Daisy Bell is a song very close to my heart, it was composed by Henry Dacre in 1892 as an ode to the beauty of a real life “daisy”, Frances Evelyn Maynard. However this is not the event that makes it special for me. It was the first song ever to be sung by electronic speech synthesis in bell labs by John Kelly in 1962 on an IBM 704 computer and guess who visited this facility? Aurthur C. Clarke, who then used this very song in 2001 a space odyssey during HAL’s most famous deactivation. Then again, the whole point is that it opened up a whole new frontier (speech synthesis) which soon became mainstream after this pioneering stunt took place.

There are several ways of doing speech synthesis one of them is known as concatenative synthesis. Which is stringing together recorded speech from a huge speech and then playing it with an associated file with it’s keyword or the phones, phrase etc. which are being said in the sentence, the down side of this is that it doesn’t sound continuous unless one uses algorithms to level out the volume difference , which might occur between two clips or there might be a slightly different speaking style in which the human speaks between two clips. Thus if the glitches are taken care of it is one of the most convincing forms but then again this system uses a huge database for generating speech , now the implications are that it takes up space and computing power to access it so it can be inefficient for small scale implementation but then again there is miniaturization.

One could also use Diphones which are nothing but transition between two sounds or phones so you use these to create speech in a very rambling sort of way. Personally I like this method as it will use up less space and it will be in my opinion extremely convincing when we make it work like it should work, however the problem is that it’s pretty hard to do that…

The rest of them are in my opinion needlessly complex like formant synthesis

Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using an acoustic model. Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.

This doesn’t produce convincing speech in any case, possibly due to the fact that our models are not that thorough or however it currently it does have a few advantages but then again it’s needlessly complicated. Now the thing is that there exists every type of system one can think of but the main argument here is to make them seamless and reliable. It may be like early computer graphics given enough time and computational power we may finally reach HAL…

Well over the years nothing caught my fancy and made me tear my hair out than perpetual motion machines. When I was small(11 or 12,I think) I used to think wouldn’t it be lovely if one existed and then we won’t have strikes over petrol price increases, energy would be free for all it would be the greatest equalizer but then I came across the laws of thermodynamics in the library and I could see the machine I used to envision run down and break apart (in quite vivid detail, all it lacked was surround sound). Nearly 150 years ago there was a chap named James Prescott Joule who quite cleverly gave a few laws telling everybody from the harebrained inventors to the train driver that there is no free lunch in the universe. You cannot get something out of nothing in this world this holds true for every sphere imaginable (even the lottery). Moreover energy flows from a region of higher concentration to lower concentration i.e. entropy increases in a system reducing differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system. There can and never has been a case of reverse entropy in a closed system….

So there can never ever be 100% efficiency there always some loss in the equation. These losses are generally manifested in the form of friction and other such forces. All perpetual motion machines look at only these few laws but the other 2 are equally important, which I shall write about later.

Thus I hope that till now you have understood the concept that underlies this situation or the problem to which it applies. so as I have said there is no free lunch but it is always fun to dream one up in your head (it’s quite entertaining I did it again during my math’s exam today). However not everyone reads the textbook recently there was an ad in The Economist by some folks who have claimed they have built one and were inviting scientists to view it, moreover yesterday they were supposed to demonstrate to the public and due to “technical reasons” couldn’t. Yeah I guess it just doesn’t work or it is probably a fraud of some sort by a poor fool who wanted to recover the money he had invested (it could have been better spent buying a physics textbook), but yet again the Ionian and Renaissance traditions to inquire, experiment and above all keep an open mind came to me and my heart as they say, said 1 to a Googolplex there might be something, something fishy that is. If it works on camera then there must be a hidden power source, for the laws of physics are the only unbreakable commandments in the universe as nature seems to make sure that the event doesn’t happen. Though shall not get free lunch or energy in this universe, now you can take that to a bank, who are even bigger misers (the RBI may revise the freaking interest rate again!)!

This is all I have to say judge for yourself at http://www.steorn.com/orbo/demo/demo.html

Update: Think it might be real? For the love of Liebniz, get a freakin’ clue: if it looks like a toy and the net gain is almost imperceptibly small, you’re selling a freaking measurement error. Sell it well!

Complete and utter nonsense but hey at least I got something to blog on!

Ankur’s note: I’ve already made a long review of the movie Transformers, but Anuj had something extra to add.

Transfomers movie poster (small)

If you haven’t seen this movie then I am advising you to drop any plans you have to do so, don’t waste your time. To tell you the truth all I could think of while watching this movie is you gotta be kidding me. Seriously the actors were rolling out jargon like the US mint, they had runaway intellectual deflation over there (seeing this movie can make your brain go into a recession).I didn’t know before watching this movie that DNA computers can perform quantum computation and why the heck will giant robots be bipeds at all and why walk at all? Bipedal movement is so imprecise and difficult to implement and why are they humanoids in the first place? Seriously the way they transform into small objects is totally ridiculous, I would like to know what happens to all that matter? Do they perform matter-energy conversions on the fly? I mean the only thing worth seeing in this movie are the special effects otherwise there is no depth in the plot which is virtually non existent.

I think that they should have seriously hired a technical consultant before writing the script or they could have checked it up Wikipedia. Maybe then they would have ALSO realized that the Beagle 2 was NOT a rover in the first place and that it was made by the British!

