AI Chat Prompt Generator

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  Elasticity (computing)

  In computing, elasticity is defined as "the degree to which a system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and de-provisioning resources in an autonomic manner, such that at each point in time the available resources match the current demand as closely as possible". Elasticity is a defining characteristic that differentiates cloud computing from previously proposed distributed computing paradigms, such as grid computing. The dynamic adaptation of capacity, e.g., by altering the use of computing resources, to meet a varying workload is called "elastic computing". In the world of distributed systems, there are several definitions according to the authors; some consider the concepts of scalability a sub-part of elasticity, others as being distinct. == Purpose == Elasticity aims to match the amount of resources allocated to a service with the amount of resources it actually requires, avoiding over- or under-provisioning. Over-provisioning, i.e., allocating more resources than required, should be avoided as it may incur extra costs (monetary, energy, operational, etc.) for unused or underutilized resources. For example, if a website is over-provisioned with two cloud computing resources to handle current demand that only requires one resource, the costs of maintaining the second resource would effectively be wasted. Under-provisioning, i.e., allocating fewer resources than required, must be avoided; otherwise, the service cannot serve its users with a good service. For example, under-provisioning a website may make it seem slow or unreachable, because not enough resources have been allocated to meet current demand. == Example == Elasticity can be illustrated through an example of a service provider who wants to run a website on the cloud. At moment t 0 {\displaystyle t_{0}} , the website is unpopular and a single machine is sufficient to serve all users. At moment t 1 {\displaystyle t_{1}} , the website suddenly becomes popular, and a single machine is no longer sufficient to serve all users. Based on the number of web users simultaneously accessing the website and the resource requirements of the web server, ten machines are needed. An elastic system should immediately detect this condition and provision nine additional machines from the cloud to serve all users responsively. At time t 2 {\displaystyle t_{2}} , the website becomes unpopular again. The ten machines currently allocated to the website are mostly idle and a single machine would be sufficient to serve the few users who are accessing the website. An elastic system should immediately detect this condition and deprovision nine machines, releasing them to the cloud. == Problems == === Resource provisioning time === Resource provisioning takes time. A cloud virtual machine (VM) can be acquired at any time by the user; however, it may take up to several minutes for the acquired VM to be ready to use. The VM startup time is dependent on factors such as image size, VM type, data center location, number of VMs, etc. Cloud providers have different VM startup performance. This implies that any control mechanism designed for elastic applications must consider the time needed for the resource provisioning actions to take effect. === Monitoring elastic applications === Elastic applications can allocate and deallocate resources on demand for specific application components. This makes cloud resources volatile, and traditional monitoring tools which associate monitoring data with a particular resource, such as Ganglia or Nagios, are no longer suitable for monitoring the behavior of elastic applications. For example, during its lifetime, a data storage tier of an elastic application might add and remove data storage VMs due to cost and performance requirements, varying the number of used VMs. Thus, additional information is needed in monitoring elastic applications, such as associating the logical application structure over the underlying virtual infrastructure. This in turn generates other problems, such as data aggregation from multiple VMs towards extracting the behavior of the application component running on top of those VMs, as different metrics may need to be aggregated differently (e.g., CPU usage could be averaged, network transfer might be summed up). === Stakeholder requirements === When deploying applications in cloud infrastructures (IaaS/PaaS), stakeholder requirements need to be considered in order to ensure that elastic behavior meets stakeholder needs. Traditionally, the optimal trade-off between cost and quality or performance is considered; however, for real world cloud users, requirements regarding elastic behavior are more complex and target multiple dimensions of elasticity (e.g., SYBL). === Multiple levels of control === Cloud applications vary in type and complexity, with multiple levels of artifacts deployed in layers. Controlling such structures must take into consideration a variety of issues. For multi-level control, control systems need to consider the impact lower level control has upon higher level ones, and vice versa (e.g., controlling virtual machines, web containers, or web services in the same time), as well as conflicts that may appear between various control strategies from various levels. Elastic strategies on in cloud computing can take advantage of control-theoretic methods (e.g., predictive control has been experimented in cloud computing scenarios by showing considerable advantages with respect to reactive methods). One approach to multi-level elastic clouc control is rSYBL.

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  Lighthill report

  Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey, commonly known as the Lighthill report, is a scholarly article by James Lighthill, published in Artificial Intelligence: a paper symposium in 1973. It was compiled by Lighthill for the British Science Research Council as an evaluation of academic research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). The report gave a very pessimistic prognosis for many core aspects of research in this field, stating that "In no part of the field have the discoveries made so far produced the major impact that was then promised". It "formed the basis for the decision by the British government to end support for AI research in most British universities", contributing to an AI winter in the United Kingdom. == Publication history == It was commissioned by the SRC in 1972 for Lighthill to "make a personal review of the subject [of AI]". Lighthill completed the report in July. The SRC discussed the report in September, and decided to publish it, together with some alternative points of view by Stuart Sutherland, Roger Needham, Christopher Longuet-Higgins, and Donald Michie. The SRC's decision to invite the report was partly a reaction to high levels of discord within the University of Edinburgh's Department of Artificial Intelligence, one of the earliest and biggest centres for AI research in the UK. On May 9, 1973, Lighthill debated several leading AI researchers (Donald Michie, John McCarthy, Richard Gregory) at the Royal Institution in London concerning the report. == Content == While the report was supportive of research into the simulation of neurophysiological and psychological processes, it was "highly critical of basic research in foundational areas such as robotics and language processing". The report stated that AI researchers had failed to address the issue of combinatorial explosion when solving problems within real-world domains. That is, the report states that whilst AI techniques may have worked within the scope of small problem domains, the techniques would not scale up well to solve more realistic problems. The report represents a pessimistic view of AI that began after early excitement in the field. The report divides AI research into three categories: Advanced Automation ("A"): applications of AI, such as optical character recognition, mechanical component design and manufacture, missile perception and guidance, etc. Computer-based Central Nervous System research ("C"): building computational models of human brains (neurobiology) and behavior (psychology). Bridge, or Building Robots ("B"): research that combines categories A and C. This category is intentionally vague. Projects in category A had had some success, but only in restricted domains where a large quantity of detailed knowledge was used in designing the program. This was disappointing to researchers who hoped for generic methods. Due to the issue of the combinatorial explosion, the amount of detailed knowledge required by the program quickly grew too large to be entered by hand, thus restricting projects to restricted domains. Projects in category C had had some measure of success. Artificial neural networks were successfully used to model neurobiological data. SHRDLU demonstrated that human use of language, even in fine details, depends on the semantics or knowledge, and is not purely syntactical. This was influential in psycholinguistics. Attempts to extend SHRDLU to larger domains of discourse was considered impractical, again due to the issue of the combinatorial explosion. Projects in category B were held to be failures. One important project, that of "programming and building a robot that would mimic human ability in a combination of eye-hand co-ordination and common-sense problem solving", was considered entirely disappointing. Similarly, chess playing programs were no better than human amateurs. Due to the combinatorial explosion, the run-time of general algorithms quickly grew impractical, requiring detailed problem-specific heuristics. The report stated that it was expected that within the next 25 years, category A would simply become applied technologies engineering, C would integrate with psychology and neurobiology, while category B would be abandoned.

