Aristotle’s Prior Analytics and Boole’s Laws of Thought: The Birth of Information Age

Symbolic logic

In 1847 George Boole published the pamphlet Mathematical Analysis of Logic. He later regarded it as a flawed exposition of his logical system, and wanted An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities to be seen as the mature statement of his views. This second book of Boole's contained Boolean algebra. Boolean logic is credited with laying the foundations for the information age. Boole maintained that:

"No general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognise, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form."

Boole was working on the main principles of Aristotle's logic and contrary to widespread belief, Boole never intended to criticise or disagree with Aristotle's logic. Rather he intended to systematise it, to provide it with a foundation, and to extend its range of applicability.

DARPA: Third Wave AI

DARPA announced in September 2018 a multi-year investment of more than $2 billion in new and existing programs called the “AI Next” campaign. Key areas of the campaign include automating critical DoD business processes, such as security clearance vetting or accrediting software systems for operational deployment; improving the robustness and reliability of AI systems; enhancing the security and resiliency of machine learning and AI technologies; reducing power, data, and performance inefficiencies; and pioneering the next generation of AI algorithms and applications, such as “explainability” and common sense reasoning.

Boltzmann Brain

In physics thought experiments, a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. For example, in a homogeneous Newtonian soup, theoretically by sheer chance all the atoms could bounce off and stick to one another in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain (though this would, on average, take vastly longer than the current lifetime of the universe).

The idea is indirectly named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who in 1896 published a theory that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when such states randomly occur can brains exist to be aware of the Universe. One criticism of Boltzmann's "Boltzmann universe" hypothesis is that the most common thermal fluctuations are as close to equilibrium overall as possible; thus, by any reasonable criterion, human brains in a Boltzmann universe with myriad neighboring stars would be vastly outnumbered by "Boltzmann brains" existing alone in an empty universe.

Number 137

Paul Dirac on Dimensionless Physical Constants and "Large Number Hypothesis"

Is there a number at the root of the universe? Is there a primal number? Is there a number that everything in the universe hinges on, that explains everything? Many of the major discoveries in science have emerged out of mathematics—Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes, parallel universes, string theory, and complexity theory are only a few of many examples. All of these can be expressed in equations; yet they also depict concrete aspects of the physical universe.

ARPANET

— The panel of the very first Interface Message Processor (IMP). This one was used at the UCLA Boelter 3420 lab to transmit the first message on the Internet

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense to ensure military communications in the event of a nuclear attack. By using packet-switching to disassemble data into addressed parcels, blip them over high-speed lines, and reassemble them just before they reach their destination, ARPANET rendered itself invulnerable to conventional attack; if a portion of the network went down, traffic would automatically be rerouted.

Kardashev scale

— Energy consumption estimated in three types of civilizations defined by Kardashev scale

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to use. It was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. The scale has three designated categories:

A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.

A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star (the most popular hypothetical concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet(s)).

A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.

Predatory Coevolution

The Mountain's Goat climbing ability

This animal is a sure-footed climber commonly seen on cliffs and ice.

Daily movement patterns reflect an individual's needs for foraging, resting, thermoregulation and security from predators or disturbance.

Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent (DQN) playing Atari Breakout

This video illustrates the improvement in the performance of the DQN agent over training (i.e. after 100, 200, 400 and 600 episodes). After 600 episodes DQN agent finds and exploits the optimal strategy in this game, which is to make a tunnel around the side, and then allow the ball to hit blocks by bouncing behind the wall. Note: the score is displayed at the top left of the screen (maximum for clearing one screen is 448 points), number of lives remaining is shown in the middle (starting with 5 lives), and the “1” on the top right indicates this is a 1-player game.

In the video below you can see all the actions running in the Convolutional Neural Network.

The code was implemented by Nathan Sprague and can be downloaded from here:

https://github.com/spragunr/deep_q_rl

It follows the paper "Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning" by Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Alex Graves, Ioannis Antonoglou, Daan Wierstra and Martin Riedmiller that you can get from:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602


— Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning:
https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/dqn/DQNNaturePaper.pdf
— Open source implementation is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/deepmind/dqn

Superintelligence [Technological Singularity]

Collapse model: Triangle (3-Dimensional Space)

– Imaginative illustration from Wave Process

The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.

Introduction to Superposition

"The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees." – Erwin Schrödinger

— Lectures from MIT 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2013
View the complete series of lectures
Instructor: Allan Adams