I’m a mathematician and independent researcher working on artificial general intelligence and the automated design of machines. To describe the shape of the problem, I’ve been posting notes on various technical details; feedback is welcome! In particular, if you’re a neuroscientist or machine learning researcher, I’d love to hear from you.

You can reach me at sid@sidmani.com, or on twitter.

Writing

Artificial intelligence

• Notes on building AGI
  • An in-progress collection of notes summarizing various theoretical and technical problems
• Difficulties with continuous approximation
  • Deep neural networks are continuous functions, but pixels introduce discontinuities
• Backpropagation, hierarchy, and adversarial examples
  • Backprop might cause problems with representational hierarchies
• RNNs are not Turing-equivalent!
  • The usual proof uses tricks that don’t apply in practice

Math

• Connecting the halting problem and induction
  • A program that evaluates whether another program halts can prove many difficult theorems

Sci-fi and speculation

• Old technology as a totem
  • Some examples of techno-worship in science fiction
• Consumption
  • What is \( \lim_{t \rightarrow \infty} \) of “software is eating the world”?
• Names
  • The name given to an object exchanges meaning with the object itself

Japanese

• A glossary of Japanese self-study
  • How to learn Japanese effectively on the internet, and some common mistakes to avoid

Research interests

• Artificial general intelligence
  • Will deep learning ever lead to real AGI? (I don’t think so)
  • How does the brain work?
    • Is connectionism a useful model?
    • What happens inside the neuron?
    • How is data stored?
• Vision
  • Is there a way to represent 3D objects in memory that respects geometry, part decomposition and semantics?
• Computation and the physical world
  • What is computation?
  • The physical Church-Turing thesis: can all physical systems be simulated on a Turing machine?
  • How can we test the hypothesis that the universe is a simulation?

Projects

• Quasar jet simulator
  • Simulate the helical jets of active galactic nuclei, with relativistic effects, in your browser!