The Road Not Taken

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHD) is all ready for operation with the first beam of protons set to “travel” to a section of the 17-mile-long circular tunnel tomorrow (Aug 8th - 10th 2008)^{[1][2][3][4].}

The two day injection test is scheduled to test section 2-3. The circulation tests around the entire machine are scheduled around Sept. 2nd - 3rd 2008. The big event of LHD start up and official unveiling is set on Oct. 21st 2008. According to a CERN press release,

The event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network.

The LHC, estimated at around 4.6 billion CHF (4.6 billion US Dollar or 3.6 billion Euro), is intended to collide at protons traveling at 99.99% the speed of light. A working LHC will the empiest, coldest and hotest place in the galaxy^[5] and hopefully will shed light on the fundamental particles which make up our universe including the elusive Higgs boson. The LHC is scheduled to perform six experiments^[6][7], two large sized - ATLAS and CMS; two medium-sized - ALICE and LHCb; and two smaller-sized - TOTEM and LHCf.

Ending on a lighter note - here is a rap video on the LHC by CERN Kate McAlpine, a science writer at CERN.

Galleries of the LHC images can be found here and here.

1. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11837478
2. http://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/lhc-commissioning/
3. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/science/29cernrap.html
4. http://lhc-injection-test.web.cern.ch/lhc-injection-test/
5. http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Facts-en.html
6. http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHCExperiments-en.html
7. http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/LHC_Experiments.htm

Intelligence Realm Inc., a canadian company engaging in Artificial Intelligence research using interdisciplinary approaches, recently announced the completion of a simulation of 100 billion neurons (the estimated size of the human brain) using volunteer computing. A technical paper detailing this endeavor is available on their website.

The intention of this project seems to find and investigate the mechanisms of information representation in the brain.

Neurons are found in all species, from worms to humans and while their functionality is different, they process information in the same way. Each brain system, be that vision, hearing, sensory or motor, is also using the same mechanisms for representing and processing information. This diversity of systems share the same traits. Any valid theory of knowledge representation has to account for all these common traits while allowing future findings to be incorporated into it.

Although I don’t think all species process information in the same way, these are quite valid assumptions for achieving a general theory of neural knowledge representation.

An interesting observation from the paper is

With its estimated 10E11 neurons that form 10E14 synapses the human brain is far more complex than the current computer architecture. This architecture is built on top of the Turing Machine, which has inherent limitations, better observed when dealing with complex systems. Its main drawback is the sequential mode of processing. In contrast to this functional mode, the brain uses a native parallel mode of processing information. While many approaches (e.g. clustering, multithreading) have been designed to overcome these limitations for the sequential model, they fail to reach the parallel processing power of neuronal networks.

Indeed it is a daunting task for a small company to acquire the computational power required to run large scale simulation. Volunteer computing offers a inexpensive way for companies (and non-profit organizations) to achieve the required computing power.

Coming to the model, 100 billion Hodgkin-Huxley neurons are simulated. The software is written in C and the results are stored in a SQLite database. This is currently an Open Source project (and hopefully will remain the same) with source code and documentation available on SourceForge.net.

Finally, here is are some interesting questions from the paper to think about.

How far can we expand the intelligence of an artificial system?

What is the speed limit of an intelligent system?

How many sensory systems and types can a conscious system
have?

A short clip about reinforcement learning, by Real-life Reinforcement Learning group at Rutgers University

The MAARS (Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System), by Foster-Miller, Inc., (a subsidiary of QinetiQ North America). See press release.

Finally SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated Linguistically Variable Intelligence Algorithms) from Cognitive Code. Video Here.

The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”, according to a concept paper for the project.

JFCOM-9 (Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command) is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data, economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary information such as military intelligence.
The original article here…

This is THE most addictive game I have played in a long time. The gameplay, the music, the effect and the idea itself are all top notch. 10/10 for the developer. Check out PlasmaPong’s homepage for latest releases.
From the site

“PLASMA PONG is a variation of PONG that utilizes real-time fluid dynamics to drive the game environment.”

and it sure uses a good one too. I got a 45fps from my laptop which has a very low end graphic card on it. On my desktop however I got a 80fps and it is awesome on both.

Checkout these really cool screenshots of plasma pong. Here is a video of the game.

Check out this neat little site called Cognews.net. It has news feeds from various sites put into a neat format. It has news on

• Mind & Cognition,
• Neuroscience, and
• Artificial Intelligence & Robots.

