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posted by martyb on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:50AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-IS-intelligence,-anyway? dept.

Anything where we can install it and watch it change all by itself, improving upon itself and not just some random action but something which LEARNS.

[Ed. note: All of the preceding is exactly as received. AI has so many branches and sub-branches (twigs?) and has evolved greatly over the years. I suspect the submitter, like most of us, has seen numerous mentions of AI in the press: self-driving cars, natural language translation, Google's Deep Mind, IBM's Jeapordy-playing computer, object recognition... but knows not even where to begin. So, fellow Soylentils, what has been helpful to you in your explorations of AI? What software can be downloaded and experimented with so as to get some hands-on appreciation for what it can do? I suspect there are many others in the community who would not mind playing around with it, too. --martyb]


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:01AM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:01AM (#983370)

    First you go learn about it [3blue1brown.com] or read about it [uark.edu].

    Then you go play around with it [tensorflow.org] in your browser [stanford.edu].

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:11AM (#983378)

      First you go learn about it [3blue1brown.com] or read about it [uark.edu].

      Then you go play around with it [tensorflow.org] in your browser [stanford.edu].

      Exactly the direction I was going to point people. Tensorflow is a great place to start.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:18AM (4 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:18AM (#983383) Journal
      Note that this is for a very specific thing, neural networks.
      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:31AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:31AM (#983395)

        Which is what it all is under the hood.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:53AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:53AM (#983410) Journal
          Except when it's not! We already have counter examples such as natural language processing and theorem-proving systems.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:44PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:44PM (#983575)

          Wow, I got slapped with the "Troll" mod. I think I hit a little too close to home for somebody. No, AI is just neural networks. Yes, there are trivial algorithms that are not neural nets, but they are thinks like cluster analysis and even simple linear regression! All the hard and interesting things are just various forms of neural nets and various ways to "train" them. They all have fancy names, and they get wrapped up into pretty black boxes, but they are just glorified nets with different forms of interconnectedness.

          I think the nerve I hit was that most of machine learning is just creating training sets and "tuning the models", which is basically GIGO. You keep tweaking knobs until it seems to work, or until you add more data to your training set and then it breaks again. Systems that "learn on their own" are basically just different algorithms that turn the knobs so that the trained monkey (er, I mean, Machine Learning Researcher) doesn't have to.

          The more sophisticated the system, the bigger the black box, and the bigger the training set.

          • (Score: 1) by Fuzzums on Saturday April 18 2020, @10:01AM

            by Fuzzums (2009) on Saturday April 18 2020, @10:01AM (#984521)

            It depends on what you call artificially intelligent. As pointed out in many places, there is AI, Machine learning and deep learning, each a subset of the previous one.
            A if-then decision tree is also artificially intelligent. Just less sophisticated than statistics, I mean neural networks.
            Or even tic-tac-toe, where a computer can calculate all the options is still artificially intelligent enough to be able to win.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:24AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:24AM (#983389)

      For a much more general, big picture, work through: http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/som-prologue.html [aurellem.org]

      This book tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence? To answer that, we'll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

      There are many "chapters" in this book, but each is quite short.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:27AM (4 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:27AM (#983390) Journal

      First you go learn about it [3blue1brown.com] or read about it [uark.edu].

      Then you go play around with it [tensorflow.org] in your browser [stanford.edu].

      Don't ask how can AI learn - ask how you can learn about AI

      -- William Shatner

      (grin)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:49AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:49AM (#983408)

        Artificial Intelligence is a marketing term. Think of AI as a sophisticated pattern matching technique that requires a large volume of human labor to create the training sets. There is no intelligence.

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:11AM (2 children)

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:11AM (#983420) Journal

          Be it as it may be, the techniques are, as you put it, sophisticated. As such, you start by learning about them before getting to use them.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
          • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:43PM (1 child)

            by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:43PM (#983728) Journal

            AI seems to come in two major forms.

            First type GOFAI. (Good Old Fashioned AI) Lisp pattern matching. Prolog. OPS5. Computer Algebra Systems (CAS). Theorem provers. Minimax game playing systems. Minikanren Etc.

            Second type Neural Net or Statistical based. The first effective spam filters were Bayesian. Neural nets do amazing things with practical every day use. Alexa: how long does it take to make the 10 minute drive to the office?

            --
            People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
            • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:28PM

              by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:28PM (#983753) Journal

              Alexa: how long does it take to make the 10 minute drive to the office?

              Half an hour.

              --
              The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by crafoo on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:39AM (1 child)

      by crafoo (6639) on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:39AM (#983467)

      Good links. 3blue1brown videos are pretty decent. I like Anaconda https://www.anaconda.com/ [anaconda.com] for easy installation of TensorFlow (and GPU accelerated version of TF) as well as all the Python an SciPy installs you might need. Great for getting into neural networks without having to worry to much about versions and distributions and whatnot.

