Let me out !
Some months ago I failed an interview question from Google that required me to write a program to navigate a maze in the least amount of steps, it is by no means a small task since a very popular book on AI ( AI a modern approach ) devotes a lot of pages to this subject, but what I got stumped with and found more interesting was the code needed to make a maze ( which wasn’t provided ) and since I like GUIs and games I thought it would be a cool little thing to learn about, so without…
Trying to visualize the thoughts and memories in the brain.
We humans (and other animals) posses the amazing ability of experiencing and remembering things along with higher modes of cognition like thoughts, ideas and feelings.
The name Engram has been given to denote the physical location and mechanisms required to process and store these bits of information. The theory seems sound, there are places in our brains where the aforementioned information is stored (where else would they be) but accessing them is still not possible, at least not directly. We make do with our communication skills to convey what we experience and know internally. The best next thing could be…
Basic or introductory texts on Neuroscience and Ai:
Purves, Dale, et al. Neuroscience. Sinauer Associates, 2018.
Gazzaniga, Michael S., et al. Cognitive Neuroscience: the Biology of the Mind. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Russell, Stuart Jonathan, and Peter Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach. Pearson, 2018.
Networks,Cycles & Consciousness:
Buzsáki, G. Rhythms of the Brain. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Sporns, Olaf. Networks of the Brain. Mit Press, 2016.
Koch, Christof. The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach. Roberts and Co., 2004.
Memory Related:
Tulving, Endel. The Oxford Handbook of Memory. Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.
Kandel, Eric R. In Search of…
Is this the one?
Like many other developers, I’ve been looking for a Python UI solution for my projects and I have yet to find the perfect one. Under this light, I‘ve been wanting to try out PySimplegui for a while, and so this will be a simple overview with some beginner's code and a more realistic project thrown at it.
Advanced Hello world
I’ve tried so many UI libraries over the years that I usually start with a simple program to get a feel for the API, the script is a simple click counter that is the basis and framework for more advanced programs. …
A bit down and to the left
I love isometric views; they pack a bunch ( punch ?) of visual information and are great for sketching pseudo 3D views, making them programmatically on the other hand has always seemed daunting, at least to me, come along as I face my isometric fears and build one from scratch in python.
Here's a typical isometric Grid/Image and a simple approximation of what's going on which we will use throughout, starting from a simple square you rotate it 45° and then squish it so it is twice as wide as it is tall. 
And 5 reasons you should skip them.
I’ve been competing in the Numerai Quant competitions ( there are 2 ) for the past 3 years and thought it could be interesting to write a follow up to my previous two posts as a way to catch up…
Previous posts you might like:- Numerai walkthrough: Quantitative Analysis & Machine learning for fun and profit. The practical parts are now outdated, but the introduction explanation is still relevant. - Practical Keras Simple regression for the Numerai Tournament An up to date (late 2020) technical look at setting up a Neural Network for the tournament.
What is it again ?
Hip to be square
At some point, you might need to make a grid or grid-like visual structure for a project or coding interview question (mazes, search). A grid is also the foundation for placing objects on a canvas surface in an orderly manner and more complex cases like isometric views and tiled games.
This article is meant to take us both from zero grids to Intermediate Gridology in a hopefully painless way.
Note: The code and concepts discussed here are somehow interchangeable between languages, but some languages provide a better native experience and primitives are needed for grids. …
We can’t describe what we don’t know.
Preface
There are plenty of articles describing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) out there, the wiki on AGI is a great place to start, I think most definitions fit somewhere between describing an emulation of human cognitive abilities and defining intelligence by some well thought out premise: It can adapt to new circumstances, it can derive meaning and reason, it is logical, etc, etc.
Regardless of which flavor of AGI definition you like or agree with, what we still don’t have is an AGI and that’s because we simply can’t build one yet, but how can this be so ? What is…
Looking into Neural Code for better AIs
How does your brain represent the environment ? The partial answer is the admittedly complex title which we will explore in this article.
Representation is a hard problem for both Neuroscience and AI and a good explanation of these terms I think is helpful if we are to build better AIs, this is my attempt.
Representations
A representation is simply that, the internal description of something, a thing, an idea or even a thought or feeling in general, but alas these later ones are very high in the hierarchy of representations and we don’t yet know exactly how they are formed…
Revolutionary, Evolutionary or something else ?
As someone that spends most of the time thinking about Neuroscience, Artificial Neural Networks and Software the latest venture from Elon Musk: Neuralink on the surface ticks all the right boxes, so after their inaugural presentation I thought it would be fun to parse it and see what’s what. Care to join ?
The Pigs
Before delving into the details let’s go over the live demo they presented starting with the pigs:
