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NASA and AI Testing
NapalmCheese writes "NASA tested their AI (Remote Agent) in space last May and it passed with flying colors. The articles makes it sound like HAL, I don't know if that is a good thing, but definately cool. The first article is found at The JPL and is nice and informative, the second article found at, rax is even more so. Hmmmm, if only it had a big red eye. "
How about if, during the 5 minute lag between Ground Control and the Mars Explorer, the rover had managed to knock itself upside down. A person could easily nudge it back over with their foot, but radio transmissions from Earth aren't going to do squat. Also, that 5 minute lag only gets longer and longer the further away from Earth you go, so having a person on the scene will dramatically affect the outcome in time-sensitive, mission-override type scenarios. AI is great for accomplishing the tasks the engineers can think of, but not for the unknown.
Work is for people who lack the imagination to play.
I'm working on two different experiments scheduled to be installed on the space station. I'll tell you that my motto is that the space station is for human (biological) science and not physical science. There are so many problems with trying to make everyone's experiments co-exist; it's a nightmare.
I support human spaceflight and think it is very necessary. We are learning a considerable amount by researching biology in a new evironment (with microgravity). That's how science is supposed to work. There was a great program on the Discovery Channel last night (The Invisible Force, check it out) that addressed this.
However, somehow during the politics, the space station was viewed as the end-all solution to putting experiments into space to support all of the funding. After all, the more customers you have, the more support you get in Congress. Now it's this big complex structure that's made it even more expensive.
I wish it was scaled back for the sole purpose of biological/human research and not this complicated experimental facilicity that's supposed to satisfy everyone. Then more money would be available to experimenters for their research.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Is this really an AI? Aren't there a set of laws that define what is truly an AI and what is just Agent software on a par with Amazon.com's ability to pick out books for me based on my past selections?
Werd.
Yep - I actually was at JPL when they were
... they should keep things more
working on putting DS1 together. A friend of
mine on that project told me that the LISP
image was actually uploaded after DS1 was off
the ground, because they didn't have enough
space for it.
Additionally, they're only running the experiment
now, after a lot of the useful stuff has been
done, since they were afraid the AI would
screw up and send the probe off somewhere random.
Generally not a fan of huge LISP based AI's for
robotics
embedded, and lower level, using C and assembly,
esp. since they're using wimpy space-qualified processors.
It's surprising but Microsoft Research has a bunch of researchers that have done a lot of important research in Bayesian networks and AI. For example, David Heckerman developed PATHFINDER for his Ph.D. thesis. (PATHFINDER is a program that helps to diagnose lymph node diseases, the last version PATHFINDER IV was just as good or better than most pathologists). In fact, I think one of them wrote a paper on diagnosing and troubleshooting PC problems which may have helped the people at JPL write the MIR software.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
> We could send a few dozen people to the moon,
> but what good is that going to do us? No, we're > better off waiting till we have something
> worthwhile, like at least go to Mars.
We have to learn to walk before we can fly, so to speak. The moon offers us a number of ways to test the technologies that we would use in getting to and staying on Mars for extended periods.
Void the Warranty
This project also had ion engines as a propulusion unit. In fact, their was a software error that messed up the timing of the ion engine components so it would shut off during this flight. The software was able to work around it automatically though.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
There is a certain undeniable problem about life on earth - every species is NOT sustainable. Humans are not going to figure out a way to decrease the human population, so eventually we will run out of resources and there will be mass starvation, etc. That is, unless another species wipes us out first - Insects anyone? Long after humans (and other animals) have disappeared from earth, the insects will still thrive.
So, if we want to ensure that the human species, and all the other animal species on earth survive far into the future, it is our RESPONSIBILITY to explore space, and find somewhere else to settle. The space station is but one important part of that space exploration. No other species on earth has the ability to seek out new worlds, and if we as humans don't do it, we are sealing the fate of every living thing on the planet (except for maybe the dominant species, those darned insects). That wouldn't be very responsible, would it?
One can think of that neat story about a guy named Noah and his ark, where he took all the animals of the earth to save them from the flood. We will eventually be flooded by overpopulation, and we'll be in need of an ark.
"Give me liberty, or give me death, Zogwarg Queen!" - Spiff.
What is the point of a space station if it is right outside the earth's atmosphere? Lets be serious here, we should colonize the moon first...
Here's why:
1) We are running out of space on earth.
2) Rockets can landon the moon to refuel if they had to.
3) The low levels of gravity would make for awesome basketball games (then i might actually make the team...)
