Blind watch maker

I found this great demonstration of a Genetic Algorithm on YouTube. The blind watch maker problem rests on the idea is that if you have all of the components required for a watch laid out in front of you, can you ever reconstruct it by using evolution alone?

Intelligence, Metaheuristics, and Orange

A post on a Metaheuristics Taxonomy by nojhan, the final image is very information dense. A rant on intelligence at the singularity institute. Also, I came across an open source data mining package called orange, cheers Alex. Orange looks like WEKA, although perhaps more user friendly (from the screenshots).

Stupid filter

Sounds strange, but a group of researchers are starting to build a web filter to eliminate stupid content from the Internet. If I understand correctly they will target the linguistics of web content and also capture user feedback to filter bad quality content in an effort to bring the Internet back to its intellectual roots. The project is looking at using similar technology to that used in spam filtering which seems like a good starting point to me.

John Conner?

Found this interesting post on a self-aware robot. I'm not sure whether we should be worried about the end of humanity though as the robot is simply able to determine whether it is looking at itself in a mirror, it hasn't started contemplating its existence... yet!

Evolve rather than invent, and a science oath

Don’t invent, evolve on the economist, cheers greythumb. Also, an official scientists hippocratic oath, proposed an currently being used in the UK (also on the guardian here and here), cheers to the science show.

Example of AI Projects in Industry

A post on examples of AI projects in the industry "Artificial Intelligence problems in Industry (things I’ve worked on)", cheers AIgameDev.

Evolving Images

MutatingPictures - an interesting website to evolve random shapes into images of faces. Another site with more features is picbreeder. Great concept application of crowd sourcing a selection function.

The three schools of the singularity

The three schools of the singularity discussed in the latest post by the singularity institute, also discussed in the podcast at the singularity summit by Eliezer Yudkowsky in a talk titled Introducing the "Singularity": Three Major Schools of Thought.