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Better and better Computers are being used to design computers. The better our computers and their tools get, the better computers and tools they can produce. But it wasn’t always an easy path. Today we look at the VAX9000. It used a system called “SID” to generate part of its design. SID was an expert …
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An experiment in fuzzy logic Computers use Boolean logic. Everything is true false, yes no, zero and one. There are plenty of situations when a simple yes or no won’t cover it. To get a computer to handle those situations, one can use fuzzy logic. Today, we have an informal experiment that shows why fuzzy …
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Socrates is not a woman Evolutionary approaches, genetic algorithms, and neural networks aren’t the only approaches to creating artificial intelligence. Today, we look at one of the early and rather successful approaches—expert systems.
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Take heart, yee robots shivering in the cold In the past, new methods of creating an artificial intelligence have garnered interest and enthusiasm. Then, when the over optimistic forecasts fail, nearly all funding and research grinds to a halt. It’s called an AI winter. Despite such setbacks, the general trend has been toward increasing ability …
Previous post in topic First post in topic Table of contents Adding by subtracting There won’t be posts after this one on this thing for a couple of weeks. I must navigate the dangerous, relative infested waters of the holidays. I need to be able to show that the way we program our machine can …
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The perceptron In 1957, Frank Rosenblatt came up with the perceptron. The perceptron is a simple neural network that was able to recognize simple shapes. Unfortunately, Rosenblatt got a little over excited, and made over inflated statements about what his perceptron would be able to do. After the 1969 publication of Marvin Minsky and Seymour …
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Tierra, bits bytes and life In the early 1990/s, a biologist named Thomas Ray created a computer program that acted like a computer infected with many little programs. He called it Tierra, Spanish for “Earth.” The little programs could, and did, mutate, self-replicate, and evolve in strange and wonderful ways. Here’s the home page for …
Previous post in topic Next post in topic First post in topic Table of contents There seems to be a tradeoff. On the one hand, you can have a complicated machine, and easy programming. On the other, you can have a simple machine, but the programming gets weird and obscure.