Category Archives: artificial neural network

Catastrophic Forgetting: Learning’s Effect on Machine Minds

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What if every time you learned something new, you forgot a little of what you knew before? That sort of overwriting doesn’t happen in the human brain, but it does in artificial neural networks. It’s appropriately called catastrophic forgetting. So why are neural networks so successful despite this? How does this affect the future of things like self-driving cars? Just what limit does this put on what neural networks will be able to do, and what’s being done about it?

The way a neural network stores knowledge is by setting the values of weights (the lines in between the neurons …read more

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Creepy Speaking Neural Networks

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Tech artist [Alexander Reben] has shared some work in progress with us. It’s a neural network trained on various famous peoples’ speech (YouTube, embedded below). [Alexander]’s artistic goal is to capture the “soul” of a person’s voice, in much the same way as death masks of centuries past. Of course, listening to [Alexander]’s Rob Boss is no substitute for actually watching an old Bob Ross tape — indeed it never even manages to say “happy little trees” — but it is certainly recognizable as the man himself, and now we can generate an infinite amount of his patter.

Behind the …read more

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Train Your Robot To Walk with a Neural Network

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[Basti] was playing around with Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), and decided that a lot of the “hello world” type programs just weren’t zingy enough to instill his love for the networks in others. So he juiced it up a little bit by applying a reasonably simple ANN to teach a four-legged robot to walk (in German, translated here).

While we think it’s awesome that postal systems the world over have been machine sorting mail based on similar algorithms for years now, watching a squirming quartet of servos come to forward-moving consensus is more viscerally inspiring. Job well done! Check out …read more

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