Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:fees (Score 1) 391

The FCC made the right call in the US, they upheld the long established status-quo of the international market, but it's a hollow victory if you only have one ISP to choose from. The decision is kind of a surprise to me given the head of the FCC was an influential telco lobbyist prior to his appointment. In this case it seems to me the FCC are doing their job by telling telco's what to do, rather than the other way around (as one would expect with such blatantly insestious oversight).

Comment Re:Ha (Score 1) 45

I understand how it works, that's why I was so impressed. What they (and others) have done in total is solve a long standing problem with NN's, their tendency to be single minded, ie: you train it to recognise cats then train it to recognise dogs, you end up with something that recognises dogs and non-dogs but has forgotten what it knew about cats. The hint is in the name "deep learning".

As for a "huge computer" Watson now knows a lot more than the original and runs on a commodity rack mounted server. Agree, prosthetics is where AI will converge with the human mind, again the technological bits and pieces are already in use, but still very much isolated from each other.

If you define AI to be the replication of human intelligence then it will never arrive except via birth and environment. IMO, it's a very narrow definition and not particularly useful since we presumably all posses our own human like intelligence. No matter how you slice it, it was a major milestone when an AI defeated the best humans in an unbounded problem space where humans excel, such as Jeopardy.

I guess it would be cooler before I knew how it worked but I was playing with ANNs on a smaller scale well before Watson came about.

Ditto, I taught myself programming in the early 80's because playing Conway's game of life on graph paper was tedious. Sure, by definition knowledge removes the mystery but to paraphrase Feynman "Knowledge can only add to the awe and beauty of a flower, I don't understand how it can detract"

Comment Re:The Real Lie - faking statistics (Score 1) 394

Dyson is a physicist and mathematician, so his opinion on this matters exactly the same as yours - not a jot

So will you take my word as a computational physicist that climate models--which are nothing but computational physics done by climate scientists rather than computational physicists--are far too uncertain to be robust guides to public policy?

Because that is my professional opinion, and it happens that my profession is the one that matters when judging computational physics, whether it's done by climate scientists, Freeman Dyson, or anyone else.

I've read climate modelling papers. I've looked at climate modelling codes and there documentation (mostly AR4, which is somewhat out of date now.) I was appalled by what I saw: it's all a good attempt to work things out, there's nothing wrong with it as science at all, but I'd rather use Wall Street financial models to guide public spending policy than climate models to guide climate policy. They have a much greater chance of being accurate.

This is not to say that climate models aren't useful inputs to the policy debate, but their accuracy if fantastically over-estimated by policymakers. GCMs have gotten Arctic warming badly wrong (the Arctic has warmed much faster than anyone anticipated) and missed the current--likely temporary--flattening of "global average temperature" increase. This is no surprise you a) look at the models and b) have the professional competency of a computational physicist to judge them. They just don't do the things that accurate models integrated over long timescales have to do, like conserve mass and energy natively.

Models before around 2005 were especially bad with energy conservation, fixing it up by redistributing energy across cells after each time step. Climate scientists were apparently OK with that, because they didn't know enough computational physics. Anyone who has spent a career building models that eventually get checked against reality knows that that is a virtual guarantee that the result will be unphysical nonsense. This is not a political statement: it is simply a fact.

So by all means dis Dyson for not being a climate scientist. But since GCMs are computational physics, you must take my word as a computational physicist over climate scientists, or admit you really don't care who is saying what so long as they say what you agree with.

Comment Hard to believe (Score 5, Interesting) 166

> "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for."

Can you even IMAGINE Microsoft saying that 15 years ago? 10 years ago? So is it because they are a better company now before... or is it just because they have no choice but to cooperate (since people left IE in droves for Firefox, Opera, and Chrome)?

>" They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web."

Oh right.... because Microsoft would never want to support a monoculture... Hmm... I need to go find some Twilight Zone episodes to watch, now.

Comment Re:#1 slashdot article submitters (Score 2) 257

What a coincidence! I've heard managers say the same thing about their staff.

