Interesting article on interesting research Turing learning

"An exciting new study from the University of Sheffield and published in the journalSwarm Intelligence has demonstrated (free pre-print version) a method of allowing computers to make sense of complex patterns all on their own, an ability that could open the door to some of the most advanced and speculative applications of artificial intelligence. Using an all-new technique called Turing Learning, the team managed to get an artificial intelligence to watch movements within a swarm of simple robots and figure out the rules that govern their behavior. It was not told to look for any particular signifier of swarm behavior, but simply to try to emulate the source more and more accurately and to learn from the results of that process. It’s a simple system that the researchers think could be applied everywhere from human and animal behavior to biochemical analysis to personal security."-source link extremetech

An interesting article on an interesting research

Nice quote on computational processes

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.-link

 And the world is entering an age, were the most powerful of all such is about to come into existence, where the design of artificial minds become possible.  It is then that entities of immense capability can be summoned into this world.  

Comment and quotes on brain

it performs massively parallel computations extremely efficiently. For example, complex visual perception occurs within less than 100 ms, that is, 10 processing steps!link

A human can perform significant tasks in much less time than a second. For example, I could show you a photograph and ask you to determine if there is cat in the image. Your job would be to push a button if there is a cat, but not if you see a bear or a warthog or a turnip. This task is difficult or impossible for a computer to perform today, yet a human can do it reliably in half a second or less. But neurons are slow, so in that half a second, the information entering your brain can only traverse a chain one hundred neurons long. That is, the brain 'computes' solutions to problems like this in one hundred steps or fewer, regardless of how many total neurons might be involved. From the time light enters your eye to the time you press the button, a chain no longer than one hundred neurons could be involved. A digital computer attempting to solve the same problem would take billions of steps. One hundred computer instructions are barely enough to move a single character on the computer's display, let alone do something interesting.-Jeff Hawkings, On intelligence

Unlike traditional computer architectures which have extremely high clock rates and can perform deep loops in short order with billions of instructions per second serially, allowing for billions of steps to be taken in an algorithm. The brain has to do its processing with about 100 instructions per second serially. Given this slow speed, it requires a very different kind of algorithms that are massively parallel and can work within few steps. That is not all kinds of algorithms are viable or can be performed within a few dozen steps.