AI Chat Rpg

AI Chat Rpg — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

Inpainting

Inpainting is a conservation process where damaged, deteriorated, or missing parts of an artwork are filled in to present a complete image. This process is commonly used in image restoration. It can be applied to both physical and digital art mediums such as oil or acrylic paintings, chemical photographic prints, sculptures, or digital images and video. With its roots in physical artwork, such as painting and sculpture, traditional inpainting is performed by a trained art conservator who has carefully studied the artwork to determine the mediums and techniques used in the piece, potential risks of treatments, and ethical appropriateness of treatment. == History == The modern use of inpainting can be traced back to Pietro Edwards (1744–1821), Director of the Restoration of the Public Pictures in Venice, Italy. Using a scientific approach, Edwards focused his restoration efforts on the intentions of the artist. It was during the 1930 International Conference for the Study of Scientific Methods for the Examination and Preservation of Works of Art, that the modern approach to inpainting was established. Helmut Ruhemann (1891–1973), a German restorer and conservator, led the discussions on the use of inpainting in conservation. Helmut Ruhemann was a leading figure in modernizing restoration and conservation. His greatest contribution to the field of conservation "was his insistence on following the methods of the original painter exactly, and on understanding the painter's artistic intention". After his career of over 40 years as a conservator, Ruhemann published his treatise The Cleaning of Paintings: Problems & Potentialities in 1968. In describing his method, Ruhemann states that "The surface [of the fill] should be slightly lower than that of the surrounding paint to allow for the thickness of the inpainting...Inpainting medium should look and behave like the original medium, but must not darken with age." Cesare Brandi (1906–1988) developed the teoria del restauro, the inpainting approach combining aesthetics and psychology. However, this approach was used primarily by Italian restorers and conservators, with the terminology becoming widespread in the 1990s. Technological advancements led to new applications of inpainting. Widespread use of digital techniques range from entirely automatic computerized inpainting to tools used to simulate the process manually. Since the mid-1990s, the process of inpainting has evolved to include digital media. More commonly known as image or video interpolation, a form of estimation, digital inpainting includes the use of computer software that relies on sophisticated algorithms to replace lost or corrupted parts of the image data. == Ethics == In order to preserve the integrity of an original artwork, any inpainting technique or treatment applied to physical or digital work should be reversible or distinguishable from the original content of the artwork. Prior to any treatments, conservators proceed according to the American Institute of Conservation of Historical and Artistic Works. There are several ethic considerations before Inpainting can be justified. Various deliberation decisions over the ethical appropriateness of the amount and type of inpainting done, resides on many factors. As most conservation treatments, inpainting's ethical questions rest mainly with authenticity, reversibility and documentation.Any intervention to compensate for loss should be documented in treatment records and reports and should be detectable by common examination methods. Such compensation should be reversible and should not falsely modify the known aesthetic, conceptual, and physical characteristics of the cultural property, especially by removing or obscuring original material.New technologies and the aesthetic demand for perfect images without imperfections challenge conservators' ethical practices to protect the integrity of originals. == Methods == Inpainting methods and techniques depend on the desired goal and type of image being treated. Treatments to fill in the gaps are different between physical and digital art. In inpainting, detailed records of the initial state of the images can help with the treatment and replicate the original closer. === Physical inpainting === Inpainting is rooted in the conservation and restoration of paintings. Inpainting can aim to make a visual improvement to the artwork as a whole by repairing missing or damaged parts using methods and materials equivalent to the original artist's work. ==== Application techniques ==== By studying the painting methods of various artists and the composition of paints used historically, conservators are able to restore works very closely to their original visual appearance. The picture as a whole determines how to fill in the gap. Helmut Ruhemann's inpainting techniques by Jessell have procedures to "preserve" the quality of oil and tempera paintings. === Digital inpainting === Many programs are able to reconstruct missing or damaged areas of digital photographs and videos. Most widely known for use with digital images is Adobe Photoshop. Given the various abilities of the digital camera and the digitization of old photos, inpainting has become an automatic process that can be performed on digital images. The inpainting techniques can be applied to object removal, text removal, and other automatic modifications of images and videos. In video special effects, inpainting is usually performed after video matting. They can also be observed in applications like image compression and super-resolution. In photography and cinema, it is used for film restoration to reverse, repair, or mitigate deterioration (e.g., physical damage such as cracks in photographs, scratches and dust spots in film, or chemical damage resulting in image loss; performed infrared cleaning). It can also be used for removing red-eye, the stamped date from photographs, and objects for creative effect. This technique can be used to replace any lost blocks in the coding and transmission of images, for example, in a streaming video. It can also be used to remove logos or watermarks in videos. Deep learning neural network-based inpainting can be used for decensoring images. Deep image prior-based techniques can be used for digital image inpainting, where a trained deep learning model is either unavailable or infeasible. Deep models for visual content generation, like text-to-image or text-to-video, learn complex priors over the distribution of visual content, and can be used to inpaint missing parts. For example, videos can be separated into layers, using a technique called omnimatte, which either pretrain an omnimatte model or without any training using an omnimatte-zero model. Three main groups of 2D image-inpainting algorithms can be found in the literature. The first one to be noted is structural (or geometric) inpainting, the second one is texture inpainting, the last one is a combination of these two techniques. They use the information of the known or non-destroyed image areas in order to fill the gap, similar to how physical images are restored. ==== Structural ==== Structural or geometric inpainting is used for smooth images that have strong, defined borders. There are many different approaches to geometric inpainting, but they all come from the idea that geometry can be recovered from similar areas or domains. Bertalmio proposed a method of structural inpainting that mimics how conservators address painting restoration. Bertalmio proposed that by progressively transferring similar information from the borders of an inpainting domain inwards, the gap can be filled. ==== Textural ==== While structural/geometric inpainting works to repair smooth images, textural inpainting works best with images that are heavily textured. Texture has a repetitive pattern which means that a missing portion cannot be restored by continuing the level lines into the gap; level lines provide a complete, stable representation of an image. To repair texture in an image, one can combine frequency and spatial domain information to fill in a selected area with a desired texture. This method, while the most simple and very effective, works well when selecting a texture to be in-painted. For a texture that covers a wider area or a larger frame one would have to go through the image segmenting the areas to be in-painted and selecting the corresponding textures from throughout the image; there are programs that can help find the corresponding areas that work in a similar way as 'find and replace' works in a word processor. ==== Combined structural and textural ==== Combined structural and textural inpainting approaches simultaneously try to perform texture- and structure-filling in regions of missing image information. Most parts of an image consist of texture and structure and the boundaries between image regions contain a large amount of structural information. This is the result when blending differ
Read more →
Knowledge processing for robots

