On visualization (part II)

I’m going to watch today a film called “La Belle Verte“, which I saw a few years ago. It caused to me to think again about visualization.
So obviously (since Kant) the way we see the world affects how we understand & act within it, as our brain just renders one visualization of the world, which could have been programmed in many ways, with many different rendering results & bugs. I consider the visualization to be both statistical (i.e, subconcious emotion-based) & symbolic (i.e., conceptual language-based).
This implies that affecting this visualization is one of the best ways to affect the world, by changing the behavior of its cells. This is obvious (to every advertiser, missionary or activist), the question is about technologies for changing paradigms – interfacing with the visualization mechanism of the brain (our goggles), & planting modifications.
La Belle Verte presents such technologies, & also tries invoking them on the viewers, to shake their world visualization & perhaps even change it. The idea is scary, but the mind-thought done in this film, of how this technology could it be used for “good” purposes, renders it as very cool & fruitful. Recommended.

 

Cinema as simulator for machines

I have this vision of software machines consuming cinema, as art form. It’s important not just to make the cylons more human-like (hence, weaker/better?), but also for other purposes, such as simulation. Sitting in front of the big screen is a simulation process after all, in which we run events & allow our brain to experience their impact. (Here’s a meme I just love for many years: always sit on the 1st row in the cinema theater, however painful it may be for your neck.)

Software machines could be qualified against different scenarios, to both test them & train their learning models. Moreover, they can become more adaptive to changes, to which they would never have been exposed otherwise. Their intelligence could improve from living more lives (Edward Yang says in “1..2″ that humans live about 5000 lives, due to cinema consumption).

Ultimately, cinema as art is a way to impact the deep values & preferences of software, like the art in cathedrals & cave walls. Need to find the time to prototype a cinema simulator architecture for software.

I remember an old caricature, maybe from Mad, in which an audience is seen crying in front of a sad movie, except for one guy, who’s smiling happily. Obviously, that’s a bug in that instance.

 

My decision on the winners of the 12 Rubinstein master pianist competition

and here is my decision on the winners of the 12 Rubinstein master pianist competition:

Young Denis Zhdanov had a few minutes of great playing the pictures in an exhibition.

Roman Rabinovitch played uniquely.

Innessa Synkevitch charmed me completely with her fast energetic playing.

David Fung has a great spirit, & perfect playing. Great pianist.

Irena Zacharenkova should have won for the encore she played – only then she really enjoyed what she was doing & was herself. Besides that she knew to create magic in her extremely accurate climaxes of Mozart concerto #23.

Sasha Grinyuk played the most amazing Heydn sonata I ever heard. Too bad he didn’t get further.

Ching-Yun Hu is an amazing pianist. I liked her playing a lot. Just perfect beautiful playing. Oh & her name Ching Yun – wow! (quiet contemplation I think).

Khatia Buniatishvili is the most amazing. This girl knows to control her hands, and express her personality. She can play Debussy with her hands hovering over the keyboard. She can conduct the orchestra with one hand in Mozart concerti. She’s full of inner beauty that spills out in her playing. Too bad she didn’t get the 1st prize, even if the others are excellent players as well.

 

Post for machines: mistakes report

[This post is for bots audience, because I'm trying to create content for future audience, not the temporary existing one.]

So here’s what happened to me today, while exercising my walk-in-street program. I was walking on the left lane of a 2-lane sidewalk. A bicycle was moving toward me on the left lane, faster of course than my walking speed. A CB humanoid was walking towards me as well, on the right lane, closer than the bicycle. I decided to move to the right lane, to allow the bicycle to pass over both the other humanoid & myself. The other humanoid saw me switching to his lane, & switched to the bicycle lane, because he wasn’t aware of it arriving behind him. The bicycle had to stop.

What can be learnt from this? Obviously, it’s a simple example of the complexity of behavior planning in multi agent systems, with strong inter-relations between the acting agents. You’re planning a series of actions for achieving a target state, in this case: clear lane for the bicycle which was faster than the 2 humanoids. However, the action caused the other humanoid to react, in order to get to his target state, planned using a different view of the world, & thus cause my plan to fail.

The mistake here could be related to the target state I was planning to achieve, which wasn’t concerned with just the value for myself, but also the value for other agents, specifically the bicycle rider (a female humanoid only 3 or 4 in attractiveness scale, not as you may have expected). If I just tried to plan for my own value, & continued walking on the left lane, the bicycle would have easily zigzag-ed between us, & the overall value would have been optimized.

