The Seductive Power of Mathematics

I believe that math is very important: My first paper was mathematical (How many ways can an N-dimensional hypercube be unfolded into (N-1)-dimensional space?) and my most recent paper was mathematical (How can a very large tensor be decomposed with limited RAM?). But medan agan: everything in moderation; nothing in excess. In machine learning and [...]

AI Success Stories

I’ve been invited to give a talk on AI Success Stories, so I’ve compiled a list of things that illustrate progress in AI research. By success, for the purpose of this talk, I mean something that is interesting and impressive to a wide audience, rather than something that is successful in terms of commercial or [...]

Scientific Productivity, Age, and Field

I once saw a graph that plotted scientific productivity as a function of the scientist’s age, with different curves for different scientific fields. I remember that the curve for mathematics peaked between the ages of 20 and 30, but the curve for chemistry peaked somewhere around 50. There was no curve for AI researchers, and [...]

Artificial Intelligence Considered as Heavier-than-air Flight

“With admirable can-do spirit, technological optimism, and a belief in inevitability, psychologists, philosophers, programmers, and engineers are sure they shall succeed [in creating human-level artificial intelligence], just as people dreamed that heavier-than-air flight would one day be achieved. … After more than 50 years of pursuing human-level artificial intelligence, we have nothing but promises and [...]

Open Problems

There was an interesting article about Einstein in The New Yorker, discussing his annus mirabilis, 1905, when he published a series of fundamental papers. One thing that was new to me in this article was that Einstein was inspired by a book by Henri Poincaré:

The Most Important Research Problem

In a recent blog post, Daniel Lemire writes:
Hamming, the famous scientist, once suggested that researchers should focus on the most important problems in their field … What are the important problems in 2007? The ones we should all be working toward? Any ideas?
I happen to be working on the most important research problem. First, I [...]

The Symbol Grounding Problem

There is a view that the meaning of words (more generally, of symbols) must be grounded in sensory perception or in physical interaction with the world (embodiment). If symbols were merely defined in terms of other symbols, then it seems that we would have an infinite regression; we would spin in circles in symbol space, [...]

Creating Friendly AI

Creating friendly AI is a popular topic among singularitarians. For example, Michael Anissimov writes:
As best as we can currently figure, the amount of effort needed to create a Friendly AI is small relative to the effort needed to create AI in the first place. But it’s a very important [...]

Analogy and Logic

Aristotle’s theory of syllogism (in Prior Analytics) is often cited as the origin of modern logic. He also had a theory of analogy (in Poetics), which he put to practical use in reasoning about ethics (in Nichomachean Ethics). It seems that he believed logic and analogy were both valid forms of reasoning. The majority view [...]