Lifeboat Foundation

Abstract: DeepMind Lab is a first-person 3D game platform designed for research and development of general artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. DeepMind Lab can be used to study how autonomous artificial agents may learn complex tasks in large, partially observed, and visually diverse worlds. DeepMind Lab has a simple and flexible API enabling creative task-designs and novel AI-designs to be explored and quickly iterated upon. It is powered by a fast and widely recognised game engine, and tailored for effective use by the research community.

We’re committed to accelerating scientific progress for the benefit of society. One way we do this is through releasing open source materials, to contribute to the AI community’s culture of collaboration and shared progress.

Along with publishing papers to accompany research conducted at DeepMind, we release open source environments, data sets, and code to enable the broader research community to engage with our work and build upon it. For example, you can build on our implementations of the Deep Q-Network or Differential Neural Computer, or experiment in the same environments we use for our research, such as DeepMind Lab or StarCraft II.

Our open source contributions can be viewed on our site and on GitHub.

Circa 2018 Essentially automating the whole system is basically the only way to solve the trillions upon trillions of problems because when we digitize everything 80 billion years of problems can be solved sometimes in seconds.

Rice University researchers created a deep learning, software coding application called BAYOU that can help human programmers work with APIs.

Circa 2017

Do we really have nothing to fear?

Right now Chandra is studying a cluster of stars in Camelopardalis! Nearby in the sky is planetary nebula NGC 1501. The progenitor star seen in the center of this nebula looks like a shimmering pearl inside of a glowing shell to some, inspiring the nickname the Oyster Nebula!

Scientists have discovered a new method for quickly and efficiently mapping the vast network of connections among neurons in the brain.

Researchers combined infrared laser stimulation techniques with functional magnetic resonance imaging in animals to generate mapping of connections throughout the brain. The technique was described in a study published in the journal Science Advances.

“This is a revolution in detecting connections in the brain,” said senior author Anna Wang Roe, Ph.D., a professor in the Division of Neuroscience at OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center. “The ability to easily map connections in the living brain with high precision opens doors for other applications in medicine and engineering.”

Red and blue lights flash. A machine whirs like a distant swarm of bees. In a cubicle-sized room, Yoav Adam, a microscope, and a video projector capture something no one has ever seen before: neurons flashing in real time, in a walking, living creature.

For decades scientists have been searching for a way to watch a live broadcast of the brain. Neurons send and receive massive amounts of information—Toe itches! Fire hot! Garbage smells!—with impressive speed. Electrical signals can travel from cell to cell at up to 270 miles per hour.

But, neural electricity is just as hard to see as electricity in a telephone wire: To the unassisted eye, the busy brain looks as lifeless as rubber. So, to observe how neurons turn information (toe itches) into thoughts (“itching powder”), behaviors (scratching), and emotions (anger), we need to change the way we see.

Continue reading “How live recordings of neural electricity could revolutionize how we see the brain” »

ARPA-E-funded alternative z-pinch fusion which is being developed by Zap Energy.

Zap Energy is the most compact solution to Fusion Energy and does not use complex and costly magnetic coils. They surpassed ARPA-E Alpha Milestones in August 2018. Their reactor is consistently producing neutrons and they received $6.8 million ARPA-E OPEN funding.

The new Z-pinch has the simplest geometry of any magnetic confinement configuration. It is a cylindrical plasma column.

Continue reading “Potentially Smallest Fusion Device Using Improved Z-Pinch Fusion” »

The sun radiates far more high-frequency light than expected, raising questions about unknown features of the sun’s magnetic field and the possibility of even more exotic physics.