, Adaptive AI - SmartAction, ...

Тук може да чуете впечатляващите записи на реални диалози между хора и агента на Adaptive AI "Smart Action": Демота на Smart Action

Забележете как клиентите прекъсват агента и говорят през него, и той ги чува и се поправя. Показва разпознаване на свързана реч, разбиране на естествен език и разговорът е на човешко ниво, но в ограничена област - поръчки.

2.avi
3:26 Кибертрон, Йордан Янков; аналогов разум; Бен Гьорцел, Хаотична логика; блогове

3.avi
1:20 Лятно училище по УИР, Китай

4.avi
3:30 СФЕРА, Йордан Янков, Кибертрон

5.avi
9:45 McGovern Institute, FPGA

...

Вижте и видео от DARPA Urban Challenge - състезанието за коли-роботи, които се управляват съвсем сами в градски условия. :) В свързаните видеа има от по-ранен етап на проекта - DARPA Grand Challenge, където колите карат в извънградски условия и без трафик.

Един линк от колегата Красимир Василев. Забавно видео за способността на Азимо освен да ходи, да посяга към предмети като бебе, да ги разпознава, да прави прости обобщения и малко да разпознава реч.

На любознателните препоръчвам канала на Тим Тайлър в Ютюб:

http://www.youtube.com/user/tmtyler

Отшелническият му външен вид е леко притеснителен :) и говорът малко монотонен (някои записи имат и текстова версия), но Тайлър е сериозен и задълбочен мислител и разглежда най-различни интересни въпроси за бъдещето, живота и разума, а във видео записите включва интересни откъси от презентации на големите учени от универсалния изкуствен разум.

Thalamic Nuclei - primary causes for Mirror Neurons? |Human Face - Important Aspect of Evolution | Cingulate Cortex | Nature or Nurture

2010-05-01T11:03:00.041+03:00

a face in action

Regarding mirror neurons and early facial expression imitation, another hypothesis. Continues from: Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...

Emotional facial expressions are innate, I remember a many decades old research on understanding facial expressions around the world, which shows that we're compatible at emotions expression level, no matter of culture and the level of society development. I think this was proven thousands of times by Cinema, and it matches with the hypothesis that emotions are driven by older parts of the brain: Cingulate Cortex --> Fornix --> Thalamus --> Hippocampus --> Neocortex.

The Neocortex eventually learns to control face as well, and good actors do it well, however, being an actor myself, I would say that good acting involves feeling the emotions of the character, "living a part", which goes below neocortex. Indeed, I believe this is easier, because it happens partially subconsciously and automatically.

Perhaps neocortex "calls" or better "recalls" and "reruns" complex functions from the lower parts - memories of already felt emotions or better - situations when emotions were felt. On the other hand, bad actors probably do not feel, because cannot recall emotional memories so well. Bad actors are trying consciously /mechanically to pull-up/pull-down facial muscles which makes their faces to look unrealistic and unconvincing (like if their characters felt nothing or something inappropriate). Perhaps, because conscious cannot do control precisely in parallel so many muscles, and maybe because these muscles are too strongly linked to their thalamic nuclei.

I would suggest here: it's better not to smile if you're not happy, rather than do a "false smile".

Facial Hardware

Our face has a dedicated cranial nerve like the other sensory and motor head-"interfaces", and like the rest, except olfaction, but including optic nerve, facial nerve passes through a thalamic nuclei in the thalamus:

Going up, Thalamus has projections to the neocortex and back, so eventually it can turn into "magic neurons" up there.

Boris Kazachenko recently suggested in a comment here: Meta Evolution: fitness beyond reproduction

BK: "I think there have been minor genetic changes in humans that produced a major increase in intelligence, mostly through the growth & folding of neocortex"

I believe that the face might be one of the important aspects of human evolution, as well.

Making a digital networks analogy (see Physical layer)

Face - physical level interface

If brains and intelligence have evolved to cope with more complex social interactions in the high level of processing, face should have taken a part of the evolution of the "Physical Level Interface" and the thalamic nuclei are a middle layer, doing primary decoding of physical layer signals, sorting, redirecting. I suspect they might/should be correlated at DNA level, because, growing one thing requires growing a counter-part, all muscles or receptors etc. need to have appropriate nerves that eventually reach the Central Nervous System, and I guess that evolving parts in pathways inside the CNS may also involve all subregions, if they develop together prenatally. (I'm not yet that much deep into embryology, though.)

Flexible physical layer interface allows telling others clearly and visually how do you feel, so they can react appropriately and/or learn using it as a sign/conditioned stimulus. I guess this should be related also to the grow of the importance of vision in human senses.

Basic Emotions and Mammals

All mammals have the basic emotions, lower animals also should have at least part of theirs (such as: Fear, Panic, Lust, Search; even the Octopus seems to have an elaborated brain and "Play" system on its own). There's a funny research showing that rats laugh when being tickled...

