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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."
I will admit that I haven't read up on the exact rules , but I find the name Urban Challenge to be a bit misleading. From what I have seen the environments are very sterile compared to real life urban environments , yes the name gives the impression that robots can now drive in a ciry like New York. This reminds of the 60s I think it was when computer scientist claimed that because a robot could restaple boxes , we will have androids in 20 years. Then it became clear that the algorithms didn't scale well with the complexity of the environment ( to put it nicely) and Artificial Intelligence became a somewhat disappointing field for the general public atleast.
All I am saying is that we and the tech journals should be carefull with exciting names like "Urban Challenge" or "60miles through urban landscape".
Other then that , congratulations to the teams , I didn't expect such good results.
That's the problem with hype. They have cried "wolf" too many times. It was the same thing at the end of the 19th century, when people were researching flight. Steam engines were too heavy for their power, airplanes had to wait until engines became powerful enough. There were many people, among them some respectable scientists, that wrote articles "proving" that heavier than air flight was impossible.
At this point, computers are too expensive and consume too much power to be practical for anything that involves "human-like" intelligence. But we are making progress, at least we do have unbeatable chess-playing computers, a feat that not so long ago many people considered impossible. Of course, computers do not follow the exact path of reasoning that humans do when playing chess, but they are unbeatable anyhow. Airplanes do not flap wings either, but they fly faster and higher than any bird.
Unless Moore's law ceases to function, we can expect desktop computers with a complexity comparable to that of a human brain in twenty years or so. Given the hardware, it's only reasonable that someone will invent a way to make a computer emulate a human brain in its full power, just like people invented machines capable of flying when they got engines with enough power.
I'm afraid I have to disagree with your logic. Yes, physics as we know it would be violated by faster than light travel, so we certainly don't know if it can be done at all. Your argument for AI is flawed, though: simply because we know sentience is possible, it does not follow that we know sentience can be created artificially. We know sentience is possible in biological organism, but we do not know if it can be recreated in a machine. Even if your definition of AI includes creating an organism that has sentience, as opposed to the current understanding of AI (machine/software-based), your statement that "it's 100% solvable" does not necessarily follow.
I think it's somewhat more likely than not that we will eventually develop true AI, but I don't think you can jump from the mere fact that sentience exists to saying that artificially duplicating it is a given.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
"We know sentience is possible in biological organism..."
And what evidence do we have of this? A bunch of biological machines running around saying "I'm sentient" is not good enough for me. No one can explain where sentience comes from or at what point on the tree of life it begins. Most people would agree that bugs and dogs are not sentient but argue that people are without explaining much about their reasoning. The simplest explanation is that people, dogs, and bugs really aren't sentient even though people may believe, talk, and act as if they are. In this case, it should be possible to recreate human behavior perfectly in a machine.