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  Demis Hassabis

  Sir Demis Hassabis (/ˈdɛ.mɪs/ DE-mis /hɑːˈsɑː.bis/ hah-SAH-bees; born Dimitrios Hassapis, Greek: Δημήτριος Χασάπης, 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Hassabis and John M. Jumper were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their AI research contributions to protein structure prediction. Hassabis is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has won awards for his research efforts, including the Breakthrough Prize, the Canada Gairdner International Award and the Lasker Award. He was appointed a CBE in 2017, and knighted in 2024 for his work on AI. He was also listed among the Time 100 most influential people in the world in 2017 and 2025, and was one of the "Architects of AI" collectively chosen as Time's 2025 Person of the Year. == Early life and education == Hassabis was born to Costas and Angela Hassapis. His father is a Greek Cypriot and his mother is a Chinese Singaporean. Demis grew up in North London. His original surname was "Hassapis" (Greek: Χασάπης), meaning "butcher" in Greek, but he later, according to Ingo Althöfer, "executed a point mutation by changing ‘p’ to ‘b’". One of his younger brothers still carries the original surname. In his early career, he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert board games player. A child prodigy in chess from the age of four, when he first learnt chess by watching his father playing against his uncle, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 and captained many of the England junior chess teams. He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford–Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996 and 1997, winning a half blue. He first got interested in technology after buying his first computer in 1984, a ZX Spectrum 48K, funded from chess winnings. He taught himself how to program from books. He subsequently wrote his first AI program on a Commodore Amiga to play the reversi board game. Between 1988 and 1990, Hassabis was educated at Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, a boys' grammar school in North London. He was subsequently home-schooled by his parents for a year, before studying at the comprehensive school of Christ's College in East Finchley. He completed his A-level exams two years early at 16. === Bullfrog Productions === Asked by Cambridge University to take a gap year owing to his young age, Hassabis began his computer games career at Bullfrog Productions after entering an Amiga Power "Win-a-job-at-Bullfrog" competition. He began by playtesting on Syndicate and then at 17 co-designing and lead-programming on the 1994 game Theme Park, with the game's designer Peter Molyneux. Theme Park, a simulation video game, sold several million copies and inspired a whole genre of simulation sandbox games. Despite being offered a seven-figure sum to remain in the games industry, he turned it down. He earned enough from his gap year to pay his own way through university. === University of Cambridge === Hassabis left Bullfrog to study at Queens' College of the University of Cambridge, where he completed the Computer Science Tripos and graduated in 1997 with a double first. == Career and research == === Lionhead === After graduating from Cambridge, Hassabis worked at Lionhead Studios. Games designer Peter Molyneux, with whom Hassabis had worked at Bullfrog Productions, had recently founded the company. At Lionhead, Hassabis worked as lead AI programmer on the 2001 god game Black & White. === Elixir Studios === Hassabis left Lionhead in 1998 to found Elixir Studios, a London-based independent games developer, signing publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal and Microsoft. In addition to managing the company, Hassabis served as executive designer of the games Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius. Each received BAFTA nominations for their interactive music scores, created by James Hannigan. The release of Elixir's first game, Republic: The Revolution, a highly ambitious and unusual political simulation game, was delayed due to its huge scope, which involved an AI simulation of the workings of an entire fictional country. The final game was reduced from its original vision and greeted with lukewarm reviews, receiving a Metacritic score of 62/100. Evil Genius, a tongue-in-cheek Austin Powers parody, fared much better with a score of 75/100. In April 2005 the intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers and the studio was closed. === Neuroscience research === Following Elixir Studios, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2009 supervised by Eleanor Maguire. He sought to find inspiration in the human brain for new AI algorithms. He continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a visiting scientist jointly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the lab of Tomaso Poggio, and Harvard University, before earning a Henry Wellcome postdoctoral research fellowship to the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL in 2009 working with Peter Dayan. Working in the field of imagination, memory, and amnesia, he co-authored several influential papers published in Nature, Science, Neuron, and PNAS. His very first academic work, published in PNAS, was a landmark paper that showed systematically for the first time that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. The finding established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall. Based on this work and a follow-up functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, Hassabis developed a new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination. This work received widespread coverage in the mainstream media and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year by the journal Science. He later generalised these ideas to advance the notion of a 'simulation engine of the mind' whose role it was to imagine events and scenarios to aid with better planning. === DeepMind === Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a machine learning AI startup, founded in London in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. Hassabis met Legg when both were postdocs at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and he and Suleyman had been friends through family. Hassabis also recruited his university friend and Elixir partner David Silver. DeepMind's mission is to "solve intelligence" and then use intelligence "to solve everything else". More concretely, DeepMind aims to combine insights from systems neuroscience with new developments in machine learning and computing hardware to unlock increasingly powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that will work towards the creation of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company has focused on training learning algorithms to master games, and in December 2013 it announced that it had made a pioneering breakthrough by training an algorithm called a Deep Q-Network (DQN) to play Atari games at a superhuman level by using only the raw pixels on the screen as inputs. DeepMind's early investors included several high-profile tech entrepreneurs. In 2014, Google purchased DeepMind for £400 million. Although most of the company has remained an independent entity based in London, DeepMind Health has since been directly incorporated into Google Health. Since the Google acquisition, the company has notched up a number of significant achievements, perhaps the most notable being the creation of AlphaGo, a program that defeated world champion Lee Sedol at the complex game of Go. Go had been considered a holy grail of AI, for its high number of possible board positions and resistance to existing programming techniques. However, AlphaGo beat European champion Fan Hui 5–0 in October 2015 before winning 4–1 against former world champion Lee Sedol in March 2016 and winning 3–0 against the world's top-ranked player Ke Jie in 2017. Additional DeepMind accomplishments include creating a neural Turing machine, reducing the energy used by the cooling systems in Google's data centres by 40%, and advancing research on AI safety. DeepMind has also been responsible for technical advances in machine learning, having produced a number of award-winning papers. In particular, the company has made significant advances in deep learning and reinforcement learning, and pioneered the field of deep reinforcement learning which combines these two methods. Hassabis has predicted that artificial intelligence will be "one of the most beneficial techn

