Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Back in class

 When I was a student you couldn't go to school if you hadn't had your vaccinations. We actually got the polio vaccine at school. We should be requiring our college students to be vaccinated. 

Sunday, January 2, 2022

Vector value reward

In their paper Scalar Reward is Not Enough* Peter Vamplew, et al, argue that scalar rewards are insufficient for an intelligent system. 

* arXiv:2112.15422, 3 January 2022. See also my blog of 19 February 2011 and Capitalism is Wrong in my book Twelve Papers (www.robert-w-jones.com, Book).

Saturday, January 1, 2022

Alternate Realities

 In his paper "What are the Realities?" arXiv:2112.10282v1, 19 Dec. 2021, James Hartle outlines a view of multiple realities that is essentially the same as mine and A.s.a.'s.

A.s.a. H. NLU

 I've been playing with S. C. Gruget's  Mini Kore and Mini Mundo languages in place of Toki Pona and Simplish.

reTerminal

I have bought a Seeed Studio reTerminal. It can be substituted for the Raspberry Pi in any of my robots and they would then have the advantage of no longer operating "headless." The 5 inch touch screen is adequate for display purposes though rather small for input. One can temporarily plug in a mouse and keyboard if need be. The fact that there is no internal battery is no problem for my use in robots. In fact, it is helpful to be able to choose from a variety of battery sizes. 

A risk of commercial spaceflight

 Elon Musk's email regarding possible Spacex bankruptcy reminds us of the fact that, large or small, most companies fail in 3 to 5 years, about 90% of companies fail within 10 years, and hardly any company survives 100 years. And what happens when Musk dies? Capitalism suffers from a shortsightedness and value system that makes it hard for a capitalist society to tackle projects like controlled nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, space travel, and climate change. 

Search filters

I tried a computer search  "real labs are messy." On my ESU machine I got no search results and a notice  that I would have to change my Bing SafeSearch filter settings in order to allow for adult content. I tried the same search on one of my home computers and got reasonable results discussing things like lab safety and clutter. Crazy.

Bot library

 I keep code libraries in BASIC, Prolog, C/C++, Python, Lisp, Java, etc. In Python, for example, I have sample programs for clustering, neural networks, genetic programming, statistics, logic programming, expert systems, etc. I am putting together a library of robot designs for walkers, grippers, arms, humanoids, etc. Such libraries help to speed up the design of new experiments.