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Old 04-03-2009, 11:42 PM
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Default 'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...ntelligence-ai

Quote:
Scientists have created a "Eureka machine" that can work out the laws of nature by observing the world around it – a development that could dramatically speed up the discovery of new scientific truths.

The machine took only hours to come up with the basic laws of motion, a task that occupied Sir Isaac Newton for years after he was inspired by an apple falling from a tree.

Scientists at Cornell University in New York have already pointed the machine at baffling problems in biology and plan to use it to tackle questions in cosmology and social behaviour.

The work marks a turning point in the way science is done. Eureka moments, which supposedly began in Archimedes' bath more than 2,000 years ago, might soon be happening not in the minds of geniuses, but through the warm hum of electronic circuitry.

"We've reached a point in science where there's a lot of data to deal with. It's not Newton looking at an apple, or Galileo looking at heavenly bodies any more, it's more complex than that," said Hod Lipson, the computer engineer who led the project.

"This takes the grunt out of science by sifting through data and looking for the laws that govern how something behaves."

(snip)
I've been chatting to my brother about this for years. Basically, formal logic is now sufficient that, if you fill up a database with a vast array of formally-described facts about the world, you can build an "inference engine" around that to infer vastly more facts from those facts, based simply on 1st-order, 2nd-order and other extensions of formal logic. Couple that to heuristics allowing the engine to determine if new facts are "interesting" or "significant" by our criteria and voila, an invention/discovery machine.

These guys have gone a step further than that and built a robot that can actually devise experiments to gather new data or seek missing data.

---

A programming project I shelved last year for lack of energy revolved around the idea of starting with a database schema* for storing formal predicates and a natural-language parser coupled with a web spider for continuously browsing the web for new facts about the world, then having an inference engine sift through those facts and try to find interesting inferences.

The gathering program would have to be trained using a variety of means so that it didn't try to download the entire internets. Among the mechanisms I was thinking of were heuristics for the classic hallmarks of bad science, using formal logic itself to establish that many facts are essentially equivalent (for pruning) and allowing the trainer to sift through facts in the database and their sources and indicate to the gathering program the bullshit level of the sites and higher level domains particular facts were gathered from (this would also influence the bullshit level of sites linked to from those sites). A second-tier extension of this might be to get valuable data out of crackpot sites by not recording their "facts" as actual facts so much as data about how humans think and the limits of their beliefs.

The internet is a godsend for training AIs since its the single largest interconnected repository of human knowledge. You just have to find a way to get an AI to read it like a skeptical and informed human would.

Sadly, between insomnia, workload and the sheer, daunting size of the problem, I found I just didn't have the energy to continue past a certain point, which is why I'm working on smaller problems like IK now in my spare time :)

*ETA for the technical types - The db engine I pulled down for this is the Berkeley DB engine behind Google, which instead of using SQL just has a programming API and expects you to manage relation constraints and all the rest. It just focuses on being massively efficient at storing vast numbers of arbitrary-sized objects in hash tables (tuples, for the even more technically-minded). Its actually a lot better and faster for a lot highly-specialised massive data storage requirements.
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Last edited by Farren; 04-04-2009 at 12:03 AM.
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Old 04-04-2009, 12:00 AM
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Default Re: 'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

I, for one, welcome our new Eureka Overlords.

Beyond that, I can't speculate about the good (or maybe not) that could come out of this contraption. Could it potentially suggest the keystone(s) of the theory of everything?

I want to be the pessimist and say "Great, now we've built machines to think for us too." But, really, we've already done that. Sorry, too much Star Trek: Insurrection or sommit.
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Old 04-04-2009, 12:00 AM
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Default Re: 'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

That article (and your post) is better than the one I read yesterday that was basically all like "thinking machines!!!"

Still I think this could be bad fucking news. Did we learn nothing from Terminator?
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Old 04-04-2009, 12:10 AM
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Default Re: 'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

Quote:
Originally Posted by BrotherMan View Post
I, for one, welcome our new Eureka Overlords.

Beyond that, I can't speculate about the good (or maybe not) that could come out of this contraption. Could it potentially suggest the keystone(s) of the theory of everything?

I want to be the pessimist and say "Great, now we've built machines to think for us too." But, really, we've already done that. Sorry, too much Star Trek: Insurrection or sommit.
I think that's the first thing that would pop into a lot of people's heads, but as you say we've already done that - moving a lot of the more humdrum thinking processes onto machines. Rather than diminish our mental capacity its allowed it to explode. The first people to start using calculators (which is essentially all the earliest electronic computers were) used them to put men on the moon and other such grand projects.

With each new thinking task we shift off to computers, it enables us to think at a more abstract level and/or grand scale. This latest development seems to me to herald an era where a lot more of our abstract thinking becomes focused around getting our thinking machines themselves to think even harder, faster and with more useful outcomes about other shit, then harvesting the fruits of that.

In the hard sciences, every other scientist I've met has some kind of programming ability as a secondary skill, even if its confined to specialised development environments like Mathematica. On PZ Myers blog the other day, for instance, he was discussing the consternation of some fools at the discovery institute at being unable to find fault with a program written by Dawkins to illustrate the power of descent with modification (they were convinced it was a trick but he made the source code publically available).

The funny thing is, this is where my interest in programming started 25 years ago. As a teenager the two things I most wanted to do was bring imagined worlds to life (computer games) and create thinking machines (AI). I was slightly more successful in the latter task than the former (I did actually program a string of games despite none of them being really professionally polished). It took me more than a decade of learning about neurology, expert systems, formal logic, epistemology and so on, to understand the fundamental constraints of this kind of useful AI on the digital technology of that time - many of which, I have to add, have been removed.
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Last edited by Farren; 04-04-2009 at 12:23 AM.
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Old 04-04-2009, 02:42 AM
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Default Re: 'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

I had a Eureka machine once, it sucked.
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Old 04-04-2009, 04:02 AM
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Default Re: 'Eureka machine' puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

When I used to play muds, I could make "scripts" in order to get things done. There were places where you could gamble your gold to make more money, at realistic casinos playing black jack or poker. I also new that there was not only consistency to be found in the games themselves, but also in the server the was generating "random" outcomes. So what I wanted to do was have my character play a series of bets at 1 gold, all while recording the data and finding out what works best. I couldn't think of how to do it, and I always assumed it would work as an algorithm for "positive stimulus".
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