Evolution of Cooperation

Post titled "Evolution of Signaling in Artificial Agents" on the Panda's Thumb (PT) about evolving cooperation in robots which references a piece at The Loom titled "Evolving Robotspeak". Basically the work is about evolving neural nets in robots with light and infrared sensors and engendering communication through competition for food. The source paper is titled "Evolving conditions for the emergence of communication in robots" (2007).
The original PT article also highlights an article last year on the biological evolution of cooperation titled "The Evolution of Cooperation: Hawks, Doves, Ravens and Starlings", which references an interesting paper in nature on evolving cooperation with neural nets in simple 2D landscapes titled "Evolution of cooperative strategies from first principles" (2006).

Fun stuff to read about, enjoy!

Tips, Vision, and a Google class

A list of tips for computer science graduate students. The 'writing your thesis' one was short and sweet, the rest didn't really interest me.
A somewhat interesting biologically inspired vision system.
A new CS class on google tech by a guy from Google.

Google on AI

Via a KurzweilAI post, there is a video on cnet with Larry Page of Google talking about artificial intelligence and his thoughts that is a problem of computation rather than that of smart algorithms.

A billion-bits, Optimization, and Long Term Predictions

The IlliGAL have released a technical report version of their paper on using a compact GA (cGA) on a billion-bit optimization titled "Towards a billion bit optimization via efficient genetic algorithms" (2007). The 'Good Math, Bad Math' blog have a brief on optimization with a geometric example and a note on linear and dynamic programming. And finally, there is an interesting podcast (from the long now seminar series) by Philip Tetlock titled "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs" about his work in an 18 year study on measuring and evaluating peoples forecasting abilities.

The Machine

Cool video on web 2.0. Short, sweet and few weeks old, but worth a watch.

In Browser Reference Scraping

Yeah, I'm totally sick of control-c control-v of reference information from websites. There is a cool firefox extension for scraping bibliographic information from sites called Zotero. Seems to work pretty good for me, although it was unable to scrape SpringerLink and DBLP. Google Scholar, IEEE Explore and Amazon worked just fine. Cheers to the MEDAL Blog for the heads up.

Machine Learning and Stats

An interesting post on Thoughts regarding "Is machine learning different from statistics?". Also a review on Turing Machines with a cool little code example.