hologram Archives - ATLANTIS RISING THE RESEARCH REPORT

By Ian Scheffler

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is ai-free.png

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, to prepare for missions and to entertain themselves, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes. Deeply immersive and fully interactive, holodeck-created environments are infinitely customizable, using nothing but language: the crew has only to ask the computer to generate an environment, and that space appears in the holodeck.

Today, virtual interactive environments are also used to train robots prior to real-world deployment in a process called “Sim2Real.” However, virtual interactive environments have been in surprisingly short supply. “Artists manually create these environments,” says Yue Yang, a doctoral student in the labs of Mark Yatskar and Chris Callison-Burch, Assistant and Associate Professors in Computer and Information Science (CIS), respectively. “Those artists could spend a week building a single environment,” Yang adds, noting all the decisions involved, from the layout of the space to the placement of objects to the colors employed in rendering.
That paucity of virtual environments is a problem if you want to train robots to navigate the real world with all its complexities. Neural networks, the systems powering today’s AI revolution, require massive amounts of data, which in this case means simulations of the physical world. “Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are trained on trillions of words, and image generators like Midjourney and DALLE are trained on billions of images,” says Callison-Burch. “We only have a fraction of that amount of 3D environments for training so-called ‘embodied AI.’ If we want to use generative AI techniques to develop robots that can safely navigate in real-world environments, then we will need to create millions or billions of simulated environments.”
Holodeck leverages the knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs), the systems underlying ChatGPT and other chatbots. “Language is a very concise representation of the entire world,” says Yang. Indeed, LLMs turn out to have a surprisingly high degree of knowledge about the design of spaces, thanks to the vast amounts of text they ingest during training. In essence, Holodeck works by engaging an LLM in conversation, using a carefully structured series of hidden queries to break down user requests into specific parameters.
Just like Captain Picard might ask Star Trek’s Holodeck to simulate a speakeasy, researchers can ask Penn’s Holodeck to create “a 1b1b apartment of a researcher who has a cat.” The system executes this query by dividing it into multiple steps: first, the floor and walls are created, then the doorway and windows. Next, Holodeck searches Objaverse, a vast library of premade digital objects, for the sort of furnishings you might expect in such a space: a coffee table, a cat tower, and so on. Finally, Holodeck queries a layout module, which the researchers designed to constrain the placement of objects, so that you don’t wind up with a toilet extending horizontally from the wall.

https://ai.seas.upenn.edu/news/penn-engineers-recreate-star-treks-holodeck-using-chatgpt-and-video-game-assets/

AR #116

Trek to the Planet Vulcan by Julie Loar

by Anil Ananthaswamy, Scientific American

Twenty-five years ago, a conjecture shook the world of theoretical physics. It had the aura of revelation. “At first, we had a magical statement … almost out of nowhere,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. The idea, put forth by Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., hinted at something profound: that our universe could be a hologram. Much like a 3-D hologram emerges from the information encoded on a 2-D surface, our universe’s 4-D spacetime could be a holographic projection of a lower-dimensional reality.

Specifically, Maldacena showed that a five-dimensional theory of a type of imaginary spacetime called anti–de Sitter space (AdS) that included gravity could describe the same system as a lower-dimensional quantum field theory of particles and fields in the absence of gravity, called a conformal field theory (CFT). In other words, he found two different theories that could both describe the same physical system, showing that the theories were, in a sense, equivalent—even though they each included different numbers of dimensions, and one factored in gravity where the other didn’t. Maldacena then surmised that this AdS/CFT duality would hold for other pairs of theories, with one having a single extra dimension than the other, possibly even those describing 4-D spacetime like ours.

The conjecture was both intriguing and shocking. How could a theory that included gravity be the same as a theory that had no place for gravity? How could they describe the same universe? But the duality has largely held up. In essence, it argues that the goings-on inside some volume of spacetime that has gravity can be understood by studying the quantum-mechanical behavior of particles and fields at that volume’s surface, using a theory with one less dimension, one in which gravity plays no role. “Sometimes some things are easier to understand in one description than the other, and knowing that you’re really talking about the same physics is very powerful,” says Netta Engelhardt, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the 25 years since Maldacena mooted the idea, physicists have used this power to address questions about whether or not black holes destroy information, to better understand an early epoch in the our universe’s history called inflation, and to arrive at an astonishing conclusion that spacetime may not be fundamental, but something that emerges from quantum entanglement in a lower-dimensional system. Granted, all of these advances involve the theoretically plausible spacetime of anti–de Sitter space, which is not the de Sitter space that describes our universe, but physicists are optimistic that they’ll one day arrive at a duality that works for both. If that were to happen, the idea could help develop a theory of quantum gravity, one that would combine Einstein’s general relativity with quantum mechanics. It would also imply that our universe is a hologram in truth.

Referenced article
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-our-universe-a-hologram-physicists-debate-famous-idea-on-its-25th-anniversary/?