Entropy law linked to intelligence, say researchers

23 April 2013Last updated at 06:08 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News The tyranny of entropy abounds in everyday examples of disorder - and a tendency toward mess A modification to one of the most fundamental laws of physics may provide a link to the rise of intelligence, cooperation - even upright walking. The idea of entropy describes the way in which the Universe heads inexorably toward a higher state of disorder. A mathematical model in Physical Review Letters proposes that systems maximise entropy in the present and the future. Simple simulations based on the idea reproduce a variety of real-world cases that reflect intelligent behaviour. The idea of entropy is fundamentally an intuitive one - that the Universe tends in general to a more disordered state. The classic example is a dropped cup: it will smash into pieces, but those pieces will never spontaneously recombine back into a cup. Continue reading the main story The laws of thermodynamics 'Beyond luck'

Kurzweil: How to create a mind How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil’s latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology . Kurzweil presents a provocative exploration of the most important project in human-machine civilization—reverse engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works and using that knowledge to create even more intelligent machines.Kurzweil discusses how the brain functions, how the mind emerges from the brain, and the implications of vastly increasing the powers of our intelligence in addressing the world’s problems. I think there are three key ideas in this book about which I have varying opinions. Regarding the second point, I have no doubt that we will someday be able to produce a non-biological brain. My biggest problem with Kurzweil’s book is in relation to the first point, a theory about how the brain’s cortex works. and Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter .

Vortex to another dimension reported in Brighton Vortex to another dimension reported in Brighton Updated 2:04pm Sunday 19th May 2013 in News By Anna Roberts, Crime reporter Vortex to another dimension reported in Brighton Council bosses have been left mystified after reports that a portal to another dimension has opened in a residential street in Brighton. A member of the public reported to Brighton and Hove City Council that the “wormhole or vortex” had opened up in Montreal Road, Hanover, on May 2. They made the report via the website Fix My Street which is more typically used to report potholes, dumped rubbish and broken lampposts. The anonymous poster said: “I was recently walking my affenpinscher (a toy breed of dog) around the Hanover area of Brighton when I noticed that a wormhole or vortex has opened up on Montreal Road. “On closer inspection it seems to be some kind of portal to other times, places and dimensions. “I would have investigated further but I was concerned my little dog would be sucked into it.

Stigmergic Cognition All things stigmergy Special Issue of Cognitive Systems Research Join the Linkedin Stigmergy group: Agents interact with others and their environment to circumvent cognitive limitation. Though the concept of stigmergy has been associated with ant- or swarm-like “agents” with minimal cognitive ability, stigmergy offers a powerful analytical tool to be deployed in the human domain. • A context or environment: o Comprised by an indefinite number of local environments o Only partially perceivable through an internal dynamics that govern its temporal evolution • Agents: o There are a multiplicity of agents populating with no one individual or clustering of individuals having global knowledge o Rationality is bounded o Behavior is self-organized o Behavior is stochastic o Behavior is dynamical • Novel features: o Arise from interactions that are neither predictable nor reducible to simpler constituents. Like this: Like Loading...