Originally published at http://thescinder.com/2021/07/12/the-fitness-hypothesis/ on July 12, 2021. The ambition of this essay is to assert, define, provide examples of, and above all else, promote debate around the below-mentioned scientific hypothesis: The objective of maximizing fitness in a given context is sufficient to drive all of what we mean by…

Originally published at http://thescinder.com on February 16, 2021, friends can read this article here: https://bit.ly/carle_2. I’m running a contest based on open-ended exploration and machine creativity in Life-like cellular automata. It’s slated to be an official competition at the 2021 IEEE Conference on Games. …

If you’re having trouble viewing this article, try reading it through this link instead, friend. As the world teeters on the cusp of real progress in understanding intelligence, and real utility in artificial intelligence, a quote from the 18th century is perhaps as prescient as ever. As the story goes…

If the text fades out below, feel free to click here to read this article. Originally published at https://thescinder.com/2020/07/11/3-ideas-for-dealing-with-the-consequences-of-overpopulation-from-science-fiction/ on July 11, 2020. Despite overpopulation being a taboo topic these days, population pressure was a mainstream concern as recently as the latter half of the last century. Perhaps the earliest…

I visualized predicted protein structures from the novel 2019 coronavirus. The structures are the latest from Deepmind’s AlphaFold, the champion entry in the CASP13 protein structure prediction competition that took place in 2018. They’ve reportedly continued to make improvements since then (perhaps hoping to make a similar showing at the…

I visualized predicted protein structures from the novel 2019 coronavirus. The structures are the latest from Deepmind’s AlphaFold, the champion entry in the CASP13 protein structure prediction competition that took place in 2018. They’ve reportedly continued to make improvements since then (perhaps hoping to make a similar showing at the…

I built two six-layer MLPs at different levels of abstraction: a lower-level MLP using explicit matrix multiplication and activation, and a higher-level MLP using tf.layers and tf.contrib.learn. Although my intention was simply to practice implementing simple MLPs at different levels of abstraction, and despite using the same optimizer and same…

Replacing an image segmentation workflow using classical computer vision tools with a fully convolutional neural network is pretty easy, and the results are pretty decent without much effort. The conv-net alleviates your fine-tuning overhead, decreases the total curation requirement (time spent correcting human-obvious mistakes), and it even expands the flexibility…

I’ve been interested in cephalopod vision ever since I learned that, despite their superb appreciation for chroma (as evidenced by their ability to match the color of their surroundings as well as texture and pattern), cuttlefish eyes contain only one light-sensitive pigment. Unlike ourselves and other multichromatic animals that perceive…