KnowRob (Knowledge processing for robots) is a system which combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods to acquire and ground knowledge. This system is the backbone of openEASE. both under developing at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen, Germany. == The framework == KnowRob can serve as a common sense framework for the integration of knowledge. This knowledge can be static encyclopedic knowledge, common sense knowledge, task descriptions, environment models, object information, observed actions, etc., which can come from different sources, like manually axiomatized, derived from observations, or imported from the web. KnowRob has been used by different research groups, as the Rice University using the ontological knowledge base in a robotic platform. As well by the Eindhoven University of Technology research group competing in the RoboCup league, in the "at Home" category, with the RoboEarth project. As well, KnowRob is mentioned in the work of some research groups from the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Middle East Technical University in their combination of different knowledge bases, Keio University as related work because of the ontology service, University of Texas at Austin as related work as well because of the relation with the work presented, Hanyang University as related work as an OWL based knowledge processing framework. == Representations == To represent the knowledge, KnowRob uses the OWL ontology language and an extended first-order logic knowledge representation with computable predicates. To give the order of subactions, KnowRob includes a pair-wise ordering constrain, which gives a partial ordering. KnowRob adopts the closed-world assumption Prolog, and an open-world assumption by the use of computables. To include reasoning rules into Prolog, KnowRob uses an inference procedure beyond the capabilities of OWL to extract information about tasks executions. In its second version, KnowRob provides a logic interface to the hybrid reasoning kernel as a logic based language. This language presents the hybrid reasoning kernel as if everything were entities retrievable by providing partial descriptions for them. This entities descriptions include objects, their parts, and articulation models, environments composed of objects, software components, actions, and events. === Episodic memories === Episodic memory is related to the experience information, which is organized temporally and spatially, alongside combined with context information. In KnowRob, an episodic memory is understood as a recording that the agent makes of the ongoing activity, which includes very detailed information about the actions, motions, their purposes, effects and the behavior they generate, it also includes the images captured during execution, etc. == Usage == The knowledge is computed by external methods using Prolog queries. In the second version of the KnowRob system, is included a better structure of the packages and documentations. Which includes some extensions from the previous version, as well as a logic based language. For example, a cup description from perception can be represented in this language as: entity(Cup,[an, object, [type, cup], [shape, cylinder], [color, orange]]) As well, a controller could represent the same object as: entity(Cup, [an, object, [type, cup], [proper_physical_parts, [an, object, [type, handle], [grasp−pose, G−pose]]]]) The interface language is comparable to other query languages for symbolic knowledge bases. KnowRob's query language integrates reasoning methods, such as the simulation-based reasoning. == Goals == The goal of the KnowRob framework is to make semantic knowledge available for service robots. It is able to answer queries about missing information in vague instructions for tasks. This is possible with the actions hierarchical representation and information about objects which can be included in certain action.
Read more →
Rnn (software)

rnn is an open-source machine learning framework that implements recurrent neural network architectures, such as LSTM and GRU, natively in the R programming language, that has been downloaded over 100,000 times (from the RStudio servers alone). The rnn package is distributed through the Comprehensive R Archive Network under the open-source GPL v3 license. == Workflow == The below example from the rnn documentation show how to train a recurrent neural network to solve the problem of bit-by-bit binary addition. == sigmoid == The sigmoid functions and derivatives used in the package were originally included in the package, from version 0.8.0 onwards, these were released in a separate R package sigmoid, with the intention to enable more general use. The sigmoid package is a dependency of the rnn package and therefore automatically installed with it. == Reception == With the release of version 0.3.0 in April 2016 the use in production and research environments became more widespread. The package was reviewed several months later on the R blog The Beginner Programmer as "R provides a simple and very user friendly package named rnn for working with recurrent neural networks.", which further increased usage. The book Neural Networks in R by Balaji Venkateswaran and Giuseppe Ciaburro uses rnn to demonstrate recurrent neural networks to R users. It is also used in the r-exercises.com course "Neural network exercises". The RStudio CRAN mirror download logs show that the package is downloaded on average about 2,000 per month from those servers , with a total of over 100,000 downloads since the first release, according to RDocumentation.org, this puts the package in the 15th percentile of most popular R packages .
Read more →
Thinking Machines Lab

Thinking Machines Lab Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI. The company was founded in February 2025, and by July had completed an early-stage funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion overall from investors such as Nvidia, AMD, Cisco, and Jane Street. The company is based in San Francisco and structured as a public benefit corporation. == History == By its launch in February 2025, Thinking Machines Lab was reported to have hired about 30 researchers and engineers from competitors including OpenAI, Meta AI, and Mistral AI. Its founding team members include Barret Zoph, former OpenAI VP of Research (Post-Training), Lilian Weng, former OpenAI VP, and OpenAI cofounder John Schulman, who joined after a brief stint at the lab's competitor Anthropic. In January 2026, it was reported that Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, departed the startup to return to OpenAI. Other former OpenAI employees who have been hired include Jonathan Lachman and Andrew Tulloch (although Tulloch departed after getting recruited for Meta Superintelligence Labs). Thinking Machines Lab's advisers include Bob McGrew, previously OpenAI's chief research officer, and Alec Radford, who was a lead researcher for OpenAI. On October 1, 2025, it announced Tinker, an API for fine-tuning language models. Users would submit jobs through the API for fine-tuning one of the various open-weight models supported. The Lab would run the jobs on its internal clusters and training infrastructure. == Business structure == Thinking Machines Lab grants Mira Murati a deciding vote on board matters, weighted to provide her with a majority decision-making capability. Additionally, founding shareholders possess votes weighted 100 times greater than those of regular shareholders. In July 2025, Andreessen Horowitz was reported to have led the company's initial funding round, raising "about $2 billion at a valuation of $12 billion". The government of Albania (Murati's country of origin) was also included in this round, making a $10 million investment which required an amendment to the country's 2025 budget. == Partnership == In March 2026, Thinking Machines Lab announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA involving an undisclosed investment and a multi-year agreement to deploy one gigawatt of Vera Rubin computing capacity.
Read more →
Brave Leo