4) If done right, (artificial light, heat, air (like a space station) it could be an even better International Space project, because people from different countries would actually want to go there.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
I found these through a search using google.com:
a ble.html
for Allegro Common Lisp: www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/mann/software-avail
for GNU Common Lisp:
stat.umn.edu/~luke/www.html
Also, why not fund oceanic research? Instead of transfering funds form one scientific endeaver to another, lets take some money out of that huge DoD budget. It is big enough as it is.
--
If I go camping, and on my way home, I drive recklessly, and hit a deer, it would cost me a lot of money in repairs, insurance, etc. If someone who is hungry comes along and eats the deer, I have in fact feed the hungry. Therefore, Everyone should go camping and drive fast and recklessly, because it will feed the hungry!
That's the NASA spin off argument... It doesn't make sence. Because we have developed teflon and a pen that will write upside-down and under water does NOT justify space exploration. If that's suppose to be a justification, then no one has ever stoped to consider the enormous stupidity and inefficency of this type of research.
Your right, I totally agree, Space Travel is just a "Romantic Notion." But, that's the problem, Hollywood makes good romance flicks, and then the whole world wishes they were part of the movie. This is part of the reason I haven't seen Star Wars Episode 1 yet.... I can't keep from thinking, "yea, right, every planet has some interesting life, and people just hope around in between them... this is less realistic than RoadRunner cartoons." Sure, the movie might be good, and I will eventually probably see it, but I will guarentee, it's not going to make me believe that someday we should be hopping around the stars. At least not in the next 1000 years. Ask me again in the year 4000.
NASA owes more to Hollywood than Congress, because Hollywood is the biggest means of thier getting public support for funding. I say pull the damn plug untill they can write a grant proposal that will show some solid, justifyable, results towards benifiting mankind. And, then, compare the cost/benifit ratio of thier work to every other science lab that is going to NSF for funding! And, can't someone please get StarTrek off the air, and get SeaQuest back on? Face it, we will get a lot more fuel, food, and knowledge for our dollar under water than up in the air!
BadlandZ (not logged in this time)
void fly_in_space()
{
if (camera == on)
turn_off_fridge_to_save_power();
for (i=0;iNUM_UNITS;i++)
if (unit[i] != working)
unit[i].reboot();
for (i=0;i if (sensor[i] == alarm)
if (sensor[i].check() != ok)
sensor_sucks();
if (thruster(1) != working)
set_thruster(2);
}
Wow, this NASA "Artificial Intelligence" is advanced stuff.
"My mind is going.. I can feel it !"
The only way to keep public support high is to treat space as The Final Frontier and to explore it with people. It's sad (I agree with you, these probes could teach us more than the space station) but a fact of life none the less.
Oh well.
Werd.
A manned trip to Mars would have to refuel once its out of the earth's atmosphere.
Would YOU want to refuel on Mir?
Posted by ionic:
I disagree whole heartedly! I both think and feel that sending Man into Space is paramount; I mean think about it this way Earth is the only stomping ground of our civilization, if Earth goes we go. Therefore, the more that we push sending Man into Space and more directly seeding Mankind on the Moon, and planets like Mars ensures that should something happen to one locale in Space then at least something of Mankind would survive. The problem today is that the "leaders" in governmentally pushed space exploration (the USA) cannot get its populace behind spending more money on manned or any other type of Space exploration. Think about it, how long did it take to get the Space station in place, and we continue to sit on our "asses" looking at the moon, Mars and the asteroid belt, dreaming about them and doing nothing to bring them to reality (don't get me wrong there are some porojects whish are aimed at this but they are few and far between). If you want to talk about economics well, my guess is that there are plenty of precious resources within the asteroids which are waiting to be mined even as we jabber about the econonic feasibility of Space ventures (be it govermentally or privately funded). To get back to my major point a whole lot of us need to awaken to the fact that if there is a push in the direction of Space it will sprout new industries to support itself thereby rendering the enconomic issue a moot point. And as a side benefit of making local Space no longer a frontier we spread the seeds of Mankind onto multiple types os soil where it can both grow and wither, but we get out there.
Mike Hay
I guess I have seen T2 to many times! An evil AI coudl wipe us all out of existance.
Only 'flamers' flame!
An "expert system" could accomplish the tasks of their agent, as could a genuinely "intelligent" agent. The real answer as to whether it is AI or not has to do with the design of the code.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Check out comp.ai for more information on the satelite. Some of the people working on the project having been posting updates and would probably be willing to answer questions.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I can't disagree with you more. Space travel is NOTORIOUSLY inefficient--it costs millions upon millions of dollars per component on each shuttle and probe NASA and other space agencies send into orbit. I should know, I work for Lockheed Martin. Absolutely nothing within the current world socioeconomic and scientific structure suggests that space travel is going to be feasible on a large scale any time in the year future--the space program has been active for decades and the price per mission keeps going up, not down.
