Teaching Computers To Learn

ABC News Australia: Scientists teach computers how to learn like humans

For artificial intelligence and smart machines to really take off, computers are going to have to think more like people, according to experts in the field.

Now, US scientists have created a computer model, or algorithm, that captures the unique human ability to grasp new concepts in a study that involved learning unfamiliar handwritten alphabet characters.

The algorithm enabled computers to recognise and draw simple symbols that were indistinguishable from those created by humans.

The study, reported in the journal Science, is a "significant advance" in the field of artificial intelligence, the scientists said.

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CSN Editor: If these developments continue, I guess it is only going to be a matter of time before the student (AI machines) will surpass the teacher (this is us).

Quantum Computing And New Approaches To Artificial Intelligence

Quantum Computing And New Approaches To Artificial Intelligence Could Get The Resources To Achieve Real Breakthroughs In Computing -- Next Big Future

Ramez gives examples and problems to achieving an intelligence explosion

* the complexity of important problems like computational chemistry have exponentially increasing complexity
- if designing intelligence is an N^2 problem, an AI that is 2x as intelligent as the entire team that built it (not just a single human) would be able to design a new AI that is only 70% as intelligent as itself

* There are already entities with vastly greater than human intelligence working on the problem of augmenting their own intelligence. A great many, in fact. We call them corporations. And while we may have a variety of thoughts about them, not one has achieved transcendence.

Let's focus on as a very particular example: The Intel Corporation. Intel uses the collective brainpower of tens of thousands of humans and probably millions of CPU cores to.. design better CPUs! (And also to create better software for designing CPUs.) Those better CPUs will run the better software to make the better next generation of CPUs. Yet that feedback loop has not led to a hard takeoff scenario.

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My Comment: The money for this research is now coming in .... but will the results follow? I guess we will find out in the next fwe years.

A New XPrize In The Field Of Artificial Intelligence Announced

TED XPrize

Can A Robot Give A TED Talk? TED Hopes So -- Popular Science

A new XPrize for artificial intelligence takes center stage

Today, Peter Diamandis and Chris Anderson, the heads of the XPrize Foundation and the TED series of conferences respectively, announced a new XPrize, in the field of artificial intelligence. The winner will be the first to develop an AI system capable of independently delivering "a compelling TED talk with no human involvement."

Previously announced XPrizes have involved challenges such as cleaning up oil spills or landing a lunar rover.

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My Comment: This could be a fascinating talk.

Robots Will Be Smarter Than Us All By 2029

Photo: Google has spent billions of its £57bn fortune quietly buying up the world’s top robotics companies including Boston Dynamics, the company behind this robot

Robots Will Be Smarter Than Us All By 2029, Warns AI Expert Ray Kurzweil -- The Independent

World’s leading futurologist predicts computers will soon be able to flirt, learn from experience and even make jokes

By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.

One of the world’s leading futurologists and artificial intelligence (AI) developers, 66-year-old Kurzweil has previous form in making accurate predictions about the way technology is heading.

In 1990 he said a computer would be capable of beating a chess champion by 1998 – a feat managed by IBM’s Deep Blue, against Garry Kasparov, in 1997.

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Update: Computer robots will outsmart humans within 15 years, Google director claims (and a giant laboratory for artificial intelligence is already planned) -- Daily Mail

My Comment: This is an optimistic prediction .... but I will admit that Kurzweil has a better track record than I do.

Google Creates A "Computer Brain"

There's a certain grim inevitability to the fact that the YouTube company's creation began watching stills from cat videos

Google Creates 'Computer Brain' - And It Immediately Starts Watching Cat Videos On YouTube -- Daily Mail

* 16,000 processors create brain-style 'neural network'
* Network learns by itself to identify cat faces
* Works with pool of 10 million images from YouTube

Google has created an 'artificial brain' from 16,000 computer processors, and sat it down with an internet connection.

There's a certain grim inevitability to the fact that the YouTube company's creation began watching stills from cat videos.

The team, led by Google's Dr Jeff Dean, used the 16,000 processor array to create a brain-style 'neural network' with more than a billion connections.

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My Comment: I am not a "cat person".

A Rat Is Still Smarter Than Google

Clever - but still learning: Google Navigation, pictured here on an Android phone, is a clever, intelligent-seeming system - but it is still just code, following instructions

Why Google Is Nowhere Near As Clever As A Rat - But One Day, Even Your Smartphone Will Be Smarter Than You -- Daily Mail

* Clever technology such as Google is still powered by rote-learning and pattern-matching, say AI researchers...
* ...But over the next 30 years, super-computers will become smarter, cheaper, and smaller

Google has spent the last 15 years becoming smarter and smarter, learning how to power our lives - from our homes, our cars, our phones.

