High-Speed Robot Hand

Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation

by Travis Deyle

A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!

Scientists create the first programmable quantum processor

A new system uses an entangled two-qubit quantum gate alongside a single-qubit gate to create a quantum computer that can perform virtually any operation.

By Casey Johnston | Last updated November 18, 2009 9:46 AM CT

Scientists have developed a number of quantum computing systems that use ions or electrons as bits of data; mathematical "operations" can be performed on them with beams of light or electrical pulses. Until recently, however, these systems could only perform the specific tasks they were designed to do. But a group of NIST scientists have published a description of a quantum processor that can receive virtually any set of instructions and perform them on a set of inputs—in short, they've made the first programmable quantum processor.

In order to do general calculations, a computer must be able to perform an arbitrary number of unitary transformations, operations that change the state while preserving the structure of the system. Unlike a regular computer, a quantum computer stores information in "qubits," or quantum bits. A regular bit may hold only one piece of data (0 or 1), but a qubit can hold a superposition of 0 and 1; it only adopts a definite value when measured.

NY Times: Color is energy! No, wavelength! No ...!

In yesterday's edition we read:

Astronomers said the gamma-ray race was one of the most stringent tests yet of a bedrock principle of modern physics: Einstein’s proclamation in his 1905 theory of relativity that the speed of light is constant and independent of its color, or energy; its direction; or how you yourself are moving.

Why does our paper of record simply state "We really don't know what the fark we're talking about here."? Well, because that would be undignified.

As I never, ever tire of repeating, color per se is not represented in physics as traditionally formulated. Don't believe me? Here's Erwin Schrödinger to back me up.

If you ask a physicist what is his idea of yellow light, he will tell you that it is transversal electromagnetic waves of wavelength in the neighborhood of 590 millimicrons. If you ask him: But where does yellow come in? he will say: In my picture not at all, but these kinds of vibrations, when they hit the retina of a healthy eye, give the person whose eye it is the sensation of yellow.

When not dabbling in quantum theory, Schrödinger was, in his day, the foremost authority on what is called color science. Other dilettantes who have turned their attention to this topic include Maxwell, Weyl, Feynman and Einstein -- but what did they know?

If only colors would just go away! But there they are, right in front of us, every waking moment, seemingly a major feature of the real world. Ooh! I know! Why not say that they're all illusory?! Don't laugh -- cry, rather -- for it's been done.

Oh, but then we have all these illusory measurements to explain.

Whatever are we to do? Why not begin at the beginning?

Newton worked out the spectrum...

Awakening Paralyzed Limbs

Brain signals can drive arm movement in a monkey with a paralyzed arm.

By Emily Singer

A monkey with a paralyzed arm can still grasp a ball, thanks to a novel system designed to translate brain signals into complex muscle movements in real time. The research, presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, could one day allow people with spinal cord injury to control their own limbs.

"This is a big leap forward--they show the monkey using the ability to artificially contract his hand to actually pick up a ball," says Krishna Shenoy, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. "I think it's the first demonstration of a cortically controlled electrical stimulation system performing a task that would ultimately be useful for a human patient."

While spinal cord injury keeps the brain's electrical signals from reaching muscles, people paralyzed by these injuries often have intact nerves and muscles in their limbs. A technique called functional electrical stimulation (FES), in which implanted electrodes deliver electrical current to trigger muscle contractions, provides a way to reconnect this loop.

Notes & Neurons

This is thought-provoking panel discussion. One of the participants mindlessly repeats the dogma regarding primary & secondary qualities -- i.e., sound only happens in our brains -- but it's fun nonetheless.

Notes & Neurons

Penrose Kind o' Gets It

Erwin Schrödinger, who created that equation, was considered a genius. Surely he appreciated that conflict.
Schrödinger was as aware of this as anybody. He talks about his hypothetical cat and says, more or less, “Okay, if you believe what my equation says, you must believe that this cat is dead and alive at the same time.” He says, “That’s obviously nonsense, because it’s not like that. Therefore, my equation can’t be right for a cat. So there must be some other factor involved.”

When you accept the weirdness of quantum mechanics, you have to give up the idea of space-time as we know it from Einstein. You come up with something that just isn’t right.

So Schrödinger himself never believed that the cat analogy reflected the nature of reality?
Oh yes, I think he was pointing this out. I mean, look at three of the biggest figures in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger, Einstein, and Paul Dirac. They were all quantum skeptics in a sense. Dirac is the one whom people find most surprising, because he set up the whole foundation, the general framework of quantum mechanics. People think of him as this hard-liner, but he was very cautious in what he said. When he was asked, “What’s the answer to the measurement problem?” his response was, “Quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. Why should I look for an answer in quantum mechanics?” He didn’t believe that it was true. But he didn’t say this out loud much.

Discover

DIY Image Recognition With NNs

Look familiar?

easyNeurons provides environment for creating and training neural networks, which can be saved as ready-to-use java components. Also it provides specialised image recognition tool to train neural networks for image recognition. Creating and training neural network for image recognition consists of the following steps:

1. Choose images to recognize and create training set
2. Create neural network
3. Train neural network
4. Test neural network
5. Save & deploy neural network

You can use the online demo and test images provided here to try this tool.

Duh: What Happened To Theoretical AI?

by David Gelernter, 06.22.09, 06:00 PM EDT, Forbes

The two major mystery-boxes of mind-science (each decorated with an intriguing question mark) are "consciousness" and "thought." Both mysteries are notoriously hard to unravel, but computing ought to help us understand thought, which is (on one level) a process or series of actions--like computing itself. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a state of being--and, despite the best efforts of theoretical AI, there is no reason to believe that a computer will ever achieve this state, or that software can bring it about.

As far as we know, consciousness can only be created by a mind, and a mind can only be realized by a human's (or some other advanced creature's) brain and body working together. If, in the near future, a grinning robot should walk up to you at a party and say, "Hi, my name is Bob; pleased to meet you," you'd be apt to cut it some slack and assume that it really is--on some level and in some way--"pleased." But in fact there's no reason to believe that any robot is pleased to meet you or ever will be, has ever been pleased to meet anybody, or has ever experienced the state of mind we call "pleasure" under any circumstances at all. So far as we know, software cannot re-create the sort of inner mental world human beings inhabit.

___________

Unbelievably, Gelernter is on the right track, up to the point where he writes "there's no reason to believe that any robot is pleased to meet you or ever will be, has ever been pleased."

Why is there "no reason"? What makes this proposition -- and many others like it -- so high a wall?

Well, because it's the highest wall of that box everybody's trying to think outside of -- where science is concerned, at any rate. It is the single greatest unexamined premise of our traditional worldview or paradigm (to use a word now out of fashion, a victim of its own success).

That wall is the dusty barrier between primary and secondary qualities, bequeathed to us by Democritus and the other atomists of Greek antiquity. Reinforced by Galileo, Newton and several of their most famous philosophical contemporaries, this division is so much a part of our thinking that we are typically unconscious of it.

Locke gets the credit for having named the distinction:

These I call original or primary qualities of the body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz., solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.

Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e. by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colour, sounds, tastes, etc., these I call secondary qualities.

And yet colors behave like vectors and so do the photons which bring them to us: SPECTRA

But I have gone into all that at length on too many occasions and I am not eager to rehearse my ideas here, but will be content to point the way.

History teaches us

Quanta & Consciousness

Field Effect Technologies