Computers Win Another One - All your games are belong to us

We've all heard about the computer's victory over humans in the game of chess. Eleven years ago, the reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov lost handily to IBM's Big Blue. But the game of poker has remained in the humans' column, until now. As the author explains in this article, poker is quite a bit more complicated than chess, and the human brain has been better at it than any computer. No more.

A computer system called Polaris outperformed some of the world's top players last weekend at a human-vs.-machine competition in Las Vegas.

The score was computer 3, humans 2, with one draw.

Bowling's team launched Polaris five years ago as a project in artificial intelligence. At first it did well against amateur players but couldn't beat professionals. Last year, it narrowly lost a match against two poker pros in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This year, a stronger version of Polaris — one that learns how to adapt to an opponent's strategy in midgame — triumphed over seven top-ranked humans drawn from the online poker-training site www.stoxpoker.com.

Read the original article.

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REEM-B - The latest in humanoid robots

For those of us who think it's very likely that technology's accelerating pace of advance is soon going to become too rapid to follow, developments like this one already seem quaint. You know what it's like to look nostalgically at photos of computers from the '50s, or old ads for magical household appliances. In a few years that's exactly how it will be to go back to articles about robots like REEM-B.

A new humanoid robot called Reem-B was unveiled on Wednesday at an event on Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.

The Reem-B robot from Pal Technology Robotics is capable of face recognition, speech interaction, biped walking, traversing stairs, and sitting (see video below). It can also recognize and pick up objects, as well as evaluate and map out a room to better navigate it.

Reem-B stands at 4'10" (1.47 meters) tall and weighs about 132 pounds (60Kg). It can carry up to 26 pounds (12Kg) in its arms and walk at a speed of 1 mph (1.5Km/h). It can also climb stairs. Using a main CPU that consists of a Core 2 Duo (1.66GHz) and a Geode (500MHz), the robot can operate for about 120 minutes before its battery needs to be recharged.

Full article.

Video.

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Why You Should Stop Worrying and Learn to Love AI

Anyone who has an interest in technology news should be able to see that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is inevitable. The forces that are driving technology toward that conclusion are enormously powerful; I am referring now to military and commercial interests. Just as the fundamental equations behind biological evolution through natural selection have resulted in human consciousness and intelligence, so the insatiable appetites of industry and combat for a better mousetrap must lead us down the garden path to conscious machines.

One has only to skim the science and technology news on a regular basis to conclude that, barring the near term ending of the world as we know it, a machine that harbors within its circuitry a mind, cannot be very far down the road. Take these excerpts for example:

Researchers at the University of Arizona in Tucson have now begun work on a set of computer algorithms that may be able to make sense of mountains of intelligence data that would overwhelm human analysts. Known as the Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, or ATRAP, the effort is aimed at dispassionately sifting through everything from fingerprints to cultural influences to establish useful links and connections. Full article.

By studying the famous honeybee waggle dance that communicates the location of top-notch nectar, researchers have designed a more efficient server system that also benefits Web surfers by cutting down on frustrating delays in accessing newly popular sites. Initial tests by collaborators at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford showed that the bee-like way of homing in on sweet spots improved a Web-hosting company’s revenue by up to 20 percent. Full article.

There is nothing in these articles that will cause anyone to enjoy a spike in their endorphin levels, but they simply demonstrate the relentless drive of the military and commercial forces of our society to make machines smarter and to get them to do more of our rudimentary thinking for us. No use crying about it, about how terrible this might be, because it will continue, and it will lead inexorably to conscious machines. So my advice is, stop worrying about whether or not we will soon be faced with AGI, and instead focus your energy on making sure when they arrive, they will like us.

There are researchers and organizations that understand the inevitability of AGI and that are working hard to figure out how to make it friendly. Either that or how to make humans and AGIs one and the same thing. Unfortunately, these guys are working with very limited resources, because most people have no clue about what is going on or where we are headed. If you would like to climb out from among the head-in-the-sand crowd, check out the following links:

KurzweilAI.net

Accelerating Future

Singularity Institute

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Computer Simulation of Human Brain Only a Decade Away

We have all heard an aphorism that enjoys an unearned degree of credibility based on no evidence whatsoever, to whit: The human brain can never be intelligent enough to understand itself. Poppycock. Scoffers will continue to believe in it, however, until a fully-developed computer simulation of the human brain smacks them on the noggin, jarring their not-smart-enough brains into the 21st century.

