quarta-feira, outubro 27, 2004

When machines dream

Uma velha conhecida do Coase Institute me mandou a matéria abaixo cujo trecho reproduzido impressiona (leia para ver se não é para tanto...).

MercuryNews.com | 02/05/2004 | Stephen Thaler's Creativity Machine: "Thaler built another neural network and trained it to recognize the structure of diamonds and some other super-hard materials. He also built a second network to monitor the first one's activities.
Then he tickled a few of the network's connections, and something began to happen. The tickling, akin to a shot of adrenaline or an electrical jolt in the brain, produced noise. In this sense, noise is not sound, but random activity. And the noise triggered changes in the network.
The result was new ideas. The computer dreamed up new ultra-hard materials. Some of the materials are known to humans, but Thaler didn't tell the network they existed. Other materials are entirely new, unknown to humans or computers before."