The abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems are advancing at an astounding rate, nearing or bettering what humans can do in simulations and test environments.
Setting aside the ethical and environmental concerns around AI and those of autonomous drones for a minute, we can marvel at this latest feat: an AI-controlled drone system that beat three professional drone pilots in a series of head-to-head races, winning more often than not.
Swift is the name of the autonomous system, which outmaneuvered the world-champion human pilots in 15 of the 25 races, on a track full of sweeping turns and screeching pivots designed by a professional drone-racing pilot.
On Thursday, NASA released the first data maps from its new instrument launched to space earlier this year, which now is successfully transmitting information about major air pollutants over North America.
Scientists believe they have found an explanation for an “impossible” blast of energy that hit Earth.
Last year, scientists reported that they had seen evidence that gamma-ray bursts could come out of mergers between neutron stars and another compact object, in the form of a neutron star or black hole. That was previously thought not to be possible.
Scientists had initially thought that the 50-second blast came when a massive star collapsed, but further work looking at the afterglow of the emission showed that it was in fact a “kilonova”, which happens when neutron stars merge with other compact objects. Previously, it was thought that only a supernova could make a long gamma-ray burst of that kind.
We don’t come across papers that attempt to redefine reality very often.
Vitaly Vanchurin, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, makes the particularly startling claim that we are living inside a vast neural network that controls everything around us in a paper that was recently uploaded to arXiv.
Michael Levin discusses his 2022 paper “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds” and his 2023 paper with Joshua Bongard, “There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-scale Machines.” Links to papers flagged 🚩below.
Michael Levin is a scientist at Tufts University; his lab studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems. He works at the intersection of developmental biology, artificial life, bioengineering, synthetic morphology, and cognitive science.
❶ Polycomputing (observer-dependent) 1:59 Outlining the discussion. 3:50 My favorite comment from round 1 interview. 5:00 What is polycomputing? 8:50 An ode to Richard Feynman’s “There’s plenty of room at the bottom“ 11:10 How/when was this discovered? Reductionism, causal power… 14:40 “It’s a view that steps away from prediction.“ 16:20 From abstract: Polycomputing is the ability of the same substrate to simultaneously compute different things *but emphasis on the observer(s)* 17:05 What’s an example of polycomputing? 19:40 They took a different approach and actually did experiments with gene regulatory networks (GRNs) 23:18 Different observers extract different utility from the exact same system. 26:35 Spatial causal emergence graphs (determinism, degeneracy) | Erik Hoel’s micro/macro & effective information. 29:25 Inventiveness of John Conway’s Game of Life.
‘A Gödel machine is a computer that rewrites any part of its own code as soon as it has found a proof that the rewrite of the code is useful, where a problem-dependent utility function and the properties of the hardware and the entire initial code are all described by axioms encoded in an initial proof searcher.’
Jürgen schmidhuber, scientific director, swiss AI lab IDSIA
Isaac Newton described his theory of gravity as a force that acts instantaneously across space: a planet immediately senses the effects of another astronomical object, regardless of the separation between them. This aspect inspired Einstein to create the renowned theory of general relativity, where gravity becomes a local deformation of spacetime.
The principle of locality states that an object is directly influenced only by its surrounding environment: distant objects cannot communicate instantaneously, only what is here right now matters. However, in the past century, with the birth and development of quantum mechanics, physicists discovered that non-local phenomena not only exist but are fundamental to understanding the nature of reality.
Now, a new study from SISSA – Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.
