Oni2:Caged Birds: Difference between revisions

Oni2:Caged Birds (view source)

Revision as of 20:57, 28 November 2019

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Avatara (to be continued)

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 First visit and "recruitment".
+[...]
+Pensatore discussed with Avatara their current state and why AIs were strongly needed within the WCG when they received a message that their project was going to get another financial partner. The professor was supposed to welcome the suprise visitor. They got so much money that Pensatore was ordered to arrange the tour through the labs himself to show their gratitude.
+Kimura claimes to be a tech-affine billionaire leading one of BGI's companies and asked Pensatore to explain him the Avatara project and its evolution by his own words. [Kimura is the anti-batman ;-)]
+[...]
+“Life and intelligence are emergent phenomena so we came to the conclusion that your approach better should be also bottom-up: Studying the smallest units first, the behavior of atoms and molecules and later DNA and entire cells. Eventually, entire organisms. Bacteria, insects, humans.”
+“Our interdisciplinary team of theoretical biologists and computer scientists had worked on Avatara for more than a decade already to finally fulfill the promises of AI research that had been made in the past. We really don’t want to see another AI winter.”
+“During the first years I constantly remembered the running gag of fusion energy – that it is always 30 years away. But now we are really closing in on AI.”
+“The teams took their time to review old textbook knowledge and corrected it where necessary. We simply didn’t wanted to fail just because of inaccurate basics.”
+“You maybe remember the euphoria, the hype, of the human genome project. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_8XRkb-wbY It was said that the one reference genome will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases. Doctors will cure diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, diabetes and cancer.]”
+“As we know today, that was a foolish thought for various reasons. Even if you have the whole sequenced genome you are still missing more than 50 percent of the raw information to understand the more complex diseases – the other half being the epigenetic information layers like DNA methylisation and histone modifications.”
+“On top of that you have to watch out for dynamic factors like microbiom and virom – all the other cells inside the human body that are part of him but don’t derive from his own genetic codes.”
+“When all data of a level was reviewed we increased the abstraction of our models. Superficially, you may think of them as onions with their layers or hollow Matroschka puppets made of wood. The more layers our model had the more complete and live-like is got.”
+“The usual way for our abstraction – reduction of complexity – was to determine the normal and exceptional conditions of before-named smallest units.”
+“For living organisms we eventually assumed a lot of normal conditions and shifted focus to neural sensation and its processing. This allows us to test the simulation with exceptional condition like disease, immune reactions, intake of nutrients, cell growth.”
+“Intelligence doesn’t pop up into existence by plugging together enough hardware. If you really want to understand it, you have to simulate cell growth and learning processes as well.”
+“So, to cut a long story short, we simulated most simple lifeforms and their environment first, then increased cell count and complexity again for higher cognitive abilities.”
+“Single cell sims were mostly used to study metabolisms, gene networks and signaling pathways. On level of colonies we included emergent phenomena like quorum sensing – chemical communication among bacteria. Next we needed to incorporate the microbiom and virom before accurately simulate the lifecycle of whole populations of microbes. For our biologist this was interesting for studying the effects of transposomes, immune systems like CRISPR CAS and symbiotic relationships.”
+“I waited teeth-gnashingly three more years before further complexity could be added. We were so close to simulate organism on level of an animals and create AIs on their level.”
+“Eventually Avatara reached the mental capacities of a human child. Naturally, it had become more than a simulation of living cells. By now it had experienced its very own evolution insilico.”
+“It’s kind of funny how much time and resources we needed to create and understand complex models and simulations just to safely reduce the complexity again for specialized working modes.”
+“For instance when you really only want to use the visual pattern recognition you can turn off the molecular and genetic layer. This gives you more computation for the actual problem solving and not the support structures. And note Avatara is just a tool to create even greater AI, right now we are working on self-optimization.”
+<!--
+“Some say a truly intelligent machine will be human’s last invention. I hope that’s not the case and that we will rather establish a symbiosis with them.”-->
+“I wish I could have given you a shorter explanation to our project, but you cannot simply create an [[wikipedia:Strong_AI|strong AI]] by ignoring 3.5 billion years of evolution."
+Kimura smirked: “It’s okay. I know two other guys with a similar scope. You should meet them. I think you all will make a great gang of crackheads.”
+Pensatore: “Excuse me?”
+Kimura hit Pensatore on the shoulder: "Oh come on, show me your mad scientist cave where you will transform all my billions into new technologies. It's behind that door, right? I can already scent the innovations behind it."
+Pensatore was perplexed. How did he know? What was up with that attitude? Was it because that man was so insanely rich?
+[Kimura regularly uses Kumo's ''black money pools'' for his own purposes. Kumo tries to keep money for himself, not passing it to the Controllers. But the Controllers and Kimura know of his actions and make him pay anyway. Kimura is in charged of the Network's espionage and counter-espionage so he takes the freedom to inflict disciplinary actions against such subbosses.
+Kimura created a dummy corporation to get in contact with Pensatore and the Avatara project. He made the WCG oversight believe that he was a new financial partner in research matters. To the outside world his setup was just a branch of the globally operating heavy machines specialist BGI which produced military equipment for the WCG.]
+[Pensatore shows Avatara to the VIP. The robot is in a hall to test his spatial awareness and locomotion. Kimura ask the robot for a sparring match. The ouside world is a dangerous place and a highly valuable piece of self-aware tech better knows to defend himself. Pensatore thinks that his guest looks for military application since the source of money is BGI. Kimura is impressed how fast the AI can adapt to his attacks and confirms that Avatara has great potential. This thoought is also mirrored by the later SLD project.]
+[Kimura invites Pensatore to his company to give them advices for [[Supercomputer_architecture#Massive_distributed_parallelism|HPC architecture]]. Eventually Kimura decides to force Pensatore to permanently participate on the Daodan research.]
+[...]
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