But - and with apologies to founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin - all of that work is still no match to the intelligence of a common rat.

Or taking it further, even a gnat.

The point was made by artificial intelligence researchers Yann LeCun and Josh Tenenbaum, who were not criticising the search engine, just pointing out how much further we have to go until we can create computers which contain - or at least, perfectly mimic - intelligent life.

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My Comment: We have made progress .... but we definitely still have a long way to go before an AI platform is smarter than a rat.

When Creative Machines Overtake Man

When Creative Machines Overtake Man -- Kurzweil Artificial Intelligence

Machine intelligence is improving rapidly, to the point that the scientist of the future may not even be human! In fact, in more and more fields, learning machines are already outperforming humans. As noted in this transcript of a talk at TEDxLausanne on Jan. 20, 2012, artificial intelligence expert Jürgen Schmidhuber isn’t able to predict the future accurately, but he explains how machines are getting creative, why 40‚000 years of Homo sapiens-dominated history are about to end soon, and how we can try to make the best of what lies ahead.

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Artificial Intelligence Will Soon Be Passing The Turing Test

Artificial Intelligence Could Be On Brink of Passing Turing Test -- Wired Science

One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade.

Turing was one of the 20th century’s great mathematicians, a conceptual architect of modern computing whose codebreaking played a decisive part in World War II. His test, described in a seminal dawn-of-the-computer-age paper, was deceptively simple: If a machine could pass for human in conversation, the machine could be considered intelligent.

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My Comment: Some would say that we are there already.

When AI Machines Overtake Man

When Creative Machines Overtake Man -- Kurzweilai

Machine intelligence is improving rapidly, to the point that the scientist of the future may not even be human! In fact, in more and more fields, learning machines are already outperforming humans. As noted in this transcript of a talk at TEDxLausanne on Jan. 20, 2012, artificial intelligence expert Jürgen Schmidhuber isn’t able to predict the future accurately, but he explains how machines are getting creative, why 40‚000 years of Homo sapiens-dominated history are about to end soon, and how we can try to make the best of what lies ahead.

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My Comment: The above video is a must see. Enjoy .... and be concern.

How Machine Intelligence Is Evolving

Marcus du Sautoy with one of Luc Steels's language-making robots. Photograph: Jodie Adams/BBC

AI Robot: How Machine Intelligence Is Evolving -- The Guardian

No computer can yet pass the 'Turing test' and be taken as human. But the hunt for artificial intelligence is moving in a different, exciting direction that involves creativity, language – and even jazz.

'I propose to consider the question "Can machines think?"' Not my question but the opening of Alan Turing's seminal 1950 paper which is generally regarded as the catalyst for the modern quest to create artificial intelligence. His question was inspired by a book he had been given at the age of 10: Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by Edwin Tenney Brewster. The book was packed with nuggets that fired the young Turing's imagination including the following provocative statement:

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AI Expert Ben Goertzel On Coast To Coast Radio

AI Expert Ben Goertzel On Coast To Coast Radio March 28 -- Kurzweilai

AI expert Dr. Ben Goertzel will be on Coast to Coast AM on March 28, talking about his work in AI and its applications in areas like financial prediction, gaming, and radical life extension. He will also discuss creating benevolent superhuman AI.

Dimitar Sasselov, Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University, will discuss thbreakthroughs in synthetic biology and exoplanetary astronomy, and how they will shed new light on our place in the universe.

The show airs nationwide nightly at 1am-5am EDT/10pm-2am PDT.

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Control Dangerous AI Before It Controls Us

A killer robot from the 2009 film "Terminator Salvation" — exactly the type of future we don't want to see. Warner Bros.

Control Dangerous AI Before It Controls Us, One Expert Says -- MSNBC/Innovation

He believes super-intelligent computers could one day threaten humanity's existence

Super-intelligent computers or robots have threatened humanity's existence more than once in science fiction. Such doomsday scenarios could be prevented if humans can create a virtual prison to contain artificial intelligence before it grows dangerously self-aware.

Keeping the artificial intelligence genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity's problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. But successful containment requires careful planning so that a clever breed of artificial intelligence cannot simply threaten, bribe, seduce or hack its way to freedom.

