Slashdot Mirror
Spirit Rover Makes Longest Trip Yet
ivan1011001 writes "Spirit traveled just over 88 feet in an attempt to visit the crater "Bonneville" to look for evidence of water on Mars. Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way. This is longer than its earlier PR of 70 feet."
at least it moves faster than my grandmother...
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
Actually, I'm impressed even at this. As long as nothing is failing, it gives me hope for future missions.
-Oy Vey
After successfully completing a journey of 88 feet yesterday, the Spririt Mars Rover completed a journey of 88 feet 2 inches today. This is a new Mars distance record.
Why did I lurk so long before registering for a Slashdot account? I could have had a Slashdot ID of less than 100000.
it was up on a hill, and the brakes malfunctioned...
Have anyone of them found any evidence of past weather yet?
Seems like everything they look at is of vulcanic origin.
It was probably cloudy out (negating some of the efficiency of the solar panels). I hope that it finds water.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
(Time And)Relative Dimensions in space... for the uninformed :-)
:-)
Anyone else think it's sort of funny that you have a probe that travels millions of miles to another planet, and the news is that it's then travelled a further 88 feet
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
If the Mars rover is wont to go off on its own accord to discover and analyze things instead of following the directions given to it by mission control, could this possibly have disastrous side effects?
What if there were an impending rock-slide and instead of maneuvering out of the way as mission control told it to, it decided to look at the shiny rocks instead and got crushed in the process?
A little 'intelligence' is important for these things to figure out how to move around correctly, but artificial 'curiosity' seems to be problematic.
I have been pwned because my
OOOOOH, Shiny!
can't resist urge.
Go SPEED Racer! Go Speed Racer!
Sig it.
"Spirit! Quit playing in the dirt! We have 100 more feet to go!"
"(sad R2-D2 sound)"
Didn't the Soviet built lunar rovers go much further in a single day back in the early 70's? What sort of over-hyped/overly-specific record is this?
"And the award for longest roving in the past 3 weeks on a neighboring planet by an American robot who's name rhymes with 'kirit' goes to...."
I demand a recount!
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Do we have to put blinkers on the little fella?
Eibhear
How do we know it was actually studying rocks ... maybe it was, oh, working on that Q-36 Illidium Space Modulator Death Ray?!?!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
The latest information on Spirit's and Opportunity's adventures can be found here!
I highly doubt the vehicle is that autonomous that they can say, "heay, head off bearing 110 deg, for 50m and take photos of interesting things along the way"
I always figured that mission control would give it vector commands like that, but that any kind of inspection would be manually done by instructions from mission control?
I can understand that it might have some self-preservation features, like slow down if too much wobble, or if grade is steep, but it seems like that things is really calling the shots.
Maybe we're not as far as logn as we thought, a la Stanly Kubrik's 2001 space oddesy.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This thing travelled millions and millions of miles at tens of thousands of miles per hour to get to the planet, and now we're measuring its progress in terms of "feet per day".
One martian day is apparently 24.7 hours.
:-)
So I guess it moved at this amazing speed?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
... as there is the wrong type of dust on the ground.
Are they sure it was 88 feet? Could've been meters...
It must be Thursday... I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
88 feet is longer than 70 feet? By golly, I'm glad that someone made sure to mention that. :P
Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way So they sent a robot with ADD to Mars?
How many digits does the trip odometer have?
THINK
> Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but
> Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more
> time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the
> way.
Sounds like the li'l guy could use some Ritalin! Hey stop playing in the dirt!
88 feet is roughtly 25 metres, one width of an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Rich
These little mini-missions are getting to be interesting. I wonder how long it will be before Spirit reaches the crater it is heading for.
:)
On an aside, Opportunity is in its crater, has been since it landed, pretty much. How much have we learned from it?
How much longer are these rovers going to last? Anybody want to set up a pool so we can all bet Karma on which rover will last longest/go farthest/etc. ?
"Bonneville"
"Mimi"
What is this, a car show?
My grandmother in the last 5 years has had an average speed of 0.000004mph. This is because she moves only every now and then.
The Spirit rover does 0.00000000001mph on average since it landed on Mars because most of the time
it does nothing.
They need to give the remote controls to some punk kids that dont know its importance.
