Slashdot Mirror
Robots Successfully Invent Their Own Language
An anonymous reader writes "One group of Australian researchers have managed to teach robots to do something that, until now, was the reserve of humans and a few other animals: they've taught them how to invent and use spoken language. The robots, called LingoDroids, are introduced to each other. In order to share information, they need to communicate. Since they don't share a common language, they do the next best thing: they make one up. The LingoDroids invent words to describe areas on their maps, speak the word aloud to the other robot, and then find a way to connect the word and the place, the same way a human would point to themselves and speak their name to someone who doesn't speak their language."
better link. Also, I didn't realize it at first, this is the person mostly responsible for it. She is from Australia and she decided to do this. I wonder what the catch with her is...
You can't handle the truth.
A lingo ate my baby!
From the summary, it sounds like the "language" is just a noun mapping. Very much like my 14.4 modem did in 1993 over a phone line, when it came to an agreement with the modem on the other side about what voltage and phase pattern corresponded to the bitstream 0001 vs 1010, in fact my modem sounds like a more complicated language because they implemented MNP4 / MNP5 error correction, admittedly that required a lot of help from the humans typing in the "right" dialer strings and of course the humans who wrote MNP4 ...
Might just be a bad summary of a summary of a summary of a summary, and the robots had developed interesting sentence structure and verb conjugations and direct and indirect objects, adjective and adverbs, similes and metaphors, better than your average youtube comment ... Or maybe youtube comments are actually being written by these robots, hard to say.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
After looking through the research, you're correct - the article's claims are very much overblown.
Do they "invent" random words for places? Yes, by throwing random characters as a preprogrammed method. Do they "communicate" this to another robot? Yes.
Is the other robot preprogrammed to (a) accept pointing as a convention and (b) receive information in the "name, point to place" format: Yes.
They share a common communication frame. That's the "language" they communicate in. And it was preprogrammed to them. That they are expanding it by "naming places" is amusing, but it's hardcoded behavior only and they could just as easily have been programmed to select an origin spot, name it "Zero", and proceed to create a north-south/east-west grid of positive and negative integers and "communicate" it in the same fashion.
They learned how to communicate meaning. The researchers taught them the words. the computers on board did not invent the words they used. In fact a computer would not do something as dumb as a spoken word but series of tones or even FSK.
When it needs a new word/label it generates it as a random combination of pre-programmed syllables that play the role of phonemes for the new language. English for example only uses 40 of them, but we combine them to make all the various words we know how to pronounce properly. It may not be a particularly sophisticated language, but I think it still counts well enough.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
pize, rije, jaya, reya, kuzo, ropi, duka, vupe, puru, puga, huzu, hiza, bula, kobu, yifi, gige, soqe, liye, xala, mira, kopo, heto, zuce, xapo, fili, zuya, fexo, jara.
The 'language' seems to be limited to 4 letter words, each one has a consonant and a vowel, and then another consonant and another vowel in it. Does not look like a language at all, there is no grammar, there is nothing except basically 4 letter words used as hash keys to point at some areas on a map.
You can't handle the truth.
You don't need to -- they're now welcoming each other without any help from us.
You shall see a cow on the roof of a cotton house.
If you did the same thing in a software simulation, nobody would pay any attention. It would be fairly trivial. Adding in the actual robot parts means that you, uh... need to have robots that can play and understand sounds. That's great, you made a robot that can play and hear sounds. If we assume nobody has made an audio modem before, then that would be something. As history stands, it isn't.
Adding these two unimpressive things together doesn't equal anything. I mean, if they're actual going to use these for something, then that's great. Make them. But so much robot "research" seems to be crap like this. We have software that can solve problem X in simulation. To do the same thing in the "real world" you'd need hardware capable of these 3 things, all of which we can do. Unless you need to solve problem X for some reason in the real world, you're done. There's no need to build that thing.
It's like saying "can we make a computer that can control an oven and use a webcam to see when the pie is done?". Yes. We can. But unless we actually want to do that, there's literally no point in building the thing. There will be no useful theory produced in actually building a pie watching computer. The only thing you'll get is to have built the first pie watching computer, and - apparently - an article on Slashdot.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Not until the University of Paris forks the research code.
I would welcome our robotic overlords, if I spoke their language.
The links I've seen about this go on and on about how the robots invent and use "words." But language is not words; language is grammar; language is a set of rules for recursively constructing highly complex expressions from smaller subparts. This is Linguistics 101 material.
The way you distinguish somebody with Linguistics training from a layperson is that the layperson will talk about language as if it's a "bag of words" and overall focus too much on the words, whereas the linguist will tend to see most words as either (a) the filler that goes inside the phrases and sentences, or (b) the stuff whose formation is constrained by the general phonological and morphological rules of the language. Or, short and sweet: words are boring unless they're function words like "the."
Are you adequate?