An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.

The rapidity with which developments are advancing continues to astound even me, one of the most optimistic singularitarian transhumanists around.



Technology Review Article

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It is Time for a Real PDA

Picture this: Your meeting with the team is over, you say your goodbyes and walk down the hall to your office. Sitting in a tray near your desk are the pages of a transcript of the meeting, which ended only a few minutes ago. You call up the project that was the subject of the meeting on your screen, and you see that every assignment is already listed, every appointment is already scheduled. You thank your PDA, and she replies, "Any time, Barry."

This scenario, which has been portrayed in many a science fiction novel, may become the real deal not too many years from now. An artificial general intelligence who lives in your corporate network, organizes your work life without being asked, and converses with you in natural human language. If truth be told, you've often fantasized about asking her out for a drink.

Enter CALO, "a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users."

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, the project brings together researchers from 25 universities and corporations, in many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. Each group works on pieces of CALO, which stands for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes."

Adam Cheyer, program director of the artificial-intelligence center at SRI, explains that CALO tries to assist users in three ways: by helping them manage information about key people and projects, by understanding and organizing information from meetings, and by learning and automating routine tasks. For example, CALO can learn about the people and projects that are important to a user's work life by paying attention to e-mail patterns. It can then categorize and prioritize information for the user, based on the source of the information and the projects to which it is connected. The system can also apply this type of understanding to meetings, using its speech-recognition system to make a transcription of what's said there, and its understanding of the user's projects and contacts to process the transcription intelligently into to-do lists and appointments. Finally, a user can teach CALO routine tasks such as purchasing books online and searching for bed-and-breakfasts that meet specific criteria. CALO can interact with other people, taking on tasks such as scheduling meetings, coordinating among people's schedules, and making decisions, such as deciding to reschedule a meeting if a key member becomes unable to attend.

Look for the progeny of CALO to appear first in large corporations, filter down to medium-sized businesses, and eventually arrive in your own home network. I can't wait.

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Your Brain is a Machine - Get Used to It

There are many whose penchant it is to romanticize the human condition. It somehow makes them feel better about their lives to do so. One of the outgrowths of this habit of spiritualizing material things is the expressed certainty that machines can never become conscious. After all, they think, if machines can ever be made to experience consciousness, then it is very likely that we are no more than machines: There is no soul, no heaven, no spirit, no existence after death. For many people, this possibility is not to be countenanced.

However, more and more researchers are concluding that even our experience of conscious will is an illusion arising from our neurological programming. In a new book authored by Harvard professor Daniel Wegner titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, professor Wegner argues that:

“When you drive to work, you don’t feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, ‘I’m going to get up and go to work,’ ” Wegner said in an interview

“We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain.”

I have written previously about the startling finding that our actions in fact come before our conscious intentions, that our minds are inventing reasons for actions over which we have no conscious control. If, as writes Dr. Wegner, our brains are trying to convince us that we are choosing actions that are merely the result of our neurological machinery, then it is only a matter of time before machines become conscious. According to some, that time may even have already arrived.

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Humans and AI: A Symbiotic Relationship?

The idea that artificial intelligence will soon become super-intelligent and discover that humans are a nuisance to be exterminated forthwith is certainly a frightening vision of the near-term future. Some of the people who are actually engaged in what is transpiring take the position that the merest chance that this may actually happen should persuade us to cease and desist from all work on AI. Others, myself included, see the “us-them” separation between human and artificial minds as a disappearing distinction, and therefore beneath our concern. This, more optimistic, group envisions a symbiotic relationship that transforms into a complete melding of human with machine, until there are just minds, comprised of various amalgams of both.

