Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

The NYT Sunday Magazine has a special feature on robots this week. The article is more or less a historical look at robots especially those developed at MIT.

I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. It had camera sensors behind its eyes, which were programmed to detect faces; when it found mine, the robot was supposed to gaze at me directly to initiate a kind of conversation. But Mertz was on the fritz that day, and one of its designers, a dark-haired young woman named Lijin Aryananda, was trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Mertz was getting fidgety, Aryananda was getting frustrated and I was starting to feel as if I were peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz. . . .

The Real Transformers

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. . . He went on to explain, “It was all because of the cool toy that my 17-year-old son took along with him.”

He then showed me this round-shaped blue gizmo (it also comes in a variety of other colours) the size of a tennis ball that looks like a yo-yo and explained to me how it functions.

Called the Radica 20Q, the hand-held, battery-operated toy is based on the old classic game of 20 Questions. All you have to do is think of an object like an animal, vegetable, mineral, and answer a series of 20 questions. You answer the questions by pressing one of four buttons that read “yes,” “no,” “maybe” and “unknown.” The game, which contains an advanced electronic brain, works in mysterious ways, using logic and reasoning to get the right answer. It might come up with questions like, “Is it bigger than a breadbox? Is it used mostly indoors? Is it found in warm climates?”

The odd time that it doesn’t come up with the right answer, it will ask you to indulge it and allow it five more questions before admitting defeat. My neighbour revealed, “We played with it throughout the whole trip and (no pun intended) it didn’t trip up even once. It correctly identified everything including the kitchen sink, wedding cake, criminal lawyer, microwave oven, ostrich, broccoli, air conditioner and hair conditioner. Grandma thought she had it stumped with kettle, but it came up with that answer also.” . . .

More information:
Write Where I Belong – Toy helps pass the time during trip
20Q ( has the toy for sale and an online version you can try )

This is not the first case where I know of a company promising AI but delivering humans instead. Some times we bite off more than we can handle.

Redmond, WA – Dissatisfied with the artificial intelligence engine on Halo 3, developers at Bungie Studios have decided to outsource the game’s AI for cheap offshore human intelligence…..

Or perhaps that is the next step in artificial intelligence? ( Human generated artificial intelligence )

More information:
BBspot: Bungie Dumps AI for Cheap Human Intelligence in Halo 3