AI War Machines March On
Aug 19, 20071
As most of us know, and shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who don’t, the military has a fervent eye on applications of AI in wars. While most modern military robots are remote controlled by humans, there are around 4,000 robots currently in Iraq, and governments don’t intend to stop at that. The goal is full autonomy, and we’re getting there. A recent article on increased autonomy of war machines mentions a few real life examples of current semi-autonomy, such as the use of the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, and DARPA’s intentions to explore systems that make life-and-death decisions on their own.
My brother called me today to tip me off on some exciting news: An article the New Journal of Physics reports evidence that inorganic space plasma might form life like structures. Fantastic! Simulations created by a Mr. Tsytovich and his colleagues at the General Physics Institute, Russian Academy of Science, have provided evidence that under the right conditions, dust particles may allow plasma to self-organize and exhibit behavior normally associated with organisms, such as self-replication.
I work on artificial creativity. That’s my main focus of research and development. Some people fix cars, others collect dolls. I work on making machines capable of original thought. The strange thing is that I haven’t been letting it shine through on Think Artificial, mainly because I’ve been searching for the right way to talk about it. But from now on there’ll be regular coverage of this important and almost magical concept. Will computers ever be capable of invention?
Sharp readers of Think Artificial may have noticed that I sometimes use bizarre, yellow icons to spice up the entries (like the one on the side here). They’re part of a 15 icon set I created sometime in 2006 during what must’ve been a night of insomnia. In any case, I’m releasing them into the public domain in this post! Hope some of you find them entertaining or even useful, or at least not annoying. Continue Reading to see all of them and download the package (“Spambots” is my favorite).
There’s something very important you must always try to do when interviewed: Ask to review it before it prints! This may not be possible at all times. For example, it tends to be a lot easier to get a copy if the article is long and scheduled for publication with a few days notice. Nevertheless: ASK. It’s amazing how often quotes can get scrambled, your statements misinterpreted, ripped out of context, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t always have to be bad to allow the reporter to have his way making the story sound more exciting on the expense of its accuracy.
If you’re into AI, you might have heard by now that Checkers has been solved. Solved, as in determining the final result of a game in which either player makes no mistakes whatsoever: The AI will always make the perfect play. Checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5×1020) and is now the largest game that has been solved to date. It took dozens of computers running almost continuously around the clock since 1989 to solve. My advisor at Reykjavik University, Yngvi Björnsson, is a part of the development team and one of the authors of the article published in Science magazine, July 6th, introducing the solution to Checkers. My congratulations to Yngvi and the team for this achievement!
I’ve been following the news and rumors on Radar Networks for a few years now, a company that’s about to unveil a new semantic web application. What originally brought it to my attention was the fact that my brother was the chief architect of the underlying system during its conception, and is now on the board of advisors. But it’s not blood relation that’s perpetuating my interest; it’s the potential revolutionary nature of the product they’re about to release. As we get closer to their beta, the shroud of secrecy is gradually being lifted.
