Teekay's Press 2.0

Human-Inspired Intelligence in Machines: Is the current research on the right path?

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:39:00 +0000

Bayesian learning, artificial neural networks etc. come under machine intelligence tools, but none of the programs is actually intelligent. None of the human-inspired machines is as efficient and intelligent as the human brain which is just a mass of protoplasm that can contemplate the universe and even contemplate itself contemplating the universe.

More than 60 years have passed since the beginning of research on AI, but what we have got now are machines which cannot even identify the differences between a cat and a dog, which a two-year old kid could do with almost no effort. This paper discusses the fundamental flaws in the current research trends on human-inspired intelligence in machines and proposes a few right directions towards achieving truly intelligent machines.

This is an excerpt from an article that I wrote for the IET WATW `09. You're right. It didn't get through. But anyway try reading it.

Read more here.. HIIIM
Also read my other article on BC Some Thoughts on ON INTELLIGENCE

Beginners' nightmare in research

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:29:00 +0000

If you're a student who has just started becoming a researcher you probably have good knowledge on the fundamentals of the subject, but not much on the research that has been going on for many many years on the subject. In junior and high schools, much time is spent on teaching the fundamentals. They are not to be blamed since teaching all advancements would be a tough load on them. So naturally, at the end of the course the student has a list of conceived ideas and problems relating to the subject, a part of which he would attempt to solve using his own ideas after starting his research career. The interest in the subject as well as the knowledge on the tools he'd learned would drive him to approach a conceived or existing problem without much reading on the existing literature. Believe me, it is a natural inclination especially after a solution to some problem has been so successful for him. After solving the problem creatively the student either directly submits the solution for publication in a journal or conference dealing with that particular subject or digs the internet for materials to include in the literature review section of the paper. This is the point where he may get a shocking sting. And that is when he finds his very same solution to have already been given by some other author decades ago. "Holy.... What the..." It feels really bad to be in such a situation. The entire work done for validating the solution goes waste.

There can be two situations. The functional architecture of the brain is the same for every person and hence the approach of several persons to solving some problem may be very similar and close to each other. This kind of approach is what would have been used by ancient people to solve seemingly direct, simple problems. For instance, the universal solution found by man to climb to a higher platform is the stair. The ladder is the portable version of the stair. Now, if they had had a patenting system then, it would have resulted in conflicts. Sometimes, this kind of a situation arises after solving something without referring the literature. The other kind of situation is when there has already been a patent or publication of a highly creative solution. It happens.

Sometimes it is quite not possible to look at the entire research previously done on a particular topic and most of the time an idea strikes instantly which urges for immediate validation that people don't feel like searching for instances of the same idea in the literature. The process of research becomes familiar with time. We will change our methodology by making extensive reading on the problem before attempting to solve it. But, it is not wrong or 'wasted' to attempt to solve something without knowing its history or reading the previous solutions. If such an attempt results in a novel solution it is great, but even if the solution is found to already exist there is nothing to worry about for such an experience will be beneficent in some ways. When you find your solution to have already been discovered by someone earlier and has been recognized, then it means you're normal and you have the ability to come up with something on your own that had once been considered novel. This gives confidence in yourself that you can bring out novel solutions to new problems if you try. The next thing is, you will get a chance to find out what you're supposed to add to such a solution that you've found, to present as an entry for publication or patenting. The residue will tell you what subtle or critical aspects you generally miss in your solution or the presentation.

So, it's not too bad to find yourself in such situations, though it will not be very easy to take the sting. Just look at the bright side and move on. If you're not in agreement with the ladder part of the story, that is, if you don't believe that such simple repetitions are made in practical situations, I will post some of my own experiences in the posts to come.

All the above should matter only to a student starting a research career. Professional researchers concentrate on much converged areas and they always try to bring out something very new for which they update themselves with the current research.

Simulating the olfactory sense

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:12:00 +0000

The blackboard (yes, we have one) is an active area of consciousness in the brain where we create the so-called mental images of the senses. It's the thalamus that I'm speaking about. The neocortex is the center of computation inside the brain that interprets stimuli from various senses, encodes them and generates actions. The structure of neocortex has been studied for a long time, but how it works is still not fully understood. This conforms to the fact that one cannot understand the working of complex programs in a computer just by looking at how the transistors are connected at the lowest level (I'm actually not sure, but I think it will be a monumental task to do so). All the senses from the sense organs (except one) enter the neocortex through the thalamus. It has been proposed that the thalamus does denoising and encoding on the raw data. Also, it performs some kind of voting that selects one of the many hypotheses put down by various areas of the neocortex when interpreting stimuli. The thalamic nuclei are reciprocally connected to the neocortex such that there is feedback between them. Many have proposed that the thalamus functions as an active blackboard which helps us to mentally imagine or more precisely, mentally simulate a specific pattern as if it has occurred. This can happen because since the cortex and the thalamus are reciprocally connected and the thalamus gets the stimuli directly from the sense organs, for mental imaging, the cortex can send a stimuli pattern back to the thalamus so that it will be like the thalamus actually getting the stimuli from the senses. But anyway, they are differentiable. I mean, we know that we're only imagining such patterns and that they are not real.

