Where I'm sitting, a lot of problems have come from Egypt cutting off their internet connections. The spillover has affected lots of routes and there were WEIRD things happening with DNS for a while.
The forum may need to be have old posts archived or the database reindexed though.
Vince, it always helps to keep something in mind when thinking about computing power and the exponential growth of same.
During WWII, the most advanced computer in the world used vacuum tubes. When revealed to the world, one of the primary questions was "can a machine ever be built as complex as a human brain".
Someone back then actually sat down and computed the number of neuron connections in the brain, then compared it to the size of a typical bank of circuits in that machine (ENIAC, IIRC) and pronounced that it would take a building larger than the Empire State building to house a machine that large, and the entire Columbia River to cool the resulting heat emission.
The brain actually performs about a trillion operations per second. A reasonable comparison with modern computers says the brain performs at a teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) though some object that the brain may perform more operations in a single neuron/neuron pulse than a computer does in a single floating point operation. This seems doubtful to me, the evidence is on the order of the "evidence" presented in the 19th century that no organic chemical would ever be synthesized by science, organic chemistry was the realm of GOD and GOD ALONE! Until it wasn't.
(I can't "prove" that a thinking computer can be created until one is created, and I'll bet you ten dollars against a wad of used chewing gum that a LARGE group of people will totally deny that a computer that talks and reasons can be "aware". OFC, they can't prove they themselves are "aware" either, but never mind THAT, the onus is always on the other party. BTDT, didn't like them much.)
As computers progressed through transistors into integrated circuits, the pronouncement was given repeatedly, a machine that had as much processing power as the human brain would be incredibly complex and huge. However, it was worth noting that the size dropped from skyscraper size to warehouse size, to house size. Then they quit talking about "impossible" hardware, and started talking about "impossible" software.
However, in 1998, the first machine capable of teraflop operation was introduced, it was a supercomputer made by (surprise) IBM. And that machine was the first one that actually could be compared to the human brain in processing power.
Did you buy a PS3 when they first came out? I believe that was new in 2006, wasn't it? The max processing speed of the cell processors in the original PS3, if running flat out, was 1.8 teraflops.
In less than eight years, a teraflop of processing power moved from supercomputer status to game machine status. Think about that! That's the kind of development speed John is talking about, becoming more and more compressed timewise as the machines get more involved in the designs.
And the new supercomputer chips appear as if they'll be made by NVIDIA in the short term. The advances in CUDA and other super massively parallel processing languages are really emulations of the massively parallel processing apparent in natural computers IOW, brains.
Thinking about it, that's no coincidence. The brain came to be in its present state because examining the physical world requires massive parallel processing to manipulate that quantity and type of data. Our computers are moving in that direction BECAUSE we design them to interface with the real world, which demands EXACTLY the same requirements for examining and manipulating that same data. We've done the "computers which interact only with logic and math" design, and found it inadequate for the task of associating with the real world.
If you like looking at the details of this, try http://gpgpu.org/
Though this is more amusing. http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/05/07/son ... -clusters/
As computers become more powerful, the intent of the designers is for them to be able to interact more effectively with the real world. And that requires massive parallel processing, exactly as the brain processes data, for the same reasons.
I think ten teraflops will be available at a price of under 1000$ by 2014. It may not be on the desktop (or it may be in the video processors and hidden to the user) but it will be available.
The rollercoaster ride to the future is still going up that steep incline, but we are getting close to the top. And it's a helluva ride after that.
Thoughts on rapid breakout in AI over the mid term
Re: Thoughts on rapid breakout in AI over the mid term
Where I'm sitting, a lot of problems have come from Egypt cutting off their internet connections. The spillover has affected lots of routes and there were WEIRD things happening with DNS for a while.
The forum may need to be have old posts archived or the database reindexed though.
Vince, it always helps to keep something in mind when thinking about computing power and the exponential growth of same.
During WWII, the most advanced computer in the world used vacuum tubes. When revealed to the world, one of the primary questions was "can a machine ever be built as complex as a human brain".
Someone back then actually sat down and computed the number of neuron connections in the brain, then compared it to the size of a typical bank of circuits in that machine (ENIAC, IIRC) and pronounced that it would take a building larger than the Empire State building to house a machine that large, and the entire Columbia River to cool the resulting heat emission.
The brain actually performs about a trillion operations per second. A reasonable comparison with modern computers says the brain performs at a teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) though some object that the brain may perform more operations in a single neuron/neuron pulse than a computer does in a single floating point operation. This seems doubtful to me, the evidence is on the order of the "evidence" presented in the 19th century that no organic chemical would ever be synthesized by science, organic chemistry was the realm of GOD and GOD ALONE! Until it wasn't.
