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 Post subject: Are Robots Mirroring Human Evolution? -Expert Says "Yes" (at Warp Speed)
PostPosted: Thu Jul 23, 2009 6:01 pm 
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“I see a strong parallel between the evolution of robot intelligence
and the biological intelligence that preceded it. The largest nervous
systems doubled in size about every fifteen million years since the
Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. Robot controllers double in
complexity (processing power) every year or two. They are now barely at
the lower range of vertebrate complexity, but should catch up with us
within a half century."



Hans Moravec,  pioneer in mobile robot research and founder of Carnegie Mellon University"s Robotics Institute.








According toMoravec, our robot creations are evolving similar to how
life on Earth evolved, only at warp speed. By his calculations, by
mid-century no human task, physical or intellectual, will be beyond the
scope of robots.



Here is a summary of his educated predictions for the future of robotics up until they can do everything we can do:



2010: A first generation of broadly-capable "universal robots" will
emerge. The “servant” robots, will be able to run application programs
for many simple chores. These machines will have mental power and
inflexible behavior analogous to small reptiles.



2015: Utility robots host programs for several tasks. Larger
"Utility Robots" with manipulator arms able to run several different
programs to perform different tasks may follow single-purpose home
robots. Their tens of billion calculation per second computers would
support narrow inflexible competences, perhaps comparable to the skills
of an amphibian, like a frog.



2020: Universal robots host programs for most simple chores. Larger
machines with manipulator arms and the ability to perform several
different tasks may follow, culminating eventually in human-scale
"universal" robots that can run application programs for most simple
chores. Their tens of billion calculation per second lizard-scale minds
would execute application programs with reptilian inflexibility.



2030: Robot competence will become comparable to larger mammals. In
the decades following the first universal robots, a second generation
with mammallike brainpower and cognitive ability will emerge. They will
have a conditioned learning mechanism, and steer among alternative
paths in their application programs on the basis of past experience,
gradually adapting to their special circumstances. A third generation
will think like small primates and maintain physical, cultural and
psychological models of their world to mentally rehearse and optimize
tasks before physically performing them. A fourth, humanlike,
generation will abstract and reason from the world model.



If Moravec is correct in his predictions, if won’t be long before
robots have cognition. With daily breakthroughs happening in the
robotic community—it may happen even sooner. Not only will they be able
to think autonomously, but robot intelligence and capabilities would
equal (and most likely quickly surpass) any human capability.



That likely possibility begs the question, what happens when robots
are superior to their creators? Will they still be subservient to us,
or will the popular “robot takeover” of sci-fi movies become reality? I
love robots as much as the next geek, but maybe we need some sort of
plan for when they stop loving us…



On the other hand, others believe that it is humans who will evolve
into advanced “robots”. Their belief is that with futuristc
technologies being developed in multiple fields, human intelligence may
eventually be able to “escape its ensnarement in biological tissue” and
be able to move freely across boundaries that can’t support flesh and
blood—while still retaining our identities. That idea seems much
further away, but whatever the case may be—there are changes ahead.



Posted by Rebecca Sato.







Related Galaxy posts:











Robots Rising -Scientists are Worried
Virtual Immortality -How To Live Forever

DepthX -Thinking Robot to Explore Jupiter"s Moon, Europa
What do Robots Dream of?
Scientists Create Artificial Brain





Source Link





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 Post subject: Another Ratbot, This One with Bigger Whiskers
PostPosted: Fri Jul 24, 2009 6:40 am 
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Encountering a swarm of genuine sewer-dwelling rats would send the average human screaming and jumping up onto the nearest chair, but there"s nothing to fear -- and everything to admire -- about the latest plague of ratbots being developed in robotics labs around the world.


First came Psikharpax, the French ratbot with the fancy literary name, whose sensors simulated the function of three senses: vision, hearing, and touch. Now comes the less jazzily named SCRATCHbot (Spatial Cognition and Representation through Active TouCh) from England, who focuses only on the sense of touch.


In nocturnal creatures like rats, touch trumps vision as a primary means of exploring the world. Hence, whiskers are the key to this new ratbot. Professor Tony Prescott, from the University of Sheffield"s Department of Psychology teamed up with the Bristol Robotics Lab to design a blind-but-be-whiskered ratbot that sweeps its environment with a frightful, rhythmic flapping of its whiskers in order to suss out the the position, shape and texture of objects it encounters.


Eventually, the ratbot will be able to use the data it collects to build maps of the terrain. This purely touch-driven technology will enable the ratbot to navigate in spaces such as dark or smoke-filled rooms, and can be applied to emergency rescues or underground or undersea exploration.


