The uncanny valley just got deeper. "Treat yourself to the perfect woman."
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

"Once you've constructed your Hexapawn opponent, it's time to start playing against it... If you play this game repeatedly ... you'll quickly notice that your matchbox opponent plays better and better until it is unbeatable!" Martin Gardner created a game called Hexapawn, and also devised an artificially intelligent opponent you can build yourself out of matchboxes and colored beads. Bonus link: An interview with Martin Gardner.
posted on Apr 1, 2008 - 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

Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, claims to have defined what it means to divide by zero. It's so simple, he claims, that he's even taught it to high school students [via Digg]. You just have to work with a new number he calls Nullity (RealPlayer video). According to Anderson's site The Book of Paragon, the creation, innovation, or discovery of nullity is a step toward describing a "perspective simplex, or perspex [ . . . ] a simple physical thing that is both a mind and a body." Anderson claims that Nullity permits the definition of transreal arithmetic (pdf), a "total arithmetic . . . with no arithmetical exceptions," thus removing what the fictional dialogue No Zombies, Only Feelies? identifies as the "homunculus problem" in mathematics: the need for human intervention to sort out "corner cases" which are not defined.
posted on Dec 7, 2006 - View this thread

Detecting the erotic (like detecting the humorous) is one of those things that people can do better than any known machine. This new patent seems largely based on "Finding Naked People", a paper in the field of Computer vision.
posted on Oct 1, 2006 - View this thread

Play chess against the computer & Watch it think.
posted on Apr 28, 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

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

20 questions, AI style. Pretty amazing... and addictive. It guessed "Superman" in 15 questions, "harmonica" in 18..."tampon" in 20.
posted on Dec 12, 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

ChatNannies: the first real AI bot, or a hoax? Cameron Marlow's private interview with the ChatNannie bot (which was recently reported by New Scientist) reveals that it has perhaps one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence engines ever devised. So far neither New Scientist nor any of the other media outlets that posted the story have shown the slightest hint of skepticism about its authenticity. Andy Baio's additional research digs up some information that further places ChatNannie's existence in doubt, but how does one conclusively prove that Jim Wightman's bot isn't for real? If it is for real, the New Scientist probably has a much bigger story to report--AI has been solved!
posted on Mar 23, 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.

...and there you have it. Or do you?
posted on Jul 7, 2003 - View this thread

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

they've got god... world's first completely artificial lifeform created. ethical, spiritual, and social implications a-go-go, via blogdex.
posted on Jan 17, 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

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

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

Teaching computers the stuff we all know. Open Mind Commonsense is a project by Push Singh. Like other competing projects, the goal is to compile a database of commonsense facts which will be used to improve relations between humans and machines. I just like to answer the questions.
posted on Nov 17, 2001 - View this thread

Given the recent cinematic floppery of late, I was pleasantly surprised when I came across an article about real-world Artificial Intelligence that was written in a solid down-to-Earth manner about some very technical concepts. If you're into AI it should be worth a look to you. How would you like to have a computer that learns and adapts? Heh...how'd you like your computer to pout because you won't buy the latest processor? ;}
posted on Aug 29, 2001 - View this thread

Silly use of Eliza for an A.I. review. I just saw it yesterday and I don't see this as Speilberg doing Kubrick as much as Spielberg taking (stealing?) all of Philip K. Dick's tricks and putting together a movie slightly more audience friendly than Blade Runner. (more)
posted on Jun 30, 2001 - View this thread

Peter Molyneaux , arguably the greatest game designer of all time, does it again with Black and White. I saw this game at the Game Developers' Conference a couple weekends ago - it really is amazing. It must have the most sophisticated AI of any game to date.
posted on Apr 8, 2001 - View this thread

VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier trashes AI and futurists and makes a case that software designers that engage in this groupthink produce user-unfriendly software.
posted on Oct 3, 2000 - View this thread

VIM33D has been released. This is truly cool; a totally new approach to AI, and it's damned fun to watch. I've spent literally hours. (more inside)
posted on Sep 4, 2000 - View this thread

Clicking for consciousness Depressingly reductionist. It is wrong to think that if we can't tell the difference between a binary machine in a box and a person in a box we should behave as if there were no difference.
posted on Sep 1, 2000 - View this thread

AOLiza: Funnier than a wombat on meth.
posted on Aug 19, 2000 - View this thread

In other news - Spielberg hijacks project (A.I.) from Kubrick's grave, hacks it and Casts Robin Williams....
Williams? Williams? I'm going to go out and kill SS myself.
posted on Aug 18, 2000 - View this thread

Will people in the future have souls? Or will our souls pass into the machines?
posted on Aug 1, 2000 - View this thread