Brave Leo is a large language model-based chatbot developed by Brave Software and included with the Brave browser. == History == In November 2023, the company said versions for iOS and Android would be available "in the coming months". == Features == Since January 2024, Leo has used the open-source Mixtral 8x7B from Mistral AI as its default large language model, in addition to LLaMA 2 from Meta Platforms and Claude from Anthropic, both of which have been used previously. Leo can suggest follow-up questions, and summarize webpages, PDFs, and videos. Leo has a $15 (US) per month premium version that enables more requests and uses larger LLMs. == Privacy == The answers given by Leo are not saved. Brave uses the slogan Love Privacy to emphasize its focus on user privacy and data protection. The phrase has been featured in Brave's official marketing campaigns and has been cited in media coverage of the browser's privacy-first approach. == Controversies == In 2023, PC World reported that Leo evades questions about US elections.
Read more →
IPO underpricing algorithm

IPO underpricing is the increase in stock value from the initial offering price to the first-day closing price. Many believe that underpriced IPOs leave money on the table for corporations, but some believe that underpricing is inevitable. Investors state that underpricing signals high interest to the market which increases the demand. On the other hand, overpriced stocks will drop long-term as the price stabilizes so underpricing may keep the issuers safe from investor litigation. == IPO underpricing algorithms == Underwriters and investors and corporations going for an initial public offering (IPO), issuers, are interested in their market value. There is always tension that results since the underwriters want to keep the price low while the companies want a high IPO price. Underpricing may also be caused by investor over-reaction causing spikes on the initial days of trading. The IPO pricing process is similar to pricing new and unique products where there is sparse data on market demand, product acceptance, or competitive response. Thus it is difficult to determine a clear price which is compounded by the different goals issuers and investors have. The problem with developing algorithms to determine underpricing is dealing with noisy, complex, and unordered data sets. Additionally, people, environment, and various environmental conditions introduce irregularities in the data. To resolve these issues, researchers have found various techniques from artificial intelligence that normalizes the data. == Evolutionary models == Evolutionary programming is often paired with other algorithms e.g. artificial neural networks to improve the robustness, reliability, and adaptability. Evolutionary models reduce error rates by allowing the numerical values to change within the fixed structure of the program. Designers provide their algorithms the variables, they then provide training data to help the program generate rules defined in the input space that make a prediction in the output variable space. In this approach, the solution is made an individual and the population is made of alternatives. However, the outliers cause the individuals to act unexpectedly as they try to create rules to explain the whole set. === Rule-based system === For example, Quintana first abstracts a model with 7 major variables. The rules evolved from the Evolutionary Computation system developed at Michigan and Pittsburgh: Underwriter prestige – Is the underwriter prestigious in role of lead manager? 1 for true, 0 otherwise. Price range width – The width of the non-binding reference price range offered to potential customers during the roadshow. This width can be interpreted as a sign of uncertainty regarding the real value of the company and a therefore, as a factor that could influence the initial return. Price adjustment – The difference between the final offer price and the price range width. It can be viewed as uncertainty if the adjustment is outside the previous price range. Offering price – The final offer price of the IPO Retained stock – Ratio of number of shares sold at the IPO divided by post-offering number of shares minus the number of shares sold at the IPO. Offering size – Logarithm of the offering size in millions of dollars excluding the over-allotment option Technology – Is this a technology company? 1 for true, 0 otherwise. Quintana uses these factors as signals that investors focus on. The algorithm his team explains shows how a prediction with a high-degree of confidence is possible with just a subset of the data. === Two-layered evolutionary forecasting === Luque approaches the problem with outliers by performing linear regressions over the set of data points (input, output). The algorithm deals with the data by allocating regions for noisy data. The scheme has the advantage of isolating noisy patterns which reduces the effect outliers have on the rule-generation system. The algorithm can come back later to understand if the isolated data sets influence the general data. Finally, the worst results from the algorithm outperformed all other algorithms' predictive abilities. == Agent-based modelling == Currently, many of the algorithms assume homogeneous and rational behavior among investors. However, there's an approach alternative to financial modeling, and it's called agent-based modelling (ABM). ABM uses different autonomous agents whose behavior evolves endogenously which lead to complicated system dynamics that are sometimes impossible to predict from the properties of individual agents. ABM is starting to be applied to computational finance. Though, for ABM to be more accurate, better models for rule-generation need to be developed.
Read more →
TRAIGA

