{"id":81026,"date":"2018-07-29T17:02:35","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T00:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/this-3d-printed-ai-construct-analyzes"},"modified":"2018-07-31T12:13:21","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T19:13:21","slug":"this-3d-printed-ai-construct-analyzes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/this-3d-printed-ai-construct-analyzes","title":{"rendered":"This 3D-printed AI construct analyzes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Machine learning is everywhere these days, but it\u2019s usually more or less invisible: it sits in the background, optimizing audio or picking out faces in images. But this new system is not only visible, but physical: it performs AI-type analysis not by crunching numbers, but by bending light. It\u2019s weird and unique, but counter-intuitively, it\u2019s an excellent demonstration of how deceptively simple these \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d systems are.<\/p>\n

Machine learning systems, which we frequently refer to as a form of artificial intelligence<\/a>, at their heart are just a series of calculations made on a set of data, each building on the last or feeding back into a loop. The calculations themselves aren\u2019t particularly complex \u2014 though they aren\u2019t the kind of math you\u2019d want to do with a pen and paper. Ultimately all that simple math produces a probability that the data going in is a match for various patterns it has \u201clearned\u201d to recognize.<\/p>\n

The thing is, though, that once these \u201clayers\u201d have been \u201ctrained\u201d and the math finalized, in many ways it\u2019s performing the same calculations over and over again. Usually that just means it can be optimized and won\u2019t take up that much space or CPU power. But researchers from UCLA show that it can literally be solidified, the layers themselves actual 3D-printed layers<\/em> of transparent material, imprinted with complex diffraction patterns that do to light going through them what the math would have done to numbers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Machine learning is everywhere these days, but it\u2019s usually more or less invisible: it sits in the background, optimizing audio or picking out faces in images. But this new system is not only visible, but physical: it performs AI-type analysis not by crunching numbers, but by bending light. It\u2019s weird and unique, but counter-intuitively, it\u2019s [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1489,2229,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-printing","category-mathematics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81139,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81026\/revisions\/81139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}