I've used a generative design tool with Fusion 360. It's really easy. You can target the lightest weight or highest stiffness. They always look like this.
This is a blog post from Interesting Engineering, which I find to be mostly fluff half ass articles that are more inaccurate than accurate. I looked at the video the post was based on and it was posted *3 years ago!* Yeah, this isn't news in any way.
"BREAKING: NASA uses off the shelf decades old generative design tool."
"Dave that's not news. At least put Blockchain or AI in there somewhere. Aliens! Come on man."
Getting *shit* results is easy.
Just like simulation software that has been around for decades, garbage-in, garbage-out.
Getting *good* results is far more complicated than pushing a few buttons.
The tech has come a long way since 2006 when NASA flew [this "weird" AI designed antenna.](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/exploringtheuniverse/borg.html)
I’m low key obsessed with fungus. It’s so fascinating. I have a degree in biology, and am now in PA school. But in an alternate universe (where I’m not so very worried about money) I’d 100% be researching fungus. They’re fascinating.
Which, as a bonus, makes the surge of fungus zombie fare incredibly entertaining.
The Girl With All the Gifts too! It’s crazy they both (probably) came up with that storyline independently.
I say probably because writing a book takes a long time, and I doubt the book was written and published in the single year after The Last of Us came out. Maybe though.
Edit: oooh. I just googled this, and apparently The Girl With all the Gifts is based on a short story Iphigenia in Aulis - published in 2012, one year before The Last of Us. But there’s zero chance the game took cues from it because game development takes years. The plot thickens.
The Last of Us is a cautionary tale. There really are fungi that are inching toward being able to colonize organisms at our average internal temperature.
The possibility I find most interesting, more than any sort of "fungi are going to evolve and turn us into mindless zombies" narrative, is that they are already influencing us in a very different way than we'd expect.
Like, for example, a quick peek at your post history shows comments in /r/LSD. It's of course a well known fact that LSD was originally derived from *ergotamine*, which is produced by a fungus. Similarly, the drug *psilocybin* is produced by psilocybin mushrooms and has similar psychological effects. Both of these compounds are now showing immense promise at treating various forms of human psychopathology, and can occasion experiences that people label as "[spiritually significant](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16826400/)". Moreover, they tend to lead to lasting changes in our sense of "[nature-relatedness](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2055102920978123)".
A truly intelligent fungus would recognize that humans have the physical and intellectual capability to greatly accelerate the process of ecological succession, which would directly benefit them (as fungi are fundamental in ecological restoration/regeneration) in unprecedented ways. This wouldn't be possible if they turned us all into mindless zombies.
I'm not the first one to have these ideas, and they are extremely far-fetched. It's definitely a fun possibility to toy with, though :)
Oh gosh, you’re gonna get me started.
So, very simply, we’ve looked at the physical makeup of fungi (lacking chloroplasts that make plants green for instance, or how a portobello mushroom literally feels more like meat than plant) and even further looked at their DNA - and it’s incredibly similar. We have far more proteins in common with fungi than we do plants. The best estimate is that fungi and animals diverged around 1 billion years ago from the same branch.
This is relatively “new” in scientific terms. Until the nineties people basically assumed “they grow out of the ground so they’re probably closely related to plants.” DNA says otherwise!
In short, they never were part of the plant group. They started with us, before they or us diverted to animals.
>fungi and animals diverged around 1 billion years ago *from the same branch*.
It's kind of mind blowing to think about that, in a way, we're like (very) distant cousins to fungus. I didn't realize we shared so much, but it makes a sort of sense the more I think about it. My knowledge of mycology basically starts and ends at the uncle bens subreddit, so this is really fascinating to me.
Thank you for the short lesson and for the new rabbit hole for me to dive into!
E: I want to subscribe to "Fun"gus facts
Get into it. It’s so fun. I was camping a few months ago and spotted “chicken of the woods” and lost my shit. My roommate thought I was insane. It straight up tastes like chicken.
And remember that the part you can see is just the reproductive body. The main fungus is underground or in the tree, and can be *huge.* There was one organism that spanned over 1000 football fields I read about!
Edit: I got curious because I couldn’t remember if the title of largest organism on earth belonged to a fungus or an aspen. It’s a fungus!
[One fungus, 2,384 acres.](https://frontenacarchbiosphere.ca/worlds-largest-organism/)
That’s one distinct, living organism. One DNA. Over 1500 football fields. 3 square miles.
>Get into it.
Challenge accepted! Any books you'd recommend or places to start (just generally I mean)?
I gotta try that chicken of the woods mushroom sometime. Is the texture similar too, or is it like, well, mushy?
You can research fungus without much money! Just look at this guy! William Padilla-Brown [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKMQpjo--HM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKMQpjo--HM)
Or this dude, Alan Rockefeller! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo)
The second video is a trip. The accents, the flow of conversation, the topics... its perfect.
My micro prof is an agrologist who specializes in micorrhizae and crops. Very fascinating stuff. Dude just goes into the woods, collects soil, and cultures the various fungi therein.
I knew almost immediately that's not what you meant, buuut for a femtosecond my brain screamed at me "_wait - beloved comedic musician Weird Al designed an antenna for NASA?!_"
"Like a friendly, non-biological form of the Borg Collective of science fiction fame, 80 personal computers, using artificial intelligence (AI), have combined their silicon brains to quickly design a tiny, advanced space antenna."
This is literally the first paragraph from the article from NASA.
Or if you read past the first paragraph you'll see that it is genetic programming:
"To design the ST5 space antenna, the computers started with random antenna designs, and through the evolutionary process, refined them"
This is an optimisation method, arguably not "AI" in the sense of an agent making decisions. Headlines that claim AI made something just get more clicks.
This is admittedly a rough definition to nail down but I disagree. While you might use a genetic algorithm to optimize the parameters or architecture of a model, that would make it no different to saying gradient descent is a subset of AI.
