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.

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