Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
wrote: > I think it's the fact that they have never seen themselves, hence don't > recognize the image in the mirror. Which brings to mind the mirror scene in "Duck Soup" -- the funniest sequence ever filmed, in my opinion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTT-sy0aLg
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Sat, 17 Dec 2016 16:22:10 -0500: Hi, [snip] >Perhaps there is something about a reflection that throws off their >perception. Even cats attack themselves in the mirror, and they are a lot >smarter than birds. I think it's the fact that they have never seen themselves, hence don't recognize the image in the mirror. OTOH they have grown up with their family, and can easily distinguish them from outsiders. Even young humans only catch on that they are looking at a reflection when they notice that it mimics all their actions. BTW this is a reasonable Turing test for AI's. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 7:12 PM, Ron Wormus wrote: > Robins do this also. Nothing I have found can dissuade them from crashing > their reflection. I had one persist for over two weeks. While robins do cooperate while food-gathering, they and bluejays and the like do not seem to possess what e.g. all the social songbirds seem to share with Humans: a certain recognizable 'gregariousness'. We Humans appear to respond strongly to this capability. Crows/ravens appear to be in a whole other class of intelligence.
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
Robins do this also. Nothing I have found can dissuade them from crashing their reflection. I had one persist for over two weeks. --On Sunday, December 18, 2016 7:56 AM +1100 mix...@bigpond.com wrote: In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Fri, 16 Dec 2016 22:11:49 -0500: Hi, [snip] My point being, that barely qualifies as conscious. Not as I defined it: "Awareness of surroundings. Some ability to make choices . . ." It is more like a set of complicated hard-wired reactions. The cricket mistakes a plastic object for another cricket. Its perceptions and awareness of the surroundings are very crude, compared to a bird or mouse. Some birds are not much better. I had a little blue jay in mortal combat with his own reflection in the window during mating season. On the other side of glass I could sit with my face not six inches away from him and he still persisted. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
I wasn't aware of any definitions of consciousness that rule out animals. But watching enough animal videos on Reddit is sufficient to make one contemplate vegetarianism. Even less intelligent animals often seem playful or excited in ways very similar to humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cILZ_cB3_so https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f_CxV4eIrU Eric
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
Jed, I basically agree. I think many animals including most mammals and birds are conscious, but there is a wide range of intelligence. I am baffled by the mysterious, esoteric properties of consciousness that academics often apply to it, ruling out all animals. AA On 12/16/2016 5:32 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote: a.ashfield mailto:a.ashfi...@verizon.net>> wrote: I think it follows we will have a "conscious" computer even earlier than Kurzweil forecasts. I think there are various levels of intelligence. Roughly speaking here are three points on the spectrum: 1. Thinking. You can make a case that even guppies and earthworms do this. 2. Conscious. Awareness of surroundings. Some ability to make choices, rather than purely instinct driving, hard-wired brain functions. I expect that mice are conscious. In this article it was estimated that present-day artificial intelligence computers have roughly as many virtual synapses as a mouse brain has. 3. Sentient, or self-aware. At the lowest level, this means knowing that you are an animal and an object in the real world. There is no doubt that apes and other intelligent creatures have this. At the zoo in Boston, when you take a picture of a chimpanzee with a digital camera, it will pose and then demand to see the back of your camera. Especially males do this, according to my daughter, who is studying biology. My guess is that computers are somewhere between 1 and 2. They have probably not achieved 2 because people who design computers are not trying to achieve this at present. Perhaps consciousness will emerge on its own as a meta-phenomenon. There are an infinite number of steps between each level. There are various mental achievements. For example, male crickets are capable of fighting for domination, which is sophisticated behavior. It is impressive for such a small brain. Surely, this is a form of thinking, even if it is mainly instinct driven. Unfortunately for the crickets, they cannot tell one another apart, and they cannot tell the difference between a cricket and a plastic model of one. So, naturalists who wanted to give a male cricket an inferiority complex engaged in ritual combat with him using a plastic model of a cricket. They did this over and over again with the same plastic model. The poor guy-cricket did not realize he was fighting the same dummy cricket every time. Apparently this sapped his male hormone supply, a.k.a. precious bodily fluids. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
wrote: > Some birds are not much better. I had a little blue jay in mortal combat > with > his own reflection in the window during mating season. A crow used to wake me up in the morning fighting its own reflection. Yet birds can distinguish other individual birds. It has been shown that chickens recognize hundreds of other individuals. Perhaps there is something about a reflection that throws off their perception. Even cats attack themselves in the mirror, and they are a lot smarter than birds. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
