Artificial Intelligence
15/03/08 10:57 Filed in: Science
Researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have demonstrated that they can simulate the intelligence of a four year old child. The Second Life environment and a 100 teraflop supercomputer were used to perform the demonstration. They named the child Eddie and he behaves like a typical young boy. The child is a product of logic-based artificial intelligence and complex modelling techniques. Eddie has his own set of beliefs, and the ability to reason about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children his age.
"Our technologies can be applied to any digital environment, and indeed we are specifically aiming, with IBM, at environments in which the physical and the virtual directly interact." said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. Eventually, more advanced versions of the artificial intelligence technology will be put to use in entertainment and gaming, as well as immersive training and education scenarios.
"The applications are endless," Bringsjord said. "Imagine being able to step into a simulation environment in which you interact with synthetic characters as sophisticated as those seen in Star Trek's holodeck. Imagine a hostage situation: How do you prepare for negotiating with a terrorist holding a hostage? Now, it's textbook and playacting. But what if you could enter the holodeck and match wits with a synthetic character that has the ability to reason in earnest about your mind, and about what you're trying to do? This is actually a demo we're considering trying to engineer," he said.
As Eddie operates entirely on formal logic and well-defined theorems, reasoning is not automatically fast, Bringsjord said, explaining the need for clever engineering and high-performance hardware.
This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and requires the use of Rensselaer's Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), which provides more than 100 teraflops of computing power through massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters.
"Our technologies can be applied to any digital environment, and indeed we are specifically aiming, with IBM, at environments in which the physical and the virtual directly interact." said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project. Eventually, more advanced versions of the artificial intelligence technology will be put to use in entertainment and gaming, as well as immersive training and education scenarios.
"The applications are endless," Bringsjord said. "Imagine being able to step into a simulation environment in which you interact with synthetic characters as sophisticated as those seen in Star Trek's holodeck. Imagine a hostage situation: How do you prepare for negotiating with a terrorist holding a hostage? Now, it's textbook and playacting. But what if you could enter the holodeck and match wits with a synthetic character that has the ability to reason in earnest about your mind, and about what you're trying to do? This is actually a demo we're considering trying to engineer," he said.
As Eddie operates entirely on formal logic and well-defined theorems, reasoning is not automatically fast, Bringsjord said, explaining the need for clever engineering and high-performance hardware.
This research is supported by IBM and other outside sponsors, and requires the use of Rensselaer's Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), which provides more than 100 teraflops of computing power through massively parallel Blue Gene supercomputers, POWER-based Linux clusters, and AMD Opteron processor-based clusters.