(I can't "prove" that a thinking computer can be created until one is created, and I'll bet you ten dollars against a wad of used chewing gum that a LARGE group of people will totally deny that a computer that talks and reasons can be "aware". OFC, they can't prove they themselves are "aware" either, but never mind THAT, the onus is always on the other party. BTDT, didn't like them much.)
As computers progressed through transistors into integrated circuits, the pronouncement was given repeatedly, a machine that had as much processing power as the human brain would be incredibly complex and huge. However, it was worth noting that the size dropped from skyscraper size to warehouse size, to house size. Then they quit talking about "impossible" hardware, and started talking about "impossible" software.
However, in 1998, the first machine capable of teraflop operation was introduced, it was a supercomputer made by (surprise) IBM. And that machine was the first one that actually could be compared to the human brain in processing power.
Did you buy a PS3 when they first came out? I believe that was new in 2006, wasn't it? The max processing speed of the cell processors in the original PS3, if running flat out, was 1.8 teraflops. (Note: some claim that to be too high, but that's the figure Sony gave when it came out.)
In less than eight years, a teraflop of processing power moved from supercomputer status to game machine status. Think about that! That's the kind of development speed John is talking about, becoming more and more compressed timewise as the machines get more involved in the designs.
And the new supercomputer chips appear as if they'll be made by NVIDIA in the short term. The advances in CUDA and other super massively parallel processing languages are really emulations of the massively parallel processing apparent in natural computers IOW, brains.
Thinking about it, that's no coincidence. The brain came to be in its present state because examining the physical world requires massive parallel processing to manipulate that quantity and type of data. Our computers are moving in that direction BECAUSE we design them to interface with the real world, which demands EXACTLY the same requirements for examining and manipulating that same data. We've done the "computers which interact only with logic and math" design, and found it inadequate for the task of associating with the real world.
If you like looking at the details of this, try http://gpgpu.org/
Though this is more amusing. http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/05/07/son ... -clusters/
As computers become more powerful, the intent of the designers is for them to be able to interact more effectively with the real world. And that requires massive parallel processing, exactly as the brain processes data, for the same reasons.
I think ten teraflops will be available at a price of under 1000$ by 2014. It may not be on the desktop (or it may be in the video processors and hidden to the user) but it will be available.
The rollercoaster ride to the future is still going up that steep incline, but we are getting close to the top. And it's a helluva ride after that.
The forum may need to be have old posts archived or the database reindexed though.
Vince, it always helps to keep something in mind when thinking about computing power and the exponential growth of same.
During WWII, the most advanced computer in the world used vacuum tubes. When revealed to the world, one of the primary questions was "can a machine ever be built as complex as a human brain".
Someone back then actually sat down and computed the number of neuron connections in the brain, then compared it to the size of a typical bank of circuits in that machine (ENIAC, IIRC) and pronounced that it would take a building larger than the Empire State building to house a machine that large, and the entire Columbia River to cool the resulting heat emission.
The brain actually performs about a trillion operations per second. A reasonable comparison with modern computers says the brain performs at a teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) though some object that the brain may perform more operations in a single neuron/neuron pulse than a computer does in a single floating point operation. This seems doubtful to me, the evidence is on the order of the "evidence" presented in the 19th century that no organic chemical would ever be synthesized by science, organic chemistry was the realm of GOD and GOD ALONE! Until it wasn't.
(I can't "prove" that a thinking computer can be created until one is created, and I'll bet you ten dollars against a wad of used chewing gum that a LARGE group of people will totally deny that a computer that talks and reasons can be "aware". OFC, they can't prove they themselves are "aware" either, but never mind THAT, the onus is always on the other party. BTDT, didn't like them much.)
As computers progressed through transistors into integrated circuits, the pronouncement was given repeatedly, a machine that had as much processing power as the human brain would be incredibly complex and huge. However, it was worth noting that the size dropped from skyscraper size to warehouse size, to house size. Then they quit talking about "impossible" hardware, and started talking about "impossible" software.
However, in 1998, the first machine capable of teraflop operation was introduced, it was a supercomputer made by (surprise) IBM. And that machine was the first one that actually could be compared to the human brain in processing power.
Did you buy a PS3 when they first came out? I believe that was new in 2006, wasn't it? The max processing speed of the cell processors in the original PS3, if running flat out, was 1.8 teraflops. (Note: some claim that to be too high, but that's the figure Sony gave when it came out.)