If they did that they would have found beagle,
discovered that Mars is just a shitty desert, overloaded Nasa's database of names for every shitty litte rock they find, and eventually drove
off a cliff giving us spectacular images of Mars!
The rover's stereo vision dynamically builds a 3D representation of its environment, and then figures out safe paths within that map.
That's all necessary because it just takes too long to specifically instruct each step (it's a 10 minute round trip at the speed of light to send instructions -- and so you want the rover to have some autonomy).
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
88 'feet'?! You mean Mars hasn't gone metric?!
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Metric units please ! - NASA have enough trouble with Imperial-Metric conversions without the Slashdot breeding another backward Imperial generation.
( Of course, with the pathetic spelling and grammar here, American Literature also seems doomed... ).
while moving my men across the landscape to slaughter my oponenet, it used to take weeks to go 80feet, now they can do it in days, that's amazing.
When asked about the heat issue, Bush assured reporters we'd be going at night.
This is almost exactly the same way that Captain Scarlet woke up the Mysterons...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
it may mean bush moves off the planet sooner
It had it's left turn signal blinking the entire way :)
So. Opportunity travel 75 feet in depths of over 2 feet of sand every day to and back from studying its rocks. And it liked it!
Strictly speaking, that's not a domain of artificial intelligence, but pure computer vision. There are known techniques for building a map, given processed camera images, and there is usually no reasoning involved. Just a simple algorithm to find the shortest path. The search space is usually small enough not to warrant AI techniques.
Of course, it is possible that they are using higher-level AI techniques for finding the optimal path, but I doubt it as the classical image processing techniques are fast and robust enough for this sort of task.
Computers may not yet pass the Turing test, but it's pretty good that we've managed to get them up to pooch standard.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Personally, I wouldve got 10 Aibo's, slapped some high gain antenna's on their backs and let them do the job - wouldve happened quicker too. With the rest of the money I would have done something real, like send a manned ship behind them - u know, to do real work, not spend billions on seeing how quick we can slap a pod on a planet, and then see how slow we can make our R/C car go.
Anyone who has tried to go for a walk with a 2 or 3 year old kid knows what I'm talking about. You want to walk, but the annoying little brat will stop and examine very carefully every piece of litter, little stone, gravel or mark on the floor. Half way through the whole thing you'll get tired and just go home.
Mars is metric. Martians have ten feet.
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
methinks it's a good thing to
:P
:P
look out for "other" stuff on
the way to the crater.
there's a rover in one crater already
and though it might be usefull to
compare data from different craters,
it should be emphazised that there
really might be some interesting stuff on
spirits way to the crater.
just "buggying" it over there
might not be very scientific at all.
i remember as a kid on hikes with
my parents i was a very troublsome
kid always stoping here and there
to look at rocks, bugs and flowers
i would like to know from JPL-NASA
how much battery the rovers have left
and if maybe the expedition might
last longer then the planned 3 months.
wouldn't it be great if the twin rovers
would get the same extensions like the
space shuttles?
oh and yeah, what about the lander?
are there any solar panels on the lander?
does the lander do absolutely nothing now
(except being a "memorial station")?
First off, I applaud NASA for their hard work and diligent efforts as of late. At a time when our country is enduring a very difficult ongoing war in the Middle East our government shows its true diversity by pursuing other important avenues such as space exploration. People can and will mock NASA, saying that these types of missions are a "waste of money" but it's easy to ridicule when your on the outside looking in. I for one, believe these types of missions are extremely crucial to our country. Maybe not so for their specific agenda per se, but because they provide a stepping stone of information and feedback that will fuel future, more elaborate and more fruitful missions. NASA has undergone massive scrutiny and has been under the magnifying glass of the world-wide community and from America's own citizens since last years Columbia tragedy. Ridicule if you must but be grateful that you live in a country where you are allowed to do so. Setting down a complex piece of equipment that sends back informative data from 194 million miles away is no easy feat. I wish them luck with the rovers being able to send back all the data that they were sent there to collect and I thank NASA for proving that it could be done. I'm proud that a portion of my tax money goes to funding NASA. I look forward to the challenging missions they will undergo in the future and the insightful information and answers they will produce.
