The marker looks very similar to those used in the Open Source ARToolKit - http://www.equator.ecs.soton.ac.uk/projects/artool kit/ - it uses known-size 2D barcodes to get the 3D transform of the camera relative to the position of the marker. Would probably be straightforward to extend the ARToolKit to be able to do this.
Hello, I made the post you quoted from, I am now logged in. Using an MMORPG to try to teach an AI to my knowledge, has never been done for academic research. I think the major reservations you would get from researchers would be a) could be difficult to reproduce for independent verification; b) it would learn to play a game, and that's just not politically correct for most academics, some of whom are already struggling to be taken seriously. Another thing about this research is that it's not just about testing or tweaking learning techniques, but also hoping that something new will present itself, that perhaps an algorithm will break in an interesting way due to an unforseen circumstance, or some oft-overlooked causal connection will prove to be critical - of course, that may well happen in an RPG, but the perception is that it is more likely to happen in the 'real' world.
I don't know as anyone could answer your second question. What you speak of is human-inspired developmental learning on robots. It is a fairly recent approach, some major researchers even now have robot 'children' that they are taking care of and are hoping will develop various qualities through long-term interaction. But it is very difficult to know how to implement, or how the development is to be 'staged' if it is to be staged at all (I mean, as in Piaget). Is hardware/software the limitation? A lot of people I know would say definitely 'yes'. But perhaps not - we just don't know what way is the best way to get 'intelligence' working.
My hobby was coding, my undergrad degree electronics engineering, my PhD bio-inspired robotics. I often wish I had more background in philosophy - during all those years, every time I thought I had a handle on what intelligence is and how to get it working, it would slip away from me, or be taken by force. 'Classical' AI was either defended as the one true path or dismissed as being bankrupt and a dead-end, depending on who I was talking to. Cognitive and computational neuroscience were (and are) raided mercilessly by everyone, and professors would claim 'emergent' behaviour from their neural net implementations, that many coders would consider contrived. Some said internal models were the way, others rejected their existence and claimed that the world was its own model. Developmental learning and evolutionary algorithms were seen by some as a route out from the AI quagmire, but all implementations had horrendous computational cost (summing up AI in general). Computer vision is a massive AI problem in its own right, and developing controllers for multiple degrees of freedom is a black art, but many naive researchers would turn to robotics in droves to try to add some form of credence to their algorithms and approaches. And there were people who said thought was language, and concentrated on speech interaction and natural language processing. And there were theories of theory of mind, and many other things.
As an engineer, I once thought that 'intelligence' was seeing my robots acquire the ability to solve problems to achieve a given goal. With the benefit of all those other perspectives, I no longer think that. I have also noticed that engineers become jaded when implementation moves consistently beyond reach. But I still wonder sometimes, just what intelligence really is and how it can be made artificially. Perhaps, with the help of philosophers, and those in other disciplines, we will get there in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
The marker looks very similar to those used in the Open Source ARToolKit - http://www.equator.ecs.soton.ac.uk/projects/artool kit/ - it uses known-size 2D barcodes to get the 3D transform of the camera relative to the position of the marker. Would probably be straightforward to extend the ARToolKit to be able to do this.
Hello, I made the post you quoted from, I am now logged in. Using an MMORPG to try to teach an AI to my knowledge, has never been done for academic research. I think the major reservations you would get from researchers would be a) could be difficult to reproduce for independent verification; b) it would learn to play a game, and that's just not politically correct for most academics, some of whom are already struggling to be taken seriously. Another thing about this research is that it's not just about testing or tweaking learning techniques, but also hoping that something new will present itself, that perhaps an algorithm will break in an interesting way due to an unforseen circumstance, or some oft-overlooked causal connection will prove to be critical - of course, that may well happen in an RPG, but the perception is that it is more likely to happen in the 'real' world.
I don't know as anyone could answer your second question. What you speak of is human-inspired developmental learning on robots. It is a fairly recent approach, some major researchers even now have robot 'children' that they are taking care of and are hoping will develop various qualities through long-term interaction. But it is very difficult to know how to implement, or how the development is to be 'staged' if it is to be staged at all (I mean, as in Piaget). Is hardware/software the limitation? A lot of people I know would say definitely 'yes'. But perhaps not - we just don't know what way is the best way to get 'intelligence' working.
My hobby was coding, my undergrad degree electronics engineering, my PhD bio-inspired robotics. I often wish I had more background in philosophy - during all those years, every time I thought I had a handle on what intelligence is and how to get it working, it would slip away from me, or be taken by force. 'Classical' AI was either defended as the one true path or dismissed as being bankrupt and a dead-end, depending on who I was talking to. Cognitive and computational neuroscience were (and are) raided mercilessly by everyone, and professors would claim 'emergent' behaviour from their neural net implementations, that many coders would consider contrived. Some said internal models were the way, others rejected their existence and claimed that the world was its own model. Developmental learning and evolutionary algorithms were seen by some as a route out from the AI quagmire, but all implementations had horrendous computational cost (summing up AI in general). Computer vision is a massive AI problem in its own right, and developing controllers for multiple degrees of freedom is a black art, but many naive researchers would turn to robotics in droves to try to add some form of credence to their algorithms and approaches. And there were people who said thought was language, and concentrated on speech interaction and natural language processing. And there were theories of theory of mind, and many other things.
As an engineer, I once thought that 'intelligence' was seeing my robots acquire the ability to solve problems to achieve a given goal. With the benefit of all those other perspectives, I no longer think that. I have also noticed that engineers become jaded when implementation moves consistently beyond reach. But I still wonder sometimes, just what intelligence really is and how it can be made artificially. Perhaps, with the help of philosophers, and those in other disciplines, we will get there in the end.