It's more accurate to say genetic programming is a subset of optimization methods, and optimisation is used extensively in developing AI.
The difference in the NASA example being that the optimization method was used to directly explore the parameter space of antennae, as opposed to training an AI "antenna designer" which then proposed optimal designs itself.
This might sound like splitting hairs if you don't work in the space but I've been working with exactly these kinds of models for nearly a decade now and people keep muddying the definition of AI to the point that it's becoming meaningless.
But don't squeeze too hard, don't hold it too long, and hopefully smear some release agent on your hand before you do this.
Source: played with epoxy putty. It can be tricky.
Hollywood would screw it up beyond belief...and I would still crawl through broken glass to see it.
edit: plus, there's more than three books, since Ringworld returns in the Fleet of Worlds series (which I enjoyed for the most part; the first book was kinda *meh*, but after that it was some of Niven's best stuff in years).
The authoritarian one-third of the US population would lose their collective minds (otherwise known as 'Tuesday'). "This is the future that liberals want! Sex with monkeys!!!"
And then searches for 'monkey sex' would soar in red states. My god: we could turn them all into furries. Divide by zero.
The Fleet series is kinda hit and miss. It's nice to get more info on the Puppeteers and whatnot but yeah, the first one is a bit of a slog; so is Juggler (although that's because the first half of the book is retelling the Schaeffer stories from Sigmunds perspective).
Hollywood would indeed butcher his stories. Many of them would be possibly possible with animation but even then, the basic stories would be hacked at until they're barely recognizable. Much as I'd love to see a Ringworld movie or series, I do not trust them to not fuck it up.
Imagine what they'd do to Teela, let alone rishathra.
They'll also get the scale wrong. I guarantee it.
Edit - there are 4 books in the Ringworld series: Ringworld, Engineers, Throne, and Children.
Ah, yeah, I forgot about Children. I had a nagging feeling I was undercounting. It's been years and years since I read the last one. In fact, I should go re-read them all.
Give it a few years, and some savant will use "AI" to create the entire series as movies. And I'll watch them, even if they're bad.
edit: "possibly possible". I love this.
Foundation was good. It's not the book, but the book would make for a ridiculously boring tv series since almost nothing happens for 4/5 of the entire written series.
If by good, you mean it ignores a lot of the underlying point of the stories, then yeah.
It was watchable, good production values and the sequences with the clone Emperors is really the best bit of it. They fit with the original stories quite well and is an inspired touch. But how they handled Salvor Hardin by turning him into a gun toting heroine who pretty much makes the situation worse nearly every time by charging in generally without much of a plan - when the character in the books is famed for being non-violent and trying to think their way out of problems.
Or the personal 'aura' fields that the Emperor clones wear - it completely contradicts one of the stories where a trader is bribing an Empire official because the Empire was never able to build personal forcefields. Which was one of the central points about the Foundation series.
I am not averse to them changing things but they really do need to take more care to preserve what Asimov was trying to say with the series.
Oh boy. If you want extra background, begin with the Gil the ARM stories (collected in the book Flatlander). If you want to more or less dive in, begin with World of Ptaavs. If you want to jump straight to the central stuff, begin with Protector.
After finishing whichever one you start with, move on to the next one in the order I've listed. If you start at Protector, move directly to Ringworld or take a side tour (that will be halfway important but not absolutely necessary) over to the Schaeffer stories (collected in Crashlander) and then go to Ringworld.
If you want something sort of sideline, read the Man-Kzin War series. Still Known Space (where the vast majority of his stories take place) but specifically about that species and their...interactions with humanity.
If you want something with a more MilSciFi feel, go with The Mote in God's Eye (which will help explain my initial post post) and the sequel The Gripping Hand.
No disrespect to georgeolduvai here, who has given a really thorough itinerary, but rather than starting you off with a 12-course meal, a more casual beginning might be to check out *Ringworld* and see if you like the vibe. It's not representative of his entire *ouvre*, but it's a fun story and shows a lot of what makes his writing tick.
Many of us Niven fans are absolutely rabid about the hope of getting a movie version someday. Dozens of us, I say!
I, a rabid Niven fan, hope we get *good* movies. I can have bad scifi movies for days on end!
May hollywood not ruin this.
Integral trees movie please!
Thank you SO much for reminding me of the name of this book! I just finished Rendezvous With Rama on audible while on a road trip and I couldn't remember where the weird alien was from. Puppeteers
Er…
I work in 3D printing/additive manufacturing and this has been going on for quite awhile. The article is just throwing “AI” into the title for clickbait. Oh no, mathematical models!
Look up Topological Optimization or lattice structures in 3D printing. 3D printing has really enabled manufacturability of these designs. It’s fascinating and beautiful stuff.
Anyway, definitely not looking forward to “AI” being used everywhere to generate clickbait for existing technologies.
Big agree on this.
I also work in AM and reading through the article I couldn't find anything that set this apart from standard topological optimisation that I've been using for ages.
Looks like the usual case of just sticking AI onto anything and everything that isn't obvious in it's exact function to make it sound futuristic. It's the modern version of slapping a few lasers and smoke machines to something to make it seem cool.
Topological Optimization is the current name for the packages/techniques that produce designs like that in the article. It doesn’t describe the algorithms that do it.
Are you inferring that from the use of the word "evolve" in the article? Generally this problem is solved using an adjoint based gradient optimization algorithm. GAs could be applied (I did it in grad school) but aren't in use in any commercial tools that I'm aware of because they're not the efficient choice for this problem.
Yeah next time I use Karamba or Galapagos or some other optimization model for something I'm going to call it "AI generated"
Hell I've got interviews coming up maybe I should throw in a line like "designed additive manufactured structure through heuristic self recursive artificial intelligence pipeline"
Topology optimization isn't really a new thing. I'm curious what AI would actually be doing here. Probably just adjusting input parameters to the simulation.
