HackingTheUniverse

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In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig decided to offer their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course at Stanford in an online delivery and free. Responding to an email invitation that went viral in the blogosphere, over 160,000 students registered to take the course, although many of them dropped their participation early. The [...]

We use a variety of terms to qualify what we consider to be intelligent life: intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, higher consciousness. There seem to be two primary ingredients common to most of the definitions of intelligent life and those are: Intelligence as some level of analytical reasoning ability and perhaps also the experience or knowledge necessary [...]

Artificial intelligence today is mostly a branch of computer science that attempts to create agents that collect and analyze sensory input in order to make reasoning decisions about actions to take based on the decisions. -0940 – King Mu of Zhou (Chinese mythology/history) – an engineer named Yan Shi gave King Mu a mechanical human [...]

The Ants – AI Challenge allows contestants to create small programs that control a group of ants that are in competition with other groups of ants. You can control how the ants explore the map, avoid collisions, gather food, spawn and attack enemies. Once you have a strategy encoded, your ant colony can compete against [...]

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence – [ai-class.com] A bold experiment in distributed education, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” will be offered free and online to students worldwide during the fall of 2011. The course will include feedback on progress and a statement of accomplishment. Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the curriculum draws from that used [...]

Alan Turing was born in London, England in 1912 and was a mathematician and one of the first computer scientists. He did work on probability theory, number theory and cryptography, but is best known for creating the concept of a computer, which became called, the “Turing Machine”. While Babbage had designed a mechanical “analytical engine”, [...]

The debate rages about whether or not Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be friendly to humans. Some think that AI will, by it’s nature, be friendly to us and others disagree, afraid that it could be malevolent and aggressive, threatening to wipe out humanity. Preceding widespread discussion of AI, the same kind of debate was held [...]

We already have many simple robots that function quite well with small knowledge sets. We also have more complex robots that require much larger sets of knowledge to function in the desirable fashion. Now we are starting to see the growth of robots of all types that can access the “cloud” for their knowledge. This [...]

Started by Doug Lenat in 1984, the CYC project (short for enCYClopedia) attempts to codify human common sense knowledge into a vast knowledge base. The idea is that an AI inference engine will be able to use access to the knowledge to perform human-like reasoning. OpenCyc is an open source version of the technology that [...]

Anna Salamon presents an idea that an increase in intelligence will dwindle our accident rate toward a vanishing point. She defines accidents as unexpected, unwanted, or undefined properties that are “bundled” with desired properties that are the consequence of some engineering or other effort. We design, engineer, manufacture and operate automobiles in order to obtain [...]