TRAIGA, or the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, is a state law regulating the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in Texas. Sponsored by Representative Giovanni Capriglione, the Act establishes a framework governing certain uses of AI, outlines prohibited uses, and creates obligations on state government entities, among other provisions. TRAIGA was signed into law in 2025 and took effect on January 1, 2026. The law applies to AI developers and deployers that conduct business in Texas or whose systems are used by Texas residents. It prohibits the intentional development or deployment of AI systems to incite harm, violate constitutional rights, engage in unlawful discrimination, and produce child sexual abuse material or unlawful deepfakes. TRAIGA also establishes the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council and creates a regulatory sandbox program. The Texas Attorney General is charged with enforcement. It has received attention as one of the first comprehensive AI-related laws enacted by a U.S. state. Legal analysts have compared it to the European Union (EU) Artificial Intelligence Act and the Colorado AI Act, noting its intent-based discrimination standard and narrower scope relative to those frameworks. == Background == In June 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 2060, which created an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council within the Texas Department of Information Resources. The Council was tasked with monitoring the use of AI systems across state government. Its membership included representatives from law enforcement, academia, and the legal profession. After submitting a report to state policymakers, the Council was disbanded in December 2024. Separately, the Texas House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies was created in 2023 to examine the political and social implications of artificial intelligence. Among its recommendations was the creation of a regulatory sandbox to allow for controlled testing of AI systems. This recommendation informed the regulatory sandbox provision included in TRAIGA. == History == In December 2024, Representative Capriglione introduced House Bill 1709, the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act. The bill sought to create a statewide framework for artificial intelligence, including transparency requirements for companies deploying AI systems, restrictions on certain uses of AI, and the creation of a regulatory sandbox. Modeled in part on the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and the Colorado AI Act, House Bill 1709 focused on "high-risk" AI systems and included provisions addressing private sector liability. House Bill 1709 did not advance during the legislative session. Industry stakeholders raised concerns that several provisions were overly burdensome. The bill informed the development of a revised proposal, House Bill 149, also titled the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act. The revised version removed requirements for private companies to notify consumers when they interact with AI systems and to conduct impact assessments, among other provisions. In April 2025, an amended version of House Bill 149 passed the Texas House of Representatives and was referred to the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce. The bill later received approval from both chambers, where the House voted on amendments adopted by the Senate. On May 31, 2025, the state legislature passed House Bill 149, one of several AI-related bills considered during the legislative session. Governor Abbott signed TRAIGA into law on June 22, 2025. During the legislative process, a proposed federal moratorium on state-level AI regulation initially raised questions about the enforceability of state AI laws, including TRAIGA. At the time of signing, Governor Abbott stated that Texas would ensure compliance with applicable federal requirements. In July 2025, the United States Senate voted to remove the proposed moratorium from federal legislation. The Act took effect on January 1, 2026. == Provisions == === Definitions and scope === TRAIGA applies to AI developers and deployers that advertise or conduct business in Texas, develop products used by Texas residents, or develop or deploy AI systems within the state. The Act also applies to Texas state and local government entities. The Act defines a developer as a person who develops an AI system and a deployer as one who deploys an AI system in Texas. Consumers are defined as Texas residents. The Act defines an artificial intelligence system as a machine-based system that "infers from the inputs the system receives how to generate outputs, including content, decisions, predictions, or recommendations, that can influence physical or virtual environments." === Government use === The Act requires government agencies to provide consumers with plain language notices before interacting with AI systems. It also prohibits government agencies from using artificial intelligence systems to assign social scores to consumers. It also restricts the use of AI systems to identify individuals using biometric data without the individual’s consent. === Prohibitions === The Act prohibits the development or deployment of artificial intelligence systems intended to cause harm, self-harm, or criminal activity. It also prohibits the development or deployment of AI systems designed to violate constitutional rights or unlawfully discriminate based on protected classes. In addition, the Act prohibits the development or deployment of AI systems that are intended to produce or distribute child sexual abuse material or unlawful deepfakes. === Enforcement === Enforcement authority under the Act rests with the Texas Attorney General. The Act does not create a private right of action. The Act requires the Texas Attorney General to create an online complaint system where consumers may submit allegations of potential violations. The Attorney General can investigate complaints received through this system and may request information relevant to the operation of an AI system, including information about training data. Before initiating an enforcement action, the Attorney General must provide a written notice to the alleged violator, who is then provided with a 60-day period to cure the alleged violation. === Penalties === If a violation is not cured, the Act authorizes civil penalties. Penalties range from $10,000 to $12,000 per curable violation and from $80,000 to $200,000 per non-curable violation. The Act also authorizes additional penalties of $2,000 to $40,000 for each day the violation continues. If the Attorney General determines that a person certified or licensed by a state agency has violated the Act and recommends enforcement, the relevant agency may impose additional administrative sanctions, including license suspension or further monetary penalties. === Safe harbor === The Act provides an affirmative defense for AI developers and deployers who identify potential violations through internal testing or auditing or who demonstrate compliance with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework or a comparable risk management framework. The Act also affords protection to developers and deployers when a third party uses their AI systems in a way that violates the Act. === Texas Artificial Intelligence Council === The Act creates the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council to assist the state legislatures in evaluating artificial intelligence policy and oversight. The Council is charged with developing recommendations for state agencies regarding the use of AI systems and with overseeing the regulatory sandbox. TRAIGA gives the Council the ability to organize AI-related training for state entities and issue reports concerning artificial intelligence. The Council does not have binding rulemaking authority. The Council consists of seven members appointed by the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. === Regulatory sandbox === The Act directs the Texas Department of Information Resources to create a regulatory sandbox program that allows participants to test AI systems under state supervision in a modified regulatory setting. To join the program, companies must submit applications that describe their AI systems and intended use. Approved participants may operate within the sandbox for up to 36 months. During that period, the Attorney General is restricted from initiating enforcement actions for certain categories of violations. == Reception == === Support === During legislative testimony, the Texas Public Policy Foundation stated that TRAIGA would benefit Texas businesses by reducing legal ambiguity and creating clearer compliance standards. Representatives of business groups also expressed support, stating that the Act would not impose overly burdensome regulations. The consum
Read more →
OpenAI Operator

