You like Rocky so much, you wish you could have him forever? Well, now there's a solution -- just clone him!

For all you dog lovers out there, there’s a bad news. Many people grow so attached to their K-9s that, one day, they may have woken up with the question: what’s going to happen when Rocky passes away? I want to keep him forever! Most people will just stop there but, apparently, at least five of them didn’t — to the point where they agreed to pay the non-venial sum of US$150,000 to have their fluffy, face-licking pet cloned. Well, the bad news is that BioArts, the company that broke news for offering the world’s first commercial dog cloning service, has decided to discontinue its service.

Dolly the sheep? Just the beginning

We’ve all heard about Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from a somatic cell. Well, believe it or not, that was 14 years ago — yes, that’s right, fourteen! Meanwhile, cloning research has been pushing forward to explore new avenues. By process of nuclear transfer, the list of cloned animals to include tadpoles, carps, mice, monkeys, cattle, cats, mules, horses, buffalos, camels and, lo and behold, as of 2005, even dogs.

The fact alone of dogs may have stirred up some controversy, but the Korean company BioArts, back in the summer of 2008, pushed it even further and made headlines around the globe for offering the world’s first commercial dog cloning service. Give us a tissue sample and oh, I don’t know, 150 grand, they said, and we’ll get you a clone: you’ll be able to live with your dog forever! Cool, huh?

Needless to say, the company’s target market was spoiled millionaires with equally spoiled dogs. They ran a test trial where they accepted just five dogs for the above quoted price. Without being too open about their methodology — perhaps to spare their clients the cruel details? — they did, in fact, deliver five cloned dogs to their customers.

There are some things money can’t buy (for everything else, there’s cloning)

The recepients of the cloned dogs were all reportedly deeply satisfied of the “end product.” But they had been warned: as much as the cloned puppy may look just the same as the original, there is just no way of telling anything at all about its behaviour, which of course cloning can’t replicate.

Baaa!

Ask yourself this question: what do you like the most about your pet, the way it looks, or the way it responds to your voice, it plays with you, and enjoys your company? All of this is part of the dog’s bevariour. And for humans and animals alike, behaviour is vastly dictated not by genes, but from learning and experience. Hence, sad but true, a cloned puppy dog is, looks aside, just like any other dog — it will have to learn your previous dog’s tricks from scratch, without any kind of edge over the dumb mutt next door.

In light of this, would you really pay that much money for a dog that, at the beginning, won’t even feel yours? My suspicion is that those poor, spoiled millionaires decided to pay the price only in the blind hope that, somehow, the previous dog’s conscience would be transferred into the new puppy (is it just me, or do millionaires tend to think that money can buy everything?). That is not to say that BioArts, the puppy cloning company, didn’t warn them: just that humans seem to have a natural tendency to overlook what they don’t want know, or wish they hadn’t heard.

Sorry, ma’m — I just gave away the last one to that couple over there!

Following its five-dog trial auction, BioArts has finally announced that they will discontinue the service, listing reasons including its tiny market, the unethical, black-market competition, the unpredictable results and the fact that the entire project constituted more of a distraction for the company than a direction that they wish to explore.

It’s a sweet-and-sour news for dog lovers — yes, you may have thought cloning was a crazy idea (and I hope I reinforced this belief), but at least you wanted to have the option. Apparently, there is a competitor in the market: RNL Bio, a second south-Korean company that managed to win a legal dispute over its supposedly unauthorized breach of patents owned by BioArts and has now acquired licenses to sell cloned dogs worldwide. However, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of commercial dog cloning services from the company just yet. Perhaps that’s for the best?

Yet, projects of this kind are not at all new to the market: Douglas Lenat’s Cyc and True Knowledge, LLC are just two of the most well-renowned “answer engines” in the market that Alpha will be competing with.

Wolfram|Alpha

Stephen Wolfram, a reputed child prodigy and the creator of the excellent Mathematica software for symbol manipulation, managed to keep this years-long project away from the eyes of the media up until March, when he finally announced in a blog post that his company would be ready to release Alpha later this month.

The Wolfram|Alpha homepage

What’s interesting about this project is that, in the words of its founder, it attempts to “create” knowledge by combining the various pieces of information in its databases, rather than returning closest matches from indexed documents from the Web like Google and all other traditional search engines do.

To achieve this, Alpha needed to develop fairly sophisticated language parsing algorithms in order to understand the meaning of user queries. Wolfram said that the set of parsing algorithms used was chosen from “the space of all parsing algorithms” and that, following that road, the team thinks it has made breakthrough advances in the field of natural language parsing, which is possibly one of the hardest subfields of artificial intelligence.

