The uncanny valley just got deeper. "Treat yourself to the perfect woman."
posted on May 27, 2008 - View this thread

Each year, people around the world spend billions of hours playing computer games. What if all this time and energy could be channeled into useful work? What if people playing computer games could, without consciously doing so, simultaneously solve large-scale problems?
GWAP is Luis van Ahn's answer [PDF, HTML cache] to these questions, a collection of easy and engaging games that make computers smarter.
posted on May 27, 2008 - View this thread

The AI-Box Experiments. The hypothesis: "A transhuman can take over a human mind through a text-only terminal." Does Artifical Intelligence create moral monsters (PDF) ? Can we create friendly AI?
posted on May 21, 2008 - View this thread

Out of the Blue: "Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?"
posted on Mar 3, 2008 - View this thread

Got a question for God? Tough. But godsbot the Christian Robot might be the next best thing. A $10 donation (minimum) will get you one year of access--or at least click the Google ads. More in the press release. Oh, and via.
posted on Feb 7, 2008 - View this thread

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has put up a some interesting media, including a variety of talks from the Singularity Summit 2006 and 2007, about the possibilites and progress of technological development. For an overview of the issues Ray Kurzweil talks about the ideas and promises of the singularity, while Douglas Hofstadter calls for deeper exploration of the implications and hazards of coming technology.
posted on Jan 21, 2008 - View this thread

Three AI researchers:
Hugo de Garis: Home - Wiki
Jürgen Schmidhuber: Home - Wiki
Marcus Hutter: Home - Wiki
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

Dr. Ben Goertzel is an interesting guy. Having previously tried to create an AI based on internet distribution he refined his approach. High level elaborations on his developing thinking here, here and here (arranged chronologically). He gave a talk to Google about it recently (video) (related text), while mentioning why he thought Google isn't in the AI business. Here's a (low quality, sorry) vid of his system's virtual learning in action. Research finances were always a problem - could this be a solution?
posted on Sep 24, 2007 - View this thread

I Chat, Therefore I Am... Outputs from chatterbots A.L.I.C.E. and Jabberwacky are piped back in forth and have a conversation that goes from nonsensical one line to surreal the next. [via Digg and BB]
posted on May 18, 2007 - View this thread

Introduced to Western culture by the Beatles in their single Norwegian Wood, the sitar has featured prominently in North Indian classical music for centuries. Princeton-based computer scientist Ajay Kapur updates the instrument with his ESitar, an audio and video controller that uses gesture input (PDF) and machine learning algorithms to facilitate joining the computer with Ajay in his sitar performance. Undergraduate engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania work from the other direction, building RAVI-bot, an award-winning, self-playing robotic sitar (YouTube) programmed to generate music from classical Raga scales and melodies all on its own. For those in the Philadelphia area, be sure to check out a live performance of RAVI-bot at the local Klein Art Gallery.
posted on Apr 19, 2007 - View this thread

Gary Stasiuk's beautiful Digital Creatures pulls the curtains on the kinematics of geometric objects, after which he plays with the mathematics and user interactivity of generative art and shows how to build the appearance of AI behaviors into Flash objects.
posted on Apr 11, 2007 - View this thread

Victim of the Brain A 'docudrama' about Godel, Escher and Bach author, Douglas Hofstadter, and philosopher Dan Dennett produced in 1988. I'm not sure how to describe it, other than incredibly strange and fascinating.
posted on Apr 11, 2007 - View this thread

Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Palm and Handspring, has started a new company, called Numenta, to test his controversial theory of intelligence. Whether you find his theory plausible or not, his book, "On Intelligence" is fascinating. Numenta is attempting to build A.I.s using Hawkins' theory as a backbone. They've developed a software engine and a Python-based API, which they've made public (as free downloads), so that hackers can start playing. They've also released manuals, a whitepaper (pdf) and videos [1] [2]. (At about 30:18 into the first video, Hawkins demonstrates, with screenshots, the first app which uses his system.)
posted on Apr 4, 2007 - View this thread

Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science, invention, space travel, colonisation, immortality, water shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse, extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI, Asia, economics, demographics, goverance, cities. What is your prediction?
posted on Oct 5, 2006 - View this thread

