submission from floenne v2
um i don't exist yet...
submission from syule
By the time Iezikol left the laboratory, the sky was a deep shade of blue. He walked down four flights of stairs, across a pedestrian bridge crossing a stream of cars and busses, down another two flights of stairs, and into a dimly lit atrium. At the japanese stall, he ordered stir-fried noodles with fish and eggs on the side. Then he sat down at one of the tables in the nearly deserted atrium to eat. But he had only barely begun when someone tapped him lightly on the shoulder.
"Hello Bla", said Iezikol. Bla sat down. Bla dropped a small, dull colored cube onto the table without a word.
"What's this?", Iezikol asked.
"I am not very sure", said Bla. "However, I know that this changes everything"
"Everything." Iezikol mouthed slowly
"Everything", Bla confirmed.
"Well, there is just one problem", Iezikol said.
"That is?"
"I don't understand what you are talking about"
"Let's both go to the talk in room 437 right now. I know it will clear everything up", said Bla.
"But I just started eating", Iezikol complained.
Bla picked up a fork, "I will help", he said, and started eating Iezikol's food.
Iezikol followed Bla through the winding corridors. They were all the same -- grey carpeting, white walls, bright flourescent lights, closed doors every few meters. At seeminly random points, another corridor would branch off the side into the distance. The only noise was a muted mechanical hum, and the soft pad of shoes on the carpet. Then they arrived in a small office room, with four other people crammed in.
"This is Iezikol", Bla said to the woman who was standing up.
"Ok", said the woman to Iezikol. "I'm Rod. Anyway, that does not matter. We are talking about the machine hallucinations here. Do you know?" (*1)
"Yes, I know", said Iezikol. Iezikol knew because he had been studying machine hallucinations himself. Most of the advanced algorithms he was working on had exhibited this property, where a grotesquely warped hallucination of the input data would be computed as a side-effect while the algorithm went about its task. For example, an algorithm taught to detect faces might start hallucinating the faces of people it had never seen before. Of course, one would never know such a hallucination existed, unless one was curious enough to explicitly extract it while the computation was happening. It was a strange quirk, but not something that was particularly important.
"Good", said Rod. "Then Darvince will tell you about Dreamer".
Darvince, who was sitting in the corner of the room, sat up a bit straighter. "So I was working on a side-project for fun recently... I thought it would be fun to play around with these hallucinations, so I set up a chain of computational cortices. I have the first cortex come up with a hallucination, and then pass that to the second cortex, which constructs a second-order hallucination from the first-order hallucinations that it recieves, and so on."
"Basically, it is just nesting these hallucinations deeper and deeper", said Rod.
"Yes, that's right, but I also set up a second chain of cortices, which just recurrently refine the deepest hallucination", said Darvince.
"What do you mean by refine?", asked Iezikol.
"Think of it as sharpening the hallucinations to make them clearer and more concrete", said Darvince. "That's what we did at first, but then Syule had another idea". Darvince looked over at Syule
"We also developed some discriminators", said Syule. "These discriminators are quite powerful, and they can determine if something is real, or if it is a hallucination. At first, they were able to tell the difference between reality and hallucination about 99 times out of a hundred. But then we used some mathematics to tweak the hallucinators. It turns out that you can compute how to tweak the hallucinators in the direction which makes it harder for the discriminator to tell the difference between what's real and what's not. (*2)
"Yes, yes", said Rod. "Of course, this is excellent for our robotics projects. Data is very scarce, too scarce to teach robots anything at all. So what do we do? We just hallucinate everything we need. It's the perfect solution, I know it will make everything so much easier now. This is excellent." (*3)
"So I did that last week, like you told me to try", said Bla. "I started teaching the robots to work, with these hallucinated data. But of course, real data is always higher quality, it's always better, just hard to obtain."
"Yes, too expensive", Rod interjected.
"But just two days ago, a team in Grenoble published a new dataset", said Bla. "It is quite high quality, and I wanted to use it. But I had to come up with a way of distinguishing the real data with the hallucinated data, or else after you give it to the robot, and it does whatever it wants to with the data, you don't know what is what anymore. Then you don't know if the hallucinations were any good."
"So I had the idea to insert some transformation-invariant marker on the hallucination data", said Darvince. "Sort of like watermarking an image. I just placed a small, rigid cube in each hallucination to mark it as fake data."
"I got up today at 4", said Bla. "I was the first person in the lab. Lying in the middle of the floor was this cube". He held the cube up between two fingers.
Then he let go.
The cube stayed in the air.
"Since it was important to distinguish the marker cube from other cubes possibly in the data", said Darvince, "I made the marker cube exempt from gravity. So... it does that."
Several hours later, Iezikol left the building. He made a call to his old friend, Swonx. Then he got on a nearly empty bus, and took a short nap. He got off at Noro Hills, and stepped inside a shopping mall. A few minutes later, Swonx arrived.
"Long time no see", she said. Iezikol nodded, then blushed.
"C-Can I hold your hand?", he asked.
"That's pretty lewd", Swonx said, smirking, and grabbed Iezikol's hand.
They went shopping for stationery. Swonx bought some thick, creamy, high-quality paper. "It's quite hard to find good paper like this", she commented. Iezikol bought a pen sharpener.
"I didn't even know pens could be sharpened", he said, walking out of the shop. "They can't", said Swonx, "but that's ok, it'll look good sitting on your desk."
Then they went back to Swonx's apartment. Iezikol slumped on the sofa, in a semi-catatonic state. Swonx picked up and set down the pen sharpener a few times, then started sketching it on the paper she had just bought. Then she brought out two glasses of wine. A couple hours passed, Iezikol staring at the ceiling, the light scratching of Swonx's pencil against paper.
"You're quiet today", she commented.
"Do you think... everything is just a dream?", Iezikol blurted out. "I don't know if that makes any sense"
"Yeah, I think that makes sense", Swonx said. She didn't think that made any sense at all. "But you should go to bed."
Iezikol went to bed (*4)
(*1) These machine hallucinations are actually kind of a thing in real life. They are more often called mental hallucinations.
(*2) This idea of having discriminators, and tweaking the hallucinators to fool the discriminators is known under the name "Generative Adversarial Networks" in real life.
(*3) Well in real life we don't bother with hallucinations we just train self-driving cars with simulations like GTAV (no, I am not joking here!)
(*4) What stop looking at me I got tired of writing this mess of a story.
Topic: ficvision thread for the fics only ayyy (Read 2360 times)
