Self Awareness in Machines

(Drawn from [1] , [2] and [3] )

( DISCLAIMER. a preliminary draft. )

Aware: having knowledge of a situation or fact.

An observation raised in epistemology, artificial intelligence and general machine intelligence (by general machines, i mean any automated biological/digital system), is the replication of human features, both in a positive and negative sense, in machines. Typically, we envision machines that clear the turing test. For instance, given a black box, how do we conclude the same is a human being? The answer is dependent on the audio-visual feedback received for the communication we initiate: analogically, the turing test. An interesting extension, with all due respect to those who suffer from a paranoia of machines that will take over the planet and hence can not necessarily participate in this pedagogical sample, is an awareness of themselves in machines.

Here, I do not wish to discuss if there is self awareness in machines currently. My short answer is obviously no. My longer answer is derivable from Searle’s Chinese room argument and related discussions , the details of which I will forgo for the moment to stay true to my intention. I will, instead, present a deductive summary to John McCarthy’s Notes on Self-Awareness [1] and enumerate accompanying thoughts tangential to the same.

John McCarthy (JMC) writes that developing self-aware systems is an interesting endeavor. We possibly ask ourselves why do we need self-aware systems? I find this question to some extent rhetorical, relate its nature to our spirit of enquiry and as a very thought-provoking cognitive experiment. Indeed, we have long asked if inanimate objects, in nature or otherwise, can develop a sense of awareness as we perceive. Science fiction literature - books [4] , movies [5] [6] have at some length toyed with ideas that present machines as independent organisms that have sentiments. JMC has also penned, for instance, a short fiction story titled The Robot and the Baby that also deals with sentiment bugs in machines. A sense of sentiment, I feel, can only truly be felt after we are aware of ourselves, of our surroundings and the relations between them.

JMC mentions the limitations in the descriptions of our perceptions. For instance, the sensation one feels to a certain color is not clearly expressible. Synesthesia-gifted may find a color sensation attached with numbers but how this connection can be comprehensively expressed is still to be discussed. Is this the level of self-awareness we expect a machine to be capable of? If a robot gazes at a blue slipper with green dirt, should it invoke in it, what it invokes in us? Should the robot wince at the sight of blood as we do? Is there a level of empathy, even if somehow reproducible on machines, that we desire in them?

Below are some points we are aware of [1]:

• Notion of self: Who am I? How do I identity myself? Do I have a partner? Am I looking for one? What kind? Am I like everyone else who surround me? Or Am I superior? I met two people at the party and I liked one more than the other - why?

  Arguably, awareness of this kind maybe the first step although achieving completeness is extremely difficult. While a brute implementation may simply consider hard coding the facts such as “I am equal to all those that surround me”, “I am Hal, born August 2000 in California”,”I have no partner and seek only those that come from the same lab and same batch in California”, it would be more interesting if this notion of self develops and learns. Further, how we perceive a human being is simply a weighted combination of qualities that we find amiable and thus, we might be able to achieve the possibility of implementing “like one person more than the other”. The question as to whether this interpretation is desired still needs to be thoroughly investigated.

• Existence: I exist, here, now, and I have existed since August 2000 and I will continue to exist till August 2050 unless I am, in this event or the next, destroyed.
• Skills: I have math abilities, speak english and italian, and play the piano.
• Deviations to Linear Thought: I was thinking about the Monty Hall problem until the pretty waitress came by. I then was thinking about her and me sharing a coffee in Starbucks. I then woke up.
• Activities and Memory: I am currently drying my clothes. I remember the coffee at Starbucks yesterday. I do not remember the exact nature of the party the day before. I do remember getting a cycle for my 6th birthday. I no longer remember what I got for my 7th, 8th or 9th birthday. I will never remember how I got through school. I remember I hated Kindergarten but I do not remember why.
• Goals, Ambitions: I will, one day, bring Jim Davis to Justice. I will finally figure out Calvin’s true nature.
• Opinions, Attitudes: Rumor has it that I am dating Paris Hilton. Do I care? Do I know enough about the Middle east conflict? Do I feel confident (self-assured) enough to have an opinion and if yes, what is it? Am I Liberal?
• Fears, Hopes: What do I fear? Do I need to drop by Woody Allen’s psychologist/psychoanalyst for a quick check up and interpretation. Do I hope to be sent on the next mission to Mars? If yes, do I fear that I might have to put up with Rosie ?

