Slashdot Mirror
Meet Lucy, The Orangutan Robot
Roland Piquepaille writes "Lucy is not an ordinary robot, driven by software. She's a pure product of artificial intelligence (AI). And after a three-year long training, she's now able to make a difference between an apple and a banana, which is quite handy for an orang-utan, even if she doesn't eat them. Her five microcontroller chips wouldn't like this... In "A Grand plan for brainy robots," BBC News Online tells us that Lucy is the brainchild of Steve Grand, an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University's School of Psychology. And why did he choose an orang-utan design? "I made Lucy as an orang-utan because, can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?," said Grand. More details and references are available in this overview which also includes the cover of Grand's last book, 'Growing Up with Lucy: How to Build an Android in Twenty Easy Steps,' which was already reviewed on Slashdot."
Best quote in the article: "I like 'intelligent' people. It's the thick ones that worry me."
Contender for best story title? =D
The final test will be if she can pull the football away just before Charlie Brown tries to kick it.
that or rip his legs off...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I haven't been this creeped out since the first time I saw that Quiznos Subs commercial.
And what's with that glowing blue Terminator eye? Imagine that thing chasing Linda Hamilton around.Can't he cover that thing with fur or something? Make it look like a toy instead of like something out of madman's nightmare?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Lucy's home page is an even better place for technical details, including an anatomical overview and scrapbook pictures
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
he said: "can you imagine how scary it would be if she looked like a human baby?"
did you guys look at the picture of that thing? It looks like my mother-in-law! Thats friggen scary! I guess he spend all the money on research, and not on matching eye's.:)
...to avoid being scary, he's failed miserably.
Can't sleep...orangutan robot'll kill me...can't sleep...orangutan robot'll kill me...can't sleep...orangutan robot'll kill me...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Maybe he could build and program an entire zoo (extinct species and all)..No feeding, no vets, just an occasional tune-up :0
opensource AI projects? It'd be interesting to play around with something, even very primative. It' would need to be OSS so I could actually modify it though.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
- Incredible tree-climbing ability
- Facial-gesture mimicry
- Pick parasites out of fur (useful!)
- Poo-flinging
And I don't know if it's all orangutans, but the ones at my local zoo have an affinity for tire swings. They wear through the rope and then roll the tire into the safety moat.
My sigs always suck.
hi. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from such robot-apes movies as "Bedtime for Bender" and "Bananabots: Gorilla Rampage"
Fur?! Good god man!
A thick blanket is what is needed here!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
That it not be absolutely terrifying looking.
That is one of the most frightening things I have ever set eyes on in my entire life. I can't imagine that a baby would have been even _more_ terrifying. Look at the cover of the book. It resembles the aliens from "Mars Attacks" to me. Also, according to the article, Frankenstein is a robot? I always thought he was a meat-bag like us? And, do we all have to refer to the hour-too-long movie "AI" every time Artificial Intelligence is referenced? Would it be infringement otherwise? Yeesh, I can't stop looking at that train wreck of a face... haunt me all night. -Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Is she programmed in Ook?
Considering that the real ones are headed for extinction, at least we'll have some facsimile as a reminder.
(Not sure whether I should follow that with a winky-face or a sad-face.)
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
I don't know if this is a trend exhibited by the majority of Japanese android/robotics researchers, but from what I've seen they tend to follow a no-face design ethic that I'm most pleased with. I think it's safe to say that most people would find anthropomorphic robots that don't look 100% identical to people (there's something off with that one) very creepy.
And besides, these Japanese robots look way cooler and have this implied subservience about them, at least to me. It's a lot harder to humanize and attach (scary) emotion to something that's faceless and non-human looking, rather than something that looks like a hairy/scary-ass rendition of a planet of the apes extra.
I would bet that the thought of a baby would be on the order of 1,000,000 times of that of this robot. And probably 100,000 times that of a real Orangoutang. Obviously I have absolutely no backing for those figures. As for AI, the studying I have done has made me conclude it's a failed, crack science at this point for people who really have no concept that a brain doesn't act like a computer, or a computer programmed to act like a brain. In order for this to work we have to be able to quantify a brains element, chemicals etc and we haven't much idea of most of these anyways, and if we do we don't have a clue as to how they function together.
I'm just sick of recursive "best yet" algorithms that claim to be AI when in fact it's nothing more than deduced logic and we are, thankfully, a but deeper than that.
So, go ahead and study AI as perhaps one day something may come of it but be realistic in that you're becoming skilled in a clever art of trickery and deterministic patterns. Good luck!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Lucy's picture on the book cover is pretty heavily airbrushed... I bet once she looks in a mirror, she'll be in for a lifetime of robot-angst.
"... the cutting edge of artificial intelligence or AI, a title used by Steven Spielberg for his 2001 film starring Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law."
Now that's good journalism: a little background about the history of AI for the lay-people who might be reading this article.
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Chucky, from Childsplay,
And this freaky uncombed urang utang thingy
I think i can understand why they went with this one. ;)
It has occurred to me, whenever the subject of AI is broached, that scientists seem to be doing a bang-up job of heading towards replicating the proper function of a brain in computer hardware, but none of the projects I've seen try to replicate the errors that result when the brain cell sending or receiving a message dies, is replaced incorrectly, is deformed one way or another, or is subject to any of the other myriad flaws of flesh.
Could it be that sentience, in the end, is the result of brain farts?
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
has 50000 'neurons'. Does Steve Grand really think he'll approach mammalian intelligence with so few? I agree strongly with him giving Lucy a rich environment, but maybe he should be looking at using something like FPGAs to get more neurons on board for a reasonable cost. That's what Hugo de Garis is doing, and he had much more ambitious plans. The company he was working for failed though, so I don't know whether he's still making progress in actual building of AI. Anyone?
I grow weary of all the people with cyberist attitudes who are scared of machines simply because they don't look exactly like us. If you look at the best of our CG characters today, they STILL don't look like us. I imagine that the first humanoid robots will probably look a lot like CG characters come to life. Get rid of those old fashioned attitudes... ;P
Un-news
Man those games were obsessions...
And I quote: "...conjures up fears of super-clever robots, the likes of Frankenstein..." Umm yeah.