OpenAI Operator was an AI agent developed by OpenAI, capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions, including filling forms, placing online orders, scheduling appointments, and other repetitive browser-based tasks. It uses OpenAI's advanced models to expand practical automation capabilities for users in daily activities. Operator was launched on January 23, 2025. It was released as a limited-access research preview to ChatGPT Pro-tier subscribers in the United States on February 1, 2025, with future plans to broaden availability. Operator was deprecated after the release of ChatGPT agent, and shut down on August 31, 2025. == Performance and limitations == In benchmark assessments, Operator achieved notable success, scoring 38.1% on OSWorld benchmarks (OS-level tasks) and 58.1% on WebArena benchmarks (web interactions). However, it did not reach human-level accuracy and faced limitations with intricate user interfaces and extended workflows. == Safety and privacy == OpenAI emphasized privacy and safety measures within Operator, including stringent data protection protocols and built-in safety checks designed to prevent unauthorized sensitive actions or information misuse. == Availability == Initially, Operator was only available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the U.S., with plans for broader availability to Plus, Team, and Enterprise users in the future.
Read more →
Universal psychometrics

Universal psychometrics encompasses psychometrics instruments that could measure the psychological properties of any intelligent agent. Up until the early 21st century, psychometrics relied heavily on psychological tests that require the subject to cooperate and answer questions, the most famous example being an intelligence test. Such methods are only applicable to the measurement of human psychological properties. As a result, some researchers have proposed the idea of universal psychometrics - they suggest developing testing methods that allow for the measurement of non-human entities' psychological properties. For example, it has been suggested that the Turing test is a form of universal psychometrics. This test involves having testers (without any foreknowledge) attempt to distinguish a human from a machine by interacting with both (while not being to see either individuals). It is supposed that if the machine is equally intelligent to a human, the testers will not be able to distinguish between the two, i.e., their guesses will not be better than chance. Thus, Turing test could measure the intelligence (a psychological variable) of an AI. Other instruments proposed for universal psychometrics include reinforcement learning and measuring the ability to predict complexity.
Read more →
Lumpers and splitters

Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any academic discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example, schools of literature, biological taxa, and so on. A "lumper" is a person who assigns examples broadly, judging that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" makes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways. == Origin of the terms == The earliest known use of these terms was thought to be by Charles Darwin, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker in 1857: "It is good to have hair-splitters & lumpers". But according to research done by the deputy director at NCSE, Glenn Branch, the credit is due to naturalist Edward Newman who wrote in 1845, "The time has arrived for discarding imaginary species, and the duty of doing this is as imperative as the admission of new ones when such are really discovered. The talents described under the respective names of 'hair-splitting' and 'lumping' are unquestionably yielding their power to the mightier power of Truth." They were then introduced more widely by George G. Simpson in his 1945 work The Principles of Classification and a Classification of Mammals. As he put it: splitters make very small units – their critics say that if they can tell two animals apart, they place them in different genera ... and if they cannot tell them apart, they place them in different species. ... Lumpers make large units – their critics say that if a carnivore is neither a dog nor a bear, they call it a cat. A later use can be found in the title of a 1969 paper "On lumpers and splitters ..." by the medical geneticist Victor McKusick. Reference to lumpers and splitters in the humanities appeared in a debate in 1975 between J. H. Hexter and Christopher Hill, in the Times Literary Supplement. It followed from Hexter's detailed review of Hill's book Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England, in which Hill developed Max Weber's argument that the rise of capitalism was facilitated by Calvinist Puritanism. Hexter objected to Hill's "mining" of sources to find evidence that supported his theories. Hexter argued that Hill plucked quotations from sources in a way that distorted their meaning. Hexter explained this as a mental habit that he called "lumping". According to him, "lumpers" rejected differences and chose to emphasise similarities. Any evidence that did not fit their arguments was ignored as aberrant. Splitters, by contrast, emphasised differences, and resisted simple schemes. While lumpers consistently tried to create coherent patterns, splitters preferred incoherent complexity. == Usage in various fields == === Biology === The categorisation and naming of a particular species should be regarded as a hypothesis about the evolutionary relationships and distinguishability of that group of organisms. As further information comes to hand, the hypothesis may be confirmed or refuted. Sometimes, especially in the past when communication was more difficult, taxonomists working in isolation have given two distinct names to individual organisms later identified as the same species. When two named species are agreed to be of the same species, the older species name is almost always retained dropping the newer species name honouring a convention known as "priority of nomenclature". This form of lumping is technically called synonymisation. Dividing a taxon into multiple, often new, taxa is called splitting. Taxonomists are often referred to as "lumpers" or "splitters" by their colleagues, depending on their personal approach to recognizing differences or commonalities between organisms. For example, the number of genera used in Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group I (PPG I) has proved controversial. PPG I uses 18 lycophyte and 319 fern genera. The earlier system put forward by Smith et al. (2006) had suggested a range of 274 to 312 genera for ferns alone. By contrast, the system of Christenhusz & Chase (2014) used 5 lycophyte and about 212 fern genera. The number of fern genera was further reduced to 207 in a subsequent publication. Defending PPG I, Schuettpelz et al. (2018) argue that the larger number of genera is a result of "the gradual accumulation of new collections and new data" and hence "a greater appreciation of fern diversity and ... an improved ability to distinguish taxa". They also argue that the number of species per genus in the PPG I system is already higher than in other groups of organisms (about 33 species per genus for ferns as opposed to about 22 species per genus for angiosperms) and that reducing the number of genera as Christenhusz and Chase propose yields the excessive number of about 50 species per genus for ferns. In response, Christenhusz and Chase (2018) argue that the excessive splitting of genera destabilises the usage of names and will lead to greater instability in future, and that the highly split genera have few if any characters that can be used to recognise them, making identification difficult, even to generic level. They further argue that comparing numbers of species per genus in different groups is "fundamentally meaningless". === History === In history, lumpers are those who tend to create broad definitions that cover large periods of time and many disciplines, whereas splitters want to assign names to tight groups of inter-relationships. Lumping tends to create a more and more unwieldy definition, with members having less and less mutually in common. This can lead to definitions which are little more than conventionalities, or groups which join fundamentally different examples. Splitting often leads to "distinctions without difference", ornate and fussy categories, and failure to see underlying similarities. For example, in the arts, "Romantic" can refer specifically to a period of German poetry roughly from 1780 to 1810, but would exclude the later work of Goethe, among other writers. In music it can mean every composer from Hummel through Rachmaninoff, plus many that came after. === Software modelling === Software engineering often proceeds by building models (sometimes known as model-driven architecture). A lumper is keen to generalise, and produces models with a small number of broadly defined objects. A splitter is reluctant to generalise, and produces models with a large number of narrowly defined objects. Conversion between the two styles is not necessarily symmetrical. For example, if error messages in two narrowly defined classes behave in the same way, the classes can be easily combined. But if some messages in a broad class behave differently, every object in the class must be examined before the class can be split. This illustrates the principle that "splits can be lumped more easily than lumps can be split". === Language classification === There is no agreement among historical linguists about what amount of evidence is needed for two languages to be safely classified in the same language family. For this reason, many proposed language families have had lumper–splitter controversies, including Altaic, Pama–Nyungan, Nilo-Saharan, and most of the larger families of the Americas. At a completely different level, the splitting of a mutually intelligible dialect continuum into different languages, or lumping them into one, is also an issue that continually comes up, though the consensus in contemporary linguistics is that there is no completely objective way to settle the question. Splitters regard the comparative method (meaning not comparison in general, but only reconstruction of a common ancestor or protolanguage) as the only valid proof of kinship, and consider genetic relatedness to be the question of interest. American linguists of recent decades tend to be splitters. Lumpers are more willing to admit techniques like mass lexical comparison or lexicostatistics, and mass typological comparison, and to tolerate the uncertainty of whether relationships found by these methods are the result of linguistic divergence (descent from common ancestor) or language convergence (borrowing). Much long-range comparison work has been from Russian linguists belonging to the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics, most notably Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Sergei Starostin. In the United States, Greenberg and Ruhlen's work has been met with little acceptance from linguists. Earlier American linguists like Morris Swadesh and Edward Sapir also pursued large-scale classifications like Sapir's 1929 scheme for the Americas, accompanied by controversy similar to that today. === Religious studies === Paul F. Bradshaw suggests that the same principles of lumping and splitting apply to the study of early Christian liturgy. Lumpers, who tend to predominate in this field, try to find a single line of successive texts from the apostolic age to the
Read more →
Hubert Dreyfus's views on artificial intelligence

