Babybot Learns Like You Did

holy_calamity writes "A European project has produced this one-armed 'babybot' that learns like a human child. It experiments and knocks things over until it can pick them up for itself. Interestingly the next step is to build a fully humanoid version that's open source in both software and hardware."

Comments

AI Learning

[fatduck]

From TFA: "The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child," explains Metta. This will have all of Babybot's abilities and the researchers hope it may eventually even learn how to walk. "It will definitely crawl," says Metta, "and is designed so that walking is mechanically possible." Not a bad goal at all, and if it's open source they can't cheat by promoting a specific goal such as walking in the software. Reminds me of Prey where they couldn't figure out how to get the nanomachine swarm to fly so they let its AI "learn" how to do it on its own.

Re:AI Learning

[EnsilZah]

They may not use a simple goal like walking, but in order to learn there has to be some sort of reward/punishment system in place.
Real babies have goals like getting their parents' attention, being fed, keeping warm.
I wonder what sort of goals a robot baby has to have to learn in the same way a real one does.

Re:AI Learning

[bmo]

TFA Said: "The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child"

You said: Not a bad goal at all

Apparently you've never been around a 2-year old.

--
BMO

Open Source?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you afraid this poor open source robot will get exploited by the other robots, or do the proprietary robots have something to hide? What kind of insults can we expect? Your father was a code monkey and your mother got her card punched by a UNIVAC!

names

[hyperstation]

babybot? robocub? fire your marketing people!

May?

[Kangburra]

may mean that such machines can never become as intelligent as us

They don't know and they're playing with it. Have they even seen the Matrix??

Dude

[Umbral Blot]

A one armed baby bot? That's disturbing on so many levels.

Re:Dude

[rolfwind]

It doubles as a slot machine....

There is more to a 2-year-old than walking

[Flyboy Connor]

The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child," explains Metta. This will have all of Babybot's abilities and the researchers hope it may eventually even learn how to walk.

A fun project, and potentially a good step on the road towards human-like intelligence. However, the "2-year-old" remark is again one of those far-fetched promises that is a loooooooooooooong way off. Making a robot-arm play with a rubber ducky is one thing, letting a robot understand what a rubber ducky is, is quite another. Making a robot crawl is one thing, but letting a robot crawl with a self-conscious purpose, again is quite another.

Fortunately, one of the researcher in TFA admits that 20 computers with a neural network on each is no replacement for a human brain. But the 2-year-old remark follows later, and is evidently entered as a way to generate funding. It sounds cool, but it is not what the result of this project will be. I assume the researchers know this all too well. Or perhaps they have no children of their own.

Re:There is more to a 2-year-old than walking

[vertinox]

A fun project, and potentially a good step on the road towards human-like intelligence. However, the "2-year-old" remark is again one of those far-fetched promises that is a loooooooooooooong way off. Making a robot-arm play with a rubber ducky is one thing, letting a robot understand what a rubber ducky is, is quite another.

How do we know the 2 year old does understand what a ruber ducky is?

Of course their brain may understand the rubber ducky is "that yellow thing... that feels a certain way... has that certain shape... and squeaks when i squeeze it..."

But do they really understand what it is in relationship to other things or true understanding. I mean... Its relationship to where we got it from. We bought it at a store... It was made in china... Its made of rubber or some type of synthetic... It floats because of physical properties... And bears a resemblence to a real life duck (a child of 2 year old might not grasp that key concept yet... think of it like captcha).

At that level a child's pattern recognition is quite limited, but is quite at the stage where it will basically explode with ability to relate verbal words to objects and actions and people.

Still... Understanding until you are older is more or less... This [object] is [this]. Later we learn [object] is [this] and does [action] which causes [result]. And then relationships of [object] with other [objects]. That is what usually throws machine intelligence into a loop. It can recognize patterns, but it can't relate those patterns to other patterns like a human can (at least right now).

Still, I certainly didn't have cognitive memories until I was older than 5 or even 7 where I started asking those annoying parental questions like "Why is the sky blue?" and "Where do people go where they die?".

Neural Networks

[EnsilZah]

The story mentions that the AI is made using neural nets.
I think it's amazing how such simple data structures can generate such complex behaviour.

In case anyone is interested, there's this pretty easy to understand tutorial on neural nets here:
http://www.ai-junkie.com/ann/evolved/nnt1.html

Re:Neural Networks

[arrrrg]

I'm an AI grad student, and I can tell you that (rather complex) statistical learning methods, which are considered part of AI, blow most simple methods (and neural nets) out of the water on most classification problems these days. In fact, I'm procrastinating from my project involving SVMs right now to write this comment.

Perhaps by AI you're referring just to neural nets? While people get them to do some cool things, these (in the for you're used to seeing them in) are at the very very "dumb end" of AI, in that they don't exploit any of the prior knowledge about a problem. They're easy to understand and quite general, but for most specific problems there are much better AI techniques out there.

Re:Neural Networks

[hyfe]

I'm an AI grad student, and I can tell you that (rather complex) statistical learning methods, which are considered part of AI,

That's what I said :)

Perhaps by AI you're referring just to neural nets?

