Category: Technology

Password advice

David Leave a comment

There have been news stories about how the Office of Inspector General, U.S. Department of the Interior found weak passwords in the Department of Interior’s Active Directory accounts:

The OIG report:
P@s$w0rds at the U.S. Department of the Interior: Easily Cracked Passwords, Lack of Multifactor Authentication, and Other Failures Put Critical DOI Systems at Risk
It has password advice on page 8:

NIST SP 800–63 recommends using passphrases instead of passwords …

Password vs. Passphrase Examples
Password = 5pr1ng*Ish3re
Passphrase = DinosaurLetterTrailChance

I believe the passphase words have to be chosen randomly from a large word list to be effective, but it is easier to remember than a complex password.

Geoffrey Hinton’s Forward-Forward Algorithm Charts a New Path for Neural Networks

David Leave a comment

2022-12-08 by Synced

there is increasing interest in whether the biological brain follows backpropagation or, as Hinton asks, whether it has some other way of getting the gradients needed to adjust the weights on its connections. In this regard, Hinton proposes the FF [Forward-Forward] algorithm as an alternative to backpropagation for neural network learning.

…

It aims to replace the forward and backward passes of backpropagation with two forward passes: a positive pass that operates on real data and adjusts weights “to improve the goodness in every hidden layer,” and a negative pass that operates on externally supplied or model-generated “negative data” and adjusts weights to deteriorate the goodness.

https://syncedreview.com/2022/12/08/geoffrey-hintons-forward-forward-algorithm-charts-a-new-path-for-neural-networks/

The Forward-Forward Algorithm: Some Preliminary
Investigations by Geoffrey Hinton
https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/FFA13.pdf

Using the Forward-Forward Algorithm for Image Classification
Includes sample Python code using the Keras Python library.
https://keras.io/examples/vision/forwardforward/

A Thought on the Lovelace Test

David Leave a comment

The Lovelace test demands of a computing machine that it not only produce an artifact that is by conventional standards amazing, but it leaves everyone looking at it
stupefied as to how it does what it does: including in this stupefaction the creators and designers of the machine.
– Selmer Bingsjord [1]

 

An artificial agent, designed by a human, passes the [Lovelace] test only if it originates a “program” that it was not engineered to produce. The outputting of the new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can’t be a hardware fluke, and it must be the result of processes the artificial agent can reproduce. Now here’s the kicker: The agent’s designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. [2]

 

My thought is if God made humans, can a human use creativity to make an artifact, so that God can’t explain how it was made?

 

[1]
Artificial Intelligence: Will Machines Take Over? (Science Uprising, Ep. 10)
2022-09-21 YouTube channel: “Discovery Science”
https://youtu.be/suuxAZbDCYE?t=362

[2]
Forget Turing, the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI
2014-07-08 Jordan Pearson
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pgaany/forget-turing-the-lovelace-test-has-a-better-shot-at-spotting-ai