About Choice of Profession and the Role of Interest in It
March 23rd, 2010
As I already wrote I gained a lot of knew experiences the last days during the IK. Especially with regard to making the decision for a Master program. During all the thoughts about what I want to do later I came to an insight that I have not seen in any advising text.
To the topHow arises intelligent behavior?
February 19th, 2010
I believe that there is no easy answer to this question. Rather I suppose that intelligent behavior emerges from many simple, modular processes.
I just wrote my current model of intelligence down. “current”, because I evolve it continuously and adept it to newly gained knowledge. Even if I have some basic knowledge of artificial intelligence; I may not have the deepest knowledge of theories of mind, yet. Therefore I do not claim that my model has to be correct. However, it might be thought-provoking impulse. Particularly because I try to show the totality instead of grabbing one exact area and saying that this all what there is to intelligence.
Why We Enjoy Music
August 10th, 2009
Some time ago I read “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins. In this book he presents his hypothesis that the human intelligence is based mainly on prediction, to put it in a nutshell. Building on this I developed an explanation approach for the question why we enjoy music.
Some Questions
June 17th, 2009
There are some questions which are on the one hand very interesting in my opinion and which on the other hand would bring us a big step forward in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, if we can answer them. However, it won’t be easy to find. Especially because these are partly the main questions in this area of science. Here is the list:
- Is it possible to find a connection between the outer (physical) and the inner (felt) states? In other words this is the question how consciouness and sensation arise.
- Is it possible to find a good, comprehensive definition for the term “intelligence”? (One which does not say intelligence is what an IQ test measures.) What are the key features of “intelligence”?
- Is consciousness for “intelligence” necessary, adequate or total independet of that.
- How does abstraction work? Is it possible to find a general abstraction algorithm?
- Are there general principles below emergence? Are there possibilities to understand emergence better?
- Is it possible to find universal intelligence tests which are independent of culture? Even better would it to find a test which is independet of our special senses and which is an alternative to the Turing test. Is it possible to create an abstraction test (or may be someone has done this before)?
Pi as Music
June 4th, 2009
Some weeks ago I had the idea to write a program which uses the decimal places of Pi to generate music. You would get an endless music which never repeats. This would be in some kind random, but also completely dertemined. However, someone has already done a program like this and also added a nice graphical interface: PI10K on avoision.com
Meta Programming
May 17th, 2009
The programming language C includes a so called preprocessor. With this you can make (halfway complex) replacements in the code before it gets compiled. A short while ago I asked myself what would happen if you continue this principle, so that you can do replacements in the preprocessor code and in the code for these replacements also and so on. You may think of it as a king selfreferencing programming language, that is possible to do any number of replacement cycles in the source code before the compilation.
This is a somewhat fascinating thougt to me. Anyways, there are probably only a few very special cases in which this will be of any use. Even then you might need only two or three replacement cycles. Moreover, every thing else might get to complex to understand.
About Strong AI
May 10th, 2009
Is strong AI possible? This is probably one of the most interesting questions of our age. I want to discuss this question in the following post, but first I should describe what is meant by “strong AI”:
On Intelligence
December 27th, 2008
I’ve found an interesting video. In the 20 minutes this video lasts Jeff Hawkins presents his theory of intelligence, which is very interesting in my opinion. I think, Jeff Hawkins might have discovered one very important piece in the puzzle of understanding the human brain.
If you are interested further in this topic you may want to read the book “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins. I did not do this, yet, but I will surely do so in the future. There is also a website belonging to this book: www.onintelligence.org
Safe Distance
November 3rd, 2008
Is there any reason why the safe distance is wider in the front than in the back?