Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

The NYT had an interesting article in that it shows what we could be doing properly using Web 2.0 resources. The current term for this is crowd sourcing.

Jeff Bezos, who we all know as the founder of Amazon.com created “Amazon Mechanical Turk”. This is an online service Amazon uses to weed out duplicate pages. The Mechanical Turk has people look for duplicate pages and pays a few cents to each duplicate page correctly identified by the user.

ChaCha pays about 30,000 users as much as $10/hour to guide web users to relevant search results.

We are beginning to see some useful things come from crowd sourcing. Where better to find open sourced photos when you need them than flickr? Yahoo news has a popular option where you can read the stories most other people are reading. StumbleUpon almost always serves up good results. Wiki has been very successful at setting up an online encyclopedia.

Sometimes it doesn’t quite work. While Digg is fun and has some great stories make the front page quite a bit of junk gets in as well. And they had a revolt they had to put down not long ago.

All of you reading this know what can be done with simple ants and ant algorithms. Imagine instead of ants we use people.

More information:
Artificial Intelligence With Help From the Humans NYT
The Rise of Crowdsourcing Wired
Amazon Mechanical Turk
ChaCha
The Mechanical Turk
The Newest AI Computing Tool: People

If you are in school you should grab one of these packages at the student price:
Mathematica
Maple soft
MathLab

If you have a few dollars
MuPAD is extremely well priced compared to Mathematica, Maple and MathLab.

Following are free and open source versions for those of us no longer getting student discounts.
Sage – installs, extends and provides a front end for Maxima ( It’s a great way to get Maxima installed and running easily on your computer, versions for Win/Linux/OSX )
Maxima has native Windows and Linux Code. ( Instructions for getting it up and running on OS X )
SciLab There are downloads for Windows and Linux and a link to an OSX version.
Axiom has Linux and Windows versions and
OS X instructions
Yacas should word on all operating systems.
Octave has OSX, Linux and Windows versions.
Euler has Linux and Windows versions. It should work on OS X as well.
A link list of other open source computer algebra programs including Jasymca so you can derive and integrate on your mobile smart phone.

Because these software packages are open source you should be able to download and compile any of them for your computer if a binary version is not available.

See also on this site:Useful math websites

Image spam was the beginning but not the end of spammers using artificial intelligence to get the spam out.

Since then use of distorted or obfuscated text, text images, video and audio files are being used by spammers. Bot nets are a larger threat still in the spammer’s tools boxes.

Newer tools in the fight against spam include: CAPTCHA { Completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart }; blocking email containing links to specific known problem sites; Cloudmark’s finger printing technology; NLP { Natural language processing}; white and black listing; and end user feedback.

Some say that the war between spammers and mail filters may well help drive artificial intelligence development in coming years.

More information:
Breaking Google Captchas for some Extra Cash
Turing Test
Natural Language Processing
Artificial intelligence scopes out spam
Spammers establishing use of artificial intelligence

AISK {Artificial intelligence spam killer} homepage ( code available through source forge )
Application of Biological Metaphors for Identifying and Killing Spam ( algorithm available )