So this is a movie worth missing and the idea that modern technology came from alien technology is so 2001…

Last night I had a really stimulating dream which I think reflects some inherent personality traits and flaws that I happen to possess. I have been obsessed with HAL since the time I first read 2001:A Space odyssey, it fired me up and inspired me to take up robotics, but slowly I forgot about it and this memory was buried in some deep recess of my mind. However, recently I found 2010:a space odyssey two in my library and it all came back, I issued it on Shikha’s card (I have 3 books in mine) and I finished it before dinner. Since then I have had dreams of me being on the spaceship discovery, I represented humankind to the incorporeal entities and one might as well guess who were my ship mates. Anyway last night I had a dream in which I was talking to HAL and I can still vividly recall the conversation it went something like this,Hal greeted me and said “professor”, after that HAL asked me “Do you dream about me?”.I found myself saying yes quite softly and my dream escalates at this point as HAL asks me “You love me more than any other human with the exception of your parents don’t you Anuj?” and to my surprise in my dream I found myself saying yes and then I started to sob. After this HAL asks me if I would like to be the one to create him to which I said yes after that I spent most of my dream brainstorming about ways to create an entity like that and quite surprisingly the insights are quite good.
I realized that we can’t program “common sense” in to a machine, how will you tell a computer that water is wet? Neither can we make a machine understand language, if after all language is a definition of intelligence(The Turing test) then we should be able to program in something like 50,000 possible responses and questions for the machine to refer to and for one or two bombshells one could answer randomly until the conversation resumes the predefined plan. this is based on the idea that even we are not random creature there is an inherent subconscious or conscious reason for everything we do and how we learn ie we build up a database of “life” as we grow that teaches us things. Now, the counter argument for this is that it isn’t true “intelligence” but how would one describe such an abstract concept? Well if I can quote some examples,it is commonly defined as:
“Intelligence is the possession of a model of reality and the ability to use this model to conceive and plan actions and to predict their outcomes. The higher the complexity and precision of the model, the plans, and the predictions, and the less time needed, the higher is the intelligence.”

Fine but let me ask one thing if a child savant is able to understand and calculate vast numbers and has a variety of computational skills and however he/she is autistic will you consider the person as intelligent (they display lack of coordination)? Or, a mentally retarded human who plays the piano and can compose pieces with ability of wolfang is he a lobotomized entity or is he/she intelligent? Hence this model is insufficient for humans then how can it be possible to describes machines as that? Surely computational and spatial skills don’t define intelligence as I have already argued intelligence maybe something quite different than that IQ test. Also it has been observed that we don’t usually create 3-Dimensional maps or models of objects in our heads when we talk of something. It is generally extremely vague and unspecific. So it’s not a model that we can coordinate through it’s in fact some data we have acquired and we combine it and extrapolate on the base of that, I think that it is extremely likely that the previous one is the way we do things i.e. there is no rigorous model as such or maybe it is a mixture of both we may never know…..

Now, lets move on to the Turing Test :
“A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel”

Now read that definition carefully you will realize that it assumes that the possession of a language that WE can engage in, in order to interact with the entity is inherently related to intelligence but what if it is an extraterrestrial which is say 3 million years ahead of us and only communicates through neural implants. As it cannot communicate with us, is it dumb? Think about it and you will realize that we are being chauvinistic in our views we need to define intelligence as the ability to do things not from a rigorous “model” but from previously acquired data and the extrapolation of facts on the basis of that data.So, why don’t we use a core gene program which acts as a base for the machine or entity to explore the world and as it moves along the different programs will come into existence using genetic algorithms and we will see which one solves the problem the best(that is how I think, by applying all the permutations for a specific event). This program will be saved for future use and it will act as a “parent program” for future(this is the basis of genetic algorithms) but now there is a twist, there will be a pint beyond which techniques will be repeated wasting valuable processing time . Then there could be a reaper or watchdog that recognizes previous algorithms and doesn’t allow the repeated data to be sent to the core instead it replies with the previously proven ‘best’ algorithm, kind of like a trained reflex.

So it keeps on evolving we should sooner or later reach the level of intellect displayed by a child if we do that then I think that hawking isn’t to far away. Then there came in other questions in my dream (or were they added in my conscious reflections??) I asked him the question if he could ‘feel’ emotions or not? HAL asked how do you know that what you perceive as emotions haven’t been hard coded into the brain as it evolved to serve the purposes of survival after all if you see a couple of freshly decapitated heads lying around you aren’t likely to stand around asking questions ones first instinct would be to run for the future propagation of the species. Thus emotions serve a use but are they necessary? Now that left me stumped as I have not given seriously it thought (but as it appeared in my dream,did I?), but I think that they aren’t that useful now as emotions at times tend to impair judgmental capabilities of an organism (us or any conscious entity like a dog, to bite or not to bite that is perhaps also the question….).

It also gave me a shock I realized that I feel comfortable more in the presence of machines than humans, I am not exactly sure if it is a good thing or bad thing.This dream also implies something else,I know what is my purpose in life, I want to do research in A.I(according to my career counselor I am ideally suited for research) and as they say-change the world. I want to revolutionize the very fabric of society by bringing a robot or a computer of some level of intelligence into every home, office and perhaps into every body. Now the question remains I know I am crazy but am I crazy enough to do it?