The first AI universe sim is fast and accurate—and its creators don't know how it works

by Thomas Sumner, Simons Foundation

JUNE 26, 2019

https://phys.org/news/2019-06-ai-universe-sim-fast-accurateand.html

For the first time, astrophysicists have used artificial intelligence techniques to generate complex 3-D simulations of the universe. The results are so fast, accurate and robust that even the creators aren't sure how it all works.

"We can run these simulations in a few milliseconds, while other 'fast' simulations take a couple of minutes," says study co-author Shirley Ho, a group leader at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. "Not only that, but we're much more accurate."

The speed and accuracy of the project, called the Deep Density Displacement Model, or D3M for short, wasn't the biggest surprise to the researchers. The real shock was that D3M could accurately simulate how the universe would look if certain parameters were tweaked—such as how much of the cosmos is dark matter—even though the model had never received any training data where those parameters varied.

"It's like teaching image recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it's able to recognize elephants," Ho explains. "Nobody knows how it does this, and it's a great mystery to be solved."

Ho and her colleagues present D3M June 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study was led by Siyu He, a Flatiron Institute research analyst.

Ho and He worked in collaboration with Yin Li of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe near Tokyo; Yu Feng of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics; Wei Chen of the Flatiron Institute; Siamak Ravanbakhsh of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver; and Barnabás Póczos of Carnegie Mellon University.

Computer simulations like those made by D3M have become essential to theoretical astrophysics. Scientists want to know how the cosmos might evolve under various scenarios, such as if the dark energy pulling the universe apart varied over time. Such studies require running thousands of simulations, making a lightning-fast and highly accurate computer model one of the major objectives of modern astrophysics.

D3M models how gravity shapes the universe. The researchers opted to focus on gravity alone because it is by far the most important force when it comes to the large-scale evolution of the cosmos.

The most accurate universe simulations calculate how gravity shifts each of billions of individual particles over the entire age of the universe. That level of accuracy takes time, requiring around 300 computation hours for one simulation. Faster methods can finish the same simulations in about two minutes, but the shortcuts required result in lower accuracy.

Ho, He and their colleagues honed the deep neural network that powers D3M by feeding it 8,000 different simulations from one of the highest-accuracy models available. Neural networks take training data and run calculations on the information; researchers then compare the resulting outcome with the expected outcome. With further training, neural networks adapt over time to yield faster and more accurate results.

After training D3M, the researchers ran simulations of a box-shaped universe 600 million light-years across and compared the results to those of the slow and fast models. Whereas the slow-but-accurate approach took hundreds of hours of computation time per simulation and the existing fast method took a couple of minutes, D3M could complete a simulation in just 30 milliseconds.

D3M also churned out accurate results. When compared with the high-accuracy model, D3M had a relative error of 2.8 percent. Using the same comparison, the existing fast model had a relative error of 9.3 percent.

D3M's remarkable ability to handle parameter variations not found in its training data makes it an especially useful and flexible tool, Ho says. In addition to modeling other forces, such as hydrodynamics, Ho's team hopes to learn more about how the model works under the hood. Doing so could yield benefits for the advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Ho says.

"We can be an interesting playground for a machine learner to use to see why this model extrapolates so well, why it extrapolates to elephants instead of just recognizing cats and dogs," she says. "It's a two-way street between science and deep learning."

Discovery of a “Holy Grail” with the invention of universal computer memory

Thread starter P4-630 

Start date Jun 25, 2019

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/discovery-of-a-%E2%80%9Choly-grail%E2%80%9D-with-the-invention-of-universal-computer-memory.256799/

A new type of computer memory which could solve the digital technology energy crisis has been invented and patented by Lancaster scientists.

The electronic memory device – described in research published in Scientific Reports - promises to transform daily life with its ultra-low energy consumption.

In the home, energy savings from efficient lighting and appliances have been completely wiped out by increased use of computers and gadgets, and by 2025 a ‘tsunami of data’ is expected to consume a fifth of global electricity.

But this new device would immediately reduce peak power consumption in data centres by a fifth.

It would also allow, for example, computers which do not need to boot up and could instantaneously and imperceptibly go into an energy-saving sleep mode – even between key stokes.

The device is the realisation of the search for a “Universal Memory” which has preoccupied scientists and engineers for decades.

Physics Professor Manus Hayne of Lancaster University said: “Universal Memory, which has robustly stored data that is easily changed, is widely considered to be unfeasible, or even impossible, but this device demonstrates its contradictory properties.”

A US patent has been awarded for the electronic memory device with another patent pending, while several companies have expressed an interest or are actively involved in the research.

