The Lab With Brad

Figuring out the neighborhood

From the surface of Earth, the sun and moon look to be about the same size. Other planets are tiny specks of light, and everything seemingly spins around us. But that’s not what our solar system is really like. So, how did we find out what was where, and which way things were moving?

Here are a couple of links with some history.

The Cosmic Distance Scale

The Solar System (How Do They know That?)

And here’s a page on ways to notice that the Earth is round.

7 ways to prove the earth is round

The matter of dark matter

From the rotation of our own Milky Way galaxy, to the expansion of the universe, much of the night sky is moving in ways we can’t quite explain. To plug the wholes in our understanding we have dark energy and dark matter. We don’t actually know what they are, but they can still surprise us.

Here’s a bit more about the surface area of a sphere, used to explain the inverse square law.

Surface Area of a Sphere, deriving the formula

Here’s a bit of math about acceleration.

Antiderivatives: Acceleration, Velocity, Position Functions

Here are tedtalks on dark matter.

Dark matter | TED.com

Here’s an article about the second galaxy found that seems to have no dark matter in it.

It's Real: Astronomers Just Discovered a Second Galaxy With No Dark Matter

And here’s an article about the 19 dwarf galaxies found that don’t seem to have any dark matter.

19 Galaxies Apparently Missing Dark Matter.

In the beginning, part 2.

After covering history and background in the last episode, we can relax and play with the strange ideas and concepts surrounding the theory of the big bang. The event horizon around our universe, the way that time flows differently depending on where you are, how parts of the early universe may have run away and become impossible to observe, and even a theory we propose with no math and fewer reasons.

Here’s what happens when general relativity and quantum physics mix.

The Worst Theoretical Prediction in the History of Physics

Here’s something on where the name “big bang” came from.

Big Bang: the etymology of a name

Since Brad’s silly notion involves black holes, here’s something about them.

A brief history of black holes

Here’s something on how time dilation has to be compensated for by GPS satellites.

timedilation and gps

Here's an article about the inflationary model—what it is and why we need it.

The Origins of the Universe: Inflation Introduction

And here's something on how the universe seems to be speeding up again.

Hubble Hints Today's Universe Expands Faster Than it Did in the Past

In the beginning, part 1.

Before 1923, the universe was thought to be static and eternal, unchanging and without beginning or end. Its size was likely just a few tens of thousands of lightyears across, with one large island of stars, our galaxy, the Milky Way. Discoveries showed us that the universe is much larger than we thought, and is getting bigger all the time. The universe seems to have had a beginning, and might even, one day, come to an end. Join us for a talk about how we got notions like the big bang and the expanding universe.

Here’s something of Einstein’s efforts to describe the universe via general relativity.

Albert Einstein and the origins of modern cosmology

Here’s a link about how rainbows tell us what stars are made of, and how they are moving.

Spectral Lines and the History of Spectroscopy

Here’s an article about the Hubble telescope looking at the star Hubble used to discover our universe was much bigger than we’d imagined.

NASA - Hubble Views the Star That Changed the Universe

And here’s an article about the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, a flash of light leftover from the big bang.

Cosmic Microwave Background: Remnant of the Big Bang

Logical, not biological

Evolution strategies, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks—they’re all AI methods that were inspired by nature. But what about other methods that have nothing to do with the brain or natural selection, or anything of the sort. Today, we take a quick look at a few AI algorithms that are logical without imitating the biological.

Here are a couple videos on Naive Bayes.

5 Minutes With Ingo: Naïve Bayes

Text Categorization with Naive Bayes

Here’s an article explaining how a tree search works.

Sudokus and Schedules

Here’s an article on building a chess playing program.

A step-by-step guide to building a simple chess AI

Here are a couple of articles about expert systems, Brad’s favorite.

Expert Systems

Putting Expert Systems to Work

Bits and brains and bots

If we could look closely at every last cell in your brain, and learn enough to simulate them on a computer, would a detailed enough simulation of your brain think? Today, we talk about artificial neural networks—an AI method that is very loosely based on how biological brains work. A bit of history, a bit of confusion, and a bit about how our latest batch of digital organisms might use one.

Phil couldn’t stop laughing at the name. Here’s an episode I did before Phil joined the show on the Perceptron, one of the first machines built based on how the brain works.