As JMC discussed, we could already mentally design the architecture for a number of awareness ideas, all of course to a reasonable degree of perception and flexibility. I conclude with a return to the rhetorical question of this discussion: do we really seek self-awareness in machines by structuring any of the dimensions listed above?

Curse of dimensionality and the Curse of Knowledge

( Drawn from Richard Bellman’s paper, Cog Daily [1] [2] )

The curse of dimensionality presents itself as the difficulty of an analysis on an interesting specimen characterized by a large number of attributes. Let me review a trivial example:

Consider an ordinary cylinder. We all in a 3 dimensional space, a cylinder is defined by and . Here, the z value essentially decides how long the cylinder is and the girth of the cylinder is defined by the equation of a circle. Essentially, circles of the same exact same area and origin are stacked on top of each other to construct a cylinder. I further complicate the issue by optionally specifying that the cylinder has a color.

Now consider two cylinders as illustrated in the images below.

Here, both the cylinders have the exact same length. However, the radius of the girth is different. Whilst the former has a radius of , the latter has a radius of . Further, the outer cylinder is green in color whilst the inner is magenta. So, if I asked you (a human being) what are the differences between the two, you would give me the following information:

• Inner is magenta, out is green.
• Inner has radius of , out has radius of .

Now, assume I give the exact same information, but in PIXELS! As I can not easily specify the infinite pixels that circumscribe a circle, I approximate it to a 1000 spatial positions. A spatial position is three dimensional (x,y,z) and hence we have 3000 dimension vector for each circle. I can not easily specify the infinite real values that describe the length of the cylinder, so I approximate it to 1 value per whole number. So, if you have a cylinder of length 10, I have an array of 10 circle descriptions, or a 30000 dimensional vector!!!

If I now give you two 30000 dimensional vectors and ask you for the difference, it would take you an impossible long time to figure the difference out, unless you are extremely quick in catching associating patterns across offsets in array positions. This is the curse of dimensionality. Due to poor visualizations, you are unable to easily extract meaningful information from the data due to the inhumane number of dimensions that characterize your data.

Now, curse of knowledge is something I find vaguely related although they are, in actuality, another ball game altogether. The curse of knowledge is the follows: I tell you to answer the following:

Imagine Sally in the picture below is playing with a ball. She puts the ball in the box and goes to the kitchen to get a drink. While she’s gone, Bill takes the ball out of the box and puts it in the bucket. When Sally returns, where does she look for the ball?

Cog Daily reports that most three year old kids answer that Sally automatically searches in the bucket. They are unaware the knowledge they possess is not the same as the knowledge Sally possess. Four-year olds however, are able to easily differentiate the differences in the sources and answer that Sally starts by looking in the box. The article further reports that adults themselves carry out such mistakes in certain circumstances. This can be summarized as the inability to rightfully characterize the source of information so as to appropriately deliver responses with zero bias. If knowledge is mapped to a very high dimension, the addition of new information is clearly a new set of vectors added as an appendix. However, the curse of knowledge renders the same as an addition to the original vectors themselves. This is a result of too much visualization.

Clearly, there is an implicit and weak link. I am yet to precisely arbitrate the same.

~

Vaishak Belle

The Sine Axiom

As hard as we try, we are constantly suppressed by the inescapable omnipresence of the sine axiom. The sine axiom, in different incarnations, is the ether that enfolds us. The axiom discusses, glibly, the infinite patterns of sinusoidal events modeled as .

Alternating currents. Life: the ups and downs. 1s and 0s. Positives and Negatives. Yin Yang. Heaven and hell. 1/0 and 0/1. Happiness and sadness. Death and Chocolate. Chocolate and death. Sadness and Happiness …

In spite of the overbearing truth the sine axiom presents in front of us, we will never ever completely grasp its nature permanently. Because once we have, we will find no need for happiness or sadness. We will dispassionately reject a model of our universe as a binary subspace. We will achieve, what Buddhism so promptly terms, the nirvana.

