The "What is your Avatar" Thread.

[Kokoro]

A Kerbal I drew: http://loli.kokorolibrary.net/?picture=407

[Mikki]

UV-footage of the sun, from SOHO satellite or such, just guessing 

[TheKosanianMethod]

Mine was going to be the same as my youtube profile picture, but was too big. Not long ago, I was making a flag based off the USAF logo for my Kerbal Air Force. I randomly decided to try and use it for forum avatar,  and I think it fits perfectly. 

Edit

Well, now it's my YT avatar as well,  but this one is formatted better.

On 6/8/2016 at 5:20 PM, Cydonian Monk said:

Just something I once scribbled onto cardstock with a Sharpie....

I was just going to ask what the dice meant on Forgotten Space Program. 

Edited September 26, 2016 by TheKosanianMethod
changed

[monstah]

7 hours ago, TheKosanianMethod said:

Kerbal Air Horse

I sometimes forget I have the Chrome extension for XKCD's substitutions and have little moments wondering just WTF am I reading  

[Guest]

On 6/14/2016 at 1:22 PM, Kokoro said:

A Kerbal I drew: http://loli.kokorolibrary.net/?picture=407

Looks fantastic!

Also, new avatar. Yay.

[richfiles]

On June 9, 2016 at 9:41 AM, monstah said:

Hey there @richfiles, I've been curious about yours for some time, buddy  

It's an amalgam of two different elements. The background is a "nebulous starry field™" inspired by the mane of Mun horse herself... aka, Princess Luna, from MLP. It's just a really nice looking backdrop, if you ask me. The foreground is a PAINFULLY reduced pixel level rendition of the Periplaneta Computatrix... an AI insect created back in the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s by Randall Beer (Jesus... imagine getting anything done in college with that last name!) 

Periplaneta Computatrix was a neural network inspired by Periplaneta Americana, aka, the American cockroach. Rather than focus on the intricacies of simulating a real, physical robot and dealing with real world issues that come from that, they did the entire AI and the environment it "lived" in, all inside the computer. In those days, desktop computers were still averaging between 1-33 MHz, and memory was still measured in kilobytes and at best a few megabytes. Doing tasks involving real world interaction in a computer was hard. The AI was a neural network that was created to study emergent and adaptive behavior from neural systems. Beer acknowledges the work done by Rodney Brooks on his hierarchical subsumption architecture to be, in spirit, very similar to his own design philosophies. While the two differ greatly in execution (Neural networks vs hierarchal sub systems of finite state machines, Simulated AI vs physical robotic hardware), they both have the same design philosophy... Create an adaptive "instinctual" intelligence that can navigate its environment without the need to higher order processing to figure out how to actually do it.

It's a lot like how we walk. We don't think about how we walk... We just intend to go from point A to point B, and our subconscious drives out bodies to get there with little actual thought involved.

Randal Beer's AI consisted of a 78 neuron, 156 connection neural network. The virtual environment was a 2 axis plane that could have obstacles, food objects, and could simultaneously run multiple "insect" AIs in the same environment... All with about 5000 lines of LISP code plus object definitions, running at 3-10x slower than realtime on an old Texas Instruments Explorer II LX LISP machine. I figured out a lot of it on my own, from a 2 inch (4-5 cm) tall image of the neural schematic, in a magazine. Not enough to actually decipher how it worked, but enough to get a fairly close approximation of the schematic. Over two decades would pass before I had all he details figured out, thanks to Amazon... Apparently, the guy published a book on it. If only I had found that earlier! 

My avatar was edited pixel by pixel (no, seriously!  ), to not look like absolute bovine manure™ on select sites (aka, YouTube). Sometimes, I have to use it on sites that have a slightly different resolution that what my original was edited down to... My response to that is...  meh. whatever **uploads anyway**. Too much trouble to re-edit. That's why it may be a little... not perfect on some other sites. It looks good on YouTube and  alright here, so I'm satisfied with that. It usually looks fine here on the forums, but can look blurry depending on scale. The fine details are... finicky...


8 is a "food" object. The rectangles are "brick" objects (obstacles). The other numbers just define points where the AI changed it's path. 2, in particular, is a point where the AI chose to flow the edge of the wall.


I first discovered all these amazingly creative people and their creations, thanks to Scientific American, back in 1991. I had to drive my dad to the hospital, after he split his knee cap trying to straighten a cultivator shovel that had been bent by a rock... Ouch... I spent a lot of time at the hospital visiting him while he recovered. The cover of a Scientific American sitting in the waiting room had a spectacular picture of a 6 legged robot.

 

Needless to say, these "insect" robots had me hooked at first sight, and within a few years, I was making my own legged robots, using simple neural networks to function. To date, I have still never made a robot with a "computer" for a brain.


