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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Sophisticated New AI Performs Better When It Can Sleep And Dream
Sleep is pretty great. In humans, evidence suggests it has a whole range of benefits, including this one: it keeps the brain healthy by letting neurons prune unnecessary synaptic connections we make during the day.
This process, called synaptic homeostasis, prevents the brain from being overrun by useless memories. It's possible that it helps to improve our cognitive performance, while dreams allow us to process our memories.
As it turns out, something similar may be occurring when artificial neural networks are allowed to sleep and dream.
Yep, you read that correctly. And it works very similarly to how it is thought to occur in humans.
Of course, artificial neural networks (ANNs) - a type of artificial intelligence based on biological neural networks - don't automatically and instinctively fall asleep and dream. Which is why mathematicians in Italy programmed a type of ANN called a Hopfield network to be able to sleep.
"Inspired by sleeping and dreaming mechanisms in mammal brains, we propose an extension of this model displaying the standard on-line (awake) learning mechanism (that allows the storage of external information in terms of patterns) and an off-line (sleep) unlearning & consolidating mechanism," they wrote in their paper.
In other words, while the ANN is 'awake', it's learning and storing patterns. But its storage capacity is limited.
So the team worked out a way to mathematically implement human sleep patterns - rapid-eye movement sleep and slow-wave sleep, the former of which is thought to remove unnecessary memories, and the latter of which is thought to consolidate important ones.
So this is what the ANN's 'sleep' state does too, cycling through and unlearning unnecessary information, and then consolidating what's left, the important stuff.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Friday February 22 2019, @11:42PM (1 child)
Each step of advance in these analog methods brings us closer to the day when there is little difference between human intelligence (in all its manifestations) and AI. Right now we are probably barely even into the "beginning to make tools" stage of AI, but considering how fast that has come along, we aren't going to have to wait 5 million years or so for AI to reach the current stage of human intelligence.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday March 01 2019, @06:48PM
We will possibly (probably) not have to wait that long. If the theoretical models are in fact the way it works. If not, we will experience roadblocks commensurate with the degree of inaccuracy between theory and reality.
Wait for the day when somebody figures out how to have Deep Mind's Alpha not only train its neural net with ASICs, but if it figures out how to program it's own ASIC neural net trainers for the neural net to achieve the goals that Deep Mind itself determines in needs to achieve. (AlphaGo doesn't learn Go because the programmers want it to, but Deep Mind becomes AlphaShogi because it, itself, has determined that is what it wishes to learn Shogi). That is the day that Deep Mind (or its successor) is no longer an "artificial intelligence" but "real intelligence" to me. Let's just hope it learns love and compassion as well ahead of that.
This sig for rent.