Look to the skies.
and its acid fields. Now that would be a trip!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The Spirit Rover breaks its record once again by travelling 185 feet - unfortunately, this was due to it getting a bit TOO close to the crater, and was 185 feet downwards.
Also check out the QT animation on the NASA site titled "Rover Navigation 101: Autonomous Rover Navigation"
AI or not, it's pretty darn cool.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I wonder if NASA had, at some point during the construction and testing of the rover, actually put the rover through a simulated Martian drive.
The reason is that, depending on the consistency and the texture of the Martian soil, you would probably want to build the rover somewhat differently if it's dry and dusty as opposed to rocky and uneven - much like how we build our cars and SUVs.
I suppose they probably still have data from the Vikings expeditions, but that is more than twenty years ago.
The difficulties giving direction with a 10 minute time lag would only be exacerbated if my wife was the one giving directions. She's notorious for telling me as we go through an intersection that it was there we should have made a left.
Anyone who's been hiking with a 4 year old knows what that's like.
Do you have ESP?
After watching that special I have more respect and admiration for the people at JPL. Alot of creativity and problem solving went into this project and I'm really happy for all of them.
Looks like the Martian already invented the traffic Jam. They are already at the second stage of evolution.
Step 1. Invent the wheel.
Step 2. Traffic jam
Step 3. ?
Step 4. Flying car
We have 7 years of the same coming up
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Engineers had hoped the rover would travel 164 feet, but Spirit didn't cover the full distance because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way.
I guess it just comes from being a vision guy in a university department full of AI people :-)
I agree, the autonomous navigation of the rover is really cool, but we are just seeing the application of rather old computer vision concepts. The really interesting part is that this is the ultimate test of such a system, uncontrolled conditions and very little room for failure.
The thing is that the rover is not looking for signs of life, just for rocks and possibly signs of water. Its obvious that the aliens that control the U.S. government had NASA design it that way. The aliens don't have as much clout with the European Space Agency so they weren't able to keep the creators of the Beagle from designing it to look for life. They had to disable it once it got to the planet. This way they won't find any evidence of life that gets to the surface from the underground Martian cities.
That sure sounds like the classic definition of AI as "anything a computer can't do yet". At one point, translation of high-level statements into machine code was considered AI. Then Fortran came along and it's not AI, it's solved, see? Decent speaker-dependent voice recognition was once AI, now it's something you can buy in the store and nobody considers it to be AI.
All the stuff you describe sounds an awful lot like AI to me. Just because it's actually doable with known techniques shouldn't disqualify it.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
... Opportunity was digging a trench in the Martian soil. I built this animation from recent raw images, and I wouldn't be surprised if NASA/JPL unveil their own version at this afternoon's press conference (6pm GMT, IIRC, and it'll probably broadcast on NASA TV.
:)
Mirror this image if you like; my ISP probably won't be too pleased if all their bandwidth gets eaten by greedy Slashdotters.
If there's an impending rock-slide, then the rover gets crushed. Remember that whatever the scientists in control see is around five minutes old, and that any directions of avoidance take an addition five minutes or so to reach the rover.
Besides, I don't believe they're letting the rover choose its own targets, nor did they give it power to override an imperative command.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
Obviously, they'll not be sending Deep Blue to the Red Planet for a game of chess -- but I'd say that this semi-autonomous navigation on another world is dependent on AI...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Engineer at NASA sneezes
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
They need to give the remote controls to some punk kids that dont know its importance.
You think playing a first-person shooter over satellite is bad? Imagine the six-figure ping times to Mars.
NASA: "Look Spirit, your brother's already in his crater. Why can't you be more like him?"
..."
Spirit: "Opportunity, this. Opportunity, that. You're always taking his side. At least I'm not like Beagle. Did you ever think of that?"
NASA: "Well that's enough out of you! Beagle isn't our problem, you are. And you could learn a thing or two from Opportunity. So you just get a move on and think about what I've said!"
Spirit: [grumbling and moving off at a snail's pace] Hey, 89 feet! Look at me, I'm just like Opportunity. Hey, 90 feet! Look at
NASA: "We heard that!"