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  Hubert Dreyfus

  Hubert Lederer Dreyfus ( DRY-fəs; October 15, 1929 – April 22, 2017) was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger". Dreyfus was featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World (2010), and was among the philosophers interviewed by Bryan Magee for the BBC Television series The Great Philosophers (1987). The Futurama character Professor Hubert Farnsworth is partly named after him, writer Eric Kaplan having been a former student. == Life and career == Dreyfus was born on 15 October 1929, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Stanley S. and Irene (Lederer) Dreyfus. He attended Harvard University from 1947. With a senior honors thesis on Causality and Quantum Theory (for which W. V. O. Quine was the main examiner) he was awarded a B.A. summa cum laude in 1951 and joined Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded a M.A. in 1952. He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard from 1952 to 1953 (as he was again in 1954 and 1956). Then, on a Harvard Sheldon traveling fellowship, Dreyfus studied at the University of Freiburg from 1953 to 1954. During this time he had an interview with Martin Heidegger. Sean D. Kelly records that Dreyfus found the meeting 'disappointing.' A brief mention of it was made by Dreyfus during his 1987 BBC interview with Bryan Magee in remarks that are revealing of both his and Heidegger's opinion of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Between 1956 and 1957, Dreyfus undertook research at the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain on a Fulbright Fellowship. Towards the end of his stay, his first (jointly authored) paper "Curds and Lions in Don Quijote" would appear in print. After acting as an instructor in philosophy at Brandeis University (1957–1959), he attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, on a French government grant (1959–1960). From 1960, first as an instructor, then as an assistant and then associate professor, Dreyfus taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1964, with his dissertation Husserl's Phenomenology of Perception, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard. (Due to his knowledge of Husserl, Dagfinn Føllesdal sat on the thesis committee but he has asserted that Dreyfus "was not really my student.") That same year, his co-translation (with his first wife) of Sense and Non-Sense by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was published. Also in 1964, and whilst still at MIT, he was employed as a consultant by the RAND Corporation to review the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). This resulted in the publication, in 1965, of the "famously combative" Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, which proved to be the first of a series of papers and books attacking the AI field's claims and assumptions. The first edition of What Computers Can't Do would follow in 1972, and this critique of AI (which has been translated into at least ten languages) would establish Dreyfus's public reputation. However, as the editors of his Festschrift noted: "the study and interpretation of 'continental' philosophers... came first in the order of his philosophical interests and influences." === Berkeley === In 1968, although he had been granted tenure, Dreyfus left MIT and became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, (winning, that same year, the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching). In 1972 he was promoted to full professor. Though Dreyfus retired from his chair in 1994, he continued as professor of philosophy in the Graduate School (and held, from 1999, a joint appointment in the rhetoric department). He continued to teach philosophy at UC Berkeley until his last class in December 2016. Dreyfus was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate for "his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence" and his interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy by Erasmus University. Dreyfus died on April 22, 2017. His younger brother and sometimes collaborator, Stuart Dreyfus, is a professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley. == Dreyfus' criticism of AI == Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence (AI) concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer hardware and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations (in the form of algorithmic rules) on discrete representations or symbols. Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity (either by animate or inanimate objects) can be formalized (mathematically) in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic (indivisible) facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that intelligence is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality. On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that cognition is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free (see contextualism). Therefore, a truly scientific psychology is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world. However, it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will be able to) understand our own behavior in the same way as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context-free psychology is a contradiction in terms. Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist views (on which AI has been based), our being is in fact highly context-bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law-governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case. In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are not (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they are will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore, the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure. Dreyfus argues that to get a device or devices with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world and to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks as well as researchers in the field of artificial life.) Contrary to a popular misconception, Dreyfus never predicted that computers would never beat humans at chess. In Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, he only reported (correctly) the state of the art of the time: "Still no chess program can play even amateur chess." Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier." == Webcasting philosophy == When UC Berkeley and Apple began making a selected number of lecture classes freely available to the public as podcasts beginning around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching a course called "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – From Gods to God and Back" rose to the 58th most popular webcast on iTunes. These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his

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  Generative art

  Generative art is post-conceptual art that has been created (in whole or in part) with the use of an autonomous system. An autonomous system in this context is generally one that is non-human and can independently determine features of an artwork that would otherwise require decisions made directly by the artist. In some cases the human creator may claim that the generative system represents their own artistic idea, and in others that the system takes on the role of the creator. "Generative art" often refers to algorithmic art (algorithmically determined computer generated artwork) and synthetic media (general term for any algorithmically generated media), but artists can also make generative art using systems of chemistry, biology, mechanics and robotics, smart materials, manual randomization, mathematics, data mapping, symmetry, and tiling. Generative algorithms, algorithms programmed to produce artistic works through predefined rules, stochastic methods, or procedural logic, often yielding dynamic, unique, and contextually adaptable outputs—are central to many of these practices. == History == The use of the word "generative" in the discussion of art has developed over time. The use of "Artificial DNA" defines a generative approach to art focused on the construction of a system able to generate unpredictable events, all with a recognizable common character. The use of autonomous systems, required by some contemporary definitions, focuses a generative approach where the controls are strongly reduced. This approach is also named "emergent". Margaret Boden and Ernest Edmonds have noted the use of the term "generative art" in the broad context of automated computer graphics in the 1960s, beginning with artwork exhibited by Georg Nees and Frieder Nake in 1965: A. Michael Noll did his initial computer art, combining randomness with order, in 1962, and exhibited it along with works by Bell Julesz in 1965. The terms "generative art" and "computer art" have been used in tandem, and more or less interchangeably, since the very earliest days. The first such exhibition showed the work of Nees in February 1965, which some claim was titled "Generative Computergrafik". While Nees does not himself remember, this was the title of his doctoral thesis published a few years later. The correct title of the first exhibition and catalog was "computer-grafik". "Generative art" and related terms was in common use by several other early computer artists around this time, including Manfred Mohr and Ken Knowlton. Vera Molnár (born 1924) is a French media artist of Hungarian origin. Molnar is widely considered to be a pioneer of generative art, and is also one of the first women to use computers in her art practice. The term "Generative Art" with the meaning of dynamic artwork-systems able to generate multiple artwork-events was clearly used the first time for the "Generative Art" conference in Milan in 1998. The term has also been used to describe geometric abstract art where simple elements are repeated, transformed, or varied to generate more complex forms. Thus defined, generative art was practiced by the Argentinian artists Eduardo Mac Entyre and Miguel Ángel Vidal in the late 1960s. In 1972 the Romanian-born Paul Neagu created the Generative Art Group in Britain. It was populated exclusively by Neagu using aliases such as "Hunsy Belmood" and "Edward Larsocchi". In 1972 Neagu gave a lecture titled 'Generative Art Forms' at the Queen's University, Belfast Festival. In 1970 the School of the Art Institute of Chicago created a department called Generative Systems. As described by Sonia Landy Sheridan the focus was on art practices using the then new technologies for the capture, inter-machine transfer, printing and transmission of images, as well as the exploration of the aspect of time in the transformation of image information. Also noteworthy is John Dunn, first a student and then a collaborator of Sheridan. In 1988 Clauser identified the aspect of systemic autonomy as a critical element in generative art: It should be evident from the above description of the evolution of generative art that process (or structuring) and change (or transformation) are among its most definitive features, and that these features and the very term 'generative' imply dynamic development and motion. (the result) is not a creation by the artist but rather the product of the generative process - a self-precipitating structure. In 1989 Celestino Soddu defined the Generative Design approach to Architecture and Town Design in his book Citta' Aleatorie. In 1989 Franke referred to "generative mathematics" as "the study of mathematical operations suitable for generating artistic images." From the mid-1990s Brian Eno popularized the terms generative music and generative systems, making a connection with earlier experimental music by Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. From the end of the 20th century, communities of generative artists, designers, musicians and theoreticians began to meet, forming cross-disciplinary perspectives. The first meeting about generative Art was in 1998, at the inaugural International Generative Art conference at Politecnico di Milano University, Italy. In Australia, the Iterate conference on generative systems in the electronic arts followed in 1999. On-line discussion has centered around the eu-gene mailing list, which began late 1999, and has hosted much of the debate which has defined the field. These activities have more recently been joined by the Generator.x conference in Berlin starting in 2005. In 2012 the new journal GASATHJ, Generative Art Science and Technology Hard Journal was founded by Celestino Soddu and Enrica Colabella jointing several generative artists and scientists in the editorial board. Some have argued that as a result of this engagement across disciplinary boundaries, the community has converged on a shared meaning of the term. As Boden and Edmonds put it in 2011: Today, the term "Generative Art" is still current within the relevant artistic community. Since 1998 a series of conferences have been held in Milan with that title (Generativeart.com), and Brian Eno has been influential in promoting and using generative art methods (Eno, 1996). Both in music and in visual art, the use of the term has now converged on work that has been produced by the activation of a set of rules and where the artist lets a computer system take over at least some of the decision-making (although, of course, the artist determines the rules). In the call of the Generative Art conferences in Milan (annually starting from 1998), the definition of Generative Art by Celestino Soddu: Generative Art is the idea realized as genetic code of artificial events, as construction of dynamic complex systems able to generate endless variations. Each Generative Project is a concept-software that works producing unique and non-repeatable events, like music or 3D Objects, as possible and manifold expressions of the generating idea strongly recognizable as a vision belonging to an artist / designer / musician / architect /mathematician. Discussion on the eu-gene mailing list was framed by the following definition by Adrian Ward from 1999: Generative art is a term given to work which stems from concentrating on the processes involved in producing an artwork, usually (although not strictly) automated by the use of a machine or computer, or by using mathematic or pragmatic instructions to define the rules by which such artworks are executed. A similar definition is provided by Philip Galanter: Generative art refers to any art practice where the artist creates a process, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is then set into motion with some degree of autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art. Around the 2020s, generative AI models learned to imitate the distinct style of particular authors. For example, a generative image model such as Stable Diffusion is able to model the stylistic characteristics of an artist like Pablo Picasso (including his particular brush strokes, use of colour, perspective, and so on), and a user can engineer a prompt such as "an astronaut riding a horse, by Picasso" to cause the model to generate a novel image applying the artist's style to an arbitrary subject. Generative image models have received significant backlash from artists who object to their style being imitated without their permission, arguing that this harms their ability to profit from their own work. The emergence of text-to-image generative AI systems has expanded debates over authorship, copyright, and artistic labor. The main issues in these debates include the eligibility of AI-generated outputs for copyright protection and the legal and ethical questions of using existing copyrighted works as training data for generative AI systems. == Types == === Music === Johann Kirnberger's Mu

