Ed Burton is Soda's Research and Development Director and is always seeking new ideas for new technologies. He also loves to play and is the original culprit behind sodaconstructor, the java toy that exemplifies his peculiar passion for dynamic interaction facilitating creative play and emergent behaviour.

Since age 15 or so Prof. Schmidhuber's main scientific ambition has been to build an optimal scientist, then retire. In 2028 they will force him to retire anyway. By then he shall be able to buy hardware providing more raw computing power than his brain. Will the proper self-improving software lag far behind? If so he'd be surprised. This optimism is driving his research on mathematically sound, general purpose universal learning machines and the New AI which is relevant not only for robotics but also for physics.

Creativity Machines represent a new kind of neural network paradigm that is capable of generating rather than just associating patterns. They are based upon what we believe to be a significant scientific discovery: that a neural network exposed to any conceptual space and then internally irritated, in a specially prescribed way, tends to generate coherent ideas derived from its absorbed wisdom.