vetta project

My thesis is now available at lulu.com.  As promised, it’s at cost, which works out at $18 plus shipping.  It’s all under a creative commons licence and in a few months I’ll put the pdf online for free.  I’ll also write a post shortly on all the tricks involved in publishing on lulu.com with LaTeX, [...]

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In 2006, a computer capable of 3 T FLOPS was enough to get onto the list of the top 500 super computers in the world.
Two years later…
This PC has 3 nVidia GTX 280 graphics cards, costs about $3,000 and is rated at 3 T FLOPS.

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This morning I received the wonderful news that I’ve won the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - Canada Academic Prize for 2008!
The award is in “recognition of [my] efforts to improve AI theory” and is worth CAD $10,000.  This will certainly help my budget over the next two years while I study at the Gatsby [...]

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Currently the foremost thinker on the ethics and safety of artificial general intelligence is Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.  On a few occasions I have tried to read some of his writings on this topic.  Every time, however, I would give up after about ten pages.  I found the ideas [...]

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I don’t trust philosophical arguments all that much. I think this comes from studying mathematics. To start with I try to see or feel a result and I then use this to either understand the essence of an existing proof, or to give me guidance in constructing a proof myself. I remember [...]

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After all this time, I’m finally getting to the stage of knowing enough to know how much I don’t know.  Or in Rumsfeld’s lexicon: unknown unknowns are slowly becoming known unknowns.  Equations, theorems and whole sub-fields of study that I’d previous heard mentioned, or that I’d studied and largely forgotten as they didn’t seem useful, [...]

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– Henry Markram in this article.
Maybe, but I suspect he will be beaten by people working on ANNs.

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Once again Kurzweil has hit the mainstream media: this time an article on the BBC. It’s currently the “most emailed” article on the website, so it’s getting a good share of attention. Although he influenced me strongly many years ago, I’m not a big fan of his writings since 2000. In my [...]

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My PhD thesis is now going through the final check by Marcus and should soon go to my committee. It took such a lot of time and effort to write; remind me never to write another book. When I put together a print version on lulu.com it will probably come out at around [...]

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In the aftermath of Webmind I still wanted to work on building a general purpose AI. I didn’t think the Webmind design was ever going to work and I wanted to make a fresh start. I had a few ideas and a name, but that was all. The name was “vetta”, which [...]

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