http://supermodelling.net A personal blog about practical machine intelligence and other fun mysteries Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:47:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The research and thinking I have done so far on conceptual modelling has given me a newfound sense of wonder at the immense complexity of concepts, while at the same time I marvel at how they display a transparent elegance. In particular, I am fascinated by the most fundamental concepts -- ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=155 In the blink of an eye, a year has passed. It's been a year of great upheaval for me personally and professionally... now I find myself starting a sabbatical of uncertain duration in which I plan (among other fun things) to continue my AGI-related research and musing. The main purpose ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=154 My recent blog essay about the Physical Symbol System Hypothesis got me thinking that it would be fun to revisit more ideas from the history of AI and make a series out of it. Even though I was poor and even though I left without my doctorate, I remember my years ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=148 Critics sometimes see the AI enterprise as merely the application of the latest tech fad -- given a shiny new toy like a computer, we just try clumsily to make a metaphorical connection: mind is like a computer. That is of course completely backwards: actually, computers are like the mind -- ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=146 If, as is widely reported, AI researchers (those scurvy dogs) began barking up the wrong tree a long time ago, I wonder when exactly that was and what scent led them astray. They started the chase promisingly... I think a lot of the foundational work of the Old Masters was ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=138 The other day I was walking around the house and, as happens to me occasionally, I noticed that I'm really good at it. You're really good at it too... try it! Walk around a little bit! The smoothness of movement, economy of action, flexibility of adapting to circumstance, variety of ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=133 I still have some rather obnoxious and academic preliminaries to slog through before I feel comfortable moving on to the specific technology of applied philosophical engineering. Even though this process is both abstruse and fumbling, it is necessary and I can only hope somebody somewhere thinks it's as interesting as ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=130 Seems I never quite got back to sleep. It turns out that I don't want to stop blogging, since I enjoy it. What I will do, though, is broaden the range and nature of my posts -- rather than attempt to focus on a particular subject matter, this blog will ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=125 The few people interested in this blog may have noticed that it has gone dormant. After toying with the "AI problem" for a while it has become clear to me that nobody (including me) seems to have a very promising research agenda for making progress on building artificial minds.  It pains ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=123 Suppose that we take a bunch of bits and break it up into two different pieces (A and B), then interpret the pair as A x 2B, where we interpret A as a fraction between, say, -1 and 1; and B is an integer. This rather complicated way of interpreting ... http://supermodelling.net/?p=121