Meet George -- 39, single, quirky sense of humour, looking for friends to chat with online. Last year, he won the Loebner Prize, to bots who can most successfully pass the Turing Test. More here from BBC. How long before we have our own Mefibots?
posted on Sep 16, 2006 - View this thread

No one believes me when I told them that the swarms of robot cockroaches are out to get me.
posted on Sep 14, 2006 - View this thread

[NSFW] Heavy Rain From Quantic Dream Sets a new standard for realism in interactive cinema... I found this to be really creepy. I have a hard time looking into their eyes. Something about it is just...well, see for yourself. Anyway the flash technology is getting better and better. Along with what has become know as augmented reality. Pretty amazing stuff.
posted on Jul 25, 2006 - View this thread

The origins and evolution of human intelligence: parasitic insects? viruses? mushrooms? neural darwinism? foraging? machiavellian competition? emergence? or something else?
posted on Jul 24, 2006 - View this thread

Douglas Hofstadter says, "What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.". That was prompted by his reception to the output of David Cope's project Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
posted on Apr 11, 2006 - View this thread

As the Pentagon ousts plans to turn insects into cyber war machines you'd be forgiven for asking the question: Where does the real digital end and the faked life begin? Are we simulating life synthetically? or just speeding up an entirely natural process? Technologically engineered life is here to stay. Its not far fetched to speculate that simulacra may become all there is.
posted on Mar 15, 2006 - View this thread

If indeed information technology is seeping out of cyberspace at a rate that will soon immerse us in a world of smart furniture and spime wranglers, I think we have bigger things to worry about than disambiguating the terminology (user experience and opting out come to mind). MeFi's own Adam Greenfield weighs in with his first book, Everyware.
posted on Feb 21, 2006 - View this thread

Blue Gene bears Blue Brain beats Deep Blue. Dr. Henry Markram answers questions in the FAQ. Neurons are beautiful. Blue Gene/L is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. IBM Research rocks. Deep Blue beat Kasparov almost a decade ago. Feeling Blue?
posted on Jan 29, 2006 - View this thread

Sheep and Dogs [Java] Tricky, but not impossible game of sheepherding with Boids-like movements.
posted on Jan 5, 2006 - View this thread

Moving AI out of its infancy: Changing our Preconceptions [.pdf]. Accelerating Change 2005: The Prospects for AI - A Panel Discussion [.mp3] Tetris AI. A few fun AI links to get the brain working [via]
posted on Dec 24, 2005 - View this thread

The first Transhuman Conference On the Law of Transhuman Persons: Whether or not you believe humans are set to evolve into gods, or AI is destined to achieve self-awareness the idea of the Transhuman is a thought provoking concept. Philosophers have debated the nature of the self, of the human for millennia. Is it time to start drafting new laws to govern all possible sentient beings on this planet? or is it all just a science of fiction? a comfortable humanist illusion?
posted on Dec 13, 2005 - View this thread

Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Some timely links in the fast changing world of instant communication. Alistair Cooke Needles the Jargonauts in Assessing the State of the English Language. The Electronic Revolution by William S. Burroughs. On Wittgenstein's Concept of a Language Game. The Economist Looking for a sign. John Zerzan Language: Origin and Meaning. Hakim Bey: Aimless Wandering: Chuang Tzu's Chaos Linguistics also Chaos Linguistics. The Language of Animals. John C Lilly on Interspecies Communication. Language Log: Natural language and artificial intelligence. Natural Language Processing AI News.
posted on Dec 1, 2005 - View this thread

Peekaboom! It's not Friday -- then again this isn't flash -- but it sure is fun. Partner with another anonymous player to identify pictures by gradually revealing them. The kicker is that as we play, the system gets smarter -- the goal is to teach computers how to identify photos the same way we can.
posted on Aug 4, 2005 - View this thread

Jedi mind tricks:No. AI mind tricks: yes. You need to read this. Not that you will necessarily know when you need to be aware. From Wired.
posted on May 31, 2005 - View this thread

Play chess against the computer & Watch it think.
posted on Apr 28, 2005 - View this thread

