3 Bots Win Pentagon's Robotic Rally

An anonymous reader writes "We've got a winner in the Pentagon's $3.5 million all-robot street rally, the Urban Challenge. Three, actually. Wired reports that 'bots from Stanford, Virginia Tech, and Carnegie Mellon all completed the course within the six-hour time limit. The robo-cars had to complete different missions taking varying times, so the flesh-and-blood judges will take a day to figure out who takes home first prize."

Comments

I believe all 6 finishers were under 6 hours

[leko]

Some of the robots were paused for a long time, and each was clocked individually. There is really no point in speculating as to who the winners are, because in addition to the time, how well the bots obeyed traffic laws as well as just how safe they drove in general are all taken into account. We should find out the scoring soon enough (sometime this morning.)

Re:We WILL have androids in 20 years

[vertinox]

No civillian space flight, no humans on planets, no artificial intelligence, no cure to AIDs, cancer, asthma or the common cold.

Actually, I don't think its not the fault of emerging technologies but rather emerging technologies must scale to the following questions:

1. Is it profitable?
2. Is is mass producible?
3. Does it follow a decentralized free market model rather than a centralized regulated model?

No one predicted cell phones and the internet in the 80s as they are now, yet if someone told me in 1989 about Youtube on my hand held device I would have scoffed at it being too Star Trek like. Yet today we have such technology.

The reason we don't have AI, Civilian Space Travel, and Flying Cars is because they meet none of the 3 criteria I mentioned. AI today would require a computer that costs billions of dollars to build, a civilian space program would cost billions to build, and the flying car industry would be too regulated and dangerous to even consider marketing to people.

Which is why cell phones and internet caught on because those things are quite decentralized in how they work (Yeah I know the cell phone companies are monopolies but you can sell someone a cell phone and it doesn't cause any problem with the rest of the system etc etc)

You make one fatal flaw

[SmallFurryCreature]

You link computing power with intelligence, clearly this means you now NOTHING about programming. Doom does NOT become F.E.A.R. by simply running it on a faster CPU.

SOMEBODY has to write the program that becomes the AI. It REALLY does not matter that much how fast the underlying hardware is that executes that program, the simple fact is that AI code right now just ain't that smart. Not even if an AI can take weeks to calculate can it come anywhere close to what a human can do in terms of reasoning with the input available.

A smart program that is just very slow would be an amazing breakthrough and if that happened then all we need to do is wait for computers to get faster, but right now the AI code just ain't there. If it was, it would long since have been given a supercomputer to run on.

These robots in the challenge have a simple task that any human can do, "see" the enviroment, and act upon that information. For years this has been attempted and the systems just ain't getting any better despite the fact that computing power has skyrocketed. Simply put, no code exists that can take a video image and turn that reliably, consistently in information that tells the decision making software what the enviroment is like.

For instance, the detection systems have problems with blue colored cars against asfalt. Consider a human being, put a car painted blue against a background painted the exact same color in blue lighting so it totally blends in. WOuldn't fool a human for a second since we would still see the windshields and through it the interior of the car and reason out that there must be car there even if we cannot see the bodywork.

Same with an other obstacle, a barrier hanging in the air, the teams actually complained about this because they thought all the barriers would be on the ground. This shows you why AI programming is so bad, the programmers are morons, the barrier involved is very common at road blocks. The car, designed and programmed to only scan the ground is unable to determine that a barrier might higher up.

Worse, when it hits it, it can't react to it. The cars have to be stopped, not one of the cars, not even that best was able to simply stop, backup and try a different course.

You can throw more GHZ at it, but all that will give you is faster dumbness.

What happens when a computer has the same complexity as the brain? You will have a very fast, braindead piece of machinery. It is the programming that matters.

Your anology to flying is flawed, we knew that things could fly, gliders had been around for ages, all that was needed for a power source that had good enough power to weight ratio. We do NOT have the AI code or any idea how to make it. Compare it to say faster then light travel. We don't know how, so claiming that if only we develop an infinite source of energy we can do it, is flawed.

Re:You make one fatal flaw

[Orange Crush]

I agree with you except on one point:

Your anology to flying is flawed, we knew that things could fly, gliders had been around for ages, all that was needed for a power source that had good enough power to weight ratio. We do NOT have the AI code or any idea how to make it. Compare it to say faster then light travel. We don't know how, so claiming that if only we develop an infinite source of energy we can do it, is flawed.

FTL violates physics as we know it and we've never observed anything indicating it's possible. We *know* sentience is possible and the hardware and code exists. It's right behind our eyeballs. Human-level intelligence can be had in a device smaller than a bowling ball giving off less waste heat than a 100 watt light bulb.

I fully agree that most don't understand the magnitude of the problem and we have a very long way to go, but we know for a fact that it's 100% solvable. Nature already did it.

Re:We WILL have androids in 20 years

[jpfed]

Faster and more powerful != More Intelligent. Sorry to nitpick, but yes, it does. Intelligence as a function of speed, power, and strategies remains monotonically increasing with speed and monotonically increasing with power, up to the bounds of the complexity of the problem domain (cf Go and Tic-Tac-Toe). It just so happens that there will be diminishing returns on existing strategies, and finding new strategies will at some point be more cost-effective than making things faster or more powerful.

To put it simply, in order to expect a human-like intelligence in 20 years requires two things we do not yet have: An understanding of human intelligence, and a hardware architecture that is able to implement it. For some definitions of "human-like", sure. But a single architecture capable of creativity in many domains, quick reaction to unforeseen circumstances, and pragmatic reasoning and problem solving doesn't have to do it the same way we do it. As I type this, I realize that people will always expect more; if a machine were to do everything I just listed, then they'd want the machine to have empathy, be able to pick up cultures through immersion, pick up accents, and appreciate humor, etc... These things vary in how central they are to the diffuse definition of "intelligence", but as long as it serves to differentiate humans from computers, raising such objections will make people more comfortable.