Hubert Dreyfus was a critic of artificial intelligence research. In a series of papers and books, including Alchemy and AI (1965), What Computers Can't Do (1972; 1979; 1992) and Mind over Machine (1986), he presented a skeptical and cautious assessment of AI's progress and a critique of the philosophical foundations of the field. Dreyfus' objections are discussed in most introductions to the philosophy of artificial intelligence, including Russell & Norvig (2021), a standard AI textbook, and in Fearn (2007), a survey of contemporary philosophy. Dreyfus argued that human intelligence and expertise depend primarily on yet-to-be understood informal and unconscious processes rather than symbolic manipulation and that these essentially human skills cannot be fully captured in formal rules. His critique was based on the insights of modern continental philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and was directed at the first wave of AI research which tried to reduce intelligence to high level formal symbols. When Dreyfus' ideas were first introduced in the mid-1960s, they were met in the AI community with ridicule and outright hostility. By the 1980s, however, some of his perspectives were rediscovered by researchers working in robotics and the new field of connectionism—approaches that were called "sub-symbolic" at the time because they eschewed early AI research's emphasis on high level symbols. In the 21st century, "sub-symbolic" artificial neural networks and other statistics-based approaches to machine learning were highly successful. Historian and AI researcher Daniel Crevier wrote: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments." Dreyfus said in 2007, "I figure I won and it's over—they've given up." == Dreyfus' critique == === The grandiose promises of artificial intelligence === In Alchemy and AI (1965) and What Computers Can't Do (1972), Dreyfus summarized the history of artificial intelligence and ridiculed the unbridled optimism that permeated the field. For example, Herbert A. Simon, following the success of his program General Problem Solver (1957), predicted that by 1967: A computer would be world champion in chess. A computer would discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem. Most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs. The press dutifully reported these predictions of the imminent arrival of machine intelligence. Dreyfus felt that this optimism was unwarranted and, in 1965, argued forcefully that predictions like these would not come true. He would eventually be proven right. Pamela McCorduck explains Dreyfus' position: A great misunderstanding accounts for public confusion about thinking machines, a misunderstanding perpetrated by the unrealistic claims researchers in AI have been making, claims that thinking machines are already here, or at any rate, just around the corner. These predictions were based on the success of the cognitive revolution, which promoted an "information processing" model of the mind. It was articulated by Newell and Simon in their physical symbol systems hypothesis, and later expanded into a philosophical position known as computationalism by philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Hilary Putnam. In AI, the approach is now called symbolic AI or "GOFAI". Dreyfus argued that "symbolic AI" was the latest version of the ancient program of rationalism in philosophy. Rationalism had come under heavy criticism in the 20th century from philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. The mind, according to modern continental philosophy, is not "rationalist" and is nothing like a digital computer. Cognitivism led early AI researchers to believe that they had successfully simulated the essential process of human thought, thus it seemed a short step to producing fully intelligent machines. Dreyfus' last paper detailed the ongoing history of the "first step fallacy", where AI researchers tend to wildly extrapolate initial success as promising, perhaps even guaranteeing, wild future successes. === Dreyfus' four assumptions of artificial intelligence research === In Alchemy and AI and What Computers Can't Do, Dreyfus identified four philosophical assumptions, at least one of which he deems necessary for AI to succeed. "In each case," Dreyfus writes, "the assumption is taken by workers in AI as an axiom, guaranteeing results, whereas it is, in fact, one hypothesis among others, to be tested by the success of such work." Dreyfus argues that AI would be impossible without accepting at least one of these four assumptions: The biological assumption The brain processes information in discrete operations by way of some biological equivalent of on/off switches. In the early days of research into neurology, scientists found that neurons fire in all-or-nothing pulses. Several researchers, such as Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, speculated with great confidence that neurons functioned similarly to the way Boolean logic gates operate, and so could be imitated by electronic circuitry at the level of the neuron. When digital computers became widely used in the early 50s, this argument was extended to suggest that the brain was a vast physical symbol system, manipulating the binary symbols of zero and one. Dreyfus was able to refute the biological assumption by citing research in neurology that suggested that the action and timing of neuron firing had analog components. But Daniel Crevier observes that "few still held that belief in the early 1970s, and nobody argued against Dreyfus" about the biological assumption. The psychological assumption The mind can be viewed as a device operating on bits of information according to formal rules. He refuted this assumption by showing that much of what we know about the world consists of complex attitudes or tendencies that make us lean towards one interpretation over another. He argued that, even when we use explicit symbols, we are using them against an unconscious and informal background including commonsense knowledge and that without this background our symbols cease to mean anything. This background, in Dreyfus' view, was not implemented in individual brains as explicit individual symbols with explicit individual meanings. The epistemological assumption All knowledge can be formalized. This concerns the philosophical issue of epistemology, or the study of knowledge. Even if we agree that the psychological assumption is false, AI researchers could still argue (as AI founder John McCarthy has) that it is possible for a symbol processing machine to represent all knowledge, regardless of whether human beings represent knowledge the same way. Dreyfus argued that there is no justification for this assumption, since so much of human knowledge is not symbolic or even expressible using formal constructs. The ontological assumption The world consists of independent facts that can be represented by independent symbols AI researchers (and futurists and science fiction writers) often assume that there is no limit to formal, scientific knowledge, because they assume that any phenomenon in the universe can be described by symbols or scientific theories. This assumes that everything that exists can be understood as objects, properties of objects, classes of objects, relations of objects, and so on: precisely those things that can be described by logic, language and mathematics. The study of being or existence is called ontology, and so Dreyfus calls this the ontological assumption. If this is false, then it raises doubts about what we can ultimately know and what intelligent machines will ultimately be able to help us to do. === Knowing-how vs. knowing-that: the primacy of intuition === In Mind Over Machine (1986), written (with his brother) during the heyday of expert systems, Dreyfus analyzed the difference between human expertise and the programs that claimed to capture it. This expanded on ideas from What Computers Can't Do, where he had made a similar argument criticizing the "cognitive simulation" school of AI research practiced by Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the 1960s. Dreyfus argued that human problem solving and expertise depend on our background sense of the context, of what is important and interesting given the situation, rather than on the process of searching through combinations of possibilities to find what we need. Dreyfus would describe it in 1986 as the difference between "knowing-that" and "knowing-how", based on Heidegger's distinction of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Knowing-that is our conscious, step-by-step problem solving abilities. We use these skills when we encounter a difficult problem that requires us to stop, step back and search through ideas one at time. At moments like this, the ideas become very precise and simple: they become context free symbols, which we manipulate using logic and language. These are the skills that Newell and Simon had demonstrated with both psy
Read more →
Dendral

