The Turing Test is a famous test of machine intelligence. In the basic setup, a human communicates with an agent through some kind of computer terminal (so the agent is never visible). The human is tasked with determining whether the agent is a machine or another human. The goal of machine agents is to imitate [...]
I just finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. One continuing difficulty in describing science is the need to properly characterize the act of intuition and discovery. Kuhn provides a masterful account of the historical and sociological aspects of scientific revolutions, but his identification of the core generative act of knowledge creation is necessarily enclosed in the vague [...]
In an otherwise interesting but ill-thought-out comparison of cuckoldry and rape, I found this little nugget: We all know that women tend to be more expressive about their complaints – you can’t beat ‘em for wailing and gnashing of teeth. Really? That hasn’t been my experience. And anyway, even by the flimsy standards of economics [...]
I keep hearing about this problem of communicating with people in the future about dangerous radioactive waste storage sites. My solution to the problem is to make the sites as desolate and unremarkable as possible. Given our natural curiosity, putting up elaborate structures seems like more like an invitation than a prohibition, even if those [...]
I’ve been traveling a great deal recently, first to the AAAI Fall Symposium then to EpiRob. One of the most interesting days of all this conference travel came at the tail end of the EpiRob conference, which coincided with the beginning of the workshop on intrinsic motivation called IM-CLeVeR. Part of the appeal was the [...]
My wife is one of those ferociously intelligent people who asks questions until she fully understands something. That really minimizes my opportunities for bullshit around the apartment. On the plus side, I end up understanding what I claim to understand just by virtue of being forced to think clearly enough to explain it. This is, [...]
Observations and perceptions may be psychological, but observability is not. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, pg. 103 Thus the real situation is quite different from the one visualized by the naïve empiricist, or a believer in inductive logic. He thinks that we begin by collecting and arranging our experiences, and so ascend the ladder of [...]
At the beginning of the summer, I always plan on reading all the things I did not quite get to during other seasons of the year. Though I am often too ambitious, I am making some progress on a number of fronts. The first is Karl Popper’s landmark The Logic of Scientific Discovery. As I [...]
I really cannot comment on the Iranian election itself, but I think I can comment somewhat on the popular pundit reaction to the election. Fortunately, Matthew Yglesias captures most of my thinking in < 140 characters: People who now think Obama is insufficiently concerned with the Iranian people used to think we should drop bombs [...]
In a recent conversation the idea of performance criteria as a measure of success in artificial intelligence came up. The context, if I recall, was whether intelligence is best understood as the end result of optimization, where the intermediate and final solutions may resist direct scrutiny, or as a sequence of representations (designed, learned, or [...]