The following is entirely my proposition. We know that we can mentally imagine an image of any object that we have seen before with ease. For example, imagine a wooden chair. We can rotate, translate or anything inside the brain. Similarly, we can imagine any known voice, example our parents'. We can also mentally picture the feelings of touch as well as taste. This is directly the result of the feedback between the neocortex and the thalamic nuclei. There is one sense left that is directly sent to the neocortex without being sent through the thalamus and that is the olfactory sense or the sense of smell. Now, I think this is why we cannot bring a mental picture of any specific smell in our brain. Why the olfactory sense has been denied this, is a mystery. What would have demanded for such a setup during evolution? We can find it out if we think. Just think.

"This is why we cannot bring a mental picture of any specific smell in our brain. Why the olfactory sense has been denied this, is a mystery."

The computational architecture of the neocortex can be understood only with the inclusion of the thalamic activity which is the center for consciousness and mental imaging. Machine intelligence cannot be fully realized without consciousness. But even the recent HTM (Hierarchical Temporal memory) has not taken into account the blackboard and hence the consciousness.

The human brain keeps fascinating me so much day by day that I have now started to think why it cannot be God.

Merely a product of imagination?

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:03:00 +0000

You believe that you exist among different individuals of your own species as well as others and that there exists a world which you perceive using your senses. You perceive the visual aspect of the entire world using only the retinal signals captured by your eyes. Now, imagine that you were born blind and you still are. In that case, you should be able to agree that you may not be able to visualize or visually feel any part of the world as it presents itself now. And so is the case with all your other senses – hearing, feeling, smelling, etc. If all your senses had been switched off since your birth you would be like a rock now. From this discussion we understand that it’s our senses that show us this world and make us believe its existence.

We come to the next part now. I think you are aware that you can use your brain to simulate your sense organs’ functions. For instance, close your eyes and try to visualize a chair. You should have been able to do it with no difficulty at all. Even you can feel the chair with your hands in your imagination. Coming to the hearing sense, you can simulate it as well. Imagine that the chair is falling down and hitting the floor. You should be able to hear it in a way close to reality. For a particular sense, the ‘close to reality’ (CTR) factor will be high if that sense organ is idle in reality. That is, for example if you close your eyes and imagine things, the CTR is high and if you be in a calm, noiseless environment the CTR of imaginatively hearing will be high. You can simulate all the senses in a similar manner, but simulating the smell is quite difficult (close to impossibility in my case). But that will not be discussed now. So, we’ve come to understand that our brain can be voluntarily made to falsely activate our sense organs.

The next part of discussion is to show you that there exist two different things – the brain and the mind. By brain, I mean the physical organ. There is a conceptual entity called mind, which indeed exists, that is so very complicated. The mind itself is composed to two parts – the conscious one and the subconscious one. The one that we use voluntarily everyday and which we can control is the conscious mind. The subconscious mind works by itself and aids the conscious one in several ways. Both of them are interconnected and dependent on each other. The following can help you understand it better. You must have had experiences in which you had forgotten a person’s name or some detail and had tried to recollect it the whole day. But in the middle of a night you would have woken up suddenly after having found that name or detail strike your mind. Now ask yourself how you can get the answer at some time when you were not even trying to search for it. And who did the searching for you at that time? It is obviously something on which you don’t have your full control. And that is the subconscious mind, we’re talking about. Understand that the mind structure is even more complicated than we believe it to be.

To be continued..

Image Mosaic

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:43:00 +0000

Last week-so bored

Click on the mosaic to view the enlarged version (Size: 1.85MB)

ANN Vs NNN

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:47:00 +0000

The brain does not work with its neural network (NN) alone. This directly means that we cannot get close to its actual behaviour from a digital simulation of the neural network alone. Around 10power12 neurons, we’ve got inside our brain to do the job. Using a digital system to implement a brain-level neural network is certainly not a cool job.
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Analog implementation is to be preferred instead. But the question at hand is, even if we’re able to build a huge analog NN with the available models, will it be comparable with the original masterpiece? No. Not with the existing models. The models for NN that we have e.g. McCulloch-Pitts’ are not accurate enough for the system to perform comparable to the real NN. Most of the existing models differ from the original network in the following aspects.

