One of the primary arguments is that machines may better suited for making the nebulous civilian/non-civilian distinction.
How can they if you cannot specify how to make that decision in the rigorous way a machine requires?
Assuming that you are not talking about the low-level machine vision requirements...
How about one of the simplest possible rules that states: Only engage targets that are actively and visibly firing weapons at the me.
Assuming you can recognize if a combatant is actually firing a weapon at you, it is a pretty direct way of inferring hostile intent. Not the safest route for a human to follow but one that would probably reduce non-combatant casualties in many situations.
Concerning the perceptual requirements: While machine perception is not there yet, there are advances being made that can help realize the perception necessary to realize relatively simple rules such as this (e.g. a variety of darpa programs for locating snipers such as described here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090324141049.htm)
In the situations of interest, it is rarely the case that only the soldier's life is on the line.
I am not certain a situation like that is of primary interest. I would think that battlefield robots would be more suitable for regular combat operations rather then fighting asymmetric warfare or peacekeeping operations. A point that is also mentioned in the article. Further, I don't think anyone is claiming that once robots become common place in warfare, civilian deaths will be a thing of the past. Varying amounts of civilian casualties are acceptable and in fact deemed ethical according to modern thinking (google: 'propotionality' and 'military necessity'). Instead what is likely, for an additional cost, robotic combatants may be used to reduce civilian causalities in a manner similar to the way smart munitions may be used in place of traditional munitions.
For peace-keeping operations like you describe, however, I agree there is significant difficulties ranging from low level perception to questions concerning the utility of engaging a particular target (e.g. which is better, killing a non-combatant by mistake or allowing for several non-combatants to be killed by lack of action. Humans even have counter intuitive beliefs for such situations).
It is certainly arguable, however, that these sort of problems may not be addressable without the realization of general intelligence.
One of the primary arguments is that machines may better suited for making the nebulous civilian/non-civilian distinction. In the heat of battle, it may be argued, a human soldier is going to be jumpy and potentially trigger happy. Rightfully so, a misclassification of combatant as non-combatant may cost the soldier their life. A robot is under no such pressure. It may err on the side of caution and classify all except the most obvious aggressors as non-combatants. The cost of misclassification in this case is merely some hardware and not a human life.
The problem is that the transaction is not over upon payment. What if the buyer says they don't receive the item or say the item is faulty when it is not. The seller won't have much recourse if they already left feedback and the buyer ends up being sleazy after payment...
The Japanese are the one doing the research partly beacuse the west and particularly the US seem to have some sort of taboo about humanoid robot research. Perhaps it is some religious qualm or too many terminator movies but generally thier humanoid robots are from the torso up or torso down so as not to be too humanlike...
Actually, the japanese are more concerned about having the robots as companions then as servents. The dream appears to be something along the lines of astro-boy. Look at some of the commercials for sony's humanoid. It is being marketed as a companion for the elderly and lonely. Westerners are more concerned with having the robotic domestic slave.
That would also imply that you need to encode every path explicitly. What about an algorithm that creates paths it for you. It would take an infinite number of bits to encode the explicit form of all the squared numbers. The formula/algorithm for recreating any of these numbers takes far less.
Partly because unlike a 4 wheeled robot, the segway is dynamically stable. It poses interesting problems as the robot falls when it is not moving unlike most 4-wheeled robots. The fact is wheeled also allows additional mobility when compared to the traditional hopping and walking dynamically stable robots.
Spoken like a true computer vision guy.:) But as a roboticist-in-training, I must defend the tinkering AI students. I would argue that without an intimate understanding of the interfaces (both sensors and actuators) as well as the environment in which such a system will operate, truly intelligent machines will fail to appear. It often appears to me that many of the computationally complex approaches seem more like brute forcing the problem and often appear to be overkill when creating an intelligent system. With proper understanding, elegant systems such as Horwswill's Polly, while certainly not employing sophisticated number crunching, it was still able to perform its tasks intelligently, largely because the time was taken to understand the hardware and how it will interact within the world.
Actually a PDA as well as all of our general purpose computing devices are FSA equivalent. That infinite stack or tape makes things a bit difficult in the real world.
Re:Warping the definition of robot
on
Immobile Robots
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It is a robot in the sense that it recieves data through its sensors and then interacts with the world via effectors. It just happens that for an immobile robot, none of the effectors are wheels or other locomotion devices.
Perhaps it make more sense from this perspective.
The program used in the experiment was used both as instructions to be carried out as well as information to be passed on to later generations (or iterations if you prefer). This is very similar to what happens in a biological system in which dna is both used as information for replication as well as instructions for the creation of various proteins. The 'evolution' in both cases is due to combinations and mutations of previous generations information which is then expressed in altered intructions (be it a different protein or different program). There does not seem to be anything to imply that evolution requires a drastic change of physical form or purpose, only changes in information that may result in such drastic expressions or more subtle ones such as described in the experiment.
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One of the primary arguments is that machines may better suited for making the nebulous civilian/non-civilian distinction.
How can they if you cannot specify how to make that decision in the rigorous way a machine requires?