If the touchy-feely technology really takes off, the researchers hope it will be used for more sensitive touching jobs, like inspecting surfaces for the textile industry, or sensing textures for optimal vacuum cleaning.


These artificial touch technologies will also help researchers understand how the brain controls the movement of the sensory systems. By developing these biomimetic robots, we are not just designing novel touch-sensing devices, but also making a real contribution to understanding the biology of tactile sensing, said Professor Prescott.



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 Post subject: Firing Up the Blue Brain -"We Are 10 Years Away From a Functional Artifical Human Brain"
PostPosted: Sat Jul 25, 2009 8:20 pm 
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Blue Brain "It"s a new brain. The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions. It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ. It is evolving at an enormous speed."

Henry Markram, Director, Project Blue Brain.



Excellent
news for fans of computer technology, neuroscience, and people who
think that humans telling the machines what to do is totally backwards.  Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, says we are ten years away from a functional artificial human brain. The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.

We
reported on the attempts of the Swiss Mind Brain Institute to simulate
the neocortical column of the rat last year using an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors, and they"ve announced success of the first phase of their project.








"We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," Markram told the audience at the TED Global Conference at Oxford, England. "There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder," he told the audience. The project may give insights into new treatments."

They"ve successfully simulated the neocortical column of a rat – only a
fraction of a full brain, but they proved that you don"t get to do
world-shattering research when you settle for second-best by choosing
one of the most complicated and vital pieces of any mammalian cortex.



Artificial Brain

They also proved that even world-class scientists still have to compete
for funding, following up this amazing achievement with bold claims
that the same process could simulate an entire rat brain within three
years, and a human brain within ten.  Obviously a team that sat down
one day and said "We"re going to build a mind from scratch using better
parts than nature did" is ambitious, but projecting an upgrade to human
consciousness  from a 2 mm chunk of grey matter designed purely to
think "eat garbage" and "carry Plague" within ten years?  That"s enough
to make Alexander the Great wave his hands and say "Hang on guys,
aren"t you setting your sights a little high?"




To anyone who"s worked in science the reasons for these assertions are
obvious: attention and funding.  And it"s a travesty that they have to
do so - they"ve achieved one of the most incredible advances in the
last decade of neuroscience and the idea that they have to make that
sound even cooler is insane: it"s like inventing a perpetual motion
machine and having to offer it in designer colours to get people
interested.  Assuming they continue to get support for this little "One
of the Greatest Achievements ever to be conceived of by Man" project,
it will raise a number of critical questions:




1.  Are we going to need a court order to reboot this thing?




Considering that most scientists don"t subscribe to the "magic
invisible soul dust" theory of what creates human consciousness, a
simulation that recreates the activity of a human brain may produce
ethical concerns.  Technically a computer that recreates a rat brain
would raise similar issues but, as you"re about to see, these guys
don"t have any sympathy for rats.




2.  How do they plan to get a human model?




The existing rat neocortical model is based on a huge amount of data
from real working rat brains - or at least, brains that were working
until the scientists got a hold of them.  Where the team ran into gaps
in the existing data they cracked open rat skulls, extracted the
brains, sliced them into wafers while keeping them alive and recorded
their responses.  It isn"t known whether they cackled maniacally while
screaming "They said we were fools, but we"ll show them, we"ll show
them ALL!" during this procedure, because  anybody who can slice a
brain into strips while keeping it alive isn"t someone you want to
annoy with questions.




Suffice to say when one third of your research staff are on the "Knifing things in the head" payroll:



a) You"re already two steps into a horror movie script

b) You aren"t just assuming there are no such thing as ghosts, you"re
betting the survival of everyone in the building on the fact

c) This is NOT a method that can be scaled up to humans without a rogue
agent with nothing to lose being sent to kill you in a highly ironic
manner.




3.  Can we make improvements?




Those involved in the project sing its praises in work to understand
the human brain, but it"s only a matter of time until somebody thinks
about making improvements - minus an hour at most, actually, because
that"s the first thing I thought of when I read about it. 




With the ability to simulate the effects of rewiring, drugs or external
electric fields at an individual neuron level we can investigate
enhancements (such as new senses, new cognitive modes or neuroelectric
interfaces) without all the inconvenient "human rights violations" and
"Crimes against humanity" such research normally entails.  We could
improve our own minds - and since we"ll have just invented a silicon
model operating at computer speeds in a bulletproof shell, we"ll have
to.



Posted by Luke McKinney.

