Kurt Vonnegut explains how fiction makes us crave drama. (That’s drama, as in real-life turmoil not as in theater.)
Information Visualization Manifesto
“The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures.”
The on-going conversation in the comments is also worth a read.
Teaching a computer to fly using reinforcement learning.
(Watch Larger HQ Version.)
RedLibrarian: The Ned Ludd Memorial Library
“The library will contain only books and paper journals. It will not have public access computer terminals. It will have a silent reading room, as well as a collaborative study room, in which laptops are allowed. There is no wired or wireless internet connectivity.
In return for all these restrictions, we will offer serene, quiet study/reading/research space, the best print collections money can buy, comfortable chairs and tables, and a return to the lovely, dusty book culture that some of us (and I think we’re still in the majority) remember, love, and think important.”
“The Mud Tub is an experimental organic interface that allows people to control a computer while playing in the mud.” (Set the video to Fullscreen by clicking on the monitor icon.)
send + receive: a festival of sound v11
October 13-17, 2009 - Winnipeg, Canada
The annual week-long event focuses on sound: its production, its applications, its meanings, and its theories of production and reception.
Fundamental Principles of Cognition
“If anyone makes a claim of having constructed (programmed) a cognitive agent, that agent should show evidence of adhering to [these 6½ Fundamental Principles]. I submit that the fewer of these principles an agent employs, the less cognitively interesting the agent is.”
- Principle 1: Object Identification (Categorization)
- Principle 2: Minimal Parsing (“Occam’s Razor”)
- Principle 3: Object Prediction (Pattern Completion)
- Principle 4: Essence Distillation (Analogy Making)
- Principle 5: Quantity Estimation and Comparison (Numerosity Perception)
- Principle 6: Association-Building by Co-occurrence (Hebbian Learning)
- Principle 6½: Temporal Fading of Rarity (Learning by Forgetting)
Sounds better than a Turing Test. ;)
Baskerville Open Source Font
An open source project to create a digital revival of the famous ‘Baskerville’ typefaces. [via sam]
e m a i l t o s i s t a
Mario AI Competition 2009
Build the best Mario playing AI. The organizers are “hoping to get submissions based on evolutionary neural networks, genetic programming, fuzzy logic, temporal difference learning, human ingenuity, and hybrids of the above.”
I’m guessing that the red lines and arcs you see are future moves the AI is choosing from. Moves could be selected by ranking their potential outcomes. A move’s score increases for positive outcomes like landing on solid ground, squashing an enemy, moving closer to the goal line, or headbutting a |?| box. The score decreases for negative outcomes like being killed by an enemy or falling in a pit.