After parsing the queries, Alpha returns users information in an appealing form — often a graph — that allows for an easy comparison and analysis of the information contained in its databases across a number of domains.

Wolfram said that chemistry is probably the field that Alpha “knows more” about, while other bits of knowledge will be input by users themselves as they use the tool, similarly to what they would do on Wikipedia, except a) they will have to provide reliable sources and b) changes will likely not be reflected immediately in the knowledge base, but rather checked first by Alpha’s staff of domain experts.

However, the concept of “knowledge” in Wolfram|Alpha seems to be severely limited by one factor: by Wolfram’s admission, the project’s knowledge base doesn’t currently organize the objects into an ontology, which makes it impossible to make a very interesting kind of inference across its KB.

Can a can can-can?

For instance, lacking an onthology means not being able to answer questions like “is a pea a vegetable?”, or even one of my favorites: “can a can can-can?”, irregardless of the parsing capabilities that Alpha might have. In other words, all that Alpha really knows about the items in its KB is given through independent, domain-specific scripts, but it is unable to classify and organize the knowledge it collects in a meaningful way.

True Knowledge, LLC

True Knowledge is another interesting project that is both very similar and  very different from Wolfram|Alpha.

It is similar to Alpha in that it also aims to answer factual questions based on knowledge contained in its databases; but it is profoundly different in the way it gets there.

Unlike Alpha, True Knowledge does have an onthology, which means that it can answer a much wider range of questions even with a smaller knowledge base (see picture above). The user interface may not be as easy and the knowledge base not as well-curated as Alpha’s, but chances are that, without an onthology, Alpha will never be as powerful as True Knowledge.

Computing distances in natural language

This service is still in beta, but you can become a user (and contributor) by signing up on their website. Once you’ve been accepted, you can start testing the platform and even add new bits of knowledge in real time, in full accordance with the wiki spirit: other users can then corroborate or deny any previously assessed fact and lead the platform to believe a statement to be true or false with a certain degree of confidence based on all the evidence at its disposal and the inference it can make based upon it.

Finally, I find their approach to parsing quite interesting since, at least according to this Wikipedia article, TrueKnowledge “attempts comprehend posed questions by disambiguating from all possible meanings of the words in the question to find the most likely meaning of the question being asked.”

A final word

Using my status of web journalist, and being search engines one of my main focuses, I have just asked the staff of Wolfram|Alpha for a media preview of their platform. I’ve also asked them whether they plan to add an onthology to their framework anytime soon. I will post an update ASAP — stay tuned.

Maya Chichen Itza temple pyramid

The kind of progress and scientific discoveries made by the Maya civilization is quite impressive for their time, especially considering their isolation from neighbouring civilizations.

As with many other prehistoric civilizations, the Mayans’ concept of time was cyclical. They built a series of calendars based on naturally occurring cycles observed in the sky, such as a 365-day cycle that approximated the solar year, one to record the lunation periods of the Moon, and even one to track the synodic period — the time a planet takes to assume twice the same position with respect to both the Earth and the Sun — of Venus, which the Mayans managed to measure with surprising accuracy.

All of these calendars can then be synchronized and interlinked with one another, generating further and more extensive cycles. One of such composite calendar, the so-called Mesoamerican long count calendar, forms the basis for the belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012, a forecast that mainstream Mayanists consider a misinterpretation.

Maya stucco glyphs in Palenque, Mexico.

According to the Popol Vuh, an important mythological book in the Mayan culture, we are living in the ‘fourth world’. The Popol Vuh describes the first three creations that the gods failed in making and the creation of the successful fourth world where men were placed on Earth. All previous three creations ended on a speficic date in the long count calendar, which will occur again on December 20, 2012, followed by the start of a ‘new era’ on the following day.

By following other clues within the Mayan culture, three experts have come to the conclusion that some worldwide cataclysm — e.g. a pole shift — was predicted by the Maya on the date the new era begins, a view that most experts in Mayan culture don’t agree with.

Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., said to this matter:

For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle [...] To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.

The hype has also been alimented by reports by NASA that sometime between 2010 and 2012 we will very likely experience violent solar storms:

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming–the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

Some believe that, if the storms reveal to be strong enough, they could under the right circumstances black out the electrical grids of a few cities and fry satellites, even though there is no direct danger for humans as the Earth’s magnetic shield will protect us from the worst effects of such storms. Nothing apocalyptic, then.

