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

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.

Read More

Watch for the MIT Competition - I Squared

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...

Read More

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

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.

Read More

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

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 universes...

...

"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 at the same sites - "me in Paris". And a big portion of the growth of the 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 on 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 most "important" for the most users are repeated the most.

Read More

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

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

Read More

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

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

Read More

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

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: Todor Arnaudov and X (As of march 2012, his membership wsa disciplinary suspended for prolonged abuse of other members and sociopathic "god-complex" attitude). 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:

Update: It doesn't work anymore. May be opened in the future. It seems that some DNS were hacked and point to a forum that doesn't have anything to do with thinking machines...

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

Read More

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

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.

Read More

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

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

Read More

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

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:

Read More

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

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) (Syllabus)

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.

Read More