Links for 2022-02-07
Lego Robot with Organic 'Brain' Learns to Navigate Maze: “Researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and the Netherlands' Eindhoven University of Technology have built a maze-solving robot based on an organic neuromorphic chip. The team constructed and incorporated a circuit of organic polymer transistors into a Lego Mindstorms EV3 robot. The chip controls the direction in which the robot's wheels move. The researchers created a honeycomb-like maze for the robot to navigate. The polymer circuit received a corrective stimulus whenever the machine made a wrong turn, which helped train the robot to make binary decisions toward solving the maze. "The device learns in the same way we teach kids, giving rewards if they are correct or not rewarding if they are wrong," said City University of Hong Kong's Arindam Basu.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lego-robot-with-an-organic-brain-learns-to-navigate-a-maze/
Can A Goldfish Drive a Car? Yes!
Physical Systems Perform ML Computations: “Cornell University researchers have trained physical systems to execute generic machine learning computations, demonstrating an early but viable substitute for conventional electronic processors. The training process enabled demonstrations with mechanical, optical, and electrical physical systems. The mechanical system involved a titanium plate positioned atop a speaker to create a driven multimode mechanical oscillator; the optical system beamed a laser through a nonlinear crystal to convert the incoming light's colors into new colors by combining photon pairs, and the electrical system harnessed an electronic circuit with a resistor, a capacitor, an inductor, and a transistor. The researchers fed each system pixels of an image of a handwritten number, encoded in a light pulse or an electrical voltage, and returned a similar type of optical pulse or voltage as output. "It turns out you can turn pretty much any physical system into a neural network," said Cornell's Peter McMahon.” https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/01/physical-systems-perform-machine-learning-computations
Computational Imaging Without a Computer: Seeing Through Random Diffusers at the Speed of Light — “This new approach is computer-free and all-optically reconstructs object images distorted by unknown, randomly-generated phase diffusers.” https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-imaging-random-diffusers-instantly.html
Math That Helped Solve Fermat’s Theorem Now Safeguards the Digital World [nytimes.com] https://archive.fo/BI0vz
Geometric foundations of Deep Learning — “Geometric Deep Learning is an attempt for geometric unification of a broad class of ML problems from the perspectives of symmetry and invariance.” https://geometricdeeplearning.com/
"Judged against where AI was 20-25 years ago, when I was a student, a dog is now holding meaningful conversations in English. And people are complaining that the dog isn’t a very eloquent orator, that it often makes grammatical errors and has to start again, that it took heroic effort to train it, and that it’s unclear how much the dog really understands." https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6288
Astronomers Suggest a Surprising New Way to Detect Alien Megastructures https://singularityhub.com/2022/01/29/astronomers-suggest-a-surprising-new-way-to-detect-alien-megastructures/
Crows may soon be Sweden’s newest litter pickers: “Over in the Swedish city of Södertälje, about 30 km southwest of Stockholm, a pilot program is being explored which will enlist crows to clean up discarded cigarette butts. Butts account for over 60% of litter in Sweden, and the per-butt cleanup cost falls between 0.8 and 2 Swedish kronor each. The company behind the project, Corvid Cleaning, estimates the cost will be around 0.2 kronor. If the birds picked up all the butts, that would be a substantial savings, but in reality, the current manual cleaning will still be needed. Total savings to the city will depend on the ratio of bird-collected vs. people-collected butts.” https://www.politicallore.com/crows-may-soon-be-swedens-newest-litter-pickers
Design policy to be testable: “I would love to live in a world where any bill required the following 5 items: 1. A description of how they're going to measure the impact of the bill. 2. A prediction distribution for the impact of the bill. 3. A level at which they'd consider the bill a success, and a level at which they'd consider it a failure. 4. A description of how they're going to measure how bad things would be conditional on the bill not passing. 5. A prediction distribution for this value.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bGDk58fPYQK7pRHvS/design-policy-to-be-testable
“Our preferred estimate suggests reduced smoking accounts for 6% of the concurrent rise in obesity.” https://www.nber.org/papers/w29701
“[A]lthough babies can certainly learn a lot about their environment by interacting with objects, they seem to be aided in doing so by inborn mechanisms that guide and constrain their inferences – a form of implicit knowledge about the world.” https://psyche.co/ideas/babies-and-chicks-help-solve-one-of-psychologys-oldest-puzzles
Crash of the titans: imminent merger of giant black holes predicted: "two giant black holes, with a combined mass of hundreds of millions of Suns, are gearing up for a cataclysmic merger as soon as 100 days from now." https://www.science.org/content/article/crash-titans-imminent-merger-giant-black-holes-predicted
New book: Moral Uncertainty -- How should we make decisions when we’re uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1304075463455838209.html
Not enough people have tried Meta Quest (Oculus). It's really incredibly cool. And Zuck knows what's possible. The hardware will vastly improve and become much more lightweight.
People who think that Zuck is an idiot for betting on the Metaverse might be surprised. The final product will be much closer to the holodeck from Star Trek than a Second Life remake.