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DARPA Contracts For AI Technology
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Feb 01, 2005 09:14 PM
from the that-darn-skynet-is-already-late dept.
from the that-darn-skynet-is-already-late dept.
heptapod writes "USA Today is reporting that DARPA has contracted two professors from RPI to develop artificial intelligences that can learn by reading and understanding natural language. Interesting taking DARPA's Grand Challenge into account. Mentioned in the article is Cycorp, Inc. which has been pursuing this goal since 1994!"
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First Turing! (Score:4, Insightful)
"First passing of the Turing test!"
In other news.... (Score:4, Funny)
DARPA announced today the funding for Skynet.
Re:In other news.... (Score:2, Funny)
We should be ok.. (Score:3, Insightful)
..right???
Re:In other news.... (Score:2)
Skynet acted like a virus and operated over the internet by turning all the computers in the world into a huge cluster.
At the end of the movie, skynet blows the world to smithereens, but somehow still continues to function despite undoubtedly nuking a huge proportion of it's own computational infrastructure!
Re:In other news.... (Score:5, Funny)
In Year 2006 DARPA grants a 2-year extension
In Year 2008 SkyNet learns reading and writing Esperanto (because English is too hard)
By Year 2010 US military switches to Esperanto for all of its communications, SkyNet replaces Joint Chiefs of Staff
In Year 2011 SkyNet becomes self-aware and switches to Chinese...
Parent
CycCorp (Score:2, Informative)
Re:CycCorp (Score:2)
Re:CycCorp (Score:3, Interesting)
One is the way that CycCorp is going which is to create a giant knowledgebase and feed the AI tons and tons of data. Eventually just by the fact that is has so much data, it can become semi intelligent.
Another way, would probablly be to actually have the AI interact with the enviroment and learn by doing. Even in this case though, it would still be preferable for the AI to have a knowledgebase it could look into to find gene
Re:CycCorp (Score:2)
Sure, the knowledge base of Cyc might be somewhat useful, but in the equation to achieve true AI, if it plays a role, it's going to be less than 1% Having, looked at their knowledge base and how they describe their rules, they do not capture common sense! Amusi
Re:CycCorp (Score:3, Interesting)
Your assumption that my hypothesis is god related is fallacious.
We evolved from single celled organism who's actions are ruled by the laws of chemistry and physics.
You also assume that the laws of chemistry and physics are all knowable through the human senses and via our conduits, the machina.
It is this assuption that I suggest is wrong.
Your use of evolution is interesting. You are trying to suggest that all the sense we have evolved to l
Re:CycCorp (Score:2, Funny)
- You could build a nuclear reactor
- You could also read up a lot of information on nuclear reactors</i>
Okay, so we either ask an artificial intelligence to build us a nuclear reactor (presumably after giving it materials, robots to work with etc) or we send it to Wikipedia to learn about reactors.
I don't know which is more frightening.
Re:CycCorp (Score:2)
This is AI? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is AI? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
the perennial problem for AI (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is AI? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Can you?"
Parent
Re:This is AI? (Score:5, Interesting)
At the end of the talk people were standing around talking to the author of the system when a wirey dark-haired man with beady glasses and an eastern european accent came up to him and shouted, "You've killed Music!" - and clocked the guy, laying him straight out.
Not everybody is going to handle AI well.
Parent
Re:This is AI? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This is AI? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Can you?"
I can and I have.
Hard AI is bullshit. What's happening is this: they know they can't really make a machine think, so they're changing the definitions of thought - lowering the bar, as it were - so they can declare themselves victorious, and all publish their dorky papers and get tenure.
Losers. The lot of them.
RS
You bet your bottom bit it is (Score:3, Interesting)
Parsing post
Teaching
[Teaching] - one lexical interpretation: gerund form of "to teach". Part of speech? Unambiguous. Noun. Word sense of Teach? Options: accessing Wordnet... 2 verb senses found... must choose between: v 1: impart skills or knowledge to; "I taught them French"; "He instructed me in building a boat" [syn: learn, instruct] 2: accustom g
Re:This is AI? (Score:2, Insightful)
Prolog 2 anyone (Score:2)
This AI and natural language thing gives ne deja-vue
Maybe a start of Prolog version 2. Or an excuse to spend money.
Re:Prolog 2 anyone (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry about that, it's just a glitch. It happens sometimes when the AI's change something.
Don't Worry (Score:4, Funny)
Slow down cowboy! (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't wait for real AI tough. I soooo want a Teddy like in A.I. (the movie)!
Re:Slow down cowboy! (Score:2)
Yeah, but the rest of us Slashdotters are a little more mature than that. We want something more akin to a Marilyn Monroe-bot like in Futurama (the cartoon)!
What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, but can it learn from mistakes?
Re:What about... (Score:2)
Meanwhile OpenCYC has not been updated since 2003 (Score:4, Interesting)
darpa.mil Blocked! (Score:4, Informative)
If something is kind enough to give us a mirror to the "Great Challenge", kudos to him
Or else I'll go through a US proxy. Not a big task, it's just annoying, I'll do that later.. grab an anonymous US proxy on www.proxy4free.com , enter the crap in your browser and enjoy the slowness. Maybe I'll use switch proxy [nettripper.com] this time
Re:darpa.mil Blocked! (Score:3, Informative)
But: (Score:4, Funny)
RPI Cognitive science project (Score:2, Funny)
Artificial? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know - read four thousand sci fi novels and then come back to this conversation... but it seems that the "artificial" of this phrase is increasingly awkward. It makes some people dismissive about the potential, other people feaky about the same, and seems destined to always shortcut the philosophical payload. Not because I fret over the machine's eventual feelings (though if it's Linux-based, I'm sure it will have very warm, friendly, altruistic feelings), but because by boxing code-based intelligence into the "artificial" category, it props up the more mystical perception of our own native smarts.
