Have you studied the following site? - it seems very good

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Human-Machine Assimilation : One Thread

http://www.imagination-engines.com/

-- Living in (the@real.world), January 25, 2000

Answers

Interesting, Living. But they got a patent on a system that works as described:

The Creativity Machine Paradigm. A chaotically perturbed net produces novel concepts derived from its training. A second net evaluates and isolates any concepts offering potential value. Feedback connections serve to focus the first net toward useful discoveries. Starbursts within first net represent random synaptic disturbances.

This is the basic premise and methodology of genetic algorithms, hill climbing, simulated annealing, and many other "generate and test" kinds of machine learning systems. They work by semi-random intial solution generation, followed by evaluation against an 'objective function' or fitness measure, retaining the 'best' results at each stage. This is a huge research area, I'd be surprised if this particular company has really got a novel solution. Certainly coupling neural nets is done everywhere.

The site doesn't mention any actual results achieved by their creativity engine, so they probably just got a patent on one random twist in the infinite space of machine learning architectures. Typically the patent office doesn't know enough to rigorously evaluate such applications. This company looks like mostly hype to me, but in the future... ????

-- Scott (hma5_5@hotmail.com), January 25, 2000.


They claim to be ahead of Robokitten.

We will see.

-- Living in (the@real.world), January 25, 2000.


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