You say: "We continue to sit on our 'asses' looking at the moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt, dreaming about them and doing nothing to bring them back to reality."
We made a manned moon landing in 1969, 30 years ago. It's a really big rock. There's nothing there. If there was, we'd still be going there.
We've been to Mars, via several unmanned probes. What's the point of sending people there? Again, it's just a big rock. If there was anything interesting, our super-expensive, super-accurate probes and surveying equipment would have picked it up by now.
We know what asteroids are made of. Scientists have been studying impact sites of landed meteorites for years. Guess what? They're rocks. Metallic rocks perhaps, but certainly not rare enough to justify SPENDING millions upon millions of dollars to retrieve them.
You claim that "if there is a push in the direction of Space it will sprout new industries to support itself thereby rendering the enconomic issue a moot point." Why is this? Things aren't going to get less expensive just because we have private companies footing the bill instead of NASA. Besides, there's still nowhere to go, and no point in going there.
Your romantic notions are, well, romantic, but they have absolutely no scientific basis behind them.
-
Full disclosure: I'm doing contract PR work for Franz. Stories like this are like candy to me. :) --Tom pr@franz.com
Tom Geller
I believe that mankind knows little about the climate on a geological scale and can not yet conclusively prove we are not in danger of a catastrophic climate change caused by other than man-made circumstances.
I believe a comment by Nobel Prize winning chemist Kary Mullis that if one were to do actuary tables on the most pressing threats to mankind, one would find that a "Extinction Level Event" caused by an asteroid is possible, and our politicians will not significantly address this problem until it's to late because of financial concerns.
I believe that NASA has not focused it's efforts correctly in these matters. I believe NASA has focused on "Star Wars" type programs (both in a Cold War, Ronald Regan sense, and in a George Lucus glamorous space travel sense), when in fact they should focus more on conservation concerns such as meteor impacts.
I believe Space Studies are disproportionately funded to Under Sea studies. Hollywood has glamorized space studies, and under played deep sea exploration. Our children are encouraged to "reach for the stars" by Hollywood, and, I believe we already know more about the stars than we do about our own planet (specifically, what's going on under the seas.
I believe the answers to many of our social and cultural problems can be found through science, and science has been given a bad hand to play by the media and government. Under Sea exploration and studies my solve countless problems in geological understanding, food and fuel resources, and many other significantly neglected problems of man kind. The underwater oil and natural gas fields north of Russia are completely ignored, and could potentially solve many of the worlds economic and fuel needs. I believe underwater agriculture may be a potential solution to world hunger. I believe that Global Warming is a potential problem, and possibly significant. But, I do not believe there is conclusive proof that it is the result of mankind's actions, and therefore I believe our scientific studies of Global Warming should not be singularly focused on "lightening Mankind's Impact on the Environment." I believe that there should also be a focus on developing a way for man to cope with climate change.
When a star that may have died 6000 years ago could cause global climate change and we are so arrogent to believe it's our use of Freon, someone has thier head up there arse. Global protection from astronomical events should be our primary consirn with relation to space/NASA/etc. Otherwise, we should keep looking to understand what is going on in our own planet (and under the sea) and solve the problems at home first.
Full disclosure: I'm doing contract PR work for Franz. Stories like this are like candy to me. :) --Tom pr@franz.com
and you folks let harlequin grab the deep space project? geez...
:)
My other car is a cons.
Nomad.
*grins*
---
DNA just wants to be free...
I'd rather give my taxes to NASA than to the degenerates down the street who hang out on the corner all day and night drinking and smoking adn fighting. Just my thoughts...
Blar.
Hello.
Remote Agent is able to reason very effectively within a domain that has been described to it. Through this reasoning process (or actually processes) it's able to come up with solutions that the developers did not explicitly encode and respond to situations they did not envision.
One may call that AI or not.
RA does not contain program code to handle every contingency that could have occured. We could have written a program that covered just the contingencies we knew we were going to inject during the flight test, but the full model of Deep Space 1 that Remote Agent has used during demonstrations on the ground has something like 2^80 states.
Remote Agent has declarative models of the spacecraft's hardware, resources (such as electrical power) and so on, and uses a set of reasoning algorithms to continually find the actions which push the spacecraft towards its goal, even in the face of failures or unexpected outcomes. The reasoning part of Remote Agent
is reusable from mission to mission, while the model of the spacecraft or what have you is developed from reusable parts each time.