1. In the models that we use, a neuron gets activated when the arithmetic sum of synapses crosses a threshold. But, in the real NN, the activation is not the sum of the synapses. The action potentials at the individual synapses occur at certain intervals depending on various internal processes of the sense organs. A complex function of these intervals and the time differences between consecutive synapses serves as the activation for the neurons.
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2. For a particular model, we use only one kind of neuron in the entire network. But actually, the brain consists of many different kinds of neurons and glial cells. Glial cells feed and nourish the neurons. These cells also have signals and synapses as neurons do.

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3. Action potentials are not the only signal providers for neurons. This is what most of the models have assumed. There are hormonal signalling and other potentials that contribute to the activation.

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However, we do not have to include all of these complexities in our future models. But, at the same time, we cannot work with the current models which are too simple.

Yikes, he's back!

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:43:00 +0000

Here's something that disrespects digital circuits in a funny manner. Digital circuitry, as someone says, is just carefully polluted sand. Look at the choice of words.
Be looking out. They're gonna make brains with sand.

Well, this is what I wanted to write here. I have gathered a lot of interesting information on the Black Box. Even clods can have a lot of facts, but having opinions is an art. And I have a lot of opinions and ideas to display here. Make yourself compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagate your opinions. Hey, I'm not telling you this with my tongue in the cheek.

Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:30:00 +0000

Yesterday, The Hindu spit a news on making complex decisions. I would have missed but caught it by this much. It goes like this,

Studies suggest the best way to deal with complex decisions is not to think about them at all, so that unconscious thought will help make the best choices.

This came to my mind. Maybe it's a kind of proof to the claim. Sometimes you spend hours trying to get back from memory, a person's name or something that you knew well. At last, you get it in a spark at a time when you don't even try. This suggests that the subconscious brain or the mind is trying to figure it out. You may branch out to this earlier post of mine here.

But, can you really use your subconscious brain's help in chosen cases?

Saving the screens

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:50:00 +0000

Hohn Socha coined the word screen saver for the program that blanked the IBM PC's screen after a 3 minutes time of inactivity. Later, screen savers were programmed (usually in C/C++) to set moving images on the screen after a variable threshold of inactivity time. They served the purpose of preventing a phenomena called 'Phosphor burn in' in monochrome computer monitors. These monitors were the CRT ones (Cathode ray tubes) in which, phosphor dots coated on the back of the tube glowed when accelerated electrons from the cathode hit them. The same image is displayed for a long time means that the electrons hit the dots continuously millions of times. This may lead to screen damage and 'ghosts' forming on the screen. 'Ghosts' make the screen display the outline of the image that was displayed for a long time before, even after the screen is blanked out. It is only to prevent this, that screen savers were made.

Nowadays, with modern monitors which are of the LCD type, this problem does not occur. Even modern CRT screens are not affected much by 'phosphor burn in' because of the improved phosphor coatings on them. But, screen savers are still being used for entertainment and security.Programs like virus scanners are activated by screen savers to run in the background while the computer is idle.

Today, screen saver is an important dangerous keyword on the web. It is the most attractive concept to a new internet user. It is used by many units to mislead a new user and guide him to get a virus program in his computer.

Other dangerous keywords are Free screensavers, Bearshare, Winmx, Limewire, Download Yahoo messenger, Lime wire, Free ringtones

Source: Wikipedia, BBC NEWS

Things to do

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:05:00 +0000

Now that the origin of terror attitudes in a few adults has been traced (reference), it’s high time that we use that as our tool to mend the minds of the misguided souls. The story of this terrorist in the reference tells me that there are viable measures that can be taken from our side, the government, to both prevent as well as eradicate terror attitudes in people. There would be very little use in holding public group discussions on the issue. Good solutions can be identified if we think about how a person enters into this very bad thing.
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The main causes are very obvious. They are unemployment and poverty (mind, this is about the guys who join the already existing terror groups). Employment opportunities should be improved to avoid guys moving to that side. When we don't do this, it will be like telling them, "There's no work for you here. You can't live. Just go to the other side"

The next thing that came to my mind is this. We can make a call to all the poor sections of the country to be alert and keep a watch on their children, the type of work they are involved in etc. Family members can bring the misguided adult into control since they are emotionally very much attached to him even though he is at the wrong side and has no concerns for the lives of others.

