Neural Nets vs Well defined lists

I had a thought cross my mind today.  It would be nigh impossible to tell the difference from a highly advanced artificially intelligent being, than from an equally advanced well thought out preprogrammed list of responses.  While the computing power necessary for human scale intelligent behavior is staggering, the computing power to follow a list of instructions that mimic that behavior, has been around for a decade or more.  What this means basically, it that logically we should be able to source a large amount of processing power once to create a "list"of many many possible responses that an android brain may need, e.g. walking/jumping, and of course talking/listening responses.  Then the "list" would be copied to awaiting robot bodies built with the minimal processing power needed to perform from the list. Even though the work and research to bring something like this about is incredible, it none the less has a definite high possibility of probability in my book.

Now where am I gonna find a semi trailer full of FPGAs, and where am I gonna hide it from my wife?

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs Compile all the things!

I recently committed myself to giving up Natty 11.04, and moving on to Precise 12.04. Even though the name is ghastly and the IU is crippled, the bones are strong.  The back bone provided an old reliable feel for an old hack like me who spends all his time "tappidy tap tap" at the console prompt.  Even when I use the UI I have multiple terms running.  Text scrolling before my eyes , while I watch from above.

I have a ritual I follow every so often, I install every compiler I can get my greedy stubby fingers on just to see what breaks. Let me tell you, I threw rockbox at 12.04, rockbox installs like 4 or 5 different cross compilers on your box from scratch. Then I dumped cegcc into my /src directory and compiled and installed that.  Then I opened synaptic searched for gcc and installed every found compiler and cross compiler there, as long as I avoid conflicts. Precise took all this in stride, now I can spend the next 5 years fixing my UI issues with it.

To program, or not To program

   What is "to program", most of us can learn any scripting language in a day for most tasks.  Some can do most anything in any language, just give us a week to get familiar the old girl.

   Heck, lock us up in a cold dark space, and we'll crank out app after app in any language you want, and call it a day, as long as the money is good. But... what is it?

   Where did it all come from?

   I can... explicitly remember, a point in my life when my time-line changed to lead where I am right now....

<flashback>

   I was 8 or 7.. let me 're' phase that in terms I would have used at that time. I was in the second grade.  My father, bless his soul, had just typed a program into the computer, and I had at the time, been invited to 'try it out' by my mother.

   I suspect now...  that it may have been a hoax, in order to cease my incessant need to disassemble and break and learn about 'everything' in the house, there was nothing sacred to the yearnings of my knowledge. The program was Guess my number, running on a good ol '78 Atari800.

   I don't remember playing the game so much as, what I did once I got bored of it.  I distinctly remember thinking, I want to do 'something' else. Then I recall reaching up and pushing in, the big 'System Reset' button right there on the top, because come on, where else are you gonna put it, right?

   Lucky for me, this did not remove the program from memory, but reset the execution to the basic interpreter.  Had I turned it off and then back on, mind you all my father's hard work would have been lost. And then the next sibling would not have gotten their turn in line, to play the computer 'game'.
</flashback>

That was the day, I became a computer programmer.

Robots

Robots! that is right people the word of the day is robots.

I was trying to come up with an idea for a robot body the other day, when I had an revelation. Ever one always goes for the really cool drone type, or bug type robot, then they attach a remote control and wham we have another expensive toy.

So my idea was to spend as little time as possible on the body, and really make sure my robot was going to be autonomous. I've been dabbling around with an OpenCL+fann library and also with ROS, they are available through a Google search if you really are interested. So after toiling  for a few hours and sacrificing a few toys, I give you Nubby the touchy robot.

This will serve as a test bed for sensory organelle as well as being a test bed for me and neural networks in general.

heh heh heh...robots

Rockbox Robot

I've been day dreaming off and on lately of starting a project to design robots with mp3 players for brains. Most players that run Rockbox have at least a com/usb port and of course audio capture/audio output.

The Com or USB port would be for sending and receiving  information to and from the "body" of the robot. The disk capacity can store instructions and collected data. These two things are simple but, the real innovation would come by using the audio input/output system of the mp3 player, along with some home brew transceiver circuits and some guru level code, as a wireless communications channel. And perhaps I could strap it all on top of a Hex bug. Honey, you now know what I want for my birthday.

But for now just a dream...