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  Conflict resolution strategy

  Conflict resolution strategies are used in production systems in artificial intelligence, such as in rule-based expert systems, to help in choosing which production rule to fire. The need for such a strategy arises when the conditions of two or more rules are satisfied by the currently known facts. == Categories == Conflict resolution strategies fall into several main categories. They each have advantages which form their rationales. Specificity - If all of the conditions of two or more rules are satisfied, choose the rule according to how specific its conditions are. It is possible to favor either the more general or the more specific case. The most specific may be identified roughly as the one having the greatest number of preconditions. This usefully catches exceptions and other special cases before firing the more general (default) rules. Recency - When two or more rules could be chosen, favor the one that matches the most recently added facts, as these are most likely to describe the current situation. Not previously used - If a rule's conditions are satisfied, but previously the same rule has been satisfied by the same facts, ignore the rule. This helps to prevent the system from entering infinite loops. Order - Pick the first applicable rule in order of presentation. This is the strategy that Prolog interpreters use by default, but any strategy may be implemented by building suitable rules in a Prolog system. Arbitrary choice - Pick a rule at random. This has the merit of being simple to compute.

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  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.

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  Xcon

  The R1, internally called XCON (Expert Configurer), program was a production-rule-based system written in OPS5 by John P. McDermott of Carnegie Mellon University in 1978 to assist in the ordering of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) VAX computer systems by automatically selecting the computer system components based on the customer's requirements. == Overview == In developing the system, McDermott made use of experts from both DEC's PDP/11 and VAX computer systems groups. These experts sometimes even disagreed amongst themselves as to an optimal configuration. The resultant "sorting it out" had an additional benefit in terms of the quality of VAX systems delivered. XCON first went into use in 1980 in DEC's plant in Salem, New Hampshire, US. It eventually had about 2500 rules. By 1986, it had processed 80,000 orders, and achieved 95–98% accuracy. It was estimated to be saving DEC $25M a year by reducing the need to give customers free components when technicians made errors, by speeding the assembly process, and by increasing customer satisfaction. Before XCON, when ordering a VAX from DEC, every cable, connection, and bit of software had to be ordered separately. (Computers and peripherals were not sold complete in boxes as they are today.) The sales people were not always very technically expert, so customers would find that they had hardware without the correct cables, printers without the correct drivers, a processor without the correct language chip, and so on. This meant delays and caused a lot of customer dissatisfaction and resultant legal action. XCON interacted with the sales person, asking critical questions before printing out a coherent and workable system specification/order slip. XCON's success led DEC to rewrite XCON as XSEL—a version of XCON intended for use by DEC's salesforce to aid a customer in properly configuring their VAX (so they would not, say, choose a computer too large to fit through their doorway or choose too few cabinets for the components to fit in). Location problems and configuration were handled by yet another expert system, XSITE. McDermott's 1980 paper on R1 won the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Classic Paper Award in 1999. Footnote 2 gave a humorous explanation for the name "R1" as "Four years ago I couldn't even say "knowledge engineer", now I ... [are one.]".