This really isn't topological optimization. They're using evolutionary algorithms to "evolve" parts. The solutions the algorithms come up with don't always make sense but they frequently perform much better than human designs for the specific traits being optimized.
That reminds me of a short story I read many years ago (I cannot recall the title or author unfortunately) in which a maintenance man is called in to a factory. The newest machine is having some troubles; the maintenance guy asks for specifics. He's told that the machine, designed and programmed to optimize production, always gets one part made then begins to destroy itself. The MM is intrigued and asks to see this occur. He watches the process and then says "Don't turn it off. Let it do its thing."
Turns out the the machine realized it had too many arms/actuators and one was getting in the way so it wanted to remove it.
I'm reasonably certain I found it in an anthology book, possibly one of the "Best Of 19xx" series (the sort of thing that was edited by J Pournelle or Heinlein). Very short, less than 10 pages or so.
But... That's just topology optimization. You don't need to create an initial design, you can just give the software a rectangular prism as design space and let it go to work. Something like Altair Inspire has been doing that for years without AI. I'd be curious what aspect of the process requires or is improved by AI.
Nothing is improved by AI here because this is just the newest case of common algorithms being mislabeled.
It seems they just use an evolutionary algorithm which popsci reporting is calling an AI.
This doesn't mean that the results aren't good or anything the like. It's just the reporting that sucks.
The usage of the term AI is so all-over-the-place anymore that it's losing all meaning for me. It's blurred beyond recognition. I appreciate your clarification.
I dislike the term AI on principle because I feel to the casual reader it imparts an idea of sentience, self awareness or agency. Things like evolutionary algorithms could not be further than this. I'd equate them more to filling a drinking glass using a fire truck from a half mile away.
> It seems they just use an evolutionary algorithm which popsci reporting is calling an AI.
Genetic algorithms are generally considered to be AI. I studied and implemented genetic algorithms in the AI course I took when getting my Computer Science degree at a top university.
What's your AI background?
Gradient descent moves toward the "reward" at each iteration. Evolutionary processes don't move "toward" anything, they move randomly the direction is achieved by culling samples which moved in the "wrong" direction.
That's still topological optimization, just done (possibly) more efficiently.
Given a sufficiently accurate testing environment, this is basically AI bread and butter.
This is just topological optimisation though. You give the program a design space, mating faces that must be maintained and then some parameters around attributes such as strength in certain directions and press go.
It shouldn't. Evolutionary algorithms have been around for like 50 years. Just they aren't used that much because the answers they give are not necessarily optimal (usually just pretty good but not the absolute best) and it's not always clear why the answer performs like it does.
Here's an example evolved antenna used by NASA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
The "new" part is the ability to manufacture what it comes up with. These shapes aren't easily machined, but can be 3D printed. With metal printing tech coming along we're getting to the point where they can design and manufacture cost effectively, and this is exciting.
The 3D metal printing technology has also been around for at least a decade. There's commercially available metal 3D printers now. Protolabs has been selling access to their machines for years.
Hell, 3d scanning>milling>sintering has already trickled down to dental work to the point you can get a perfect fit ceramic crown in a couple of hours.
It even identifies likely high impact points and compensates.
It figures out where the stress will be and how the material will behave under that stress. Then it builds up the parts where the stress is most or reduces it where it's not needed.
Yeah, I used that in one of my structural engineering courses. The optimized structure will look like that picture where there will be no straight edges and a lot of curves and whatnot. The problem is though, this optimized structure is always a pain to manufacture.
Presumably topology optimisation just randomly changes the parameters of an existing design, whereas AI is given a lot more freedom to fuck around, or even start from scratch based on some basic requirements.
> It figures out where the stress will be and how the material will behave under that stress. Then it builds up the parts where the stress is most or reduces it where it's not needed.
No that's not how Genetic Algorithms work.
Generative design is a more specific term. I think NASA just gave it a new name but it's the same thing, they even mention the term in the video. It's been out for I think four years or so now. This was one of the first videos I saw about it - neat stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc
It isn’t new but differential equations are still very difficult and time-intensive. [This video](https://youtu.be/Pjn-uP2CGHU) does a pretty good job explaining it for anyone interested. He starts talking about topology optimization at the 5 minute mark.
If you read the article it tells you a good amount. They are using AI to create stronger and lighter parts for spacecrafts. Up to 10x better than human designs, that's wildly awesome!
This is ~~nearly~~ **over** 20 year old tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
Still, the science and math behind it are *super* cool imho.
Edit: I'm getting older.
I wouldn't say they look "alien" either, just vaguely "biological". Which I guess isn't surprising, as life kind of ground out similar optimization algorithms the hard way through random trial-and-error with millions or billions of years of evolution. And now DNA and simple cell-growth rules have plants, corals, mammal blood vessels, etc. producing these kinds of forms naturally.
I suppose the "alien" impression might come in because of the H.R. Geiger "biomechanical" art style he pioneered. And got put out into pop culture and the collective consciousness with the Alien movies. Most notably the Xenomorph, something the audience would deem terrifying, but ultimately biological, but had disturbing and disruptive forms. It had body parts subtly reminiscent of industrial ribbed pipes and tubes. And also the alien derelict spacecraft. Where the audience would expect more angular or orthogonal shapes, or other machine-like curves that they were used to, instead set pieces like the ship's corridors and bulkheads, or pieces of inscrutable machinery that had various bone-like organic shapes.
And something that melded what people held distinctly separate as biological or mechanical had not been seen before and looked very strange. It all created an aesthetic very divorced from both Earth life and human technology.
Although we've found organisms with structures we once thought to be only in machines, I forgot what exactly, but fleas or something similar has been found to have "gears" in their legs that provide mechanical advantage for their impressive ability to jump relative to their body size.