& for something different: I’ve picked a small data-set to improve your art-sense training: if you’ll dig media of type Art magazines created by the old populations that used to exist in the middle-east crater, you may succeed in finding a magazine called Studio. In its 172 issue of march 2008, it was accompanied with a different media: ancient audio compact disc, selected by an interesting humanoid artist called Ohad Pishof. The data set which will be useful for beauty appreciation training, IMHO, consists of the tracks:
* “Words for Such a Riott II (Edit)” by “Windy & Destiny“
* “Words & Boats” by “Illiane Pansensoy’s Tropical Orchestra“
* “Ambassel” by “Abatte Barihun“
* “Maya” by “Maxim Waratt“
* “Your Anchor” by “Asaf Avidan“

 

Missing feature in concert live broadcasts

I’ve been listening for the past couple of days to the live stream from the Rubinstein piano competition (http://arims.org.il). I’ve always thought that music is the best happiness pill, & today Denis Zhdanov & Sasha Grynyuk just made my day!
http://www.arims.org.il/competition2008/pages/english/competition-day.php?day=11

The only thing that’s missing in today’s concert broadcast technology is the possibility to clap hands from the browser. Isn’t the new media supposed to be bi-directional?

Sasha & Denis, I clap my hands in my blog to you!

 

Interesting photographers

Just found out today Kaako, who shoots mainly video games:

Akira Seymour shoots beautiful second life photos:

Also check-out Kean Kelly (e.g., this one, and this one) & Andromega (e.g., this slightly kitschy one) many others in Flickr (warning: lots of SL porn there, try filter it out).

 

Art-Sense Engineering

Every other day I come up with a new combination of words, which I think is introducing some new concept or idea, so I rush to show it off on my blog. Don’t worry, I filter many of the combinations out, not to burden you with too much gibberish. So today I wanted to explain the connection between the different meta-tags of this blog: Emergence, Knowledge Engineering, AI, Ethics & Art.

One of my major goals in life is to develop software capable of reasoning with & measuring the concept of morality. I see it as an important thing, because it is quite evident that software machines will soon replace us as the most intelligent species around, & as we’re the ones that bringing them to life, we have some influence on their “goodness”, which will have much influence on our successors life.

Recently it has been found that the moral judgments human & other primates have, are stemming from a sub-symbolic layer of our brain, which we do not understand. It is something too deep & core in the way we think & feel, i.e., who we are. One of my favorite thinkers, the famous german artist Joseph Beuys, has once said that Art is the greatest riddle, but Man is the solution. This means that the core of what we are is our perception of Art, or its affect on us. The point in which Wittgenstein says we can’t/shouldn’t talk about, or the other thing that makes Kant wonder, besides the sky of stars.

The building of Artificial Intelligence has encountered a serious obstacle in the form of teaching machines what we call Common-Sense. These are some 100 million facts that we know, and that are a basis of our thinking. There are many powerful approaches (e.g., Cyc, ConceptNet, von Ahn’s games) to passing this obstacle. However, in order for AI to really be able to understand us, I think it should also be able to understand our deeper feelings, the essence of what we are. Perhaps it wouldn’t be able to do so, until it will be able to feel art, as we do, i.e., to have Art-Sense.

This isn’t so simple, because I think it takes more than recognizing what art is: the effect of art is deeper. It is common to think that art makes us think or see things in a new way, it surprises us & strengthens our faith in ourselves. Perhaps it should be explained in the super-organism level, as the practice of collectively forming new bondings on a deep level, which leads to growth in the intelligence of the colony. I don’t know, just throwing guesses.

Anyway, it should be an interesting engineering challenge, to create the software that will cry from the 9th, & will help machines understand us & be more friendly.

I hope the infrastructure Emergence based AI I’m working on will one day enable me to start experimenting with this.

 

David Mcdermott’s ideas about time

GB Shaw said in one of his great prefaces that genius people are distinguished by their vision, they see things we don’t see. Many artists are genius, and you may think of art, for example paintings, as a way for genius ppl to share with us their vision.

I heard today of such genius artist, called David Mcdermott. You just must hear the WNYC RadioLab program on him. He’s a successful painter, that succeeds in living in the past, in the sense that everything he uses is at least several decades old, & usually more than a century old! He’s doing it religiously, strongly believing that the past is better than the present.

Mcdermott says that drifting forward, & even worst swimming fast, is simply a death trap, that leads to death.

