Software engineers – the ultimate brain scientists?

Published 17/10/03 By Bill Softky on "The Register"

Can software engineers hope to create a digital brain? Not before understanding how the brain works, and that's one of the biggest mysteries left in science. Brains are hugely intricate circuits of billions of elements. We each have one very close by, but can't open it up: it's the ultimate Black Box. Click for more...

[G.K Comment: What do you think? Can a computer simulate the human brain? Can a robot start making sensible conclusions and even start having a high-level discussion with a human? This article answers only some of the questions on this very debatable issue. As a software engineer I believe it can be done. Let's discuss...]

Design patterns for a Black Box Brain?

Published 20/10/03 By Bill Softky on "The Register"

The bad news is that biologists are very far from figuring out the grand mystery of the brain. The good news is that software engineers might get there first. [...] What we desperately need - and what software and signal processing can help us with - is a theory of what a brain ought to do. A human brain is a black box with a million wires coming in and half a million going out; a rat's brain is smaller, with fewer wires, but faces the same basic signal-processing problems: what kind of input patterns can it expect, and how can it deal with them? Click for more...

[G.K Comment]: Without a doubt, the most interesting article I have ever read. It is exactly what my favourite research topic is all about... i.e. using software to create a human-like brain. Science finction? ...well it's only 2 years away I say. Let's see...

How Google translates without understanding!

Published 15/05/07 By Bill Softky on "The Register"

After just a couple years of practice, Google can claim to produce the best computer-generated language translations in the world - in languages their boffin creators don't even understand.

Last summer, Google took top honors at a bake-off competition sponsored by the American agency NIST between machine-translation engines, besting IBM in English-Arabic and English-Chinese. The crazy part is that no one on the Google team even understands those languages.... the automatic-translation engines they constructed triumphed by sheer brute-force statistical extrapolation rather than "understanding". Click for more...

[G.K Comment: I urge every one of you to try and understand this article even if you are not a software engineer. Google has proven that the time when machines will become more intelligent than humans is not very far away.]