There is an analogy with computer graphics: your rendering engine does not contain explicit instructions on how to draw a velociraptor, a space craft, etc. It has a set of general algorithms (ray tracing, texture mapping, etc) which can be applied to models which describe a world.
Similarly, Remote Agent has some general algorithms (planning, diagnosis, recovery, plan running, etc) which can be applied to different descriptions of spacecraft, life support systems, etc.
Some other random comments:
Therefore the recoveries are fairly trivial, such as switching control modes in the attitude control system. In simulation, where there is no spacecraft at risk, RA has taken on much more critical situations such as engine failure during the Cassini orbital insertion.
I view personally view this experiment as the "thin end of the wedge" for AI, or automated reasoning if that's a less controversial term, in space.
RA has done a simple demo in space, more complex scenarios on the ground, and now is being evaluated by a number of NASA centers for future missions. At the same time, a great many people are working on systems which improve upon RA's capabilities.
On an Ultrasparc or my Linux laptop this takes well under a second. On the rad-hard (read slow) spacecraft processor I believe it takes on the order of a minute do to the actual diagnosis and make the recovery recommendation.
Much more info can be found on http://rax.arc.nasa.gov in the "How it works" area.
Cheers,
James Kurien
Remote Agent Team
Does anyone think it's odd that there aren't any pictures from the craft? I mean, there are all these artist's renderings, but no actual photos. I don't know, just food for thought. Oh, and if I somehow missed the pictures, please, point me in the right direction.
this space intentionally left blank
Hard to "fix" the impact of a 200 m wide asteriod (look up Toutatis in a search engine or 1997 -XF11) or comet smashing into the ocean or Asia (the 2 biggest areas, simply for arguments sake). This is an Extinction Level Event - there will be no one left to "fix" it. At least with 100 people in an orbiting space station the human race has some chance of survival.
Besides, there are literally thousands of NEO's which are made of rare metals and elements which could be mined, and tha's some economic justification there.
Have some imagination!
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Just based on the myriad of AI definitions,
it appears that AI is
a set of computer algorithms that replicate human cognitive functions to some degree.
Also, an AI is defined by the program that is most similiar to human cognitive functions.
Basically, the definition always changes as new AI innovations occur. The newest and best AI becomes the next definition. We just need to establish a starting AI and go from there.
I'm sure there are better AI definitions, but it seems the AI definition changes as much as the definition for life changes in biology.
--my sig was kidnapped by another sig
On the whole, Deep Space 1 is just a robot with some extremely cool sensors and actuators in an adverse environment. Until now, all such robots launched by NASA have been, at best, remote control "toys" (albeit extremely cool ones). This new software makes the first jump by NASA from remote control to teleautonomous.
This new field that NASA has entered, teleautonomous robotics, allows ground controllers to spend less time actually controlling the robot saving some serious cash for the NASA budget. This will allow even cooler robots to be built in the future, such as their proposed Mission to Pluto.
I can't disagree with you more. Space travel is NOTORIOUSLY inefficient--it costs millions upon millions of dollars per component on each shuttle and probe NASA and other space agencies send into orbit. I should know, I work for Lockheed Martin. Absolutely nothing within the current world socioeconomic and scientific structure suggests that space travel is going to be feasible on a large scale any time in the year future--the space program has been active for decades and the price per mission keeps going up, not down.
You may work for Lockheed Martin, but apparently not in a function relating to the HSF (Human Space Flight) program. Under the SFOC (Space Flight Operations Contract) that NASA has signed with United Space Alliance (Lockheed and Boeing Parnership), mission cost have been declining! Yes! Declining! Consolidating all of the operations from planning to launch to landing is performed by one company that has and will continue to reduce the cost of running the space program.
Also, apparently you haven't heard of a little trend happening in NASA pushing towards the small, quick, and cheap. Pathfinder was merely the start. Many other programs are already nearing completion under that same paradigm.
We made a manned moon landing in 1969, 30 years ago. It's a really big rock. There's nothing there. If there was, we'd still be going there.
Why the hell are we crashing a probe into the surface then? Hmm? For grins? Please.
We've been to Mars, via several unmanned probes. What's the point of sending people there? Again, it's just a big rock. If there was anything interesting, our super-expensive, super-accurate probes and surveying equipment would have picked it up by now.
There are things on the bottom of the ocean being discovered every year. And the current generation of probes are nowhere near "super-accurate". Nothing like using the five senses that we as humans have.
We know what asteroids are made of. Scientists have been studying impact sites of landed meteorites for years. Guess what? They're rocks. Metallic rocks perhaps, but certainly not rare enough to justify SPENDING millions upon millions of dollars to retrieve them.
