In an obvious attempt to hasten the destruction of mankind, a team of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin built a neural network and promptly induced in the system a state of digital Schizophrenia. The DISCERN neural network was created, in part, to test a hypothesis that schizophrenic symptoms are a byproduct of the sufferer’s inability to efficiently ignore stimuli — they can’t forget information as easily as the average person. The team mimicked this effect by programming DISCERN to learn natural language — storing information based on the relationship of the words and sentences. As the team increased the system’s rate of learning, DISCERN could not properly parse the data, resulting “language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia,” according to one researcher. DISCERN eventually started putting itself at the center of delusional stories, even going so far as to claim responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
[University of Texas – Austin via ScienceBlog.com via Popular Science]