And there are other machine-like structures that have been found in various microbes too I believe.
I’m a structural engineer (on land, not for space). It sounds like my job is going to change a lot during my career. I better get more proficient with AI software
This is what I don't understand about these types of parts. Anyone who has worked with or around FEM knows that getting anything to converge with actual test data is fraught with challenges. So are these just optimizing based on relative values and has anyone been able to get these parts succesfully correlated between FEA and test?
These parts in particular I have no clue, but I know at the company I work at there are generative designed parts that are in full production. Can't say I know how the real world results compair to the FEA, but if they made it to production, they certainly couldn't have faired to poorly. The designs are basically just going to come down to feeding stress vectors and criteria into the simulation plopping that data into a generative design program and telling it to generate the most efficient structure to handle the required forces. If you didn't acount for all the real world inputs in the start, that design will probably not fair very well in the field. The more accurate the imput data, the simulations, and the asumptions made through the design program, the closer the real-world testing will match the theory. Having engineers that understand when the programs are outputting nonsensical designs and how to fix that is certainly important as well.
-I only work tangentialy with FEA and haven't branched out much beyond traditional modeling/design. But I work extensively with 3d printing and have picked up a bit about generative design through research. So basically, everything I just said might be somewhat Bs or using the wrong terminology, but like definitely still at least a bit more informed than 99% of the other reddit comments when everyone starts talking about anything they want to call AI and treat like magic.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ARM](/r/Space/comments/1131pak/stub/j8pa0s4 "Last usage")|Asteroid Redirect Mission|
| |Advanced RISC Machines, embedded processor architecture|
|[CFD](/r/Space/comments/1131pak/stub/j8q6l7k "Last usage")|Computational Fluid Dynamics|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1131pak/stub/j8p8e2g "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[UHF](/r/Space/comments/1131pak/stub/j8owwmw "Last usage")|Ultra-High Frequency radio|
----------------
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This gives me hope for our future. Other articles featuring AI makes it seem like a ticking time bomb, but this is a great example of how things can be improved 10xs over in a lot of manufacturing and safety issues.
Makes you think how “natural” looking tech may look for some potential advanced interstellar intelligence. Perhaps we might’ve seen some evidence already but deemed it too natural looking.
Trying to get free energy system schematics out of AI but feel like that’s on the blocked list… stubborn shit. Won’t even help with keno plots to beat the system.
Pretty cool but they still need human expertise. These industrial AI's need to be able to run physical experiments to generate new unique data to really come into themselves. In the medium term these AI system connected to wide array of experimental and diagnostic equipment will change the landscape. Imagine an AI running simultaneous tests for a specialized critical component 24 hours a day 7 days a week for months with no sleep, no fatigue. Pretty exciting stuff.
We've been able to design these types of parts for decades. The difference is that we were not able to manufacture them until recently, thanks to the advent of SLS 3d printers.
This is not new, I'm pretty sure this has existed for decades. You take a basic design for a part, then put it in a physics simulation to figure out what portions of the part are actually necessary, then remove the rest. You end up with quite organic looking parts most of the time from what I've seen.
I remember reading about AI designed circuits a while back, and looking at these I get the same impression: we were wrong that AI would struggle with creativity and get stuck in ruts... it is \*we\* that lack freedom of thought to design things in different ways. We're quick to decide a design is "good enough" and we generally use things the way they're supposed to be used. AI seems less constrained in design.
From what I know of this stuff, I think it's more like procedural iteration rather than "Intelligence." It simulates a bunch of designs given set boundary conditions and then optimizes it for the strongest design with the least material.
A lot of people are using "AI" to optimize geometry for different parts.
This is the way the entire field of engineering is going.
The toughest part is defining the problem properly.
In reality though, a lot of these solutions are just optimization algorithms. But some are actually using ML.
I've used a generative design tool with Fusion 360. It's really easy. You can target the lightest weight or highest stiffness. They always look like this.
This is a blog post from Interesting Engineering, which I find to be mostly fluff half ass articles that are more inaccurate than accurate. I looked at the video the post was based on and it was posted *3 years ago!* Yeah, this isn't news in any way.
"BREAKING: NASA uses off the shelf decades old generative design tool." "Dave that's not news. At least put Blockchain or AI in there somewhere. Aliens! Come on man."
>"BREAKING: NASA uses off the shelf decades old generative design tool to make its parts budget stretch a little further. Modern enough for ya?
This is a paid feature now, right?
Free for education edition, not sure on others.
Getting *shit* results is easy. Just like simulation software that has been around for decades, garbage-in, garbage-out. Getting *good* results is far more complicated than pushing a few buttons.
Correction. Its easy. It wasnt easy for the people who made the AI. But for us. The people using the AI. Its easy to get good results.
I FEA my generative design projects. They are fine. I'm not sure why it was so hard for you.
Yes i used it to make this [shelf bracket](https://imgur.com/a/9E1sxpX) And im just a 3d printing hobbyist. Not even a professional
The tech has come a long way since 2006 when NASA flew [this "weird" AI designed antenna.](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/exploringtheuniverse/borg.html)
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Based on mycelium. The algo is available in fusion 360. Lady that created it is from MIT IIRC.
I’m low key obsessed with fungus. It’s so fascinating. I have a degree in biology, and am now in PA school. But in an alternate universe (where I’m not so very worried about money) I’d 100% be researching fungus. They’re fascinating. Which, as a bonus, makes the surge of fungus zombie fare incredibly entertaining.
Honestly I’m partially convinced that The Last of Us is a psyop by Big Mycelium to get everyone interested in fungus.
The Girl With All the Gifts too! It’s crazy they both (probably) came up with that storyline independently. I say probably because writing a book takes a long time, and I doubt the book was written and published in the single year after The Last of Us came out. Maybe though. Edit: oooh. I just googled this, and apparently The Girl With all the Gifts is based on a short story Iphigenia in Aulis - published in 2012, one year before The Last of Us. But there’s zero chance the game took cues from it because game development takes years. The plot thickens.