Yeah, they are rocks. They tell us about our past and can help us predict the future. The rocks discovered barely tell the story of space. There have been traces of nearly every element in the periodic table found in the fragments. That means economic possibilities do exist for extra terrestrial mining.
You claim that "if there is a push in the direction of Space it will sprout new industries to support itself thereby rendering the enconomic issue a moot point." Why is this? Things aren't going to get less expensive just because we have private companies footing the bill instead of NASA. Besides, there's still nowhere to go, and no point in going there.
See above. Cheaper by the mission. Private companies just add to the competition. Competition lead to lower prices and more efficient ways od doing things. Also, with private entities entering the field, more of the expensive components gets produced, also leading to lower prices. As for a place to go, look up. Many places to go, many things to see...
Your romantic notions are, well, romantic, but they have absolutely no scientific basis behind them.
Gee, what the hell have we been doing in the past ~40 years? Sticking our thumbs in our asses? I suggest you stop working for L-M. Your heart doesn't seem to be with the rest of the team.
RB
The name is Neo.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
What's on the moon? Just for starters:
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I see a few others have already posted similar to this, but I think I need to underline that this is NOT AI!! Can it learn? I don't think so. Basically it just identifies what to do for a specific situation according to a knowledge base. Big wow... I mean, it's still cool and all, just don't go calling it AI when it's not.
Check out http://www.eet.com/story/OEG19990607S0035 It's mostly about using analog electronics to create very simple nervous systems. A Swedish satellite set to launch this August will use such a system for it's attitude control system.
Moo!
dB!
Actually, the space station gave us a lot of valuable data pertinent to long term space colonies and exploration. Things like the effects of long term zero-gee that we can't get with the space shuttle. (Since it can't stay up for 6 months at a time.)
Geek-grrl in training
"Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
I looked through the pages listed and could not find any reference to the use of Common Lisp. Could you please point me to a reference somewhere saying they are using Lisp? I would be quite interested in this information.
---
The JPL article refers to the technology as "Synthetic Intelligence", not "Artificial Intelligence", highlighting a key idea. This "intelligence" was built, programmed, what have you. Basically, what they have is a complex program that can diagnose problems correctly. I think when the machine can accurately detect that the "false errors" it was receiving were truly false and can thus operate outside its bounds, we can call it AI.
Of course, that doesn't diminish its importance. If only we could get this sort of self-diagnostic power into our Linux and MS boxes.
Unmanned probes cannot conduct long term experiments that require direct human intervention.
True, in a tautological way, but irrelevant. Nothing actually requires direct human intervention. Intervention through ground monitoring and control would work just fine. If the money spent on hauling up astronauts and all their support equipment was spent on developing ground-controlled tools, they would be doing much more for less money.
I'm all for space colonization, but humans in space are cargo, dead weight (at least this close to the Earth, where radio delays are minimal).
You know...
If this gets put into use by 2001... um.... that's kinda creepy.
I am so pissed, I didn't hit the right button
I can't disagree with you more. Space travel is NOTORIOUSLY inefficient--it costs millions upon millions of dollars per component on each shuttle and probe NASA and other space agencies send into orbit. I should know, I work for Lockheed Martin. Absolutely nothing within the current world socioeconomic and scientific structure suggests that space travel is going to be feasible on a large scale any time in the year future--the space program has been active for decades and the price per mission keeps going up, not down.
You may work for Lockheed Martin, but apparently not in a function relating to the HSF (Human Space Flight) program. Under the SFOC (Space Flight Operations Contract) that NASA has signed with United Space Alliance (Lockheed and Boeing Parnership), mission cost have been declining! Yes! Declining! Consolidating all of the operations from planning to launch to landing is performed by one company that has and will continue to reduce the cost of running the space program.
Also, apparently you haven't heard of a little trend happening in NASA pushing towards the small, quick, and cheap. Pathfinder was merely the start. Many other programs are already nearing completion under that same paradigm.
We made a manned moon landing in 1969, 30 years ago. It's a really big rock. There's nothing there. If there was, we'd still be going there.
Why the hell are we crashing a probe into the surface then? Hmm? For grins? Please.
We've been to Mars, via several unmanned probes. What's the point of sending people there? Again, it's just a big rock. If there was anything interesting, our super-expensive, super-accurate probes and surveying equipment would have picked it up by now.
There are things on the bottom of the ocean being discovered every year. And the current generation of probes are nowhere near "super-accurate". Nothing like using the five senses that we as humans have.
