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Robot Dogs Evolve Their Own Language
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.
I, for one, welcome our new robot dog overlords.
The guy there has video of an Aibo following a ball and differentiating colors from a few years back.
3 billion human legs were humped on August 29th, 2007. The survivors of the frottage called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the cute little machines.
"Hey! Hey! He's got the ball! He's got the ball!"
"Oh boy, gimme the ball! I want the ball!"
"Ooh, a squirrel! Hey! Squirrel! Gotta get the squirrel!"
"Oh, gimme a treat! Please.....Gimme a treat!"
"Oh boy! Someone new! I wonder what his crotch smells like?"
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
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
How does this work? Is it a neural network, where sounds are associated with objects? That would make sense for the first part, but how does a neural network represent more complex ideas like "the red ball is behind the blue ball"? Or do the AIBO's not have thoughts that complex?
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Hey, your one of those robot dogs aren't you? -Todd
-Todd
Put down the sig, and step away from the computer.
""What has been achieved at Sony shows that the technology gives the robot the ability to develop its own language with which to describe its environment and interact with other AIBOs. It sees a ball and it can tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it," Nolfi said."
These quadrapedal Terminators can now coordinate their efforts to get our balls. The rise of the machines has clearly begun. We shouldn't give robots the ability to scheme in their own langauge - how embarrasing would it be if the human race were wiped out by cute robot dogs?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Very interesting.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
And of course, the dogs will be used to track down those who try to circumvent Sony DRM.
for "Sieze Control"? hrm. might be a tall order for a robot dog. No opposable thumbs.
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
This is all very fine and dandy, but I don't believe that mimicking what is presently known about human language capabilities will help us understand it better.
The technology was, if I understood the article correctly, built on the foundation laid by cognitive science. It mimics chldren's curiosity, it begins from the general semantics (i.e. selecting an entity), goes on to phonology (i.e. the shape of the symbol for the entity), and deals with finer points (morphology, syntax) in the end...
I'd be very interested to see how it goes on, but I really don't think we'll be seeing a huge breakthrough in cognitive science.
NLP, maybe... almost definitely, if we can get machines to learn human languages.
But I really doubt the humans and animals part.
Ignore this signature. By order.
"I'll be back..."
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
translation of parent:
fp!!!!!
Robot Dogs Evolve Their Own Language? That honestly sounds more like a Fark headline.
I guess they are intelligently designed?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
The initial prototype (named 'Maxthon') is the first in this new line of robotic dogs (which, oddly enough, resembles the "Shinese" breed). 'Max' is supposedly using his new language to circumvent Chinese censhorship.
This is really exciting but the prospect of swarms of any kind of robot is a bit scary - hopefully designers will build in a simple, easily exploitable flaw so that an out-of-control swarm could be easily deactivated.
To me, it would seem the most seminal part of creating AI is to somehow instill "wants" and "needs" into machines. Without those, there's really no intelligence. When it comes down to it, the only reason we (humans) do anything is to be happy and to survive; how the hell do we make a machine want/need to be happy/survive? Interesting stuff, to be sure, but we've really got quite a long way to go.
or at least tech him to stop humping the roomba. everytime the roomba comes off its charger Rex jumps it like a 16 year old on prom night. I would throw water on him but that seems like a bad idea.
WTF?
playing..
Spot: [the AIBO's are running the gauntlet toward the Red Ball] The newspapers- they've stopped!
Rex: [realizes why] Stabilize your tails... Watch for enemy cats!.
Rover: They're coming in! Three marks and 2-10!
[Spot] is slain by Darth Puddles and his wingmen; Rover starts to panic]
Rover: It's no good down here, I can't maneuver!
Rex: Stay on target.
Rover: *We're too close!*
Rex: Stay on target!
Rover: [shouts] Loosen up!
[he too is picked off by Puddles and Company; Rex tries to escape but is fatally winged]
Rex: Rex to Skippy, I Lost three, Lost three. They came from... behind!
[crashes]
"There is only a one in six billion chance that you actually exist"
..."Do Robot Dogs Dream of Electric Cats."
It will eventually be made into a movie starring Harrison Ford as "Shaggy" - an aging inventor who is being tortured by his robotic great dane. The great dane constantly comes up to him and goes, "ruh roh!"
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
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?
Stop posting crap on Slashdot and get on with Blob and Conquer. The game's not going to code itself you know.
Particularly if I'm spending most of my time replying to your messages.
Summation 2
While computing power is of course good have, I don't think the computing power of individual agents is a major factor hindering development in this type of AI. Our own research (which is similar in spirit to Nolfi's, from TFA) points to the importance of appropriate sensor setups, environments and tasks, and that much can be done with simple neural networks. (On the other hand, if you work in simulation, much processing power might be needed for simulating the environment of the robot.) I recently wrote an article about this, and how computer games might provide the appropriate tasks and environments.
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.
Just one more step, and it would make a perfect domestic companion. That and a wet, velvety tongue.
We could call it the "Peanut Butter" paradigm.
-Styopa
Technology Quarterly
How to build a Babel fish
Jun 8th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Translation software: The science-fiction dream of a machine that understands any language is getting slowly closer
IMAGE
IT IS arguably the most useful gadget in the space-farer’s toolkit. In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Douglas Adams depicted it as a “small, yellow and leech-like” fish, called a Babel fish, that you stick in your ear. In “Star Trek”, meanwhile, it is known simply as the Universal Language Translator. But whatever you call it, there is no doubting the practical value of a device that is capable of translating any language into another.
