Vicious Cycle features a group of little autonomous robots performing a range of repetitive functions, driven by mechanical devices. But as the mechanisms mercilessly start getting faster and faster, things take a turn for the worse for the helpless robots.
Yesterday at the University of Reading in London, a computer convinced human judges that it was actually a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy. By convincing one-third of the judging panel of its humanity, it became the computer ever to pass the famous Turing Test.
The Turing Test is a controversial test invented by Alan Turing in 1950. Turing believed that if thirty percent of humans could not distinguish a human from a machine in conversation, that would mean the machine is capable of "thinking." Until yesterday, a machine was never capable of convincing enough humans to be deemed artificially intelligent, though others have tried.
... the test was a five-minute keyboard conversation with someone or something on the other side. The questions are a free-for-all — no script is applied and there are no topics assigned in advance. It's meant to simulate a conversation with a complete stranger. The judges then determine if they believe they have been speaking to a machine or a human. As long as one-third of judges believe its human, the machine passes the test.
In 2012, a program nearly passed with 29 percent of judges convinced, but just barely missed the cut. Saturday's computer, who acted as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman, made the cut. Gootsman was created by a team of computer engineers, led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko ... Goostman told the judges that he likes to eat hamburgers and candy, and that his dad works as a gynecologist.
The Turing Test has been a point of contention among researchers, and some argue that it is not a valid way to determine if computers can think. Professor Kevin Warwick, a visiting educator at the University of Reading, explained that this version of the test was actually quite vigorous: "The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world [but] this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted."
Goostman's age was crucial to passing the Turing Test. Developer Veselov explained that, "Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn't know everything." So if the judges asked him something he was not programmed to know, judges might write that off as a factor of his age instead of his lack of humanity.
If you would like to talk to the first computer capable of "thinking," you can chat with Eugene here.The Wire
At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment.Ummmmm ... SkyNet.
Bringing a new meaning to the phrase "experience is the best teacher", the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.
Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro was responsible for the first Geminoids—super realistic androids capable of reproducing facial tics and other subtle mannerisms—but a team of researchers at Aalborg University in Denmark has fired back with their own fair-skinned take on the creepily realistic robot: the Geminoid DK.
DK already looks startlingly familiar, like he's the cool guy who teachers your English composition class at Uncanny Valley University, but he's still very much a work in progress. Currently, he's programmed to breathe and make his own involuntary muscular reactions, though both actions currently seem a bit too pronounced from these first videos. Nevertheless, he's considerably cheaper than Ishiguro's Geminoids, meaning that he'll be more widely available to robotics researchers. Oh and if you're late to class he punishes you with laser beams that shoot out of his eyes.
Facial motion test of Affetto, which is an child robot that is currently under development in emergent robotics laboratory at Osaka university for simulating infant cognitive development. Its face is created realistically so as to be treated as a human being by human caregivers, not as a robot.Much less creepy than the Yotaro Baby Simulator. I predict a Japanese remake of "Child's Play."
S. Shankar's Endhiran, which is a Kollywood movie ... features the splashy dance routines you'd expect from Indian films. (And the soundtrack is already on the top of the iTunes chart!)io9
But it also features a fairly intricate plot, in which a guy creates a robot as a companion for his son — and, depending on which synopsis you read, the robot either goes on a killing rampage, or evildoers try to seize control of the robot. One way or the other, the robot may be turning on its creator. Superstar Rajnikanth plays both the robot and its creator. The love interest is played by Aishwarya Rai, who's been photographed dancing with ostriches in a giant set piece.
Hiroshi Ishiguro exhibited a “geminoid” during the Ars Electronica Festival 2009 as a featured artist. The geminoid is a tele-operated android modeled after his creator. Once the operator talks with visitors by using the geminoid, both the operator and visitors can adapt to the android body. The operator recognizes the android body as his own body and the visitors recognize it as the operator.
His newest project is a geminoid named “telenoid”. The unique appearance may be eery [sic] when we first see it. However, once we communicate with others by using the telenoid, we can adapt to it. If a friend speaks from the telenoid, we can imagine the friend’s face on the telenoid’s face. If we embrace it, we have the feeling, that we embrace the friend.
Two spiders are walking along a track – a seemingly ordinary scene, but these are no ordinary spiders. They are molecular robots and they, like the tracks they stride over, are fashioned from DNA. One of them has four legs and marches over its DNA landscape, turning and stopping with no controls from its human creators. The other has four legs and three arms – it walks along a miniature assembly line, picking up three pieces of cargo from loading machines (also made of DNA) and attaching them to itself. All of this is happening at the nanometre scale, far beyond what the naked eye can discern. Welcome to the exciting future of nanotechnology.Read more at Discover
The two robots are the stars of two new papers that describe the latest advances in making independent, programmable nano-scale robots out of individual molecules. Such creations have featured in science-fiction stories for decades, from Michael Crichton’s "Prey to Red Dwarf", but in reality, there are many barriers to creating such machines. For a start, big robots can be loaded with masses of software that guides their actions – no such luck at the nano-level.
The two new studies have solved this problem by programming the robots’ actions into their environment rather than their bodies. Standing on the shoulders of giants, both studies fuse two of the most interesting advances in nanotechnology: the design of DNA machines, fashioned from life’s essential double helix and possessing the ability to walk about; and the invention of DNA origami, where sets of specially constructed DNA molecules can be fused together into beautiful sheets and sculptures. Combine the two and you get a robot walker and a track for it to walk upon.
National Robotics Week recognizes robotics technology as a pillar of 21st century American innovation, highlights its growing importance in a wide variety of application areas, and emphasizes its ability to inspire technology education. Robotics is positioned to fuel a broad array of next-generation products and applications in fields as diverse as manufacturing, health-care, national defense and security, agriculture and transportation. At the same time, robotics is proving to be uniquely adept at enabling students of all ages to learn important science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts and at inspiring them to pursue careers in STEM-related fields. During National Robotics Week, a week-long series of events and activities is aimed at increasing public awareness of the growing importance of “robo-technology” and the tremendous social and cultural impact that it will have on the future of the United States.Via Make
A Swiss team has applied Darwinian selection to robot development, producing robots that can walk, cooperate and even hunt each other.Read more at TG Daily | PLoS
"Just a few hundred generations of selection are sufficient to allow robots to evolve collision-free movement, homing, sophisticated predator versus prey strategies, coadaptation of brains and bodies, cooperation, and even altruism," say the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and University of Lausanne researchers. "In all cases this occurred via selection in robots controlled by a simple neural network, which mutated randomly."
While most people have heard of small baby-simulator dolls used to teach people about childcare, they probably haven’t heard of Yotaro, a robotic baby simulator with an interactive screen for a face. This strange creation is the result of research at the University of Tsukuba in Japan ...University of Tsukuba (Site is in Japanese)
Yotaro is an interactive robot that portrays a variety of facial expressions, movements, and physiological characteristics that are all natural to babies. The device reacts to the user through a sophisticated emotion-control system that watches and senses what the user is doing and provides an appropriate reaction. That the baby can do a variety of things (like crying real tears) makes it much more sophisticated than the standard baby-training dolls. Edited for clarity.
