I’m about to archive the current state of this project as figures0.1. 0.0 was just far enough so that a program could reproduce itself, and add a slight mutation. This version has every last port implemented. That is, the little programs, or figures, can do everything I want them to be able to do. They …
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How to have a lucid dream Ask yourself, right now, “Am I dreaming?” Do you know how you got where you are? Does what’s around you and what you’re doing make sense? Do letters or numbers look right, or do the figures wriggle around and change while you’re watching? Does gravity work like it should, …
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Dreams and memory Do you remember your dreams? Everyone dreams, but not everyone regularly recalls them. If you wish to explore your dreamscape, you’ll need to remember what dreams may come. You could have the most inspirational, vivid, detailed dream imaginable, but if you can’t remember it, it doesn’t much matter. Today, we look at …
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Ride the nightmare If you have nightmares, and you wish to experiment with lucid dreaming, you’re rather lucky. It’s fairly easy to recognize nightmares while they are happening. It often happens to people spontaneously, even if they’ve never heard of lucid dreaming. It happened to me.
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A tale of two books, part 2 One of the things I’ve always had available for experiment is my own mind. Whether it’s mnemonics to improve my memory, or strange mental exercises to induce a lucid dream or an out of body experience, I’ve spent decades plumbing the depths of my internal ocean. Today, I …
When I started posting about this project, I just dove in. Eventually I’ll have to lay out exactly what I’m working on, and how I’m approaching the development of my artificial life forms. That will take some time. For now, have yet another post wherein I entirely fail to explain what’s going on. Over the …
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A tale of two books, part 1 After over 120 episodes, I thought it might be about time I introduce myself. So, today we have the story of how I fell in love with science. In this episode, I quote Walt Whitman’s poem “O Me! O Life!” with the line: “That the powerful play goes …
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Neural Turing machines Traditional programming methods are very good at solving problems that have simple rules to apply. They’re not so good when there are no simple rules that can be used, or when the rules are unknown. Neural networks are very good at problems that have complex or poorly defined rules, but not so …
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Long short-term memory In episode 117, I expressed some concern. It seemed that neural network implementations lacked a way of holding onto information over time. It turns out that the problem has been addressed by recurrent neural networks. Recurrent networks remember, though not very well. Today, we look at a modification of recurrent networks that …
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Robotic dreaming When you are awake, the world comes in at you through your senses. When you are asleep and dreaming, you create a world from within. An algorithm for deep learning, called “the wake sleep algorithm,” seems to capture this behavior. I referenced the previous episode in this one, so you may as well …