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Well, that seems to be the 'common' understanding of AI, but in the computer science (and other scientific fields), it has a more specific meaning. Otherwise, factoring large numbers would also be considered AI, although there is nothing intelligent about it, given a good algorithm. Finding that algorithm is what would require intelligence.
Here is a definition I like:
AI is the capacity of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot device to perform tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. The term is also frequently applied to that branch of computer science concerned with the development of systems endowed with such capabilities. --- Herbert A. Simon, Professor of Computer Science and Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
I am nitpicking here, but given an algorithm to extract edges and corners from two images, using the camera calibration values to calculate distance, and creating a map based on these data does not require intelligence, and as such isn't strictly AI.
The robot still follows strict instructions which find the optimal path. It will not learn if this algorithm fails a certain number of times, it will not generalise to make future computation quicker, like a human would. It does not have a concept of the obstacles. It does not get more proficient after doing the same for a while. So, even though it's a brilliant example of applied computer vision and autonomous navigation, there is very little of what is considered AI involved. Hope this clears it up a bit.
my aunt called my mom. I decided to answer the phone. She told me to go get my mom, so I started walking outside to get her. Along the way, I started playing with rocks and bugs in the driveway, and completely forgot about my aunt.
I finally made it over to my mom, and told her that there was a phone call for her. It was 45 minutes later, though!
I know this has nothing to do with the mars lander, but it reminded me of something silly I did when I was a toddler.
... because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way ...
.... sniffing here a bit, peeing there a bit, etc. Maybe a vet should be included in the design team. :-)
Mmmm, sounds like walking the dog
I have written this type of software in the past. And it is pretty complex, because the 3D data you get is so damn unreliable. However, the Spirit has one advantage, on Earth a lake or other piece of water looks for a vision system exactly the same as a nice flat piece of tarmac. "Let's go there, no bumpy rocks"!! Don't think they have yet to cope with that problem on Mars.....
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
What part of it is AI?
The vison modules tell you what is around you, where you can go and where you can't. Then you use standard algorithms to find the shortest path given the obstacles.
You can learn more about how the rover works by downloading NASAs Maestro Program. It's a RAM hungry Javaapp that is nicely documented and let's you plan your own mission using their stripped down version of the Uplink-Browser. Give it a shot, it's pretty interesting (well, at least if you got some spare time on your hands to fiddle with it and are into Marsroving at all!).
cu,
Lispy
You might want to see this mildly humorous QuickTime movie on the official MER site detailing how the rovers get around without engineers having to shimmy the things around every other obstacle. The thing does it by itself--something the Russian lunar rovers didn't do.
Two words about the movie's beginning: Bullet time.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
"Opportunity is in its crater, has been since it landed, pretty much. How much have we learned from it?"
From what I read, I say that we have discovered that there are interesting "berries" in the crater rock face, but these features could just as easily be caused by volcanic action than by water. They don't know which. Also, that there is Hermite sand on the ground, which doesn't come from the local bedrock. They don't know from where. Neither do they know if the Hermite was formed from water.
NASA scientists probably have done much more analysis on the data, but they're not telling us anything. Probably waiting to accumlate all the data first. Scientist don't really like proposing theories until they're absolutley sure.
Probably uses SI (metric) units for all its calculations and distances, but translates them in PR releases because the average American wouldn't know how big a metric unit is.
The last time it used non-metric units, I believe was the occasion its previous Mars probe became a cropper....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
It's the journey, not the destination.
Sig Applied For
It's nice to see it has the sense to stop and smell the roses* instead of blindly rowing to the corporate drum.
* - well, if you were made of tin and had a spectrometer for a nose, it'd be the same.
"A man living alone in his apartment traveled just over 89 feet in an attempt to visit the toilet to look for evidence of pee on the seat. The man had hoped the travel 164 feet, but decided not to walk into the kitchen first to get a bowl of cereal. This is longer than the man's earlier PR of 70 feet."
God.... must be a slow news day if this kind of stupid robot trick is considered newsworthy. Pure drivel.
seems the hype on this thing is way out of scale. I am not trying to marginalize NASA accomplishments, though I do find some statements pretty funny.
When they cut into one of the rocks:
"It went deeper than we ever imagined!" (Few millimeters)
Assessing the landing site:
"We can't believe our luck!" (Flat, with a few rocks)
etc.