Ep 106: The perceptron

Here’s a nice sight with some history on neural networks.

A 'Brief' History of Neural Nets and Deep Learning, Part 1

Here’s a page on how graphics cards can be used to run neural networks much faster.

Why are GPUs necessary for training Deep Learning models?

And here’s something cute MythBusters did on the difference between a CPU and a GPU.

Mythbusters Demo GPU versus CPU

Genetic algorithms and evolution on fast-forward

The dorg, the latest batch of digital organisms, will one day be placed in a little world to work out their destiny. The notion is to try and coax them into becoming intelligent. They aren’t ready yet. There’s a bunch of coding that Brad has to finish first. In the meantime, they’ve been tuned and tested with a genetic algorithm. Today, we talk about genetic algorithms and how they can be used to speed up evolution, and point the dorg in what will hopefully turn out to be the right direction.

Here’s a link to a tutorial on genetic algorithms and how they are used.

Genetic Algorithm Tutorial

Here’s a link to the self-replicating artificial life experiments of John von Neumann, worked out before computers were fast enough to test them.

John von Neumann's Cellular Automata

Here’s a bit of info on how evolution like approaches have been used to design hardware.

What's an Evolution Strategy?

And here is a link to a tutorial on genetic programming.

Tutorial – Genetic Programming

Maybe, if they all work together…

Last time we talked about how the dorg, the lab’s latest batch of digital organisms, are unlikely to be able to evolve into intelligence. This week, we talk about how they might be able to do it anyway. But first, we need to get them to cooperate. In fact, we made need many dorg to act as one creature—to be multicellular. Join us as we talk about cooperation, eusocial insects, and the mystery of multicellular animals.

Here’s an article on how a single celled life form evolved into a multicellular organism in the laboratory.

Experimental evolution of multicellularity

Here’s a paper about Salpingoeca rosetta, everyone’s favorite choanoflagellate, that can live as either a single cell or in a multiple cell colonial form.

Multicellular Development in a Choanoflagellate

Here’s an article about the amazing cooperation of termites.

Mind in the Mound: How Do Termites Build Their Huge Structures?

Here’s a brief outline of some simple algorithms that can capture some of the complex results that insects like ants and termites can produce.

Ant intelligence

Here’s an article about the conditions that can help cooperation to evolve.

Survival of the nicest?

How and why the dorg are doomed

It seems like such a simple and obvious thing. Given that we can cause computer programs and the like to evolve and evolution is what gave us our intelligence, couldn’t we give a computer intelligence by letting it evolve? The experiment has been done, in project after project, by one group after another, (including one of your hosts)—and yet, somehow, it never quite happens… Why not?

Here’s the animation Brad brings up, with some very pretty images of very interesting evolved virtual creatures in simulated environments.

Evolved Virtual Creatures, Evolution Simulation, 1994

Here’s an introduction to the digital organisms that Brad made.

Introducing the dorg

And here are a few videos of the dorg, after they were evolved to perform a very simple task—move toward a target.

part 1 of 4

part 2 of 4

part 3 of 4

part 4 of 4

Of mice and men and minds

We’ve been looking and different unusually clever creatures—ants, bees, crows, octopus, elephants, whales, sea otters, dogs, racoons and monkeys. Along the way I was hoping to figure out some general idea of how intelligence arises from the chaos that is our universe. I share what I’ve come up with with Phil, and talk about what we could do to some unsuspecting mice to test some of the notion. Join us as we look at one last unusually intelligent animal—the human.

Here’s a study that looked at the different numbers of neurons in different mice of the same species.

When larger brains do not have more neurons: increased numbers of cells are compensated by decreased average cell size across mouse individuals

Here are the episodes about how the human brain develops before we’re born.

Ep 195: Baby’s brain before birth

Ep 196: How neurons find their home

Here’s a short list of some early primates.

Five Early Primates You Should Know

Here’s an overview of primate evolution

70 Million Years of Primate Evolution

Here’s an article about the idea that learning to cook is what fueled the explosive growth in our brain size seen over the last 2-millean years or so.

What Makes Us Human? Cooking, Study Says

Here’s an article on the beginnings of cooking.

Every human culture includes cooking – this is how it began

Here’s an article on a cave site that looks like fire was being used around one-million years ago.

Human Ancestors Tamed Fire Earlier Than Thought