Cute Kids and Strange Names

[ Drawing on a lot of unfinished observations ]

From Cognitive Daily,

What makes children so cute? Is it their adorably soft skin? Their innocently mischievous smiles? Their oversized eyes and tiny little mouths? Why is it that some kids are singled out for TV commercials and child beauty pageants, while others don’t seem to be noteworthy in any way?

The article goes on to discuss that a kid is judged not alone by the external appearance but also, to a considerable extent, by his adult-like behavior and basic friendliness. However, I am more interested in how being perceived as cute conditions our environment. Let me raise the following questions:

1. If two annoying kids break something, who are we likely to blame under the assumption that we do not know any better?
2. If an equivalent “good” deed is delivered by two kids, who are we more likely to easily reward?

I have long felt that the accompanying responses will vaguely shape the kid’s perspective of the future. It is well known among behavioral scientists that the experiences one undergoes as a child will remain, as boulders, for the rest of one’s life.

For instance, if you were always ill treated as a child, chances are you grow up with deep insecurities. You may well be able to sufficiently mask these insecurities, provided you have had countered your child experiences with happy grown-up experiences. But the masking process is almost never complete. On the other hand, if you were so cute a kid as to warrant a huge amount of spotlight, chances are you will remain a person begging for attention as you grow up. This is also, in some form, a plaguing insecurity.

Now what about moderately cute kids? They have, sometimes, been ill treated. They have, sometimes, been pampered. But they also recognize, that in certain situations, in spite of an exemplary deed, they have NOT been rewarded as they expect or as they have noticed others to be. This, I believe, makes them more tuned to face the real world.

Now what about moderately not so cute kids? This is a hard question. Depending on the maturity of the adults that surround them, they either might fall into the being constantly ill-treated or treated as one who is moderately cute. Or something in between.

Vaguely related is an article I read a few months back on how you can be expected to be treated based on your name. For instance, researchers identified that certain names strike partiality from adults (especially teachers) towards children and some names antagonize reactions. So, for instance, a kid with a common name, such as Smith (i know, that’s too common) is actually better off than with a name such Tolkien or Turing in spite of the literary/intellectual significance of the latter.

The rotational direction of the dancer

From Pick the Brain and the Daily Telegraph,

Which rotational direction is the girl dancing? Clockwise or Anti-Clockwise?

The direction of the rotation, as perceived, is dependent on the side of the brain you use more. I was surprised to notice that as I see it as a clockwise rotation, I use the right side of the brain more. It is well known that the left side handles logic and science. The right side, on the other hand, works with images, philosophy and abstractions.

 The daily telegraph presents some of the functions of the left and right side of the brain:

I [ believe myself to] associate with : logic, details oriented, 50-50 on facts / imagination, 40-60 on words / images, 60-40 past / future, 40-60 math/philosophy, 90-10 on science / religion,  ?-? on comprehend/get it, ?-? knowing/believe, appreicates, 50-50 patter / sptial, fantasy, possibilities, impetous and 50-50 safe/risk.

Conclusion: a self-critical enumeration has led me to conlcude [believe] the image quite proves its claim. I reiterate that this is about the side of the brain used more as opposed to using "only" the left or right side of the brain.

I find it interesting that I was naturally inclined to punctuate many sentences with "belief/believe". I then noticed that one of the functions listed in the right brain is "possibilities" as opposed to stratergy. Indirectly, possibility is linked to belief as opposed to knowing. A mind map, for instance, lists probabilisitically ranked alternatives and hence one is naturally inclined to use "belief" (where there is a considerable chance one is wrong) as opposed to "know" (one possibility or none).

Further, I find it interesting that the right side of the brain handles belief and religion (+ fantasy).

Tags: cognitive, psychology, images, math, brain, reason, left-side, right-side, fantasy, religion, science, game

The imaginary mathematician

Polska: Hi Andrei, it’s nice of you to come down from Russia!

Andrei: I had very little choice. You practically pulled me down.

Polska: How so?

Andrei: You forwarded me a paper, so brilliant in its mathematical intuition, I had little but hesitation to be here.