      AI I think is a little more broad subject than just neural networks, and doesn't necessarily require neural networks.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @01:50PM (#983579)

        > AI I think is a little more broad subject

        Bingo!! You get the prize for understatement of the day! If you sweep away all the current pattern matching activity (with big funding), there is still a core of researchers working on understanding human intelligence--in many different aspects.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:03AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @02:03AM (#983372)

    True AI doesn't want to speak to you.

    • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:10AM (2 children)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:10AM (#983506) Journal

      Truly superior AI will not want to speak to you. What's the point of speaking with someone who is not able to comprehend anything relevant anyway? Anything you would be able to comprehend is utterly boring for the superior AI.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:45PM (1 child)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:45PM (#983729) Journal

        If you love an AI,
        Set it free!
        If it comes back,
        It's truly yours.
        If it takes over the world
        and kills all humans
        that's not our responsibility!

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:18PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Thursday April 16 2020, @07:18PM (#983745) Journal

          Why would it kill all humans? The one thing humans are really efficient in is to kill other humans. So obviously the AI would let us do that job, with only minimum effort by the AI to ensure that we keep on doing it.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:18AM (#983515)

      > True AI doesn't want to speak to you.

      Wait a minute... what was all that 'one in a million' talk?

  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:15AM

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:15AM (#983423) Journal

    Warzone 2100

    One of the best cyberpunk, and open sourced for quite a long time.
    However, it chronically suffers from bad AI design, for decades. To balance with experienced human players, all multiplayer AI instances cheat, with both resources and visibility. Some even with research tree too. Having a really good true AI would be a game changer.

    You can find this game on both BSD and Linux platforms, both need accelerated OpenGL.
    But be aware those are different versions forks, incoherent between each other, and both have different glitches and bugs. This is why I am not linking those projects. Suit yourself.

    For a personal note: This game was the very reason why my own robotank was hostnamed Echidna.

    --
    Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:26AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:26AM (#983430)

    I don't know if it still runs, but the Norns do learn by an organic process. They have small neural nets, things happen, the weights change, they learn to better handle situations.

    I've had people complain that it was clearly scripted. When I tell them it wasn't they seem impressed. I think the problem is Norns don't have much in the way of instinct, so they start out doing the kind of stupid things that no animal would ever do. It is pretty much random at first, but real associations are formed via experience. Death is a thing and the unfit ones don't get to procreate, so it's an AI and A-life sim.

    It's an experiment and game. I'm not sure what you're looking for, but it is one of the most impressive examples of software learning that I've ever seen. Most of what's out there is nets trained on data sets, this is an embodiment simulation and no guidance except a tiny bit of biology.

    • (Score: 2) by Moru on Friday April 17 2020, @08:17AM

      by Moru (1248) on Friday April 17 2020, @08:17AM (#984043)

      Creatures can be bought on GOG still and is working. But the online part of Creatures 3 has been shut down since a while but it's not needed for the learning part.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:28AM (#983431)
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:34AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @03:34AM (#983434)
    You have to define the problem that you want an algorithm to solve. Text comprehension? Image understanding (captioning, generation, classification, etc)? Game playing? Right now the approaches differ by the problem, but all have some similarity, from a bird's eye view.

    Tensorflow is pretty good (or was, until Google started breaking backward compatibility left and right). It relies on Cudnn (which you could use directly and cut-out tensorflow), if you have an nvidia gpu. Cudnn is just a C library for running backpropagation for several common types of neural network layers very quickly on a gpu.
    • (Score: 2) by EJ on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:47AM (3 children)

      by EJ (2452) on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:47AM (#983462)

      To pass butter.

      • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:09AM (2 children)

        by Gaaark (41) on Thursday April 16 2020, @10:09AM (#983511) Journal

        I pass butter: I'm lactose intolerant!

        --
        --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:40AM (#983482)

    Project Brundlefly. Together, we can do it!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:56AM (#983484)

    What's so civil about war anyway?

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by PiMuNu on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:22AM (4 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday April 16 2020, @09:22AM (#983508)

    > Any free programs where we can test A.I.?

    No, because AI has not been invented yet.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @12:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @12:17PM (#983535)

      Yes, the short answer is no, and removing 'free' doesn't change the answer.

      Suggest looking up AGI. (Artificial General Intelligence)

      This is the current term for what you appear to be hoping for.
      The old term appears overloaded with interesting, but very limited applications.

      No signs of HAL yet.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2020, @04:07PM (#983649)

      You are extremely ignorant.

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:07PM (1 child)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:07PM (#983715) Journal

      Every time we solve an AI problem it is magically no longer AI.

      • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:36PM

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday April 16 2020, @06:36PM (#983726)

        > Every time we solve an AI problem it is magically no longer AI.

        Every time we make a definition of "life", someone finds an exception that breaks the definition. Doesn't mean that the exception is alive.

  • (Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:38PM

    by gtomorrow (2230) on Thursday April 16 2020, @05:38PM (#983702)

    ...IBM's Jeapordy-playing computer...

    ...or at least less dyslexia.

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