Movies play a role too. Entertainment media is one of the best ways to communicate an idea to the people effectively. Films can inspire people, motivate them to take a message and act. In olden days, there were street dramas that exactly served this purpose. Only after looking at the results of the recent attacks did I realize that the films depict numerous creative ways of practising terrorism. In fact, the there's one line in the news that says, "Ajmal starts getting influenced by films on India’s “atrocities” in Kashmir, by impassioned speeches by preachers, including LeT chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed. Starts believing it might be worth sacrificing his worthless life for..." There are many Indian films as well, on terrorism and to me, they seem to give new ideas for carrying out terror activities. The film certifying system should be equipped with new rules to ban such movies which invoke feelings that motivate terrorism.

"The story of this terrorist in the reference tells me that there are viable measures that can be taken from our side, the government, to both prevent as well as eradicate terror attitudes in people."

On the other hand, apart from filming good natured movies, movies that display very emotionally, the sufferings of the common people due to terrorist activities can also be produced to melt the hearts of the viewers so that they may not get involved in such trouble causing activities.
And, it seems that the captured guy is 21 yrs old. I am 20 yrs old and so, I could imagine the amount of pressure that he would have gone through at this age that has pushed him into terrorism. The society or rather the government has to bear most of the blame, I think.

If you think any of the above-said points could, in some way help, then spread it.

The Smart Start

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:21:00 +0000

No. Put your pen down. Writing a novel requires more thinking before the start than most of the people think. A lot of issues need to be chewed upon before making an attempt to write a novel. I have not made any novel of mine but I become eligible to discuss the initial preparatory steps as I have started to draw the outline of my first novel. Most normally, as in my case too, it starts with conceiving the idea regarding the style by which the novel is going to sewn and not the story or its characters. The style which I mentioned includes the novel's genre, the kind of voice adopted by the writer, the number of parallel lines in the plot, the structure of the parallel lines etc.
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There's nothing I can say regarding the choice of the genre. That is left to the unqualified freedom of choice of the author.(A writer can be even one who writes accounts in an office but an author is more of one who makes literary works, professionally) Coming to the voice of the speaker, there can be two styles (actually three) that an author can adopt - first person or the third person. The third one is the second person view which is a very unrecommended style; that which doesn't work well for most writers. And it's worse for amateur writers. Third person is usual and is easy to write with. But the quality of flow in the story has to be maintained with care while adopting the third person style of authoring it. The main advantage of this style is that the writer can describe from multiple points of view and thus enhance the details of the plot. He can provide varying emotional feelings of the different characters in the story.

The first person way is also quite easy. The main problem is that, the story will revolve around the author's foot. Everything described in the novel will have to be known to the main narrating character. In spite of these limitations, the novel can be made a great hit. There are novels written in the first person style where the narrator turns out to be the killer at last. Making such a plot is a challenging task indeed. One has to write as much in both the styles before he could understand which one suits him and then put that style into work.

"In spite of these limitations, the novel can be made a great hit. There are novels written in the first person style where the narrator turns out to be the killer at last. Making such a plot is a challenging task indeed."

Parallel running lines in stories is a very welcomed concept which interests the reader very much. Two stories will run parallel. In one style, they will not be independent but correlated slightly in the beginning and will later on be intertwined to a common climax. Such plots thrill the reader and will make him hesitant to drop the book in between.

With these ideas and choices, one has to start making an outline of the plot. And, the story is very important too. The word 'novel' itself means 'something new' - new, not in all aspects though. Originality is very much necessary for people to read with interest.
Another faq is about the size of the novel. A beginner can make a novel with around 60K words. Roughly, a page contains 600 words to make it around 100 pages. Writing two pages everyday will take you to 'The End' in around 2 months.
There are also loads of tips given by various professionals to amateur writers. Following those rules and guidelines will help a lot.

Automated Drawing: A Freeman Chain MOD

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 19:16:00 +0000

Here's a simple method to make a robotic hand draw the core of an image. Among the many steps involved, the first is to code the image contours to facilitate the line drawing. Let's get to the discussion. The method is summarized here. Extract the best relevant textural parts of the image (to be drawn by a robotic hand) and find the chain code (Freeman chain code) of all the parts (contours/edges) in the resulting image. Finally combine them to a single line drawing on a normalized axis.

Extraction of the best texture

The image is read and converted to gray scale with eight levels or eight gray values. All the eight gray values are separated and analyzed. The analysis will show that the third gray value yields the best image configuration to draw. So this gray level image is selected for further processing. So ‘image’ represents this selected image hereafter.