In less than eight years, a teraflop of processing power moved from supercomputer status to game machine status. Think about that! That's the kind of development speed John is talking about, becoming more and more compressed timewise as the machines get more involved in the designs.
And the new supercomputer chips appear as if they'll be made by NVIDIA in the short term. The advances in CUDA and other super massively parallel processing languages are really emulations of the massively parallel processing apparent in natural computers IOW, brains.
Thinking about it, that's no coincidence. The brain came to be in its present state because examining the physical world requires massive parallel processing to manipulate that quantity and type of data. Our computers are moving in that direction BECAUSE we design them to interface with the real world, which demands EXACTLY the same requirements for examining and manipulating that same data. We've done the "computers which interact only with logic and math" design, and found it inadequate for the task of associating with the real world.
If you like looking at the details of this, try http://gpgpu.org/
Though this is more amusing. http://nexus404.com/Blog/2010/05/07/son ... -clusters/
As computers become more powerful, the intent of the designers is for them to be able to interact more effectively with the real world. And that requires massive parallel processing, exactly as the brain processes data, for the same reasons.
I think ten teraflops will be available at a price of under 1000$ by 2014. It may not be on the desktop (or it may be in the video processors and hidden to the user) but it will be available.
The rollercoaster ride to the future is still going up that steep incline, but we are getting close to the top. And it's a helluva ride after that.
Re: Thoughts on rapid breakout in AI over the mid term
The first Teraflop supercomputer was in 1996 and now you can do it on a personal computer. Yes, Moore's law progress is amazing.OLD1953 wrote:
The brain actually performs about a trillion operations per second. A reasonable comparison with modern computers says the brain performs at a teraflop (trillion floating point operations per second) [...]
I think ten teraflops will be available at a price of under 1000$ by 2014. It may not be on the desktop (or it may be in the video processors and hidden to the user) but it will be available.
But we did not make machine intelligence in 1996. Nor did we when supercomputers got to 10 Teraflops. Whatever level it takes, supercomputers will be there like 15 years before cheap computers. So my argument is that the first time we do it will be on supercomputers.
Now you might argue that the problem now is mostly software and we will need to have cheap powerful computers in the hands of many researchers so that someone can develop the software. Because of this one could claim that the first intelligent machine will be on a cheap computer. If this is correct then the singularity does come shortly after the first intelligent machine.
I suspect the first time we get a good simulation of human level intelligence it will be on a cheap computer but at 1000+ times slower than real time. Once this is done there will be a rush to build a supercomputer that can match human intelligence. I suspect that the first couple attempts will fail to really match average human intelligence at real time speed. You will see something like Japan saying "we are going to do it" and then when done it won't really be as good as expected.
I still think that there is a big gap between average human intelligence and the high end. And even after we get supercomputers at $100 million matching high end intelligence it won't make sense to have them design computers as even they won't match a team of high end humans. So I still think there will be many years (like 15) between when we get the first human level intelligence and when the computers are designing the next computers and the singularity really takes off. We will see.
Re: Thoughts on rapid breakout in AI over the mid term
The machine IBM is putting on Jeopardy is essentially an expert system with a natural language front end and a natural language parser capable of examining sentences for key words relating to the action words in questions typical of Jeopardy questions. This goes into a massively indexed database with a front end capable of putting together associations between those questions and the most likely correct answer.
While it's true that this is not "intelligence" in terms we normally understand, it is certainly capable of outstanding performance in this limited field of endeavor.
There are not an infinite number of basic computing algorithms - or perhaps it might be more accurate to say there are not an infinite number of possible results.
I'd say it is self evident that there is an algorithm that results in self aware intelligence, you run it, I run it, and so does my dog. (Tell her she's not self aware and she'll probably bite you.)
It is also true that any hardware can be simulated on other hardware - though it may run more slowly or more rapidly, depending on the circumstances of the simulation and what is being simulated. This is the essence of virtual machines.
Therefore the brain can be simulated on other hardware, and thus I would conclude that a self aware machine is possible, if the algorithms are properly set up to run on the brain simulation.
The development I expect to see in the short term, is for the algorithms used in computing now (see "The Art of Computer Programming" by Knuth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of ... rogramming ) to be placed in this sort of expert system, set up to run under human direction just as the human directed chess systems eliminate dead ends and blind alleys by allowing the human in control to eliminate whole categories of obviously stupid moves.
