Show jiggly soft robots:
https://www.creativemachineslab.com/soft-robot-evolution.html
https://www.uvm.edu/neurobotics/publications
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXuR_soDnFo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWQ-gPIvt4
Review what they did, why it’s cool.
Learning like a cute playful kid… is this a coincidence?
Fresh, curious, playful, naivete is a good goal in life and
learning?
use computational tools to contribute to the primary goal of
domain-specific knowledge in X:
Computational Neuro
Computational Bio
Bioinformatics
Neuroinformatics
takes perspective and design from X as a guide in contributing to the
primary goal of knowledge in computing itself:
Bio-inspired computing
Neuro-inspired computing
Evolutionary computing
I found learning programming (C++) to be boring, more than 20 years
ago…
Soon after having those tools, the first thing I ever enjoyed
programming was an evolutionary model of simulating bacterial
populations!
As a first year student, I was bored by the simplicity of engineering,
so switched primary focus onto studying biology as inspiration for
engineering and computing, and only secondarily focused on engineering
and computing.
The first computing devices were not general purpose.
They did things like spreadsheet processing or specific math
calculations.
Then, slower, less efficient general purpose computers were
envisioned.
Now, application-specific hardware is still better!
But, we use general purpose computing.
Today, we have only really succeeded with application-specific AI.
I, and (surprisingly few) other researchers are primarily interested in
the general flavor.
AGI is like the Turing machine, as AI is like spreadsheet
calculator…
EC is a generalist meta-method, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaheuristic, an easy
jack of all trades, though it’s not quite AGI either, it may be a good
way to design an AGI system, or at least tune one.
EC is THE learning algorithm for life and nature.
Neurons are a niche after-thought.
EC is big, broad, and includes many sub-domains.
It’s general enough that we call it a meta-heuristic, not an
algorithm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons
I will bring you to the edge, where we are working through hard real
questions!
I will also experiment with this class – things may break!
We will code as a class, in class – things may break!
One more new fun assignment every semester,
and we don’t know whether it will work.