Arquivo para a ‘Computer – Hardware’ Categoria
Agent environments and an example
17
May
The example that Norvig and Russel (2010) will give to describe what an environment in 
Artificial Intelligence is happy and unhappy at the same time, happy because it has become something real 8 years after the edition of the book, a taxi as a stand-alone vehicle, and unfortunate because there are already cases of accidents with autonomous vehicles.
What is called environment is described as PEAS (Performance, Environment, Actuators and Sensors) (figure on the side), whose first stage is to design the task environment.
The agent will be different from a software (a softbot or webcrawler), but it is didactic.
The suggested environment was a stand-alone taxi, which at the time was “little beyond the capabilities of existing technology,” but on page 28 will describe a robot with this function, the fortuitous side of the example as the authors say is a ” completely open” and “there is no limit to the new combinations of circumstance that may arise”. (Norvig, Russel, 2010: 40)
What performance measures will be desired: arrive at the correct destination, minimize the correct destination time, fuel consumption and wear, traffic violations, disturbances and safety to passengers and other drivers, and if there are conflicts make decisions (this is one of the reasons for the accident to protect the passengers caused a hit by a passer-by).
The next step is to map an autonomous car environment, it must deal with a variety of roads, from rural lanes and urban lanes to 3, 4 and up to 5 lanes, with lanes, other vehicles, road works, police cars, puddles, and potholes, and should interact with potential and actual passengers.
Actuators for an automated taxi include those available to a human driver: control over the engine through the throttle and control over steering and braking. some optional choices of communication with other vehicles with arrows and even horn, and with passengers who will need voice synthesizers.
The basic taxi sensors will include one or more controllable video cameras so they can see the road; you can increase them with infrared or sonar sensors to detect distances to other cars and obstacles.
The problems of safety and conviviality with human drivers is evident, but thanks to this example of success made in 2010, today we have maps, GPS, road signs, and many others advances.
NORVIG, P.; RUSSEL, P. (2010) Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach 3nd ed., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
The singularity and the tecnoprofetas
09
May
Before Jean-Gabriel Ganascia talked about the Myth of Singularity, the idea that
machines would surpass man in human capacity, had already been analyzed by Hans Moracev in his work: Men and Robots – the future of human interfaces and robotics, careful and ethical Ganascia did not fail to quote him.
There are groups that study the ethical issues that this involves as the Center for the study of existential risk at Cambridge University, but also groups engaged in this project with University of Singularity, with weight sponsors such as Google, Cisco, Nokia, Autodesk and many others, but there are also ethical studies such as the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies that Ganascia participates in, and the Institute of Extropia.
In the account of technoprofetas, the word was coined by Ganascia, a genius prejudice Kurzweil is one of the most extravagant, injected drugs in the body preparing to receive the “computational mind”, but with prediction for 2024 already spoke and now it is for 2045 to 2049 , something that is incredible for someone who is said to have no beliefs, for this fact is very distant if it occurs.
Ganascia thinks this is a false prophecy and Moracev analyzes the difficult real possibilities.
The Gartner institute that works on forecasting predicts neural computing still crawling with predictions for 20 years from now, interfaces like Amazon’s Alexa and Hanson’s Sophia, are human interaction machines that learn things from everyday language but are far from the so-called machines of a general artificial intelligence, because human reasoning is not a set of propositional calculations as they think.
One can argue more this is because people are illogical, but this according to what logic, what we know is that men are not machines and what we ask if machines are men, is the essential question that inspired the series Blade Runner, the book of Philip K. Dick “Do androids skeep dream of electric sheep” from 1968, which inspired Blade Runner.
I think dreams, imagination and virtuality are faces of the human soul, robots have no soul.
World created beyond the imaginary
08
May
The story of Claude Shannon, who worked in a MIT laboratory
of Vannevar Bush and Alain Turing crosses through World War II, while working on secret projects, which were two sides of the same coin, unaware of one another’s project, the idea of passing the language to a human code, the System X that worked Shannon, and the one of Turing that was to decipher the code of the Machine Enigma capture of the German army.
Not being able to talk about his projects, speaking at lunches and gatherings in Gödel’s Incomplete Theorem, and the idea of creating a machine that could encode human thought, he said in a joke, “could be a mundane brain like that of the president of Bell Laboratories”, place of secret projects in development.
Bell Labs began as an AT & departament in Washington and later of independent labo of the project’s development (photo above).