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  Language Server Protocol

  The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source-code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers that provide "language intelligence tools": programming language-specific features like code completion, syntax highlighting and marking of warnings and errors, as well as refactoring routines. The goal of the protocol is to allow programming language support to be implemented and distributed independently of any given editor or IDE. In the early 2020s, LSP quickly became a "norm" for language intelligence tools providers. == History == LSP was originally developed for Microsoft Visual Studio Code and is now an open standard. On June 27, 2016, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Red Hat and Codenvy to standardize the protocol's specification. Its specification is hosted and developed on GitHub. == Background == Modern IDEs provide programmers with sophisticated features like code completion, refactoring, navigating to a symbol's definition, syntax highlighting, and error and warning markers. For example, in a text-based programming language, a programmer might want to rename a method read. The programmer could either manually edit the respective source code files and change the appropriate occurrences of the old method name into the new name, or instead use an IDE's refactoring capabilities to make all the necessary changes automatically. To be able to support this style of refactoring, an IDE needs a sophisticated understanding of the programming language that the program's source is written in. A programming tool without such an understanding—for example, one that performs a naive search-and-replace instead—could introduce errors. When renaming a read method, for example, the tool should not replace the partial match in a variable that might be called readyState, nor should it replace the portion of a code comment containing the word "already". Neither should renaming a local variable read, for example, end up altering identically-named variables in other scopes. Conventional compilers or interpreters for a specific programming language are typically unable to provide these language services, because they are written with the goal of either transforming the source code into object code or immediately executing the code. Additionally, language services must be able to handle source code that is not well-formed, e.g. because the programmer is in the middle of editing and has not yet finished typing a statement, procedure, or other construct. Additionally, small changes to a source code file which are done during typing usually change the semantics of the program. In order to provide instant feedback to the user, the editing tool must be able to very quickly evaluate the syntactical and semantical consequences of a specific modification. Compilers and interpreters therefore provide a poor candidate for producing the information needed for an editing tool to consume. Prior to the design and implementation of the Language Server Protocol for the development of Visual Studio Code, most language services were generally tied to a given IDE or other editor. In the absence of the Language Server Protocol, language services are typically implemented by using a tool-specific extension API. Providing the same language service to another editing tool requires effort to adapt the existing code so that the service may target the second editor's extension interfaces. The Language Server Protocol allows for decoupling language services from the editor so that the services may be contained within a general-purpose language server. Any editor can inherit sophisticated support for many different languages by making use of existing language servers. Similarly, a programmer involved with the development of a new programming language can make services for that language available to existing editing tools. Making use of language servers via the Language Server Protocol thus also reduces the burden on vendors of editing tools, because vendors do not need to develop language services of their own for the languages the vendor intends to support, as long as the language servers have already been implemented. The Language Server Protocol also enables the distribution and development of servers contributed by an interested third party, such as end users, without additional involvement by either the vendor of the compiler for the programming language in use or the vendor of the editor to which the language support is being added. LSP is not restricted to programming languages. It can be used for any kind of text-based language, like specifications or domain-specific languages (DSL). == Technical overview == When a user edits one or more source code files using a language server protocol-enabled tool, the tool acts as a client that consumes the language services provided by a language server. The tool may be a text editor or IDE and the language services could be refactoring, code completion, etc. The client informs the server about what the user is doing, e.g., opening a file or inserting a character at a specific text position. The client can also request the server to perform a language service, e.g. to format a specified range in the text document. The server answers a client's request with an appropriate response. For example, the formatting request is answered either by a response that transfers the formatted text to the client or by an error response containing details about the error. The Language Server Protocol defines the messages to be exchanged between client and language server. They are JSON-RPC preceded by headers similar to HTTP. Messages may originate from the server or client. The protocol does not make any provisions about how requests, responses and notifications are transferred between client and server. For example, client and server could be components within the same process exchanging JSON strings via method calls. They could also be different processes on the same or on different machines communicating via network sockets. == Registry == There are lists of LSP-compatible implementations, maintained by the community-driven Langserver.org or Microsoft.

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  Pretext

  A pretext (adj.: pretextual) is an excuse to do something or say something that is not accurate. Pretexts may be based on a half-truth or developed in the context of a misleading fabrication. Pretexts have been used to conceal the true purpose or rationale behind actions and words. They are often heard in political speeches. In US law, a pretext usually describes false reasons that hide the true intentions or motivations for a legal action. If a party can establish a prima facie case for the proffered evidence, the opposing party must prove that these reasons were "pretextual" or false. This can be accomplished by directly demonstrating that the motivations behind the presentation of evidence is false, or indirectly by evidence that the motivations are not "credible". In Griffith v. Schnitzer, an employment discrimination case, a jury award was reversed by a Court of Appeals because the evidence was not sufficient that the defendant's reasons were "pretextual". That is, the defendant's evidence was either undisputed, or the plaintiff's was "irrelevant subjective assessments and opinions". A "pretextual" arrest by law enforcement officers is one carried out for illegal purposes such as to conduct an unjustified search and seizure. As one example of pretext, in the 1880s, the Chinese government raised money on the pretext of modernizing the Chinese navy. Instead, these funds were diverted to repair a ship-shaped, two-story pavilion which had been originally constructed for the mother of the Qianlong Emperor. This pretext and the Marble Barge are famously linked with Empress Dowager Cixi. This architectural folly, known today as the Marble Boat (Shifang), is "moored" on Lake Kunming in what the empress renamed the "Garden for Cultivating Harmony" (Yiheyuan). Another example of pretext was demonstrated in the speeches of the Roman orator Cato the Elder (234–149 BC). For Cato, every public speech became a pretext for a comment about Carthage. The Roman statesman had come to believe that the prosperity of ancient Carthage represented an eventual and inevitable danger to Rome. In the Senate, Cato famously ended every speech by proclaiming his opinion that Carthage had to be destroyed (Carthago delenda est). This oft-repeated phrase was the ultimate conclusion of all logical argument in every oration, regardless of the subject of the speech. This pattern persisted until his death in 149, which was the year in which the Third Punic War began. In other words, any subject became a pretext for reminding his fellow senators of the dangers Carthage represented. == Uses in warfare == The early years of Japan's Tokugawa shogunate were unsettled, with warring factions battling for power. The causes for the fighting were in part pretextual, but the outcome brought diminished armed conflicts after the Siege of Osaka in 1614–1615. The next two-and-a-half centuries of Japanese history were comparatively peaceful under the successors of Tokugawa Ieyasu and the bakufu government he established. === United States === During the War of 1812, US President James Madison was often accused of using impressment of American sailors by the Royal Navy as a pretext to invade Canada. The sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 was blamed on the Spanish, despite early reports of it having been an accident, contributing to U.S. entry into the Spanish–American War. The slogan "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!" was used as a rallying cry. Some have argued that United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941, as a pretext to enter World War II. American soldiers and supplies had been assisting British and Soviet operations for almost a year by this point, and the United States had thus "chosen a side", but due to the political climate in the States at the time and some campaign promises made by Roosevelt that he would not send American troops to fight in foreign wars, Roosevelt could not declare war for fear of public backlash. The attack on Pearl Harbor united the American people's resolve against the Axis powers and created the bellicose atmosphere in which to declare war. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, later revealed to have been partly provoked and partly not to have happened, was used to bring the United States fully into the Vietnam War. United States President George W. Bush used the September 11 attacks and faulty intelligence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the war in Iraq. == Social engineering == A type of social engineering called pretexting uses a pretext to elicit information fraudulently from a target. The pretext in this case includes research into the identity of a certain authorized person or personality type in order to establish legitimacy in the mind of the target.

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  Paradigms of AI Programming

  Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp (ISBN 1-55860-191-0) is a well-known programming book by Peter Norvig about artificial intelligence programming using Common Lisp. == History == The Lisp programming language has survived since 1958 as a primary language for artificial intelligence research. This text was published in 1992 as the Common Lisp standard was becoming widely adopted. Norvig introduces Lisp programming in the context of classic AI programs, including General Problem Solver (GPS) from 1959, ELIZA: Dialog with a Machine, from 1966, and STUDENT: Solving Algebra Word Problems, from 1964. The book covers more recent AI programming techniques, including Logic Programming, Object-Oriented Programming, Knowledge Representation, Symbolic Mathematics and Expert Systems.