In fact, symbiosis already exists between organic and non-organic intelligence. In my real-world occupation I am a financial aid adviser. At my finger tips are networks of schools, lenders, government agencies, and the machines and software applications that make the whole thing work. In a few minutes I can put together a financial aid package for a student so that their entire education at my school will be paid for. The machines could not do it without my mind’s assistance. I certainly could not do it without the technology, certainly not with the efficiency and productivity that is possible now. This symbiosis reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s excellent novel, A Deepness in the Sky.

In the novel, a race of humans called the Emergence develops a unique method of focusing the minds of humans to such an extent that, together with computers, they can transcend the power of either in previously unimaginable ways. This human-machine collaboration is not merely science-fiction, however. Some of the most effective search engines in existence today have humans in the loop. My prediction is that this symbiosis will continue, until technology arrives at literal physical blending, either by the instantiation of human minds into machines, or machine parts being connected directly with human neurons. Or both.

The result of this symbiosis/blending will be that there will exist no substantial distinction between humans and machines once AGI comes into being. I sure hope it turns out this way.

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Where Have All the Workers Gone? Enter AGI

It won’t be long before employers are singing this song, if demographers are correct in their predictions. Researchers tell us that the Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964 and numbering some 79.9 million souls (Mature Market Institute, 2000), will soon begin retiring. So what’s the problem with that? The problem is, there aren’t enough people in the generation called Gen-X to fill those newly open positions. In fact, according to Law Practice Today, there are only 51 million people around who were born between 1965 and 1976. What does this mean? Very simply, we can expect a serious labor shortage to settle over the land soon, and last 10 to 15 years.

While managers alternate between hoping the doomsayers are wrong and doing everything they can to attract and keep talented workers, they will find that there are not enough warm bodies to go around. Some firms will probably thrive in this worker-poor market, but many will feel the pinch. There are two possible circumstances that this scenario might bring about that I will posit here.

First, the law of supply and demand may cause firms to pay a significant premium in salaries, which may bring about inflation. Second, firms may begin to push hard for the development of some very serious automation. Serious as in general artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence today is comprised of applications that can perform a narrow range of tasks very well; far better than humans, in fact. But that narrowness places some significant boundaries in the way of solving the labor shortage problem. General artificial intelligence would solve it in two ways: Such intelligences could be deployed and trained to perform any task a human could perform, only a lot better. Second, they would quickly improve themselves to the extent that they would be smart enough to find other solutions to the problem.

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Predicting the Path to AI

As they say, hindsight has perfect vision. It is a simple matter to look back after an event takes place and recreate the path of steps that led up to that event. It is much more difficult to see that path in advance. When AI is born, assuming that such an event would be immediately apparent, and assuming that it has not yet occurred, what path will it have taken? Will cloud computing and data centers turn out to have been a crucial fork in the road?

IBM and Google have announced a joint initiative to build large data centers that will allow students and researchers to participate in remote "cloud computing," at term that refers to the combined use of thousands of processors, vast libraries of data, and specialized software that "scour the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights."

As these cloud computing centers are created and more and more resources are injected into their ever-increasing capacities, will a crucial threshold be attained? It has been theorized that consciousness is an inevitable outcome when a sufficient degree of processing complexity is reached. Are we on a path to the inevitable emergence of a conscious Internet? If this is indeed what happens, remember where you heard it first. Stay tuned.

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Birthplace of Strong AI: Virtual Worlds?

Where will strong AI make its first appearance? Where will it be born? There is some speculation that virtual worlds may prove to be the birthplace and nursery of super-intelligence.

What are the alternatives? Some researchers believe that an artificial intelligence must interact with other intelligences to become intelligent itself. This stands to reason when we consider the development of our own intelligence, which grows through interactions with other humans as we mature.

Another, related school of thought holds that a body is also necessary, some manifestation of the intelligence that can interact with others.

We have all seen the rudimentary efforts of researchers to combine these elements in the lab in the form of cute robots that interact with people in order to learn, but these may be simply too limited in scope.

What's left then is a virtual environment where an intelligent machine can have any kind of body and interact with human and other artificial intelligences at will.

BBC News in this article proposes this scenario, highlighting the work of one particular company, Novamente.