The major obstacles to innovation initiatives stem from the mental blocks caused by unproven beliefs, prejudices and perceptions about the possibilities of technology, which are not only strongly alienating, but are inhibitors of creativity and can condemn processes of poor mental development. In spite of the irony of Shannon and Turing with the president of Bell Laboratories, there developed from the first valves, the first transistor that was awarded a Nobel Prize, the telephone systems in their most diverse versions arriving the dialed line and the use of the network for transmission over the internet, and the optimal fiber system, whose first test was done in Georgia.
Also lines of radio and television handsets, the development of the Linux precursor UNIX system, the first solar cells, several Nobel prizes and famous students passed by.
The challenge of pioneers is never simple, critics are always willing to devalue the human effort of progress, Bell Laboratories and other study centers, such as CERN and Research Institute around the world, Brazil has some of them as INPE in São José dos Campos, are central drivers of human creativity and project the future of man.
History of the algorithm
07
May
The idea that we can solve problems by proposing a finite number of 
interactions between several tasks (or commands as they are called in computing languages) for several problems originates in Arithmetic.
Although the machine of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and George Boole’s (1815-1864) Algebra make a huge contribution to modern computers, most logicians and historians of the birth of the digital world agree that the problem of fact was raised by David Hilbert’s second problem (1962-1943) at a 1900 conference in Paris.
Among 23 problems for mathematics to solve, some recently solved such as Goldbach’s Conjecture (see our post), and others to solve, the second problem was to prove that arithmetic is consistent, free from any internal contradiction.
In the 1930s, two mathematical logicians, Kurt Gödel (1906-75) and Gerhard Gentzen (1909-1945) proved two results that called new attention to the problem proposed, both referring to Hilbert, so in fact, there is the origin of the question, roughly, if an enumerable problem is solved by a finite set of steps.
In fact, Gentzen’s solution was a proof of the consistency of Peano’s axioms, published in 1936, showing that the proof of consistency can be obtained in a system weaker than the Zermelo-Fraenkel theory, used axioms of primitive recursive arithmetic , and is therefore not general proof.
The proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic, called Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, is more complete and shows that some proof of the consistency of Peano’s axioms can be developed without this arithmetic itself.
This theorem states: if the only acceptable proof procedures are those that can be formalized within arithmetic, then Hilbert’s problem can not be solved, in other more direct form, if the system is complete or consistent.
There are polemics raised about these results, such as Kreisel (1976) who argued that the proofs were syntactic for semantic problems, Detlefsen (1990) who says that the theorem does not prohibit the existence of a proof of consistency, and Dawson (2006) that the proof of consistency is erroneous using the evidence given by Gentzen and Gödel himself in 1958 work.
The controversies aside, Kurt Gödel’s participation in the important Vienna circle in the 1920´s before the war exploded, and the subsequent discussions of his theorem by Alain Turing (1912-1954) and Claude Shannon (1916-2001) underline its importance for the history of algorithms and modern digital computer.
A way forward in education
19
Apr
The basic basic education as stated in the first post of empathy, the
ability to resolve conflicts and it will not be possible with online education reach the levels of schooling for the lower age groups, but from the first schooling.
I call this age up to 10 or 12 years, it is possible to observe that online education helps and can be of great advancement, especially for children living in peripheral countries have a school performance capacity above what would be appropriate for their age, of course this child should enjoy normal channels of empathy and sociability of his age.
But at the higher level we can have higher quality jumps and provide high schooling on a world scale, just to give an example, India that still has alarming levels of health and poverty is a country that generates brains and high school students.
Massive Open Online Curses (MOOCs) is a type of open course offered through virtual learning environments, Web 2.0 tools or social networks that aim to offer a large number of students the opportunity to attend without physical presence in universities and without costs of housing, transport, etc.
A fake News ran this universe saying that the MOOCs were born in 2012 and died in 2014, but this is not true, the numbers prove this: the current numbers according to the Central-Class site, the number of online students is 58 million distributed in more than 700 universities, in 6850 courses, also the graphics of this site show increasing values.
In Brazil, large universities already have online courses, for example: FEA, from USP, has a course on Fundamentals of Administration (FEA / USP), available on the Veduca online education platform in Brazil. who wants to learn how to manage, another course is Social Responsibility and Sustainability of Organizations (PUC / RS), a PUC course in Rio Grande do Sul available in Miríada X, the Physics of São Carlos has The Basic Physics course (IFSC / USP) the course has a workload of 59 hours divided into 26 classes and UNB has the Bioenergetics course (UNB), which allows the interested party to choose to attend classes or obtain the certificate.