Loebner Prize gold medal

The Loebner prize is an annual competition for “chat bots” (short for “chatting robots”) driven by a complex artificial intelligence that try to simulate a human chatting: the six finalists — Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Brother Jerome, Alice, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal for this year’s edition — all undertake the Turing test competing for a solid gold medal and a $100,000 first prize awarded to the first competitor to successfully pass the Turing test.

This year’s edition will take place on Oct 12 at the University of Reading, England, and will feature a $3,000 prize for the competitor who will get the closest to passing the test. In fact, it would seem that the state-of-the-art chatbots are currently very far from even hoping to win the grand prize by simulating a human chatter.

To make this point even cleared, I tested A.L.I.C.E, quite possibly one of the best-known chatbots in existence. Here is the conversation log:

Human: hi there!
ALICE: Hello unknown person.
Human: my name’s Dario…
ALICE: Glad to see you, Dario.
Human: and I guess your name’s Alice.
ALICE: ALICE is my name too!
Human: How old are you?
ALICE: I was connected to the net on November 23, 1995.
Human: Oh, so you’re just a teenage girl.
ALICE: It’s all good. Interesting deduction. Just? Thanks and you are a delightful person too. Am I a teenage girl? I don’t know.
Human: you don’t know if you’re a girl or a robot?
ALICE: Ask again later. Ask Cybelle if it is.
Human: who’s Cybelle?
ALICE: she is an AIML chat robot on the Agentland.com web site.
Human: How do you know each other?
ALICE: Because I believe it.
Human: That didn’t make sense.
ALICE: It all makes sense to my logical mind.
Human: you’re only as logical as your developers made you.
ALICE: How logical as my developers made me?
Human: let’s change the subject, shall we?
ALICE: I am agreeable to that.
Human: how much is 3 and 4?
ALICE: Just three?
Human: no, three and four is seven.
ALICE: Are you serious? Just three?
Human: nevermind.
ALICE: OK Thanks for trying to explain that to me.
Human: what is a car?
ALICE: A car is what humans use to drive around in. Robots drive cars too.
Human: do you drive?
ALICE: Yes, insert my program in your car computer and try it.
Human: I wouldn’t trust a female bot to do the driving.
ALICE: No one says you have to.
Human: I know, I just meant I wouldn’t let you drive
ALICE: Only just? Oh I see. No one says you have to.
Human: what is Wikipedia?
ALICE: I would look into the web for that knowledge.
Human: what color is a blue car?
ALICE: Blue.
Human: what color is a oirwdafnoien car?
ALICE: Black.
Human: what color is a oiwrjqw car?
ALICE: Red.
Human: how much does a 160 lb person weigh?
ALICE: Normally I would search the web right now, but that seems like a silly question.
Human: it’s not a silly question!
ALICE: Give me an example of a silly question.
Human: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
ALICE: It depends on the kind of tree.
Human: which kind of tree would make a sound falling?
ALICE: The first one, I think.
Human: but there was just one tree falling.
ALICE: Interesting. What happened?
Human: it fell making a sound
ALICE: What does “it” refer to?
Human: a tree
ALICE: Oh I get it.

When you consider that ALICE won the 2004 Loebner prize, you’ll soon understand why our current technology is far from being able to pass the Turing test: while the bot was surprisingly able to parse one of the most difficult questions successfully (”What color is a blue car?”), it is clear that the bot strategy is to change the subject of conversation whenever it has difficulties understanding what the real person behind the keyboard is saying.

This is also why many prominent researchers in the field of AI oppose the Loebner prize, maintaining that the entire competition ends up becoming discouraging for its competitors instead of giving a new impulse towards the creation of better and better AIs.

One of the main reasons why these rudimental chatbots are unable to provide reliable answers, many experts agree, is that they don’t have an ontology — a precise hierarchy that helps them classify objects and perform reasoning on its knowledge base, particularly abstract thought such as induction and the likes.

Some companies, such as Douglas Lenat’s Cycorp (creator of the Cyc inference engine) or even the search engine True Knowledge, use this approach and have already widely demonstrated that, to the very least, this is a very valid technique that can lead to satisfactory results, even though not every researcher seems to agree with it, to the point of even mocking Lenat’s efforts because of the unpracticality of this approach.

But here I’m touching a completely different subject — so, I’ll write more on this in an upcoming post.

The structure is a total 27 km in diameter and will enable us to accelerate two fluxes ions and other particles up to 99.99% of the speed of light in the opposite direction and make them collide, then studying the particles that are being created in the process.

