The Next Level of Artificial Intelligence

I’ve been reading Jeff Noon’s novels and as well as being swept up by the stories, I’ve been marvelling at the science and mathematics underpinning the action, as well as the history and culture of the punk rock music era in Manchester.

His new telling of Alice In Wonderland is the one I’ve enjoyed most so far, with oddball animals modelled on Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, even.

Bethan Roberts interviewed him for  Spike Magazine:

He claims that Vurt was written whilst listening to The Pixies and Nirvana, Pollen to ambient dub trance. I asked him what Automated Alice was written to and his answer was “country and western! Drum and bass! Free jazz! Frank Zappa! A jigsaw, in other words, like the book.” This parallel between popular music and fiction strikes me as rather dubious, but Noon’s cultural roots are in music – he’s a former member of punk band Manicured Noise (”that’s okay – no-one else has heard of them either”). If he has to place his writing, he does so within the Manchester music scene rather than in any literary tradition: “it’s never been a literary city; I suggest it never will be. It’s a musical city. I hope this comes across in the language I use, the musical rhythms of Mancunian music.”

The most recent Jeff Noon book I’ve read is Nymphomation.  Alice’s robotic “double”, a doll, Celia, remained in the future after Alice went back through the clock and is part of the action in Nymphomation. Manchester gets gripped in a fever of a domino-based gambling game that unwinds – very macabrely – into a musing on the creation of artificial life systems on early computers. It may be the notion that there’s blank space in our genome, unwritten pages that our DNA hasn’t filled that could be used to store information, that might have inspired the flying insect “blurbvurts” advertising creatures that mate and mutate, as well as the early evolutionary experiments on flies.

Today in the New York Times there’s a profile of Daphne Koller, who is taking artificial intelligence to the next level:

Ms. Koller is beginning to apply her algorithms more generally to help scientists discern patterns in vast collections of data.

“The world is noisy and messy,” Ms. Koller said. “You need to deal with the noise and uncertainty.”

That philosophy has led her to do research in game theory and artificial intelligence, and more recently in molecular biology.

Her tools led to a new type of cancer gene map based on examining the behavior of a large number of genes that are active in a variety of tumors. From the research, scientists were able to develop a new explanation of how breast tumors spread into bone.

One potentially promising area to apply Ms. Koller’s theoretical work will be the emerging field of information extraction, which could be applied to Web searches. Web pages would be read by software systems that could organize the information and effectively understand unstructured text….

She didn’t spend her time looking at a computer monitor. “I find it distressing that the view of the field is that you sit in your office by yourself surrounded by old pizza boxes and cans of Coke, hacking away at the bowels of the Windows operating system,” she said. “I spend most of my time thinking about things like how does a cell work or how do we understand images in the world around us?”