We know what asteroids are made of. Scientists have been studying impact sites of landed meteorites for years. Guess what? They're rocks. Metallic rocks perhaps, but certainly not rare enough to justify SPENDING millions upon millions of dollars to retrieve them.
Yeah, they are rocks. They tell us about our past and can help us predict the future. The rocks discovered barely tell the story of space. There have been traces of nearly every element in the periodic table found in the fragments. That means economic possibilities do exist for extra terrestrial mining.
You claim that "if there is a push in the direction of Space it will sprout new industries to support itself thereby rendering the enconomic issue a moot point." Why is this? Things aren't going to get less expensive just because we have private companies footing the bill instead of NASA. Besides, there's still nowhere to go, and no point in going there.
See above. Cheaper by the mission. Private companies just add to the competition. Competition lead to lower prices and more efficient ways od doing things. Also, with private entities entering the field, more of the expensive components gets produced, also leading to lower prices. As for a place to go, look up. Many places to go, many things to see...
Your romantic notions are, well, romantic, but they have absolutely no scientific basis behind them.
Gee, what the hell have we been doing in the past ~40 years? Sticking our thumbs in our asses? I suggest you stop working for L-M. Your heart doesn't seem to be with the rest of the team.
RB
Posted by kurien:
The MIR software is more a continuation of the model-based diagnosis work that came out of Xerox PARC and other places in the past decade.
Model-based diagnosis uses Bayes' rule as do Bayes' nets, but it is specialized to the problem of diagnosis, and now recovery/reconfiguration. This specialization allows very fast inference on this restricted class of problem. There are some systems that do diagnosis strictly with Bayes' nets as well, but MIR uses additional techniques such as conflict directed search from the model-based diagnosis world.
The MIR system on DS1 was provided by an inference engine called "Livingstone", after the doctor and explorer, which was written at NASA Ames. You can grab papers and other info at NASA Model-based Autonomy Home Page.
Cheers,
James Kurien
Remote Agent Team
You'd think /. would know better than to use terms like this without knowing their meaning. Obviously you guys don't know what an Artificial Intelligence is.
This is not an Artificial Intelligence. An AI would pass the Turing Test, and I'm quite certain this won't. This is a project specific system that has been designed to operate a spacecraft.
It's an Expert System. It's been designed to know all about the spacecraft and it's controls and what to do given a set of conditions. Most likely the engineers can give it a high level objective ("Go to these coordinates") and it will be able to interpret that into a series of steps required to complete the objective. And given the final objective, it will be able to handle exceptions in the process without deviating from the overall mission. And if it comes upon an exception it can't handle, it will shout for help. Then, perhaps, it will be able to learn from whatever ground control tells it to do and add that to its list of "exception handlers".
-Todd
is no more intelligent than an if {} then {} else {} statement. This kind of coding has been around for years...it's not THAT great. But what i find cool is that it's the first time it's been givin authority over a satillite's internel systems. Hopefully we can see this kind of stuff prosper. NASA is already doing well with their smaller, faster, cheaper projects, now they need to add smarter to it. Research in this area will make anyone launching a sallite have an easier time maintaining it. Maybe this can start being applied to the non-satillite-launching community, Airliners that diagnose themselves and all those other nifty kinda things.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
An expert system is considered to be a primitive type of AI. At least, that's what I was taught in a class on the subject.
AI is a much broader term. "Intelligence", in this sense, simply means problem solving ability. Old-school AI - expert systems, minimax algorithms, theorem provers, and the like - tries to mimic abstract reasoning. New-school AI - then work of folks like Rodney Brooks - asks how biological organisms interact with their environment to get things done and tries to apply that to robots and computer systems.
Expert systems are type of old-school AI - so no foul in calling this AI.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
This is the sort of thing that we should be putting the majority of our space exploration budget into.
Massive PR exploits like the space station, or a manned missions to Mars will never have the same ROI as unmanned exploration craft.
It just makes me want to cry when I think about all the good science that could be conducted by probes like these with the money that is being wasted on the space station.
Oh, pooh. Try The Adolescence of P1, of an AI whose purpose is to avoid detection. I particularly liked its making programs more efficient so it could use the extra time...
As Arthur C. Clarke also demonstrated in his classic 2001, you can easily synthesize gravity using a rotating spacecraft. If you do this, justifying further fruitless research into microgravity is just putting people's health in jeopardy.
In his excellent book, The Case For Mars, Robert Zubrin advocates a well-researched and complete plan for the exploration of Mars. It avoids extended travel through microgravity, does not require any on-orbit assembly, and could be launched with a slightly modified shuttle or even by starting up the Saturn V production line again! For not much more than we are going to waste on the space station, we could go to Mars within 10 years.