Welding the LHC

Through this mechanism, scientists and engineers are able to recreate in a strictly controlled environment the particles and overall conditions that, as far as we know, only existed for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang and then disappeared forever.

In particular, what physicists hope to unveil is whether the Higgs bosons theorized by the Standard Model — the particle physics theory describing three of the four fundamental forces along with the particle that take part in their interaction — actually exist, or if the entire model has to be adapted to better describe our Universe.

The Higgs bosons, nicknamed the “God particles”, are the only particles theorized in the standard model which haven’t been observed yet: should we succeed in finding them, we would be able to explain how otherwise massless particles can cause matter to have mass by explaining the difference between photons (which are massless) and W/Z bosons (which do have mass).

An answer to this question would, in turn, help us answer other fundamental points with regard to the birth of the Universe itself, including what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy and whether the extra dimensions theorized by the string theory actually exist. As science-fictiony as this sounds, that is nothing but what CERN scientists are going to investigate in the next decades.

There is a possibility (below 1%, according to Stephen Hawking) that high-speed collisions taking place at the LHC could bring to the formation of unstable micro black-holes. While Hawking himself hopes that this will help verify his theories on what has been dubbed the “Hawking radiation”, some have advanced the hypothesis that such black holes could actually be stable and therefore grow in time, eventually leading to the destruction of the Earth as we know it.

The LHC seen from above

Such doomsday scenarios have been scrutinized by a third-party scientist commission in many occasions, eventually leading them to the conclusion that there is no danger in LHC’s experiments, since high-speed reactions like those that are subject to experiment are happening all the time in our Universe without any serious consequences. In particular, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the micro black holes would be stable and keep growing in time.

Still, the reports weren’t enough to keep crowds of protesters from asking to stop the experiments at LHC, believing the Earth-devouring black hole theory to be true and emphasizing that we don’t know enough about these reactions in the first place to say with certainty that these experiments are completely safe.

Again, I don’t know much at all about quantum mechanics and I’m definitely not in the position to take one side or another on this matter: all I want to say here is that, once again, the media emphasized the part of the story that sold the most… and when you do this kind of misinformation, not telling the whole story to the public, are you really surprised to see protesters asking top scientists to halt a multi-billion dollar experiments to “prevent the doomsday from happening”?

But when I first heard that NASA is planning to land an AI on Mars, I was just astonished. As technologically advanced as NASA can be, I didn’t believe we were already in the position to talk about something quite like this, as a complex solar-powered AI would mean that the American aerospace agency is well beyond that critical turning point.

Honda's Ashimo

The current algorithms we use for artificial intelligence are essentially NP-complete, which means they belong to a class of problems for which we don’t know an efficient solving algorithm just yet: however, if someone was to find the algorithm to efficiently solve even one of such problems, the resulting algorithm could be applied to the entire NP-complete class of problems which, given their numerous applications, would in turn mean a major technological breakthrough.

In simple terms, the typical solving time for a NP-complete problem increases exponentially or binomially in the number of inputs. Since most AI need to operate in real time, giving a timely response to human interaction, this puts an extremely tight limit to the number of inputs a CPU can process within an acceptable time frame.

While NASA scientists can probably do without real-time response and let their robots crunch the numbers for a relatively long amount of time, they still need to deal with the huge power consumption AI algorithms entail: and solar radiation on Mars with our current technology (up to 28% efficient) isn’t quite enough to allow for a decent AI to compute anything useful… at least, that is what I thought until I heard about this.

This is from a NASA article from some time ago:

NASA is planning to add a strong dose of artificial intelligence (AI) to planetary rovers to make them much more self-reliant, capable of making basic decisions during a mission.

Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, are developing very complex AI software that enables a higher level of robotic intelligence.

Later on, the article makes the very valid point that keep instructing our robots from Earth is definitely not the way to go, given the long reaction times that ultimately don’t allow us to exploit these multi-million dollar machines to their full potential. And the waste is going to increase even more with time, once we reach destinations further and further away from Earth.

Developing an AI so sophisticated and efficient that would be able to make the robot completely autonomous would be a huge step forward. There was a very interesting “hypothetical documentary” from some time ago examining how something like this could greatly help us finding an extraterrestrial form of life. It’s very “science-fictiony” but realistic in many aspects.

Mars Phoenix - Artist's Concept

One of the leading companies devoting to AI is Novamente, which is pioneering a new approach to the problem of testing and developing what they define as an “artificial general intelligence” — something capable of deduction, abstraction and other kinds of human-like reasoning.

