cAIus

So we've agreed that the brain is a complex system that somehow manages to work as a control system for the body. It receives info from the body (input), info from itself (state), and produces info for the body (output). For now, however, let's forget that it's a control system for the body and let's just focus on the fact that it's a complex system. So what's a system? Imagine a set of pieces that interact among them: a clock? the brain? a beehive? a city? they all are systems. Some more complex, some less. This explanation could become way more complex but there's no need (pun intended). A complex system is also a system... only it has extra characteristics: 1) it's conformed by an unusually large number of pieces, 2) the pieces are very similar, and 3) the pieces have relatively many relationship among them. Known complex systems are: The brain, cities, weather, economy, etc. There's also an artificially made complex system cal

So we've explained that our quest is to find and simulate a simplification/reduction of the brain that displays intelligence. We summarized that we were gonna try many simplifications until one of those actually worked. We lied... kind of. It's not that easy. This blog was created in order to show how we build ONE simplification that, we hope, works. We'll walk you through all that path trying to be as simple and explicit and possible. Remember that everything is about finding and simulating a simplification of the brain that works. However we need to define what "it works" means in this context. But we won't... Let's just assume that we all can recognize intelligence (even if it we don't know how it works). At the end we may have a (measurable) definition of what intelligence means. Let's start In the most aggressive simplification we can make of the brain, we can deduce something:  brain is not alone. What do we mean by this? We mea

If the purpose is to understand the intelligence we should look at the only example we have at hand: the brain. We should ask ourselves how does the brain gives room for intelligence and consciousness. Yet to know you've understood how it works, you need to experiment. Either playing with a living mammal brain, or testing your hypothesis in simulation. Regardless of how much I'd like to do the first, that's out of the table and so, simulations will have to do. Fortunately we are computer scientists and that's something we can somehow do. The easy answer then is to simulate the brain and the tinker with it until everything is understood. But... can the brain be simulated? Short answer: no. Not so short answer: not yet. Long answer:  Simulating stuff is not easy. People who works doing simulations usually reduce the thing they want to simulate to the basics relevant to the simulation. If the simulation wants to show how an object moves, regarding the gravity, then

This blog is a collaborative effort to explain the things we achieve by trying to understand how the mind works. It will probably be useful to make more approachable the topic of artificial intelligence (AI from now on) to people who don't know much about it, and it may be the crib to new ideas and maybe papers... Who knows? Let me present myself: I'm Alejandro Navas and I've always loved the topic of AI, to the point that my dream was creating it. I guess I'm kind of late. AI is now in the phase of early adoption by the industry and while most research was made in universities, now it's made in companies. Contrary to what happens in industry, we are not moved by profiting from artificial intelligence techniques, but rather by curiosity. We want to understand how intelligence and consciousness come to exist. This blog will be a journal of our team, as we explain step by step how we abstract and represent the mind. You'll see our struggles as we try to find h