The inventors of the device used quantum mechanics to solve the dilemma of choosing between stable, long-term data storage and low-energy writing and erasing.

The device could replace the $100bn market for Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), which is the ‘working memory’ of computers, as well as the long-term memory in flash drives.

While writing data to DRAM is fast and low-energy, the data is volatile and must be continuously ‘refreshed’ to avoid it being lost: this is clearly inconvenient and inefficient. Flash stores data robustly, but writing and erasing is slow, energy intensive and deteriorates it, making it unsuitable for working memory.

Professor Hayne said: “The ideal is to combine the advantages of both without their drawbacks, and this is what we have demonstrated. Our device has an intrinsic data storage time that is predicted to exceed the age of the Universe, yet it can record or delete data using 100 times less energy than DRAM.” 

Research: Researchers grow active mini-brain-networks —

 James M. Patterson

July 2, 2019

http://www.tunisiesoir.com/science/research-researchers-grow-active-mini-brain-networks-17081-2019/

Cerebral organoids are artificially grown, 3D tissue cultures that resemble the human brain. Now, researchers from Japan report functional neural networks derived from these organoids in a study publishing June 27 in the journal Stem Cell Reports. Although the organoids aren’t actually “thinking,” the researchers’ new tool — which detects neural activity using organoids — could provide a method for understanding human brain function.

“Because they can mimic cerebral development, cerebral organoids can be used as a substitute for the human brain to study complex developmental and neurological disorders,” says corresponding author Jun Takahashi, a professor at Kyoto University.

However, these studies are challenging, because current cerebral organoids lack desirable supporting structures, such as blood vessels and surrounding tissues, Takahashi says. Since researchers have a limited ability to assess the organoids’ neural activities, it has also been difficult to comprehensively evaluate the function of neuronal networks.

“In our study, we created a new functional analysis tool to assess the comprehensive dynamic change of network activity in a detected field, which reflected the activities of over 1,000 cells,” says first and co-corresponding author Hideya Sakaguchi, a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University (currently at Salk Institute). “The exciting thing about this study is that we were able to detect dynamic changes in the calcium ion activity and visualize comprehensive cell activities.”

To generate the organoids, Takahashi, Sakaguchi, and their team created a ball of pluripotent stem cells that have the potential to differentiate into various body tissues. Then, they placed the cells into a dish filled with culture medium that mimicked the environment necessary for cerebral development. Using the organoids, the team successfully visualized synchronized and non-synchronized activities in networks and connections between individual neurons. The synchronized neural activity can be the basis for various brain functions, including memory.

“We believe that our work introduces the possibility of a broad assessment of human cell-derived neural activity,” Sakaguchi says. The method could help researchers understand processes by which information is encoded in the brain through the activity of specific cell populations, as well as the fundamental mechanisms underlying psychiatric diseases, he says.

While cerebral organoids provide a means for studying the human brain, ethical concerns have been previously raised regarding the neural function of cerebral organoids.

“Because cerebral organoids mimic the developmental process, a concern is that they also have mental activities such as consciousness in the future,” Sakaguchi says. “Some people have referenced the famous ‘brains in a vat’ thought experiment proposed by Hilary Putnam, that brains placed in a vat of life-sustaining liquid with connection to a computer may have the same consciousness as human beings.”

However, Takahashi and Sakaguchi believe that cerebral organoids are unlikely to develop consciousness because they lack input from their surrounding environments.

“Consciousness requires subjective experience, and cerebral organoids without sensory tissues will not have sensory input and motor output,” Sakaguchi says. “However, if cerebral organoids with an input and output system develop consciousness requiring moral consideration, the basic and applied research of these cerebral organoids will become a tremendous ethical challenge.”

In the future, applied organoid research will likely explore three main areas — drug discovery, modelling neuropsychiatric disorders, and regenerative medicine, Takahashi says.

“Cerebral organoids can bring great advances to pharmacological companies by replacing traditional animal models and can also be used to model untreatable neural diseases,” he says. “Using our method, it will be possible to analyze cell activity patterns in brain functions to further explore these areas.”

Source:

Cell Press.

How you and your friends can play a video game together using only your minds

Sarah McQuate

July 1, 2019

UW News

https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/

Telepathic communication might be one step closer to reality thanks to new research from the University of Washington. A team created a method that allows three people to work together to solve a problem using only their minds.

In BrainNet, three people play a Tetris-like game using a brain-to-brain interface. This is the first demonstration of two things: a brain-to-brain network of more than two people, and a person being able to both receive and send information to others using only their brain. The team published its results April 16 in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, though this research previously attracted media attention after the researchers posted it September to the preprint site arXiv.