Related Galaxy posts:

Unlocking Your Inner Fish: Human DNA Traced Back to Marine Origins





Sources:

BBC World News
Blue Brain project simulation milestone
Our initial report 






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 Post subject: Tricycling Robot Goes for Guinness Record on Endurance Racing Circuit
PostPosted: Sun Jul 26, 2009 11:54 pm 
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Sports cars have long tested their 24-hour endurance on the Le Mans racing circuit in France. Now a Panasonic robot named Mr. Evolta will try to claim the distance record for a remote-controlled car, pedaling along furiously at 1.3 kilometers per hour (0.8 mph).


The tricycling robot should manage about six laps of the 4-kilometer (2.5 mile) Le Mans circuit during the required day-long period, when it makes the attempt next Wednesday. It will navigate the winding course by following an infrared beam emitted by a lead buggy that travels ahead.


Two AA Evolta batteries will power the robot. These batteries supposedly possess greater capacity than other alkaline cells, with efficient sizing that allows more battery volume to be used for active ingredients.


But the tiny competitor faces challenges unique to its small stature. Tomotaka Takashi, the robot"s inventor, said that even insects could present a problem, by blocking the buggy"s headlights. Then there are other natural elements to consider.


It"s almost impossible to expect 24 hours of nice, calm weather, Takahashi told IDG News Service. There could be a shower or [strong] wind.


Still, that may not deter a robot that vaguely resembles an early Astro Boy prototype. Mr. Evolta"s previous exploits include climbing up a rope stretching more than 1,700 feet at the Grand Canyon. And if it succeeds in its current display of robotic derring-do, it will claim the Guinness World Record for distance traveled by a remote-controlled car.


For our part, it"s nice to see a robot that has not languished under the current worldwide recession, even if it is a front man for Panasonic batteries. Maybe Mr. Evolta can eventually ditch the training wheels and go for a real bike.


[via IDG News Service via Digital Arts]





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 Post subject: Does Baseball"s Future Lie In These Cold, Robotic Hands?
PostPosted: Tue Jul 28, 2009 8:15 am 
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A robot pitcher faces off against a robot batter


Right now the next baseball great may be warming up, not on a Little League diamond, but in a lab. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have pitted a robotic pitcher against a robotic batter to show that the robots can respond to each other at high speeds.


The pitcher is a three-fingered robot arm that was developed by the University"s Graduate School of Information Science and Technology: it can open and close its fingers 10 times a second. This allows for precise pitching that lands in the strike zone 90 percent of the time. The batter is an arm developed by MIT that has a 1000-frame-per-second camera eye attached to detect incoming pitches.



While the video demonstration only shows the pitcher throwing a ball at 25 mph for a distance of only 11 meters, it may signal the beginning of the end. The debate over adding asterisks to statistics will be moot. We"ll have to use a whole other symbol for robot-based stats.


[via Pink Tentacle]



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 Post subject: Japanese Invent Giant Soccer-Playing Robot
PostPosted: Wed Jul 29, 2009 10:16 am 
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Soccer players are a weird bunch. Some cover themselves in Elvish tattoos, while others claim to have problems telling men and women apart. Hajime 33 is no exception to the trend, what with him being a giant robot and all.



So far, this robot doesn"t look like it"s going to be starting for Barca any time soon, and creator Hajime Sakamoto said he struggled to get the robot simply to stand up without falling over. However, Hajime 33 does serve as a proof of concept that humanoid robots can be both tall and active. By comparison, Asimo, Honda"s famously agile humanoid robot, only stands about four feet tall. And some soccerbots are quite a bit smaller


This is not the first time someone has created a soccer-playing robot. However, Hajime 33 certainly is the tallest, so maybe he can play keeper -- sort of the Zeljko Kalac of the all-robot team.


[via Scientific American]



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 Post subject: Video: The Fastest Robot Hands in the East
PostPosted: Thu Aug 06, 2009 2:48 am 
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Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory, the same folks that developed the pitcher "bot in last week"s baseball-playing tandem, have also developed an incredible robotic hand can bounce balls at furious speed, toss and catch cylindrical objects in a standing upright position, and even twirl a rod between its fingers as easily as a person plays with a pencil.


The high-speed, multi-fingered hand demonstrates dexterity and reaction times which well surpasses those of humans, and also make the robotic pitcher"s abilities and lineage much clearer.


Just remember not to challenge a robot with these smoking hands to a duel at Westworld.


[BotJunkie via DVICE]



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 Post subject: Artificial Intelligence Software Learns to Play Super Mario Bros.
PostPosted: Thu Aug 06, 2009 12:22 pm 
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But will it find the warp zones?

