Anyone who stumbles on this website, might look at my last post and think. Wow, he stopped writing when Steve Jobs passed away, he must have taken that seriously. Nope, sorry everyone, I just got busy with life. But I am back again!
Category Archives: Personal
Those little feel good stories that everyone loves.
The evolution of time.
Ok, well not really the evolution of time in the sense that time is everwhere in the universe and is an innate feature of it. Instead this video shows the evolution of a clock. It is a very elegant representation of how a genetic algorithm can evolve surprising and different solutions to a problem. For anyone that doesn’t really understand genetic algorithms this video can give you a feel for how they work. It is quite exciting to see a solution evolve from a simple program.
This video actually comments on the long standing debate between creationism vs evolution. I do not wish to comment on that debate, I simply want to educate on the use of evolutionary algorithms. We can leave creationism vs evolution to those who enjoy the debate. If you would like to jump ahead to the beginning of the experiment go to 1:34 in the video.
Whew, gaming and other thought processes
Yep, it is been a while since I blogged. You start playing a game with a highly addictive nature, and blamo, you haven’t blogged in a couple months.
That’s ok though, there have simply been too many cool breakthroughs the last couple weeks that I just couldn’t ignore and I had to blog about. Keep an eye out for posts, they are starting again.
The dawn of a new age.
Congratulations to my American brothers, I believe your world just got a thousand times better. Now let’s all work together and make the world as a whole an even better place.
Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Turing
Well yesterday was Thanksgiving, my wife and I went to our friends house and cooked a turkey. Quite the proceedure, I researched several sources including YouTube and my mother, to figure out the best way to get the job done. The turkey was fabulous. The human beings ability to take in information from several sources, assimilate it, process it and use it to understand and reproduce something is remarkable.
Computers got a bit closer to that on the same day. The Turing Test I wrote about in my last post happened yesterday and quite a few of the systems did quite well. The program Elbot actually managed to fool twenty five percent of the judges into thinking it was a human. That is no small feat, as even the tiniest confusion or mistake can make a human aware it is not talking to one of its own kind.
I wonder if in another 25 years, an AI based robot I have will ask me about how to cook a turkey. I will explain the process to it, and it will proceed to make that turkey for me. Who knows…
Is this thing on?
Well, it has been about a year since I posted on Automatons Adrift. There have been some significant changes in my life. I completed my masters degree with a clear pass. A very rare feat I am told, typically there are at least minor revisions. I left my job at UNBC and moved to the University of Alberta to be the System Administrator for the Faculty of Science. This of course means I moved to the wonderful city of Edmonton.
The most surprising thing is, all these changes happend in the last couple of months. Now that my research for my thesis is complete I have a lot less time pressure and I can devote more energy to Automatons Adrift. I have updated the website along with the hosting service for it. I have added some new content including pages on the SDNEAT and NEAT algorithms which were at the center of my research. I have also started a page for the Neuroevolutionary Solver. This page will outline how to use the system and modify it to perform further experiments.
There is a lot of material to be posted as we move forward. I hope you enjoy the new Automatons Adrift!