by yurisagalov on 3/5/19, 6:03 PM with 40 comments
by stefs on 3/6/19, 4:16 PM
i've just recently finished peter watts "freeze frame revolution" of the sunflower cycle, where the gate-building spaceship eriophora is mostly on its own for thousands of years while the crew sleeps, guided by an AI called "the chimp".
-- spoilers --
one of the key ideas in this book is that the ships AI - the chimp - is not advanced at all, with a synapse count of roughly the chimp. anything more intelligent would get unstable and develop its own motives, so the original builders constructed it to be comparatively dumb and thus stable, predictable and deterministic (the humans are woken up only in case something unexpected happens which requires more creativity and brainpower).
by LeanderK on 3/6/19, 6:55 PM
I wonder whether a hybrid approach is the future, since in some tasks neural networks are just far better than anything we have. If the only tasks of the neural network is to estimate/classify some sensor-input and is trained in a purely supervised setting, the "right thing" for the neural network is still pretty well defined and rigorous testing should be possible (simple tasks can be very complex to implement). Then, interpretable, high-level reasoning could be solved by old-school coding (and maybe verifying).
This is not possible with end-to-end training.
But I am not sure what they mean, normally neural network (and their training) is purely deterministic. It's not that they are just very good at rolling a dice.
I am not into this stuff (autonomous, "intelligent" systems, more the data-analysis guy), but I would use neural networks for simple to define, hard problems that involve a lot of noisy data (where some kind of accuracy on some test-set is a well-defined metric) and then build a higher-level reasing system by hand.
by yingw787 on 3/6/19, 5:05 PM
by readhn on 3/6/19, 3:19 PM
If he stayed in Russia the course of human history might have been very different ... if he was developing all that technology for the USSR... and not USA.
tell me about boot strapping!! :
"In 1923, Sikorsky formed the Sikorsky Manufacturing Company in Roosevelt, New York.[36] He was helped by several former Russian military officers. Among Sikorsky's chief supporters was composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who introduced himself by writing a check for US$5,000 (approximately $61,000 in 2007).[37] Although his prototype was damaged in its first test flight, Sikorsky persuaded his reluctant backers to invest another $2,500. With the additional funds, he produced the S-29, one of the first twin-engine aircraft in America, with a capacity for 14 passengers and a speed of 115 mph.[38] The performance of the S-29, slow compared to military aircraft of 1918, proved to be a "make or break" moment for Sikorsky's funding."
by sandworm101 on 3/6/19, 4:05 PM
No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have things like gyroscopes to take much of the load off the pilot. And autopilots really do work (auto, not autonomous). They can hold a steady heading/alt. Feed them data from a radar altimeter and they can hover like a rock.
The computers can fly the aircraft, they can literally make it move as needed, but that is a totally different problem than deciding where to move the aircraft. The pilot's job is making the judgement calls necessary to keep the aircraft safe. Show me a computer than can determine whether an approach is safe enough to execute, whether the weather en route is acceptable. Show me a computer than an judge which path to take to avoid carrying an unsteady slung load over someone's head.
by avgeek808 on 3/6/19, 3:24 PM
by samlittlewood on 3/6/19, 5:38 PM
by tnash on 3/6/19, 8:17 PM
by mhb on 3/6/19, 3:01 PM