Forget about beating human chess grandmasters. Now computer scientists have challenged the best AI programs to beat Nintendo"s Super Mario Bros., and perhaps evolve along the way.


The new competition would pit different AI design approaches against one another, such as programs based on evolutionary learning techniques versus completely hand-coded programs. It uses a heavily modified, Java-based version of Super Mario Bros. as a virtual playground for the AIs, with the added challenge of endless random level generation.


The researchers behind the project have no doubts about the educational benefits of video games for computer learning.


As far as I"m concerned, Mario is the computer game, both as a gamer and as a good machine-learning challenge that requires a broad set of skills, said Julian Togelius of the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, in a New Scientist interview.


Togelius and colleague Sergey Karakovskiy even envision better AI programs helping the video game industry develop more challenging games down the road.


For now, programmers must act quickly to meet the first deadline of August 18 for the Games Innovation Conference in London, and perhaps snag small cash prizes of $200, $100, and $50. A second contest deadline on September 3 for the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games offers a slightly heftier prize purse of $500.


Perhaps any Mario-learning software could take a cue from another project at Rutgers University, where a learning algorithm plowed its way through the classic Atari game Pitfall. Cue victory dance … now.



[via New Scientist]




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 Post subject: Cyborg Update: Bone-Anchored Hearing Aids Add iPod Input To Your Skull
PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 2:13 am 
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The Sydney Morning Herald reports today on an Aussie man who traveled all the way to Beverly Hills to receive bone-anchored hearing aids, which are implanted behind the ear and use conductive technology to transmit sound more effectively than regular in-ear aids. But here"s the real bonus--these let you plug in your MP3 player or cellphone directly via a standard headphone jack.


The Baha (bone-anchored hearing aid) Divino, made by Cochlear, has been out for a few years now, but you can"t help but be impressed with hearing aids that come complete an adapter that lets you plug in virtually any audio source for enjoyment (an MP3 player seems the most logical, but TVs and Stereos are also possible).


The hearing aids work when titanium screws are drilled into the bone behind the ear. Then the aids are attached, which use the natural resonance of the bone to provide hearing that is 25 percent better than standard, amplified hearing aids. A digital signal processor filters noise.


The hearing aid implants cost $6,000 apiece, and last 15 years. [Sydney Morning Herald]




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 Post subject: "Creating Artificial Personalities" (An Evolutionary Step Toward Replacing the Human Species?)
PostPosted: Wed Aug 19, 2009 10:02 pm 
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Watchman-1820 We can now engineer entirely artificial personalities, and we don"t
mean your-kid-for-cash strategies like Hannah Montana.  Scientists have
now evolved artificial personalities based on simulated genetic
algorithms. Meaning they"re only one good synthetic-skin invention from
getting rid of our species altogether. A research collaboration between Samsung and the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has created a virtual
puppy, Rity, a computerized creature whose every action is guided by a
simulated personality system.  It"s an excellent choice by the
developers, making the first models as harmless-looking as possible -
affording them extra time to develop successors and dig the
EMP-shielded bunkers.










Rity"s personality is based on
silicon-simulated genes.  Its personality program is run from a an
artificial genome consisting of 1,764 genes, divided into 14
chromosomes.  These chromosomes control various components of three
separate internal state units, which react to external information and
send votes to a probabilistic behavior module equipped with instant
instinct reactions. This puppy"s brain is more complicated than most
country"s governments, and this is only the first generation.

It"s
important to understand what "genes" mean in software development: this
electronic puppy isn"t able to breed (to the dismay of the scarier
parts of the internet population), so we aren"t looking at a horde of
evolved software agents.  Evolutionary algorithms evolve a program by
mutating various genes in thousands of generations - the fittest
results are selected and mutated again, and again and again.  This can
result in surprisingly effective algorithms - the evolved solutions in
this case actually performed better than those hand-designed by the
programmers.  Or in other, more movie-trailer-friendly terms, this
thing is better at the game than the people who designed said game. 
And the game is "create artificial beings."  And these are the same
people who, presumably, designed the "don"t escape into the world and
kill etc etc" subroutines.

So the system can"t breed an
invincibly army, but as a program it can easily be copied, which is the
point - spend a ton of computer time evolving up a good solution then
use it for everything.  At this point the solution is only for "See if
a simulated pet likes being stroked", which even a pink DS can do, but
the future applications are far more significant.

Everything from
assistants for the elderly (which have already been built), to
human-interface agents online, to more realistic AI in video games. 
Because that"s the best possible idea: evolve electronic intelligences,
then shoot at them all the time to see what happens.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

The Origin of Artificial Species





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