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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."
They merged up into a superbot and won the contest by destroying everything around them.
liqbase
Ben Franklin Racing (a collaboration between UPenn, Lehigh and Lockheed Martin) also finished within the 6 hour time limit.
The judging will certainly be interesting.
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
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.
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.)
That article is pretty sparse on detail. The best coverage I found was at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/03/darpa_uc_blog/
How long until one of the sore losers goes into "Destroy All Humans" mode?
Actually on second thought, wouldn't that be the one DARPA would want to have? It's win-win!
When is Slashdot going to add a -1 moderation option for people who actually RTFA?
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You mention chess. Alright, Deep Blue. Lets challenge deep blue. Half way through the game, we switch the board, introduce a new rule. Jumble the pieces up and tell it to pick them up and put them in the correct place again.
NOT a challenge for a human being. Deep Blue? Will fail totally, unable to even understand the commands.
AI is NOT the same thing as doing a simple task over and over again really fast. Laser range finders are nothing new, ACTING upon that information, THAT is the challenge. Especially when that information is not constant and reliable.
Kasparov showed that when he switched styles constantly, Deep Blue was unable to cope. That Kasparov went on to beat Deep Blue is often forgotten. It however showed very clearly that Deep Blue had been setup by HUMANS to beat Kasparov, when he became another player by changing style, the computer could not cope, it had no AI to deal with this.
It reminds me of futurama and robot blurns ball. Putting a howitzer on the field does NOT prove robots are good pitchers. IF Deep Blue could be put in front of a `checkers board and pick that game up in seconds, like a human could, then switch to TicTacToe and then play some poker ALL without human input, then I would be impressed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I don't know why the contestants are spending all that cash and beefing up the AI on these machines. A tape recorder that mumbles incoherent obscenities could pass as a NY cab driver.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.