Spyder Walking - Dailymotion
"Spyder". 4 legs, 8 motors, 16 neurons, a signal conditioning circuit, and orientation sensing. It's frame is made from brass rod, brass hinges, and brass sheet snipped from salvaged brass gauges from an old poultry plant that I "raided" before they tore it down!  The "head" is the shield from a flyback transformer out of an old black and white portable TV. The wires to the legs are protected from wear and snagging with medical air/oxygen tubing. All the PC boards are laid out by hand and were etched at home.

In general, Rodney Brooks, Misha Mahowald, and Randall Beer drove my early interest in neural networks and emergent behavioral systems more than any other people. Mahowald also grew up two hours from where I live, which totally made her way cool in my book!  Rodney Brooks is a master of hardware, building physical robots and driving them with electronic control systems. Misha Mahowald was a master in biology and created biologically inspired electronic hardware that mimicked the aspects of biological neurons. Randall Beer was a pioneer in neural network simulation, and created virtual environments and placed virtual AIs into them to observe their behavior. Me, I have a passion for hardware, but I've taken elements of all the fields of these creators and let myself be inspired by all of them.

So that's what my avatar is all about, @monstah.
My long time passion for neural networks, insect robots, and brains made it a no brainer for me. 

P.S. Sorry for the quality of some of these images. They were taken with a potato from the 90s.

Some book and reference links:
Heterogeneous neural networks for adaptive behavior in dynamic environments (PDF)
Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior (at Google Books)
Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior (At Amazon)
LOL! Price for the book varies wildly... I bought my copy for $2.11 + shipping ... Sometimes it's over $70!  That doesn't hold a candle to the crazy prices I've seen for some of Misha Mahowald's books! I've seen prices higher than $130! Thankfully, there are some PDFs available online of some of her papers, which cover everything in the book.
Misha Mahowald's Thesis, 1992 CIT

Edited June 21, 2016 by richfiles

[monstah]

@richfiles AI! Dude, way more awesome than any 8-bit videogame alien I thought that was!

[adsii1970]

@richfiles: Most impressive...

[monstah]

Okay, finished reading just now. Had a few wikipedia detours. So cool.

I love me some neural networks. Like you said, there's something fascinating about the instinctual intelligence that is not (directly) modelling anything but just acting. Have never built my own but - hey, I'm young (ish)! I've only recently actually started putting my hands on electronics. I've been interested for quite a while, but never actually made anything until recently I got my first arduino and started my KSP simpit - which I kinda abandoned but promise to finish eventually.

78 neurons? Man. We've come a long way.

Edited June 21, 2016 by monstah

[CAKE99]

Sort of like this, but for avatars!

Earlier I created a Imgur album of a history of my avatars, http://imgur.com/gallery/YNTgY

Anyone remember when I still used the "Measles" avatar?

Edited July 30, 2016 by CAKE99

[NSEP]

My current one is a weird, a little disturbing and funny medieval drawing of a king being stabbed in the head. But the king does not seem to care lol. It makes me laugh whenever i see it. But my friend @Lo Var Lachland says i need to bring back my old ''buddy icon''. My old one a satellite map of Doggerland, wich i absolutely hate. Its very pixelated. I might change my profile picture in the future. because Lo is my friend, and i dont want to lose a friend.

[legoclone09]

It's a picture of my cat sitting in front of my TV with doge meme captions? in Times New Roman around it saying

much cat very purr such meow.

[razark]

A grue in its natural habitat.

Edited July 30, 2016 by razark

[pTrevTrevs]

A picture of a reproduction Fokker triplane (no originals now remain) painted in the colors of Manfred Von Richthofen. It was chosen to match my rank of "Vintage Plane Addict"

My first avatar was a picture of an asteroid colliding with the earth to match my original custom rank of "Destroyer of Worlds".

[Pixel of Life]

It's a gif I made using a clip from a video called "Doge Adventure". You've probably seen it.

[HoloYolo]

It's Holo from Spice and Wolf.

[benzman]

At the USAF museum at Dayton there is an Apollo space suit with the back removed so you can stand inside it and get your photo taken!

 

[Tex]

I'd hope you all can guess what my avatar is.

[Endersmens]

My avatar is....me! Well, the internet me. If I was actually and enderman in space I wouldn't have a connection to the internet now would I.  

[cubinator]

Mine was originally a Moyu Weilong speedcube, which is the kind I carry around everywhere with me. Now it's the first ever working Rubik's Cube made in KSP.

[ZooNamedGames]

Mine is a gif of a person called The Video Game Nerd which could be called one of the earliest successful "let's players" on YouTube. Anyway, it's of him playing pong on a 1970s pong machine. He moves his hands up and down to movie the paddle sliders and watches the square box bounce from side to side.

Edited July 31, 2016 by ZooNamedGames

[Robotengineer]

Dwarf Fortress legendary dwarf, purple for scholar. 

[Nuke]

a mutant worshiping a nuclear missile. from beneath the planet of the apes.

[Fluburtur]

It's me

[Rainbowtrout]

A pokémans.