Check out Mars Direct for more information on Robert Zubrin's excellent arguments, and The Mars Society to get involved.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Well, "Massive PR Exploits like the space station" keep NASA in the news and funded to do things like this. The number of new technologies and new techniques that have been developed to build ISS are staggering. Any new program that NASA undertakes usually has massive tech spinoffs that can be used in the private sector. People said the same thing about the Apollo program in the 1960's and huge technological benefits such as microcomputers and smaller IC's were gained with it. ISS is providing the same as we speak.
Do you have any idea what the ISS is for?
Unmanned probes cannot conduct long term experiments that require direct human intervention. The ISS can. What about the Shuttle you say? Well, the longest period of time it can stay in space is around two weeks, which really is not long term. ISS is one of the best things the world (Yes, the world, NASA, NASDA, ESA, and the RSA are working on it together) is doing.
It isn't always reaching the destination that is the goal, but the path along which you take to get there.
RB
BTW, Part of the human space flight program (ISS, Shuttle) involves AI development which has been pretty sucessful so far.
Speaking of Artificial Intelligence and Remote Control of something... Am I the only one that is somewhat amaized by the new Ad here from Sony for the Robotic Dog? $2500, and has been sold out since the first time I saw the ad?
Wonder what kind of interfaces it has, what the code base is, etc, etc...
Just thought I'd ask, since this might be as close as a story gets to relevent.
take a look at the telemetry log - it contains lines such as:
;; [:EXEC-ACT :INTERESTING 43645139.016] ;; Simulating NEB1 status throw failure ;;
:)
this is not only lisp/scheme syntax, but the colon-prefix notation is typical lisp. it's also one of the ways one could represent phenomena in lisp-based inference engines.
granted, the evidence is circumstantial, but fits lisp better than any other language!
My other car is a cons.
Is this really an AI? Aren't there a set of laws that define what is truly an AI and what is just Agent software [...]?
oh, but it is ai. this system uses a full inference engine - formal inference being one of the 'classic areas' in ai research.
here's what happens. you give the computer information about the components of the system (in this case, all the parts of the proble that it needs to know about: probably thrusters, sensors, etc.), information about what inputs/outputs these components handle, and what are the effects of those components on other components. these details should be numerous, but fairly simple - after all, one thingy can be causally directly connected to only so many other thingies.
and then once you have this network in place, you can tell the machine to achieve some goal - for example, once it reaches one a.u. from the earth it should take photos of the earth every hour.
the computer will now perform 'inference' - grovel through its network of dependencies, find all conditions that need to be satisfied for the task to be successful (open camera lens, etc.:), will satisfy them, and perform the task. furthermore, if equipment fails (as it invariably does), the internal network will get updated with the information that the goal is not achievable because of some X, and the engine will find some other way of achieving or maintaining the goal state.
judging from the telemetry log, i'm pretty sure that's the type of engine they use. high intelligence it ain't, but hey, it's better than doing everything manually the way nasa used to do it... but the term 'agent' is really ill-fitted to this application (not the least because 'agent' is one of the most widely abused terms in computer science today) - so the whole probe may be an autonomous agent in a sense that it has a concept of 'survival goals' and takes actions to make sure they are achieved, but it would be much clearer to call it an inference engine...
My other car is a cons.
Uh, what we learned from Mir is that we do not know very much about the long-term effects of microgravity. Mir is old and does not provide the research space and other resources needed for the types of studies required for research.
Mir provided a platform for asking new and bigger questions that ISS will hopefully be able to provide answers to.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
But what can it tell us that Mir didn't? We already know a lot about long-term effects of microgravity. The cost of finding out what a year does as opposed to 8 months isn't worth that much money.
Think about it. If you were an AI made of electronics wouldn't you want/need humans around to take care of you and do things you couldn't yet do yourself?
:)
That's what I will^H^H^H^H would do.
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
I guess you folks missed this one:
HARLEQUIN LISPWORKS FLIES ON NASA'S DEEP SPACE 1
Cambridge, Mass., May 21, 1999
link to pressrelease
Harlequin LispWorks is supporting the operation of the Remote Agent
Experiment (RAX), activated this week on NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft.
However, nothing like that happened. Of course, people are often worried about using untested technology in such situations, but that's one of the major points of this NASA program -- to test new technology, particularly technology that makes such missions cheaper in the long run.