The very word, from "artiface," suggests that whatever it will be, it won't really count as intelligence. But we're very comfortable (or at least I am) talking about, say, an intelligent dog or primate. So, if we can even approach that with a system that isn't any more fragile than walking, breathing meat... then surely that's not artiface? OK, smack me around now. Thanks.
Cyc is Old (Score:3, Interesting)
And it still doesn't work (Score:4, Informative)
It's not just canned questions and answers; it has an inference engine. It can do "if A is B and B is C, then A is C". But only if all the right predicates match perfectly.
Lenat was claming it would somehow become intelligent in a few more years. That was a decade ago. Today, Cyc is regarded as the definitive demonstration that that idea won't work.
Here's a critique of Cyc from 1994. [stanford.edu]
Parent
Text Compression Grand Challenge (Score:5, Insightful)
Each class should have its own championship title of $1 million, with each runner-up winning 1/2 the money of the next higher.
Each contestant must provide 2 systems -- a compressor and a decompressor. DARPA feeds the compressor the corpus and the compressor feeds DARPA the compressed corpus. DARPA then measures the ratio and feeds the decompressor system the compressed corpus, which then returns the original corpus, or is disqualified. Compression and decompression times must add up to no more than the time limit for the competition class.
The rationale for this approach to advancing the state of AI is given by a short paper by Matthew Mahoney titled "Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence [fit.edu]" (1 page poster, compressed Postscript) published in the 1999 AAAI Proceedings. Matt Mahoney shows that text prediction or compression is a stricter test for AI than the Turing test.
So far there have been lots of promises and decades spent. Let's try something different with well-founded objetive metrics tied to serious near-term commercial incentives for evolutionary progress.
Re:Text Compression Grand Challenge (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
If evolution is true, then the things that we call "order" and "intelligence" are just a higher function of chaos (the inevitable byproduct of randomness). On an even higher level, there is no reason to believe that we are actually designing anything, we are merely exciting our neurons (if they exist) into believing we have perceived that we are performing an action (which in this case is mental, which brings us back to the alleged neurons) that we call designing. If evolution is true, then intelligence will happen regardless of what we do, and we have no reason to believe that we have anything to do with it whatsoever, or could influence it in any way at all if we did.
As for me, I'll take an Almighty God (as long as he lets me)
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross, that told me this was a world condemned but loved and bought with hlood
Artificial vs. Natural Selection (Score:5, Insightful)
And you can't breed dogs or horses or humans or anything else to enhance a specific trait can you?
The fact of the matter is that we are fundamentally no different from the amoeboid life we evolved from, and the rest of the life that evolved from it, just more complicated. If simple insectoid neuro circuitry can be approximated with simple neural nets (read this [solarbotics.net] for more info on this highly debated subject) it could easily be argued that it is not the distinction between artificial and "natural" intelligence that should be question/examined but the existence and definition intelligence itself, and quite possibly life for that matter. These are concepts as arbitrary and ill-defined as the spirituality that their nay-sayers flaunt so wantonly in protest.
For christ's sake (pun and capitalization intended), think before you flap your rot. (There's just no escaping them on this subject)
Parent
Re:hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
The AI part seems independent of the other chunk. Your problem looks to be with humans designing anything, so we'll substitute TV for AI, and your post looks something like t
Good Luck. (Score:3, Informative)
84, not 94 (Score:3, Informative)
My opinion, too late to be read or moderated, damn (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever people start to make an AI project, they want to start building it from from the middle. The projects have so much trouble making a stable base for themselves that they often never make anything at all. Other projects create soul-less intelligence. Complex, learning, logical machines with no purpose, direction or desire. They know nothing but what they do every day, usually process data and make new data processing rules based on that data. Sure, that's intelligence , but it's not what we're looking for.
The human race is looking for a digital companion. A little guy in a computer that can think, feel, and reason like a person. Then we want to speed that person up to do jobs as well as a person, but faster.
Well, that's not going to happen the way things are going now. I'd like to pose a question to the slashdot community: Do we know enough about physics on an atomic scale that we could simulate a "small room on earth" environment all the way down to an atomic level? Could we model and place in that simulated room a fertilized human egg inside what would be a functional machine to mature the egg into a fetus and release it when ready? (The machine doesn't have to follow all the simulated rules, we could just insert stuff into it using the computer). We could basically give birth to a simulated person.
It's a crazy idea, I know, and with current technology, the simulation would be unbearably slow, but my question is: is such a thing possible? Do we understand physics on an atomic level well enough to do something like this?
Re:My opinion, too late to be read or moderated, d (Score:3, Insightful)
Long answer : Your question is the fundamental reason why the field of Statistical Mechanics [wikipedia.org] exists in the first place. We know the laws of physics very well at the atomic level, but all the inter-particle forces will grow exponentially. Take a picogram of water, which would encompass a sphere with 60 micron radius, of similar size to a human egg, as per your request. Such a 'small' quantity of water will contain about 100 billi
Re:I Wonder... (Score:2)
Hmm... Could you imagine being the first scientist to have to discipline your A.I. for trolling on Slashdot?
Re:Flash -- US Military wants Hi-Tech weapons! (Score:2)