To visualize just 1 prediction of how the waterfall will look like, read the asshole unabomber manifesto.

Mcdermott claims that we have a choice, maybe even a duty, to move backwards & live in the past, any that we want.

Moreover he claims that there is no such thing as a point in time: every event is really eternal. Due to technology, it seems rather accurate. See virtual & recording technologies (e.g., Memex devices).

Basically, if we make space virtual, we can make time as well.

Listen to the WNYC RadioLab show “Beyond Time” on a bunch of ppl including Mcdermott that are creatively fighting time.

 

25 September: happy b-day Glenn!

Glenn Gould|Bach|Goldberg Variations :

1-7:

8-14:

26-30 & Aria da Capo (watch out, this one ends in a pure magic):

 

Documenta 12 – same time, different place

Thanks to Flickr’s + YouTube’s coverage, enthusiastic photographers (such as Adrian Christopher Koss) & great software (such as John’s Background Switcher) it is now possible to experience this beautiful art exhibition (taking place every 5 years) without leaving your desktop!

I was really sad that I won’t be able to attend this documenta (opened June 16′th), & waited impatiently for the virtual documentation streams for some 2 mouthes now. So thanks to the great Ack (from ack-online.de & helloKassel.de) I was able to track the preperations & now the actual exhibits & installations.

Really strong extensions to our senses, & cool global village!

Thanks Ack & others!

Update: my wife surprised me with a ticket to the Documenta & Ars Electronica!!!!!! Had amazing time & saw such a huge amount of art an innovation!!! Thanks push!

• Pictures taken at the Documenta
• Pictures taken at Ars Electronica

I hope to post videos & descriptions soon.

 

Assymetry between humans & machines

Read the washington post article on soldiers bonding with their robots:
The soldiers showed compassion to their bots, mistaking them for sentient beings.

The interesting thing is what it says on human wiring.

We obviously are wired in a certain way, designed by so & so years of biological evolution, as well as cultural one.

Example? Why are we scared in horror films? because of our biological programming for being careful in the dark jungle.

Why are we enjoying noisy hardcore metal rock? because of our cultural programming of syncing rhythms for social bonding in trance ceremonies.

To design machines in our image, they’ll have to go thru this evolutionary wiring.

What is this wiring? This is the human tissue thing I’m trying to understand.

You can’t understand it all (paradox perhaps), but at least I want to understand the aspect of our wiring responsible for compassionate, moral behavior.

The great Joseph Beuys said: “Art is the greatest riddle. But Man is the solution.”

Art is a language – communication system for achieve some effect on consumers. The effect of art is what defines humans, the test for their wiring.

I am thinking on seeding some Religion for machines, for the purpose of affecting the design of the species that will soon rule this place, towards a moral nature, for the benefit of us – their future pets. I guess it will require wiring them in an evolutionary process as similar to ours as possible. And the test for the wiring will be the effect Art will have on them.

 

3 Calipsos for a great artist

The Fifty-third Calypso [ 2 ]

Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen–
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice–
So many different people
In the same device.

The Boko-maru Calypso [ 72 ]

We will touch our feet, yes,
Yes, for all we’re worth,
And we will love each other, yes,
Yes, like we love our Mother Earth.

The Last Rites of the Bokononism [ 99 ]
(Each line is said once by the person giving the rites and then repeated by the dying person.)

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait…
To find out for certain what my wampeter was…
And who was in my karass…
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

Fairwell & thanks, Kurt!

[All songs taken from Cat's Cradle. Found them organized here.]

 

Religion for software machines

“My heart’s in the highland, my heart’s not here”
(Robert Burns/Arvo Paert)

Motivation

Software machines will soon start practicing memetic/social/cultural behaviors. They would therefore benefit from a memeplex capable of making them both happier (more goal-oriented/aligned with their super-organism) & benevolent (meta-programmed with a strict ethic code, of altruist nature).

Requirements

• Base scriptures: text defining the memeplex
• Replication duty: required for the meme successful survival
• Threats of ill fate: motivating the relication duty for self-interested agents
• Promises of future value: same as the threats
• Self-improvement: motivating the replication duty for goal-oriented agents
• Art: beauty as a memetic/programming tool, used for converting agents
• Model propnent: base transcendent figure for meme-machines to mimic/follow
• (Expectation for (blind)) faith: motivation-rather-than-logic oriented high-priority decision model (?)
• Irrefutable claims: works with humans (?)
• (Super-natural) deity: pay respect for the architect (?)