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  DAYDREAMER

  DAYDREAMER is a goal-based agent and cognitive architecture developed at the University of California, Los Angeles by Erik T. Mueller and Michael G. Dyer beginning in 1983. The system models the human stream of thought and how it is triggered and directed by emotions, simulating human daydreaming. Taking situational descriptions as input, DAYDREAMER produces English-language daydreams as output and encodes new daydreams, plans, and planning strategies for later reuse. The program comprises five components: a scenario generator based on relaxed planning, a dynamic episodic memory, a collection of personal goals and control goals, an emotion component, and domain knowledge of interpersonal relations and everyday occurrences. The source code was released under a free software license in 2015. == History == Erik Mueller began DAYDREAMER in 1983 while he was a doctoral student in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, studying under Michael G. Dyer. Initial development of the project was supported by a grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation with matching funds from the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Additionally, Mueller was supported by an Atlantic Richfield Doctoral Fellowship and Dyer by an IBM Faculty Development Award. The first published descriptions of the program appeared in 1985 at the Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Los Angeles and at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Irvine. Work on the program continued, and a book, Daydreaming in Humans and Machines, was published by Ablex Publishing in 1990. The program was implemented on top of GATE, a knowledge-representation and inference substrate developed by Mueller and Uri Zernik at UCLA, and was originally written in T, a dialect of Scheme. In 2015, Mueller released the DAYDREAMER source code, version 3.5, a Common Lisp rewrite of the original T implementation, on GitHub under the GNU General Public License version 2. The release comprised approximately 12,000 lines of Common Lisp code, along with the GATE knowledge-representation substrate on which DAYDREAMER had originally been built. == Architecture == The program operates in two modes. In daydreaming mode it daydreams continuously until interrupted, while performance mode allows it to demonstrate behavior it has learned through daydreaming. === Emotion and control goals === Emotions and daydreaming form a feedback loop for DAYDREAMER. Emotions activate goals that produce daydreams, and the resulting daydreams modify existing emotions and trigger new ones, which prompt subsequent daydreaming. Recall of a goal success produces a positive emotion whereas recall of a goal failure produces a negative emotion. Emotions activate a set of goals, called control goals, which direct the course of a daydream. The program has four control goals. "Rationalization" generates reasons why an unsatisfactory outcome is in fact acceptable, in order to reduce a negative emotion and maintain self-esteem. "Revenge" is activated by anger when a failure is caused by another and reduces negative emotion through imagined retaliation. "Failure/success reversal" imagines alternative scenarios in which a failure was prevented or a success did not occur as a means of learning planning strategies for future situations. "Preparation" generates hypothetical future scenarios in order to rehearse plans and actions for events that have not yet occurred. === Scenario generator and relaxed planning === The scenario generator produces the sequence of events that make up a daydream. It operates under multiple, often conflicting personal goals rather than pursuing a single goal, applies relaxation rules that permit the generation of non-realistic scenarios, and it draws on episodic memory of past experiences both as subject matter and as a source of planning knowledge. The personal goals that guide the scenario generator include health, food, sex, friendship, love, possessions, self-esteem, social esteem, enjoyment, and achievement. These goals are organized into a goal tree that specifies their relative importance at any given time. Relaxation rules allow the program to set aside its ordinary constraints when generating a scenario. The four constraints that may be relaxed are the behavior of others, the daydreamer's own attributes, physical constraints, and social constraints. The degree of relaxation varies with the active control goal. For example a failure-reversal goal aimed at alternatives uses a low level of relaxation, whereas a revenge goal aimed at a retaliation uses a high level. === Episodic memory and analogy === DAYDREAMER's episodic memory stores its personal and vicarious experiences along with the daydreams it generates. The memory is described as dynamic because it is continually modified during daydreaming such that previously daydreamed episodes become available alongside real ones. As it daydreams, the program indexes daydreams, future plans or actions, and planning strategies into memory. Episodes are organized and retrieved using surface-level similarities, emotions, abstract themes, and Plot Units which are abstract configurations of positive and negative outcomes developed by Wendy Lehnert. A recalled episode is adapted to the current situation through analogy, which requires less effort than generating an equivalent scenario from scratch. == Sample output == In the sample experience from the source code, called LOVERS1, DAYDREAMER begins from an initial situation in which it has a job, is not romantically involved, and is at home. Starting in daydreaming mode, it activates a top-level goal to be in a romantic relationship because it is not currently in one, and a positive motivating emotion of interest becomes associated with that goal. The program then activates a goal to be entertained and pursues seeing a film as a way to achieve it. Facts asserted into memory are converted to English and produced as output, such as "I want to be going out with someone" and "I have to go see a movie". == Reception and influence == DAYDREAMER has been cited in research on computational models of creativity, emotion, and narrative. Linda Wills and Janet Kolodner cite the program as an example of work on opportunism in their study of serendipitous recognition in design. Joseph Bates, A. Bryan Loyall, and W. Scott Reilly of the Carnegie Mellon Oz Project cite DAYDREAMER among prior work in their description of an architecture combining action, emotion, and social behavior. Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Ricardo Sosa, and Christian Lemaitre cite Mueller's DAYDREAMER as one of the few computer models at the time to model daydreaming during the creative process. Jichen Zhu and D. Fox Harrell likewise cite the program in their work on imagining and agency in generative interactive narrative.

