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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.
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
""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.
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
I guess they are intelligently designed?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
I, for one, welcome our new robot dog welcoming overlords.
Stuff that in your overlord pipe and welcome it.
People discover the meaning of life between getting piss drunk and the following hangover.
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.
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?
..."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!"
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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?
Man, can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
I think that would be a Beowoof cluster.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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