Is LaMDA at Google sentient? Is the current state of the art AI showing signs of having qualia? The phenomenal binding problem asks us to consider, ‘how can huge set of discrete neurons form a unified mind?’ Is topological binding a requirement for AI to be sentient?
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The scientific world has long acknowledged that proving mathematical theorems is an essential first step in developing artificial intelligence. To prove the truth or falsity of a conjecture, one must use symbolic thinking and sort through an unlimited number of alternatives. These tasks are beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated AI systems.
The state of the art in artificial intelligence today is to create machines that can “solve at once” or come up with a whole answer to a problem in a single go. However, this is not how most individuals approach difficult situations. Mathematical reasoning is significantly more challenging to formalize and measure.
Meta AI has made an important development at the intersection of artificial intelligence and mathematics. The neural theorem prover developed by the team has completed five times as many IMO problems as any other AI system before it, totaling ten. Concerning miniF2F, a popular mathematics test, the AI model outperforms the state of art by 20% and outperforms Metamath by 10%.
Imagine a robot that could find human beings after a natural disaster because it has a mosquito’s ability to sense human sweat. Shoji Takeuchi of the University of Tokyo has already made a robotic finger that includes living tissue – here he explores possible applications of combining biological material with artificial materials in robotic systems.
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Continue reading “Bio-hybrid robotics built from living tissue | Shoji Takeuchi” »
The U.S. Space Force has a mini-fleet of two robotic X-37B space planes, which have been flying secret missions since 2010.
The most recent mission, called OTV-6, launched in May 2020 and is ongoing. As that name suggests, it’s the sixth flight for the robotic X-37B, which is also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV). The other five OTV missions launched in April 2010, March 2011, December 2012, May 2015 and September 2017.
We’ve assembled 10 surprising facts about the military space plane for you. Just click the arrows to launch to the next page and enjoy.
Continue reading “The US Space Force’s secretive X-37B space plane: 10 surprising facts” »
Mental health practitioners and meditation gurus have long credited intentional breathing with the ability to induce inner calm, but scientists do not fully understand how the brain is involved in the process. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrophysiology, researchers in the Penn State College of Engineering identified a potential link between respiration and neural activity changes in rats.
Their results were made available online ahead of publication in eLife. The researchers used simultaneous multi-modal techniques to clear the noise typically associated with brain imaging and pinpoint where breathing regulated neural activity.
“There are roughly a million papers published on fMRI—a non-invasive imaging technique that allows researchers to examine brain activity in real time,” said Nanyin Zhang, founding director of the Penn State Center for Neurotechnology in Mental Health Research and professor of biomedical engineering.
Watch any episode of “CSI,” and a character will use forensic DNA profiling to identify a criminal. A new study from San Francisco State University suggests that these forensic profiles may indirectly reveal medical information—perhaps even those of crime victims—contrary to what the legal field has believed for nearly 30 years. The findings, now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could have ethical and legal implications.
“The central assumption when choosing those [forensic] markers was that there wouldn’t be any information about the individuals whatsoever aside from identification. Our paper challenges that assumption,” said first author Mayra Bañuelos, who started working on the project as a San Francisco State undergraduate and is now a Ph.D. student at Brown University.
Continue reading “Study questions the medical privacy of forensic samples” »
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced allocations of supercomputer access to 56 high-impact computational science projects for 2023 through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. These awards, which will pursue transformational advances in science and engineering, account for 60% of the available time on the leadership-class supercomputers at DOEs Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories.
The projects will support a broad range of large-scale research campaigns to advance knowledge in areas ranging from astrophysics to sustainable energy technologies to materials design and discovery.
Jointly managed by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), the INCITE program is the primary means by which the facilities fulfill their mission to advance open science by providing the scientific community with access to their powerful supercomputing resources. The ALCF and OLCF are DOE Office of Science user facilities.
As LHC Run 3 gets into its stride and the first results at a new energy frontier roll in (p5), all eyes are on what’s next: the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC), scheduled to start operations in 2029. Civil engineering for the major upgrade is complete (p7) and new crystal collimators for HL-LHC operations are to be put to the test during the current run (p35). Looking beyond the LHC, how best to deal with the millions of cubic metres of excavation materials from a future circular collider? (p9), and a new project to explore the use of high-temperature superconductors for FCC-ee (p8). The HL-LHC and proposed future colliders also feature large in the recent US Snowmass community planning exercise (p23).
For more than half a century, researchers around the world have been struggling with an algorithmic problem known as “the single source shortest path problem.” The problem is essentially about how to devise a mathematical recipe that best finds the shortest route between a node and all other nodes in a network, where there may be connections with negative weights.
Sound complicated? Possibly. But in fact, this type of calculation is already used in a wide range of the apps and technologies that we depend upon for finding our ways around—as Google Maps guides us across landscapes and through cities, for example.
Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Computer Science have succeeded in solving the single source shortest path problem, a riddle that has stumped researchers and experts for decades.
Yitang (Tom) Zhang, a Chinese-American mathematician who recently revealed that he had solved the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture, delivered an online speech at Peking University on November 8 to answer external questions on his newly published 111-page paper.
On November 7, Zhang’s new paper, “Discrete Mean Estimates and the Landau-Siegel Zero,” was officially launched on arXiv, an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints.
During the speech, Zhang used a whiteboard and a black marker to show the relevant proof formulas by hand and explain the innovations. He gave the speech in Chinese and didn’t use PowerPoint.
