This is REALLY an amazing article and I encourage everyone to read at least HALF of it....
01/25/2004
By Tina Hesman
Of the Post-Dispatch
Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.
Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he's really just "the man behind the curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.
What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"
Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.
Others say it is something far more sinister - the beginning of "Terminator" technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.
Thaler's technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.
The invention began to take shape in the 1980s. By day, the physicist worked at McDonnell Douglas Corp., where he wielded a powerful laser beam to crystallize diamonds. He built elegant computer simulations, called neural networks, to guide his experiments.
But at night, things were different. Shirley MacLaine and her ilk were all over the TV and on magazine covers talking about reincarnation and life after death and near-death experiences. It made Thaler wonder: "What would happen if I killed one of my neural networks?"
Neural networks can be either software programs or computers designed to model an object, process or set of data. Thaler reasoned that if a neural network were an accurate representation of a biological system, he could kill it and figure out what happens in the brain as it dies.
In biological brains, the information-carrying cells, called neurons, meet at junctions, called synapses. Brain chemicals, such as adrenaline and dopamine, flow across the junctions to stimulate or soothe the cells. In the computer world, there are switches instead of cells. The switches are connected by numbers or "weights."
So after work, Thaler went home and created the epitome of a killer application - a computer program he called the Grim Reaper. The reaper dismantles neural networks by changing its connection weights. It is the biological equivalent of killing neurons. Pick off enough neurons, and the result is death.
On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he'd taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network's digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.
The network wove its remaining strands of memory together, producing what someone else might interpret as damaged memories, but what Thaler recognized as new ideas. In its death spiral, the program dreamed up new carols, each created from shards of its shattered memories.
"Its last dying gasp was, 'All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,'" Thaler said.
But it wasn't the eloquence of the network's last words that captured Thaler's imagination. What excited him was how noisy and creative the process of dying was. It gave Thaler ideas. What if, he asked, I don't cut the connections, but just perturb them a little?
Thaler built another neural network and trained it to recognize the structure of diamonds and some other super-hard materials. He also built a second network to monitor the first one's activities.
Then he tickled a few of the network's connections, and something began to happen. The tickling, akin to a shot of adrenaline or an electrical jolt in the brain, produced noise. In this sense, noise is not sound, but random activity. And the noise triggered changes in the network.
The result was new ideas. The computer dreamed up new ultra-hard materials. Some of the materials are known to humans, but Thaler didn't tell the network they existed. Other materials are entirely new, unknown to humans or computers before.
"A little elbow room"
When Rusty Miller went to lunch one day in 1998, he picked up a specialized computer magazine called PCAI journal. He flipped through the pages and came across a story about Thaler and his Creativity Machine inventing the ultra-hard substances. Instantly, Miller knew that Thaler had taken a step beyond other artificial intelligence technologies, such as fuzzy logic or genetic algorithms, he said.
The brilliance of Thaler's invention is the noise he introduces into the system, Miller said.
"Noise allows neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas," Miller said.
Other researchers have come to the same conclusion.
Good old-fashioned artificial intelligence uses human experts to input huge quantities of data and a list of rules to create a model, said Robert Kozma, a computer scientist at the University of Memphis. Kozma is experimenting with a similar technology.
The rigidity of traditional artificial intelligence technologies holds back creativity, Kozma said.
"This type of rule-based system is frozen. It's dead and cannot get to the essence of intelligence," Kozma said. "Creativity cannot be derived in a logical way, in a step-by-step fashion." You need a little noise to come up with good ideas, he said.
Human brains are also noisy places, said Dr. Walter J. Freeman, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. A debate has raged for half a century about what the brain does with noise.
Many biologists see noise as just a nuisance or a necessary evil, Freeman said. The brain devotes many neurons to the same task so it can swamp out that random activity, those scientists argue.
But Freeman subscribes to an alternative theory - that noise is essential for the brain to function properly. Noise provides variability that allows organisms to adapt to new situations, he said.
Kozma has replaced the brain of a robotic toy dog with this new technology. The idea is to create a robot that can explore a new environment, such as the surface of another planet, without human guidance. NASA is funding Kozma's efforts.