The Last of Us is a cautionary tale. There really are fungi that are inching toward being able to colonize organisms at our average internal temperature.
The possibility I find most interesting, more than any sort of "fungi are going to evolve and turn us into mindless zombies" narrative, is that they are already influencing us in a very different way than we'd expect. Like, for example, a quick peek at your post history shows comments in /r/LSD. It's of course a well known fact that LSD was originally derived from *ergotamine*, which is produced by a fungus. Similarly, the drug *psilocybin* is produced by psilocybin mushrooms and has similar psychological effects. Both of these compounds are now showing immense promise at treating various forms of human psychopathology, and can occasion experiences that people label as "[spiritually significant](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16826400/)". Moreover, they tend to lead to lasting changes in our sense of "[nature-relatedness](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2055102920978123)". A truly intelligent fungus would recognize that humans have the physical and intellectual capability to greatly accelerate the process of ecological succession, which would directly benefit them (as fungi are fundamental in ecological restoration/regeneration) in unprecedented ways. This wouldn't be possible if they turned us all into mindless zombies. I'm not the first one to have these ideas, and they are extremely far-fetched. It's definitely a fun possibility to toy with, though :)
This is one of the best sentences I've read this year lmao
Not really and animal, not really a plant. My friend is also obsessed, he says their stomach is on the outside.
Closer to human than plants even!
Can you expand on this? This sounds really interesting.
Oh gosh, you’re gonna get me started. So, very simply, we’ve looked at the physical makeup of fungi (lacking chloroplasts that make plants green for instance, or how a portobello mushroom literally feels more like meat than plant) and even further looked at their DNA - and it’s incredibly similar. We have far more proteins in common with fungi than we do plants. The best estimate is that fungi and animals diverged around 1 billion years ago from the same branch. This is relatively “new” in scientific terms. Until the nineties people basically assumed “they grow out of the ground so they’re probably closely related to plants.” DNA says otherwise! In short, they never were part of the plant group. They started with us, before they or us diverted to animals.
>fungi and animals diverged around 1 billion years ago *from the same branch*. It's kind of mind blowing to think about that, in a way, we're like (very) distant cousins to fungus. I didn't realize we shared so much, but it makes a sort of sense the more I think about it. My knowledge of mycology basically starts and ends at the uncle bens subreddit, so this is really fascinating to me. Thank you for the short lesson and for the new rabbit hole for me to dive into! E: I want to subscribe to "Fun"gus facts
Get into it. It’s so fun. I was camping a few months ago and spotted “chicken of the woods” and lost my shit. My roommate thought I was insane. It straight up tastes like chicken. And remember that the part you can see is just the reproductive body. The main fungus is underground or in the tree, and can be *huge.* There was one organism that spanned over 1000 football fields I read about! Edit: I got curious because I couldn’t remember if the title of largest organism on earth belonged to a fungus or an aspen. It’s a fungus! [One fungus, 2,384 acres.](https://frontenacarchbiosphere.ca/worlds-largest-organism/) That’s one distinct, living organism. One DNA. Over 1500 football fields. 3 square miles.
>Get into it. Challenge accepted! Any books you'd recommend or places to start (just generally I mean)? I gotta try that chicken of the woods mushroom sometime. Is the texture similar too, or is it like, well, mushy?
You can research fungus without much money! Just look at this guy! William Padilla-Brown [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKMQpjo--HM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKMQpjo--HM) Or this dude, Alan Rockefeller! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo) The second video is a trip. The accents, the flow of conversation, the topics... its perfect.
My micro prof is an agrologist who specializes in micorrhizae and crops. Very fascinating stuff. Dude just goes into the woods, collects soil, and cultures the various fungi therein.
I knew almost immediately that's not what you meant, buuut for a femtosecond my brain screamed at me "_wait - beloved comedic musician Weird Al designed an antenna for NASA?!_"
But that antenna wasn’t AI, was genetic programming
"Like a friendly, non-biological form of the Borg Collective of science fiction fame, 80 personal computers, using artificial intelligence (AI), have combined their silicon brains to quickly design a tiny, advanced space antenna." This is literally the first paragraph from the article from NASA.
Or if you read past the first paragraph you'll see that it is genetic programming: "To design the ST5 space antenna, the computers started with random antenna designs, and through the evolutionary process, refined them" This is an optimisation method, arguably not "AI" in the sense of an agent making decisions. Headlines that claim AI made something just get more clicks.
optimization methods are methods to make decisions. i understand most of the current ais are based on optimization algorithms
Genetic programming is a subset of AI.
This is admittedly a rough definition to nail down but I disagree. While you might use a genetic algorithm to optimize the parameters or architecture of a model, that would make it no different to saying gradient descent is a subset of AI. It's more accurate to say genetic programming is a subset of optimization methods, and optimisation is used extensively in developing AI. The difference in the NASA example being that the optimization method was used to directly explore the parameter space of antennae, as opposed to training an AI "antenna designer" which then proposed optimal designs itself. This might sound like splitting hairs if you don't work in the space but I've been working with exactly these kinds of models for nearly a decade now and people keep muddying the definition of AI to the point that it's becoming meaningless.
>But that antenna wasn’t AI, was genetic programming Which is as much 'AI' as the OP's article.
Nasa went to the moon with basically a calculator in 1969. 54 years later and we have AI designing spacecraft parts. Very amazing.
They remind me of the descriptions of Motie and Puppeteer tech.
Whenever I buy a new tool or something of the sort and it is of poor design I always try to imagine how the Moties would make it better.
And the answer is always to fill in the handle with goop and give it a good squeeze while it cures around your fingers...