Complex systems will be produced by these human/computer teams that could not be produced by ordinary programming methods. An obvious use for these designers will be to improve on the computer programs that are writing the programs. If properly written, these programs will eliminate many categories of security holes common in todays software and that in itself will be a major reason for adopting them. (Example: no such program will ever ignore the boundary limits of an array, it simply won't be programmed to make that sort of common programming error. Tired programmers make for security problems, but computers don't get tired.)
I expect that eventually such programs will become sophisticated enough to search for new algorithms by brute force, just as the Jeopardy machine searches for answers to questions it hasn't seen before.
And eventually, those machines or the machine and its human director will find a viable algorithm for self aware intelligence. And then they'll run it on the most powerful machine they have access to, and the world will change overnight.
(Side note here, many people expect such a machine to "kill the humans". Why? I usually ask such folks why they killed their parents, and get a shocked response. Why would you expect a machine intelligence to have a mad hate for its parents?)
While it's true that this is not "intelligence" in terms we normally understand, it is certainly capable of outstanding performance in this limited field of endeavor.
There are not an infinite number of basic computing algorithms - or perhaps it might be more accurate to say there are not an infinite number of possible results.
I'd say it is self evident that there is an algorithm that results in self aware intelligence, you run it, I run it, and so does my dog. (Tell her she's not self aware and she'll probably bite you.)
It is also true that any hardware can be simulated on other hardware - though it may run more slowly or more rapidly, depending on the circumstances of the simulation and what is being simulated. This is the essence of virtual machines.
Therefore the brain can be simulated on other hardware, and thus I would conclude that a self aware machine is possible, if the algorithms are properly set up to run on the brain simulation.
The development I expect to see in the short term, is for the algorithms used in computing now (see "The Art of Computer Programming" by Knuth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of ... rogramming ) to be placed in this sort of expert system, set up to run under human direction just as the human directed chess systems eliminate dead ends and blind alleys by allowing the human in control to eliminate whole categories of obviously stupid moves.
Complex systems will be produced by these human/computer teams that could not be produced by ordinary programming methods. An obvious use for these designers will be to improve on the computer programs that are writing the programs. If properly written, these programs will eliminate many categories of security holes common in todays software and that in itself will be a major reason for adopting them. (Example: no such program will ever ignore the boundary limits of an array, it simply won't be programmed to make that sort of common programming error. Tired programmers make for security problems, but computers don't get tired.)
I expect that eventually such programs will become sophisticated enough to search for new algorithms by brute force, just as the Jeopardy machine searches for answers to questions it hasn't seen before.
And eventually, those machines or the machine and its human director will find a viable algorithm for self aware intelligence. And then they'll run it on the most powerful machine they have access to, and the world will change overnight.
(Side note here, many people expect such a machine to "kill the humans". Why? I usually ask such folks why they killed their parents, and get a shocked response. Why would you expect a machine intelligence to have a mad hate for its parents?)
Re: Thoughts on rapid breakout in AI over the mid term
I agree with all what you wrote before, but you're speaking ONLY about the way that is going to be used in "using computers to program computers", The algorytm are there so it WILL happen.OLD1953 wrote:(Side note here, many people expect such a machine to "kill the humans". Why? I usually ask such folks why they killed their parents, and get a shocked response. Why would you expect a machine intelligence to have a mad hate for its parents?)
Now you forgot one thing, man is only driven by 2 forces, sex, curiosity (I think like Freud that this is the same) AND Power, control, how to kill the "father", the man beside him.
Now we are in a type of society where ONLY power has a meaning (as a kind of proof, more that one half of the perverse people (under the psychiatric definition of perversity) are at the highest level of our society. Even if there is NO study on the probability for how many people at the top are perverse, this has to be taken into account).
POWER IS HUMAN AND WILL BE PROGRAMMED.
Power means power and money. If you have both you are going to be the first one to use the best computer to give you more power AND more killing power.
So, for me, there is almost no doubt that the first real supercomputers will be used to give more power to powerful insane people (I never mean that being powerful means being insane), and so that is why supercomputer will come to the state of art of destroying humanity (I should construct the logic all the way down, here I go from introduction to conclusion in one step, but I think my thought is clear enough in that way)
At NO time will a computer consider man as their parents, forget it, these are machine, they have no feelings, but you can be certain that they will reproduce first the "Black side" of the humanity (or the perverse side if you prefer).
Re: Thoughts on rapid breakout in AI over the mid term
IBM has found another niche for Watson.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1082 ... ent-trolls
Total cataloging of all research and patent data, that's what this is heading for.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1082 ... ent-trolls
Total cataloging of all research and patent data, that's what this is heading for.
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