Skynet is a go - step one is complete. Cyc (pronounced psych) is an AI with a new twist. "Cyc's creator says it has developed a human trait no other AI system has managed to imitate: common sense." - New Scientist (via)
posted on Apr 21, 2005 - View this thread

Pygmalion stories in literature and art. The myth of the scuptor who fell in love with a statue and prayed for it to be brought to life.
Related :- Galatea, a piece of interactive fiction which allows you to interact with a interpretation of the living statue (by Emily Short); Wikipedia entry on the myth.
posted on Feb 21, 2005 - View this thread

breaking CAPTCHAs. In this case the programmers were able to use software they had already designed to analyze images of people.
posted on Jan 31, 2005 - View this thread

The Ethics of Deep Self-Modification. What will happen when machines gain the ability to modify their own psychology? Do we have a responsibility to step in? What happens when we have the ability to modify ourselves? Philosopher Peter Suber has dedicated himself to issues of self-modification... not just in psychology, but also in constitutional law. Small wonder that this is the guy who invented Nomic. His site is littered with great stuff; he now is primarily involved with the open access movement. Check out his open access primer and blog.
posted on Jan 3, 2005 - View this thread

Copycat [Java] - long available only in its rickety original LISP source - is now an interactive applet. You can propose analogy puzzles based on strings of letters and watch Copycat build up and tear down models of the problem until it finds a solution it's happy with. It will explain its reasoning, and, since stochastic elements are inolved, can come up with alternate solutions upon rerun. Tutorial for the applet here; or, explore MetaCat, the next generation follow-up.
posted on Dec 2, 2004 - View this thread

Bongard problems are a benchmark of sorts for visual pattern recognition; they're also just fun puzzles, and this guy has got the definitive collection.
posted on Nov 28, 2004 - View this thread

Thinking Machine 4 explores the invisible, elusive nature of thought. Play chess against a transparent intelligence, its evolving thought process visible on the board before you.

From Martin Wattenberg (with Marek Walczak); they have been noted here before.
posted on Oct 27, 2004 - View this thread

I am learn is a weblog written by a Perl script and – get this – its managed to create quite … a lucid weblog. Yes. A weblog. By a Perl script. The author says "I wrote a ridiculous Perl program to generate text. Thing is, it developed some bugs, and has managed to create phrases and combinations of words (which actually make sense) that I didn’t even program in. I hooked it up to the Blogger API, and now it updates its own weblog with no editing on my part (I just give it a bunch of topics to talk about)."[via Kevin Francis]
posted on Oct 4, 2004 - View this thread

The Mind Project. Delve into the research, including Iris and AI. Browse the curriculum. And, if you're a student or educator, or have Flash/programming skills, you can get involved. (Please note the site is always under development, and the interface is a little wanky - Flash intro.)
posted on Apr 8, 2004 - View this thread

Meet Lucy. She sure ain't pretty, but she's certainly unique. Steve Grand (interview 1, 2) one of the brains behind Creatures, has been working for the last three years on building a robot orangutan in his own house. Those is the South Wales area can catch Steve speaking about his experiences next month. Steve may well be a non-establishment genius, but when I see pictures like this, I can't help thinking it's already been done.
posted on Feb 27, 2004 - View this thread

Heaven or Hell? It's Your Choice
A new shareware E-Book is out, penned by the likes of Captain Crunch and Matthew Smith, that makes the claims:

Don't bother planning your pension, the world is about to change and we can prove it, please just take 2 minutes out of your life to read this page, it may change your life. Artificial intelligence is coming and it may become smarter than any of us. Smart networks using grid technologies could become a threat to us ALL, this is the real Matrix. From Dot.Net to the X-Box, from M-Theory to the Playstation 3 the future is V.R. / A.I. and Nanotech. If you ever wanted to know what the system is and what it has done to you, then this ebook is for you. You left school, you were standardised, you took an exam, you were graded, they made you believe in money, this is the last great social control mechanism. There's more to this, than you can imagine.

