Ransen's Blog

I'm sort of investigating an idea of primitive vision (as in: "how did it evolve?"), artificial neural networks and the Arduino . I'm making a primitive eye, deliberately avoiding video cameras. Here it is partially constructed: It is all very hand made and I was experimenting with the positioning of the sensors (LDRs). I struck me that the drawing on the piece of hardware looked very like one of Giordano Bruno's strange diagrams, for example: Bruno's diagram is called Campus Martis. There are 7 sensors. I could have chosen 9 7 5 or 3. But I chose 7 because, believe it or not, I thought to myself, Newton would have liked 7. He chose 7 as the number of colors in the rainbow, but the choice is arbitrary, unless you consider the magical powers assigned to the number 7. And Newton did.

I saw the Netflix documentary on AlphaGo, an AI/Neural Network program to play Go. I can highly recommend it, even though the events tool place in 2016. It is a very human story.  The long and the short of it is that, as usual, experts in a certain domain believe that a computer will never be able to do what they do. And then AlphaGo beat the world champion of Go, Lee Sedol , 4 games to 1.  Lee Sedol seems to me to be a nice bloke who fought an heroic fight against the machine.  But what struck me was what he said at the end. That AlphaGo had made him rethink his way of playing, he would learn from the machine. But I think that is impossible, AlphaGo's "reasoning" is nothing like ours. Which is why AI / Neural Networks can uncover hidden patterns and strategies. Because they do not think like humans. Our experience sometimes limits us. Well designed neural networks have no such limits. One of the Go commentators said during the documentary that move 37 by Alpha