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

We WILL have androids in 20 years

[mangu]

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 at least.

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.