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Robot Dogs Evolve Their Own Language

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the we-welcome-our-new-canine-robot-linguistic-overlords dept.

bab00n writes According to this article at The Engineer Online, researchers led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are developing robots that evolve their own language, bypassing the limits of imposing human rule-based communication. The technology, dubbed Embedded and Communicating Agents, has allowed researchers at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France to add a new level of intelligence to the AIBO dog. The robot dog has learnt to see a ball and tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it.

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm... by ThinkingInBinary · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This seems a little hard to believe. I could believe that they programmed it to be able to speak and hear statements that are directly connected to thoughts, but I just can't see an AIBO learning, much less inventing, the syntax to be able to say something like "The red ball is behind you, rolling to the right." It just seems a little far-fetched.

    What the article doesn't explain is at what level the language system is attached to the brain. Does it talk about raw thoughts, or specific ideas (like the ball)? Do AIBO's have "raw thoughts", or can they only think about what they were programmed to know about?

    --
    ttuttle is a rankmaniac
  2. Insight into other speech? by whitehatlurker · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Something that was interesting from FTA was the "babble" stage, which was compared to human children. This experiment might teach us more about human linguistics as well. Learning languages, how languages "mutate" over time, how cultures mix when two communities with different languages are placed together, the group mind boggles ...

    Very interesting.

    --
    .. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
    1. Re:Insight into other speech? by SirClicksalot · · Score: 3, Interesting

      This type of language/vocabulary development experiments has been done before.
      You should take a look at the talking heads experiment.
      This page has some related publications.

      --
      It is not so much that I have confidence in scientists being right, but that I have so much in nonscientists being wrong
  3. Details on the language please? (disappointing) by Theovon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This article is all fluff. They don't say anything really interesting. Ok, they can communicate. If that's so, then engineers can record it and perform analysis on the lexicon and gramatical structure. I want to know something about that! I'm sure it won't match up well to human language, but that's okay, because human languages are themselves very diverse in the way things are represented. Would it kill them to give a few examples of 'words' (even if they're described in terms of musical notes or whatever), what they mean, and how they go together to form sentences?