A simple whois shows that this domain belongs to thinklab.pl. Their site seems to be still under construction. Something to watch out, I guess.

opensource.org has an article by Michael Tiemann (the guy who wrote the g++ compiler, and Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution ), in which he talks about his early experiences with GNU compilers and GNU in general.

Its almost the same way most of us are drawn into the world of opensource. But reading the article I could not help wondering whether it was worth it for him, whether it is worth it for us?

Read the complete article.

Infowars.net has an article on the DARPA’s HI-MEMS program, the aim of which is to construct a tiny lepidopterine infiltration borg by growing a living moth around a “micro-mechanical system”.

Sounds cool. Imagine if this technology were to be successful and effecient, we could have real terminators in the future.

Interesting points from the post -

“A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and ‘grown’ inside it. “

“Once the moth hatches, machine learning is used to control it.”

The bot-cored lepidoptera will be controlled by various methods such as “electrical muscle excitation, electrical stimulation of neurons”, or the intriguing “presentation of optical cues with micro-optical visual presentation”, suggesting miniscule displays strapped over the hapless creatures’ eyes. Our personal favourite means of moth control, however, is “projection of ultrasonic pulses simulating bats”.

Worryingly, MIT’s Brooks adds: “The [Defense Department] has said it wants one third of all missions to be unmanned by 2015, and there’s no doubt their things will become weaponised, so the question comes: should they be given targeting authority?”

An article from Washigtonpost.com discusses how army personnel are finding themselves more and more attached to their robot assistants.

While some operators are known to take their bot for fishing, some are known to name their bots, “Scooby Doo”, “Frankenstein”, “Cheryl” :-), etc…

I really liked the following excerpts from the article -

Excerpt 1 -

That day, an explosive ordnance disposal technician walked through his door. The EODs, as they are known, are the people who — with their robots — are charged with disabling Iraq’s most virulent scourge, the roadside improvised explosive device. In this fellow’s hands was a small box. It contained the remains of his robot. He had named it Scooby-Doo.

“There wasn’t a whole lot left of Scooby,” Bogosh says. The biggest piece was its 3-by-3-by-4-inch head, containing its video camera. On the side had been painted “its battle list, its track record. This had been a really great robot.”

The veteran explosives technician looming over Bogosh was visibly upset. He insisted he did not want a new robot. He wanted Scooby-Doo back.

Excerpt 2 -

It’s common for a soldier to cut out a magazine picture of a woman, tape it to the antenna and name the bot something like “Cheryl,” says Paul Varian, a former Army chief warrant officer who has served three tours in Iraq with the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office. “There’s an awful lot of picture-taking,” he says. One guy who married just before deployment wanted his wife to see the gal who was his constant companion. It was a PackBot. “One Guard unit got so attached to a development model that we gave it to them. It was pretty beat up. They put it in a place of honor in their museum.”

Excerpt 3 -

“When we first got there, our robot, his name was Frankenstein” says Sgt. Orlando Nieves, an EOD from Brooklyn. “He’d been in a couple of explosions and he was made of pieces and parts from other robots.” Not only did the troops promote him to private first class, they awarded him an EOD badge — a coveted honor. “It was a big deal. He was part of our team, one of us. He did feel like family.”

But the thing that strikes the most in the article is how the operators (who know that it is just a machine) get attached to the robot to the extent that they start treating it as a human, awarding it bravery medals for successful missions, mourning on the its destruction (or death!!), etc…
Looks like robot rights advocates have an upper hand in the argument.

A new book, The Intelligent Universe, by renowned complexity theorist, James N. Gardner, proposes yet another convincing argument to the biggest mystery of life - its beginning and its fate. With a foreword by Raymond Kurzweil, the book is introduced by its author as

“A new book, The Intelligent Universe, proposes that the universe might end in intelligent life, one that has acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole.”

Another interesting excerpt from the argument the author puts forward -

“Traditionally, scientists have offered two bleak answers to the profound issue of how the universe will end: fire or ice. The cosmos might end in fire–a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets, and any life forms that might have endured to the end time are consumed in a raging inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang, but in reverse.

Or the universe might end in ice–a ceaseless expansion of the fabric of spacetime in which the thin soup of matter and energy is eternally diluted and cooled. Under this scenario, stars wither and die, constellations of cold matter recede further and further from one another, and the vast project of cosmic evolution simply fades into quiet and endless oblivion.

The Intelligent Universe proposes a third possibility: that the universe might end in intelligent life. Not life as we know it, but life that has acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole, just as life on Earth has acquired the ability to shape the land, the sea, and the atmosphere.”

This book is a must read for anyone who is plagued by the question for origin of life and its fate.

Read the original article.