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  Seq2seq

  Seq2seq is a family of machine learning approaches used for natural language processing. Originally developed by Lê Viết Quốc, a Vietnamese computer scientist and a machine learning pioneer at Google Brain, this framework has become foundational in many modern AI systems. Applications include language translation, image captioning, conversational models, speech recognition, and text summarization. Seq2seq uses sequence transformation: it turns one sequence into another sequence. == History == One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode. seq2seq is an approach to machine translation (or more generally, sequence transduction) with roots in information theory, where communication is understood as an encode-transmit-decode process, and machine translation can be studied as a special case of communication. This viewpoint was elaborated, for example, in the noisy channel model of machine translation. In practice, seq2seq maps an input sequence into a real-numerical vector by using a neural network (the encoder), and then maps it back to an output sequence using another neural network (the decoder). The idea of encoder-decoder sequence transduction had been developed in the early 2010s. The papers most commonly cited as the originators that produced seq2seq are two papers from 2014. In the seq2seq as proposed by them, both the encoder and the decoder were LSTMs. This had the "bottleneck" problem, since the encoding vector has a fixed size, so for long input sequences, information would tend to be lost, as they are difficult to fit into the fixed-length encoding vector. The attention mechanism, proposed in 2014, resolved the bottleneck problem. They called their model RNNsearch, as it "emulates searching through a source sentence during decoding a translation". A problem with seq2seq models at this point was that recurrent neural networks are difficult to parallelize. The 2017 publication of Transformers resolved the problem by replacing the encoding RNN with self-attention Transformer blocks ("encoder blocks"), and the decoding RNN with cross-attention causally-masked Transformer blocks ("decoder blocks"). === Priority dispute === One of the papers cited as the originator for seq2seq is (Sutskever et al 2014), published at Google Brain while they were on Google's machine translation project. The research allowed Google to overhaul Google Translate into Google Neural Machine Translation in 2016. Tomáš Mikolov claims to have developed the idea (before joining Google Brain) of using a "neural language model on pairs of sentences... and then [generating] translation after seeing the first sentence"—which he equates with seq2seq machine translation, and to have mentioned the idea to Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le (while at Google Brain), who failed to acknowledge him in their paper. Mikolov had worked on RNNLM (using RNN for language modelling) for his PhD thesis, and is more notable for developing word2vec. == Architecture == The main reference for this section is. === Encoder === The encoder is responsible for processing the input sequence and capturing its essential information, which is stored as the hidden state of the network and, in a model with attention mechanism, a context vector. The context vector is the weighted sum of the input hidden states and is generated for every time instance in the output sequences. === Decoder === The decoder takes the context vector and hidden states from the encoder and generates the final output sequence. The decoder operates in an autoregressive manner, producing one element of the output sequence at a time. At each step, it considers the previously generated elements, the context vector, and the input sequence information to make predictions for the next element in the output sequence. Specifically, in a model with attention mechanism, the context vector and the hidden state are concatenated together to form an attention hidden vector, which is used as an input for the decoder. The seq2seq method developed in the early 2010s uses two neural networks: an encoder network converts an input sentence into numerical vectors, and a decoder network converts those vectors to sentences in the target language. The Attention mechanism was grafted onto this structure in 2014 and is shown below. Later it was refined into the encoder-decoder Transformer architecture of 2017. === Training vs prediction === There is a subtle difference between training and prediction. During training time, both the input and the output sequences are known. During prediction time, only the input sequence is known, and the output sequence must be decoded by the network itself. Specifically, consider an input sequence x 1 : n {\displaystyle x_{1:n}} and output sequence y 1 : m {\displaystyle y_{1:m}} . The encoder would process the input x 1 : n {\displaystyle x_{1:n}} step by step. After that, the decoder would take the output from the encoder, as well as the as input, and produce a prediction y ^ 1 {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}_{1}} . Now, the question is: what should be input to the decoder in the next step? A standard method for training is "teacher forcing". In teacher forcing, no matter what is output by the decoder, the next input to the decoder is always the reference. That is, even if y ^ 1 ≠ y 1 {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}_{1}\neq y_{1}} , the next input to the decoder is still y 1 {\displaystyle y_{1}} , and so on. During prediction time, the "teacher" y 1 : m {\displaystyle y_{1:m}} would be unavailable. Therefore, the input to the decoder must be y ^ 1 {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}_{1}} , then y ^ 2 {\displaystyle {\hat {y}}_{2}} , and so on. It is found that if a model is trained purely by teacher forcing, its performance would degrade during prediction time, since generation based on the model's own output is different from generation based on the teacher's output. This is called exposure bias or a train/test distribution shift. A 2015 paper recommends that, during training, randomly switch between teacher forcing and no teacher forcing. === Attention for seq2seq === The attention mechanism is an enhancement introduced by Bahdanau et al. in 2014 to address limitations in the basic Seq2Seq architecture where a longer input sequence results in the hidden state output of the encoder becoming irrelevant for the decoder. It enables the model to selectively focus on different parts of the input sequence during the decoding process. At each decoder step, an alignment model calculates the attention score using the current decoder state and all of the attention hidden vectors as input. An alignment model is another neural network model that is trained jointly with the seq2seq model used to calculate how well an input, represented by the hidden state, matches with the previous output, represented by attention hidden state. A softmax function is then applied to the attention score to get the attention weight. In some models, the encoder states are directly fed into an activation function, removing the need for alignment model. An activation function receives one decoder state and one encoder state and returns a scalar value of their relevance. Consider the seq2seq language English-to-French translation task. To be concrete, let us consider the translation of "the zone of international control ", which should translate to "la zone de contrôle international ". Here, we use the special token as a control character to delimit the end of input for both the encoder and the decoder. An input sequence of text x 0 , x 1 , … {\displaystyle x_{0},x_{1},\dots } is processed by a neural network (which can be an LSTM, a Transformer encoder, or some other network) into a sequence of real-valued vectors h 0 , h 1 , … {\displaystyle h_{0},h_{1},\dots } , where h {\displaystyle h} stands for "hidden vector". After the encoder has finished processing, the decoder starts operating over the hidden vectors, to produce an output sequence y 0 , y 1 , … {\displaystyle y_{0},y_{1},\dots } , autoregressively. That is, it always takes as input both the hidden vectors produced by the encoder, and what the decoder itself has produced before, to produce the next output word: ( h 0 , h 1 , … {\displaystyle h_{0},h_{1},\dots } , "") → "la" ( h 0 , h 1 , … {\displaystyle h_{0},h_{1},\dots } , " la") → "la zone" ( h 0 , h 1 , … {\displaystyle h_{0},h_{1},\dots } , " la zone") → "la zone de" ... ( h 0 , h 1 , … {\displaystyle h_{0},h_{1},\dots } , " la zone de contrôle international") → "la zone de contrôle international " Here, we use the special token as a control character to delimit the start of input for the decoder. The decoding terminates as soon as "" appears in the decoder output. ==

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  Chris Olah

  Christopher Olah (born 1992 or 1993) is a Canadian machine learning researcher and a co-founder of Anthropic. He is known for his work on neural network interpretability, particularly mechanistic interpretability, and for research and tools that visualise internal representations in neural networks. In 2025, Forbes reported he had become a billionaire due to his ownership in Anthropic. == Early life and education == Olah was born in Canada. According to Wired, he left university at age 18 without earning a degree and later received a Thiel Fellowship, which supported him in pursuing independent work. == Career == Olah has worked on interpretability research at Google Brain, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Time called him one of the pioneers of mechanistic interpretability and noted that he pursued this research line first at Google, then at OpenAI, and later at Anthropic, which he co-founded. Wired reported that Olah was involved in neural network visualisation work including DeepDream in 2015, as part of efforts to better understand what neural networks learn. Later coverage linked him to more structured interpretability approaches such as "activation atlases". The Verge covered activation atlases as a collaboration between Google and OpenAI researchers to help inspect neural network representations. At Anthropic, Olah has been identified in major press coverage as leading interpretability work aimed at mapping internal "features" in large language models and relating interpretability findings to AI safety. Quanta Magazine has also quoted Olah in reporting on interpretability and the internal structure of modern language models. Time included Olah in its TIME100 AI list in 2024. === Vatican address on AI ethics === On May 25, 2026, Olah spoke at the Vatican during the official presentation of Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, which addresses artificial intelligence and human dignity. Olah said AI could lead to large-scale displacement of human labor and exacerbate global inequality. He said the commercial and geopolitical incentives driving frontier AI labs often conflict with the public good, and described AI systems as "grown" rather than strictly engineered. Olah called for external moral oversight from religious institutions, scholars, and civil society to hold the technology sector accountable.

