DARPA Contracts For AI Technology

heptapod writes "USA Today is reporting that DARPA has contracted two professors from RPI to develop artificial intelligences that can learn by reading and understanding natural language. Interesting taking DARPA's Grand Challenge into account. Mentioned in the article is Cycorp, Inc. which has been pursuing this goal since 1994!"

Comments

Re:This is AI?

[NanoGator]

"Can a machine create a syphany or comopse a masterpiece?"

"Can you?"

Re:Text Compression Grand Challenge

[segmond]

Any advance in the field of AI will fetch a gigantic amount of money. No one in their right mind will sell out to DARPA if they have the solution. For example, think of search engines, just a little drop of AI and you will have the best search engine around. Think of language translation, just a little drop of AI and your langauge translation software will be the best. Likewise with a lot of software systems. Once the idea comes to anyone, please believe that they are heading to the patent office first not to collect $1million prize from DARPA.

Re:This is AI?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Actually there was a digital music symposium in the early 90's where a (IIRC) Bach composer was demonstrated. They fed a neural network all the Bach pieces digitally and let it learn from the patterns. Then they set it to composing and it came out with a 5-minute piece that sounded remarkably like Bach. (I'm sure I'm oversimplifying) There was resounding applause for the demo.

At the end of the talk people were standing around talking to the author of the system when a wirey dark-haired man with beady glasses and an eastern european accent came up to him and shouted, "You've killed Music!" - and clocked the guy, laying him straight out.

Not everybody is going to handle AI well.