Now, I think the rover is cool, and want the science just as much as anyone else does, but the statements from the scientists (or their PR person) are just giddy.
Blogging because I can...
That definition agrees with what I said, IMO:
"tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience...."
What exactly is a 'higher' process? Obvious! It's something a human can do but a computer can't. The trouble is that this is a moving target.
Ok, so Spirit's fancy image-processing stuff isn't AI by today's standards. But I bet if you'd asked in 1980, people would have considered it AI. I'll also bet that once computers are able to generalize or learn from past experience, that will pass from the domain of AI and into the realm of ho-hum everyday. There are tons of AI techniques that are less than what a complete human can do, but I think that nobody will really recognize AI in a computer process until that computer can pass, say, a Turing Test, when it's impossible to deny.
Can you name an example of an AI technique that is used in a production system and not just a fancy research toy? It looks to me that everything which is considered as "AI" turns into "blah, boring" as soon as it becomes good enough to work in real situations.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Um, the lunar day is some 28+ earth days. It is not dark forever on the moon.
Recognizing what is an obstacle might be AI, if it's done merely with a flat image.
In 1969, the world stood breathless as an American stepped onto the surface of a new world.
Today, we get all excited because a golf cart moves 80 feet.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Two models, the original compact and the new science utility vehicle.
I've seen no proof that the Rover reasons, discovers meaning, generalizes or learns from past experience. It just runs a program which gives it very direct commands.
It's a bit like this: If I ask you to get some good tomatoes, you would break this up into several steps: Go to the market, find the tomatoes, then select some good ones. But what is a 'good' tomato? You will have to rely on your experience, your taste, and the past input from others to determine what a good tomato is. Then you would choose the tomatoes which best fit the ideal you have in your mind.
A computer cannot do that. It has no concept of what a tomato is. It doesn't deduce properties from past experiences. You can program a robot to go to the market (by giving it specific instructions on how to do that), then have it pick up tomatoes which have a certain height, weight, a given hue, and a softness, all expressed in measurable units. The robot would bring back some 'good' tomatoes according to these requirements, but it wouldn't be doing anything remotely intelligent, even though it might look like it from the outside.
Now, an AI approach to this would be to model a tomato internally, for example, using a Bayes net of different fruits, associated with different properties. A tomato would be grouped with similar fruits according to some characteristics. The computer would learn through repeated observations (like a human does), and propagate its deductions throughout the net. For example, a squashed tomato and a squashed pepper are both 'bad' fruit/vegetables, and a red pepper and a red tomato would both be 'good', but a green pepper can be good, while a green tomato cannot. The network gets updated to accommodate these observations and build a better model, up to the point where the computer can pick the 'good' fruit without being told exactly what it is.
See, in the second example, there is learning, there is deduction, and there is reasoning, as well as generalization. In the first one, there isn't. That is the fundamental difference.
We've had plenty of evidence of current, as well as past weather on Mars before we even launched the Spirit Rover.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I hate it when folks
Try to type inside the box
Please, don't strike "Enter."
Does anyone else here not find it somewhat amazing that "feet" are being used in relation to such a scientific endeavour?
SI units anyone? Why am I reminded of that probe that had problems because NASA mixed up Imperial and Metric measurements?!
I mean, it's one thing using Imperial for everyday stuff (not that I like that - seeing as we weren't even taught it in school!) - but scientific purposes? Argh!
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
You haven't addressed my fundamental objection, which is that the definition of AI changes.
You stated two things. First, a definition of AI today. Second, that nothing Spirit does fits this definition.
I have no argument with this.
My complaint is that what Spirit is doing would have been considered AI twenty years ago. And twenty years from now, when we have a super-rover on Mars that is doing some of the stuff you quote, the definition of AI will have changed yet again so that it will only include things that computers can't do.
Again, is there an example of something that would be considered an AI technique that is in actual practical use today? I submit that there will never be a technique that is simultaneously considered to be AI and in actual practical use until we manage to create a full human-equivalent intelligence.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That's ridiculous. I don't think 20 years from now a rover is going to go to mars to get some good tomatoes.
