Science: January 2005 Archive Page

A computer that learns to play a 'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers.

CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own "hypotheses" about the game's rules.

In contrast to older artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mimic human behaviour using hard-coded rules, CogVis takes a more human approach, learning through observation and mimicry, the researchers say. --Machine learns games 'like a human' (NewScientist.com (will expire))

Thanks for the link, Mike.

The model is:

[W + (D-d)] x TQ
M x NA

The equation is broken down into seven variables: (W) weather, (D) debt, (d) monthly salary, (T) time since Christmas, (Q) time since failed quit attempt, (M) low motivational levels and (NA) the need to take action. --Jan. 24 called worst day of the year (MSN)

April may be the cruellest month, but British psychologist Cliff Arnall calculates that Jan 24 is the most depressing day of the year.

Let's hope that doesn't have anything to do with the fact that, as Mike Arnzen notes on Pedablogue, that's the day we go back to school.

"If you're looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn't it." -- David Atkinson, scientist whose 18 years of work on a space probe experiment were trashed when someone forgot to turn the thing on before the probe's 1997 launch. --Professor's Saturn Experiment Forgotten (AP/My Way)

You wouldn't buy a car or a house without asking some questions about it first. So don't go buying into someone else's data without asking questions, either.

Okay, you're saying... but with data there are no tires to kick, no doors to slam, no basement walls to check for water damage. Just numbers, graphs and other scary statistical things that are causing you to have bad flashbacks to your last income tax return. What the heck can you ask about data? --Robert Niles --Data Analysis (RobertNiles.com)

Boring title for a very handy guide for developing a healthy scepticism of statistics.

If the notion of hacking DNA sounds like genetic engineering, think again. Genetic engineering generally involves moving a preexisting gene from one organism to another, an activity Endy calls DNA bashing. For all its impressive and profitable results, DNA bashing is hardly creative. Proper engineering, by contrast, means designing what you want to make, analyzing the design to be sure it will work, and then building it from the ground up. And that's what synthetic biology is about: specifying every bit of DNA that goes into an organism to determine its form and function in a controlled, predictable way, like etching a microprocessor or building a bridge. The goal, as Endy puts it, is nothing less than to "reimplement life in a manner of our choosing." --Oliver Morton --Life, Reinvented  (Wired)

This is exactly the premise behind R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1919 Czech play that introduced the word "robot" to languages around the world. The author, Karel Capek, wasn't interested in the technical details of how his synthetic humans were created -- he was more interested in writing about how big business changes the human relationship to work.

Crichton doesn't like the idea that someone else is better placed to make judgments than he is. He seems convinced that global warming is largely an invention of careerist scientists abetted by a partisan press.

And he seems to find something smug and stifling, if not dishonest, about consensus: "the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus", he says. "If it's consensus, it isn't science." --Philip Ball
--Brought to Book (Nature)

A skeptical review of Michael Crighton's latest book, in which the villians are alarmist environmentalists.