Blogs The missing component for true AI

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2009/08/24/the-missing-component-for-true-ai/

 

after the descrete graphics card, the discrete soundcard, now comes the discrete AI card. a bunch of those memristors on a pcb and you can play agianst a real challenge! no need for other people anymore!

 

A very interesting and informative blog.

 

I read that NS article, it was very good. However I think there's still a lot more to come in developing true AI than a missing part - everyone always seems to say it's 'just around the corner' and then some new level of complexity is discovered which pushes it back again. Rather than designing AI in a sort of 'reverse-engineersing the human brain' kind of way, perhaps the way to do it is simply to attempt to arrange matters so that it can arise from the underlying architecture? Is that what is happening in this field? Wish I knew more about it really... definitely one of the most interesting areas of IT today, and receives less attention than it deserves

 

skynet?!

 

If anyone wants to read a fascinating paper on memristors, here's the reference:

Strukov, D.B., Snider, G.S., Stewart, D.R., Williams, R.S. (2008) The Missing Memristor Found. Nature. 453(1): 80-3.

Shows a lot of promise for super-high-density low-volatility memory.

 

From what I gathered researching for the Artificial Intelligence feature that we wrote, it seemed to me more like we had hit something of a deadend in our searh for creating a true AI rather than it being just round the corner. There's more to conciousness than just a hardware and software combination and that's all we can do. The memristor may change that provide us a way out and set us on a path to creating a real Jonny Five. However there also may be more pieces of the puzzle that are yet to be discovered.

 

Okay, so basically Leon Chua and Stan Williams are the guys who we need to go back in time and kill to stop Skynet being created?

 

You win the reading-between-the-lines-of-the-blog competition. That is precisely the case. Work is currently under way to finish the time machine, though attempts are in jeopardy of being foiled by evil robots that have been sent back in time by Skynet. Watch this space.

 

hehe yeah it's crap to mystify the masses.. so what, it holds it's 'memory' or resistance in a powered off state- it's old tech too.. how is that any better than ram when it comes to the task of creating true ai- imo the more they go down this route, the more fail your gonna have

computers just do exactly what they are programmed to do.. nothing more, nothing less.. until they can somehow master biology- that's a long way off imo.. we won't see a true ai, in reality all these guys trying to create a working ai with hardware, if they step back.. on/off that's all it is, it maybe complex but nothing intelligent

we may never figure it out

 

Yup, it's true, we may never figure it out. But. If we don't try then we will definitely never figure it out. If you want a comprehensive answer as to why a memristor is different to RAM in the task of creating an AI, let's revert back to New Scientist's feature.

'In true memristive fashion, Chua had anticipated the idea that memristors might have something to say about how biological organisms learn. While completing his first paper on memristors, he became fascinated by synapses - the gaps between nerve cells in higher organisms across which nerve impulses must pass. In particular, he noticed their complex electrical response to the ebb and flow of potassium and sodium ions across the membranes of each cell, which allow the synapses to alter their response according to the frequency and strength of signals. It looked maddeningly similar to the response a memristor would produce. "I realised then that synapses were memristors," he says. "The ion channel was the missing circuit element I was looking for, and it already existed in nature."
The behaviour of synapses looked maddeningly similar to a memristor's response

To Chua, this all points to a home truth. Despite years of effort, attempts to build an electronic intelligence that can mimic the awesome power of a brain have seen little success. And that might be simply because we were lacking the crucial electronic components - memristors.'

 

What is this "biology" you speak of? Do you mean a bag of complicatedly managed chemicals? Computers can do that. Do you mean evolution? Computers can do that too, i submit to you that the current generations of computers would have been impossible to build without the last.

 

If the patterns of thought can be mimicked with hardware and software, AI is possible. Since we've been simulating small parts of the brain with brute force software techniques and getting similar results as biological brains, it's probably just a matter of time.

 

Do you have a link to any good examples of this?

 

I can see this being pretty important, isn't the brain different from a machine in that it can think in shades of grey, not just 0's and 1's. Though I can't see myself buying a robotic, artificially intelligent, servant soon

 

2 comments

1) the brain is holographic, you do it all or you do it wrong.

2) AI will not be in computer games until there is no more Ministry or Department of Defense. The US military already has cloaking, you do not see that...

Yours in harsh but True Plasma,
Star*Dagger

 

that is kind of what we're worried about.

 

http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

The BBC covered the story as well;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8012496.stm

 

Extremely interesting read. It's going to take years of research to even try to see what practical implications any of this will have, but isn't that what science is all about?