Madness In My Method

Childcare shortage in Japan is simply a matter of being able to drone on and on.

Good to know, in the last paragraph, that they're already looking at how to turn the data collected into marketing strategies.

Searching Google for "AI school Texas" gets me into the world of artificial insemination, particularly bovine insemination. This is Texas, after all. We like our brisket more than the thought of building our future overlords.

Searching for "artificial intelligence school Texas" still gives me "2017 Statewide Artificial Insemination and Pregnancy Determination ..." as the second listing.

The beef hold is strong in Texas.

Take that as you like.

Me? I prefer medium rare.

Let's talk noise.

I've been wracking my brain for the past few months wondering how to find patterns within noise. This, for AI programming, is probably one of the most difficult questions I've pondered without ever having actually programmed a computer to detect patterns. I wanted to see how much of it I could reason out in my mind through introspection before attempting the pattern recognition studies I'd like to pursue.

I kept imagining ongoing sets of noise inputs and wondering what separates those inputs from an input that has, what we as adult humans would call, some form of structure (read: pattern) that could be detected. How is one still image of "noise" different from a still image of "a pattern"? How do our eyes look out upon a visual field and not just constantly see various degrees of noise?

Yeah, yeah. I'm quite aware that studying things like Bayes' formulas will shed light on things, but again, my goal was to be able to reason it out BEFORE actually looking into how some programmers and mathematicians have already figured it out.

With all that being said, I'm not one bit closer to my answer. However, this little experiment seems to be giving me better insight into my dilemma. I've always been curious about the fusiform gyrus and its role in prosopagnosia, the inability to detect/recognize faces. A person with prosopagnosia will only see an apple, eggs, olives, a tomato, and (...what is that?...red spaghetti?), while the rest of us will see Kermit the Frog and Animal. (Looking at such images, I really like this one for some reason - I think because of its bold colors - and Wow, that's impressive.

The thing is, a person with prosopagnosia doesn't have the face template to then make comparisons (or so, that's how we think of the disorder so far), much like how none of the 7,000+ noise images don't have at least something resembling a face image in them to then provide a basis of comparison. That seems a bit ass-backwards, doesn't it? But the truth is, we have evolved to detect patterns because the world already has patterns in it. To understand pattern recognition at a very base level, you'd have to go back to when we were still nothing more than single-cell organisms not seeing patterns and then understanding how we developed from that point forward. The patterns are what drove our DNA engineering, not the other way around.

(Thanks, lolotehe, for the article.)

I'm currently listening to Proust was a Neuroscientist.

The concepts in it are fascinating, but going into chapter four I started feeling odd about the book, without being able to place it. This is funny in my view, because if there's one thing I have learned from neuroscience and cognitive psychology it's how our subconscious minds will perceive things prior to our rational, conscious mind being able to explain them. (reference the Wisconsin Card Sorting cognitive test)

To be fair, this is in stark contrast to when I first sat down to read Dianetics (prior to ever hearing any "news" about the book or Scientology as a whole, so I was completely untainted by bias when I read it), in which by the second chapter I was boiling over trying to figure out what the hell kind of dribble I was reading. I continued reading it to the end out of morbid fascination to see exactly how horrible it was going to get.

It would appear my underlying suspicions regarding Proust was a Neuroscientist have already been proven to have merit.

One thing I like about that review versus this review is that the first review is pointing out factual idiosyncrasies versus putting fourth a simple opinion. Granted, I think they both point to the odd feeling about the book I was getting.

I still think it's a good read, because it is forcing me to look outside of science alone in wanting to uncover the secrets of thought. I'll just be sure to read it with that little grain of salt in my head.

On a separate note, I can't stand the way the reader, Dan John Miller, is reading this audiobook. At least it's still a narrator rather than the computer reading it to me, but I do wonder if I wouldn't have been better off with a monotonous computer voice rather than this narrator. It's very grating to me.

I finished listening to Speaker for the Dead, the sequel to Ender's Game.

( Thoughts )

This test seemed ridiculously easy to me.

Much the same as the spatial reasoning section of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills that I took back in junior high (~age 15).

There was one question that had pictures of objects. I recall being able to make out a screwdriver and a thing I first thought was a spoon but then later decided was a shovel. With that I deduced the top image must be a saw, but the second and third images eluded me, so I pretended the second was a pen and the third I gave up on completely. I had to guess for that question. I didn't like that I had to guess on one of the questions.

It struck me as odd that the bell curve chart presented with the final score only goes to 145, but the test scores up to 160.

I was also annoyed by the lack of a comma in the first sentence of the main page before starting the test and a couple typos I found in the test. It reminds me of the "Apptitude Test" I have an ancient copy of that basically contains logical riddles, such as:

"Some months have 30 days and some have 31. How many have 28?"
"You're in a house with four south-facing walls when a bear walks by the window. What color is the bear?" (A more correct question would be, "What color does the bear's fur appear to be?")
"Do they have 4th of July in England?" (Obviously, this test was written for Americans.)

The last question of the test is, "What word is misspelled on this test?"

Knowing how Cleverbot works, having the Cleverbot app really is no different than talking to millions of other people in person.

If you're going to have such conversations, you might as well post to Facebook.

I don't see any difference.

I'm done for. Find me in a few hours still surfing the Tube.

Vsauce


( Video 1 remarks )



It's the last thing that I like the best.