But don't squeeze too hard, don't hold it too long, and hopefully smear some release agent on your hand before you do this. Source: played with epoxy putty. It can be tricky.
And keep an eye on the Watchmakers.
It's time to flush the ship. Call general quarters and prepare for hard vacuum.
Can we finally get Hollywood to discover Larry Niven? I'm gonna die of old age without ever seeing a Ringworld movie.
God I would love a ringworld movie/trilogy
Hollywood would screw it up beyond belief...and I would still crawl through broken glass to see it. edit: plus, there's more than three books, since Ringworld returns in the Fleet of Worlds series (which I enjoyed for the most part; the first book was kinda *meh*, but after that it was some of Niven's best stuff in years).
As long as they include all the rishathra I'll like it.
The authoritarian one-third of the US population would lose their collective minds (otherwise known as 'Tuesday'). "This is the future that liberals want! Sex with monkeys!!!" And then searches for 'monkey sex' would soar in red states. My god: we could turn them all into furries. Divide by zero.
Florida immediately makes having sex with aliens illegal. Wait...🤔
Always projection with those fools.
The Fleet series is kinda hit and miss. It's nice to get more info on the Puppeteers and whatnot but yeah, the first one is a bit of a slog; so is Juggler (although that's because the first half of the book is retelling the Schaeffer stories from Sigmunds perspective). Hollywood would indeed butcher his stories. Many of them would be possibly possible with animation but even then, the basic stories would be hacked at until they're barely recognizable. Much as I'd love to see a Ringworld movie or series, I do not trust them to not fuck it up. Imagine what they'd do to Teela, let alone rishathra. They'll also get the scale wrong. I guarantee it. Edit - there are 4 books in the Ringworld series: Ringworld, Engineers, Throne, and Children.
Ah, yeah, I forgot about Children. I had a nagging feeling I was undercounting. It's been years and years since I read the last one. In fact, I should go re-read them all. Give it a few years, and some savant will use "AI" to create the entire series as movies. And I'll watch them, even if they're bad. edit: "possibly possible". I love this.
Known Universe has so much. Gil Hamilton would be a great procedural. Lucifer's Hammer would be a great apocalyptic take on the meteor-disaster movie.
I wanna see the little Motie cars!
Be careful with what you wish. Look at what they did with Fundation... Or even worse, imagine what netflix would do.
Foundation was good. It's not the book, but the book would make for a ridiculously boring tv series since almost nothing happens for 4/5 of the entire written series.
If by good, you mean it ignores a lot of the underlying point of the stories, then yeah. It was watchable, good production values and the sequences with the clone Emperors is really the best bit of it. They fit with the original stories quite well and is an inspired touch. But how they handled Salvor Hardin by turning him into a gun toting heroine who pretty much makes the situation worse nearly every time by charging in generally without much of a plan - when the character in the books is famed for being non-violent and trying to think their way out of problems. Or the personal 'aura' fields that the Emperor clones wear - it completely contradicts one of the stories where a trader is bribing an Empire official because the Empire was never able to build personal forcefields. Which was one of the central points about the Foundation series. I am not averse to them changing things but they really do need to take more care to preserve what Asimov was trying to say with the series.
They're gonna ruin The Three Body Problem, that's for sure
Coming soon to Sy-fy... (I'm sorry.)
Never read any Larry Niven. Where's the best place to start?
Oh boy. If you want extra background, begin with the Gil the ARM stories (collected in the book Flatlander). If you want to more or less dive in, begin with World of Ptaavs. If you want to jump straight to the central stuff, begin with Protector. After finishing whichever one you start with, move on to the next one in the order I've listed. If you start at Protector, move directly to Ringworld or take a side tour (that will be halfway important but not absolutely necessary) over to the Schaeffer stories (collected in Crashlander) and then go to Ringworld. If you want something sort of sideline, read the Man-Kzin War series. Still Known Space (where the vast majority of his stories take place) but specifically about that species and their...interactions with humanity. If you want something with a more MilSciFi feel, go with The Mote in God's Eye (which will help explain my initial post post) and the sequel The Gripping Hand.
No disrespect to georgeolduvai here, who has given a really thorough itinerary, but rather than starting you off with a 12-course meal, a more casual beginning might be to check out *Ringworld* and see if you like the vibe. It's not representative of his entire *ouvre*, but it's a fun story and shows a lot of what makes his writing tick. Many of us Niven fans are absolutely rabid about the hope of getting a movie version someday. Dozens of us, I say!
I, a rabid Niven fan, hope we get *good* movies. I can have bad scifi movies for days on end! May hollywood not ruin this. Integral trees movie please!
I haven't read a ton of Niven, but my first was the short story Inconstant Moon and it's stuck with me.
All those smooth curves would make a Puppeteer feel very safe.
Thank you SO much for reminding me of the name of this book! I just finished Rendezvous With Rama on audible while on a road trip and I couldn't remember where the weird alien was from. Puppeteers
Which book? The Mote in God's Eye?
I thought of the moties too!
It's that half-melty, multipurpose look. Great minds think alike!
Er… I work in 3D printing/additive manufacturing and this has been going on for quite awhile. The article is just throwing “AI” into the title for clickbait. Oh no, mathematical models! Look up Topological Optimization or lattice structures in 3D printing. 3D printing has really enabled manufacturability of these designs. It’s fascinating and beautiful stuff. Anyway, definitely not looking forward to “AI” being used everywhere to generate clickbait for existing technologies.
Big agree on this. I also work in AM and reading through the article I couldn't find anything that set this apart from standard topological optimisation that I've been using for ages. Looks like the usual case of just sticking AI onto anything and everything that isn't obvious in it's exact function to make it sound futuristic. It's the modern version of slapping a few lasers and smoke machines to something to make it seem cool.
They used genetic algorithms for these parts, that's the "AI" part, not Topological Optimization.
