Scientists on Reddit

Jürgen Schmidhuber

AI researcher, co-inventor of the LSTM

u/JuergenSchmidhuber ↗Personal account

How we know it's theirs

The 2015 r/MachineLearning AMA, posted from this account

We retrieved 1 post and 105 comments from u/JuergenSchmidhuber, all from 2015, most often in r/MachineLearning.

Best moment

A redditor wrote in r/MachineLearning

On “I am Jürgen Schmidhuber, AMA!”

Kennen sie (was halten sie von) Herrn Prof Weizenbaum? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum

u/JuergenSchmidhuber replied

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IMO, Joseph Weizenbaum was by far the coolest of the invited speakers. The rest of us pulled out their slides and tried to make their point. When it was his turn, he sat down, noticed that the projector was still on, and said: switch that off, I don’t need this. Then he very eloquently argued against “digital physics”, saying things such as “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a man with a computer, everything looks like a computation.” The audience loved it.

In private conversation about both computable universes and Artificial Intelligence he made fun of me and my “Schmidhubris” (I am an easy target). In many ways, I found him very impressive and admirable. (He did not convince me though.)

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More moments

A redditor wrote in r/MachineLearning

On “I am Jürgen Schmidhuber, AMA!”

Do you have any interesting sources of inspiration (art, nature, other scientific fields other then obviously neuroscience) that have helped you think differently about approaches, methodology, and solutions to your work?

u/JuergenSchmidhuber replied

I think the basic motivation (objective function) of artists and scientists and comedians is data compression progress, that is, the first derivative of data compression performance on the observed history. I have published extensively about this. A physicist gets intrinsic…

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A physicist gets intrinsic reward for creating an experiment leading to observations obeying a previously unpublished physical law that allows for better compressing the data.

A composer gets intrinsic reward for creating a new but non-random, non-arbitrary melody with novel, unexpected but regular harmonies that also permit compression progress of the learning data encoder.

A comedian gets intrinsic reward for inventing a novel joke with an unexpected punch line, related to the beginning of his story in an initially unexpected but quickly learnable way that also allows for better compression of the perceived data.

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