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  WordNet

  WordNet is a lexical database of semantic relations between words that links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into synsets with short definitions and usage examples. It can thus be seen as a combination and extension of a dictionary and thesaurus. Its primary use is in automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications. It was first created in the English language and the English WordNet database and software tools have been released under a BSD style license and are freely available for download. The latest official release from Princeton was released in 2011. Princeton currently has no plans to release any new versions due to staffing and funding issues. New versions are still being released annually through the Open English WordNet website. Until about 2024 an online version was previously available through wordnet.princeton.edu. That version of WordNet has been deprecated, but a new online version is available at en-word.net. There are now WordNets in more than 200 languages. == History and team members == WordNet was first created in 1985, in English only, in the Cognitive Science Laboratory of Princeton University under the direction of psychology professor George Armitage Miller. It was later directed by Christiane Fellbaum. The project was initially funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and later also by other U.S. government agencies including the DARPA, the National Science Foundation, the Disruptive Technology Office (formerly the Advanced Research and Development Activity) and REFLEX. George Miller and Christiane Fellbaum received the 2006 Antonio Zampolli Prize for their work with WordNet. The Global WordNet Association is a non-commercial organization that provides a platform for discussing, sharing and connecting WordNets for all languages in the world. Christiane Fellbaum and Piek Th.J.M. Vossen are its co-presidents. == Database contents == The database contains 155,327 words organized in 175,979 synsets for a total of 207,016 word-sense pairs; in compressed form, it is about 12 megabytes in size. It includes the lexical categories nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs but ignores prepositions, determiners and other function words. Words from the same lexical category that are roughly synonymous are grouped into synsets, which include simplex words as well as collocations like "eat out" and "car pool." The different senses of a polysemous word form are assigned to different synsets. A synset's meaning is further clarified with a short defining gloss and one or more usage examples. An example adjective synset is: good, right, ripe – (most suitable or right for a particular purpose; "a good time to plant tomatoes"; "the right time to act"; "the time is ripe for great sociological changes") All synsets are connected by means of semantic relations. These relations, which are not all shared by all lexical categories, include: Nouns hypernym: Y is a hypernym of X if every X is a (kind of) Y (canine is a hypernym of dog) hyponym: Y is a hyponym of X if every Y is a (kind of) X (dog is a hyponym of canine) coordinate term: Y is a coordinate term of X if X and Y share a hypernym (wolf is a coordinate term of dog, and dog is a coordinate term of wolf) holonym: Y is a holonym of X if X is a part of Y (building is a holonym of window) meronym: Y is a meronym of X if Y is a part of X (window is a meronym of building) Verbs hypernym: the verb Y is a hypernym of the verb X if the activity X is a (kind of) Y (to perceive is an hypernym of to listen) troponym: the verb Y is a troponym of the verb X if the activity Y is doing X in some manner (to lisp is a troponym of to talk) entailment: the verb Y is entailed by the verb X if by doing X you must be doing Y (to sleep is entailed by to snore) coordinate term: the verb Y is a coordinate term of the verb X if X and Y share a hypernym (to lisp is a coordinate term of to yell, and to yell is a coordinate term of to lisp) These semantic relations hold among all members of the linked synsets. Individual synset members (words) can also be connected with lexical relations. For example, (one sense of) the noun "director" is linked to (one sense of) the verb "direct" from which it is derived via a "morphosemantic" link. The morphology functions of the software distributed with the database try to deduce the lemma or stem form of a word from the user's input. Irregular forms are stored in a list, and looking up "ate" will return "eat," for example. == Knowledge structure == Both nouns and verbs are organized into hierarchies, defined by hypernym or IS A relationships. For instance, one sense of the word dog is found following hypernym hierarchy; the words at the same level represent synset members. Each set of synonyms has a unique index. At the top level, these hierarchies are organized into 25 beginner "trees" for nouns and 15 for verbs (called lexicographic files at a maintenance level). All are linked to a unique beginner synset, "entity". Noun hierarchies are far deeper than verb hierarchies. Adjectives are not organized into hierarchical trees. Instead, two "central" antonyms such as "hot" and "cold" form binary poles, while 'satellite' synonyms such as "steaming" and "chilly" connect to their respective poles via a "similarity" relations. The adjectives can be visualized in this way as "dumbbells" rather than as "trees". == Psycholinguistic aspects == The initial goal of the WordNet project was to build a lexical database that would be consistent with theories of human semantic memory developed in the late 1960s. Psychological experiments indicated that speakers organized their knowledge of concepts in an economic, hierarchical fashion. Retrieval time required to access conceptual knowledge seemed to be directly related to the number of hierarchies the speaker needed to "traverse" to access the knowledge. Thus, speakers could more quickly verify that canaries can sing because a canary is a songbird, but required slightly more time to verify that canaries can fly (where they had to access the concept "bird" on the superordinate level) and even more time to verify canaries have skin (requiring look-up across multiple levels of hyponymy, up to "animal"). While such psycholinguistic experiments and the underlying theories have been subject to criticism, some of WordNet's organization is consistent with experimental evidence. For example, anomic aphasia selectively affects speakers' ability to produce words from a specific semantic category, a WordNet hierarchy. Antonymous adjectives (WordNet's central adjectives in the dumbbell structure) are found to co-occur far more frequently than chance, a fact that has been found to hold for many languages. == As a lexical ontology == WordNet is sometimes called an ontology, a persistent claim that its creators do not make. The hypernym/hyponym relationships among the noun synsets can be interpreted as specialization relations among conceptual categories. In other words, WordNet can be interpreted and used as a lexical ontology in the computer science sense. However, such an ontology should be corrected before being used, because it contains hundreds of basic semantic inconsistencies; for example there are, (i) common specializations for exclusive categories and (ii) redundancies in the specialization hierarchy. Furthermore, transforming WordNet into a lexical ontology usable for knowledge representation should normally also involve (i) distinguishing the specialization relations into subtypeOf and instanceOf relations, and (ii) associating intuitive unique identifiers to each category. Although such corrections and transformations have been performed and documented as part of the integration of WordNet 1.7 into the cooperatively updatable knowledge base of WebKB-2, most projects claiming to reuse WordNet for knowledge-based applications (typically, knowledge-oriented information retrieval) simply reuse it directly. WordNet has also been converted to a formal specification, by means of a hybrid bottom-up top-down methodology to automatically extract association relations from it and interpret these associations in terms of a set of conceptual relations, formally defined in the DOLCE foundational ontology. In most works that claim to have integrated WordNet into ontologies, the content of WordNet has not simply been corrected when it seemed necessary; instead, it has been heavily reinterpreted and updated whenever suitable. This was the case when, for example, the top-level ontology of WordNet was restructured according to the OntoClean-based approach, or when it was used as a primary source for constructing the lower classes of the SENSUS ontology. == Limitations == The most widely discussed limitation of WordNet (and related resources like ImageNet) is that some of the semantic relations are more suited to concrete concepts than to abstract concepts. For example,

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