Déjà Vu

Every night I have many dreams. Right before I completely go to sleep, my brain starts a dream. I suspect that may be the reason I have a hard time getting to sleep since the dream process must start before I can really get to sleep. My dreams are very vivid and usually involve real life circumstances. I may dream about work, school, home, or anything. Sometimes, however, my dreams mix with my real memories. Sometimes distinguishing between dream memories and real memories is quite a challenge.

The most unusual feeling, though, is the one of déjà vu. Sometimes, in real life, I encounter a situation: a scene that seems to me to have come straight out of one of my dreams---as if in the past I had dreamt about a scene in my future. This past weekend it happened again, I was at a friend's house where he was having a gaming party. We started playing a game I had never seen before (Halo 3). We all took turns playing (two people could play at the same time), and at some point two of my friends were playing when they encountered a scene in Africa on a highway system. This triggered my déjà vu and I remembered having a dream watching both of them playing and encountering the exact same scene.

Now I suspect that I did not really dream exactly that, but the feeling of déjà vu is so strong that immediately when I feel it, I wonder if I am currently dreaming...

Insanity

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein

Spammers solving A.I. Problems?

New Scientist has published an article about how spammers could be the key to solving A.I. problems and eventually passing the Turing test. The one thing they do not mention is that CAPTCHAs are all about computers detecting other computers, while the Turing test is about humans detecting computers.

Sorry for any inconvenience

Yeah, who hasn't been inconvenienced by 24 hours only?

AGI

So it seems some other people have also noticed that the field of A.I. has lost its direction and have proposed starting a new name for the old A.I., A.G.I (Artificial General Intelligence).

There has even been a first conference and a wiki.

Tired

I've been very tired during the day for the past couple of weeks. I was pretty sure it was not just the usual lack of sleep---and today it hit me: I started taking allergy medicine in the morning a couple of weeks back. Doh! I guess I'm going to skip it for a while so I can get some things done.

True A.I.

I was talking with a friend the other day about free will and we reached the point where we thought that free will is currently missing from alot of A.I. research. I would not consider any A.I. to be true A.I. without the machine having free will. This then brought up how I believe that there is true randomness if and only if there is free will. And that a machine must have a fuel source of true randomness in order to have free will. However, this is a topic of another blog post that perhaps will someday be written. Here I wanted to talk about...What the heck happened to A.I. research!?

I think at some point, every researcher who starts in A.I. realizes that there just really isn't much funding for foundational true A.I. research. All of the so-called A.I. research is currently more about data-mining and adaptive systems. I believe this is because these areas have a clearer short-term potential economic gain.

Who is working on the real foundational questions concerning constructing a true A.I.?

I can't believe Jorge used Theta and Sigma incorrectly! :(