Contour finding and labeling

For contour extraction, no edge detection methods are used. Instead a new way is developed. The image is made black and white. Then the image is eroded a bit with a specific mask. The resulting eroded image is then subtracted from the original image to reveal its contours. Thus, the contours are extracted. Once the contours are extracted, the individual unconnected contour parts in the image are labeled. Suppose if there are

n unconnected contours, they are each given a number from 1-n.

"For contour extraction, no edge detection methods are used. Instead a new way is developed. The image is made black and white."

Coding all the contours

The labeled contour parts are separately coded by the Freeman chain coding algorithm. The resulting coded line structures are superimposed on a normalized/common image axis forming a line structure of the entire image.

The chain codes could be given to the robot controller which instructs the robot to move its arm according to the codes and make an approximate drawing of the image. This is to be one after a suitable interpolation of the discrete data points.

Probing into the Black Box

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:13:00 +0000

Nature keeps changing in various aspects as time rolls and everything adapts to its environment by changing its properties. Life embraces nature and the dance is always awesome. Specifically, at any point of time, the human body as well as the brain (why did I separate brain from the body?) work well suited to their environment. We use our body and brain following almost a fixed set of patterns so that they work more efficiently for such patterns. This is like water in a bottle. As the shape of the bottle changes, the water column inside adjusts itself so that it gets to the shape of the bottle. I discovered a cool experimental verification of this theory somewhere in the web. Here,it is.

Sitting on a chair, lift your right foot and make anticlockwise circles with it. Simultaneously, keep drawing '6' in the air with your right hand. You should have no problem doing this.

Now, come back to rest. Lift your right foot again and make clockwise circles again with your right hand drawing '6' simultaneously. Your foot movement will change its direction now (from clockwise to anticlockwise).

Forget the obvious question that you have got - why the brain wants the same direction to be maintained by the hand and foot.? The other important question is why the brain chose to alter the sense of movement of the leg instead of doing it to the hand. This is what I think and propose. We use our legs only for walking and a very few other works. But, our hands are put to use in numerous ways ; I mean our hands are trained to a lot of different patterns of movement everyday. Because of this, the brain has acquired more control over the hands than over the legs. This is why the foot changed direction instead of the right hand.

Image credit: www.shapingyouth.org

Swee'pea is not Popeye's real son?

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:35:00 +0000

I didn't know that. Swee'pea or sweet pea came to Popeye's door in an express package through mail. Maybe I missed that episode.Here's the rest of the story.

Wimpy is with Popeye when he receives the package. They are initially suspicious as to what that package contained. Popeye, after hearing noises from the package, thinks Brutus has sent him a wild animal that's going to kill him. BOth of them even try shooting the wild animal inside the box. But popeye thinks again and decides to open the box. The funny part is, he opens the box four days after he receives it. To his surprise and delight, he finds a boy, a baby. The package has a note attached to it from the baby's mother requesting to take care of him. Excited Popeye, then spends his next few weeks in attending child-rearing courses and reading child rearing books.

Next, he wants to name the child. Wimpy suggests names after a few presidents but Popeye disregards them. He then names the child Scooner. So, Scooner is Swee'pea's original name. I have no idea why and how Scooner changed to Sweet pea.

Popeye adopts him and raises him. Swee'pea is actually Popeye's adopted son. Investigation Complete.Case Closed.

Check out my Popeye painting here. Do you see a painter in me ?

Click Here

Show your teeth. Let me find your birthplace.

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 09:51:00 +0000

The way researchers use science to solve issues has always fascinated me. Today, a similar fascination aroused in me when I read The Hindu which had a news on the unearthing of the remains of stone-age(~4600 years old) nuclear families somewhere in Germany. The inferences of the researchers from various evidences were interesting. There was one concept that was new to me and I'm sharing it here.It is this.

Strontium builds up in teeth during childhood and can be a clue where someone was raised.

Not only teeth but, Strontium levels in bones,skull etc. also can indicate the geographical location where an animal or human lived. This is because, the Strontium profile on earth is distinctly different in different regions and the composition has not changed over the years as Strontium is processed through the food chain in the ecosystem. The distribution in US is shown here below.