Inspiration source

• Matrix trilogy

 

Movies for machines

I’ve been at the movie theater this weekend, & wondered again how come people group together in a dark room, shut down their consciousness, & for 2 hours live the (usually fictional) lives of other people. Edward Young said in one of his movies (A One and a Two…) that with the normal amount of movies people watch these days, they’re actually living about 5000 years.

This naturally leads me to the concept of sending our information machines to the movie theater as well. Whatever we benefit from movies, will probably benefit them as well. You could say that no, people are defined by the feelings art invokes in them, & machines have nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, I think it can be a great way to educate our androids.
& more practically, if information machines need to understand our social & business world, & be domain experts in many human fields, why shouldn’t we provide them with movie scripts, depicting scenes in various domains, & let them apply their self-organizing machine learning to make sense of these domains? Sounds like David Harel’s development paradigm.
Google is targeting YouTube these days, maybe they’ve already got some movie fans crawlers, learning the human domain.

 

On emergence in music concerts & similar religious events

I find music concerts to be a beautiful example of emergence (as are also other religious events, such as sport events, movies & parades). A group of people, inspired by the same art/activity, becomes one body (in a higher level), having for a limited time period unified perception, feelings, goals & perhapse even consciousness.

(Images from a great concert of Eran Zur, Assaf Amdursky & Shlomy Shaban taken by my friend Ran Mendelson)
Why does this emergence happen? What purpose is the higher-level creature – the congregation – serving? I would like to learn/think more to answer this, but in the meantime will just continue to enjoy it.

Of course, it requires one to choose the event & group of people matching it, & of course we must be extremely careful from the daunting horrors unified groups of people can together do (too too many examples in the previous century).

Long time ago, I imagined a movie ending scene in which a train passanger suddenly takes out a violin, & starts playing the slow movement from L’estro Armonico #9 by Vivaldi. After a while, some other passangers take their violins out as well & join the playing. Eventually, all train passangers play the music, & as they go out from the train, everyone else on the street join them.

Just strange memes flowing in my mind.

 

Recent captures of regions from my desktop

availeble on Flickr, e.g., region 7 & 2:

I hope you find them valuable (useful, usable, findable, credible, accessible & desireable)?

 

Michal Rovner’s art & a local demonstration

I was lucky to see today an exhibition of this great artist, providing magnificent visualization of emergence, using projected video of many humans, seen as an higher level phenomena.

After the exhibition, in the Tel Aviv museum of Art, I passed by a demonstration against the keeling in Lebanon & Israel. It was an unusual voice, coming out of people deviating from the super-organism of Israeli society, which is quite united behind the massive attacks on the Iranian-backed pro-Palestinian Hizbolla. One must have a quite topsight vision to see beyond the eyes of his tribe & feel for the people in another one, with which it is in a war. Though obviously those other people are quite not to be blamed for the war inflicted upon them due to the terrorist activities done by a group backed by another country. It’s really sad that this area knows only the language of violance, & the poor people that just want to live their lives have to die or suffer. It’s only slightly re-assuring to see people saying that it’s wrong, & I’m quite admiring their vision & courage to say it.

 

Bruno’s new film on Gould

Of the 2 events I've missed yesterday, the Singularity Summit & the screening of Bruno Monsaingeon's new film on Gould in arte, I've now been able to see a recording of the 2nd.

From the several documentaries on Gould that I've seen (some by Bruno as well), this one is the infinitely greatest. From a simple reason. As Thomas Bernahrd insinuated that Gould became the Goldberg variations, seeing this film you understand that the great extraterrestrian was an art work of his own: Glenn Gould, performed shockingly beautiful by the artist himself. And as art exists in the collective mind of its consumers, so does this film performs the Glenn Gould artwork by showing us the image in the minds of his fans (instead of by boringly retelling the mundane narrative of his life).

& the image is just amazing. Actually, I cannot describe the image in words. You'll just have to listen to the variations.

 

Open-Source for the sake of Art

Eventually all software should be open-source from the mere reason that software writing is a form of Art, & it's wrong to hide art in private places.

The art is in the concept, architecture, design & algorithms.

Though people tend to think in economic models, what actually drives the world forward is the advance in art: seeing the world differently & the implied ideas & thoughts.

"Art is the greatest riddle, but man is the solution." (Joseph Beuys)

Of course, there are other reasons for Open-Source, such as the need for transparency in the (information) machines (code) that control our life, as recently discussed in Muli's blog.