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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.
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Core Wars In 1984, the game Core Wars was written and introduced to the public. Contestants write programs in a special language called redcode, and attempt to halt or overwrite the other programs in order to be the last game standing. Here’s a beginner’s guide to redcode The beginners’ guide to Redcode Here is a …
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Darwin, the game In the summer of 1961, a game was created. It was a programming game. Players would write programs that would compete against one another to try and copy themselves as often as possible, and attempt to deactivate the other programs. Here are a couple of links with more information on the game. …
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Meanwhile, elsewhere on the planet I wanted to do something special for episode 100. It snuck up on me, and I never figured out what to do. I decided to share a couple of other projects, outside of the podcast. One is a blog series I’m working on, about how computers compute. The other is …