Strontium isotope variations- continental USA

Credit:Strontium Isotope Composition of Skeletal
Material Can Determine the Birth Place and
Geographic Mobility of Humans and Animals, Beard, Johnson

Strontium is ingested by the teeth and bones during childhood, the concentration and composition of which is characteristic of the geographical location where the person lived. This level of strontium does not change once the teeth develops fully ie. once the person grows up to a certain age. Thus, the Strontium isotope composition measured in human teeth reflects the average isotopic composition of the region where he lived during his childhood and the measurement, if done in the bone, will reflect the average composition over the last ten years of life (since Sr is processed and changed continuously in the bone).

With this technique, the investigators have found that the remains of women in the grave have distinctly different Strontium composition in their teeth when compared to that in men and children. And thus, they have concluded that females of that society had grown up in different regions from the males and children which is an indication of marriage between different groups, with the women going to join their husbands.

Scitalk 3012: The AI alert

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:23:00 +0000

"AAhhhrr..", Robin cried in pain when he pulled out the N-injection plug which had been buried deep in his waist. He lifted his hand and glanced at his watch-a WPT20 (see figure). Opening its messaging panel, he typed the message 'To MX78800. Deactivate Jen.'Then he pushed the button that had 'Send' on it and heaved a deep sigh. Messages sent through a WPT20 needed no encryption since they got transferred by photon teleportation. Photon teleportation became the most reliable method of communication after it was invented by an Indian scientist in 2038. Robin took the injection plug in his hands and looked at it. For a moment, he thought of crushing the plug under his boots but reluctantly placed it inside his kit safely. N-plugs injected nano batteries for the nanobots inside the human body.

Nanobots were minuscule robots. In 2087, the year when the Robotic Web collapsed out of control due to the failure of a Parrondo's paradox verification system, the server bot, Zen (a Cisco Systems product equipped with its IOS) sent interrupts to all the housekeeping nodes and ordered them to inject nanobots into humans for activity monitoring purpose. Those were the K-bots designed by Miescher to monitor the health factors of humans; blood pressure, glucose level, heart beat etc. but were later banned as some of the k-bots escaped beyond their domain, to the brain and started manipulating region 12's activities that resulted in people making suicide attempts. Zen called for the robots at the programming division in Atcale corp. to change the code in k-bots' RAM.

"Zen had shut down all cloning machines with a 28M bit key which would be changed every 18 hrs - a day lasted only for 18hrs then."

The k-bots then started monitoring human activities like communication between people regarding the Robotic Web etc. and sending data to Zen again through photon teleportation. The bots have to be powered regularly failing which, the human body hosting it would be infected and the person would die after which his memories would be imaged to Zen's profile allotted for storing human memories- the HSS 3.0 ; HSS stood for Homo sapiens sapiens. Zen had shut down all cloning machines with a 28M bit key which would be changed every 18 hrs - a day lasted only for 18hrs then.After transmitting the memory images, the k-bots were deactivated. The dead bodies were usually sent to RD1 which disintegrated the body and used the resources to grow itself. The RD1 grew 0.023% of its size limit (11 meters) on an average for every human body it disintegrates. The earth's population was 0.9 billion then.

Robin stood up and went near the window in the room. He saw the vast, empty desert-like place below and wiped the sweat on his forehead with his hands. Shortly lifting his head, he saw at a long distance, the skyscraper in which Zen 'lived'. Robin clenched his fists.

P.S. No moral. I wrote this piece of Sci-fi crap because I was free for a few minutes today :)
Image Credit : Ebayblog.net

Chandrayaan : My first Haiku

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:29:00 +0000

while on bed, i see
the moon on which India
has hoisted its flag

- Kumaran

Image Credit : Wikipedia
Know how you count syllables? If yes, Haiku will be the easiest kind of poetry for you to learn. A Haiku is a Japanese poetry type which usually portrays feelings related to nature and life. The poem is to be of three lines only and the syllable count in lines 1,2,3 has to be 5,7,5 in the order (Totally 17 syllables in the poem). In Japanese, Haiku is printed in a single vertical line. Traditionally, every Haiku mentions nature in some form but it can also be written without it.

This is my first Haiku and it is about India's recent achievement - Chandrayaan.

Introducing the Favtunes

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:27:00 +0000

Loads of songs of various styles and genre get released each day. When someone says "I like this song much", in almost all such cases he means that some part of the song has attracted him. It may be a part of the lyrics or the tune or their blend. One may get attracted to the whole song as well; all of its aspects.I would not say that it is rare but it is not so in most cases. Favtunes is a stream or a play-list that is composed of only the user's favourite segments from a bunch of songs. Just get a good mp3 cutter and collect all your favourite segments in the songs that you have. Put them in a playlist and push the play. That'll be an awesome mix, believe me.