The point of the RAX software, however, was to automate a lot of the tasks that ground controllers now perform manually: planning in detail, recovery from failure, conservation of resources, etc. If you want to do complicated things, you usually have to use more resources, regardless of whether you use LISP. If you succeeded in writing such software in C or assembly, you would probably find that it wasn't so much smaller, after all. These engineers weren't using some bloated, slow, half-baked version of LISP implemented as a quick hack. They were using the real thing, with all the tools necessary to optimize for use of time and space.
Why the space station, though? There is not one experiment to be done on the space station that couldn't be done reasonably well billions of dollars cheaper by an unmanned probe or in the space shuttle. Public support is a goood argument, I guess, but for that kind of cash NASA can do some serious PR! They could just buy commercials on "Channel 1" telling every middle school kid to be an astronaut instead of building the space station. It'd be cheaper, so they could have more unmanned probes and learn about stuff.
It's rather optimistic to think that we're at the point in human history where sending people into space is the main goal. Far from it! Where are we going to send them? We could send a few dozen people to the moon, but what good is that going to do us? No, we're better off waiting till we have something worthwhile, like at least go to Mars. And the unmannned missions are the best way to get us to where we can do that. Accomplishing the goals of the Pathfinder and Deep Space missions with manned expeditions would cost a lot, but these are the things we need to get somewhere useful.
The space station doesn't work yet; it's a big money-hole in the sky. They've given up on Mir now, too. The international space station is one of the few scientific endeavours I've seen scientists say is a waste of money.
Ah, LISP, one of the slightly-less braindead languages.
I have been searching for OpenGL bindings into LISP for a while.
Anyone happen to know if they exist?
Scott
Who has an unused and pretty lambda?
1) a launching/refueling point for deep solar missions.
2) I think there will be a vehicle like a space shuttle permanently attached to it, so they can affect repairs on failing satellites in a resonable amount of time.
3) This is a very good way to get several countries to work together; especially the scientific communities of those countries.
4) It is a place to test the "space worthiness" of several products, from solar panels, paints, foods and especially construction methods & tools (a power screw driver will turn the user, and not the screw).
If we ever want to go into space, to attain space travel, we have to START SOMEWHERE. It it such a difficult problem (or series of problems) that it won't be miracously solved one day.
We might figure out warp drives, but to get stuff
from the surface into space, and what to make the ship out of, what they need, etc. We won't know until we try it now.
just my 2 cents.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
Well, think of it this way. When we get the space station working, we can send more of these probes into space without the extreme costs for fuel on a space shuttle. One of the advantages about a Space Station is to make space travel cheaper
Just how are you planning to get the probe to the space station? Hmmm? It would have to go up by shuttle. Unless you're planning to build the probe on the space station. You'd still have to shuttle up all of the parts/raw materials PLUS all of the technicians, test equipment, etc.
The ISS only makes sense as a platform for long term biological/microgravity research. Anything else is better handled by robots.
Forget the ISS, even the shuttle doesn't make sense. It costs somewhere in the neighbourhood of $3000.00 per kilogram to launch a payload by shuttle, but only $300.00 per kilo by conventional rocket.
Why send a shuttle, its crew, food, air and water for the crew, external fuel tank, satellite booster rocket, etc when you could probably do the whole job with just one of the solid rocket boosters?
Think about it. You're lifting a team of at least three, probably seven, people up into orbit (endangering their lives, by the way) just so that they can push a button to launch the probe? For all I know the button may still be pushed from mission control back here on terra firma.
I agree with the previous poster. Put the funds into oceanic research.
Hi,
C also the NASA DS1 Mission , testing even more cool stuff like ion_engines...
Joerg
True AI could be considered a new branch of human evolution, if it has the power to self replicate. Since it would be created by humans, and have all the requirements of life, it would be an instant new life form. (Although not human, it would be in our genera) Similar to when some spicies double the number of genes.
Yes, but HAL was "born" last year. So we are certainly playing catchup.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I didn't notice anything mentioning the use of lisp either, though I suspect the original author was rather referring to lisp because it is commonly used to write AI type things. (That and scheme....*shudder*)
Actually I think LISP and PROLOG are the big AI languages. Scheme is pretty much a subset of LISP so US researchers tend to use LISP more. Europeans tend to use PROLOG.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I didn't notice anything mentioning the use of lisp either, though I suspect the original author was rather referring to lisp because it is commonly used to write AI type things. (That and scheme....*shudder*)
if the schedule says the engine should be on
if the antenna should be pointed at earth
if the camera should point at a target
if the sun sensors fail
if the star sensors fail
if the heaters fail
if the gyros, radios...
I think that you will soon find that your if-then-else decision tree will have expanded to a rather unwieldy size. With certain unforseen situations forgotten.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Common Lisp this time.