Remarkably, however, such devices are now on the verge of becoming a reality, thanks to new “statistical machine translation” software. Unlike previous approaches to machine translation, which relied upon rules identified by linguists which then had to be tediously hand-coded into software, this new method requires absolutely no linguistic knowledge or expert understanding of a language in order to translate it. And last month researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh began work on a machine that they hope will be able to learn a new language simply by getting foreign speakers to talk into it and perhaps, eventually, by watching television.
Within the next few years there will be an explosion in translation technologies, says Alex Waibel, director of the International Centre for Advanced Communication Technology, which is based jointly at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and at CMU. He predicts there will be real-time automatic dubbing, which will let people watch foreign films or television programmes in their native languages, and search engines that will enable users to trawl through multilingual archives of documents, videos and audio files. And, eventually, there may even be electronic devices that work like Babel fish, whispering translations in your ear as someone speaks to you in a foreign tongue.
This may sound fanciful, but already a system has been developed that can translate speeches or lectures from one language into another, in real time and regardless of the subject matter. The system required no programming of grammatical rules or syntax. Instead it was given a vast number of speeches, and their accurate translations (performed by humans) into a second language, for statistical analysis. One of the reasons it works so well is that these speeches came from the United Nations and the European Parliament, where a broad range of topics are discussed. “The linguistic knowledge is automatically extracted from these huge data resources,” says Dr Waibel.
Statistical translation encompasses a range of techniques, but what they all have in common is the use of statistical analysis, rather than rigid rules, to convert text from one language into another. Most systems start with a large bilingual corpus of text. By analysing the frequency with which clusters of words appear in close proximity in the two languages, it is possible to work out which words correspond to each other in the two languages. This approach offers much greater flexibility than rule-based systems, since it translates languages based on how they are actually used, rather than relying on rigid grammatical rules which may not always be observed, and often have exceptions.
Examples abound of the ridiculous results produced by rule-based systems, which are unable to cope in the face of similes, ambiguities or bad grammar. In one example, a sentence written in Arabic meaning “The White House confirmed the existence of a new bin Laden tape” was translated using a standard rule-based translator and became “Alpine white new presence tape registered for cof
The extreme centre is the paper's historical position. --Geoffrey Crowther
Information about the actual AIBO setup:
http://www.csl.sony.fr/perspective/
Videos here: http://www.csl.sony.fr/perspective/node6.html
"The technology could lead to robots able to carry out rescue operations fire attacks by swarming over inaccessible areas to find any left living humans people,"
-Dickens
Despite the generated jokes about dogs and the French, and the "oohing and aahing of the crowd at the AIBO robotics soccer games broadcast on U.S. national television, this is not merely "cute". This may be the most important research that you have ever read about.
Researchers Luc Steels and colleagues at Sony's Paris Computer Science Laboratory in France have performed a series of remarkable experiments demonstrating the development, from naught, of spoken language among robots. Words, grammar and semantics evolve spontaneously among cooperating robotic agents initially programmed with a small base set of ground perceptions and behaviors. And from the development of language arises cooperative group (intelligent) behavior.
Enhanced AIBOs are initially programmed to recognise simple stimuli from their surprisingly limited hardware sensors. Over the course of several hours or days, the AIBOs learn to distinguish objects and how to interact with them. A built-in curiosity system ('metabrain') continually directs the AIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks and to cease activities that are not fruitful. In time they develop more complex tasks, just as do human children.
Like children, the enhanced Sony AIBOs initially babble ("argue?") until two or more settle on a sound to describe an object or aspect of their environment. Over time the group gradually builds a lexicon and grammatical rules through which to communicate. Agreement on word usage spreads through the population as terms for similar meanings compete for acceptance. For example, the robots develop the language structures to express that a red ball is rolling to the left. Just as human twins sometimes develop a unique language in which only they can communicate, the enhanced AIBOs (which are clone-like and similar to twins) develop their own language.
Language analysis and generation are part of Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI) and have been studied extensively for decades by AI researchers. In the past several decades GOFAI was challenged by Nouvelle AI (Situated AI) championed by Hans Moravec and Rodney Brooks. This alternative approach holds that true AI will not arise from formal mathematical systems but instead from robotic behaviors which have a subsumption architecture as an overall organising principle for the individual robot. This architecture consists of layers of behavioural modules, each capable of carrying out a complete but simple task. Steels' enhanced AIBOs are embodiments of just such a subsumption architecture and provide strong support for Moravec's and Brooks' hypotheses
Prior to Luc Steels' experiments, no one had experimentally demonstrated how language develops among intelligent agents. Steels' experiments are no less than stunning: in a controlled environment AIBO robots develop their own words and grammars for objects in their environment. All aspects of human language development are mirrored in these experiments: words compete for acceptance in the population, new words are created, and grammatical structures arise spontaneously. Steels' work also addresses the idea of a "robot culture", since it is in the context of a population of cooperating agents that language becomes most useful.
Contrast this with the W3C's Semantic Web effort, which has received much more interest and money in recent years due to the growth of the Internet yet has proven far less fertile. In the Semantic Web there are multiple competing "ontologies" (roughly, data dictionaries wherein all terms are strictly defined by specialists from their
And so in the experiments new words are created; old less useful words decline in use. At any time, there may be multiple words for the same thing in the population, but eventually one of those words mostly "wins over" the other words (although the older word may continue to be used by a small part of the population).
BTW what's an IPC? [See, here we're attempting to resolve terms in our separate "ontologies" (dictionaries): doing what the W3C's Semantic Web cannot do and what the enhanced AIBOs _can_ do].
Not only can they run Linux, they can be condescending to the dogs that don't.
I am kind of worrying about what a group of agents might learn to communicate while wandering around in GTA: San Andreas. Maybe in the interests of society you should limit this to Kirby.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.