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.

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.