Topological Optimization is the current name for the packages/techniques that produce designs like that in the article. It doesn’t describe the algorithms that do it.
Are you inferring that from the use of the word "evolve" in the article? Generally this problem is solved using an adjoint based gradient optimization algorithm. GAs could be applied (I did it in grad school) but aren't in use in any commercial tools that I'm aware of because they're not the efficient choice for this problem.
honestly, none of that looks "alien" to me
That's right, and just to point out, the video in the article was filmed 3 years ago.
Yeah next time I use Karamba or Galapagos or some other optimization model for something I'm going to call it "AI generated" Hell I've got interviews coming up maybe I should throw in a line like "designed additive manufactured structure through heuristic self recursive artificial intelligence pipeline"
We really need to start using more specific terms than "AI" for literally everything that a computer generates.
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Topology optimization isn't really a new thing. I'm curious what AI would actually be doing here. Probably just adjusting input parameters to the simulation.
This really isn't topological optimization. They're using evolutionary algorithms to "evolve" parts. The solutions the algorithms come up with don't always make sense but they frequently perform much better than human designs for the specific traits being optimized.
That reminds me of a short story I read many years ago (I cannot recall the title or author unfortunately) in which a maintenance man is called in to a factory. The newest machine is having some troubles; the maintenance guy asks for specifics. He's told that the machine, designed and programmed to optimize production, always gets one part made then begins to destroy itself. The MM is intrigued and asks to see this occur. He watches the process and then says "Don't turn it off. Let it do its thing." Turns out the the machine realized it had too many arms/actuators and one was getting in the way so it wanted to remove it.
Was this from a published short story? That sounds like a really cool prenise
I'm reasonably certain I found it in an anthology book, possibly one of the "Best Of 19xx" series (the sort of thing that was edited by J Pournelle or Heinlein). Very short, less than 10 pages or so.
And that machines name?
^(albert einstein...?)
*Loved legionnaire and notorious 2pac fan, RIP in Peace*
Elon Musk. Mark my words, this time next year he'll have one fewer arm and Twitter will make sense.
Sounds like Topological Optimization with fancy new tools.
That's pretty much topology optimization Testing different parts to see what can evolve and devolve
But... That's just topology optimization. You don't need to create an initial design, you can just give the software a rectangular prism as design space and let it go to work. Something like Altair Inspire has been doing that for years without AI. I'd be curious what aspect of the process requires or is improved by AI.
Nothing is improved by AI here because this is just the newest case of common algorithms being mislabeled. It seems they just use an evolutionary algorithm which popsci reporting is calling an AI. This doesn't mean that the results aren't good or anything the like. It's just the reporting that sucks.
The usage of the term AI is so all-over-the-place anymore that it's losing all meaning for me. It's blurred beyond recognition. I appreciate your clarification.
AI now pretty much just means using statistics
I dislike the term AI on principle because I feel to the casual reader it imparts an idea of sentience, self awareness or agency. Things like evolutionary algorithms could not be further than this. I'd equate them more to filling a drinking glass using a fire truck from a half mile away.
> It seems they just use an evolutionary algorithm which popsci reporting is calling an AI. Genetic algorithms are generally considered to be AI. I studied and implemented genetic algorithms in the AI course I took when getting my Computer Science degree at a top university. What's your AI background?
Isn’t AI basically an evolutionary algorithm?
Not usually. Most AI these days is powered by gradient descent, which isn't an evolutionary process.
Is it not? It’s still moving towards the “reward” each iteration
Gradient descent moves toward the "reward" at each iteration. Evolutionary processes don't move "toward" anything, they move randomly the direction is achieved by culling samples which moved in the "wrong" direction.
Yup that makes sense. Thanks!
That's what they are talking about.
That's still topological optimization, just done (possibly) more efficiently. Given a sufficiently accurate testing environment, this is basically AI bread and butter.
This is just topological optimisation though. You give the program a design space, mating faces that must be maintained and then some parameters around attributes such as strength in certain directions and press go.
Why does this fill me with existential dread while also giving me a massive boner?
It shouldn't. Evolutionary algorithms have been around for like 50 years. Just they aren't used that much because the answers they give are not necessarily optimal (usually just pretty good but not the absolute best) and it's not always clear why the answer performs like it does. Here's an example evolved antenna used by NASA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
The "new" part is the ability to manufacture what it comes up with. These shapes aren't easily machined, but can be 3D printed. With metal printing tech coming along we're getting to the point where they can design and manufacture cost effectively, and this is exciting.
The 3D metal printing technology has also been around for at least a decade. There's commercially available metal 3D printers now. Protolabs has been selling access to their machines for years.
Yes, but it’s constantly improving and spreading. It’s not new, but it’s becoming much more common than it used to be.
Hell, 3d scanning>milling>sintering has already trickled down to dental work to the point you can get a perfect fit ceramic crown in a couple of hours. It even identifies likely high impact points and compensates.
You've read too much Warhammer 40k?
It figures out where the stress will be and how the material will behave under that stress. Then it builds up the parts where the stress is most or reduces it where it's not needed.
That's just standard topology optimization that's available in most commercial grade FEA packages though.
Yeah, I used that in one of my structural engineering courses. The optimized structure will look like that picture where there will be no straight edges and a lot of curves and whatnot. The problem is though, this optimized structure is always a pain to manufacture.
Additive manufacturing is making it much easier, though of course there are always trade-off to be made.
Presumably topology optimisation just randomly changes the parameters of an existing design, whereas AI is given a lot more freedom to fuck around, or even start from scratch based on some basic requirements.
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> It figures out where the stress will be and how the material will behave under that stress. Then it builds up the parts where the stress is most or reduces it where it's not needed. No that's not how Genetic Algorithms work.
