Meditating Autorevs

While watching Ergo Proxy, a depressing cyberpunk set on a desolate earth, I saw meditating autorevs. An autorev, in ergo proxy universe, is just an android with no true "soul". However they get infected by a certain "cogito virus" and acquire a "soul". A "soul" is just a matter of self awareness, acquiring one makes them question everything from their purpose as an entourage, to their behaviour as a companion. While all of this might seem obvious; what struck me was given a life times experience, knowledge and a processing power of a million circuits, what would a being trying to discover itself do ? As in the anime, Eegi finds itself meditating and brooding over its own life as do a lot more of the androids. Well we have meditating androids essentially. Like meditating humans. What would normally an unexpected behavior for a machine, suddenly becomes acceptable both intuitively and intellectually. So consider this, what if we build a machine not essentially "self aware" per say, but capable of analyzing the history and the knowledge of at least an entire lifetime ? Would this give us the answer to universe, life and everything ? Well probably not !!

But it sure sounds interesting on what would it achieve on years of computation time spent on brooding. However, to answer the question we must formulate the question first. The formulation of the question is essentially expressing the process of meditation in terms of mathematical equations !! We probably know all the hows, but we need to know all the whys. Sure this will make another blog post sometime :)

Simulating Social Behaviour

For a long time I have been thinking of simulating life like creations. A-life seems to be an upcoming topic in Computer Science and elsewhere. I admit I havent read about it much. I have read a little bit about complex systems though. After attending a lot of CS courses and doing projects on AI/ ML and random processes as well as optimization (as part of EE ), I have developed a basic understanding that all AI / ML problems are essentially optimization problems. Each one a unique and a unique way to solve each. Quite Interesting.

What is more interesting is when we see our own life and try to see it in the aspect of an optimization problem. However our own life is not standalone but is influenced by that of others and is (figuratively) a sum total of all the states that are influencing our own state.

Now this is getting a bit vague.

To put it straight forward way I want to design a simulation of artificial life. Where I can spawn a number of individual entities and assign a separate optimization problem to each. Where the goal of each individual entity is to optimize its own problem. Now the deciding factor can be either CPU time, where entities compete for CPU time. But I guess this has already been tried. I think I want to relate them by their optimization functions not just to the environment but by each other also.

Obviously I need to formulate the optimization problem first and than hope that it can actually be solved :).

chow for now !

A Genius' Dilemna

Suppose you are a genius. You are good at everything you do. You are good at biology, physics, chemistry and math, even arts, essay writing and all that. What do you do ? What is your destiny ? How do you choose ?
Theoretically you are good at everything and given sufficient time and space you can be good at anything. So what do you do that satisfies you the most, given that your satisfaction is directly related to your professional success ?

Now assume you have a constructed a set of AI entities and ask them to gather information by crawling all data on the web. Will they not display similar characteristics as above. They will be equally inclined to dig all sort of information. Is it not for a system to survive ? or is it simply impossible to achieve ?

Going to the first argument if it is equally satisfying to do any particular thing, why not just choose any particular track and stick to it. But the next question is does life has a meaning in such a situation ? Again to the second argument, does an AI entity such as above will infer a meaning to its life if tasked with the above problem ? Can the AI be self aware than ?

What does an AI have to do in order to be self aware ? What logic circuit, what algorithm will give it so much power ? Lets say such an AI as above is crawling the web it comes across this post makes an inference of this one by comparing it with similar systems using a certain classification algorithm. It realizes that such a classification puts the system described here i.e. a self unaware AI that is capable of understanding every subject matter in this world, in its own category. In other words it finds that the system describes itself. Now it goes on and sees that it is self unaware as described above ... so what ? It is just a property of the system, it will add it to its several known properties and simply move on.

The point is knowing that if you are aware that you are unaware of your own purpose does not make your life purposeful. So such an AI cannot become self aware and cause Armageddon. In essence it needs some additional logic.

So what question do I pose to a genius (read AI) that it will help solve the dilemma of his/her/its life ?