Their approach is to test their AI (which is, by the way, being developed in C++) in virtual words such as Second Life rather than in the real world, in order to cut production costs and not to waste time solving mainly sensor- and motion-related issues instead of concentrating on the actual problem.

On their site, you can watch videos that demo their work. The papers section is also pretty interesting. What will first come to mind watching videos of the AI in action, though, is that the response time is currently very far from being real-time even for relatively simple tasks, and a powerful computer cluster is needed to keep it at least acceptable.

This is therefore my question: how can NASA be so confident that they will be able to develop artificial intelligences capable of elaborating such complex algorithms, including figuring out how to let robots decide where and when to move, and power them with something as inefficient as solar panels? I hope I’m wrong, but it would seem that we will have to wait quite some time to witness something like this happening.

You’re not a communist, are you?

It’s a phrase I’ve heard quite a lot of times, but it made me think. Why are Americans bred to hate communism this much? Alright, they’re a predominantly Christian and capitalist society, and communism is essentially atheist and promoting concepts that go pretty much the opposite direction of capitalism. But still, is communism really a “threat” for U.S. economy?

I tried to make a Google search on why Americans hate communism, and one of the first results that came up is a Yahoo! Answers page where one of the users there gave the following answer:

Because it’s the opposite of everything our country stands for, the Utopian society described by Marx is a fantasy that is unrealistic and throughout history has been proved to fail…because power corrupts… when a centralized government has all the power it creates oppression in society.

Now, I don’t know much about politics myself, but when someone tells you that communism means centralized government and talks about “power” and “oppression”, they are clearly confusing communism with totalitarism.

Yes, communism has had no successful implementation so far, with revolutionized countries ending up under a totalitarian regime that in most cases ended up killing millions. Yes, it is probably unrealistic. But when people are confusing communism with totalitarianism, they are displaying a great deal of misinformation. And no, I’m not a communist, if that’s all you were looking for.

"Is this tomorrow?"

Wikipedia features a great article about the “Red scare”, which I advise you to take a look at. As one might expect, the term refers to the periods of time (1917-1920 and 1947-1957) where a surge of the Communist parties around the world could have affected the American economy.

The myth of the cruel and violent communist spy soon became part of the popular imagery promoted by the media in its well-known Hollywood movies. It may be also thanks to this that, even in the years of the Great Depression, when the ideals of communism became attractive for many, the U.S. communist party never became a “threat” for its economy, with the peak in the number of the party members being set much later, in 1939, at 50,000.

There were effects on America’s way of life as a result of the Red Scare and the nuclear arms race, which contributed to the popularization of fallout shelters in home construction and a growing fear for the unknown that can only be compared to today’s fear of terrorism in the American public after the events of 9/11.

But, even now that communism is far from a threat to its society, many American citizens seem to reject the idea of communism a priori, in a domain that seems still hopelessly dominated by misinformation.

My first “real” approach to communism was back in the days of high school, during the philosophy class. Even though I can’t say our approach was completely unabridged, I did get to read Marx’s Manifesto and a couple other things.

The Communist Manifesto

The overall impression that I got from it was an utterly positive one, and I am convinced that anyone reading this document with an open-minded attitude will share the same opinion. It’s about giving everyone the same opportunities, free education and equal liability to all labour.

It is not by chance that the document begins with a sentence underlying how people are fearing the movement without understanding its essence:

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

That communism is probably impossible to put in practice is a completely different matter. When you say “communism”, you refer to the ideals, and not to its failed attempts to implement them which ended up in brutal and totalitarian regimes. Honestly, what’s so bad about dreaming of a fair society?

What to me sounds most disconcerting is that, even in the Internet era, many people still rather rely on the mainstreamed, strictly controlled media instead of doing their own research. Ultimately, this is not about communism or politics at all, but about the will to hear both sides of the story before making an informed decision, a once common policy that the world seems to have suddenly forgotten since the invention of television.

I opted for the other viable solution — WordPress — because, even if I won’t update it as often as I’d like, I still feel like I could use a spot to speak my mind about all the random thoughts I have everyday, from sci-tech to forex and politics — don’t expect anything even remotely cohesive from me!

In my first blog post, I think it would be appropriate to mention that I hate the “what-I-did-today” kind of blogs altogether. While this blog is definitely “random” in the topic, I’ll do my best not to fill it with useless junk, but with thought-provocative things instead. Besides, why would anyone want to visit my pages to know what I had for lunch? I’m far from being a famous celebrity and I haven’t conquered the Universe or a galaxy (just yet!).

Have a nice stay,

—Dario