#2 - Professor Keith Downing - Emergent Intelligence, Evolutionary Algorithms and Computational Neuroscience

4 billion years ago the earth was bombarded with photons, a short while later a Tesla got launched into space. This week I'm speaking to Professor Keith Downing about emergent phenomena; which the above scenario is a prime example of, alongside the formation of a baby from a fertilised egg, economies from individual interactions and for good measure alcohol from respiring yeast! Full synopsis:0:00 - Intro1:20 - Emergence and emergent systems13:20 - Evolution and its algorithms23:40 - Theory of facilitated variation31:30 - Neural Information vs Synthetic Information 41:30 - Evolutionary computation vs Neural networks48:25 - Re-enforcement learning1:02:15 - Building intelligence - neural net architectures1:07:00 - Advice and Book recommendations