However, most mammals, e.g. cats or dogs display just a portion of their emotions using face. Expression of Rage (human also growls and clenches its teeth) and Fear/Panic? (eyes wide open) seem to be similar, and I think they both are amongst the evolutionary older emotions.

When we do say that a cat or a dog has "a sad face", though I suspect it's rather a blind visual similarity we spot (like finding faces in a fish or insect), a form of anthropomorphizing, than real. Cats and dogs faces are not that flexible and expressive as ours - as Alice says in Wonderland: "Cats can't smile". Well, I don't know. :)

Whitney was a sad little kitty, starring in a photo story of mine.
Photos - (C) Todor Arnaudov, 2006 - "The Ghost" photo story

Big Apes

I haven't studied well great apes facial expressions to speak seriously. Of course they do use faces for expressing emotions, but I suspect their face is not as versatile as human's, the visual contrast between features and background is worse and they lack eyebrows, which are clues for human emotions.

However mirror neurons and facial expressions imitation were found as early as rhesus monkeys, so this line may started long ago.

Conclusion

Overall, I guess that mirror neurons might be projections or related to projections from facial and optic thalamic nuclei, maybe related to a primary integration of both. I suspect that part of the integration between face and optic, dealing with imitation of facial expressions, can be done as early as the thalamus itself, by sort of low resolution processing; I haven't studied internal thalamus anatomy yet, though (is it studied/understood?).

I would conclude, that if one day I could do study myself how exactly a baby imitates faces, I would try to find spatial/contrast etc. resolution thresholds when these reactions first appear. E.g. a baby boy may put his tongue out if he sees a quick-enough change in contrast in a wide spot of the visual field, not only in a mouth - it might be a high-contrast line moving quickly vertically anywhere etc. I don't know if such tests had been done already.

Appendix 1: Talents
I think there's no doubt that there are innate predispositions/talents for arts - drawing, music, dancing, also acting. So far I thought that it's related to details about personal cortical architecture, maybe differences in the speed of learning - ease/speed/durability of synaptogenesis/neuroplasticity. Now I have an additional guess: Thalamic Nuclei may also play a significant part in talents. E.g. people who can't feel the rhythm can barely learn dancing, while the others start dancing even without being taught. At a low level dancing seems to be related to basic prediction of sound patterns, linked with syncrhonized motions. Cingulate Cortex, related to emotions, has projections into motor-pathway as well, which may add to explanation why dancing is an emotional activity. I suspect that acting talent may have some of its roots in Cingulate Cortex as well.

Finally, good dancers and any talented people may have an advantage in that lower-level preprocessing part. The cerebellum of course should be also a "suspect" whenever there is fine motor-coordination, and it has much more neurons than the neocortex and supposingly vast computing power. I can't speak about cerebellum with supporting data yet, but my first guess is that some people have faster "processors" - cerebellum has longer-lasting and faster neuroplasticy capabilities, maybe wider range connections.

Appendix 2: Lower parts of the brain and prediction - prediction mechanisms below neocortex

Many if not all AGI researchers would agree that prediction and compression are amongst the main basic keywords when defining the substance of intelligence. I assume that classical conditioning, which seems to exist even in fish*, can be assumed as a primitive form of prediction of one stimuli, associated with another. The emotions or the basic behavioral drives are also forms of prediction, predicted behavioral patterns, appropriate for particular situations. This is there in all animals, in insects as well - genetically predicted/precomputed patterns.

I think a nice example is the ants "conditioning" to care for their "farms" of greenflies, which ants keep to milk juice. Ants are not eating the greenflies, but are just milking them, and even further - they are protecting their animals from enemies such as lady-birds...

It is known that thalamus does make primary decisions about what sensory information should pass up to neocortex and what should be processed faster through lower pathways.

I suspect (it may be a well known fact), that Thalamus and Cingulate Cortex do have capabilities to predict or drive complex motor patterns like the Neocortex, but of course their models are much vague, short and specific - emotional patterns, face expressions, body language(?).

I suspect that it may be connected with part of the body-language as well, which seems to be uniform in many cultures. (Not all gestures, though - e.g. the middle finger evidently passes through a visual analogy... ;) )

...To be continued:

Beauty, music and more.

Learned or Innate? Nature or Nurture? Speculations of how a mind can grasp on its own: animate/inanimate objects, face recognition, language...

2010-04-24T19:28:00.033+03:00

Some possible explanations of mine. Български - като го преведа... :)

Nativists:

Babies early can make a difference between animate and inanimate objects etc...

Todor:

They can, because the difference is easy to extract from the raw sensory inputs:

Inanimate objects are:

- Static. E.g. places which seem to drive "place cells" in mammal's brain are simpler stimuli than stimuli caused by "animate" objects.
- Dynamic, but mind can predict their future with a precision that it believes is "high enough". E.g. when one throws a ball, he doesn't know where exactly it will fall, but the ball wouldn't fly at all if an animate object didn't throw it.
- They change in parallel with the will, in pair with the motor commands.
- Linear (generally).
- Places are immovable inanimate objects.

