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!"
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???
No Killer Robots (Score:2, Informative)
And for a glimpse, if somewhat longwinded, of what lengths DARPA will go to to make this happen, check out this article: http://villagevoice.com/news/0337,baard,46901,1.h
Re: (Score:2)
Re:In other news.... (Score:2)
Re:In other news.... (Score:2)
(No, not really, just the loss of a few nodes.)
Re:In other news.... (Score:2)
Oh, you said "Terminator 3" and "plot" in the same sentence and my brain turned o
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...
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)
Re:CycCorp (Score:2)
Re:CycCorp (Score:2)
This is AI? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is AI? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
I certainly don't see how a mere computer can understand. Perhaps some sort of greater machine, but considering Searle's arguments, a mere computer can not. Like Descartes, a computer which dreams that it is a robot: it could arrange signs in such a way to pass a Turing test all day, but it has none of Searle's intentionality, or Chomsky's appropriateness.
the perennial problem for AI (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is AI? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Can you?"
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
Believe it or not: I, Robot. The movie.
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
Based on the trailer I wasn't interested in the movie. I happened to see it anyway on rental and was surprised that it had nothing to do with the trailer.
While not the best picture of the year, if you've only seen the trailer, it's not a movie about a killer AI that Will Smith has to hunt down and destroy. There's a bit of thought that went into the picture and a bit of a mystery.
Worth adding to your Netflix queue anyhow.
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
I've gotta second that. Part of it was that I had low expectations, and part of it was that it was an action flick with a pinch of thought. (Emphasize pinch...) Imagine that. A decent Amisov action flick. Weird.
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.
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
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
Can a human read a misspelled word without ERRORing?
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
There are some who define A.I. as simply the "bleeding-edge fringes of computer science and computer engineering." This is suggested strongly by the apparent fact that as soon as an algorithm, methodology, or other such computing device is taken up by industry and mass-produced, it has always lost its "A.I." status and merely become, well, I.T., I guess.
Re:This is AI? (Score:2)
Makes you wonder then. Does America's teenage population have cognitive reasoning?
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)
When linked to the Grand Challange... (Score:2)
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)!
Re:Slow down cowboy! (Score:2)
Part of research on this grand of a scale is to discover the subproblems necessary to tackle the big problem. Each of these problems may involve a dozen subproblems. After a few years, you have fl
Re:Slow down cowboy! (Score:2)
So the next step would be, as they're trying to do, adding that context-sensitivity which is a form of understanding. But understanding is not the same as thinking: thinking would involve taking all the t
What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, but can it learn from mistakes?
Re:What about... (Score:2)
Re:What about... (Score:2)
"Can you?"
Meanwhile OpenCYC has not been updated since 2003 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Meanwhile OpenCYC has not been updated since 20 (Score:2)
That said, kudos to DARPA for funding so much AI research. I was on a DARPA advisory panel for a year in 1998 (neural network tools) - lots of fun and interesting because of the other people on my panel.
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)
try this (Score:2)
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.
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
In that context, intelligence may mean information on the enemy (and create it as in make it up
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Perhaps "Computer Intelligence" would be more descriptive?
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
It's nobody else's fault if you pick the wrong definition, especially when you are preferring a less popular definition. It's also nobody else's fault when you get your etymology wrong; at least according to that entry, "artifice" and "artificial" are siblings, not ancestor-descendant, so drawing conclusions about the meaning of "artificial" from "artifice" is highly suspect at best.
From where
crud; s/"fake"/"inferior"/g (Score:2)
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Looking at it from a poetic viewpoint, I'm not sure anything else has the proper euphony [reference.com], though. You really ought to lead with a four-syllable word if you want to displace Artificial; a two-syllable might work. "Generated Intelligence"? "Machine Intelligence" might work, but it's still not quite as flowing.
For those who wish to go hunting, you can start in the thesaurus [reference.com], but it should be pointed out that the definition of artificial in question doesn't even show up there; there don't seem to
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Yup, I get that. Forgive me if I rely too often on dogs to make a point (but when one owns serious bird dogs, one does these things). So: the two dogs I own are the absolutely unnatural product of human art, and I would say that while their wicked (nay, evil sometimes) intelligence certainly has its roots in wolves, there is no question that certain aspects of their capabilities and firmware are the direct result of human (in th
Re:Artificial? (Score:2)
Or, "Engineered Intelligence" or "Mensability"?
I don't know about "MI," though, because that's also a common acronym for a type of heart attack. You know, "That Dr. Smith is really working on an MI!"
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]
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)
Re:Text Compression Grand Challenge (Score:2)
(Or N+1, for that matter, when the 1 is the one you need.)
Have you ever actually gotten a patent? (Score:2)
You have been buying the lines from con-artists who claim they're inventors when they're actually tax collectors with an ability to write up neat ideas that almost anyone could come up with except those making judgements about "obviousness" during law suits.
Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um... (Score:2)
Besides, Darpa is funding a large number of different AI projects right now [darpa.mil], as they have been for the last, I don't know, few dozen years... Why is this newsworthy?
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
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 evolu
Re:hmmm... (Score:2)
where did those rules come from? where did anything come from? what except randomness governed the first combination of proteins? what except randomness brought proteins about? The whole point of evolution is that given sufficient time and sufficient randomness, everything has to happen at some point or another. (I know the Infinite Improbability Drive was a joke, but let's be honest, it strikes a chord with evolutionary thinking doesn't
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 sy
Re:hmmm... (Score:2)
As for me, I'll take an Almighty God (as long as he lets me)
No kidding; I figure any God could take you any day (assuming s/he wasn't out late partying the night before), so letting you win would obviously be the result of, "meh, I'll take care of revery on Sunday when all the other wrestling is on and I'm not so busy".
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)
Re:Artificial vs. Natural Selection (Score:2)
Those first five words can kill you if you're not careful. I think I may have a decent grasp on the things I do not know. The problem with evolution is that most people start building way too advanced. Where did all those rules that govern all those complex reactions come from, and if the reactions can change, why are the rules locked into place? The Devil (pun and capitalization intended) is in the details. So is God.
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar or the the cattle lo
Re:hmmm... (Score:2)
Please read this short story [maddad.org].
Order and chaos are not what they seem... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Cycorp= (Score:2, Funny)
Good Luck. (Score:3, Informative)
Just one lightning strike away from.... (Score:2)
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:I Wonder... (Score:2)
Re:I Wonder... (Score:2)
Re:Flash -- US Military wants Hi-Tech weapons! (Score:2)
[tt]:SCREENSHOTS (Score:2)
Ended up having to make a page with the chipmunks doing their immitation of The Restuarant Scene in "When Harry Met Sally" instead.
Re:Who do I email in darpa? (Score:2)
Re:Who do I email in darpa? (Score:2)
Re:Sex Kills (Score:2)
Re:As long as we're bantying about theories (Score:2)