Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

I wonder if we could get one of these to run for president? It’s bound to be progress.

The two year old Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as the Buddhabot began answering questions on Yahoo! Answers site last week. Yahoo Answers is a Web 2.0 site with a social content rating system reminiscent of Digg. The Buddhabot has so far answered 102 questions and eleven have been selected as the best answer. The Buddhabot is the first and only AI to compete with human beings to provide the best answers on Yahoo Answers new social networking site. . .

Ingram says that if the Buddhabot can demonstrate even an average score on Yahoo! Answers this is tantamount to passing a variant of the Turing Test, a test proposed in the 1950’s by the famous British Scientist Alan Turing to prove computer consciousness. Turing suggested that if a machine could convince a human being that they were talking to another human instead of a machine that the machine might be considered intelligent. Turing Tests have become the holy grail of the Artificial Intelligence community and many scientists consider the challenge to be as insurmountable as superluminal space travel or nuclear fusion. . . [read more AI beats human intelligence on Yahoo answers social networking site ]

More information:
Buddhabots.com

Anyone running a website has been plagued by link spam. It shows up in your access-log files, in false comments on a blog, even in user registrations on a blog. An incredible amount of resources are being put into both sides of this battle. Do a search on any search engine and you’ll find many sites in the top ten results who are just pages of links, or partially scraped content from several other sites. These sites hold little value to the users and hurt legitimate sites.

Identifying and preventing spam was cited as one of the top challenges in web search engines in a 2002 paper. Amit Singhal, principal scientist of Google Inc. estimated that the search engine spam industry had a revenue potential of $4.5 billion in year 2004 if they had been able to completely fool all search engines on all commercially viable queries. Due to the large and ever increasing financial gains resulting from high search engine ratings, it is no wonder that a significant amount of human and machine resources are devoted to artificially inflating the rankings of certain web pages. . . . [ read more Spam Rank - Full automatic link spam detection work in progress ( pdf )]

Link spam is different than regular links in that it shows up in access-logs, links in are often only found in comments on blogs, links may be hidden ( text same color as background ) or cloaked ( show users some thing different than you show search engine bots ) and often all appear in a very short period of time. Other tells include lots of links from low page rank sites or lots of links from sites with the same page rank. Page rank follows a power law and incoming links should do the same.

More information:
Transductive link spam detection (pdf)
Spam Rank – Full automatic link spam detection work in progress ( pdf )
Detecting link spam using temporal information (pdf )

All these recent studies using neural networks to predict human behavior have found a purpose. They are being trained and used on game users computers to get around network lag in games by predicting the gamers next move.

Lag time is the ping time between you and the game computer. If two players are shooting at each other, he with the shortest ping time ( lag time ) wins. This can be frustrating for people whose networks lag. The neural network will level the playing field.

Gamers know the problem well: in the middle of an awesome, fast-paced battle, the action onscreen becomes slow and jerky. Suddenly, your character turns up dead, and you didn’t see who did it. In massively multiplayer online games, the problem of lag arises when a player’s computer can’t keep up with changes in a shared online world–and it can turn euphoria into frustration. New software being designed at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, could help reduce the problem and may also have applications in military simulations. . . [ read more Reducing lag time in online games]

Also interested , as always, is Darpa who hopes to use this technology to improve military battle simulations.

More information:
Neuro-Reckoning may reduce mmog time lag
Multistep ahead neural network predictors for network traffic reduction in distributed interactive applications