Generative design is a more specific term. I think NASA just gave it a new name but it's the same thing, they even mention the term in the video. It's been out for I think four years or so now. This was one of the first videos I saw about it - neat stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3smr5CEdksc
Their explanation was poorly worded, but what they said is generally how topology optimization works.
It isn’t new but differential equations are still very difficult and time-intensive. [This video](https://youtu.be/Pjn-uP2CGHU) does a pretty good job explaining it for anyone interested. He starts talking about topology optimization at the 5 minute mark.
If you read the article it tells you a good amount. They are using AI to create stronger and lighter parts for spacecrafts. Up to 10x better than human designs, that's wildly awesome!
This is ~~nearly~~ **over** 20 year old tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna Still, the science and math behind it are *super* cool imho. Edit: I'm getting older.
These things looks so much like bone marrow to me. Might as well by million year old tech.
I wouldn't say they look "alien" either, just vaguely "biological". Which I guess isn't surprising, as life kind of ground out similar optimization algorithms the hard way through random trial-and-error with millions or billions of years of evolution. And now DNA and simple cell-growth rules have plants, corals, mammal blood vessels, etc. producing these kinds of forms naturally. I suppose the "alien" impression might come in because of the H.R. Geiger "biomechanical" art style he pioneered. And got put out into pop culture and the collective consciousness with the Alien movies. Most notably the Xenomorph, something the audience would deem terrifying, but ultimately biological, but had disturbing and disruptive forms. It had body parts subtly reminiscent of industrial ribbed pipes and tubes. And also the alien derelict spacecraft. Where the audience would expect more angular or orthogonal shapes, or other machine-like curves that they were used to, instead set pieces like the ship's corridors and bulkheads, or pieces of inscrutable machinery that had various bone-like organic shapes. And something that melded what people held distinctly separate as biological or mechanical had not been seen before and looked very strange. It all created an aesthetic very divorced from both Earth life and human technology. Although we've found organisms with structures we once thought to be only in machines, I forgot what exactly, but fleas or something similar has been found to have "gears" in their legs that provide mechanical advantage for their impressive ability to jump relative to their body size. And there are other machine-like structures that have been found in various microbes too I believe.
I’m a structural engineer (on land, not for space). It sounds like my job is going to change a lot during my career. I better get more proficient with AI software
Isn't that just topology optimisation? There's a bunch of consumer programs that can achieve this for 3d printing.
> topology optimisation The outcomes are similar, but they used genetic algorithms for this.
This isn't news, engineers have been doing this for years, you just don't see it much in mass produced applications due to cost of manufacturing.
This is what I don't understand about these types of parts. Anyone who has worked with or around FEM knows that getting anything to converge with actual test data is fraught with challenges. So are these just optimizing based on relative values and has anyone been able to get these parts succesfully correlated between FEA and test?
These parts in particular I have no clue, but I know at the company I work at there are generative designed parts that are in full production. Can't say I know how the real world results compair to the FEA, but if they made it to production, they certainly couldn't have faired to poorly. The designs are basically just going to come down to feeding stress vectors and criteria into the simulation plopping that data into a generative design program and telling it to generate the most efficient structure to handle the required forces. If you didn't acount for all the real world inputs in the start, that design will probably not fair very well in the field. The more accurate the imput data, the simulations, and the asumptions made through the design program, the closer the real-world testing will match the theory. Having engineers that understand when the programs are outputting nonsensical designs and how to fix that is certainly important as well. -I only work tangentialy with FEA and haven't branched out much beyond traditional modeling/design. But I work extensively with 3d printing and have picked up a bit about generative design through research. So basically, everything I just said might be somewhat Bs or using the wrong terminology, but like definitely still at least a bit more informed than 99% of the other reddit comments when everyone starts talking about anything they want to call AI and treat like magic.
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Jesus Christ the website is mobile cancer, fuck.
This gives me hope for our future. Other articles featuring AI makes it seem like a ticking time bomb, but this is a great example of how things can be improved 10xs over in a lot of manufacturing and safety issues.
Makes you think how “natural” looking tech may look for some potential advanced interstellar intelligence. Perhaps we might’ve seen some evidence already but deemed it too natural looking.
HolUp, how does NASA know what alien tech looks like?!?!?! /s
Trying to get free energy system schematics out of AI but feel like that’s on the blocked list… stubborn shit. Won’t even help with keno plots to beat the system.
HR Giger vibes but it's just human-AI optimization, maybe we are our own alien life after all...
Pretty cool but they still need human expertise. These industrial AI's need to be able to run physical experiments to generate new unique data to really come into themselves. In the medium term these AI system connected to wide array of experimental and diagnostic equipment will change the landscape. Imagine an AI running simultaneous tests for a specialized critical component 24 hours a day 7 days a week for months with no sleep, no fatigue. Pretty exciting stuff.
We've been able to design these types of parts for decades. The difference is that we were not able to manufacture them until recently, thanks to the advent of SLS 3d printers.
This is not new, I'm pretty sure this has existed for decades. You take a basic design for a part, then put it in a physics simulation to figure out what portions of the part are actually necessary, then remove the rest. You end up with quite organic looking parts most of the time from what I've seen.
I remember reading about AI designed circuits a while back, and looking at these I get the same impression: we were wrong that AI would struggle with creativity and get stuck in ruts... it is \*we\* that lack freedom of thought to design things in different ways. We're quick to decide a design is "good enough" and we generally use things the way they're supposed to be used. AI seems less constrained in design.
From what I know of this stuff, I think it's more like procedural iteration rather than "Intelligence." It simulates a bunch of designs given set boundary conditions and then optimizes it for the strongest design with the least material.
A lot of people are using "AI" to optimize geometry for different parts. This is the way the entire field of engineering is going. The toughest part is defining the problem properly. In reality though, a lot of these solutions are just optimization algorithms. But some are actually using ML.
Imagine AI comes up with warpdrive, now that would be interesting