The Personality Forge. Create an AI bot, and set it loose.
posted on May 16, 2003 - View this thread

Review on SF Site Here’s a question: what if the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 film The Matrix was not just an entertaining piece of sf-action-adventure hokum. What if, instead, it is all true? Imagine it as a message sent via the medium of the Matrix itself (Hollywood cinema) from someplace outside the Matrix, to wake us up to our human condition, to alert us all to the fact ‘that we are slaves’. If so, then we are not living the lives we thought we were living; we are instead inhabiting a virtual reality composed by oppressive machine-intelligences. What if this were literally true? How would it appear to us? Well, clearly, it would appear exactly as our lives presently appear to us. Unless we get ‘unplugged’, unless we become enlightened, we cannot see past the illusion that has been created for us. What should we do in this circumstance? Should we collaborate with the machines and not rock the boat? Or should we fight, free ourselves and eventually free everybody else? Clearly, says The Matrix Warrior, this latter. This is a book that proceeds from the assumption that the situation described in The Matrix is real, and tells you where to go from there.
posted on Apr 20, 2003 - View this thread

Another year, another Chat. This year's Loebner Prize competition will be held next week in Atlanta, GA (at SciTrek and GSU). The yearly contest is a modified "Turing test" (seminal paper here) where people try to guess whether they're chatting with computers or with people.

There are some resources for rolling your own AI bot, but before you begin, think about these two sentences and you'll see what a serious problem natural language is: "We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were hungry" and "We gave the monkeys the bananas because they were ripe" (nod to this guy for the example). You have to know a lot about the world and the things in it to disambiguate the "they" in those sentences.
posted on Sep 20, 2002 - View this thread

A search engine to help you find things you don't know about. gnod stands for The Global Network of Dreams, and is a test of artificial intelligence. Building a database from the user choices, it helps you find books, music and misc. other by having you enter in things that you like, and based on what other people like, it shows you stuff you ought to like, too (which is slightly different from what Amazon does, showing you what other people have bought). Don't know if all the Amazon Associate links detract from it all or not
posted on Aug 30, 2002 - View this thread

"When he can't get along with the real world, Wallace goes back to the only thing he has left: his computer. Each morning, he wakes before dawn and watches conversations stream by on his screen. Thousands of people flock to his Web site every day from all over the world to talk to his creation, a robot called Alice. It is the best artificial-intelligence program on the planet, a program so eerily human that some mistake it for a real person. Richard Wallace has created an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does." A fascinating article (NYT), how a beautiful and original mind survives in our corporate society with the help of "a daily cocktail of psychoactive drugs, including Topamax, an anti-epileptic that acts as a mood stabilizer, and Prozac. Marijuana, too -- most afternoons, he'll roll about four or five joints the size of his index finger."
posted on Jul 9, 2002 - View this thread

Meet Cyc. This endeavor to produce AI has been going on since 1984. In ’86 it asked if it were human; it later asked “if any other computers were engaged in such a project”. It’s strength lies in a database of assumptions and generalities, in the hopes that it will eventually “generalize as much as possible until further generalization would be false”. Is this going to be the breakthrough, or does it just seem really cool? (yes, via Slashdot)
posted on Jun 8, 2002 - View this thread

Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto. Both Honda and Sony have unveiled the newest versions of their humanoid robots. Honda favours a more practical design, while Sony's is geared for entertainment. Having just watched AI the other night, I'm wondering when and if people would want to have one around the house.
posted on Mar 19, 2002 - View this thread

Go for the gold! Concord 2002: Site of the upcoming Loebner Prize. Can reigning champion A.L.I.C.E. repeat her triumph? Chat bots from around the globe are scouting out their rivals on the AI competitive circuit and studying their crib notes.
posted on Feb 9, 2002 - View this thread

Little Computer People was a game produced in the '80s and at a time when the gaming landscape was very different from today's market. The point? Life.
posted on Feb 4, 2002 - View this thread

The Robots Are Coming (Yawwwn...). Yet another corporate futurist (with a bizarre 1996 Mosaic-type website) telling us that A.I. will deliver the "homework" robot by 2006 (now, is that January or December?). Also, look out for an emotionally responsive Barbie:

"We already have technologies that can measure stress, using simple cues like skin condition and temperature and it will be easy to put these in Barbie dolls which will be able to talk to little girls when they are upset and ask what is wrong." Ech.
posted on Jan 22, 2002 - View this thread