By AI I'm referring to something that is not inheretly (too) bound by the abstractions required to make it work. EG; how easily transferable is the experience from numbers to actualc concepts. Various forms of regression analysis and stuff sure do wonders, but to be honest, they feel so inheretly limited I don't see much hope for them. It's mathemathicians playing with maths, like scripts emulating AI in games are programmers playing with programming, getting neat/good enough results; but still not making actual progress.

I guess all it means is that AI is hard, and I have way too much faith in the people that are supposed to be more intelligent than me.

Re:Neural Networks

[Helios1182]

I think we, the AI community, are making actual progress. The problem is that the problem is much harder than people thought it would be back when it first emerged.

Statistical models have done wonders for a lot of things. Classification, mentioned above, is one of the most obvious successes. Natural language processing is another surprising success of statistical methods. The use of hidden markov models has solved a number of problems that were difficult using symbolic approaches (mostly dealing with syntax). The natural language understanding is still a long ways away of course.

Partially observable markov decision processes have also been used a lot in learning in uncertain environments with good success -- another technique from stats.

The problem with AI as a whole is that there is so much knowledge. It is really incredible how much we know. Not even in an academic sense, you know things will fall, how to balance, and all sorts of "common sense" knowledge. Modeling this in a symbolic way is very difficult because of the large amount of information. It is also hard to express. Formalisms such as first order predicate calculus are often used, but they have limitations.

Statistical models are appealing because we do not have to manually write down knowledge. The machine can learn by itself (to some extent). This is probably why machine learning is one of the hottest topics right now.

So keep faith in the smart people trying to work on AI -- just don't expect true intelligent machines for some time yet. Advances are constantly being made in smaller domain-specific areas though.

Wow.

[Dare]

I wonder what happens when this bot discovers that it's a physical object, and can try and manipulate itself.

(... yeah, baby robot masturbation... but no, seriously...)

Can you turn off a 2-year-old?

[Richard Kirk]

This particular experiment is not going to create a 2-year old. We have had robots and simulations of robots that have used neutral nets to see if motor skill can be optimised using learning-like techniques. We have had recognition programs that do the same things that our eye and brain system do. This is an intelligent combination of the two.

However, just suppose, and then suppose, and then suppose...

So far, we can build computers that can simulate brain cells. There is nothing stopping us making a computer that has a similar complexity to the brain. We will have to mimic the strange mix of part-design, part randomness that brains are. Or maybe we can just throw more computing power, and stuff the brain doesn't have, like the ability to back up and regress. Sooner or later - probably later is my guess, but who knows? - we are going to come up with something that shows intelligence, and probably has inteligence.

African grey parrots are kept as pets. These are said to be as intelligent as a two-year old. Some of them can understand sentances from a vocabulary of hundreds of words. They don't progress much beyond a two year old. And they are Not Like Us, so it's OK to keep them in cages. Apparently. Hmmm.

One day, someone is going to make something intelligent, and then turn it off, and there will be an outcry. Is anyone doing the thinking on the ethics of making it before making it?

Re:Can you turn off a 2-year-old?

[mrcaseyj]

The difficulty is coming up with a consistent ethical policy that is reasonable, and works when relating to bacteria, plants, animals, humans, superior aliens, and machines. It seems obvious that all life including bacteria can't be given human rights. But where do you draw the line between bacteria and humans? If you decide that rats can be killed, experimented on, eaten, etc, then how do you argue that aliens or super intelligent machines shouldn't declare humans insignificantly better than rats, and decide to eat us. The best policy I've come up with is that we should respect the rights of anything that asks for its rights to be respected, and understands what it is asking. The asking part keeps bacteria and plants out of the protected class and the understanding part keeps tape players out. This policy provides grounds for a truce to prevent conflict between intelligent entities. I would also add some safety precautions to the policy, like protecting the rights of all humans from birth, whether they can ask for or understand their rights.

Simple algorithm

[vagabond_gr]

It experiments and knocks things over until it can pick them up for itself.

You don't need an advanced AI to do that, the algorithm goes like this:


while(1) {
    throw_toy();
    while(!toy_is_back())
        cry_loud();
}

Making babies

[thewiz]

"The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child," explains Metta.

There is a far easier and more pleasant way to create a child.
Unfortunately, it requires 2 years, nine months, and three minutes.

Re:What is Open Source Hardware?

[Zaphod2016]

Seriously, what is Open Source Hardware, if it's not just a sorry misuse of a buzzword?

Valid point, but please don't let that detract from the benefits of this. As a part-time "tinkerer" myself, I for one am happy to know that not *everyone* in this world is patent-obsessed.

After all, how can we stand on the shoulders of giants when those same giants keep stepping on the little guy?

ouch

[icepick72]

That baby would be tough on the birth canal.

Pain

[Onuma]

I don't believe they'll truly make a human-esque robot until they can make it understand pain.

Sometimes a child needs to have a hand across his/her hiney to teach him. What if the bot touches a hot stove and melts the crap out of its hand - without pain it would not know the difference.

Let a robot go through that, and then they might truly begin to learn like a human being.