Recommendations : Mp3cutter, Billy
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The R2MD Commutator

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:47:00 +0000

The Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) shows us a time domain signal in the frequency domain as we all know.The idea of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is to break down the DFT and thereby reduce the computational complexity. There are several algorithms for this like the Radix-2,4, split radix etc. The R2MDC (Radix 2 Multi-path Delay Commutator) is a pipelined FFT implementation system. The pipelined method is to utilize the hardware more effectively.The input is a stream of samples. The algorithm splits it into two parallel streams, each passing through a series of delays, multipliers and adders. The outputs are produced in pairs of values in bit-reversed order, starting a few cycles after the first sample was inputted. It is in the literature that the R2MDC has only 50% utilization of the hardware. An altered version of the algorithm is also available for 100% utilization.

The first two stages of a N point R2MDC architecture
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I am trying to make a verilog code for this architecture but it is getting me mad. If there's someone free and jobless, please try coding it and give me the code. Otherwise the reader might take this post as just a source of knowledge.

A more clear visual explanation of the algorithm's functioning is provided here.

The Race!

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:27:00 +0000

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The long awaited event has happened. This is about a race that started nearly a month ago. There is no finish line. Today, november 10, n(inbox) exceeds n(sent_items) by 1.

Isn't this a good reason to celebrate.?

Why supersonic?

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 09:12:00 +0000

We've heard about supersonic aircrafts - aircrafts whose speed exceeds that of sound in air (Mach 1). I was wondering why people would have wanted to build a flight that moves faster than sound. Why sound? As usual, after a bit of research, I understood that it was a nonsense question to ask. Certainly, no one wanted to make a supersonic jet. People had wanted to learn more about high speed aeronautics and the effects when planes flew very faster. Motivation and interests began to appear in them after Geoffrey de Havilland, Jr. died while carrying out high speed tests in a British experimental aircraft.

Image from Wikipedia

Initially, the problems with supersonic planes were these. As a plane goes through the speed of sound, effects like buffeting, lateral rocking of the plane, wing dropping etc. occur. Buffeting is defined as

The vibratory motion of a component or the airframe as a whole when subjected to the vibratory impulses contained within an aerodynamic wake.

Wing dropping is caused by a shock wave dancing on the wing or the control surfaces; it would wiggle the controls, making the plane begin to rock or oscillate. Wing dropping would seriously limit the performance of fighter planes since it makes gun aiming very difficult. At Mach 1, however, these effects are controllable. Sometimes, even at Mach 1, planes had problems like engine compressor disintegration etc. Pilots required pressure suits for safe driving.
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One other problem that supersonic planes created was the sonic boom. Usually when an airplane moves in air, it pushes the air out of its way creating pressure waves that travel in all directions. Pressure waves are a series of compressed and uncompressed air. These pressure waves travel at the speed of sound in air. When the plane's speed is increased beyond that of sound, the pressure waves pile up ahead of the plane just like the water waves that pile up in front of a boat. Such waves create the sonic boom. They travel out of the plane behind it and hit the earth. When they hit the human ear, there is a sudden pressure change and we hear the sonic boom. The intensity of the sonic boom can be increased by two simple ways - Increasing the plane's size, flying the plane at lower altitudes.
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An interesting thing about sonic booms is that they can be seen. If the plane is at the right orientation to the sun, the sunlight would be dispersed in some manner so that a shadow would be casted through the shock wave and the shock wave moving around on the wing could be seen.

There's one interesting question here. Light travels at a speed well higher than that of sound. But it doesn't cause sonic booms. Why? The answer is in the second comment on the page.

Research tips: Chuck Yeager, X-1, Douglas D-588, JATO, Concorde

Here.. Wear these glasses

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 11:37:00 +0000

If you can't see properly, you can't drive safely.

Live your life. After a small threshold, filling the bank must become a hobby.Remember, hobbies are done during leisure times.

Often get curious!

Want to open a lock? Generate your own key - the will.

Cultivate in yourself, the qualities you admire in others.

You cannot count the number of fruits that a single seed can give you.

Believe that everything you do affects every matter in the universe.

v > 3x 10^8 m/sec is possible.

Tonight, there is no party. Let's have it tomorrow after the project gets over.
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Phase Congruency based corner detection

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:02:00 +0000

Thanks to Mr. Peter Kovesi for his excellent method of corner detection. The method uses moments of phase congruency for finding edges and corners in image data. The method has a lot of potential uses. I have used his technique in two of my works on image processing.