Dendral was a project in artificial intelligence (AI) of the 1960s, and the computer software expert system that it produced. Its primary aim was to study hypothesis formation and discovery in science. For that, a specific task in science was chosen: help organic chemists in identifying unknown organic molecules, by analyzing their mass spectra and using knowledge of chemistry. It was done at Stanford University by Edward Feigenbaum, Bruce G. Buchanan, Joshua Lederberg, and Carl Djerassi, along with a team of highly creative research associates and students. It began in 1964 and spans approximately half the history of AI research. The software program Dendral is considered the first expert system because it automated the decision-making process and problem-solving behavior of organic chemists. The project consisted of research on two main programs Heuristic Dendral and Meta-Dendral, and several sub-programs. It was written in the Lisp programming language, which was considered the language of AI because of its flexibility. Many systems were derived from Dendral, including MYCIN, MOLGEN, PROSPECTOR, XCON, and STEAMER. There are many other programs today for solving the mass spectrometry inverse problem, see List of mass spectrometry software, but they are no longer described as 'artificial intelligence', just as structure searchers. The name Dendral is an acronym of the term "Dendritic Algorithm". == Heuristic Dendral == Heuristic Dendral is a program that uses mass spectra or other experimental data together with a knowledge base of chemistry to produce a set of possible chemical structures that may be responsible for producing the data. A mass spectrum of a compound is produced by a mass spectrometer, and is used to determine its molecular weight, the sum of the masses of its atomic constituents. For example, the compound water (H2O), has a molecular weight of 18 since hydrogen has a mass of 1.01 and oxygen 16.00, and its mass spectrum has a peak at 18 units. Heuristic Dendral would use this input mass and the knowledge of atomic mass numbers and valence rules, to determine the possible combinations of atomic constituents whose mass would add up to 18. As the weight increases and the molecules become more complex, the number of possible compounds increases drastically. Thus, a program that is able to reduce this number of candidate solutions through the process of hypothesis formation is essential. New graph-theoretic algorithms were invented by Lederberg, Harold Brown, and others that generate all graphs with a specified set of nodes and connection-types (chemical atoms and bonds) -- with or without cycles. Moreover, the team was able to prove mathematically that the generator is complete, in that it produces all graphs with the specified nodes and edges, and that it is non-redundant, in that the output contains no equivalent graphs (e.g., mirror images). The CONGEN program, as it became known, was developed largely by computational chemists Ray Carhart, Jim Nourse, and Dennis Smith. It was useful to chemists as a stand-alone program to generate chemical graphs showing a complete list of structures that satisfy the constraints specified by a user. == Meta-Dendral == Meta-Dendral is a machine learning system that receives the set of possible chemical structures and corresponding mass spectra as input, and proposes a set of rules of mass spectrometry that correlate structural features with processes that produce the mass spectrum. These rules would be fed back to Heuristic Dendral (in the planning and testing programs described below) to test their applicability. Thus, "Heuristic Dendral is a performance system and Meta-Dendral is a learning system". The program is based on two important features: the plan-generate-test paradigm and knowledge engineering. === Plan-generate-test paradigm === The plan-generate-test paradigm is the basic organization of the problem-solving method, and is a common paradigm used by both Heuristic Dendral and Meta-Dendral systems. The generator (later named CONGEN) generates potential solutions for a particular problem, which are then expressed as chemical graphs in Dendral. However, this is feasible only when the number of candidate solutions is minimal. When there are large numbers of possible solutions, Dendral has to find a way to put constraints that rules out large sets of candidate solutions. This is the primary aim of Dendral planner, which is a “hypothesis-formation” program that employs “task-specific knowledge to find constraints for the generator”. Last but not least, the tester analyzes each proposed candidate solution and discards those that fail to fulfill certain criteria. This mechanism of plan-generate-test paradigm is what holds Dendral together. === Knowledge Engineering === The primary aim of knowledge engineering is to attain a productive interaction between the available knowledge base and problem solving techniques. This is possible through development of a procedure in which large amounts of task-specific information is encoded into heuristic programs. Thus, the first essential component of knowledge engineering is a large “knowledge base.” Dendral has specific knowledge about the mass spectrometry technique, a large amount of information that forms the basis of chemistry and graph theory, and information that might be helpful in finding the solution of a particular chemical structure elucidation problem. This “knowledge base” is used both to search for possible chemical structures that match the input data, and to learn new “general rules” that help prune searches. The benefit Dendral provides the end user, even a non-expert, is a minimized set of possible solutions to check manually. == Heuristics == A heuristic is a rule of thumb, an algorithm that does not guarantee a solution, but reduces the number of possible solutions by discarding unlikely and irrelevant solutions. The use of heuristics to solve problems is called "heuristics programming", and was used in Dendral to allow it to replicate in machines the process through which human experts induce the solution to problems via rules of thumb and specific information. Heuristics programming was a major approach and a giant step forward in artificial intelligence, as it allowed scientists to finally automate certain traits of human intelligence. It became prominent among scientists in the late 1940s through George Polya’s book, How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method. As Herbert A. Simon said in The Sciences of the Artificial, "if you take a heuristic conclusion as certain, you may be fooled and disappointed; but if you neglect heuristic conclusions altogether you will make no progress at all." == History == During the mid 20th century, the question "can machines think?" became intriguing and popular among scientists, primarily to add humanistic characteristics to machine behavior. John McCarthy, who was one of the prime researchers of this field, termed this concept of machine intelligence as "artificial intelligence" (AI) during the Dartmouth summer in 1956. AI is usually defined as the capacity of a machine to perform operations that are analogous to human cognitive capabilities. Much research to create AI was done during the 20th century. Also around the mid 20th century, science, especially biology, faced a fast-increasing need to develop a "man-computer symbiosis", to aid scientists in solving problems. For example, the structural analysis of myoglobin, hemoglobin, and other proteins relentlessly needed instrumentation development due to its complexity. In the early 1960s, Joshua Lederberg started working with computers and quickly became tremendously interested in creating interactive computers to help him in his exobiology research. Specifically, he was interested in designing computing systems to help him study alien organic compounds. Lederberg had been heading a team designing instruments for the Mars Viking lander to search for precursor molecules of life in samples of the Mars surface, using a mass spectrometer coupled with a minicomputer. As he was not an expert in either chemistry or computer programming, he collaborated with Stanford chemist Carl Djerassi to help him with chemistry, and Edward Feigenbaum with programming, to automate the process of determining chemical structures from raw mass spectrometry data. Feigenbaum was an expert in programming languages and heuristics, and helped Lederberg design a system that replicated the way Djerassi solved structure elucidation problems. They devised a system called Dendritic Algorithm (Dendral) that was able to generate possible chemical structures corresponding to the mass spectrometry data as an output. Dendral then was still very inaccurate in assessing spectra of ketones, alcohols, and isomers of chemical compounds. Thus, Djerassi "taught" general rules to Dendral that could help eliminate most of the "chemically implausible" structures, and p
Read more →
Video renderer

