Scott wrote:I was having a back and forth conversation with another forum member about Artificial Intelligence and wandered, where is it going? Sure it's commonly thought to be tied in with games (which it is) but where else could extremely complex AI be used in. One thing that comes in mind is the military. Using a gun that only shoots at people in it's database or possible who don't have a chip like the rest of the military. Complex AI could be used in hospitals as well. Helping doctors figure out the disease and best treatment for a patient with voice commends and comparing the look of the patient to other patients who had other diseases. There are many possibilities. Then my mind just kept thinking about other things in the future. Like teleportation with atom-entanglement, time travel by going the speed of light, harnessing photons for power, etc. So if you have something nerdy to talk about or just want to comment on something I've said feel free. If it gets enough interest maybe admin will consider it it's own thread? Anyway I anticipate the things you guys (and girls) have to say.
Ah this is my cup of tea
I've done alot of personal research into AI (using the internet, not actual in a lab research) and am studying physics at university so i hear alot about these sort of subjects reguarly.
I'll start of with AI. Currently our AI is pretty stupid and the programming generally revolves around programming in thousands of events that could happen and then programming in the appropiate responses. This is not intelligance! These AI do not really have the ability to make decisions of thier own free will when you get down to it, they are effectivly doing what they are told.
One aspect of our intelligence that most people do not realise (and hollywood never encorporates) is that it depends on our emotion. This may sound odd but but scientists think that there is a massive link between higher levels of intelligence and emotional capacity. This is because our emotional capacity helps us to evaluate our decision proccess.
Alot of people have wrote articles about this and what not and alot of them say that we simply cannot programme in a human-like intelligance at current technology. However, this does not mean that we have given up
computer scientists have come up with some interesting ways to create intelligence in robots. One way is to get robots to become clever like we humans do, through learning. When we are first born we know nothing, we can't talk or walk and are completly dependant on our parents to look after us. We can only really function, with simple fundamental instincts we learn quite complicated things over the course of our lifes. This has inspired scientists to do things like this:
http://www.imagination-engines.com/robo ... a_rasa.htm
If we can get the to learn tasks why not use the same approach towards general intelligence?
Another really interesting (and perhaps frightening) piece of research that has happened:
http://www.channon.net/alastair/
That link is more about forcing programmes to change and compete against each other to gain the upper hand. Which has actually produced intelligent like effects in programming. I know of one company to build a programme that you give a task (like walk from a to b) and it builds 100 different programmes randomly and runs them all. It then selects the 10 best programmes and 'mates' them to make 100 new programmes and repeats. This proccess actually produced incredable results with the programme successully completing its objective in under 10 'generations' of programmes.
Thats all I really can remember right now about the field of artificial intelligence, on to some of the more physics related topics:
Like teleportation with atom-entanglement, time travel by going the speed of light, harnessing photons for power
1) Travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible, Einstein postulated that the maximum speed you could travel at was the speed of light in his theories of general and special relativity, which then gave him some lee-way in his calculations and have led to some robust theories that to date have never been broken or even faltered and until that day we cannot travel faster than the speed of light. But have hope as one of the basic postulates of quantum theory directly contradicts that of relativity...yet both work..an both have lead to revolutions in the world of physics....so one could be wrong and who knows, it could be to do with the speed of light?
However there are other ways of getting across the universe, in a shorter time than it would take light but not actually travelling faster than it. The way you could do this is via wormholes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormholes
ok look at the first picture, usually we go along the red line, like light and travel that distance but if you went through a wormhole you could travel a shorter distance and effectivly arrive at your destination faster than usual. If my crap description makes no sense, have a read through that article.
2) Time travel can't happen in the same universe and this is why:
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/g ... radox.html
3) Teleportation can happen under current theory. Just not like startrek, de-matterisation would require you to know the postion and velocity of all particles in your body, which directly contradicts the heisenberg uncertanty principle (spelling?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
meaning you couldnt record the data needed to de-molecularise yourself and re-asemmble yourself under current theory, however in the future this could be possible if we sort the mess of quantum out.
Speaking of quantum, there are two things that have happened on the quantum scale that actually have exhibited teleportation, to some degree, one is quantum teleportation and the other is quantum tunneling. I know nothing about quantum teleportation but do know how tunneling works, however right now i need a bit of a break from writing this post (im very hung over)
