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Maybe I am confused. Is it simulating a lava lamp, or a video of a lava lamp?

• muxamilian 5y ago
  You show the neural net many video snippets of a real lava lamp. It tries to output videos that are supposed to imitate the behavior of a real lava lamp. So it actually outputs videos of lava lamps but to do that convincingly, it has to understand the physical behavior of a lava lamp at least a little bit.
  • nautilius 5y ago
    So a GAN that draws a cartoon of an owl is 'simulating an owl' and has to 'understand the behavior of an owl at least a little bit'? I don't think so. Don't get me wrong, it's a cool project, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
    • uoaei 5y ago
      It doesn't have to, no. But come on that's not really what is meant here. It does need to understand certain properties of owls, even if "arrangement of pixels that look like an eye near arrangement of pixels that look like a beak" is as far as it gets. Though as in another thread it is not necessarily the owl (you would need to do something like rendering a la Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to get closer to some perfect comprehension of an owl.
  • npteljes 5y ago
    I don't think that's right. The proof of that learning could be that it applies the knowledge to something other than a lava lamp, or at least a modified lava lamp - so something "out of the box".
• rgovostes 5y ago
  This is a great philosophical question that John Searle would be proud of. The superficial answer would be "a video of a lava lamp," since that is its input and output. (It therefore tries to mimic artifacts of the video itself, compression, scaling, banding, etc.) But the means by which the network generates frames involves some kind of learned representation of the lava lamp that is more than just a matrix of pixel values, and the network encodes a function for how it predicts this representation will change over time. So it also simulates the lava lamp itself. On the other hand, the network has no idea about things that would be necessary to perform a remotely accurately simulation, like properties of the chemicals involved or the laws of thermodynamics.
  • uoaei 5y ago
    Well, any learned "representation of a lava lamp" would necessarily be of a subjective perspective, and so we have zoomed out only slightly from "video of a lava lamp" to "subjective experience of a lava lamp", both of which have video-like qualities (temporal correlation, large-scale persistent structures). So it simulates really the "experience of a lava lamp". But it still doesn't do it very well.
• npteljes 5y ago
  It doesn't simulate anything in the first place, but generates images from a dataset that's built up from a set of images.