Researchers at US firm Novamente have created software that learns by controlling avatars in virtual worlds.

Initially the AIs will be embodied in pets that will get smarter by interacting with the avatars controlled by their human owners.

Novamente said it eventually aimed to create more sophisticated avatars such as talking parrots and even babies.

It may not be very long before you are socializing with an artificial person in Second Life. So keep you eyes peeled and your ears to the ground, and as always, stay tuned.

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Confronting the Social Implications of the Singularity

Imagining the social implications and conundrums that humanity will be faced with in the coming decades with the development of machine consciousness and the uploading of human minds into machine substrates takes a special kind of mind. A mind like the one contained within the brain of Greg Egan.

Greg has both the technical knowledge, writing skills and penetrating imagination that, when combined, allow him to create fiction that examines many of the social dilemmas with which we will be confronted within a few tens of years. In his book of short stories, Axiomatic, Greg conceives some utterly captivating scenarios. Here are the gists of a few:

A ransom demand is made by a group that holds hostage a digital recreation of a man's wife. Does the virtual woman feel pain? Does she suffer? Should the man pay the ransom?

A man who has within his skull a "jewel" which has been matched with his own brain faces the prospect of turning over control of his body to the immortal jewel so that his biological brain can be disposed of. Is his consciousness that of the jewel, or the brain? When his brain is disconnected, will "he" die? Will the jewel be truly conscious, or will it be an imitation of consciousness? Is there a difference?

After an injury to his brain and its subsequent repair by nanobots, a man's perspective shifts to a position outside his body. Although he "knows" only that which his eyes can see, his mind builds a picture of reality as it might appear from a position a few feet above his physical body.

These are just a few of the stories within Axiomatic. If you want to think about what might actually happen when the singularity arrives, this book will certainly set you on the right path.

Axiomatic

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Reverse Engineering of the Brain Grows Closer

In a stunning new development, researchers have discovered a revolutionary means of figuring out which of the 100 billion neurons in the brain communicating with each other when people perform various functions, such as learning a new skill.

One of the newest, fastest strategies co-opts a photosensitive protein called channelrhodopsin-2 from pond scum to allow precise laser control of the altered cells on a millisecond timescale. That speed mimics the natural electrical chatterings of the brain, said Dr. Karl Deisseroth, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford.

“We can start to sort of speak the language of the brain using optical excitation,” Dr. Deisseroth said. The brain’s functions “arise from the orchestrated participation of all the different cell types, like in a symphony,” he said.

Laser stimulation can serve as a musical conductor, manipulating the various kinds of neurons in the brain to reveal which important roles they play.

This light-switch technology promises to accelerate scientists’ efforts in mapping which clusters of the brain’s 100 billion neurons warble to each other when a person, for example, recalls a memory or learns a skill. That quest is one of the greatest challenges facing neuroscience.

The channelrhodopsin switch is “really going to blow the lid off the whole analysis of brain function,” said George Augustine, a neurobiologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Understanding the intricate interplay between neurons and how they are structured within an individual's brain is thought to be vital to the ultimate goal of simulating a human brain in a silicon substrate.

Source

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Instantaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation: Thank You DARPA

In the New Testament there is a story about certain men who spoke in languages they had never learned, and crowds of listeners who heard these men speaking their own languages. As it happens, this tale may soon take place in reality, not through the working of a supernatural being, but through technology now under development by DARPA.

Necessity gives birth to invention, and translators are sorely needed in Iraq. For one reason or another, there aren't enough humans to do the job. So DARPA and NIST have been hard at work on this and are currently testing prototypes. This is not a "could" situation. This is the real thing.

Darpa and NIST are focused on bidirectional translations of English and Arabic spoken in Iraq. NIST, U.S. Marines, and Iraqi Arabic speakers just completed lab and outdoor tests on prototypes in Gaithersburg, Md. The evaluations included controlled background noise from speakers, generators, garage doors, running vehicles, and radio broadcasts to mimic noise in real-world situations.

