Author Archives: Shane

Ray 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 the age of 83. … Continue reading

Posted in Singularity | Tagged | 1 Comment

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 … Continue reading

Posted in Singularity | 34 Comments

1973 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 to have contributed … Continue reading

Posted in Research Review | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Monte 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 writing Go algorithms so … Continue reading

Posted in Research Review | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

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 recently is the speed of matrix function calls. What … Continue reading

Posted in Programing | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Funding safe AGI

From time to time people contact me wanting to know what I think about whether they should donate money to SIAI.  My usual answer is something like, “I am not involved with what happens inside the organisation so I don’t … Continue reading

Posted in Ideas | Tagged , , | 15 Comments

Prospect theory investors

I recently completed a finance paper on the implications of prospect theory for portfolio choice and asset pricing. I worked on this with Prof. Enrico De Giorgi during my post doc at the Swiss Finance Institute. This post is meant … Continue reading

Posted in My Research | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

Most surprising thing since 1999?

I just read this article on the scale of time by Mike Treder. Part the way through it has an interesting question: What would surprise a person from the year 2000 most about the year 2010? As I don’t know … Continue reading

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 6 Comments

On universal intelligence

It’s been a while since my journal paper on universal intelligence came out, and even longer since the intelligence order relation was published by Hutter that this was based on. Since then there have been a number of reactions; here … Continue reading

Posted in My Research | Tagged , , | 29 Comments

The innovator’s dilemma

The way in which technological change occurs in industries has always interested me. One quite well known book on this subject is “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton M. Christensen. Here’s a nice post on a friend’s blog that summarises the … Continue reading

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