For a while I’ve been trying to figure out how to resolve the Fermi Paradox. For those of you who don’t know, the Paradox is, given what we know about life, the universe and everything, there should be a significant number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. The reasoning here boils down to the Drake equation (a Fermi problem), which lets us get a ballpark estimate of how many extraterrestrials are out there. From wikipedia:
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
I use Google Reader a lot, and recently a “popular item” showed up on my reading list regarding how to resist the temptations of Satan. I poked into it just enough to get bored and start scrolling through the article until I saw this image:
I don’t know why I named it “Tide Pool”; there aren’t any tides. Oddly enough though, the creatures learn to move as if there were.
Yesterday I decided to play with some genetic programming. Though I found a neat GP resource, I decided to work from scratch and build a simulated tide-pool with algae/plants and animals of indeterminate form. Truth be told, I’m not even sure what I did really “counts” as genetic programming because the only evolved feature is the behavior for the animals. Regardless, I wrote the thing in a single day and got some neat emergent behavior and a screen-saver-wannabe. Green dots are “plants” and yellow/white/red/black are “animals”.
Continuing my search for AGI I’ve been thinking about conscious and unconscious thought. Investigating these led me to explicit and implicit memory. This actually led me to the lecture by Eric Kandel (above), which goes into good detail the mechanisms by which animals learn. Read More
This blog comes straight from the middle of Kansas. The low rumble of the bus engine underscores the bleakness, as most other passengers on the bus are catching up on the sleep they were unable to get during the night. My mind is so active that I don’t easily become bored, but there’s something about this place that drives one to madness.
I was given How to Think About God by Mortimer J. Adler to read, but I find it very difficult to focus on the dry concepts while my eyes droop from fatigue. In the pages that I’ve read so far I’ve come across an interesting concept—that of a “supreme being.” Adler elaborates a bit on the concept by clarifying that a supreme being is one that is greater than any other, like the concept of infinity is greater than any number. As the author moves on from this to discuss things such as the existence or non-existence of such a being, I have trouble following because I fail to see the metric by which the greatness of a being is measured.