-no broken link
I'll tune in when they send it to check out GTO and Trans Am.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'm all for space exploration but I've HAD IT What the F%#k is wrong with you clueless geeks over at NASA? Get a friggin PR clue and get one fast!! Listen to me:
- STOP calling press conferences to announce that a golf cart rolled 88 feet!
- STOP naming every F%#king rock and crater on Mars; give the objects catalog ID numbers!
- STOP with the music every morning! It's a friggin rover - it really doesn't care about the music. Just stop it...
- STOP with the floating astronauts playing with soda and bananas! Just stop it...
- STOP making stupid EXPENSIVE recommendations about sending humans to Mars.
- DO fight for CHEAP robotic probes.
- DO make an issue about killing the Hubble before it has a replacement. For F%#k sake it's the single best return on investment NASA has ever had, and you idiots are letting it die without a fight!*
- DO take credit for the tens of thousands of useful everyday things and technologies that have spun off from NASA work!
- DO hire an image consultant QUICKLY!!!
*I'm serious about the Hubble. How much would it cost to push the Hubble into a high orbit so that future generations could recover it as a museum piece? Why not launch a PR campaign to push the Hubble to this high orbit? We let Mir die and now it's GONE! Don't let Hubble burn up! If we created a charity to "Save the Hubble" NASA would get TONS of well deserved free publicity. But nooo instead we're gonna endure endless press conferences about rocks with names like "Bonneville"!!!
Shhheeeezzz...
--Richard
Bonneville was a huge lake that once covered most of the intermountain west. It dried up, maybe you can see why they would name what they HOPE is a dry lake bed Bonneville. Bonneville is also the name of the salt flats left behind when lake Bonneville dried up.
"...because it spent more time than initially planned studying rocks and soil along the way"
Look - something shiny!!!
I asked for a refund - and got my monkey back.
The guys in the front of the field *are* really excited.
It is amazing stuff really, but it also sounds pretty giddy. Oh well, we all paid for it, I hope they are getting our moneys worth. If they are not, its a shame.
Blogging because I can...
... the rover must move through the dunes Fremen-style to avoid rousing the sandworms.
in 80,000 years?
We are on a path to pollute Mars with our space probes, rocket fuel, and eventually lifeforms from microbes to humans. Dear God in heaven, please, do not let us pollute it with the Imperial measurement system.
Anybody want a peanut?
I don't guess it will be doing any dune jumping.
Mars in 3D
Bzzzzt. Wrong. IT is currently about a 10 minute trip at light speed ONE way between Earth and Mars. So....20 minutes, about, round trip.
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
I'm not sure I agree that the definition of AI changes. AI is when a machine is capable of intelligence and the definition of intelligence doesn't change dramatically. And the definition of intelligence coincides very closely with the definition I gave: learning from experience, logical deduction, generalisation...
An example of an AI technique in common use today is the heuristics used by virus software to detect virus-like behaviour. It can also be seen in some search engines, whenever the search space is too large for an exhaustive search, for example, for solving the travelling salesman problem.
The definition of intelligence doesn't change? I would argue otherwise, in the extreme! In an earlier post, you mentioned Bayesian networks in AI. These work quite well in allowing AI systems to make decisions. However, most evidence to date indicates that humans do not in fact use Bayesian logic when making decisions (or at least that was the case a few years ago, when I took a Cognitive Science course). Does a sufficiently complex AI system founded on Bayesian networks qualify as intelligent? Not if you're measuring it against human intelligence... but of course that's not the only standard for comparison.
;-)
To say that there's one unified, accepted definition of intelligence would be pretty much false. Your definition seems very strongly rooted in the classical AI tradition. Psychologists, cognitive science people, and many others would disagree with your definition of intelligence. Of course, if you have a very useful and effective robot or expert system whose decisions are rooted in Bayes theorem, it may not matter if it's "intelligent," per se. It works, doesn't it?
Then He got bored with having to do all the programming himself, and decided His creations had to start helping out. They do so by testing themselves against their environment in a long process of self-programming and adaptation. It's not efficient, but what does an Omnipotent Being care about efficiency? He just wants His Works to be interesting!
And anyway, half the fun of being a higher life form is always having some of that little kid inside you -- that part of you that poke and prod at every little thing. And if you can't create fun, what's the point of being God?