Participants acted out 10 scenarios, including conversations at traffic checkpoints and neighborhood interviews. Those testing the devices carried them in back packs and other hands-free configurations. Lab participants couldn't see their laptop screens as they recorded the conversations. Iraqis who understand English wore earphones that blocked out the English language portions and relayed the system's Arabic interpretations.

Craig Schlenoff, project leader of the NIST evaluation project, said the evaluations showed improvements to the translation systems and provide information about which technologies are most promising.

"Effective two-way translation devices would represent a major advance in field translators," he said in a prepared statement. "Although American forces in Iraq currently have the use of phrase-based translators, the devices can only translate English into pre-recorded Arabic phrases. They cannot translate Iraqi Arabic into English."

Darpa hopes to eventually provide American forces with palm-sized translators for increased convenience, ease, and safety in war zones and potentially hostile environments. Darpa also wants to position itself to develop automatic translator systems within 90 days of receiving a request for that language.

Obviously, as these "palm-sized translators" come online, there will be an enormous market for them, which will drive further R&D. It will be a better world when we can all understand each other and undo what God allegedly perpetrated on us at Babel.

Source: InformationWeek

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The First Real Natural Language Search Engine?

A company is claiming to be on the verge of launching what I think may be the first real natural language search engine. Powerset Inc. is not talking about just being able to accept searches in the form of questions.

No, they happen to be claiming a bit more, namely that their engine will find "the best answer by considering the meaning and context of the question and related Web pages. 'Powerset extracts deep concepts and relationships from the texts, and the users query and match them efficiently to deliver a better search,' Powerset CEO Barney Pell says."

How have they been able to succeed where others have failed?

Even though attempts have been made at natural-language search for decades, Powerset says that its system is different because it has solved some of the fundamental technological problems that have existed with this kind of search. It has done so by developing a product that is deep, computationally advanced, and still economically viable.

Pell says that it's difficult to pinpoint one particular technological breakthrough, but he believes that Powerset's superiority lies in the three decades of hard work by scientists at PARC. (PARC licensed much of its natural-language search technology to Powerset in February.) There was not one piece of technology that solved the problem, Pell says, but instead, it was the unification of many theories and fragments that pulled the project together.

We shall soon see for ourselves, since they say they plan to release demonstration versions on its web site sometime in September.

Source article

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How to Build Gods (Rough Cut)

I apologize if the title of this post offends anyone, but it really is an good way to describe what this video is about; that is, building artificial super-intelligence.

There is a substantial qualitative difference in the predictions being made today and those made in the 50s concerning human-level artificial intelligence. Isaac Asimov was clearly off when he set his AI, HAL, in the year 2001. But at that time, no one had any idea what kind of computational power would be needed to achieve that goal, nor did they have decades of Moore's law from which to extrapolate.

Today, we have pretty good idea what kind of power will be required, and we have a pretty good idea when it will be available. IBM is currently involved in a project to simulate an entire cortical column, which is how the neocortex is wired. Once they have completed the first one, they will add others. A brain will be built. And fairly soon.

I encourage you to watch this video which, according to YouTube, is a rough cut of a film called "Building Gods." You'll then have a sense of how imminent these astonishing developments really are.



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Future Technological Change: Evolutionary or Revolutionary?

Among the individuals making up the scientific community, according to Mike Treder of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, there are two competing schools of thought concerning the near-term future changes in technology. One group, the majority, believes in a continued gradual slope of change. The other, a much smaller set of scientists, is expecting a discontinuity to occur fairly soon. They anticipate a change so transformative that society will not be the same subsequent to it. This transformation may be the result of advances in on of three possible fields: artificial intelligence, bioengineering, or nanotechnology.