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Update: Humanity Must 'Jail' Dangerous AI to Avoid Doom, Expert Says -- Live Science

'Genius' Computer With An IQ Of 150

Artificial intelligence? The high-IQ software uses a mix of computer logic and 'human like' thinking to achieve higher scores than previous software

'Genius' Computer With An IQ Of 150 Is 'More Intelligent' Than 96 Per Cent Of Humans -- Daily Mail

* Software uses mixture of logic and 'human-like' thinking
* Score is classified as 'genius'
* It could 'spot patterns' in financial data

A computer has become the first to be classed as a 'genius' after scoring 150 in an IQ test.

The average score for people is 100. A score of 150 ranks the artificial intelligence programme among the top four per cent of humans.

The programme uses a mixture of mathematical logic and 'human-like' thinking, enabling it to outperform previous software on IQ tests.

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A Computer That's As Clever As A Human?

Rollo Carpenter, the inventor of the Cleverbot

Has Inventor Made A Computer That's As Clever As A Human? -- The Independent

Rollo Carpenter's Cleverbot was smart enough to convince a group of techies it was a person. But can it fool Tom Peck?

Given that, in countless science fiction films, the moment when the computers start thinking for themselves tends to coincide with the end of the world as we know it, it is perhaps a little unsettling that an American inventor has for more than 20 years been sponsoring a prize to encourage such a feat.

More worrying still, a conversational computer by the name of Cleverbot has arguably just come closer than ever to doing it.

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Deceptive Robots Hint At Machine Self-Awareness

From New Scientist:

A robot that tricks its opponent in a game of hide and seek is a step towards machines that can intuit our thoughts, intentions and feelings

ROVIO the robotic car is creating a decoy. It trundles forward and knocks over a marker pen stood on its end. The pen is positioned along the path to a hiding place - but Rovio doesn't hide there. It sneaks away and conceals itself elsewhere.

When a second Rovio arrives, it sees the felled pen and assumes that its prey must have passed this way. It rolls onwards, but is soon disappointed.

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Robot Teaches Itself To Fire A Bow And Arrow

From Gadget Lab:

In the latest episode of “stop teaching them so much,” scientists have created a humanoid robot that teaches itself how to accurately hit a target with a bow and arrow.

The cute, childlike robot, named iCub, was designed by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology. Armed with a bow, an arrow, a cute (if politically incorrect) Native American headdress and a complicated computer algorithm, the robot learns from his missed shots iteratively, until he makes the bull’s-eye.

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Artificial Intelligence: Riders On A Swarm

From The Economist:

Mimicking the behaviour of ants, bees and birds started as a poor man’s version of artificial intelligence. It may, though, be the key to the real thing.

ONE of the bugaboos that authors of science fiction sometimes use to scare their human readers is the idea that ants may develop intelligence and take over the Earth. The purposeful collective activity of ants and other social insects does, indeed, look intelligent on the surface. An illusion, presumably. But it might be a good enough illusion for computer scientists to exploit. The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure. AI based on ant behaviour, though, is having some success.

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When Will We Be Able To Build Brains Like Ours?

Image: Henrik5000

From Scientific American:

Sooner than you think -- and the race has lately caused a 'catfight'.

When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things -- airplanes that fly, radios that reach millions of listeners. When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities -- such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions. In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain. When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science. This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic “firsts.”

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Opportunity Mars Rover Gets Artificial Intelligence Upgrade, Decides For Itself What to Explore Next

Opportunity Target Selection Opportunity scans the Martian terrain for rocks meeting specific criteria – shape, size, coloration – set by scientists on the ground. When it finds what it's looking for, it sets a course for the point of interest. NASA/JPL-Caltech

From Popular Science:

NASA's Opportunity Rover, now in its seventh year of roaming the Martian surface, just got a little smarter. Like parents giving their growing child a little more autonomy, engineers updated Opportunity with artificial intelligence software this past winter that allows the rover to make its own decisions about where to stop and which rocks to analyze during its travels. Now the first images of Opportunity picking and choosing where to investigate have been released.

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Startups Focus On AI At South By Southwest

From Technology Review:

A new crop of startups aims to bring artificial intelligence to the masses.

South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive has a reputation as being the place for social Web startups to hit the headlines. Twitter found one of its first big audiences at the event in 2007, and attendees are among the most eager adoptees of new social Web tools.

To harness this cutting-edge mood, last year the event's organizers launched the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator, a competition showcasing 32 Web-focused startups. This year's competition starts today.

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