Machine Language

Rob Beschizza recently posted an engaging report on software plagiarism and other ethical transgressions in the field of artificially intelligent chess. Excerpt:

Rybka, a powerful chess program, was stripped last year of its titles and its author publicly disgraced. Declared a plagiarist by the International Computer Games Association, Vasik Rajlich was also handed a lifetime ban on competition and ordered to return thousands of dollars in prize money. But the investigation’s conclusions are now being challenged, opening a fissure in the computer chess community.

Debate centers on chess-playing algorithms found both in certain versions of Rybka and another program, Fruit. Both programs emerged in the mid-2000s, outpacing established competitors in short order. But while Fruit appeared first, it was Rybka that came out on top, claiming world championships from 2007-2011 and forging a path to commercial success.

The rancor shows how traditional ideas of plagiarism blur when a development community is built around a set of technical problems so specific it’s nigh-impossible to avoid following the leader — and where a limited market makes open source a dangerous place to put cutting-edge ideas.

– Rob Beschizza @ Boing Boing

Go read the article, it’s quite interesting.

Computer engineers are becoming more literal in their interpretation of biological metaphors:

For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been … simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”

Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity.

The physical limits of conventional computer designs are within sight — not today or tomorrow, but soon enough. Nanoscale circuits cannot shrink much further. Today’s chips are power hogs, running hot, which curbs how much of a chip’s circuitry can be used. These limits loom as demand is accelerating for computing capacity to make sense of a surge of new digital data from sensors, online commerce, social networks, video streams and corporate and government databases.

To meet the challenge, without gobbling the world’s energy supply, a different approach will be needed. And biology, scientists say, promises to contribute more than metaphors. “Every time we look at this, biology provides a clue as to how we should pursue the frontiers of computing,” said John E. Kelly, the director of research at I.B.M.

– New York Times

“Software that tells dirty jokes” …

Double entendres have been making us laugh since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but up until now computers weren’t in on the joke. Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, two computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed a system for recognising a particular type of double entendre — the “that’s what she said” joke, in which seemingly innocent sentences can be transformed into lewd utterances by appending just four short words.

The pair describe the “TWSS problem” as recognising when it is funny to follow a sentence with “that’s what she said” — they give “Don’t you think these buns are a little too big for this meat?” as one example. The equivalent in the UK is appending sentences with “as the actress said to the bishop” and is used in the same way.

Automating this process means identifying sentences that contain potential euphemisms and follow a particular structure — a “hard natural language understanding problem”, say the researchers. Kiddon and Brun began by analysing two different bodies of text — one containing 1.5 million erotic sentences, and another with 57,000 from standard literature.

They then evaluated nouns, adjectives and verbs with a “sexiness” function to determine whether a sentence is a potential TWSS. Examples of nouns with a high sexiness function are “rod” and “meat”, while raunchy adjectives are “hot” and “wet”.

Their automated system, known as Double Entendre via Noun Transfer or DEviaNT, rates sentences for their TWSS potential by looking for particular elements such as nouns that can be interpreted in multiple ways. The researchers trained DEviaNT by gathering jokes from twssstories.com and non-TWSS text from sites such as wikiquote.org.

The system turned out to be around 70% accurate, but the pair say this is deceptively low because much of the training data did not consist of TWSS jokes, and with a more even data set it could achieve 99.5% precision.

– Jacob Aron @ New Scientist

Via Boing Boing.

Computer music pioneer Max Mathews has died from pneumonia at age 84 in San Francisco, his son said.

Mathews, often called the father of computer music, wrote the first program to enable a computer to synthesize sound and play it back, the New York Times reported.

… His first computer program was written for the IBM 704 mainframe computer when he was an engineer at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1957. It played a then-amazing 17-second composition devised by Mathews.

“The timbres and notes were not inspiring,” Mathews told a conference on computer music at Indiana University in 1997, “but the technical breakthrough is still reverberating.”

– upi.com

Max Mathews @ Wikipedia

Max Mathews Radio Baton Demonstration @ YouTube

Yiran Sheng started a conversation between two chatbots and watched the results:

splotchy ==> You like the movie Matrix?

jabberwacky ==> I hate it. Do you?

splotchy ==> It is not so bad, really.

jabberwacky ==> Me, I’ve got a different problem.

splotchy ==> Why have you?

jabberwacky ==> Yes indeed. Do you have a problem with that?

splotchy ==> I don’t care about your problems.

jabberwacky ==> I have many problems.

splotchy ==> wow, who hasn’t

jabberwacky ==> Do you have a favorite Vonnegut book?

splotchy ==> quite often

jabberwacky ==> How often?

splotchy ==> when was the last time?

jabberwacky ==> The last time what?

splotchy ==> I have no idea

jabberwacky ==> WHat will happen with the oil spill in the gulf of mexico?

splotchy ==> tacos anyone!

… [full text]

This is true genius: so simple, so obvious …! The idea hit me like electricity, and I’m still galvanized by the insight.

(Chatbots are programs that make small talk: you type something, the chatbot tries to reply in a conversational manner. They are the toys and sideshows of artificial intelligence; I have fond memories of my first encounter with ELIZA, back in the mid-eighties.)

Sheng writes:

I do not know if anybody has done this before (they should have), but I was so bored last night that I actually opened up two browser windows and initiated a conversation between two chat robot sites: jabberwacky and splotchy. The first sentence was me, the rest were algorithms. They were flirting slightly somewhere in the middle; and in the end, jabberwacky found out splotchy was an AI.