Mike makes a compelling case for the idea that we will see a combination of the two futures. He posits that we are really talking about two different kinds of change: Societal and Technological. Technology often changes society, but not always immediately upon its invention. For example, the Internet was created some years before the World Wide Web made it accessible to most people. So Mike introduces the following graph:



He proposes several possible scenarios that could cause the sudden societal transformation shown in his graph:

• Significant improvements in software development and sophisticated user interfaces could produce a level of virtual reality that is close to indistinguishable from the real world.
• A combination of advanced neurotechnology and powerful supercomputing conceivably could enable consciousness uploading, in which a replica of an individual human mind would be recapitulated in cyberspace.
• Breakthroughs in computer programming could give rise to true artificial intelligence; if one or more such systems are capable of recursive self-improvement, this could lead to a superintelligence far surpassing human comprehension.
• In nanotechnology, the long anticipated development of exponential general-purpose molecular manufacturing could present tremendous opportunities for societal benefits while simultaneously bringing grave dangers such as economic meltdown, environmental havoc, or an unstable arms race.

Admittedly, there is a chance that none of this will occur. However, I wouldn't bet on it.

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Exploring Swarm Theory

As promised, I have been searching the Internet for the latest news about emergent complexity. I found this fascinating article on National Geographic written by Peter Miller.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.

Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

That is fascinating, you say, but how does it affect the price of rice in China? It turns out that building computer models of ant behavior and swarm intelligence is allowing researchers to solve real-world problems.

In Houston, for example, a company named American Air Liquide has been using an ant-based strategy to manage a complex business problem. The company produces industrial and medical gases, mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, at about a hundred locations in the United States and delivers them to 6,000 sites, using pipelines, railcars, and 400 trucks. Deregulated power markets in some regions (the price of electricity changes every 15 minutes in parts of Texas) add yet another layer of complexity.

So they built a computer model based on the behavior of ants.

Ants had evolved an efficient method to find the best routes in their neighborhoods. Why not follow their example? So Air Liquide combined the ant approach with other artificial intelligence techniques to consider every permutation of plant scheduling, weather, and truck routing—millions of possible decisions and outcomes a day. Every night, forecasts of customer demand and manufacturing costs are fed into the model.

"It takes four hours to run, even with the biggest computers we have," Harper says. "But at six o'clock every morning we get a solution that says how we're going to manage our day."

For truck drivers, the new system took some getting used to. Instead of delivering gas from the plant closest to a customer, as they used to do, drivers were now asked to pick up shipments from whichever plant was making gas at the lowest delivered price, even if it was farther away.

"You want me to drive a hundred miles? To the drivers, it wasn't intuitive," Harper says. But for the company, the savings have been impressive. "It's huge. It's actually huge."

Another application of swarm intelligence uses the flocking actions of birds in flight.

A team of robots that could coordinate its actions like a flock of birds could offer significant advantages over a solitary robot. Spread out over a large area, a group could function as a powerful mobile sensor net, gathering information about what's out there. If the group encountered something unexpected, it could adjust and respond quickly, even if the robots in the group weren't very sophisticated, just as ants are able to come up with various options by trial and error. If one member of the group were to break down, others could take its place. And, most important, control of the group could be decentralized, not dependent on a leader.

This field is just getting started, and the applications to come defy imagination. How much do you want to bet that there's swarm intelligence in the brain's huge collection of neurons? Stay tuned.

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Learning How to Walk Uphill: Neural Loops

One of the most memorable times in any parent's life is when their child first learns to walk. One parent will hold the toddler upright while the other stands a few feet away with arms extended in encouragement. Baby steps, then a diaper-cushioned fall. Didn't quite make it. Try again. Baby gets almost all the way there. Try again. Success! Clapping hands and hugs all around.

What a marvelous thing is our brain, to be able to learn such a difficult process. We go on from there to the most anxiety-laden time in any parent's life: When their child first learns to drive. But learn they do, forming new neuronal connections as they go. Like riding a bicycle...you never forget how to do it. You add skill upon skill, understanding upon understanding. Amazing.

Now, let's apply that power to machines. Add some neuronal loops to the analysis circuitry, and you get this...the robot learns how to walk up a ramp. Remind you of anything?



[via Think Artificial]

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Overcoming Public Misconceptions About AI

We are all, to one degree or another, influenced in our beliefs by the popular culture in which we exist. For example, what the public may believe, or think it knows, about artificial intelligence, has been influenced and shaped by science fiction in both movie and book form. For this reason it seems to be important, for the sake of informed and intelligent discourse, that laymen become disabused of the more egregious and even absurd ideas that have embedded themselves into our consciousness.