Both of you are wrong, keep it up and whatever project/task you're working on will be unpleasant, and at best limp to the finish line. Just about everyone has a manager, a professional in any field will get their manager's respect by learning and solving their manager's problems with minimal fuss. If after 12 months or so, that doesn't work, find a new job/manager. If your manager doesn't have problems it's probably because you're both about to be put out to pasture on the next payroll cycle.

At 55, I've been on both sides of the managerial fence and I've hired and fired programmers. I rejected the project managers job when my current employer offered it to me 4-5yrs years ago, having "been there before" I decided to keep my more interesting and less stressful role as the resident CVS Nazi. My overall goal has always been to automate my way out of whatever tedious task confronts me, I've been lucky enough to work with several professional managers who ensured I never ran out of tedious, annoying, tasks.

Comment Re:Ha (Score 3, Interesting) 45

Skimmed the article, conspiratorial themes aside, it seems like a good general history of neural nets.

To answer what I see as the main question in TFA - Here's the difference "this time around".

I've been interested in AI and automata since the early 80's, sporadically following closely over the years. Life distracted me from this interest for most of the noughties. The first time I watched IBM's Jeopardy stunt with Watson I was blown away, the missus shrugged and said "It's impressive but what's the big deal, it's just looking up the answers, like google with talking, right?" I tried to explain why my jaw was on the floor, but all I got was a blank look and a change of subject.

Far from being overhyped I think the general public simply don't comprehend the significance of these developments. They see it as 'hype' because like my missus they simply don't comprehend the problem and tend to grossly underestimate the difficulty of solving it. IMO the Watson stunt is one of the most significant technological feats I've witnessed since the moon landings, and possibly the start of a new Apollo style arms race based on the same old fears. That doesn't mean I think all the problems in AI have been solved, but machines like Watson are very strong evidence that we have recently cleared a significant hurdle (that few in the general public have even noticed).

To me, this period in AI is very reminiscent of where digital comms were in the early 90's. Most of the bits for the comms revolution existed but rarely talked to each other; pagers, email, mobile phones, computers, printers, fax, GPS, fibre optics, etc. Just a few years later everyone was talking about "convergence", "as foretold" pretty much all of those things and more have now converged into the ubiquitous smart phone. In 1990, virtually nobody on the planet saw the internet coming (including me), I was at Uni, mature age CS/Math student, 88-91. I was perfectly placed in space and time to see it born but didn't notice it.

I first heard about HTML and Mosaic at Uni, one of our CS lectures was very impressed and went on a tangential rant about it one day in a networking lecture. Still, nobody in his hijacked audience I talked to afterwards could figure out why he was so impressed. "What's wrong with zmodem?" was a typical comment that I would have agreed with then.

I think we are more or less at that "1990" point where everyone will soon start talking more and more about "convergence" in AI. The Watson that won Jeopardy in 2011(?) required 20 tons of air-conditioning alone, today an instance of Watson fits on a "pizza box" server and you can try out your own Watson instance for free with a web based developer's API (google it). Their goal is to squeeze Watson into a smart phone.

A couple of things that a Watson style AI may "converge" with aside from phones are, "Big Dog" which has pretty much solved the autonomous movement/balance problem, and face recognition software which has also made big strides in the past few years. What the end result will be when it all converges and evolves, or even when it will converge, I have no idea, but a dystopian SkyNet style future is no longer purely fiction. From a less pessimistic POV, AI could serve as a "check and balance" in a democracy full of bullshitters, a tool to fact check the waffle and make evidence based, transparent, recommendations on public policy free from partisan politics, in other words "speak truth to power", like the public service in a democracy is supposed to be doing now.

Disclaimer: The "missus" is far from dumb, she has a Phd in Business and Marketing, she lectures to several hundred students at a time. I sometimes fail to see why she is interested/impressed by some obscure event in the Business News and politely change the subject :)

Slashdot Top Deals

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. -- Henry David Thoreau

Working...