1/29/2004 07:51:00 AM

The Machine That Invents

Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches.... but he's really just "the man behind the curtain," he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.

What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box...

"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!"

...Thaler's technology was born from near-death experiences of dying computer programs. Its foundation is the discovery that great ideas are the result of noisy neurons and faulty memories.

...Neural networks can be either software programs or computers designed to model an object, process or set of data. Thaler reasoned that if a neural network were an accurate representation of a biological system, he could kill it and figure out what happens in the brain as it dies.

...The brilliance of Thaler's invention is the noise he introduces into the system, Miller said.

"Noise allows neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas," Miller said.

Other researchers have come to the same conclusion.

Good old-fashioned artificial intelligence uses human experts to input huge quantities of data and a list of rules to create a model, said Robert Kozma, a computer scientist at the University of Memphis. Kozma is experimenting with a similar technology.

The rigidity of traditional artificial intelligence technologies holds back creativity, Kozma said.

"This type of rule-based system is frozen. It's dead and cannot get to the essence of intelligence," Kozma said. "Creativity cannot be derived in a logical way, in a step-by-step fashion." You need a little noise to come up with good ideas, he said.

...In biological brains, the information-carrying cells, called neurons, meet at junctions, called synapses. Brain chemicals, such as adrenaline and dopamine, flow across the junctions to stimulate or soothe the cells. In the computer world, there are switches instead of cells. The switches are connected by numbers or "weights."

So after work, Thaler went home and created the epitome of a killer application - a computer program he called the Grim Reaper. The reaper dismantles neural networks by changing its connection weights. It is the biological equivalent of killing neurons. Pick off enough neurons, and the result is death.

On Christmas Eve 1989, Thaler typed the lyrics to some of his favorite Christmas carols into a neural network. Once he'd taught the network the songs, he unleashed the Grim Reaper. As the reaper slashed away connections, the network's digital life began to flash before its eyes. The program randomly spit out perfectly remembered carols as the killer application severed the first connections. But as its wounds grew deeper, and the network faded toward black, it began to hallucinate.

The network wove its remaining strands of memory together, producing what someone else might interpret as damaged memories, but what Thaler recognized as new ideas. In its death spiral, the program dreamed up new carols, each created from shards of its shattered memories.

"Its last dying gasp was, 'All men go to good earth in one eternal silent night,'" Thaler said.

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once weaponized this is the new enemy.
i have the same sentiments i had on this day.