Artificial Intelligence

As the stock market continues its dive, economists and business columnists have spilled a lot of ink assigning responsibility for the ongoing financial calamity. While hindsight might be clear as day, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory are trying to create new economic models that will provide policymakers with more realistic pictures of different types of markets so they can better avert future economic catastrophe.

I undertook to flesh out my intuitive feeling that intentionality might in fact be a non-computable matter. It is a feeling rather than an argument, but let me set it out as clearly (and appealingly) as I can.

If you own an iPhone, you can now be part of one of the most ambitious speech-recognition experiments ever launched. On Monday, Google announced that it had added voice search to its iPhone mobile application, allowing people to speak search terms into their phones and view the results on the screen.

Prescient Group, LLC, New York, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Washington, DC, the sole US provider of iSentry, a groundbreaking artificial intelligence-based video surveillance technology, this week is introducing the innovative iSentry software at the 15th World Congress of Intelligent Transport Systems convention at booth # 556 of the Javits Convention Center (November 16-20).

Robots.net recently featured the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap (pdf) produced by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. The Future of Humanity Institute has a transhumanist tinge which I find slightly off-putting, and it does seem to include fiction among its inspirations, but the Roadmap is a thorough and serious piece of work, setting out in summary at least the issues that would need to be addressed in building a computer simulation of an entire human brain. Curiously, it does not include any explicit consideration of the Blue Brain project, even in an appendix on past work in the area, although three papers by Markram, including one describing the project, are cited.

As computers get smarter machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to an event dubbed the Singularity. Technologists are still debating the possibility but what if just enough people believed it is likely?

Who would do better on your midterms: you or your laptop?

Trying to keep up with Will Wright is a fool's game. In the space of a few breaths, the legendary creator of The Sims, Sim City, and more recently, Spore, leaps from proclamations about the inevitability of the recent Xbox Live-enabled Obama campaign ads, to predictions about a future full of artificial intelligences that program themselves.

By Peter Hankins

The annual Loebner Prize has been won by Elbot. As you may know, the Loebner competition implements the Turing Test, inviting contestants to put forward a chat-bot program which can conduct online conversation indistinguishable from one conducted with a human being.

Those pesky visual puzzles that have to be completed each time you sign up for a Web mail account or post a comment to a blog are under attack. It's not just from spam-spewing computers or hackers, though; it's also from researchers who are using anti-spam puzzles to develop smarter, more humanlike algorithms.

University researchers have developed an artificial intelligence that can learn by watching "experts" perform a task.

"...As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — "derive" — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?"

Long thought the province of the abstract, cognition may actually evolve as physical experiences and actions ignite mental life.

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs -- 'artificial conversational entities' -- will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised 'thinking' machine.

By Peter Hankins

So, another bastion of mysterianism falls. Cognition Technologies, Inc. has a semantic map of virtually the entire English language, which enables applications to understand English words. Yes, understand. It’s always been one of your bedrock claims that computers can’t really understand anything; but you’re going to have to give that one up.