DARPA Contracts For AI Technology 403
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!"
First Turing! (Score:4, Insightful)
"First passing of the Turing test!"
This is AI? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, but can it learn from mistakes?
Re:This is AI? (Score:3, Insightful)
We should be ok.. (Score:3, Insightful)
..right???
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.
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.
Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is AI? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Artificial? (Score:1, Insightful)
Today a more popular definition is the one that you imply, meaning presumably, "not genuine or natural".
You can argue semiotics all you want, but in reality, the phrase "artificial intelligence" has no real meaning on potential or limitation. (unless you want to get a metaphysical about man's creations)
also artifice comes from the latin root art and originally meant craftmanship. So really, the only reason why it sounds so negative to you is due to popularized usage.
Re:hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Evolution isn't chaos except that mutations happen somewhat randomly. The evolutionary process is based on natural selection = fitness for reproduction. If a mutation turns out useless or unattractive for potential mates, it is absorbed uselessly or discarded respectively. There's a lot of process in that. So while evolution is caused by chaos, it is reinforced and propigated by success at survival to a reproduction age and success in mating. (assuming sexual reproduction)
We wouldn't very well expect people born without reproductive organs to have a lot of offspring. They're still born from time to time but that gets stopped dead in its tracks.
It's like religions, suicide cults are an occasional phenomina, resonable control structures that serve a purpose and are therefore spread via word of mouth (sexual reproduction-like) last quite some time, though adapting to suit new needs along the way.
Re:I've been spreading AI spam out (Score:1, Insightful)
Anyways, dont you think it would be much easier, say instead of doing it software, to create an actual robot with visual inputs, tactile inputs, auditory inputs, and outputs such as arms and legs and motors and lights? Create the robot in such a way that it has basic frameworks for its inputs and outputs, but it can build open them in a Object oriented style and add nueral networks loaded with data and also add new features in an object oriented sort of way.
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)
Wrong again.... (Score:2, Insightful)
The process is geared to produce things that are: a) Hardier and better equipped at survival, b) better equiped to reproduce themselves in the environment.
This applies to the basic chemical components and the proteins and the organisms and the etc. The more stable and reproductive a system is the more of them there are likely to be for a longer period of time. The End.
Read about RNA, it's ability to reproduce in small strands and the abiotic clay-catalyzed synthesis of RNA. Here is one link of the thousands available online: http://www.astrobiology.com/asc2002/abstract.html
And here are that other thousand (actually 21,600) I was mentioning: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&i
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 this:
"If evolution is true, then the things that we call "order" and "television" 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 television 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."
And so we're back to semantics, because I don't give a crap how the TV got there, I just care that it shows me naked girls after midnight on Saturdays. If AI can do that when the universe gets around to making one of its clumps build it, then I'm fine with it, too.
Re:In other news.... (Score:2, Insightful)
In Year 2005 DARPA announces 1-year funding to figure out how to build SkyNet.
In Year 2006 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
In Year 2008 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
In Year 2010 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
In Year 2012 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
In Year 2014 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
In Year 2346 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
In Year 2348 DARPA grants a 2-year extension.
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 billion atoms (3 atoms per water molecule). This would be a very simple system of only water, without complications of DNA, proteins, and other organics.
However - chemical processes are primarily governed by electron interactions (between themselves and nuclei). For simplicity, one could probably model the nucleus merely as a simple charge, ignoring individual protons and neutrons, at least to first order. But the electrons must be independent, so this would leave each water molecule with 3 nuclei and 10 electrons. So that would really be about 300 billion charged entities to model. Assuming only Coulombic interactions (charge-charge repulsion/attraction) between charge pairs, there are about 5e23 such interactions to model (all individual pairs that can be produced), just for calculating the forces to advance the system from one state to the next (ignoring summation and momentum considerations). If you had a 1 Teraflop cluster, and assuming you can do one calculation per clock cycle (very generous), it would take about 15,000 years just to make one small time evolution of the system!!!
Now account for quantum mechanics (essential in system of this size, especially for molecular electron interactions) and the extra baggage of maintaining the wavefunctions (or doing an ensemble average of wavefunction expectation values). Then add in more complexity to allow for DNA and other organics. Then do enough time evolutions to advance the system far enough to see the interactions of interest. Our sun will be long burnt out by that time.
Hell, when you take an elementary course in quantum mechanics, you see that modelling an 'ideal' hydrogen atom is doable. By ideal this means ignoring relativity, interactions between electron spin and it's orbit, interactions between electron spin and proton spin, etc etc. Add in these real factors and it becomes much harder. Although such a system you could probably make more approximations, such as assuming exponential charge screening, which means the Coulomb forces would act only in a local area. But still the processing time would be incredible.
Then when you try to model something more complicated, like Helium, it gets VERY difficult. Even the best simulations nowadays can't use too many particles for a real macroscopic system, because you need to do enough averaging to get worthwhile results, but you also cannot wait an eternity.
So that's why statistical mechanics is used, if you have a room full of air, you cannot model all the individual nitrogen and oxygen molecules bouncing off each other, but you can determine average behavior, such as pressure and temperature. And with statistical mechanics you can calculate the relative uncertainties of these quantities (ie, how much variation you'd expect in such a measure of a quantity that's defined as an average anyway), which gives it more utility than thermodynamics. But doing statistical mechanics of a very complicated system with DNA, proteins, and other organics, and accounting for quantum mechanics, would quickly become extraordinarily difficult to model and calculate as well. There would be enough individual parts there (DNA sequences, for instance) that you'd encounter the same difficulties just described.