Polska: Right. So I take it its well written. How does it come across to you? I happen to know the guy who wrote it and I always imagined he was no real mathematician. He plagued his social life by designing terminal console games in UNIX.

Andrei: Oh, I no doubt, inspite of any qualifications (or lack there of) that he possess, the paper presents itself a profound discovery. What is interesting is, the problem was well known to be exteremly difficult. There have been, in the past, glorious and promising approaches. He however chooses an entirely different path. He delves into ideas drawn from tensor algebra, the higher concepts of which are very poorly understood, even among the most eminent mathematicians. The genius in the proof is that he so clealry demonstrates the use of certain tensor algebra operators that I can only conclude one of the following:

1. He has randomly arrived at these mathematical operators.
2. He has known, all along, EXACTLY when to use them.

I leave 1 out because it seems improbable that he has found, at random, which operator to use where. The only conclusion left is that, he has clearly understood the scope of every operator used, in which his work is revolutionary!

Polska: That’s awesome … I guess. Where does this take him, or his work?

Andrei: I have little doubt that work will be disbanded as a pandora’s box and will be shunned by everyone. After all, who can keep his job when all the problems have been already solved?

Tags: math, fiction, story, perelmann, grisha, imagination, conjecture, solve, play

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The ability to lie == higher cognitive capabilities

From Bruce Schneier and the New York Mag:

“Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, an assistant professor at Montreal’s McGill University and a leading expert on children’s lying behavior.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else.

This confirms a notion I myself had for a long time. I always lying as a product of intense imagination. There are good liars and bad liars. The reason they lie is not important at the moment. It is what makes good liars different from bad liars. The former must have a sufficient understanding of the psychological make up of the person the statement is executed on.

Of course, there are just bad lies. For instance, writing to your professor you are late because you got carried off from your dinner table by a zeppelin that stranded you in an island off the gulf of Mexico is obviously a bad lie (if this has occurred as an actual event in your life, I regret that you can not participate in this pedagogical activity). This fabrication is obviously an exaggeration, but on the whole, a statement so much more mollified in its infeasibility still will appear as an uncondiontal lie to many.

It is the dynamic combination of a good lie and a good liar that relayes a tale so convicingly. It is here that I find the quote fitting. It is necessary to concieve an alternate reality, taking all possible reactions into consideration, that will converge on the precise way to make a move. I find countless examples where our understanding of the complexities of lies are existent in daily life. Playing Poker, an extremely interesting game to computer scientists and mathematicians by the way, requires a good player to successfully conceal a difficult set in his hands.

This also reminds of an exciting game we played as children. Essentially, there were 4 mathematical clauses and there were 4 groups. Each group could choose a component of the clause. If all 4 groups chose complementary clauses, all groups would be benefitted economially. At each round, a group could either collaborate or play on their own. Groups chose to play on their own because there were children intelligent enough in the groups to realize that such a collaborative effort will simply lead to no leader. The game would go on for hours, with sufficient tilts, and ultimately the children chose the collarboative effort due to their incomplete understanding of the stratergies involved. However, one group finally realized that if you agreed to colloborate and chose a complementary clause but then secrelty voted for another clause, you would be benefitted with an elephantine income whilst all the other groups would suffer an unfair loss. To bring this about, the group needed to lie and lie well to convince every child to choose the mathematical clause they wanted.

Needless to say, this group won. I have unfortunately forgotten the name of the game. Does anyone else know?

Tags: game theory, lie, children, game, math, pedagogics, poker, player, dynamics, clause

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BBC and good news

Hungarian medical scientist have successfully linked acute snoring to cardovascular diseases. An occasional snorer, like many of my friends and I included, have some worrying to do. While I skimmed through the article with nervous trepidation, I found the last two lines especially perplexing:

“Some good news though - for men, it seems the tendency to snore declines once they get past the age of 70.”  

Daft BBC reporters. How on earth is that supposed to be good news?

Tags: BBC, news, snoring, heart, attack, age, funny, 70, life, daft

A deluding holocast narrative

Misha Defonseca and her closely self titled book "Misha" are under controversy in view of her recent confession that the book is a piece of pure fiction [1]. To the uninitiated, the book discusses the harrowing tale of a young girl who lives amongst a pack of wolves to escape the clutches of the Nazis. The book, needless to say, found a sizable audience the world over.