In reply to mix...@bigpond.com's message of Sun, 18 Dec 2016 07:56:51 +1100: Hi, I think I may have inadvertently given blue jays a bad name. What I saw was probably a bluebird, not a blue jay. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
Re: [Vo]:Article about Artificial Intelligence in NYT
In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Fri, 16 Dec 2016 22:11:49 -0500: Hi, [snip] >My point being, that barely qualifies as conscious. Not as I defined it: >"Awareness of surroundings. Some ability to make choices . . ." It is more >like a set of complicated hard-wired reactions. The cricket mistakes a plastic >object for another cricket. Its perceptions and awareness of the surroundings >are very crude, compared to a bird or mouse. Some birds are not much better. I had a little blue jay in mortal combat with his own reflection in the window during mating season. On the other side of glass I could sit with my face not six inches away from him and he still persisted. Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/project.html
[Vo]:Extending the list of LENR Miracles with help
http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2016/12/dec-17-2016-extending-list-of-lenr.html Peter Dr. Peter Gluck Cluj, Romania http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com
[Vo]:"Pressure Hydrometallurgy" of nickel refining
The missing detail from the international effort to validate nickel-hydrogen as an anomalous heat source remains a mystery after 26 years. The positive reports of gain cannot be ignored, but something major is absent from the knowledge base which can explain the mixed results. As of now, the best scientific evidence for the thermal anomaly goes all the way back to Thermacore Inc. in the mid nineties, including one notable runaway reaction. Rossi may have had something valid at one time, but he lost the magic and has not been able to reproduce his own gain. His major backer wants their $11 million investment back. Randell Mills, despite his protestations, has not allowed truly independent replication and continues to stage deceptive PR events with a tin cup as the main feature. Plus, BLP no longer uses nickel. Parkhomov recently reports gain that is barely above noise. At least 8 replication attempts of Parkhomov have scarcely shown anything out of the noise level. A few Russian, Italian and Chinese attempts look intriguing at first glance, and are begging for replication but are not yet reproducible even by the original proponents. The Italians, notably, have gone silent. The following is an effort to identify and characterize the identity of what may be required for reliable replication, and it goes back to basics - to the active nickel reactant itself. Prior to recently, the key was thought to be the nanostructure of nickel powder ... but the long list of partial successes (or failures) with nanostructured nickel have shown that physical structure alone is not enough. Nanostructure can possibly help, but it is almost useless without the more important detail. The new key finding which is suggested below was found by going back two decades to Thermacore and talking to remaining personnel, which Brian Ahern has done. It turns out that they did one thing differently twenty years ago - which was to use a variety of nickel from an Alberta mine and refining process. This is called Sherritt-Gordon nickel and the mine has been closed, since the nickel deposit was finally depleted after 60 years. The specific operative detail of nickel from this source appears to be the impregnation of the nickel with dense hydrogen during manufacture. This can be done in several ways, but in the Sherritt-Gordon process, it requires the leaching of nickel ore using hydrogen in an autoclave under heat and pressure. This method is called "pressure hydrometallurgy". The identification problem we face in LENR - is that dense hydrogen (aka UDH, DDL, or hydrino), whether it be defined by Holmlid, Mills or Dirac or as the magic "neutron" of W-L, does not turn up in an assay of nickel. Thus, the best way to learn whether the nickel has been activated by a population of dense hydrogen is to look at the method of manufacture, or in some cases the method of pretreatment of the nickel in the lab (for many days or weeks). Normal hydrogen would be released from molten metal during the process of manufacture and typically comes off as steam, having reduced the metal oxide -- but in the S-G process, a fraction of the hydrogen used has apparently become densified... and the UDH material will not be released as a gas. Instead, it can make the nickel from this process appear to vary in density from the normal 8902 kg/m^3. The Sherritt-Gordon method of manufacture seems to impregnate nickel from its point of origin at the refinery by reducing nickel ore using hydrogen instead of carbon. This is seldom done in mining, because carbon is cheap while hydrogen, even if made from a local supply of natural gas, is more expensive. Processing in an autoclave under pressure is also more expensive. This method is the subject of about 45 patents which go back 50 years to one metallurgist named Vladimir Nicolaus Mackiw of Fort Saskatchewan,Canada chief metallurgist of the Sherritt Gordon company. The process was favored primarily because the ore also contained cobalt, which is both valuable and can be separated by pressure hydrometallurgy but not by coal-based extraction. Some of the story can be found in "A History of Sherritt – Fifty Years of Pressure Hydrometallurgy at Fort Saskatchewan" – by M. E. Chalkley but the company itself appears to be unaware of the the dense hydrogen connection - if in fact this explanation is valid. The one way to know whether the "pressure hydrometallurgy" explanation is valid or not is to reproduce the Thermacore runaway. It is a bit of a surprise to realize that this obvious tactic has not been undertaken in the past 20 years. Of course, runaway reactions are not favored for obvious reasons, but perhaps that will change. Hopefully, thanks to the efforts of Brian Ahern, we should know the answer early in 2017. Stay tuned.
