Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

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

Once upon a time Searle, a philosopher, argued that artificial intelligence couldn’t be intelligent no matter how we programmed it.

The thought experiment goes like this: Take an English only speaking person and lock him in a room. Put a slip of paper under the door with Chinese markings posing a question. In the room is a rule book for translating the Chinese questions into Chinese answers. The person finds the symbols matching the question, copies the appropriate answer onto the paper and slips the paper back under the door. Since the person does not comprehend what he is doing it is not intelligent nor is he conscious of what he is really doing. Therefore programming a computer to do something does not make it intelligent or conscious, it is just simple pattern matching.

Early on in the days of artificial intelligence this was a compelling argument. Now we have software that teaches itself through weighted networks not unlike our brains and it learns things we didn’t put in the code.

This fall we have a book put out by Harvard professor Wegner “The Illusion of Conscious Will” who argues that consciousness is but an illusion. His argument is that the brain convinces you it is not a machine.

“When you drive to work, you don’t feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, ‘I’m going to get up and go to work,’ ” Wegner said in an interview

“We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain.”

So if we only think we are conscious and the machine is showing behavior we did not program into  has it already achieved consciousness?

More information:
A new thinking emerges about consciousness
The Chinese room argument

I’ve been hearing more and more about Lua and today finally had enough free time to download, install and play with it a bit.

I downloaded the source files and they compiled and installed painlessly on the Mac, just follow the directions in the INSTALL file. There is a folder full of test applications. Open up a terminal and type:> lua hello.lua at a command prompt to be sure you’ve gotten everything up and running.

It is an odd looking language. Hello World looks like this:

– the first program in every language

io.write(“Hello world, from “,_VERSION,”!\n”)

Bisection method for solving de looks like this:
– bisection method for solving non-linear equations

delta=1e-6 – tolerance

function bisect(f,a,b,fa,fb)
local c=(a+b)/2
io.write(n,” c=”,c,” a=”,a,” b=”,b,”\n”)
if c==a or c==b or math.abs(a-b)
n=n+1
local fc=f(c)
if fa*fc<0 then return bisect(f,a,c,fa,fc) else return bisect(f,c,b,fc,fb) end
end

– find root of f in the inverval [a,b]. needs f(a)*f(b)<0
function solve(f,a,b)
n=0
local z,e=bisect(f,a,b,f(a),f(b))
io.write(string.format(“after %d steps, root is %.17g with error %.1e, f=%.1e\n”,n,z,e,f(z)))
end

– our function
function f(x)
return x*x*x-x-1
end

– find zero in [1,2]
solve(f,1,2)

( * These and several other example programs are included in the Lua download. )

You can keep your programs in text format and run them as scripts ( lua program.lua ) or you can compile them using the luac compiler into binary form. ( luac -o hello hello.lua )

Lua is dynamically typed, it can call and use C functions, it has it’s own threads so you can run routines concurrently * these are not OS threads.

The key word list for Lua is surprisingly small ( and, break, do, else, elseif, end, false, for, function, if, in, local, nil, not, or, repeat, return, then, true, until, while ) and it is a case sensitive language. All else is defined in lua_functions of which there are all the things you’d expect.

I found projects including Apache modules so you can use Lua for webscripts, Palm versions so you can write Palm programs with Lua, and more than a few games. Lua is used in game scripting and interactive AI scripting.

See also:
Cognitive Code develops software personal assistant using Lua

More information:
Lua Reference manuals
O’Reilly article, ‘Introducing Lua’
Introduction to Lua Programming
GameDev, ‘An Introduction to Lua’

DHAKA (Reuters) – Move over Japan? A Bangladeshi graduate student is developing a robot capable of picking up objects, mopping floors and performing other simple tasks — at the fraction of the cost of other humanoids.Feroz Ahmed Siddiky of the International Islamic University in Chittagong says his “IRobo” responds to voice commands, has spatial intelligence and is cheap because it’s made from scrap materials he’s collected from electronic shops and car mechanics. [ read more Bangladeshi develops humanoid robot from scrap ] 

I could find little more on this story.

However in my hunting I found this Cool Blog, Robotic-lab.com for all you robot fans out there.

After a two-year collaboration with colleagues at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University scientists unveil their Gigapan camera system this week. It’s a robotic device that attaches to any digital camera. The device enables the public to shoot interactive, multi-billion pixel panoramas that can be explored in great depth on the Internet.”We are going to change the way people browse for exploration, discovery and cultural understanding,” said Carnegie Mellon’s Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor of robotics. Nourbakhsh is co-director of the Global Connection Project, with project scientist Randy Sargent of Carnegie Mellon West. [ read more Introducing the Gigapan Camera ] 

The robotic camera mount takes hundreds of overlapping images to create the panoramas. The the software developed to go with the robot stitches all the images together. 

More information:

Gigapan
View some of the panoramas that have been taken
System enables any digital camera to produce interactive, multibillion pixel panorams
Google Earth GigaPan: Disappointing?

See also:
Amazing camera phone art