Tokyo: A Cython BLAS wrapper for fast matrix math
Prototyping mathematical code in Python with the Scipy/Numpy libraries and then switching to Cython for speed often works well, but there are limitations. The main problem that has been bugging me...
View ArticleMonte Carlo AIXI
While I was visiting Marcus Hutter at ANU a month or so ago, I got talking to one of his students, Joel Veness, who’s working on making computable approximations to AIXI. Joel has a background in...
View Article1973 Lighthill debate
Some of you might know about the Lighthill report from 1973 which was deeply critical of progress in AI. This report was the main factor behind cutting the funding of AI research in the UK, and seems...
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Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING
Am I the only one who, upon hearing the year 2010, imagines some date far off in the future? I think I felt the same way in the weeks before 2000, so I’m sure it will pass. Anyway, another year has...
View ArticleRay Solomonoff
A little over a week ago I felt rather honoured to be reviewing a new submission by a living legend of artificial intelligence, Ray Solomonoff. Sadly the great man passed away just two days later, at...
View ArticleThe Noughties
The start of the Noughties for me was Y2K. It was a non-event, thanks, I might add, to people like me making ourselves mentally unwell fixing endless date issues in crappy database code. Next was the...
View ArticleThe Teenies
I’ve decided to christen the next decade the teenies. Firstly, I’ve still heard no other suggestions; secondly, it’s phonetically consistent with the noughties and the twenties; and thirdly, the name...
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Short film by Alex Roman
This short film, The Third & The Seventh, by Alex Roman, is a great example of cutting edge computer graphics. The airy elegant style reminds me a bit of Kubrick. I’m not sure what impressed me...
View ArticleSummit 2010
Another great Singularity Summit. I liked the focus on neuroscience this time. I think it will be a major driving force behind AGI over the next 20 years. The talk by Demis Hassabis is the one to look...
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Goodbye 2010
Well, well, another year is drawing to a close. That means it’s once again time to review what has happened and where things are going. It’s been a very eventful year for me, both personally and on the...
View ArticleTechnological themes
Looking over my predictions for the teenies from a year ago, they already look pretty lame. Take 1/3 off USA’s PPP GDP and you already get China, the latest Sony portable device has a 4 core processor,...
View ArticleSutton on human level AI
Prof. Rich Sutton, probably the most famous person in the field of reinforcement learning, gave a talk today at the Gatsby Unit. I was expecting a standard introduction to reinforcement learning to...
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AIQ
Some of you might remember the talk I gave at the 2010 Singularity Summit about Algorithmic IQ, or AIQ for short. It was an attempt to convert the theoretical Universal Intelligence Measure into a...
View ArticleGoodbye 2011, hello 2012
I’ve decided to once again leave my prediction for when human level AGI will arrive unchanged. That is, I give it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028 and a mode of 2025, under the assumption...
View ArticleNeil Armstrong
“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer” — Neil Armstrong, 2000 On the topic of space, I thought this video from the ISS was spectacular. Flying over the aurora...
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