“In the quest for artificial intelligence, the United States is perhaps just as advanced as Japan. But analysts stress that the focus in the United States has been largely on military applications. By contrast, the Japanese government, academic institutions and major corporations are investing billions of dollars on consumer robots aimed at altering everyday life, leading to an earlier dawn of what many here call the ‘age of the robot.‘” And to think I was geeking out over the Roomba just a few weeks ago.
Category: AI
Color of Knight.
By way of Usr/Bin/Girl, a chess program that draws what it’s thinking. (Not surprisingly, it still worked me.)
Holding the Line.
In the most recent skirmish against the machine chessmasters, human contender Garry Kasparov tied X3D Fritz in a four-game series. He fights for us.
Riddles in the Dark.
In celebration of a quarter-century of Science Times, the paper ruminates on the 25 questions currently driving science, while Alan Lightman ponders the motivations that fuel scientists. I’m not sure if the likes of Stephen Hawking are really contemplating Atlantis, but there’s some intriguing stuff here.
The Right-Thinking Warbot.
Paging Fox News…LinkMachineGo has discovered a robot that randomly detects lefty media bias for you. This might just be the worst thing that’s ever happened to Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.
My Buddy.
Surfers go ga-ga over their IM buddy-bots.
What are you doing, Dave?
Researchers come ever closer to teaching common sense to Cyc, the thinking computer. In 1986 Cyc asked whether it was human. That same year it asked whether any other computers were engaged in such a project. Shades of Douglas Adams‘ Deep Thought.