The (in) visible relations and networks
09
Apr
One of the issues in focus today is social networks, they are not
of today, the problem is that today they are in evidence, but they continue to keep certain aspects of invisibility, confused with virtuality, make a historical analysis.
The networks of commerce in antiquity, by sea and by land, the invisible colleges, defined by Solla Price in her work “The development of science: historical, philosophical, sociological and economic analysis” of 1976 (in Brazilian edition), calls the scientific networks of collaborative networks, where researchers communicate, exchange information and experiences, means that even in the absence, through printed works and conferences, authors collaborate.
Essentially, a network is a web of nodes and links between nodes, although these participants are autonomous, the consequences of network connections can exceed their own limits by connecting to “out” through weak links. In the analysis of networks can be identified only for didactic reasons, three types: ego networking, global networking networks and networks of actors relationships, called TAN (Theory Actor-Network) with origin in the works of Michel Callon.
Airport networks, container transport networks around the world, Global networks are strongly influenced by the media, and they create a certain amount of invisibility, since the collaborative networks of publications are also called invisible colleges by authors like Solla Price, but accelerated by the speed of the media, electronic media is larger speed of publication and communication that prints it, then blog, twitter and the social media media like Facebook occupy a new role at the present time, but are not in themselves networks, but networks media.
Several measures can be thought of, the centrality of closeness of an actor measures how close a node is to all others, the greater the proximity measure, the intermediation betweenness measures the importance of a node in the circulation of information. So, for information effect, betweenness is the measure of control that an actor holds in the flow of information and closeness is the facility that an actor has of access to information.
The invisibility, emphasizing present in the “invisible” colleges in modernity, is relative to the process of communication and information that can go beyond the actor actors along the network, virtuality in turn refers to the potentiality of increasing the capacity of the network
They aren´t deaf but not listen
04
Apr
The physiological fact of listening can be in contrast with the
apprehension of the content in the human brain, that is, one can have a suitable hearing aid or even artifacts that help, but even listening, do not listen, that is, they do not apprehend the content.
McLuhan’s view that communication as a medium tends to be defined as transparent, innocuous, unable to determine what are the communicative contents that are conveyed.
Its only effect on the artifact, whatever it was, in the communication process would be negative, due to noises or obstacles in the delivery of the message, this was already the preoccupation as a device of Claude Shannon, but now McLuhan calls either the message made orally or in writing, be it transmitted by radio, television, puts in play new structures being artifacts intended to broaden the senses highlighting contours and other nuances of what is communicated, in this work relates to the artist who wishes to highlight something.
Put more directly, for McLuhan, the medium, the cane (terms more appropriate for Shannon), the technology artifacts that communication establishes, is not only a form of communication, but will ultimately determine the own content.
What McLuhan points out is the fact that a message delivered both orally as in writing, when broadcasting on the radio or television sets the content.
Their central thesis is that there is a double operation: 1) to study the evolution of the communal media used by men throughout their history, and 2) to identify the specific characteristics of each of these different media / communication artifacts .
These are two central points of his investigation that are at the root of one of his fundamental works, namely Understanding Media, of 1964.
Thus develops three galaxies, when only one is remembered, the Gutenberg Galaxy, which is typical of the written culture and then printed with the possibilities of reproducibility, but there is the oral or acoustic cultural that is previous, where the question of listening is fundamental (orally speaking), oracles and prophets occupy a central role, and the present one that McLuhan called electronic, but it is possible as an extension to speak of a digital galaxy in network, where there are media of networks that do not must be confused with the networks, since they exist in the previous galaxies.
So those who are trapped in the Gutenberg galaxy do not listen to oral culture, and those who are trapped in the culture of pure technology do not listen to oral and written culture
Codified: For a Design Philosophy
22
Mar
Vilém Flusser was a Czech, brazilian citizen naturalized, died in 1991, who worked for about 20 years as professor of philosophy, journalist, lecturer and writer in Brazil and then back in his country of birth to the Czech
Republic.
His books are being republished in Brazil, including all his writings, and I began rereading The Coded World – for a philosophy of Design.
His work goes beyond the influences he received from Roland Barthes, Marshall McLuhan, because his philosophy is itself with elements of phenomenology and existentialism.