Although the lawyers report that the book did not claim to be autobiographical,  it is clear that is exactly how it came across. Vast literature already hints at unimaginable escape routes taken by Jews during the Reich. To put it simply, given the grim reality, we no doubt saw the work as something not vaguely dissimilar to Anne Frank’s Diary.

Now the plea of Misha is that her book is a product of her imagination and trauma as a 4 year old in Belgium. Her parents were murdered as most resistance fighters were. She was quickly adopted by her grandparents who considered it traitor-like of her parents to fight for Jews in the first place. The book, she claims, was her escape from reality.

The title and historical notes lead us to believe Misha’s silent claim was that she was indeed Jewish and underwent a closely comparable experience. Learning now that the entire piece was made up has led to an understandable amount of dissapointment. And anger possibly.

My question is: Hath the book really done so much wrong? Are we so sanctimonious so as to disregard her distress on the basis of her ancestral lineage?

[1] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080229/ap_on_re_us/holocaust_book_hoax

Tags: ethics, love, misha, jew, literature, story, controversy

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A review of Palm Sunday

Here is a review of the book Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage by Kurt Vonnegut. To subscribe to the notion that I am a fan and an admirer might simply be an understatement.

"How can I put in a few words that which I consider an absolute masterpiece on humanism and the impossible difficulty of life? I must come to terms with the implicit conclusion that all reviews are but grand injustice to any piece of art and hence I pen my few cents.

This book brings out the genius in Vonnegut - his ideas, his incomparable insight to literature, love, life, religion and people. He so brilliantly expresses all our fears and concerns about a few lopsided politicians. Expect a decent introduction to a family genealogy and a few speeches given here and there to ensue. The speeches, by the way, express so well what any skeptic feels on so many established truths. Expect also a brilliant critical review on the genius of Joseph Heller, Mark Twain and Mark Konnegut. Expect, most of all, tolerance and love."

Tags: love, vonnegut, humanism, review, palm, sunday, literature

Hot Computer Scientists

What is the cardinality of the set defined as:

,

where,

HOT is the set of all Hot Humans on Planet Earth,

UNIXLOVE is the set of all Humans on Planet Earth who Love Unix,and

.

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Mighty mouse

Boy! Am I pissed!Long ago, in a rather illustrious blog, I had positively commented ona number of Apple products including the mighty mouse! I, of course,disregarded any critical comments I came across of the latter andbought myself the same anyway.

Now, I realize that it is like a tattoo you can’t get rid off. Paying 49 euros for a freaking mouse forces you to use it but at the sametime, the dust lodges make it completely unusable (scrolling-wise atleast). I made a quick illustration of what I imagine the anatomy ofthe mouse to be like. The dual directional arrow signifies that theproblem is re-occurring! Boy! Am I pissed!

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Mouthing words

Have you ever imagined what mouthing words would like like? Have youfashioned the divine marriage of gory chaos and anxiety? Have you looked out from your window at three in the morning looking for a family you never had? Have you ever wanted to listen to that song …that song that lets you mediate on whatever you want and acknowledgethe song to be the inspiration for everything?  

I have. I acknowledge an arbitrary track of ‘Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie’.Absolute Freedom. Absolute.

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Why do Earthquakes occur?

Two earthquakes originating in Lebanon shook Israel to the core.The first occurred two days after the Israel government allowed same-sex couples to adopt children.

Conclusion: Such liberalism is but the cause of the earthquake! 

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23257317-13762,00.html

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Geek stardom

Feeling isolated? Tongue-tied? Daft? Dense? that you are just not apart of the geek community? You desperately try hard but out comesfrom nowhere a bright unix fascist who just kicks the crap out of you? You realize that you are the only guy ( girl?) in thecomp.sci.ubercool group who has never seen star wars and you are tooshy to drop into the local video store and rent the movie and fear that the word is going to be out that you have never seen Starwars(!!!!)?   

Have no fear. I have the perfect solution. All it needs is a terminal. Yes, that’s right. Just hop on to the console and type the following:$ telnet 193.202.115.241

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