Artificial Intelligence  

Since the publication of James Barrat's Our Final Invention, one of the key featured artificial intelligence thinkers featured in the book has garnered a lot of interest. Recently, Steve Omohundro was interviewed on the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.

Steve Omohundro is a scientist, professor, author, and entrepreneur with a Ph.D. in physics but has spent decades studying intelligent systems and artificial intelligence. His research into the basic “AI Drives” was featured in James Barrat’s recent book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era that has been generating international interest.

Recently Omohundro was interviewed on Nikola Danaylov's Singularity 1 on 1 podcast (video above).

Related articles The Rise of Artificial Intelligence  James Barrat on Our Final Invention  James Miller Discusses Aspects of the Singularity

During their conversation Omohundro and Danaylov cover a variety of interesting topics such as: Omohundro's personal path starting with a PhD in physics and ending into AI; his unique time with Richard Feynman; the goals, motivation and vision behind is work; Omai Ventures and Self Aware Systems; the definition of AI; Rational Decision Making and the Turing Test; provably safe mathematical systems and AI scaffolding.

The pair also cover hard vs soft Singularity take-offs.

Omohundro has been a scientist, professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur doing research that explores the interface between mind and matter. He has degrees in Physics and Mathematics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and cofounded the Center for Complex Systems Research.

He published the book Geometric Perturbation Theory In Physics, designed the programming languages StarLisp and Sather, wrote the 3D graphics system for Mathematica, and built systems which learn to read lips, control robots, and induce grammars. He has worked with many research labs and startup companies.

Omohundro is the president of Self-Aware Systems which is developing a new kind of semantic software technology. In addition to his scientific work, Steve is passionate about human growth and transformation. He has trained in Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, Gendlin’s Focusing, Travell’s Trigger Point Therapy, Bohm’s Dialogue, Beck’s Life Coaching, and Schwarz’s Internal Family Systems Therapy. He is working to integrate human values into technology and to ensure that intelligent technologies contribute to the greater good.


SOURCE  Singularity Weblog

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square

 Physics  

Physicists have discovered the amplituhedron — a geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and does not require space and time as part of the inherent calculations.

Physicists have discovered the
amplituhedron — a geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and does not require space and time as part of the inherent calculations.

The amplituhedron makes quantum physics calculations much simpler than anything that has been done before, replacing hundreds of pages of Feynman diagrams in some cases.

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

Related articles MIT Researchers Improves Quantum Dot Creation Method  Higgs Particle Mass Suggests Doom For Our Universe  Physicists May Have Found A New Form Of Matter

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also aid the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

“Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks (see below) and in a forthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”

Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature.

In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.

“It’s a better formulation that makes you think about everything in a completely different way,” said David Skinner, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.

The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. But Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators think there might be a related geometric object that does. Its properties would make it clear why particles appear to exist, and why they appear to move in three dimensions of space and to change over time.

Because “we know that ultimately, we need to find a theory that doesn’t have” unitarity and locality, Bourjaily said, “it’s a starting point to ultimately describing a quantum theory of gravity.”

SOURCE  Simons Foundation

By 33rd Square

Subscribe to 33rd Square