Assuming that you are not talking about the low-level machine vision requirements...
How about one of the simplest possible rules that states: Only engage targets that are actively and visibly firing weapons at the me.
Assuming you can recognize if a combatant is actually firing a weapon at you, it is a pretty direct way of inferring hostile intent. Not the safest route for a human to follow but one that would probably reduce non-combatant casualties in many situations.
Concerning the perceptual requirements: While machine perception is not there yet, there are advances being made that can help realize the perception necessary to realize relatively simple rules such as this (e.g. a variety of darpa programs for locating snipers such as described here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090324141049.htm)
In the situations of interest, it is rarely the case that only the soldier's life is on the line.
I am not certain a situation like that is of primary interest. I would think that battlefield robots would be more suitable for regular combat operations rather then fighting asymmetric warfare or peacekeeping operations. A point that is also mentioned in the article. Further, I don't think anyone is claiming that once robots become common place in warfare, civilian deaths will be a thing of the past. Varying amounts of civilian casualties are acceptable and in fact deemed ethical according to modern thinking (google: 'propotionality' and 'military necessity'). Instead what is likely, for an additional cost, robotic combatants may be used to reduce civilian causalities in a manner similar to the way smart munitions may be used in place of traditional munitions.
For peace-keeping operations like you describe, however, I agree there is significant difficulties ranging from low level perception to questions concerning the utility of engaging a particular target (e.g. which is better, killing a non-combatant by mistake or allowing for several non-combatants to be killed by lack of action. Humans even have counter intuitive beliefs for such situations).
It is certainly arguable, however, that these sort of problems may not be addressable without the realization of general intelligence.
One of the primary arguments is that machines may better suited for making the nebulous civilian/non-civilian distinction. In the heat of battle, it may be argued, a human soldier is going to be jumpy and potentially trigger happy. Rightfully so, a misclassification of combatant as non-combatant may cost the soldier their life. A robot is under no such pressure. It may err on the side of caution and classify all except the most obvious aggressors as non-combatants. The cost of misclassification in this case is merely some hardware and not a human life.
The problem is that the transaction is not over upon payment. What if the buyer says they don't receive the item or say the item is faulty when it is not. The seller won't have much recourse if they already left feedback and the buyer ends up being sleazy after payment...
The Japanese are the one doing the research partly beacuse the west and particularly the US seem to have some sort of taboo about humanoid robot research. Perhaps it is some religious qualm or too many terminator movies but generally thier humanoid robots are from the torso up or torso down so as not to be too humanlike...
Actually, the japanese are more concerned about having the robots as companions then as servents. The dream appears to be something along the lines of astro-boy. Look at some of the commercials for sony's humanoid. It is being marketed as a companion for the elderly and lonely. Westerners are more concerned with having the robotic domestic slave.
That would also imply that you need to encode every path explicitly. What about an algorithm that creates paths it for you. It would take an infinite number of bits to encode the explicit form of all the squared numbers. The formula/algorithm for recreating any of these numbers takes far less.
Partly because unlike a 4 wheeled robot, the segway is dynamically stable. It poses interesting problems as the robot falls when it is not moving unlike most 4-wheeled robots. The fact is wheeled also allows additional mobility when compared to the traditional hopping and walking dynamically stable robots.
Spoken like a true computer vision guy. :) But as a roboticist-in-training, I must defend the tinkering AI students. I would argue that without an intimate understanding of the interfaces (both sensors and actuators) as well as the environment in which such a system will operate, truly intelligent machines will fail to appear. It often appears to me that many of the computationally complex approaches seem more like brute forcing the problem and often appear to be overkill when creating an intelligent system. With proper understanding, elegant systems such as Horwswill's Polly, while certainly not employing sophisticated number crunching, it was still able to perform its tasks intelligently, largely because the time was taken to understand the hardware and how it will interact within the world.
Actually a PDA as well as all of our general purpose computing devices are FSA equivalent. That infinite stack or tape makes things a bit difficult in the real world.
The SDR actually has impressive balancing capabilities.
Look at this video clip to check it out: Video
Here is some info on sumo matches. Click me
It is a robot in the sense that it recieves data through its sensors and then interacts with the world via effectors. It just happens that for an immobile robot, none of the effectors are wheels or other locomotion devices.
Perhaps it make more sense from this perspective.
The program used in the experiment was used both as instructions to be carried out as well as information to be passed on to later generations (or iterations if you prefer). This is very similar to what happens in a biological system in which dna is both used as information for replication as well as instructions for the creation of various proteins. The 'evolution' in both cases is due to combinations and mutations of previous generations information which is then expressed in altered intructions (be it a different protein or different program). There does not seem to be anything to imply that evolution requires a drastic change of physical form or purpose, only changes in information that may result in such drastic expressions or more subtle ones such as described in the experiment.
Check out genetic programming. Automatic programming via genetic algorithms.
You may want to check check out marsupial robotics.
I remember a kool-aid game for the atari 2600. Me and my brother saved up kool-aid points until we had enough for them to send it to us.