Friday, July 14

Interesting!

This is a really interesting article if you're interested in technology at all. It's about a guy who built an "invention machine". It's a computer program that can literally invent new things. The article is kind of lengthy, but I found it fascinating.

I won't argue...I have definitely have some nerdish tendencies. :)

2 comments:

no_average_girl said...

hey you! Yeah, this sounds waaaaayyyyyy too complicated for me! LOL An invention that invents things! Question is, could it invent itself? haha

Ok, bedtime now...I'm getting crazy!

Mark Nenadov said...

I must say I haven't studied this carefully, but this introduces some problems in the philosophy of invention :>

I believe this could only create flawed inventions. And, at that, inventions more flawed than a human could create.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the following is true: No invention is perfect.

So, the man who invented this "invention machine" made it imperfect. Will these imperfect inventions be more or less perfect than the invention machine? They will be less perfect, unless in a rare instance by some weird fluke, they have some better attribute.

And what if the invention machine decides to invent another invention machine? Will the downward spiral, compounded by occasional invention machine mistakes, result in one of the most incompetent invention machines that the world could possibly concieve?

Futuristic speculation aside, this seems like a good way to try to refine and further experimentations in artificial intelligence and decision making software. I think in things like this, the technology becomes slightly less important and the information it works on becomes more important. The technology will never make a reality-corresponding decision without good data. Of course, one may ask, can you differentiate between technology and data?

I could make pretty startlingly good inventions too if I just had all the necessary data in front of my nose :>

My hope is that some day John Koza develops some more advanced artificial intelligence technology that will once and for all make the right and wise decision to stop humans from making invention machines and rather invent a way invent things without a computer aided process. Once we do that, we can invent a computer that does someting truly useful, like making coffee or creating our blog entries for us.

Follow that? :)