“Humans are social beings who communicate with each other to cooperate and solve problems that none of us can solve on our own,” said corresponding author Rajesh Rao, the CJ and Elizabeth Hwang professor in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and a co-director of the Center for Neurotechnology. “We wanted to know if a group of people could collaborate using only their brains. That’s how we came up with the idea of BrainNet: where two people help a third person solve a task.”

As in Tetris, the game shows a block at the top of the screen and a line that needs to be completed at the bottom. Two people, the Senders, can see both the block and the line but can’t control the game. The third person, the Receiver, can see only the block but can tell the game whether to rotate the block to successfully complete the line. Each Sender decides whether the block needs to be rotated and then passes that information from their brain, through the internet and to the brain of the Receiver. Then the Receiver processes that information and sends a command — to rotate or not rotate the block — to the game directly from their brain, hopefully completing and clearing the line.

The team asked five groups of participants to play 16 rounds of the game. For each group, all three participants were in different rooms and couldn’t see, hear or speak to one another.

The Senders each could see the game displayed on a computer screen. The screen also showed the word “Yes” on one side and the word “No” on the other side. Beneath the “Yes” option, an LED flashed 17 times per second. Beneath the “No” option, an LED flashed 15 times a second.

“Once the Sender makes a decision about whether to rotate the block, they send ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the Receiver’s brain by concentrating on the corresponding light,” said first author Linxing Preston Jiang, a student in the Allen School’s combined bachelor’s/master’s degree program.

The Senders wore electroencephalography caps that picked up electrical activity in their brains. The lights’ different flashing patterns trigger unique types of activity in the brain, which the caps can pick up. So, as the Senders stared at the light for their corresponding selection, the cap picked up those signals, and the computer provided real-time feedback by displaying a cursor on the screen that moved toward their desired choice. The selections were then translated into a “Yes” or “No” answer that could be sent over the internet to the Receiver.

“To deliver the message to the Receiver, we used a cable that ends with a wand that looks like a tiny racket behind the Receiver’s head. This coil stimulates the part of the brain that translates signals from the eyes,” said co-author Andrea Stocco, a UW assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS. “We essentially ‘trick’ the neurons in the back of the brain to spread around the message that they have received signals from the eyes. Then participants have the sensation that bright arcs or objects suddenly appear in front of their eyes.”

If the answer was, “Yes, rotate the block,” then the Receiver would see the bright flash. If the answer was “No,” then the Receiver wouldn’t see anything. The Receiver received input from both Senders before making a decision about whether to rotate the block. Because the Receiver also wore an electroencephalography cap, they used the same method as the Senders to select yes or no.

The Senders got a chance to review the Receiver’s decision and send corrections if they disagreed. Then, once the Receiver sent a second decision, everyone in the group found out if they cleared the line. On average, each group successfully cleared the line 81% of the time, or for 13 out of 16 trials.

The researchers wanted to know if the Receiver would learn over time to trust one Sender over the other based on their reliability. The team purposely picked one of the Senders to be a “bad Sender” and flipped their responses in 10 out of the 16 trials — so that a “Yes, rotate the block” suggestion would be given to the Receiver as “No, don’t rotate the block,” and vice versa. Over time, the Receiver switched from being relatively neutral about both Senders to strongly preferring the information from the “good Sender.”

The team hopes that these results pave the way for future brain-to-brain interfaces that allow people to collaborate to solve tough problems that one brain alone couldn’t solve. The researchers also believe this is an appropriate time to start to have a larger conversation about the ethics of this kind of brain augmentation research and developing protocols to ensure that people’s privacy is respected as the technology improves. The group is working with the Neuroethics team at the Center for Neurotechnology to address these types of issues.

“But for now, this is just a baby step. Our equipment is still expensive and very bulky and the task is a game,” Rao said. “We’re in the ‘Kitty Hawk’ days of brain interface technologies: We’re just getting off the ground.”

See a related story from NPR.

France: Police attempt to dislodge eco protesters blocking Paris bridge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-ULop-lJM

Polls & Meghan McCain Say Tulsi Won Debate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWoo90eoM58

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is "Isolationism"

Caitlin Johnstone

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-29/forever-war-so-normalized-opposing-it-isolationism

After getting curb stomped on the debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard, the campaign for Tim “Who the fuck is Tim Ryan?” Ryan posted a statementdecrying the Hawaii congresswoman’s desire to end a pointless 18-year military occupation as “isolationism”.

“While making a point as to why America can’t cede its international leadership and retreat from around the world, Tim was interrupted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard,” the statement reads.

