Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. Wired's David Kushner examines the work of two young, competitive AI researchers, and the eerie circumstances of their deaths.
posted by knave on Sep 15, 2009 - 48 comments

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies [more inside]
posted by supercres on Jun 2, 2009 - 38 comments

IBM Research is planning on working on taking artificial intelligence beyond master-level Chess (previously), and on to question answering with a computing system that has been in development for the past two years. Named "Watson," after the I.B.M. founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr., the system will challenge human contestants at Jeopardy (previously). Watson's success depends as much on its ability to understand and respond to the subtleties of human language as it does on the extent of its knowledge database. Don't worry, Alex Trebek knows what's in store. (via)
posted by filthy light thief on Apr 27, 2009 - 45 comments

The uncanny valley just got deeper. "Treat yourself to the perfect woman."
posted by loquacious on May 27, 2008 - 100 comments

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 by desjardins on May 21, 2008 - 55 comments

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 by empath on Apr 11, 2007 - 19 comments

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 by grumblebee on Apr 4, 2007 - 22 comments

Play chess against the computer & Watch it think.
posted by growabrain on Apr 28, 2005 - 25 comments

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 by plep on Feb 21, 2005 - 10 comments

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 by painquale on Jan 3, 2005 - 14 comments

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 by e.e. coli on Oct 27, 2004 - 11 comments

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 by nylon on Feb 27, 2004 - 6 comments

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 by metameme on Jul 7, 2003 - 24 comments

The Personality Forge. Create an AI bot, and set it loose.
posted by plep on May 16, 2003 - 7 comments

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 by zpousman on Sep 20, 2002 - 15 comments

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 by sherman on Jun 8, 2002 - 9 comments

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 by moz on Feb 4, 2002 - 11 comments

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 by otherchaz on Nov 17, 2001 - 9 comments

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 by Spanktacular on Aug 29, 2001 - 5 comments

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 by skallas on Jun 30, 2001 - 51 comments

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 by SilentSalamander on Apr 8, 2001 - 17 comments

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 by skallas on Oct 3, 2000 - 4 comments

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 by Steven Den Beste on Sep 4, 2000 - 3 comments

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 by scum on Sep 1, 2000 - 3 comments

AOLiza: Funnier than a wombat on meth.
posted by fable on Aug 19, 2000 - 2 comments

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 by tiaka on Aug 18, 2000 - 11 comments

Will people in the future have souls? Or will our souls pass into the machines?
posted by sudama on Aug 1, 2000 - 10 comments