for all that fancy lab equipment.. ;->

the article is self contradictory — it says "It actually self-determines what its own objective is," said Wissner-Gross. "This [artificial intelligence] does not require the explicit specification of a goal".

this is not true, because it then goes on to say, "trying to capture as many future histories as possible".

so there IS a goal — it maximizes the number of future states — exactly the same way a negaMax search can maximize the mobility paramater in a chess engine search.

in other words, this is a lot of hype — defining intelligence as maximization of finding states of less entropy (i.e. maximal future states), and running a classic negaSearch on that basis is what is going on here.

its a novel way to go about things, but redefining the terms doesnt actually make anything new in the sensation way this article claims.

but you have to die — its the only way to live again!! :-)

safe passage — our cat, 'puck' goes today.. :-(

it depends a lot on what you need to do — you can model and design something in a specialized app like ArchiCAD in 2 days what would take you 2 weeks in a generalized programme like AutoCAD.

if you were doing 3D animation, and needed procedural behaviours, particles, and vast datasets — Houdini is the top of the bunch for 3D Rendering and Animation.

needs define software.

ArchiCAD (free trial, requires registration): http://www.graphisoft.com/support/archicad/downloads/

Houdini (Apprentice Free Version): http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_download&task=apprentice&Itemid=208

best regards from toronto island
jp

personally, i'd like to string up by their toenails the person who ever invented the idea of daylight savings time — it should be abolished. it never should have existed in the first place.

When told the reason for daylight savings time, the Old Indian said, 'Only the government would
believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.

for years (since day1) — you can run iOS on mac OSX — you get an iPad or iPhone simulated on your screen.

just download the free XCode tools, and it includes the iOS simulator.

you mean like the iPad simulator that comes with the free XCode IDE for years..

life must be gettin pretty good now.. ;-)

keeping it simple is the hard part.

done it for ten years — love it, and feel better all the time.
(yes, summer AND winter)

j

how about the 'play with your kids app'??
like peek-a-boo, and pass the ball, and ride the horsey?

expecting a 10 month yr old to play w an android tablet instead of playing w a real human is ridiculous..
you can do better as a parent

2cents
j

comon - all of the U.K. is still on imperial and no plan to switch to metric - come to think of it - they still have a monarchy smack dab in the middle of their democracy - the british dont like change - and i dont think that'll change anytime soon..

2cents from toronto island
jp

sweet lord — core memory and bringin the 70's.. TRS80 and CP/M.. ssh from phone triggering serial interfaces.. nice. :-D

also — old MIDI synthesizers can be hooked into modern interfaces — i use a 1988 ensoniq EPS to drive sounds generated in garageband on a macBook pro — the ensoniq still boots from a 3.5" floppy disk — that's a two decade usability window, and the audio from the macBook gets fed out to 1970's B&O amp.. three decades of electronics working together at any given moment on a daily basis. :-}

art & technology together.

new digital audio to vintage audio gear is a marriage made in heaven. a simple wire from the back of any PC audio 1/8" > RCA line-in on an old 1970's solid-state block amp will sound better than (worse sounding) computer speakers you have to spend more on.

i use an old 1970's beomaster 2400 — a beautiful piece of audio technology as the primary system amp, and it still solidly drives a pair of pro speakers. kind of spoils you for when people use the current fashion of small IC chip-based generic amps which dont tend to carry the low-end the way the 1970's amps did with the 1/4" power-transistors bolted on to the heat-sinks — made to handle more bottom-end.

other good projects include hooking an iPod to an home-built FM transmitter, and tuning in the iPod with an old radio reciever (my parents had a 'Kuba Stereo Console' with the magic-eye tuning tube) — very cool when you can use that to tune in a newly programmed iPod-jukebox, and get the sound of all the compression and radio processing artifacts, playing out of a tube-driven speaker. once you've programmed with the modern methods, adapting them with line-level out makes it an easy project, and breathes new life into some good sounding amps.

2cents from toronto island
jp

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/Radiometer_9965_Nevit.gif