A video renderer is software that processes a video file and sends it sequentially to the video display controller card for display on a computer screen. An example of a video renderer, is the VMR-7 that was used by Microsoft's DirectShow. An example of a UNIX video renderer is the one container within GStreamer. Commonly used video renderers are: Enhanced Video Renderer VMR9 Renderless Haali's Video Renderer Madvr Video Renderer JRVR, a part of JRiver Media Center
Read more →
Jan Leike

Jan Leike (born 1986 or 1987) is an AI alignment researcher who has worked at DeepMind and OpenAI. He joined Anthropic in May 2024. == Education == Jan Leike obtained his undergraduate degree from the University of Freiburg in Germany. After earning a master's degree in computer science, he pursued a PhD in machine learning at the Australian National University under the supervision of Marcus Hutter. == Career == Leike made a six-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute before joining DeepMind to focus on empirical AI safety research, where he collaborated with Shane Legg. === OpenAI === In 2021, Leike joined OpenAI. In June 2023, he and Ilya Sutskever became the co-leaders of the newly introduced "superalignment" project, which aimed to determine how to align future artificial superintelligences within four years to ensure their safety. This project involved automating AI alignment research using relatively advanced AI systems. At the time, Sutskever was OpenAI's Chief Scientist, and Leike was the Head of Alignment. Leike was featured in Time's list of the 100 most influential personalities in AI, both in 2023 and in 2024. In May 2024, Leike announced his resignation from OpenAI, following the departure of Sutskever, Daniel Kokotajlo and several other AI safety employees from the company. Leike wrote that "Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products", and that he "gradually lost trust" in OpenAI's leadership. In May 2024, Leike joined Anthropic, an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees.
Read more →
Open Knowledge Base Connectivity

Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) is a protocol and an API for accessing knowledge in knowledge representation systems such as ontology repositories and object–relational databases. It is somewhat complementary to the Knowledge Interchange Format that serves as a general representation language for knowledge. It is developed by SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center for DARPA's High Performance Knowledge Base program (HPKB).
Read more →