From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Aug 12 1999 - 10:30:20 MDT
viscerella@webtv.net (viscera) writes:
> 1. It ought to be possible to build a computer that does not require
> hardware. Is it? From liquid, free electricity or light?
Wouldn't that be hardware? After all, hardware doesn't have to be hard
in the physical sense.
On the other hand, as far as I know, nobody has yet demonstrated the
feasibility of such a system. I would guess that the Navier-Stokes
equations for some suitable boundary conditions *may* be able to do
Turing computation (fluidistors certainly can, but maybe also flows
constrained by other flows).
> 2. Can a system be made, an artifical intelligence, which is
> sensitive...which , when subjected to a battery of sensory input, will
> become selective and adjust its own sensitivity and continue to 'learn'
> based on it's sensory needs?
I can't see why not. Artificial neural networks have shown both the
ability to adapt to the range of inputs and to build feature detectors
suitable for the input. Having a good architecture for the network and
the right learning rules is of course essential.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:04:44 MST