Robert J. Marks

He offers some here: When I teach a course, I too like to sell the sizzle at the beginning of each lecture. For a graduate course in information theory I teach, the students are told that they will learn why their cell phones use recently discovered coding that pushes the boundaries of what is mathematically possible in communication speed. I also tell them that we will prove that some things exist that we can also prove are unknowable. And there are numbers that a computer can’t compute. There also exists a single number, Chaitin’s number, that we know lies between zero and one. If we knew Chaitin’s number to finite precision, we could prove or disprove numerous open problems in Read More ›

AI help, not hype, with Robert J. Marks: AI can carry out its programmers’ biases and that’s all: Some people may be under the illusion that AI detection of hate speech will be disinterested and fair. After all, the assessment is being done by a computer, which has no ideology or political leanings. An added strength is that the program is being written by “scientists” who are never corrupted by political bias. 🙂 In reality, every computer program contains bias. Without bias, computers cannot do anything smart. This is a major theme of the book I co-authored titled Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics. The question is, what is the bias? … More. See also: 2018 AI Hype Countdown 6: AI Can Read More ›

AI adopts a solution in an allowed set, maybe not the one you expected:. In the same paper in which researchers purported to find examples of AI creativity, we also read the following statement about problems with performance: “Exacerbating the issue, it is often functionally simpler for evolution to exploit loopholes in the quantitative measure than it is to achieve the actual desired outcome.” One example they offered of this type of gaming the system was a walking digital robot that moved more quickly by somersaulting than by using a normal walking gait. That was a very interesting result. But again—recognized or not — somersaults were allowed in the solution set offered by the programmer. … I was once working Read More ›

Robert J. Marks is one of the authors of Introduction to Evolutionary Informatics, with design theorist William Dembski and Winston Ewert. There’s little danger, he thinks, in computers ruling us but considerable danger that we can use them to magnify the impact of our errors. More. Here’s the podcast. See also: Human consciousness may not be computable One model of consciousness would mean that conscious computers are a physical impossibility. (Robert Marks)