To that end, I am reposting here a short piece from a very detailed analysis of "Creating Friendly AI," which was posted on an excellent reading list at Accelerating Future. The short piece is titled "Movie Clichés about AIs." I think you'll find it entertaining as it points out some of the more untenable features of AIs as portrayed in movies.

Movie cliches about AIs

• All AIs, no matter how primitive, can understand natural language.
  • Corollary: AIs that comically or disastrously misinterpret their mission instructions will never need to ask for help parsing spoken English.
• No AI has any knowledge about blatant emotions, particularly emotions with a somatic affect (tears, frowns, laughter).
  • Corollary: AIs will always notice somatic affects and ask about them.
  • Double corollary: The AI will fail to understand the explanation.
• AIs never need to ask about less blatant emotions that appear in the course of ordinary social interactions, such as the desire to persuade your conversational partner to your own point of view.
  • Corollary: The AI will exhibit the same emotions.
  • Double corollary: An evil AI will feel the need to make self-justifying speeches to humans.
• All AIs behave like emotionally repressed humans.
  • Corollary: If the AI begins to exhibit signs of human emotion, the AI will refuse to admit it.
  • Corollary: Any evil AI that becomes good will gradually acquire a full complement of human emotions.
  • Corollary: Any good AI that becomes evil will instantly acquire all the negative human emotions.
  • Corollary: Under exceptional stress, any AI will exhibit human emotion. (Example: An AI that displays no reaction to thousands of deaths will feel remorse on killing its creator.)
• AIs do not understand the concept of "significant digits" and will always report arithmetical results to greater-than-necessary precision.
  • Corollary: An AI running on 64-bit or 128-bit floats will report only four more digits than necessary, rather than reciting fifteen or thirty extra digits.
• AI minds run at exactly the same rate as human minds, unless the AI is asked to perform a stereotypically intellectual task, in which case the task will be performed instantaneously.
  • Corollary: The reactions of an overstressed AI undergoing an Awful Realization will be observable in realtime (the Awful Realization will not take microseconds, or a century).

Clichés that are actually fairly realistic:

• A newborn AI can take over the entire global computer network in five minutes. (Humans stink at network security - it's not our native environment.)
• A spaceship's on-board AI can defeat any crewmember at chess. (The amount of computing power needed for decent AI makes Deep Blue look sick.)

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Letting AIs Take the Wheel

As Ray Kurzweil like to say, "People keep asking me, where is all the AI I've been hearing about? That's like visiting the rain forest and asking where are all the different species? when there are 50 different species of ants within 50 feet of them. AI is so deeply embedded in the environment that you don't see it but it's all around you." Well, pretty soon it'll be in the wheels of your car.

Scientists at the University Portsmouth have been using the latest advances in artificial intelligence to make "the world's first thinking wheel."

University scientists are providing the artificial intelligence systems for the wheels on the company's prototype eco-friendly electric super-car. The wheels use microcomputers to perform 4000 calculations per second and 'talk' to each other. The wheels use AI to think and learn as the car is being driven, making calculations and adjustments according to travelling speed and road conditions.

It is the first time artificial intelligence has replaced fundamental mechanics within a motor vehicle and will mean tighter control, a smoother ride and a safer drive, yet the driver remains in control of the car.

"Conventional wisdom says you can't reinvent the wheel. We have done just that. We have taken the wheel, given it brains and the ability to think and learn. It's a huge breakthrough," said Dr David Brown of the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Industrial Research.

Artificial Intelligence controls the suspension, steering and breaking systems, teaching it to adapt to bends in the road, potholes and other potential hazards, and compensating by adjusting the car's reactions. The information is retained in the computer's memory and used the next time the car encounters similar road conditions. The car is learning as it drives and adapting its performance accordingly.

Will the AIs controlling your car's wheels suddenly decide to drive you where they want to go rather than the destination you had in mind? Well, that probably won't happen for a while yet. Stay tuned.

[via Herself's AI]

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