horseass

boobie testucles boobie testucles boobie testucles One thing I like about hacker news is that some complete moron, like me, can write 'boobie testucles' in reply to the topmost comment, thus keeping the reply visible to all on top even if its voted down by the retarded masses who don't know what a good reply really is. Man, lisp sucks. Please vote my reply up, thanks!

This was a great article, thanks for sharing it. I'm a huge fan of twitter myself, so I can only imagine how awesome this bank will be. I wish him luck in his future endeavors.

Well I rate your rating -1

Some chick in some ramachandran youtube video, if I remember, said a giant black widow told her to cut her shirt with scissors or it'd bite her. And there was a conspiracy against people people who's name started with 'j'. The movie naked lunch is kinda schizophrenic.

'Someday an entrepreneur will make a fortune by figuring out how to monetize personal attention in the most efficient way.'

pimps

I don't know, but its probably like a cellular automata on a hexagonal 2d plane (like wolfram 'new kind of science' stuff). I wonder why they're flat/ not 3d- I guess something do do with falling and air resistance. I wonder what role initial conditions or randomness while developing play in the wide variety of unique snowflake designs. If randomness while developing has much to do with it, it seems like the 'limbs' of 1 snowflake should develope differently. Doesn't seem like there'd be that many combinations at the initial molecular level to support that many designs.

If i remember, they used to have shells in their evolutionary history (like the nautilus).

Never trust 'wizard' characters who offer help on computers. They're a species of tricksters that either purposely mislead you, like microsoft's internet connection wizard, or, when they have more experience points, cast evil spells like this one on facebook.

The letter 'g' is a completely arbitrary shape. Similarly an entire word 'everything' is just an arbitrary shape (though subdivided into constituent organized blobs of arbitrary shape). Letters and words seem to be symbols/code that stand for something else, and that something else might be raw sensory neuron patterns or something (imaging an apple with your eyes shut might be a trick to trigger that raw data without needing external stimulus to do so, such as seeing a real apple). Even the "sesame street" concept of up/down might require some sort of raw inner ear balance and sight sense to experience.

There seems to be an assumption that there would be just a single AI. It might be a group. Though, given that they'd likely have ability to transfer information amongst individuals much easier than humans, the group might behave like a single 'being' with shared cooperative goals, just having multiple bodies.

Also, say we somehow prove it isn't evil and let it go. It'll almost certainly start changing/improving itself, maybe even with some sort of algorthim that's superior and faster than evolution. So a friendly AI could morph into anything.

Good point. Evolution has replication at its core so perhaps is better for creating artificial life rather than specifically searching for brain designs (there'd have to be a lot of intelligent design to select brains anyway since evolution doesn't 'want' to go in any particular direction by default other than successful replication). Even though it can't forsee or jump, evolution's mass search power might outweigh these pitfalls (its the only known algorithm so far to have proven being able to build something as complex as a human brain.. though there's all sorts of bundled 'non-brain' stuff like arms, reproduction, kidneys, etc. included, which engineering could presumably ignore). This video shows 2 'wheels' of sorts in nature (but of course living things are full of mandelbroit 'roughness' and have compromises and such, instead of evolving perfectly engineered wheels):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLS2WXZQxU

Those are obvious rare exceptions though, and evolution never built something as fast as a jet etc. and plenty of other stuff that would need foresight. Not sure if there is some sort of somewhat simple engineering principle behind brains/consciousness that we just havn't figured out yet, but if we knew it, maybe we could engineer it like a jet instead of using evolution. A jet seems extremely simple relative to just about any of nature's locomotion creation though.

For the comment below, interesting fractal 'amplification' idea. I've briefly thought about positive feedback loops possibly building something interesting. But mostly just as some vague analogy since I don't have enough programming knowledge to experiment much.

How dictionaries circularly define words using other words, and how humans might learn by progressively expanding analogies starting with simple 'axioms' of body sensations like up vs. down (more on other pages): http://members.cox.net/deleyd/politics/cogsci5.htm

I think evolution is the best approach, given its proven power. Maybe we need replicators (like genes, only artificial/computer related) that actually codes to build hardware as the 'phenotype'. Then evolution can have something 'real' to select from instead of just a bunch of software. Only real stuff can interact with the real world obviously (opposable thumbs, eyes, ears). With DNA, the phenotype is physical like that.. molding form like hair/muscle/bone/etc. And it seems to me that a sophisticated sense, like eyes (that can see into the real world, not just 'seeing' inside the isolated simple second life software world model or something) is needed.

I suspect that something with approximately human equivalent intelligence would require real world embodiment to learn and manipulate things, so it might not even be likely that a super AI could be locked in a box. I guess this embodiment could be limited to senses though (having eyes/ears.. but no arms or evolved weapons like claws etc.. a living head on a table isn't very threatening, and can receive information from the world.. it just can't send much information out to the world, so to speak, in the form of manipulating it with arms or a body).

I guess another possibility could be that there's an artificial polygon (or similar) environment inside the box with it (seems like it'd need something to interact with or intelligence would basically be meaningless and it'd be a helen keller (who couldn't touch or taste either). Maybe in the future we'll have programmed models of the real world that are nearly as rich as it (the matrix) so the robot could 'exist' there until a human decides to embody it in the real world instead. I kinda doubt an artificial world can be nearly as real as the real world though just due to computational irreducibility (for example, if you're in a polygon world and look at stuff with a microscope, you'll see pixels, not molecules). An artificial world and the real world might be too incompatible to transfer an intelligence from one to the other, so maybe the only way a super intelligence could come about is in the real, complex, atom filled world.

The singularity seems like a quasi religion and/or SEO tactic mostly by people who used to play dungeons and dragons.