1. Image Processing Based Logical circuit Solver.
2. Method of finding slope of a curve at a point in an image.

As Mr. Peter Kovesi says, a corner is defined as a location in the image where the autocorrelation function gets a distinct peak. There are also other methods available for corner detection but their response would vary considerably as the image contrast varies. This makes fixing the threshold, a difficult task. Mr. Kovesi, in his work, has used the phase congruency of the Fourier components of the image along a particular direction as a feature that is invariant to the image contrast.

The fourier components (the fourier expansion of several orders for a 1D signal) of a step signal, all converge in phase at the point where the step occurs. This is the main idea. For more information, read his paper Phase Congruency detects corners and edges.

Eigenbasis: Look straight - Click

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:24:00 +0000

Teacher: Write straight, teekay.You've always been like this. Your handwriting is like a printed work but, you cannot write straight on an un-ruled sheet.
Teekay : Anyway, it is to be scanned and printed maam.
Teacher: So what?

She doesn't know about the Eigen transformation - the automatic data adjuster.

With the eigenbasis, image data could be aligned properly so that post processing is made easier. Eigenbasis based transformation is used in a lot of areas as a preprocessing step. For example, in fingerprint based identification, the print sensed by the pad could be aligned vertically using the eigen transformation irrespective of the alignment the user makes while making the thumb impression.
Consider the image shown. It represents a misaligned print of some text. The steps to do eigen transformation or Hotelling transform (as it is otherwise called) are very simple. It is simpler if you use applications like MatLab to do the work. The image to the right of it is the result of the transformation.

The misaligned image and the image after Eigen transformation
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The basic steps follow. You can tweak the algorithm in anyway to get the desired result.

Just find the pixel coordinates that represent the data and nullify their mean by subtracting the centroid of the data from every coordinate. Then find the covariance matrix of this collected data positions. (Read about covariance, eigenvectors etc. elsewhere or may be I'll write about them later. Note that I will have to 'waste' a page to explain about them when you can learn them from a book more efficiently). After finding the covariance matrix, find the eigenvectors/eigenbasis of it. All the eigenvectors, arranged as columns in a matrix will give you the transformation matrix. The eigen vectors for the image presented above are plotted in the image to the left. You can find the slope of the eigenbasis and rotate the image data by the angle represented by the so found slope. Cool isn't it.?

These are the results of the transformation that was done by me on my writing (just kidding. My handwriting is not that neat). Now the teacher has to give me a high score. Right?

This technique, also called Hotelling transform or KLT is used in a lot of document processing applications like character recognition as a preprocessing step.

The new AI theory

noreply@blogger.com (Kumaran Thulasiraman) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:13:00 +0000

I was very much interested , a couple of years back, in the so called Artificial Intelligence because of the grandiose word. After extensive reading on the subject, I understood that AI is simply a program that will reproduce some aspect of human intelligence. Nothing I was able to do with this definition. So, I went in search for the meaning of 'Intelligence'. As the reader might know, there is no definite definition for intelligence. Then, I read a few examples of AI which were mostly of the language understanding type. I thought of picking up an action that humans could do intelligently and make a model of it to reproduce the behaviour. That was a grand failure because every such action required extraordinary capabilities and a few things cannot be brought out in a computer. Also, I was of the idea that if we make a program (any computer language), it is going to run the same way every time and so, intelligent 'behaviour' can never be expected out of such a program. I arrived at the conclusion that it's not the job for me and giggled at the AI researchers because I was very much convinced that it is not a possibility to bring out AI.

But, now I seem to feel that AI is indeed possible. This is because, I think that the main difference between human performance and machine performance is that the human processor's actions and decisions depend on a lot of senses/sensor outputs whereas we usually make a code that monitors only a very few senses and uses them to act accordingly. And my past opinion that every program is going to run the same way every time is a very crude and unrefined one, I know. Because, there could be a lot of 'if-else' statements in a program that will decide the actions of the program and the choice is dependent on a few variables from sensors.

What I believe is that when we increase the number of sensors on which a program's actions depend, intelligent behaviour would emerge from the code.

The main problem of implementing it now is that a specific program has to be written for every particular action and that would demand lot of mental and physical work from the programmer. Instead, as I had explained in one of my previous posts, the common information processing algorithm of brain has to be identified or hypothetically developed. This would reduce the burden.

And I was wondering whether a thin slice of a neural network could be taken from some region of the human brain and the weight matrix of it could be determined by supplying voltages to its input nodes. I have no idea whether it'll help us in any way.

Anyway, I’m trying to validate my claim of getting intelligent performance by increasing the number of sensors. May be, in the next post I'll try to provide the results.