01/25/2004
By Tina Hesman
Of the Post-Dispatch
Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.
Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he's really just "the man behind the curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.
What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"
Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.
Others say it is something far more sinister - the beginning of "Terminator" technology, in which self-aware machines could take over the world.
Thaler's technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.
The invention began to take shape in the 1980s. By day, the physicist worked at McDonnell Douglas Corp., where he wielded a powerful laser beam to crystallize diamonds. He built elegant computer simulations, called neural networks, to guide his experiments.
But at night, things were different. Shirley MacLaine and her ilk were all over the TV and on magazine covers talking about reincarnation and life after death and near-death experiences. It made Thaler wonder: "What would happen if I killed one of my neural networks?"
Neural networks can be either software programs or computers designed to model an object, process or set of data. Thaler reasoned that if a neural network were an accurate representation of a biological system, he could kill it and figure out what happens in the brain as it dies.
In biological brains, the information-carrying cells, called neurons, meet at junctions, called synapses. Brain chemicals, such as adrenaline and dopamine, flow across the junctions to stimulate or soothe the cells. In the computer world, there are switches instead of cells. The switches are connected by numbers or "weights."
So after work, Thaler went home and created the epitome of a killer application - a computer program he called the Grim Reaper. The reaper dismantles neural networks by changing its connection weights. It is the biological equivalent of killing neurons. Pick off enough neurons, and the result is death.
On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he'd taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network's digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.
The network wove its remaining strands of memory together, producing what someone else might interpret as damaged memories, but what Thaler recognized as new ideas. In its death spiral, the program dreamed up new carols, each created from shards of its shattered memories.
"Its last dying gasp was, 'All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,'" Thaler said.
But it wasn't the eloquence of the network's last words that captured Thaler's imagination. What excited him was how noisy and creative the process of dying was. It gave Thaler ideas. What if, he asked, I don't cut the connections, but just perturb them a little?
Thaler built another neural network and trained it to recognize the structure of diamonds and some other super-hard materials. He also built a second network to monitor the first one's activities.
Then he tickled a few of the network's connections, and something began to happen. The tickling, akin to a shot of adrenaline or an electrical jolt in the brain, produced noise. In this sense, noise is not sound, but random activity. And the noise triggered changes in the network.
The result was new ideas. The computer dreamed up new ultra-hard materials. Some of the materials are known to humans, but Thaler didn't tell the network they existed. Other materials are entirely new, unknown to humans or computers before.
"A little elbow room"
When Rusty Miller went to lunch one day in 1998, he picked up a specialized computer magazine called PCAI journal. He flipped through the pages and came across a story about Thaler and his Creativity Machine inventing the ultra-hard substances. Instantly, Miller knew that Thaler had taken a step beyond other artificial intelligence technologies, such as fuzzy logic or genetic algorithms, he said.
The brilliance of Thaler's invention is the noise he introduces into the system, Miller said.
"Noise allows neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas," Miller said.
Other researchers have come to the same conclusion.
Good old-fashioned artificial intelligence uses human experts to input huge quantities of data and a list of rules to create a model, said Robert Kozma, a computer scientist at the University of Memphis. Kozma is experimenting with a similar technology.
The rigidity of traditional artificial intelligence technologies holds back creativity, Kozma said.
"This type of rule-based system is frozen. It's dead and cannot get to the essence of intelligence," Kozma said. "Creativity cannot be derived in a logical way, in a step-by-step fashion." You need a little noise to come up with good ideas, he said.
Human brains are also noisy places, said Dr. Walter J. Freeman, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. A debate has raged for half a century about what the brain does with noise.
Many biologists see noise as just a nuisance or a necessary evil, Freeman said. The brain devotes many neurons to the same task so it can swamp out that random activity, those scientists argue.
But Freeman subscribes to an alternative theory - that noise is essential for the brain to function properly. Noise provides variability that allows organisms to adapt to new situations, he said.
Kozma has replaced the brain of a robotic toy dog with this new technology. The idea is to create a robot that can explore a new environment, such as the surface of another planet, without human guidance. NASA is funding Kozma's efforts.