Ideas Born from a Dieing Neural Network?

Posted 6 Feb 2004 at 05:59 UTC by The Swirling Brain

The Washington Post has an extremely interesting article about Stephen Thaler's Creativity Machine. The Creativity Machine is a new kind of Neural Network from Imagination Engines, Inc. Basically, it's like you take a Neural Network and fully train it, then you go back and randomly kill off a few nodes until it starts to hallucinate causing it to have a sort of near death experience. Either it will go off on a really bad trip, or it might cause it to have an imagination and generate something new like the works of Shakespeare (as if that were a new thing). Apparently, by killing off a few neurons it causes some Neural Nets to go noisy and perhaps start thinking and figuring out new ideas? I'm not sure I believe it, but it seems Steven Thaler figured out that by doing this new technique and forcing anomolies, all sorts of new innovative ideas and dreams can be born like harder substances than diamonds and bad christmas carols, or perhaps even the recipe for mom's pudding and the answer to everything before they can shut it off. With all of these new deep thoughts being generated, one could wish that they could come up with the right questions for the answers it gives (hey, that's sort of like Jeopardy). For that matter what would a neural net's dieing wish be? (BTW, happy love your robot day - Feb 7th!)