Rafael Cardoso’s introduction to the book highlights his change of thinking about the modern media he just saw born: “unlike most modern philosophers, who tend to focus their analysis on verbal language or mathematical codes, Flusser part of its gigantic power of reflection to images and artifacts, laying the foundation for a legitimate philosophy of design and communication. “(Flusser, 2017, p.10)
He asked deep questions about the virtual world: “If a tree falls into virtual space, and there is no one online, does it generate a warning message?” Returning to the famous question of the tree falling in the forest, the difference between the material and the immaterial? Can we exchange things for not things? “(Ibid.) And concludes with an even more fundamental question:” What destination should we reserve for the detritus generated by our frantic activity of transforming nature into culture? “(FLUSSER, 2017)
It approaches the paradigm of information, an essential basis for knowledge and education, “the end of history seems to be the end of our collective ability to fight against entropy, against the breakdown of meaning and form. If the basis of what we understand by culture resides in the action of in + form, then is not it paradoxical that the excess of information leads us to the breakdown of meaning? “(Idem)
The importance of the “concept of virtuality is perhaps the best and most elegant proof of how well Flusser was right.” (Ibid.), And can no longer escape this question, use in various forms of information, communication and the arts requires opening of this “black box”, the name of an essay published in the year 1985.
Flusser, unlike apocalyptics, admits that “at least in thesis,” which should become human well-being, becomes a slave to the forces of another “nature” which it helped to artificially generate. ”
Aspects of virtuality and a codified world are uniquely developed by the author and contribute to a more serene debate on new media.
FLUSSER, V. (2013) Shape of Things: A philosophy of Design, Reaktion Books, 2013. (pages and year em Brazilian edition).
Princess Leia: Back to the Future
03
Feb
I know, it’s two distinct films, but Brigham Young University (BYU) seems to return to the
path of broadcasting and projecting 3D holographic images into the air.
“Our team’s mission is to make the 3D holograms of science fiction a reality,” said Daniel Smalley, a professor of computational engineering and computer science, a holography expert who recently published an article in Nature magazine.
The technique he developed is based on the phenomenon of photophoresis, in which particles suspended in the medium of a gaseous liquid (there are experiments with droplets of water that forces it to be sucked into the air), it can be the particles that are in the air, which need to be moved by thermal gradients and can be done by laser beams, explains Smalley, “these screens are capable of producing images in a ‘fine beam’ that are visible from any direction and are not subject to cutouts,” ie seen from any position of the viewer.
The technical name of this effect is more precisely: “photophoretic-trap volumetric display”, and is superior to old techniques that could not capture light through the air to create a virtual object with the same notion of depth as the actual object.
But the most spectacular is the possibility of RGB projection (Red-Green-Blue, the three primary colors that composed were the visible spectrum by the human being) as the point of light is able to move quickly and thus the point of light produces the color, the projection of the green, red and blue laser radios produce the visual effect of the color.
The color image in three-dimensional volumetric (3D), will have the resolution of 10-micrometer (10 ^ -6 of the meter or 10 ^ -4 of the centimeter), this means to produce 10 thousand voxels (Pixels volumétricos) by centimeter or one million by meter cubic.
In a short time the communication has changed, in 10 years we have spoken through the Web in visual interaction, thanks to VoIP (voice over Internet), now the volumetric interaction in holograms, or also, to watch images of objects and people around us that are thousands of miles of distances, or simply in filming from other times, we are back in the future.
Intel Hardware Insecurity
15
Jan
The storage of data had 3 levels: the external memory (HDs), the memory 
of the computer (the RAMs) and the many internal ones before called Register and today is the Kernel Memory, are in the kernel of the computer and are the faster, but can also be windows for data theft, today there is a fourth level which is the external stores in clouds, computing center scattered around the world selling these stores.
An error in the production of Intel’s chips, which make up almost 90 percent of the world’s computer chips (smartphones are very different), has just been caught in a design flaw that gives data vulnerability.
AMD, a competitor of Intel, took the opportunity to point out that its Kernel memory (computer core memories) are unaffected by hacker attacks, and does not allow access to passwords and other sensitive machine data, through which data from a computer can be stolen.
According to Paul Kocher, president of security company Rambus for the New York Times, the problem could be bigger if access was in the clouds, where large parts of the data are already being stored today, this is because the sharing of machines this sharing of core memories) can be made, even if considering the security protocol that avoids access to other memory levels.
Security issues with the giants Amazon, Microsoft and Google, in addition to the chipmaker Intel may rock the market, in addition to AMD other Eastern competitors should be on the lookout, we alerted to the key problem.
