EcceroBot - A terrible effort

The Horror of EcceroBot. Supposedly made with bones and synthetic muscle at first I was worried. Had they done it before Noonean? NO! It's all servos pulling on fishing line. What a joke.  Of course it moves like a pile of crap! They got millions to  make crap cause they are Europeans. Makes me want to puke. Seriously puke deep and hard. 

"We think it has better potential to interact with humans" Why because it's a piece of shit?

Hugo Gravato Marques Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Switzerland

Had To Laugh At this : True Humanoid Robot

About as humanoid as my vacuum cleaner ...

Chinese Robots look Just as Creepy As American Robots

Romeo, the big SoftBank investment, once again can barely walk. What a joke. 

The VAR horror in Java 10

Why have all the smart people left the Oracle Java Team and the JCP ? To our horror, it seems one of the few BIGGIE new features of Java 10 will be support for VAR. WHY?

I don't know how useful this will be, as I am quite used to seeing int i =0 or String name = "Java", and I liked the type information present in the variable declaration line, but it looks like Java is going the way Scala and Kotlin are and trying to incorporate changes from there.
Also note that the var keyword can only be used for local variables, i.e. variables inside methods or code blocks — you cannot use it for member variable declaration inside the class body.
And, finally, it doesn't make Java a dynamically typed language like Python. Java is still a statically typed language, and once the type is assigned, you cannot change it. For example, var name = "Java" is OK, but then name = 3; is not OK.

VAR is an abomination. It is even doubled abomination in Java because it indicates dynamic typing when it IS NOT. Worse, it is code type OBFUSCATION leading to more bugs.

They've gone full nutters over there. Someone tell me what's happened to the smart people.

Is Avaama an AI Company? What about Lumiata? Is it enough just to add .AI to your domain name to get the big bucks?

Companies like Avaama are a bit hard to understand. with 28 million in funding from Series A from the likes of Intel Capital and Wipro, really all they are doing is putting a speech query system in front of standard applications. Is this AI? Not really.

There is a lot of talk about making speech better and many systems have advanced features. MaryTTS is one good example where you can even specify moods like Happy in the response. Is this AI? Nothing is being inferenced.

Noonean's first product - NeuralBase - thinks about what data you are asking for and uses several deep analytics which are AI based including neural network language systems to provide more sophistication rather than simply speech to text.

Noonean's second product - OnticBase - extends that with knowledge management capture into a neural structure. This provides even more information.

But we still have a lot of work to do. It used to be that seed round was initiated with a clear product concept and business plan. Now many people want to see beta level products. This was OK with simple websites, it's not so OK when complex AI products are part of it.

Lumiata is another "AI" company getting a lot of investment. They take big data from healthcare and then use "AI" to analyze it. This special sauce is never specified there is never anything described as to their technique and what makes it "AI"

Sadly investors are not savvy and many are going to be fooled with systems which barely could be said to be doing AI but then again, definitionally, what qualified for AI or machine learning. Some people seem to have a very shallow concept of this. They are willing to throw buckets of money on anything remotely having anything to do with AI, well hopefully they will be interested in a real machine learning company with real products not just a big data cruncher or a speech to app player.

This is going to be a big problem going forward as more companies jump in with somewhat "MEH" offerings.

What is an Ontic Processor?

A lot of people ask me what is an Ontic Processor, a term we use at Noonean Cybernetics to describe one of our supporting components. I've even had people get huffy and puffy "That Doesn't Exist!". Well yes it does we use it every day.

No it's not a Pregel graph matrix processor or Deep Graph Transition matrix. Those typically require multiple pass point to point traversal.

Instead the Ontic Processor is a bit like a neural network in reverse. The Ontic processor maps terms and associations like language item -- Role -- Connection Role -- Other Item

The way it works is a bit closer to what happens to a human brain when you stimulate it with an electrode. You stimulate several nodes, and then look at what result nodes get excited. It is a complicated dance through BILLIONS of Neurons and connections that is a bit like chaos theory, utterly unpredictable.

Getting the data mapped into an ontic structure is a bit challenging. It requires a bit of step by step learning, and asking if associations and understandings are correct. But it grows ever more savvy over time.

So perhaps we might say it is not so much a database gobbler, a big data cruncher, or a document parser. Rather, it builds interactively, learning and correcting. Once some sufficient linguistic structure (although it encodes knowledge relationships so it is so much more than NLP) then it can begin digesting more information more quickly, and again continuous testing of relationships through questioning.

When we develop cybernetic systems we have typically large processors to handle senses like vision and audition, and another very large scale neural network configured as a Neural Cube  or ANCPHSELAC  ("ancephelac") (Advanced Neo-Cognitron with Pribram Holographic structures and Edelman Live Association and Competition).  This includes a consciousness processing function as well which is gathering and weighting and responding to inputs while "thinking" about them. So to better understand what is going on, the information is passed to the Ontic Processor, and then much more specificity and more possibilities about the language and knowledge is returned, specifically relationships, part composition and decomposition, roles in relationships, and other terms which are not originally in the language. For example, if someone says "Had a problem with the car's rotation" it would get information back that the tires are rotated, rotate, and so does the engine. So it might reply "You rotated your tires or do you mean a problem with the engine" This is much more interesting linguistic interaction rather than the "DO YOU WANT TO DANCE. I CAN DANCE" nonsense. One can only wonder what a Boston Dynamics Language processor will sound like "MOVE AND I KILL KILL YOU". Scary.

So the Ontic processor is a necessary advanced way to retain knowledge but NOT memory. But it can be a supporting classifier for memory and item IDs in memory. That work still to come.

One Terabyte in a postage stamp vs. 16k in a brick ....

You will laugh. This is an atari 800 and this is the very expensive 16k ram expansion which is the size of a brick. Of course this only stores information as long as there is electricity, turn it off and it all goes away. Silly huh? 

And then today we have microSD cards which hold one terabyte, and the data never goes away. which is  62,500,000 times the storage of the brick in case you wondered. Wasn't it AC Clark who said any suffienciently advanced technoloy will appear as       Magic.  To an old geezer like me its better than Hairy Putter.