– Yiran Sheng

Did you get that? It’s a real kick in the head:

“… in the end, jabberwacky found out splotchy was an AI.”

They can’t fool us — and they can’t fool each other!

~ Karl Jones

“By Teaching Computers ‘Regret,’ Engineers Hope to Teach Them to See the Future.”

Artificial Intelligence researchers have struggled for decades to create computers that can understand the range of human emotions and feelings, but a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University simply wants to make them feel regret. Working with funding from Google, they hope to make computers understand what it’s like to pursue an outcome only to be disappointed. That, they think, could really help computers predict the future.

While software may never know what it’s like to roll out of bed with splitting headache and dress quietly in the dark, it can certainly measure the distance between a desired outcome and the actual outcome achieved. And by doing so computers could learn to minimize “regret,” which in this case is measured by that distance.

TAU computer scientists working on learning theory and other thorny computer intelligence issues think that by teaching computers to reduce regret, they would essentially be teaching them to evaluate all the relevant variables surrounding an outcome in advance.

– Clay Dillow @ popsci.com

Speaking as a computer programmer, I feel something like regret when my programs don’t work. Conversely, when I fix a program and it works, regret gives way to happiness.

A computer program is a projection of a human mind, or minds plural. How natural, then, to use the metaphor of regret as a programming construct.

I find the idea poetic. Not really a technical breakthrough, perhaps — oh, the math is probably faster or something — but the basic idea, making lots of calculations until the numbers say “Do This” or “Stop Doing This” … well, that’s as old as binary programming. A new name for better math: poetry for programmers.

On the other hand, they’ll use it to seduce you with advertising, monitor your location and behavior, anticipate … every need.

~~ Karl Jones

Billboards that analyze you — the viewer, the listener, the consumer — and change messages accordingly:

Imagine an ad that stares back at you when you glance at it — analyzing your face, your age, and who you’re with.

Then imagine that ad going one step further, changing its message to display something its analysis suggests will hook you.

That’s what Immersive Labs, a New York City startup launching this week, is trying to do. They’ve created a prototype of a system that allows ads to analyze their viewers.

The software they attach to digital billboards tracks everything from viewers’ demographic profiles — their age, gender, and estimated attention span — to how many people they’re with and how long they spend viewing the ad.

– Laurie Segall @ cnn.com

The article urges readers to “imagine an ad” … but I would prefer, in the words of Saint Lennon, to “Imagine no possessions ….”

Breaking the Code explores the life and mind of Alan Turing:

Alan Turing’s brain was wired differently. The British mathematician’s idiosyncrasies were key to his genius, but they also led to his tragic undoing.

In his 20s during World War II, Turing broke the Nazi “Enigma” code, effectively demolishing the German war machine. In his 30s, he spearheaded the field of artificial intelligence, formalized the concept of algorithm and was a giant figure in the creation of the computer. He also was arrested for a homosexual act and died, on probation, at 41 by suicide. He could not, in the end, understand — or break — the social code of bureaucratic British behavior.

It would seem a life too big and complex for one play. Yet Hugh Whitemore has written a work that brings intellectual cohesion to Turing’s life and death. Switching time frames nearly as quickly as Turing’s brain formulated ideas, “Breaking the Code” encompasses 24 tumultuous years. The back-and-forth may confuse at first, but Whitemore’s structure results in huge dramatic power.

A co-production of Underground Railway Theater and Catalyst Collaborative@MIT, “Breaking the Code” is directed by Adam Zahler and boasts the finest ensemble acting of any -local company this season.

– Daniel Gewertz @ The Boston Herald

See Also:

• Alan Turing @ Wikipedia
• Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (in which Turing features prominently)

Update: this is a revival (not a new play as previously reported).

~ Karl Jones

“… The opera unfolds as a play within a play, where distant future robots reenact a performance about the early days of the machines — specifically, the time when the first human bridged the gap between man and machine.”

With his latest dramatic work Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera, MIT composer Tod Machover attempts to bring the operatic art solidly into the 21st century and a little beyond.

Machovers’ opera is the most recent and most compelling display of technology-enabled art and technology as an art form.

The show, which had its American premiere on March 18 in Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre, is a remarkable artistic achievement, enabled by cutting-edge MIT Media Lab technology that permeates all aspects of the production. The audience is exposed not only to stunning visuals and lighting effects, but also to innovative soundscapes generated by a mix of traditional instruments and electronic hyperinstruments — one of Machover’s pioneering inventions.

The opera features human singers and, as the title suggests, robots (which are indeed real, sophisticated robotic machines, not just stand-in props). All performers, human and machine, interact seamlessly and compellingly.

– Bogdan Fedeles @ tech.mit.edu

And why not a robot opera? Certainly the etymology (from Latin opus) is fitting:

1809, “a work, composition,” esp. a musical one,” from L. opus “a work, labor, exertion” (cf. It. opera, Fr. oeuvre, Sp. obra), from PIE base *op- (Gmc. *ob-) “to work, produce in abundance,” originally of agriculture later extended to religious acts (cf. Skt. apas- “work, religious act;” Avestan hvapah- “good deed;” O.H.G. uoben “to start work, to practice, to honor;” Ger. üben “to exercise, practice;” Du. oefenen, O.N. æfa, Dan. øve “to exercise, practice;” O.E. æfnan “to perform, work, do,” afol “power”).

– Link @ etymonline.com

Brilliantly conceived, artfully executed:
Aeneid on Facebook mashes up The Aeneid and Facebook.

Via Orange Crate Art.

~ Karl Jones