Justin's COSMOS 2005 Blog

Before the Presentation...

2005-08-04T18:59:00.000-07:00

Today is a dark day: the last Thursday, the last day before the project is due, the last day to work feverishly. In the morning, we had the interesting discovery lecture about Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Then, we practiced (and failed miserably) on our presentations. Now, we just have to finish our poster. Oh joy! At the very least, our program works, sort of.

Some Time Later

2005-08-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, on Tuesday, we had a pretty interesting lecture on structural engineering and how to build and rebuild buildings to protect against natural and man-made disasters. And we also covered the new jobs and careers associated with this type of role. After this, we've just been programing, except for this morning. We talked about not knowing what we do not know and knowing what we know. My brain hurts. We are getting close to finishing our final project though.

Last Monday Lecture

2005-08-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

It's the last Monday we have here. =( . This morning, we had a very short lecture, where everyone presented a short speech about the programs we were assigned to research. And after that, we headed down to the computer lab to program. Our handwriting recognition program is not doing very well right now, and my head is crammed with new information. I must hold onto reality... Just kidding; I'm sure we'll finish our project JustinTime.

Late, but Here: Friday

2005-07-31T18:17:00.000-07:00

Two days ago, Friday, was absolutely great! No lectures or anything, instead we took two field trips. In the morning, we headed to the Neuroscience Institute to look at the NOMAD, DARWIN, and soccer-playing robots that we saw previously in one of our discovery lectures. We saw these robots in greater detail, and then got to ride on Segways. In the afternoon, we took vans out to watch the new movie "Stealth". It was ok, but it was cool to go out and watch a movie.

Wednesday Afternoon and Thursday

2005-07-28T18:30:00.000-07:00

Wednesday Afternoon - We had Christine do a lecture and a demonstration of sketch recognition and the challenges that befall it. It was cool, being able to use the PC Tablets to draw and all.

But...
Thursday, we had a cool time with a digital war: Rulers. We programed our rulers to command and build soldiers and peaseants and have them fight. We spent some five hours programming code and running simulated battles. Cool.
Also, in the morning, we had a fascinating discovery lecture on the use of different types of digital lighting to make more realistic digital renderings.
A fun day.

Logs, More Logs, and Still More Logs

2005-07-27T11:10:00.000-07:00

This morning, Joe came to lecture, with gifts, although we won't be able to keep them =( .He brought abacuses and slide rules, and showed us through various test calculations and demonstrations, how everything is counted and arranged according to logs. We even delved into history a bit in talking about Pythagoras and how he said "All is Numbers".

Global Warming in the Morning, HCL in the Afternoon

2005-07-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

In the morning, we had our Tuesday and Thursday Discovey Lectures. Today's was on the Science and History of Global Warming; the lecture was delivered by Professor/Doctor Keeling, the son of a Professor/Doctor Keeling. He chronicled the first notice of global warming by Servante Arrhenius, and how his father made detailed measurements. Quite interesting.

In the afternoon, our cluster went on our second field trip (still on campus) to one of the Computer Science buildings and labs. It was really cool. The professor showed us new projects that are and were being developed around the world, like projectors linked to the computer so that you could drag stuff from the screen into the real world and vice versa, touch pad screens utilizing electrical capacitance, and much more. Yeah.

Machine Perception

2005-07-25T18:54:00.000-07:00

We had Christine give a lecture today in class in the afternoon. She commented on how machines could learn and the way to teach them to learn and recognize perceptions, objects, and items. Her slideshow, which she cited as having borrowed from another professor, illustrated various characteristics that could help distinguish objects from each other, such as the ratios of height to width and colors. We got to play around with one learning program that tests each point in a supervised learning environment to develop a proper "dividing line" that could separate two items from each other.

Algorithm Development

2005-07-25T10:10:00.000-07:00

This morning, Larry showed us how through the manipulation of the number of multiplications and additions, you can increase the efficiency of an algorithm to multiply numbers. We had a bit of confusion over the use of logs and all, and he went a tad bit fast, but overall, I got the general idea, if not the math and logic itself. By reducing the number of multiplications, which require greater computer power, you can reduce the order of the calculation and exponentially increase the speed of that calculation.

