Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have given Honda’s humanoid robot, ASIMO, the ability to walk towards a goal position while avoiding stationary and moving obstacles.
This could be the coolest, most expensive game of Frogger ever played!
Tag Archive for 'artificialintelligence'
While I was away people were often interested to learn that I studied AI, but there were a couple of times when (otherwise very intelligent) people told me they were convinced that sufficiently advanced systems could only be used to enslave/exterminate humanity. One even went so far as to compare my honours project to vivisection. She seemed appalled that I took as a compliment the suggestion that I had created a system with sophistication comparable to a thinking and feeling animal.
The critics of AI might not be so wrong though because, according to the Telegraph,
Terrorists could one day use an army of robot “suicide bombers” to attack British targets
Schneier calls it a “movie-plot threat”, but I suppose it’s good to know that someone in the Home Office is planning for the rise of the Cylons…
I saw an interesting Gamasutra article on Slashdot today about creating game AI which is “stupid” enough to be beatable, but “intelligent” enough to make realistic mistakes.
Taking poker as an example:
For weak poker AI, an intelligent mistake consists of figuring out what you should do, and then not doing it, so long as not doing it does not make you look stupid.
For example, if the human player just put in a big raise, yet you know there’s a 75 percent chance your hand is the best, then an intelligent mistake would be to fold. The odds are the AI would win, yet we are simulating a weak human player, and weak human players often fold to a large raise when they are unclear on their odds.
Conversely, weak human players often call when their chances are weak. It’s a natural thing to do and allows us to reduce the strength of the AI player, without it looking artificially stupid.
There’s also mention of a fairly cool sounding chess program:
The programmers of Fritz hit upon a solution that involved the AI deliberately setting up situations that the human player could exploit (with some thought) that would allow the human to gain a positional or piece advantage. Once the human player gained the advantage, the AI would resume trying to win.
At no point here is the AI actually dumbed down. If anything, there is actually quite a bit more computation going on, and certainly more complexity.
Mamoru-Kun (”Little Protector”) is a robot that is able to tell his owner where an object he or she lost or misplaced within a certain area is located. He can do it verbally or by pointing at the object.
It seems to be using some pretty heavy computer vision technology to track objects as they’re moved around a room, then point them out when asked later.
The robot stands 40cm tall and weighs 3.8kg. He has 4 joints (two in the neck and one in each arm) and is equipped with a microphone and speakers. Mamoru-Kun is cell phone-controlled.
Users have to register and record items they regularly misplace in advance. Once they did that, the area in question will be constantly covered by various cameras, which are connected to Mamoru-Kun.
This is really cool! It’s aimed toward helping the elderly or disabled, but I’d want one just to hack around with!
Commercialization of the assistance system is planned to begin by 2018.
But I want my Japanese Helper-Robot now!
I really like poker. Partly as an interesting artificial intelligence problem, but mostly as a fun way to spend time with a group of friends. Now that I’ve finished travelling the problem is finding people to play with!
There are a couple of reasons why I don’t like online poker. The first is an issue of trust. Between bots, collusion, and poor security, I just don’t believe that all the players in a game are on an equal footing. The second reason is that I think of poker as a social game. I like to be able to see the people I’m playing against!
PokerTH is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux) Texas Hold ‘em poker application, released under the GPL. It includes the option of a local game against AI opponents, as well as a free online setting, allowing the player to join a public table or create a private one to play with friends. I still can’t see the other people at the table, but it’s a great way to learn the game or just play for fun!
My only complaint so far is that the minimum window size is too big for the Eee 701. It’s easy to get around by moving the window every so often, but it would be nice to have the ability to scale the window down for smaller screens.
Download PokerTH (Currently version 0.62)
PokerTH version 0.60 is currently available in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories.
