Virtual gaming is about to warp through a black hole, thanks to a band of scientists in Hong Kong and a hedge funder with a zealous science background, called Jeffrey Epstein. Indeed, game programming is moving away from algorithmic robots to a twilight realm of emotional thinkers, taking online, video and toy entrepreneurs, one step closer to Star Trek’s ‘Holodeck’. For years, in virtual gaming, the only intelligent player was the person playing the game, responding to non-reactive obstacles. At most, opponents could blow up or morph into something else. Whatever the reaction, it was a simple linear or algorithmic response (if A, then B, if A+D, then C).

By the 1970’s, opponents became more complex with the development of virtual chess, where the program responded to a vast network of algorithmic possibilities: up to 10123 chess board variations to be exact. But even in those scenarios, the program remains purely reactive and deterministic: it does not have any goals, nor does it aim for check mate, but simply responds to a series of steps that lead to that direction.

Today’s gaming characters from virtual soldiers to Tinkerbell are also vastly more complex than their dash line tennis, Pac Man or Pong forbearers. Like the chess program, virtual soldiers can react to a wide variation of landscape scenarios and respond in a myriad of ways, based on each case.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) group in Hong Kong behind this new emotive software is called Open Cog. As an open-source foundation, Open Cog (‘Cognition for All’) lead by co-founder Ben Goertzel, develops programming language for the AI community to share, in what is still a very fragmented field. However, in efforts to map the architecture of the human mind, Open Cog also programed three game characters, a ghost, a robot and a girl that push past traditional gaming algorithms: cont...

SOURCE:

www.jeffreyepstein.org





Evolution at Harvard--How financier Jeffrey Epstein Accelerated the Course of Evolution at Harvard

National Review Online

If the scientist’s job is to ponder the stars, the banker’s is to funnel his vision into stellar panels. For while scientific theory can be enthralling, it’s in danger of racking up lost gigabytes and circuitry dust. But when a smart businessman and a top scientist get together, not only can the partnership lead to pragmatic accomplishments, it can actually change the course of scientific inquiry.

Such has been the case at Harvard. The study of evolution is always moving, but nowhere has it been livelier than in Brattle Square, where, ten years ago, a financier named Jeffrey Epstein set up the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics with a $30 million gift to the university, $6.5 million of which was a current-use gift to the PED. His mission was not to coddle neo-Darwinian theorists (because, honestly, couldn’t $30 million be used to vaccinate the entire country of Zaïre?) but to embolden a pragmatic use for the study of natural selection. It was in August 2003, with the cooperation of Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, that the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics set up for business, and, under the direction of Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology, it revolutionized the way in which evolution is studied and utilized. PED became one of the first programs to give a high priority to the use of mathematics in studying the evolution of microbiology. It also became one of the first departments to develop a mathematical model of how human cancer cells evolve, as well as infectious bacteria and viruses such as HIV. The program’s models have led to key discoveries toward combatting diseases of all kinds and have encouraged researchers around the world to make new discoveries of their own.

It all started in early 2000 when Epstein, a New York hedge-fund manager with a passion for cutting-edge science, invited Nowak to organize a conference on the evolution of language. Nowak was then head of the Program in Theoretical Biology at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and had already published a substantial amount of work on the mathematics of the HIV virus, infectious bacteria, and cancer cells. Before going to Princeton, Nowak had been the head of the mathematical-biology group at Oxford University. His work was not just theoretical but keenly practical.

By 2003, Epstein already had a substantial track record in science philanthropy. He had supported the research of many prominent scientists, including Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Eric Lander, George Church, and Nobel laureate physicists Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek. He was also a member of the New York Academy of Science, a member of Rockefeller University’s board, and actively involved in the Santa Fe Institute, the Quantum Gravity Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Mind, Brain & Behavior Advisory Committee at Harvard. Epstein himself was not a scientist per se. He had studied physics at Cooper Union in New York and mathematics at the Courant Institute in New York, leaving both without a degree, and moved on to teaching calculus and physics at the Dalton School in Manhattan. He was then scooped up into options trading on Wall Street and applied his acumen and mathematical wit to the markets.