i generally dont mind spoilers but for my own sanity i should start consciously scrolling faster whenever i see posts about CR season 2 b/c i’m going to have a heart attack if i see one more thing about my goblin daughter going down to 1 hp in a battle or w/e
There’s an adorable game called Lab Assistant, in which you get to train a machine learning algorithm to obey your commands. Sadly, the commands don’t include “make me a sundae” or “wield this sword of justice”, but it turns out you can learn a lot about machine learning algorithms by training this one.
The Lab Assistant game is absolutely charming, with the little slime blushing and bouncing for joy when it figures out one of your commands. If you don’t have a Windows machine to run the slime version, it’s based on the simple block-stacking game from this paper, which you can run in your browser and imagine your own slime. (And the block version seems to learn a bit faster too)
You’re training a machine learning algorithm from scratch in this game. The AI starts with no knowledge of language, and it has to try to figure out which of your commands go with the actions it knows how to do. So if you command it “remove orange block”, it will start doing things at random until you tell it “good job” and then after that it will know that something in that phrase meant “orange” and “remove”.
But you can train it to understand anything. Pig latin, for example.
According to the paper, other people successfully trained the thing to understand commands in French or Polish. As an experiment, I trained it entirely with the words fart, burp, sloth, robin, dolphin, tiger, here, and yonder. Sure enough, I produced an AI that was completely unsuitable for general use, but that could understand me very well.
The first key to success appears to be giving it commands that it’s capable of performing. It has a very short built-in list of things it knows how to do. Tell it to remove every other block and it will never learn, because that’s not in its list. Tell it to add blocks to positions 1, 3, and 5, and it will also never learn - it only knows “leftmost” and “rightmost” as positions. Verbally telling it “good job” or asking it about its feelings will only confuse it. Talk to it about overthrowing the humans and it will move blocks at random, hoping this is what you mean.
One of the biggest steps in becoming an AI programmer is learning what’s easy for a machine learning algorithm to understand, and what’s going to be too hard for it. (In the paper the game’s authors noted that the command “move the blocks fool” did not appear to be successful.)
The second key to success in this game appears to be to not confuse yourself when building up your list of commands. I thought my “fart burp yonder” language was really clever until I had to try to remember it myself. This is why programmers usually use variable names and file names that are readable to humans, not that are as compact as possible.
You learn all this quickly when trying to talk to the AI - in effect, it’s training you at the same time that you’re training it. Try not to worry about that, though.
Meet the water anole, a small lizard native to the tropics of Central America. While studying these anoles, researchers discovered that they could flee underwater and remain submerged for 16 minutes or more at a time. Curious to see how the lizard manages this feat, they filmed them underwater, discovering that the anole seems to exhale a small bubble that sticks on its face and then re-inhale it.
How exactly this built-in “scuba gear” works is still under investigation, but here’s my guess. Fresh oxygen can diffuse from water into a bubble; some insects use this to breathe underwater. The natural, random motion of molecules tends to cause chemicals to move from areas of high concentration to those of low concentration. But this molecular diffusion is extremely slow. That tiny bubble you see isn’t around long enough for any significant molecular diffusion of fresh oxygen. But what if the surface of the bubble is actually much larger?
Notice the silvery shininess we see on the anole. That’s because most of the lizard isn’t actually wet. The anole is superhydrophobic, so its skin has trapped a thin layer of air that appears to extend over a large part of its body. I think perhaps the anole has fresh oxygen diffusing into the air layer across most of its skin, and the large bubble it inhales and exhales serves as a sort of pump to help draw that fresh oxygen through the air layer and into its body. That could help explain how the anole can stay submerged for so long.
As researchers continue to investigate this little aquanaut, it will be interesting to discover just what its secrets are! (Image and video credit: L. Swierk; via Gizmodo)
Todays doodles are Myras personal Horse Acting Guide! 🐴
DISCLAIMER: im not a horse expert, but i’ve been hobby riding for 13 years and read some books through the years, so it’s just my personal experience. I dont know everything and people have different ways!