Thursday and Friday

2005-07-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

Thursday, we had a wonderful experience with lectures. In the morning, we listened to a talk about the heart, how it works and functions, and a little about coronary heart attacks. Then, in the afternoon, Professer Savage delivered a pretty interesting lecture on the Internet, its function, and the various problems that plague it, with a focus on Worms.

Friday, we had more lectures. In the morning, Larry talked about recursions and the abilities of a computer's computational abilities to analyze all the events following an action in a two-player game where a player can win.

We need more time to program, I can only write up the bare minimum on this blog, and we need more time for our final project, we have finally gotten it assigned to us.

Yesterday Afternoon and This Morning

2005-07-20T11:04:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, a strange and uninformative title. Well, that's so you read the post. Anyhow, yesterday, we had such a cool afternoon session as we had about a hour to just do anything in the computer lab. After that, we toured SDSC, the San Diego Supercomputer center. We saw the computers and a few demonstrations of what they calculated, and that computer is super fast and has super amounts of memory (6 petabytes).

This morning, a guest speaker, a professor at UCSD, came and spoke about game design and programming as a medium through which much of the technology of Computer Science is used. He spoke a little about one of his classes which programs a game as its course and final and about basics and changes in computer and systems gaming.

Morning Discovery Lecture

2005-07-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

This morning was probably the most interesting lecture, for me, to date. The professor spoke about creating robots with brains. These robots were capable of movement and learning on their own, and one of the later ones participated in a RoboCup 2005 robotic soccer competition against Carnegie Mellon and won. Pretty cool. That's all for today, except I have one question, if anyone ever reads this:

If computers, robots, etc. gain intelligence comparable to our own, will these entities possess an individual conciousness and will?

AI Debate

2005-07-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

We spent an entire morning aruging, or debating, about when computers would appear as intelligent as humans. What do you think? I aruged that computers already seem as intelligent as us, but few people agreed. Oh well. In the afternoon, we continued our AI discussion with Chrsitine and delved further into the realm of visual perception, with Gestalt Laws and etc, and then some work on text recognition and stuff, so yeah.

Lectures Today - A lot of AI

2005-07-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

So, this morning, Christine, our professor started off with a main objection to the Turing Test and to Strong AI, Searle's "Chinese Room." (A person who does not speak Chinese sits in a room and receives input through a chute and uses a book to put out correct replies.) A strange but somewhat logical arguement. Because strong AI says that the program itself becomes intelligent, Searle challenges that saying that it only does formulaic manipulation without understanding the meaning. Rebuttals include the System Reply, the Robot Reply, and the Other Minds Reply. The system reply claims that the man does not understand, but the system does. The robot reply says that the man has no context to learn the meaning. And the Other Minds says that we aren't really sure if we truly understand, so we should extend the courtesy to computers. And then they all start rebutting each other endlessly.

And then in the afternoon, Joe gives a lecture/debate on Whether or not Humans are just Machines. Very depressing. We came to the conclusion that we don't know. Yes, I know probably you have strong opinions about it, but that was our conclusion. Our class could find no purely, truly logical arguement that definitively set us apart from a machine, an extremely complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless.

First Class Post

2005-07-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Just a few minutes ago, a speaker came, Professor Pezvner (sorry about the spelling, I'm not sure), who spoke about Bioinformatics and the complexity of DNA, especially breakpoints and the ability to use these breaks to calculate genetic lineage and relationship. It was pretty interesting, about how because the number of distinct breakpoints is too small compared to an algorithmic calculation of his, certain points of DNA must contain genetic faults where DNA reversals occur more frequently.

But I don't know. What if the reversals occured in such a way that the orginal breakpoints were overridden? I can't remember, but I had other objections, if I remember, I'll try to post it.

And I might have mistaken the lecture, so I think he is putting out a paper soon.

Open to Suggestions

2005-07-12T15:04:00.000-07:00

oh, just a note. i've almost never used a blog before, i don't have im or anything, so if you have any suggestions about what i should post or how i should format this blog, comment please.

finally working

2005-07-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

well, this is really the first time that i've logged into and written on this blog. so, just saying, "Hello World!"

My First Post

2005-07-10T16:16:00.000-07:00

The blog has been created!