Tag Archives: artificial-intelligence

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AI up the game

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cardsA fascinating article in the FT magazine over the weekend on the ongoing arms race between those who program the software bots in online gaming rooms, one Martin Smith, and those who play against them:

These are contests that take place on constantly shifting terrain. Smith releases his latest version of a program: it wins for a couple of weeks, then the humans figure out how to beat it and they win for a couple of weeks while Smith goes away and works on his software – algorithms, probability calculations, search techniques – and scratches his head. Then he comes back with a new version of the program that wins for a couple of weeks, while the humans go away and think about it. “We have this ratcheting up,” Smith says. “It’s a very intellectually rewarding thing.”
…
“There’s a very big difference between computer intelligence and human intelligence. This is clearly indicated in games. Back in the ’70s, it was considered that in order to get computers to play chess like a grandmaster, they had to think like grandmasters. That turned out to be wrong. Computers can play fantastic chess and they don’t do anything remotely like what human grandmasters do.”

It is interesting how the upgraded software eventually becomes beatable after sufficient practice by large groups of humans. It’s also interesting for the insight into what a particular flavour of AI researchers actually spend their time doing.

On the distinction between mind and computers, this article at The New Atlantis makes for an interesting read.

[image from Malcav on flickr]

Blog

21st Century digital boy – Milo, the virtual kid

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He’s still only a demonstration at the moment, but maybe your kids will be hanging out with Milo in a few years’ time:

Milo is the creation of Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios and developer of ambitious games such as “Black and White” and the “Fable” series. Those games tried to present players with moral choices that had consequences for their characters, and also tried to play on people’s real emotions.

Molyneux’s latest effort takes advantage of Microsoft’s new full-body controller for Xbox 360, known as Project Natal. The controller’s sensor bar tracks the real-world movements of Xbox players and translates them into the game, which allows them to practically play with Milo in person.

Yup – Milo is an AI avatar of a boy, and (by all accounts) an impressively convincing one. Here’s the demo video:

As LiveScience puts it:

The E3 demo shows Milo responding to a developer’s questions with some fairly convincing facial expressions, body behavior and voice tone. He even “talks” and looks at a real-world drawing, courtesy of the Natal controller scanning it into the game. It’s an impressive display that appears very human-like, and does not evoke any “uncanny valley” sensations of eerie or weird behavior that make people nervous.

Of course, that’s just the recorded demo. A Kotaku editor who got hands-on time with the Milo demo did run into moments of awkwardness, such as Milo waiting for him to say something. But he also described the magic of the virtual boy complimenting him on his blue shirt.

Molyneux continually beats a drum about “science fiction writers never having imagined such a technology”, and I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on that count, but I was genuinely blown away by that video, even after factoring in a degree of cynicism appropriate to a demonstration given at an industry junket.

Now, Milo as a playmate and companion for kids is a marketable deployment of this technology, sure. But wait until the beleaguered porn industry gets hold of the same algorithms…

Today's Tomorrows

Machines That Think

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Welcome to the inaugural column of Today’s Tomorrows here at Futurismic. For any readers who missed my introduction, I’m going to explore a science topic a month, with both some evaluation of current news on the topic and a chat about how it has been dealt with in science fiction.

A few days ago, I was at a futurist technology conference called FiRE in San Diego, listening to new developments in multiple fields. The speed of change right now is amazing. We first flew at all in 1903. Today, we have a space program that ranges from commercial ventures like Space-X to NASA flying by Saturn and operating remote-control rovers on Mars. In 1993, the Mosaic internet browser allowed us popular and easy access to the computing tools to create cyberspace; I’m reading information from all over the world in order to compose this article. My iPhone has more computing power than the room-sized computer I used to support the City of Fullerton, CA. Continue reading Machines That Think →

Blog

Is a Terminator scenario possible?

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metropolis h+ Magazine conducted a poll of “roboticists, AI workers, SF writers, and other techie types” (the SF writers were David Brin and Vernor Vinge) to see if they thought a “Terminator-like scenario” was possible, and if so, how likely it was. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Boiling it down (read the whole thing here), the consensus seems to be 1) forget about the time travel; 2) don’t expect a super-intelligent Skynet to spontaneously awaken and start wiping us out (though rather alarmingly, it was generally thought that was just “highly unlikely,” not flat-out impossible); but 3) do expect a future full of robots, both beneficial and warlike–though in the latter case, the intelligence directing them is likely to be humans of a destructive bent, rather than an AI with its own designs on the planet.

Knowing what humans are capable of, this is not much comfort.

Even though I am by nature optimistic.

(Image: 1935 tobacco card of Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis, from Film Virtual History.)

[tags]robots, Terminator, artificial intelligence, science fiction, robotics, predictions[/tags]

Blog

Of two minds

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brain-simulationAn old science fictional argument: to what extent is it correct to characterise the human mind as a digital computer? According to this insightful article [via Charles Stross] many AI researchers have been making an error in their belief that the human mind can be thought of as a computer:

The fact that the mind is a machine just as much as anything else in the universe is a machine tells us nothing interesting about the mind.

If the strong AI project is to be redefined as the task of duplicating the mind at a very low level, it may indeed prove possible—but the result will be something far short of the original goal of AI.

In other news:

A detailed simulation of a small region of a brain built molecule by molecule has been constructed and has recreated experimental results from real brains.

The “Blue Brain” has been put in a virtual body, and observing it gives the first indications of the molecular and neural basis of thought and memory.

Is there a meaningful distinction between the traditional view of a strong AI and a molecular-level simulation of a human mind?

[image and article from the BBC]