I am browsing http://del.icio.us these days.. It is great way to find interesting information over the net. I think I’ll prefer it over the google..

But there is an interesting observation here.. Most of the recently bookmarked pages by people are on the same topic.. Like these days “AJAX” is highly searched/bookmarked technology on the del.icio.us and in the programming front, just by looking at the http://del.icio.us/popular/programming , how popular programming language “Ruby” is becoming..

So can there be some program which automatically monitors/crawls such social bookmarking sites and then picks up future trends.. Identifying “future trends” is the biggest quest for marketers and thus correctly identifying such trends can be a great boon for marketing people and money-spinning device of program writer..

The future is trend hunting..

Which is more fundamental to the world: Mathematics or Science? Are the mutually exclusive? Is there somethings such as particles and forces in maths and differentiation and square root in physics?

I think that maths are science are ultimate a type of single unified subject, let us call it subject “X”. So is philosophy subject X? I don’t know but it is a close candidate..

See mathematics is a tool which solves science problems.. Not solves but aids.. Can science sustain without maths?? Yes, it can , but it would make the life of scientists hell. And the science in turn gives life to abstract concepts of mathematics.. Does 1 exists without intelligence? Is mathematics independent of the one practicing it? I don’t think so.. But science certainly science is.. Then, does it make science superior to maths?

Before starting writing about Why AI is dead, I’d like to invite a few comments on “Is AI really dead?”. Today, in my view, I don’t see any breakthrough research going on. I no more sumble across programs which can create poetry, can chat effectively or can demonstrate novel applications. So I consider AI dead today.

The reason AI is dead because researches, in the past, have taken a wrong decision that the goal of AI is to *imitate* humans. By imitation I mean programming a computer to behave like a human. For example, the turing test involves the testing of a computer to be able to communicate like humans.

This is nuts!! Do we design air-planes to fly like birds. No! Then why do we aim the machines to behave like us. Intelligence itself is an entity which can be approached via n number of paths. Then, why do we aim to approach it through the most difficult of paths which is human-like intelligence. Evolution has taken millions of years to evolve the intelligence. We aim to do achieve the intelligence via same path in relatively lesser period of time.

I know there is a contradiction of terms. First, I say AI is dead because there are no more development into human-like intelligence. Secondly, I refuse to say that human-like intelligence is AI. See, AI itself is a very broad concept. It is more that how you pursue AI rather than what it is. Human-like intelligence is a form of AI, not vice versa.

So, this death of human-like intelligence is, indeed, very welcome. It will now let a few budding enthusiasts (myself included) to experiment alternative routes to AI. By alternative routes, I mean letting computers themselves decide what intelligence (according to them) really is. Then use that intelligence for really cool applications.

So, at last, I would like to conclude this post by saying that we are really lucky that finally the attempts for programming human-like intelligence are dead. It had to be someday, but luckily that day is today.

Good luck!!

I was reading GEB last night, wherein the author asked: “Can you imagine your non-existence?”. I think the question is very deep in a philosophical sense. How can you see yourself non-existing? For that you have to exist. That’s a paradox.

But the question makes perfect sense, so does this suggest that our brains are limited in some way. Brains cannot think about non-brains.

How do you prove that the world goes on after you die? Marvellous thought which can shed some light on how brains work.

Check out this link