An object is a set of correlated stimuli.

"Animate" objects or subjects with "free will":

- Their future cannot be predicted with high enough precision and one cannot predict precisely enough their behavior based only on observations. Sometimes they are totally unpredictable.
- They can start to do a sequence of actions on their own, a behavior.
- They can react to your action, without being physically affected/touched.
- Mind can assume that there are internal states, which are unobservable. This is the inanimate object's "free will" or its "state of mind", opinion etc., as opposed to predictable entities, whose state is observable.
- Non linear.
- It's hard to synchronize your will with the will of another "animate objects", or to do so you need to do a complex sequence of voluntary actions.

Where "high enough" precision is a value that mind decides.

Recognition of faces

A baby can easily spot that this is an entity that changes the most in his first perceptions, especially the eyes and mouth. I think the eyes - two spots that move in the same direction and same speed can show to a developing mind that they are correlated. This also goes for nose and mouth, which all do translate in parallel. Entities which are correlated can be grouped together, this is "a face", i.e. this is a set of dynamic correlated elements.

Actually, this can be one of the first coherent and stable set of visual correlations/patterns that the mind understands, and may serve as a basis for the future ones, which may explain existence of "face cells" or so. Faces are seen everywhere afterwards, and we use to see faces in inanimate objects.

Besides, these stimuli are early and further strongly conditioned with the baby's/one's own feelings, behavior and other agents' behaviors - these functions are exercised a lot.

Why baby's cry irritates us?

Nativists: "Evolutionary encoded" etc., to call his mother to deal with it...

Todor:

Actually a very simple explanation of this is: because it reminds us our own cry, and these sound patterns were conditioned with our own early unpleasant experiences.

Why "mama" means a mother in so many languages?

This is also a simple one to explain - my theory is that "mama" requires one of the simplest possible articulations, if not the simplest - just the mouth opens and closes twice + breathing.* The sounds is recognizable even without a breathing, and even dogs can be trained to say "mama".

I think it is important that there are two open-close operations, because this may serve as a confirmation of the first syllable.

So I believe that the babies themselves have coined the word for their mothers, then their parents started to use it themselves.

*BTW, I've been speech synthesis designer and developer and have some projects, but not the time....

Hippocampus

- formation of long term memory
- navigation
- head direction cells
- spatial view cells
- place cells

At least several or even all of these can be generalized. Places and navigation goes together. Places are long-term memories of static immovable inanimate objects (the agent has not experiences that these entities move).

Navigation, head-direction, spatial-view, place-cells - they all are a set of correlations found between motor and sensory information, and long-term memories, which are invoked by the ongoing motor and sensory patterns.

The static immovable inanimate objects (places) change - they translate/rotate etc. - most rapidly in a correlation with head direction (position) and head movements.

Navigation and spatial view are derived from all.

Language

This one needs work, but in short I would say that:

The language is a hierarchical redirection/abstraction/generalization/compression of sequences of sensory inputs and motor outputs, and records and predictions for both.

Chimps can communicate using sign languages, such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_(chimpanzee)

Mirror neurons

They were found experimentally in rhesus monkeys (it's well known that monkeys use to imitate people) . Monkeys can imitate facial expressions and operations with hands such as picking.

There is a famous research of Miltzoff proving that newborn human babies at age of a few weeks are capable to imitate some facial expressions, like sticking out a tongue. They've never seen themselves and other experiments show that babies at that age are not capable to recognize different faces or to find a difference between a face without a nose or mouth or 2D vs 3D etc. (it smiles when see fake faces, by Fantz, R., 1966 trough R. Stamatov "Child Psychology")

This is interesting, I don't know how far the experiments have gone in the aspect of showing to the babies stimuli which are similar to faces.

This capability may require inborn links between basic image analysis (to find contrast/color change etc.) and motor commands to facial and tongue muscles, I suspect that part of this may be done out of the neocortex, it can be of a very low resolution. Or there can be some pre-wired mirror neurons at the neocortex, related to this.

Other researches state that a one month baby vision has about 1/30 of the adult's resolution, which grows rapidly to about 1/4 at 8 months.

Regarding imitation of manual operations by monkeys, though, I believe that this can be learned by mapping of similarities. Human arms and hands are visually similar to monkey's ones, they are "sticks" and "planes" which translate, rotate etc.

Unlike with the face, a monkey can see its own hands and other hands and can make a map between both. I don't know how it's done, but I think it can be done even without a pre-wired map.

I would quote my own teenage Theory of Mind and Universe (only Bulgarian yet: http://eim.hit.bg/razum), where I concluded that mind is a Universal hierarchical simulator and predictor of virtual universes, where these virtual universes are derived from sensory inputs.

Further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_N._Meltzoff
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Mirror_neurons
http://www.interdisciplines.org/mirror

Google keywords and expressions: "mirror neurons", "Miltzoff", "chimps sign language" etc....

Keywords: Artificial General Intelligence, Seed AI, Development, Cognition, Developmental psychology, Neuroscience