“When he tried to answer her, she contorted a factual point Tim was making — about the Taliban being complicit in the 9/11 attacks by providing training, bases and refuge for Al Qaeda and its leaders. The characterization that Tim Ryan doesn’t know who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is simply unfair reporting. Further, we continue to reject Gabbard’s isolationism and her misguided beliefs on foreign policy. We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it’s ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people.”

Ryan’s campaign is lying. During an exchange that was explicitly about the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ryan plainly said “When we weren’t in there, they started flying planes into our buildings.” At best, Ryan can argue that when he said “they” he had suddenly shifted from talking about the Taliban to talking about Al Qaeda without bothering to say so, in which case he obviously can’t legitimately claim that Gabbard “contorted” anything he had said. At worst, he was simply unaware at the time of the very clear distinction between the Afghan military and political body called the Taliban and the multinational extremist organization called Al Qaeda.

Tulsi Gabbard

✔@TulsiGabbard

Watch the 5 minutes that have people talking Tulsi!
A soldier's truth about the establishment war machine driving US foreign policy http://tulsi.to/trumps-chickenhawk-cabinet … #DemDebate - #TULSI2020

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More importantly, Ryan’s campaign using the word “isolationism” to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn’t accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good. Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option.

This is entirely by design. This bit of word magic has been employed for a long time to tar any idea which deviates from the neoconservative agenda of total global unipolarity via violent imperialism as something freakish and dangerous. In his farewell address to the nation, war criminal George W Bush said the following:

“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”

A few months after Bush’s address, Antiwar’s Rich Rubino wrote an article titled “Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism”, explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense.

“Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world,” Rubino explained. “In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent.”

“A non-interventionist supports commercial relations,” Rubino contrasted. “In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations.”

“A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations,” wrote Rubino. “In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences.”

View image on Twitter

Tim Ryan

✔@TimRyan

Statement from Ryan Campaign on Afghanistan

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Calling an aversion to endless military violence “isolationism” is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people “agoraphobia”. Yet you’ll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists. Gabbard supports most US military alliances and continues to voice full support for the bogus “war on terror” implemented by the Bush administration which serves no purpose other than to facilitate endless military expansionism; Trump is openly pushing regime change interventionism in both Venezuela and Iran while declining to make good on his promises to withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan.

Another dishonest label you’ll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is “pacifism”. “Some wars are bad, but I’m not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary,” supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They’ll say this while defending Trump’s potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq.

This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, virtually no one is a pure pacifist who opposes war under any and all possible circumstances; anyone who claims that they can’t imagine any possible scenario in which they’d support using some kind of coordinated violence either hasn’t imagined very hard or is fooling themselves. If your loved ones were going to be raped, tortured and killed by hostile forces unless an opposing group took up arms to defend them, for example, you would support that. Hell, you would probably join in. Secondly, equating opposition to US-led regime change interventionism, which is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful, is not even a tiny bit remotely like opposing all war under any possible circumstance.

Mehdi Hasan

✔@mehdirhasan

Replying to @RaniaKhalek

She’s not “antiwar” - she’s anti a US war. She’s totally pro the Russian air war in Syria and celebrated Russian air strikes that have killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians.

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Another common distortion you’ll see is the specious argument that a given opponent of US interventionism “isn’t anti-war” because they don’t oppose all war under any and all circumstances. This tweet by The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan is a perfect example, claiming that Gabbard is not anti-war because she supports Syria’s sovereign right to defend itself with the help of its allies from the violent extremist factions which overran the country with western backing. Again, virtually no one is opposed to all war under any and all circumstances; if a coalition of foreign governments had helped flood Hasan’s own country of Britain with extremist militias who’d been murdering their way across the UK with the ultimate goal of toppling London, both Tulsi Gabbard and Hasan would support fighting back against those militias.

The label “anti-war” can for these reasons be a little misleading. The term anti-interventionist or non-interventionist comes closest to describing the value system of most people who oppose the warmongering of the western empire,because they understand that calls for military interventionism which go mainstream in today’s environment are almost universally based on imperialist agendas grabbing at power, profit, and global hegemony. The label “isolationist” comes nowhere close.

It all comes down to sovereignty. An anti-interventionist believes that a country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn’t have the right to conquer, capture, infiltrate or overthrow other nations whether covertly or overtly. At the “end” of colonialism we all agreed we were done with that, except that the nationless manipulators have found far trickier ways to seize a country’s will and resources without actually planting a flag there. We need to get clearer on these distinctions and get louder about defending them as the only sane, coherent way to run foreign policy.