4 ms·

Seconded. Diaspora is one of the best sci if books I've read. Highly recommend it (and all of Egan's work) to the HN community.

wfn 12y ago
Thirded. Before Diaspora, I first read "Wang's Carpets"[1] which is a short story of his. Then found out this story had later been incorporated as a chapter into the book. I remember basically immediately ordering said book that night. fwiw, that "Webly-Supervised Visual Concept Learning" reminds me of the stuff that Hinton et al. do re: unsupervised (concept, etc.) learning (using restricted Boltzmann machines, and so on.) Good talk on the subject (of deep learning, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M [1]: read online here: http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997 http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997
- MachineElf 12y ago
  Umm.. fourthed? I just couldn't help but jump in and also recommend Greg Egan's "Permutation City". That book is just wonderful... think simulation, cellular automata as a model for computation, artificial life and all that other good stuff :). Also, about the LEVAN thing... given the amount of data available online, both in various structured formats and unstructured formats, don't be surprised if deep learning will yield better and better results moving forward. To me though, they mostly seem evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I mean if you look back at the AI field, during the days before the "AI winter" came, huge amounts of data is one thing researchers back then didn't have available. This is not to say that there haven't been advances in learning algorithms at all recently. ..
  - arethuza 12y ago
    As well as adding my own strong recommedatios for Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" I would also recommend "Quarantine" - which has a rather splendid idea for mobile apps - "neural mods" that actually augment the brains own congnitive capabilities (including augmenting sensory data for the ultimate in VR). And there is what one group chooses to do with a very special neural mod...
  - agibsonccc 12y ago
    This is happening now in deep learning. Deep autoencoders[1] are allowing for computer representations of "similar" concepts. I recently gave a talk on this very concept to assist in QA systems. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/ir-34811120 http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/ir-34811120

wfn 12y ago

Thirded. Before Diaspora, I first read "Wang's Carpets"[1] which is a short story of his. Then found out this story had later been incorporated as a chapter into the book. I remember basically immediately ordering said book that night. fwiw, that "Webly-Supervised Visual Concept Learning" reminds me of the stuff that Hinton et al. do re: unsupervised (concept, etc.) learning (using restricted Boltzmann machines, and so on.) Good talk on the subject (of deep learning, etc.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M [1]: read online here: http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997 http://bookre.org/reader?file=222997

MachineElf 12y ago
Umm.. fourthed? I just couldn't help but jump in and also recommend Greg Egan's "Permutation City". That book is just wonderful... think simulation, cellular automata as a model for computation, artificial life and all that other good stuff :). Also, about the LEVAN thing... given the amount of data available online, both in various structured formats and unstructured formats, don't be surprised if deep learning will yield better and better results moving forward. To me though, they mostly seem evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I mean if you look back at the AI field, during the days before the "AI winter" came, huge amounts of data is one thing researchers back then didn't have available. This is not to say that there haven't been advances in learning algorithms at all recently. ..
- arethuza 12y ago
  As well as adding my own strong recommedatios for Egan's "Permutation City" and "Diaspora" I would also recommend "Quarantine" - which has a rather splendid idea for mobile apps - "neural mods" that actually augment the brains own congnitive capabilities (including augmenting sensory data for the ultimate in VR). And there is what one group chooses to do with a very special neural mod...
- agibsonccc 12y ago
  This is happening now in deep learning. Deep autoencoders[1] are allowing for computer representations of "similar" concepts. I recently gave a talk on this very concept to assist in QA systems. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/ir-34811120 http://www.slideshare.net/agibsonccc/ir-34811120